Last night I wrote a long post about my relationship with so many bloggers who are Episcopalian or Anglican. I wrote about what strong union I felt with them - such community, such love and how the spirit moves among us. It is a real example of the tremendous zest of life, the true dynamism of community. It shows me why my earlier approaches in life, of "Jesus 'n me" seemed fruitful, but were anything but.
In any case, I wrote this whole long post and for some reason I did not post it, nor will I now. Why? I am not sure, but that is my decision today.
Then today I went to Sue J.'s blog and was surprised to find an Episcopalian reference there.
Now we all know that I am as Catholic as can be, but since Catholic actually does mean universal... well I am always trying to be as Catholic as can be. That said, I am held aloft with the love and prayers of my blogging faith community, the majority of which are Episcopalian.
In so many ways, I feel a part of that denomination as well, which is to me pure manna from heaven. It is not lost on me that while I would not switch so easily, if I did live somewhere else, I might have become part of the TEC by now.
It made me weep as I thought about how we tear each other up and push each other away, and so very often in the name of Jesus Christ.
Today's post from Gene is in marked difference to this from yesterday, which I found filled with hope.
That is the Way. We climb and we descend, climb and descend. Today +Gene needs our prayers. I wept as I read about how hurt and excluded he feels on this Sunday in England.
There is some table we have all - each and every one of us - been pushed away from. It hurts to be left out, ignored and rejected.
Today the Gospel was about the weeds and the wheat and what a day it is to ponder that.
Today I weep, but I pray. Today I lament, but I rejoice. Please pray for +Gene if you are a praying sort. And if you are not, maybe - just maybe - you can send him and the world around us a thought, a wish and an intention for integrity, dignity, wholeness, unity, healing, reconciliation and peace.
Good Lord I have been so fecking serious these past days, with theology, heaven, hell and all manner of deep thoughts.
I exhaust myself, I am amazed that any of you actually keep up with this. Today Mr. He Is and I hope to go to the beach to relax and have fun together. (It ain't the ocean, but it is what we've got.)
Wanting to post something more lighthearted today, I was delighted to find an email from Tengrain in my inbox which was like an answer to my kosher dill-iest of prayers.
Frankly - I think Tengrain is asking me if I have accepted a pickle as my personal savior. And I am not in a position to answer that question right now. Plus a girl has to have some boundaries, even on a let it all hang out bloggy like this one.
Enjoy - and as the nice man says, don't try this at home kids. I can assure you that no conversions will occur as you watch this video or after. Except the conversion into fits of laughter, that is. This is a little over 4 minutes of briny, pickle-y goodness.
This pickle is over. Please watch the video and go in peace to serve the pickle and one another. Thanks be to cucumbers.
***Please see: Comment that should not go unnoticed from the lovely Canadian blogger and friend Kate Morningstar:
Fran -- that shouldn't go unremarked, and I'm sitting here and sitting here trying to think of anything I could say. Have mercy! I'm afraid if we cut that pickle in half now, there'd be a likeness of the Virgin Mary inside. (Emphasis mine! Somebody alert Mad Priest too!)
Sister Joan is a Light, she is a Way Shower, a Voice Crying Out. I love her. I am posting the entire column here.
As Sr. Joan aptly points out, the Pope actually does give good advice to our sisters and brothers in the Anglican Communion. However, he is not really in a position to be doling out such advice now, is he?
Do not split up is good advice. However, like Sr. Joan also aptly says - um, like - what about what we are doing in our own house Catholics?
Blogging has brought me many joys and in many ways. One of the most significant is the tremendous gift of community with so many people of faith including no small number of bloggers from the Episcopalians and Anglicans.
This gives me hope for Christian unity as I see it unfold in my life and as I said yesterday- the Kingdom is here and now. Right now. Yep, happening as we speak.
I understand quite clearly that time as I understand it has nothing to do with time as God understands it. To that, I surrender. However, I also accept that my hands and heart are needed to move in whatever time may be, to keep building the Kingdom.
Every time someone is pushed away from The Table - like Sister Louise Lears has, the Kingdom is diminished, not built up.
