Sunrise at Los Arenales - by Steve Locke

 

“It has been the interruptions to everyday life which have most revealed the divine mystery of which I am a part, all these interruptions presented themselves as opportunities to go beyond the normal patterns of daily life and find deeper connections than the previous safety of my physical, emotional and spiritual well being.”  Henri Nouwen

I lay in bed this morning in a reflective mood. It was time to get up, but it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m resolved to take it as more of a holiday than as a regular work day. So I lay there remembering 2008 and wondering what profound insights might be drawn from having experienced it! And where and how in Heaven’s name did it go so quickly?

I’m not sure I have any profound insights to offer. I’ll leave those for others. But it seems to me that 2008 will be remembered as a time both of great changes and of much that remains the same.

I’m sure you’re all bored to death of lists of wars, disasters, financial upheavals, political scandals and the like. We’re all aware of the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. We have high hopes that with the new year, solutions will be found to begin to refocus world economies and reverse the economic declines we’ve experienced. And thus we see the beginning of hope again – a hope that seems to come with the dawing of each new year – things will be better this year!

In our personal lives, people will be born, people will die. Some will get married, some marriages will fail and the spouses will be left to grieve and grow through it. Some will have steady work, others will find their jobs transitory at best. Children will continue to grow up. We’ll each move a year closer to being the older generation – hopefully growing wiser along the way.

And in the midst of it, we’ll have the surprises. A deck will need to be repaired unexpectedly, and friends will step in to help fix it. An appliance will reach the end of its useful life (as in it’ll just plain quit working!) and someone else will have one for which they need to find a home. An unexpected bill will arrive in the mail and funds will show up from somewhere else that make it possible to make ends meet anyway.

I think of this as God’s “just in time financing” and find myself counting on it often – something to do with “Give us this day our daily bread.”

I can’t promise the new year will be easy. I know it will be challenging. We’re in a major world-wide recession, after all. But I know that with God’s help we’ll get through it. We can’t solve it by having another world war – that’s not an option. We can solve it by looking out for each other, offering a caring hand, recognizing that we’re all in this together (even across national boundaries) and trusting God to soften our hearts and open our eyes to help each other through our days. In the end, hope is the gift we receive and can offer to each other. God is with us. God has become one of us. God lives and works through each of us.

May the blessings of the Christmas season be with you through the coming year and may you see God’s loving hand reaching out and touching you through all the ups and downs, all the interruptions and surprises of this New Year. 

Lackey #1:  Your Grace the neo-pagans are at the door.

His Grace:  Very Well. Let them in and call my theologians.

Lackey #1 to Visitors:  Please be seated, the palace theologians will be with you shortly. Would anyone like coffee or mineral water?

Visitor #1:  We appreciate the welcome but we were hoping to speak with his Grace. We have come a long way with a special message for his Lordship.

Lackey #1:  I’m sorry, it won’t be possible. Philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other thinking persons have to be interviewed by the court theologians. I’m afraid it is protocol.

Visitor #2:  We emailed our request for an audience some time ago and explained that we have a message based on Signs in the Heavens.

Lackey #1:  I’m sorry but we only receive messages, electronic or otherwise, from persons who are properly credentialed. It all started after that unfortunate affair with John the Terrorist and his threats against the government.

Visitor #3:  We thought that he was some sort of leader of revivals – a fringe sort of religious figure with some sort of discredited theology of liberation. We didn’t know he was a terrorist.

Lackey #1:  Most people don’t know that and we would prefer to keep it that way – but some of his followers confessed after some aggressive interrogation.

Visitor #1:  We thought that torture was outlawed here in the Commonwealth.

Lackey #1:  It is, but let’s just say that our less squeamish allies can be of great assistance. Besides, most of our citizens are in favor of  “necessary means” according to the polls if it will produce valuable information.

Visitor #2:  You mean they would give up their constitutional rights?

Lackey #1:  Not their own rights, mind you – just those of people opposed to his Grace. Well, here are the members of the Government’s Panel of Divinity. Please rise.

Theologian #1:  Welcome Ladies of the New Age or should I say Priestesses of the Orient?

Visitor #1:  Actually, we are astronomers and astrologers – scientists and visionaries.

