9/11 and Pearl Harbor

Posted: September 12, 2011 in Uncategorized
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She is in her 90s. On her wall is a certificate thanking her for serving her country as a part of the Army Nurse Corps during WWII. She told me the stories, how she tended the wounded. “All those boys with their missing limbs”, she said, “that still haunts me.”

As we talked, the news program running on her television in the background was dominated by images and talk about 9/11. And she says to me, “It’s been ten years now. What if we dealt with Pearl Harbor in that same way? What if we focused on it and kept on dredging it up? Sure, we had a day named after it, but that doesn’t mean we relive it all the time. How could you heal and move on?” Then, without blinking, she said “It’s time to do the same with the terrible events of 9/11. We have to move on and put it where it belongs, in the past, into history. We’ll remember, but it won’t dominate us.”

She looked at me to see how I’d take that.

I nodded in agreement. Yes, it’s time.

I watched a news program today that focused on the behavior of the huge killer whales, the Orcas, in Sea World in Florida. You may remember that one of the Orcas, Tilikum, drowned one of the trainers earlier this year. It had been involved in previous accidents.

They talked about the investigation into the Sea World organization and how culpable they might be, what whale behavior they had observed that might be considered suspicious and how staff safety was considered.

Many angles of the situation were discussed except one. Not once did a single person suggest that the situation itself was the cause; these creatures are not designed for captivity and the artificial, small and confined world we have created for them. The truth may be as simple as this: Sea World drove the Orca crazy and it killed in flash of madness.

It’s not meant to live like that.

Take Richard O’Barry, for instance. He was the trainer of the famous dolphin, Flipper. In fact, he captured and trained hundreds of dolphins for similar purposes. Until he discovered the hard way that it was driving them crazy. Once he realized what he and other were doing he made an about face. Now he works to free dolphins from the Sea Worlds scattered over the globe. The dolphins are amazingly healed when reunited with the natural flow of the tides, the chemistry of fresh salt water, the hunting of live fish and living in a community of dolphins that migrate long distances according to the seasons. I first became aware of this through viewing the documentary, The Cove. I recommend it.

It’s not just whales. The seamy side of the factory farming of chickens is not known to most of us as we much down on our Colonial Sanders or take our eggs sunny side up. The factory farming of chickens, at its worst, involves over packing live chickens into small steel wire crates and then keeping the artificial light on 24/7 to increase laying patterns. They lay more eggs.

Only problem? The chickens go crazy and peck each other to death. Solution? De-beak them. You snip off their beaks so that when they go crazy they can’t kill the crazy neighbor whose beak has also been clipped off. Bloody stubs can’t kill another layer.

Like the Orcas, chickens go crazy in those kind of conditions. The difference is that we aren’t raising the Orcas in order to eat them. But we are consuming them; taking their lives for our entertainment until they go mad.

According to the English medieval theologian, William of Ockham (1287-1347) , and his metaphorical razor, the simplest and most direct explanation is most often the truest: “Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.” The more we extend and multiply simple truths the further they get from the truth itself.

Let’s just say that it appears that no one is applying Ockham’s razor to the Sea World situation. Because if we were, we would be opening the large doors to the sea and shooing the Orcas toward open water. Rather, we’re going to figure out how to deal with their madness, come up with a technical solution, give them some Orca Prozac or maybe a few sessions on the Orca therapeutic couch. Or retrain the trainers to live on the edge of a tank that creates madness and then drowns a person ever so often just to get our attention. “I am, by the way, going crazy in here. Let me take one of you down to make my point.”

But I doubt if we will listen to the Orcas or to William of Ockham. I imagine we’ll make a few adjustments, offer a few rationalizations and keep on selling those tickets, filling those stands, and clapping like mad with every leap from the blue, blue water.

How could I have missed it? Somebody just wrote that everyone has mixed motives, which we already know, but that (hold your breath) God uses them all the time. Duh.

The reason I may appear at the door of a church has to do with some vague sense of obligation for my children. I ought to get them there. But no matter. God uses my less-than-pure motive for seeking God anyway. I may end up finding what I wasn’t angling for.

Maybe I do the right thing because there is some peer pressure to do so, not because I’m so virtuous. But I go along with it and do something good I might not have done on my own. In the process I find something I wasn’t looking for. No problem, God rides my less-than-Mother-Teresa motive and transforms it into something more.

Maybe it was the music that first attracted me to some worship service. Yeah, great band, or classical flute, or whatever. Pretty, an aesthetic I dig. The fact that the music is supposed to be an avenue rather than an end in itself eludes me. No biggie. God helps me find God in spite of myself.

We’ve got all kinds of mixed motives for everything we do. God doesn’t wait for us to be pure in heart before steering us toward being more pure of heart. God’s specialty is raw material. Like clay in the potter’s hand. We give God the mixed bag and God picks through it and puts it back together again in a different way.