So, while the idea of not "breaking up" is indeed foundational to any kind of serious Christian life, like all things, that idea should be embraced more seriously by Benny if he is saying this to our brothers and sisters.
At this moment I am reminded of the words of another Catholic heroine of mine, from another era. I present the words of St. Teresa of Avila(another strong woman who took on and reformed the Church) here, followed by Sr. Joan's words of wisdom and her challenge to integrity.
‘Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, not feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which to look at Christ’s compassion to the world, yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good, and yours are the hands with which he is to bless now.’ -St. Teresa of Avila
Why Them and Not Us - Joan Chittister
The church world got a really good piece of advice this week. The pope, we're told, warned the Anglicans not to split over their internal controversies about homosexuality and the ordination of women bishops. He warned, quite wisely, about the dangers and the destructiveness of schism. (See As easy as it sounds to simply go away and play in your own ecclesiastical sandbox, the fact is that divisions are never neat -- if for no other reason than that they not only fail to resolve the present problem but they model how not to resolve the next problem, too. After all, if we can fix one issue by simply leaving it, we can do the same with the next one -- and there will be a next one -- until what was intended to be a nice, clean division becomes one fracture after another, more a splintering and a slivering, than a surgically healing separation of unlike tissues.
Now if the Catholic church could only get to the same clear point about the question of "excommunication" and/or "interdict" -- the process of splintering a church within a church, of putting people outside the pale of the sacraments, of separating ourselves from contentious questions one person, one diocese, at a time. While we're getting better at holding both ends against the middle at times -- we managed to deal with the Feenyites and the Lefevbrites, for instance -- we clearly have some serious problems about how to deal with individuals who dare to raise new questions in the midst of a shifting body politic. Like how to be personally moral in a pluralistic state if you're a politician or, worse, a candidate for political office, for instance. Like how to maintain past liturgical forms in the face of the development of more contemporary ones.
Nevertheless, more important than the question of excommunication is the unevenness with which it is applied. We excommunicate women who support the ordination of women, for instance, but we don't excommunicate either military officers or military chaplains who support the use of nuclear weapons. We excommunicate people who belong to groups of which we don't approve. In the past, for instance, YMCAs and YWCAs were forbidden to Catholics. In the present, in some places, it's membership in Call to Action. But we didn't excommunicate bishops or priests who said nothing about Adolph Hitler in Germany or Augusto Pinochet in Chile, nor did the church excommunicate those who belonged to their organizations.
Now we are watching while Sister of Charity Louise Lears is denied the sacraments and the opportunity to minister in the archdiocese of St. Louis for her support of the role of women in the church, though women religious have always worked on behalf of the role of women in church and society when the rest of the world stood aghast at the thought of even educating women, let alone training them for independence. Yet, at the same time, executioners in prisons -- who do their public work secretly! -- will not be excommunicated for executing prisoners. Whatever we think of the essential morality of state executions, the number of errors we now know to be the norm in the public practice of capital punishment ought surely be enough to make the practice morally reprehensible.
We are, in other words, dangerously close to being more punitive of women who raise theological questions about women's role in the church than we are of any other facet of moral confusion or contention in society. And the situation is not a new one. In the 1600s, the church excommunicated Mary Ward for wanting to start a religious order of non-cloistered women. In our own era, in Indiana, they excommunicated M. Theodore Guerin, foundress of the Sisters of Providence, for starting new schools without the bishop's permission. She was canonized in 2006. In 1871, they excommunicated Mary MacKillop in Australia for trying to do the same and then beatified her in 1995. Church officials excommunicated Joan of Arc -- and burned her at the stake -- because she wouldn't agree to obey the church voices around her over the voice of God she heard in her heart. But they don't excommunicate pedophile priests who prey on children or military dictators who use genocide or ethnic cleansing as a political tool against others and massacre against their own. No, we just excommunicate those who question the practices of the church itself.
There will be a great deal written about Lears' situation, of course, -- and it should be -- while we all try to sort out both the question and the so-called spiritual cure.