Theologian #2:  We are interested in speaking with you. We are specially licensed to deal with the occult and other forms of demon worship.

Visitor #2:  We are not shamans or priestesses of the Crystal.

Visitor #3:  We study the stars and are accredited to the Global Space Research Council.

Theologian #3:  As unbelieving secularists how can you claim to be visionaries?

Visitor #1:  We are as perplexed as anyone else. The patterns of planetary alignments are most unusual. The probability that this is mere chance is very, very low.

Theologian #1:  Wouldn’t you say that it is just random chance in your Godless scheme of things? Besides, how would you know to come here? – and for what?

Visitor #2:  What indeed! The Star Regulus – the King Star -  in conjunction with Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces – the House of Judah – is a very unusual occurrence.

Theologian #2:  Reading the stars. Don’t you mean reading into the stars? Astrology was discredited centuries ago and now you want to revive it in your so called Age of Aquarius? You must be the laughingstock of your fellow scientists!

Visitor #3:  Empirical science is one mode of knowing certain things, including the mechanics of the stars, but it does not tell you what it means.

Theologian #3:  It is very clear from the Writings what it means. God made Creation whole out of nothing – everything in six days.

Visitor #1:  And the fossils?

Theologian #1:  A simple test of faith. God made the fossils to fool unbelievers like you.

Visitor #2:  We came here to honor the birth of a heavenly ruler. Has a child been born here?

Theologian #1:  What Child? That’s absurd. We are a republic founded by God fearing men. How could a child be the Ruler?

Visitor #3:  It has become more common for the sons of your rulers to be elected. But perhaps we are wrong.

Theologian #2:  That seems to be the case. The Child was born a long time ago and rules in Everlasting Glory. Have you not heard the Good News?

Visitor #1:  With all due respect, it hasn’t been such good news.

Theologian #3:  What the hell!

Visitor #2:  Yes, I am afraid that that has been the case.

Theologian #1:  Did you come here to insult us or did your stars send a message with you.

Visitor #3:  We will have to look elsewhere. She is not here.

Theologian #2:  You’re going to look a long time. He came as a man.

Visitor #1:  I thought it is written “He became one of us.”

Theologian #3:  The correct wording is “He became man.”

Theologian #2:  Perhaps you could let us know when you find her. We would be most interested in seeing who she is.

Visitor #2:  Yes, perhaps we should be on our way. We are free to leave aren’t we?

Theologian #1:  It’s a free country isn’t it?

Visitor #3:  Peace Be With You

Lackey #1:  Ladies – this way please.

St. John of Kanty (June 24, 1390 -  December 24, 1473) was born in the town of Kenty near Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in the diocese of Cracow, Poland. St. John of Kanty had an easy going personality and a brilliant mind. At the age of 23 he enrolled in one of the oldest universities in Europe, the Cracow Academy.

St. John of Kanty spent most of the rest of his life studying philosophy and theology and becoming head of the department of philosophy. The only time he was away was a brief period during which he had been fired as a result of unjust charges brought by his rivals. He served for eight years as a parish priest, winning the hearts of his parishioners, who begged him to stay with them when his position at the University was restored. As a result of this experience, he is sometimes seen as a patron for those who are out of work or seeking work.

Founded in 1364, the Cracow Academy was renamed in 1817 as the Jagiellonian University to commemorate a Polish dynasty.  Copernicus registered at the Cracow Academy 80 years after John of Kanty first registered. Several centuries later another Polish philosopher at the Jagiellonian University, Carol Wojtyla – Pope John Paul II,  would look to St. John of Kanty as a patron. In his 1997 visit to his homeland, Pope John Paul II prayed at the tomb of St. John of Kanty as he had when he was a student. His address to professors of the university was based on the theme that summarized the life of St. John of Kanty –  knowledge and wisdom seek a covenant with holiness.

Wintery weather has finally come to California’s Central Coast. Sunday we had rain and hail. Yesterday I got out my winter coat and used it for the first time this season. There was thunder in the night. (I didn’t see the lightning – my eyes were closed – but assume it was thunder because the house didn’t shake as the rumbling continued!) This morning the weather report said possible snow in the mountains as low as 1,000 feet.