Mixed motives? No problem. Bring ’em on. It’s always just the beginning.

A Prayer for September

Posted: September 6, 2011 in Uncategorized
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We do not presume
to tell you who you are
as if we could, with these words

Neither can we suggest
the direction of your purpose
when we barely know our own

For now we wait, trusting
holding enormous life
in these little hearts

Without a shred of presumption
we ask who we might become
if not now, then later

Fill us with

Honesty that dares look ourselves in the mirror
Compassion that overcomes our inclination to self
Courage that dares to do what is right when not popular
Hope that never limits the future by the contours of the present
Curiosity that always draws us to that which cannot be known, and yes, to the mystery that is you

These things we pray, knowing that you have known them in our hearts before they passed through our lips

Amen

The Emptied Killing Zone: Joplin, Missouri, September 2011

The six mile by one-half mile of devastation left by the Joplin tornado has been cleared, a 24/7 effort fueled by a timeline. By mid-August the removal would need to be complete if the city were to realize the full federal disaster support (90% of all expense). That happened, amazingly, and what was a land covered with debris became an empty land, a ghost town within a city.

Outside of that zone, beyond national media coverage, on the other side of what volunteers have and do offer, are the actual residents of Joplin, making their way toward what my brother calls the “new normal.” It’s a long, slow trek characterized by accumulating weariness. But full of hope and inspiration, too.

My brother opened his new office during the past couple of weeks. Patterns of normalcy have returned, albeit in a new form. And the vacancy left behind has provided room for something new. What will that be? We can only imagine. But something will grow up in its place. It always does.

A baby was born in Joplin today, crying and gasping for new air. She came into this world after the tornado, the cleanup, and all the starting over. Years from now people will tell her, “You were born in the year of the great tornado.” And she will ask, “What was it like?” And her grandmother will say, “It was a stormy and windy night …”

As I’ve been reading more source material on the faith perspectives of our American founders, the diversity of viewpoints relating to not only doctrine, but the interplay between church and state (of which there was no little argument!), I ran across, again, the Thomas Jefferson solution to Jesus (Faith of the Founders, Edwin S. Gaustad, Baylor University Press, 2004).

Jefferson (like Madison, Franklin and many others) was not an orthodox Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a Deist who prized freedom of thought and practice. He sought out reasonable self-evident truths embodied in the natural universe. This natural order contained ethical norms that governed the way of humanity. What was not included in his religious schema was anything resembling “revelation” or “supernatural” occurrence that somehow suspended the natural order.

Late in life, as Jefferson revisited the personage of Jesus, he found a true companion, but only after a radical editing. He was, in his mind, liberating Jesus from New Testament portrayals (especially those of Paul)  and the later church distortions of him.

To go about this process of retrieving his Jesus, he compiled all the ethical teachings of Jesus – which he thought superlative – and snipped out anything resembling miracle or supernatural elements. The Jesus of Jefferson became an Enlightenment teacher of truth. So that would include the sermon on the mount, but forgo conversations about his role as Messiah. We would hear the parables but not talk about healing the man born blind. There was his martyr’s death, but no mention of resurrection. Jesus, like the rest of humanity, had an immortal soul, so he would find his place in another world, but not with the disturbance of the natural order of things. And so it went.

Having known about the “Jefferson Bible” for a long time, I was not surprised with his project. What strikes me now, as I consider our religious landscape, is how we are creating another version of the Bible, an X-ray negative of Jefferson’s.

The project of many today is not to expunge the text of its supernatural or miraculous content. To the contrary, bring that on. Many people would be aghast at the thought of Jefferson’s edits.

No, many are engaged in creating a negative opposite of Jefferson’s Bible in which the ethical teachings of Jesus – his parables, ethical challenges, sermon on the mount – fall to the cutting floor. Walking on water? Raising the dead? Ascending to God the Father? Yes, include all of these. But no, do not include his stern warnings to the powerful, the oppressors of the poor, those of us who have sold out to the world.

What is finding its way to the dustbin is the Jesus material that sounds like the classic prophets – Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, Hosea. That we are to avoid. There is a gag order on that Jesus.The word “justice” is a negative, to be avoided at all cost, even though it dominates the thought of the prophets and Jesus.

In the same way that Jefferson filtered out the supernatural, many current American Christians are filtering out the ethical demands of Jesus. So two interesting volumes sit on the shelf, side by side. There is Jefferson’s. And then there is the Un-Jefferson. And they both betray the worldviews of their interpreters.

When we skew to the extreme edge we inevitably lose something.  It is easy to miss that slippery truth that stands somewhere in that illusory middle. If there is a golden mean then it is precious precisely because it doesn’t want to lose what excess could strip from it. This calls for humility, discernment and more than a little courage not to coast with the pack.