But the issue, not the system, is the issue. Instead of a difference of opinion about the role of women in religion, a subject that is at this moment of history a topic in every tradition, every religion, every part of the globe, we now have a full-blown ecclesiastical shoot-out. An "excommunication." A casting out even of those who do not break the canon laws on the subject but who do broach the forbidden discussion. What should be seen as part of the spiritual discipline of living in hope and faith and openness to the Holy Spirit in "the-already-but-not-yet" is labeled instead as infidelity.
Finding ourselves in a time of social turmoil when all the answers of the past are being brought into question has become for many a Galileo moment. Non-thinking, euphemistically called "obedience" in such situations, has become more important than the search for light in darkness. The last time such things happened we made it a mortal sin to go to the marriage of a loved one in a Protestant church. We turned a blind eye and deaf ear on wife-beating while forbidding divorce and remarriage. We declared slavery the will of God and made one human color the color of intelligence, ordination and the fullness of humanity. As a church, we forgot the Gospel on some issues and condemned whatever was the present brand of heretics.
But the scripture is there and won't go away. In the face of all that, Jesus tells us a parable: "Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?" the laborers in the story ask the farmer about the bad seed "an enemy had sown." The answer, at a time of great change and deep reflection, ought perhaps to give us great pause: "No," the scripture answers, "because as you gather the weeds you might pull up some of the wheat along with them." We pulled up a lot of wheat with the excommunication of Martin Luther and the reformers, for instance, and have been trying to repair those exclusions ever since. Surely this is no time to start doing the same kind of thing again. Surely we have learned better by this time. Surely we don't want to do it to one nun whose only crime is a question and in whom the people see a minister of uncommon quality. Maybe we ought to "leave some chaff and grain to grow up together" for a while longer until we can see clearly which is which.
From where I stand, Pope Benedict XVI is dead right about urging the Anglicans to sit down together and work things out. He's right about calling us to remember that we're all in a time of new beginnings. He's surely right, history shows us, about making community a more demanding factor than law with all its cultural vagaries and historic changes. Now if we ourselves would only take the call to heart and sit down together and do the same.
Will you make it to heaven? What a joke. Will you make heaven here?
As human beings, well those of us who are religiously inclined anyway, we think of Earth as here and now.
We think of Hell as down there and hopefully never.
We think of Heaven as up there in the sky that we think about in a completely self-serving please-sweet-baby-jeebus-please-i-will-be-good-i-promise and that we get "in."
Which is pretty much not only theologically incorrect, but also a big crock of horseshit anyway.
WHAT?!
Oh the fecking Kingdom - it is here and now. We are so damn pigheaded and exclusionary to think otherwise. It is what makes so many so-called Christians seem inauthentic, disingenuous and more...
Hedging a bet as to what may be, rather than living out of a truth in the present moment.
It is not about what you deposit into your celestial IRA or 401K and then "live off" of later. It is about who you are and what you are doing now, right now.
Which pretty much has little to do with gay marriage and other such nonsense. It is much more about what you have done for the "least" of those around us.
Feeling a tremendous amount of frustration over ever-growing levels of moronic behavior being lived out under a so-called "Christian" mantle, I am tired of the great profession of Christ so that someone can assure themselves an eternal retirement home of comfort, rest and lots of angelic good room service.
To that I end may I direct you to the blog of someone that I am not even linked to here... yet.
Under the Overpasses is a blogger who runs a homeless shelter. He is a religious person but not in any way that you have probably encountered.
That link goes to a very specific post, which I highly recommend.
I may not have time to read all of your blogs right now. I do not have the luxury of not reading his.
You can't read him and be unchanged. I hope you will stop by there. In the meantime, I sit here and do little, I write about the Kingdom. Under the Overpasses actually lives the Kingdom.
(I am off to another day of consulting work and very little blog reading. Some of you sent me your posts that you wanted me to read- thank you. Send and I shall read!)
Blogger has decided that there will be no visual for you today...
Can we carry the burden of reality? How can we remain open to all human tragedies and aware of the vast ocean of human suffering without becoming mentally paralyzed and depressed? How can we live a healthy and creative life when we are constantly reminded of the fate of the millions who are poor, sick, hungry and persecuted? How can we even smile when we keep being confronted by pictures of tortures and executions?