Now I know this is no big deal for a lot of folks in this world, but here, we count this as winter.

Yesterday, when I was out walking beside the ocean, I reached into my coat pocket to get my gloves and didn’t find any. This was strange because I generally keep a pair of gloves and a scarf in every coat and jacket I own. Beside the ocean, one never knows when the fog will blow in and it can get chilly! But the gloves weren’t there. I decided I must have taken them out when I washed the coat and forgotten to put them back.

So, this morning, as I got the coat, I put another pair of gloves into the pockets – green ones. I got into the car and decided it was indeed cold enough to put on a pair of gloves. I reached into the left pocket and pulled out a glove – a pink one! Laughing at myself, I put it on and reached into the other pocket and found a green one. Now both my daughter and I were laughing. So I put on the green one as well and we headed down the street to school – one hand pink and one hand green, laughing and joking all the way.

It came to me as we went that life is full of these kinds of surprises from our God. Cold rain, thunder, snow – followed by a beautiful sunny day. The joy of a wedding, followed by the sadness of a family death and funeral. The hopeful waiting for the birth of a child. The friendly word on a difficult day. The kindness of strangers who sympathize and offer help when money is tight.  The friends who simply smile at our foibles and love us anyway when we’re being difficult.

We are truly blessed to have a loving God who is always there for us and who delights in surprises – like finding a pink glove in a pocket where only a green one was expected.

Once again, today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

When I was a girl, this feast was not a major focus of my life. Growing up in Eastern Washington, in a community with relatively few Mexican Americans, we simply didn’t celebrate this feast.

Then I married into a Mexican American family and all that changed. I learned much more about Our Lady of Guadalupe. I discovered the traditions associated with her feast day. I got up early one morning to join the community in Oakland in singing the mañanitas at 5:30 a.m. We celebrated together in the liturgy and then had a wonderful breakfast of posole, champurrado and pan dulce (soup, chocolate/cocoa, and sweet Mexican bread) with the Mexican immigrants who were our English language students and friends.

When I was pregnant with our first child and nervous about the course of the pregnancy, my mother-in-law advised, “Just put it in Our Lady of Guadalupe’s hands. It’ll all be OK.” She was right. More than once since then Our Lady has gotten a problem dumped into her hands. It always turns out OK – not always the way I expected, but always OK.

Tonight we’ll again celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We don’t get up for mañanitas these days, but we do celebrate. We’ll get out the nice dishes, have a tasty dinner, and eat pan dulce with champurrado for dessert. And once again, we’ll celebrate the special relationship with Our Lady we enjoy as a Mexican American family.

Fountain of flowing water - from Terry's website

It’s the second week of December. Christmas carols are sounding on the radio, in the grocery stores, elevators, and malls. Television is filled with uplifting Christmas programming. Gala fundraisers are filling evenings and weekends. Church youth groups, Scouts, Campfire Girls, Boys and Girls Clubs, etc. are selling wreaths, candles, centerpieces. Bake sales pop up all over the place to tempt us with holiday goodies. Countdowns to Christmas appear on family bulletin boards. Everywhere people are asking, “Are you ready for Christmas [or other holiday] yet?”

And in the midst of all this activity, school assignments must still be completed. Our daily work moves ever forward with its demands, whether in the office, on an assembly line, in a store, at home or any other of the myriad worksites of our lives. The amount of daylight gets shorter (in the Northern Hemisphere where I live), so it seems the amount of time to accomplish anything is shorter too.

Pressure builds for all of us and can easily spill out into our relationships with others.

So how do we reconcile all of this activity with the quiet season of hope and expectation that is Advent? How do we find the space for a few moments of quite reconnection with life, hope, love, peace, joy? Where do our relationships with family and friends find space to be nourished?

These are challenges we all face.

One of Theologika’s Trusted Authorities is Terry Hershey, a nationally known speaker and writer. Terry lives and works on Vashon Island in Washington state. He has worked as a minister and more recently has shifted his focus to the nurture of personal relationships and gardening. You can find a short description of his life journey at http://www.terryhershey.com/about.htm.