I think Jefferson lost a lot in his quest. And I think the Un-Jeffersons are losing much now. Neither way is viable, in my mind. But both remind us of the places we do not want to go.

During a recent retreat in New Mexico I ran into a therapist who, among other things, was talking about new ways he was dealing with Post Traumatic Stress. He had worked with folks suffering with many kinds of past traumas for years, but this was different, he said. As he is a person of faith, he shared how this dovetailed with his conviction that spiritual healing, and its physical parallels, was part and parcel of the great religious traditions. Whatever science was discovering was but a reflection of the ancient wisdom.

The book he recommended to me was The Healing Code by Loyd and Johnson (Life & Style, 2010). After reading most of the book I dropped a note to a friend I knew was experimenting with new modes of spirituality and healing. Too late, she was already onto it. But that’s good; I wasn’t climbing a ladder to nowhere. And if you want access to the “hard” science and research behind the theory and practice, you can get a copy of the book yourself.

The truths are fairly simple, but not widely accepted by the public at large. For Christians, for spiritual persons of many traditions, there is a familiar ring, like we’ve heard this before. Surprise, we have! But in different terms, different language.

Basically, from a quantum physics view, everything is energy. And energy fields animate our bodies, not only in our brains and central nervous system but throughout our entire cellular body. There is a cellular memory that stores all of the things that contribute to our illness – unforgiveness, guilt, hate, fear. They block the natural healing properties of our immune system. In fact, the body’s natural alarm system in the presence of threat continues on – inappropriately – even when the original threat is gone. Automatic responses – subconscious ones – continue to dominate us without our conscious consent. And there is no way to deal with the subconscious through the conscious. Most of our therapies are preoccupied with dealing with the symptoms rather that the working with the source. “Coping” mechanisms actually keep the body stressed, dealing with symptoms. Medications of various kinds are also preoccupied with symptoms. But the root of the problem has to do with energy and how negative blocks and forces have obstructed its natural flow.

The Healing Code has nothing to do with psychotherapy, in fact, it is its opposite. It does not believe that mucking about in the memories and feelings will bring a positive result – except for initial understanding. If the subconscious, the cellular memory, is the place of the heart where the difficulty resides, and if we are unable to access this consciously, then what? You appeal to a healing code that is already present with us that disrupts the false energy patterns that have developed within us. And the code unlocks this and replaces it with something else. And that universally addresses our dilemmas and the ways they keep undermining our health and happiness.

So what is the healing code? It is a prayerful application of our own energy, given by God, to heal the distorted patterns of energy. It’s like defragging your hard drive. And to do this you prepare with prayer, asking that God heal all that is blocking and harming you and others. Then through a pattern of motions – using your fingers held in several healing centers for 30 seconds each, you breath deeply and let your own energy patterns do their God-given work. You do this for six minutes, three times a day. You can precede or follow this with any other prayer, such as the Lord’s Prayer.

The four healing centers, acting  like portals to their biological centers,  are the bridge of the nose between the eyes, the adams apple, the place where the jaw hinges, and the temples. So you spend thirty seconds pointing your fingers toward these areas, one after the other, fingers held a couple of inches away, not touching.

Tim footnote: Traditional healing patterns have also used rituals and methods of disruption and replacement: Repeated prayers, prayer postures, hands held on certain places of the body, laying on of hands, anointing with oil … all attempt to do the same kind of thing. Think about the way that singing a hymn – with its spiritual ideas and musical patterns – displaces the unruly energy patterns surging within us. It’s no wonder that David played his harp to soothe the tortured soul of King Saul. Sound waves are energy, affecting the energy patterns inside us. Deep massage attempts to do this in a physical way, releasing areas where negative energy has been bound and stored. This includes the energy flowing through the hands of the healer.

We are psycho-somatic unities. A science or medicine that misses this misses most. And healing, as we know it now, will, most likely in the future, become preoccupied with energy – as the new physics intersects with the ancient wisdom and practice. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue …

I’ve been reading Edwin Gaustad’s Faith of the Founders: Religion and the New Nation 1776-1826 (Baylor University Press, 2004). In a time when reference to our national founders is often framed in vast generalities and often ideologically driven, Gaustad’s research is refreshing and nuanced.

One of his observations opened a new level of comprehension in me, namely, that the world of church-state issues did not suddenly commence  in 1776. Nearly two centuries of colonial life – and its religion – preceded the revolution. And knowing what realities were at work during the colonial period is essential to understanding what would follow.

The truths that were evident to Thomas Jefferson were certainly not for the colonists that preceded him. The Church of England would go where England went. And except for a robust presence of congregationalists – Puritans and Quakers – the Anglicans dominated the middle states. And so, the religious tensions and struggles of the England, struggles for pre-emminance,  continued in the colonies.  In fact, the freedom of practice and non-establishment that Jefferson would later champion was fairly non-existent. The leaders of the colonists, clerics and political officials alike, pretty well understood that it would take a united presence of state and established church to make a go of it. Which religious expression would prevail, of the few choices, would be the real question.