What keeps us from opening ourselves to the reality of the world? Could it be that we cannot accept our powerlessness and are only willing to see those wounds that we can heal? But life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a creative response can come forth.-Henri Nouwen
This was today's email from Inward/Outward. I think it was Jan that introduced me to that website; getting my daily email from them is a great source of inspiration. (As is Jan who sent me a lovely card in the mail o' the snail that I received yesterday. Thank you Jan!)
Henri Nouwen was such a source of wisdom and insight. I get a daily email based on his writings too.
My hand-wringing is over. Or if it is not, I am going to try to be a little less public about it. You have all been great sources of comfort, support, inspiration and love. That is the essence of community and if blogging is about anything, it is community.
I have two half-day consulting assignments - this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, with busy mornings too.
The photo above was taken by me at very near to a border crossing between Israel and Lebanon, at Metulla, Israel in July 2006. What a different place that must be today - what about that gate? It was only a few weeks later that the war began. This is commonly known as the Good Fence in Israel. (BLOGGER has decided that no photos can be uploaded, I have now tried about 1o times. Later. Sigh.)
Will we ever learn?
Go do something good for someone else today, someone really in need. Sometime the simple act of saying hello, an authentic look in the eye or listening can change and transform a life. Including your own.
(PS - I am hitting "Mark all as read" on my reader. If you have something that you have published over the last few days and you want me to read it, please email me and I will!)
The day has come. Yesterday was the last day that I was "paid."
Free fall!
The other day when I posted this I got so many amazing and loving comments. One of them came from my IRL friend JAS, (who I know via my other IRL friend, Dcap) where he said:
Hey Fran. The one thing about your last severance check is that you're finally severed from the past. You are actually free. And that's a wonderful thing. As the insightful poet, Bruce Springsteen, has said, "One day we'll look back and it will all seem funny." So my dear Fran, "Come out tonight". XO, JAS from Kingston
Emphasis was mine. Holy crap.
How right is JAS? (And JAS does know about free fall, yes he does indeed.) I am letting go... Wheeeeeeeeee.
Well not so much, but I am trying. I actually just had the audacity to recommend ways of letting go to another beautiful dear blogging friend via an email, just moments ago.
Sheesh I can be such an ass sometimes. Lovely one, you know who you are - please ignore me, I am being Hector Projector I think.
What I am trying to do is free myself here and the reality is it is not about me freeing myself, which is rather narcissistic if you ask me, but about being free.
Last week I did have an informational interview that did not produce a job, but it lasted 90 minutes, not the polite 20 minutes that I thought it would. There are some possibilities, but nothing immediate.
What came out of it is that I know what I really want to do. And what I really want to do will mean low pay and the need to get an advanced degree. Which coincidentally is the advanced degree that I have secretly longed to get for years.
No job, no money - and thoughts of grad school?! Hah. I am calling for an appointment to go see the director of the program - I met her in May by chance. What have I got to lose? The woman who I met with last week sees me in a couple of roles for which I have no credentials but plenty of experience per se and some knowledge. Her advice was to get the credentials as I go along, which was great.
All of this self-indulgent swirl. And in my angst that stupid post from earlier yesterday. It is all idiocy. I have more security than most on the surface and in the vast sense, I am really called to live the faith I profess, so let me actually set about doing that.
Speaking of which, I do see the hand of God at work in the world, most beautifully these days through the life of Bishop Gene Robinson.
While others argue from their extremes and put each other down, +Gene is just out there being, living and loving. Period. In his very Franciscan way, +Gene is "preaching the Gospel always, using words when necessary."
If for some reason you don't know this man, he is the openly gay Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. Depending on who you ask, he is greatly loved and revered or greatly hated and despised.
He is in England right now and while any of you who know him have probably already seen this, I most highly recommend this video. It is 30 minutes long. Honestly, I watched it but I also did not, just listened to his words in the background as I did some other things.
The man is brilliant and I have rarely seen the work of God made so manifest in one human being. Truly holy, wise and deep, filled with tremendous love and compassion and seemingly no judgment.