Terry’s website and the focus of his work these days is “Embracing the Sacred Present” and finding Sabbath Moments in life. He has a regular weekly newsletter and column to which you can subscribe online through the website. I highly recommend his work. I look forward to spending a few minutes each week reading his thoughts. There’s always a good story and a reflection that helps me remember to slow down, notice the presence of God in the people and places of my life, and enjoy the love that surrounds me.

Thank you Terry. Happy Birthday. And may you ever be open to life in the sacred present!

Our Advent Spiral

One of the wonderful things about having children is that as they go through school, there are many chances for parents to experience new things too. One of the new experiences I discovered was the Waldorf School custom of celebrating the beginning of Advent with an Advent Spiral.

Children from kindergarten through about 3rd grade typically celebrate this ritual. A spiral is made on the floor of a large room using greenery, generally evergreens. Holly and other wintery plant materials can be added to make it more beautiful and colorful. Stars are placed along the edges of the green spiral. In the center, there’s a candle. Sometimes a person is there to hold the candle. Sometimes it’s just the candle.

After dark, the children and their families assemble and enter the room. It’s quite dark. Usually there’s only a little light for singers or musicians. An “angel” enters carrying a lighted candle and walks into the spiral path, around and around to the center. There he or she lights the candle at the center, extinguishes the one carried in, and walks back out of the spiral. At that point, each child in turn is given an apple with a candle held in its center – where the stem has been. The bottom of the apple has been cut so that the apple will sit safely level when it’s put down. The child carries the apple candle into the center of the spiral, lights it there, then carries it back out from the center. Finding a star, the child puts the apple candle down on the star and then walks the rest of the way back out the spiral.

As each child lights his or her candle and deposits it around the spiral, the room takes on a lovely golden glow. When all have had their turn, the “angel” returns to the center and extinguishes the candle there, leaving the room lighted by the candles of the children. All then leave the room and go to another for a treat.

No explanation is given to the children or their families of the significance of the ritual. The children have been told what they are to do, but not why. It is understood that when the time comes that they are old enough to understand its significance, they’ll figure it out for themselves. In the meanwhile, it is a lived experience to see the way the light each brings from the center helps light a dark room/world.

This year, at a time of financial chaos in the world and great uncertainty, my family and I again celebrated an Advent spiral. We invited a few relatives who live nearby to come to our home after dark on the First Sunday of Advent. We had made a spiral on our patio using greens trimmed from around our yard. We don’t have evergreens, but willows, morning glory, bouganvillea, and other blooming plants made the spiral beautiful. (It is the central coast of California, after all!) This time all walked the spiral. There were only a few of us, but again the light shone forth and it was beautiful to see. A simple dinner of stew, salad and pie followed, with much conversation and laughter. A renewal of hope and commitment to each other for the new year.

If you choose to celebrate Advent with a spiral of your own, be sure you have water or sand close at hand in case of fire. Children should not wear long skirts, and hair must be tied back – away from flames. We used tea candles in votive lamps instead of the apples, so the breeze would not blow out the fire. It was a bit more challenging to light them, so our “angel” stayed in the center to help light each candle.

Wishing you all the blessings of hope, faith, light, joy and love in Advent and the new year to come.

St. John of Damascus (676 – 794), a monk and priest, was a native of Damascus and was also Chief Councilor to the Caliph. As a Christian, he held an hereditary position of great importance under the Ummayid dynasty of Syria.  The Caliph was the chief religious and political leader of the Islamic world.

David Levering Lewis’s book, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 – 1215, provides an interesting insight into this transitional world in which Christianity gives way to Islam. (God’s Crucible also deals with the ways in which Islam stopped at the Pyrenees and the reconquest of Spain.) There were roles for Christians and Jews as subordinate groups.

The Sassanid dynasty of the second Persian Empire (which included Syria) had been defeated a generation earlier by the Caliphate in 651. St. John of Damascus became a key religious and Christian cultural figure at a time of great transition. St. John of Damascus is often called the last of the Greek Fathers and signals the end of the great Patristic period in theological and philosophical reflection. The little that we know about his life is fragmentary and subject to historical criticism. What we do have and know are his writings.

In the various theological controversies of the Patristic period, in both the East and the West, the political and cultural context provides a fascinating dimension for appreciating the wider meaning and importance of these seemingly abstract issues and their very real importance not only to the faith but also to the wider culture.