The dominance of the Church of England prevailed right up to the revolution. Exceptions were to be found in New England and particular colonies, such as Pennsylvania. The way that William Penn normalized broad tolerance of diverse religious expressions became exemplary. And the way Pennsylvania flourished – economically – proved that religious tolerance was not only possible, but preferable.

Resistance to imposed religious conformity came early, and people like Roger Williams continued to insist that religious persecution for non-conformity was the greatest of evils. The countless persecutions, torture, inquisitions and burnings for the sake of enforcing the one true religion were to stay behind where they belong, in the history of England and other countries. They were not to  continue in the new republic. Penn wrote that all religious expressions “shall in no ways be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practice in matters of faith ad worship, nor shall they be compelled at any time to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever.” His words became precursor to what would become national doctrine penned by the likes of Jefferson, Madison and others.

The American Revolution changed everything, especially as regarded religious spheres. Anglicans were dis-established and as English influence waned, so did the absolutest claims of any other religious body. The first amendment, with its freedom of practice and non-establishment clauses, sealed that social compact. It was really only then that the many religious traditions began to immigrate and multiply, leading to the present religious mosaic we know today.

Those who would like to take us back to pre-revolutionary religious times in America, some kind of theocracy, would do well to revisit their history. A decision was made – a good one I think – that broad religious tolerance and the non-establishment of any religious body should be the way of things. So it has been and in my book, so it should remain.

Years ago a friend heard one of the challenging parables of Jesus and it so confounded him that he’s never gotten over it. No matter how much time has passed, whenever I see him he brings it up. “That parable,” he says, “is just wrong. That can’t be the way God is. It’s not fair …” And so it goes. The truth is that we don’t always like Jesus or what he says.

I’ve thought about that over the years, how the message of Jesus and, by extension, our preaching and teaching about his message, confounds and disturbs us. I don’t like it all, though I struggle to accept or apply it to my life. I fall so short of his vast vision of God and humanity that I often feel judged. That’s the point, of course, to realize the difference between who we are and could be. And Jesus had an uncanny way of exposing our little self-deceptions. We usually don’t appreciate it when someone challenges our little versions of the way things are.

So people shouldn’t feel comforted every time they hear the words of Jesus. Like me and my friend, they should, from time to time, feel disturbed. If not, if we’re not feeling discomforted some of the time, we’re probably not being faithful to the Gospel. The good news sometimes sounds bad.

Similarly, there’s a lot we don’t always get, don’t understand or comprehend. If I were always able to say, “Oh, I understand everything I find here,” I would be reading, hearing, some little children’s version of the Bible or theology or the challenge of Jesus. Truth be told, I shouldn’t get it all the time. I shouldn’t understand everything. If I do, I’m probably ingesting mother’s milk, but not adult food. And even so, my finite mind will never be able to get around the infinite part or all of the time. If I do believe that I am able to get it all the time, with my finite understanding, I’m probably not really struggling with an infinite word, but rather a weakened, diminished little version, one I think I can control.

There’s much we don’t like and much we don’t get, but that’s not a bad thing. If we liked everything and got everything it would be real cause for concern. Liking everything and getting everything is the verification that we are not encountering a mysterious and infinite God but something else, a watered down little pablum.

So go ahead and cringe when Jesus spins his God stories. And wrinkle up your face and say, “Huh?” Leave your Bible study or worship or devotional time shrugging your shoulders and shaking your head. If you understand too much and like too much it’s the sure sign you’re headed the wrong way.

The internationally known Celtic artist, Nóirín Ní Riain will be in our own Columbia the first part of Advent! This is actually part of a St Louis – Columbia – Kansas City Missouri tour. Our date is the Tuesday after the first Sunday of Advent, November 29, 7:00 p.m. It will be held in the sanctuary of Broadway Christian Church.

Noirin is known for working in the Celtic spiritual traditions and she has recorded with the Monks of
Glenstal Abbey. With occasions to play for the Dali Lama and represent Ireland in other internationals gatherings, her reach has been significant. She travels with her two instrumentalist sons, “the lads.” One of her well known CDs is Celtic Soul– a gathering of the spiritual traditions. She will be sharing a variety of music at the concert but some of it will reflect the traditions of Advent.

We are also working on putting together a Columbia workshop on Celtic spirituality.

Her home page: http://www.theosony.com/ (Nice, eh? Theosony: God and Sound)
And here is Paul Winter’s write up on her on his page: http://www.livingmusic.com/biographies/noirin.html
For a little video clip of her tribute to Bridget, one of the foremost saints in Ireland, here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v8qxFo3nxM
Put it on your calendar now!