All of which finally leads me to the title of this post. No job, no advanced degree, no money, a trip coming up that is committed to and that we can't afford...
Yet here I sit, as JAS reminds me - free from my past. Time for me to be me. And people as diverse as JAS and +Gene and all of you remind me of that all the time.
One of my very favorite hymns and not at all hokey IMHO is "How Can I Keep From Singing?" You may know it as it is on the 1991 release from Enya, Shepherd Moon. I am no big Enya fan, but I went through a phase and that song has stayed on forever long after phase ended.
So here is a video of it and the lyrics are below. Despite it all and with no small amount of thanks to God and to YOU ALL, how can I keep from singing? (thus ends this series of navel gazing posting!)
My life goes on in endless song above earth's lamentations, I hear the real, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife I hear it's music ringing, It sounds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?
While though the tempest loudly roars, I hear the truth, it liveth. And though the darkness 'round me close, songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I'm clinging. Since love is lord of heaven and earth how can I keep from singing?
When tyrants tremble sick with fear and hear their death knell ringing, when friends rejoice both far and near how can I keep from singing?
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I'm clinging. Since love is lord of heaven and earth how can I keep from singing?
My life goes on in endless song above earth's lamentations, I hear the real, though far-off hymn How can I keep from singing?
I must say that I regret getting into the mishegas that was noted in the post below. Truth be told, I wrote the post in anger and in haste, two things I try not to do. For some reason, go figure what my psyche was up to, I put it in future-publish mode and thought I would deal with it by not publishing.
As the old saying goes, Fran proposes and Blogger disposes and I did not get back to the computer in a timely way and it was published.
I do not wish to give either ego-maniacal idiot any further attention.
With that in mind, I ask you to redirect your attention to this post, which I have moved back up.
Please go visit Border Explorer's blog and and let us focus our time and attention on actual human issues.
The great blogger Border Explorer has put one not one but two updated posts on the subject.
I ask you to please go read her posts from Saturday and Sunday.
The cut to the chase is that - Que sopresa - the US government acted in an inappropriate way.
From the NY Times editorial that Border Explorer links to:
"Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.
“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”
He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”
It is a sad day in bully nation. And it grows sadder. This does nothing but hasten the economic demise of a town already in decline. Everyone loses - and why?
With so much going on it is easy to bypass this story, but try to visit Border Explorer and check this out.
And please thank her for her commitment working with the poorest of the poor, those on the margins and the liminal edges of life. She is a gift.
I said that earlier, in my post. Somebody has to go first.
I did not say this, but I will now...then somebody has to know when to stop.
I also said this:
I will try to post something about communion soon and this recent communion flap. At first I was angered by the anti-PZ contingency, but I am also somewhat angered by the pro as well, as the whole thing gets blog/internet blown to out of proportion bits. We have seemingly lost all ability on all sides to be reasonable.
Allow me to repeat that last sentence... we have seemingly lost all ability on all sides to be reasonable.
I completely respect PZ Myers' right to be an atheist. I could care less if he worships a pencil eraser or the reflection of his own face in the mirror. That said, he has gone too far over the top on this. Why can't he accept the rights of others? And who asked him to get involved? Does he give a rat's ass about Webster Cook? I have to wonder.
He does seem give a rat's ass about his own need for his agenda and grandstanding. Kind of like the loudmouths he takes on. At first I was all for standing up for Myers but not any longer. He is as ridiculous as the bloviating blowhards himself at this point and shockingly even more so. He is supposed to be the intellect in the crowd, no?
We - or at least I did not expect the same from the highly regarded and vaunted Myers. I know that some of you know him, seem to like him, respect him... that means something to me, but not any more.
It is really sad to me that he has stooped to conquer. You know, I am a friend of the atheist around here. However, the pedantic assrocket- be they Catholic or atheist - holds no sway with me.
Just as Donohue and his ilk could spend their time actually helping the poor or the disenfranchised, kind of like Jesus might like, Myers could be more productive in forwarding the atheist cause in a way that is uplifting to people.
Now Myers is just the other side of the Donahue coin. How messed up is that?
This whole thing has become really pathetic and I think that Mad Priest has done a good job of posting on this.