Despite his contributions to law, philosophy, theology, and music, St. John of Damascus is best known for his role in the Iconoclastic controversy. The Byzantine court endorsed a movement that rejected the veneration of religious images. St. John of Damascus, a high official in the Islamic Caliphate in Damascus opposed the Emperor, Leo III, and supported the Patriarch of Constantinople in support of the veneration of icons and their public display. Ironically, the making and admiration of images of either a secular or sacred nature were not tolerated by Islam. Although Islam provides a place for Jesus as a prophet and accords a special place to Mary, St. John of Damascus exhalted her status in his writings on the Assumption of Mary into heaven. At a time of the repression of Christian culture, St. John of Damascus composed hymns that became the core of the Eastern liturgy and are sung even today.

It is perhaps only fitting that St. John of Damascus has become the subject of venerated icons. The one above is an Arabic icon from the the 19th century attributed to the iconographer Ne’meh Nasr Homsi and is now in the public domain.

Latin Baby by Ralph & Shelly Neibuhr

In an interview on National Public Radio yesterday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee offered a very intelligent and fluent presentation of the pro-life position. While being interviewed about his new book, Do the Right Thing, he stated clearly and succinctly that life has to be seen as sacred and valued and that humans cannot be wantonly discarded when they are inconvenient or an economic liability. The big danger, as Mr. Huckabee pointed out, is that if we teach our children that certain marginal people are disposable, we ourselves may become disposable once we are old and infirm.

One of the listeners emailed a questioned about the consistency of an anti-abortion position and one in favor of capital punishment. Mr. Huckabee allowed that there might come a point when the case could be made to eliminate the death penalty. Even as he praised those who participated in candle light vigils outside the Governor’s mansion protesting the execution of criminals, Mr. Huckabee said that the taking of such lives occurred not at the whim of an individual mother but after an exhaustive judicial process. He made the point that some crimes are so severe and the danger to society is so great that killing people is the one definite way to make sure that such people will never commit this crime again. He added that the death penalty is a deterrent that benefits society.

His presentation was very sincere, yet there was something that made me uneasy about it. Is re-criminalizing abortion truly a pro-life position? Abortion still occurred when it was illegal. Making it illegal once again will not stop the practice. Philosophically, a true pro-life position requires supports and incentives for the care and nurturing of all - at every stage of life. An acceptance of abortion can represent a coarsening of the public’s view of unborn children and human life.  An acceptance or a toleration of abortion is seen by many as leading to a debasement of the human fetus and of motherhood itself.

Nevertheless, if we criminalize abortion, we won’t stop it. We can “enjoy” taking the moral high ground, but I think that this is an illusion. What happens when women do not have safe and legal access to abortion? The mother and child relationship becomes socialized without the benefit of the social and economic supports necessary to lead a life of worth and dignity.

If we accept the view that birth control is also immoral, we are holding to an idealized view that sex only occurs in marriage and that in natural family planning, reason and ovulation always win out over human passion.

Although well intentioned – that great pavement on the road to perdition – the movement to re-criminalize abortion does not represent a well integrated philosophy of the dignity and worth of life. Criminalization could very well return us to a public policy that moves us away from a humanistic and Christian philosophy of life.

Morally, one can advocate an idealized Christian lifestyle focused on virginity, abstinence, and separate beds for married couples, but pastoral applications of moral theology have always been more about actual living - and dealing with the messiness of life.

Perhaps, what we are really wrestling with is the notion of what it is to be inhuman. Interrupting an otherwise healthy pregnancy without a very compelling reason still appears to have a lot of support as being an inhuman activity. Then again, the notion of placing a woman at risk of death because she does not share our beliefs or because she perceives she has no other choices also appears to have widespread support as something that is inhuman.

Can you have a secular policy that permits abortion and even physician assisted suicide? It is hardly a Christian position. Then again, perhaps the Christian witness is better seen in public policy that makes these choices less necessary and less desirable. If we insist that public policy has to be Christian in a post-Christian civilization, we may be doing something that is not really very Christian – we may be claiming (against the teaching of St. Paul) – that the law can save us.

(Image taken from Shelly Niebuhr’s home page: http://shellyn.com/pageForLarger.html)