Second Sunday in Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious
to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them
again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and
hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ
your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

"If the first Sunday in Lent is about temptation then the second is about the call to faith." That is how I began my last blog post about this collect. And re-reading it I think that it is true. This Sunday is about Abraham and his righteousness in both Old Testament and Epistle readings. We see Abraham move his family on the promise of an unseen God. We see him trust in the rather ridiculous promise from a worldly standpoint that he and his barren wife would have children. And we see his willingness to sacrifice that same son without question to a God who seems cruel and capricious. And parallels are drawn between Abraham and Jesus...Jesus as the perfection of that sacrificial attitude. Jesus, willing to go to an even darker place than Abraham...to the gates of Hell itself. Clearly this "unchangeable truth" isn't something easy or always pleasant.

But I think what interests me this time around in this collect is the first petition. Be gracious....That phrase has such medieval connotations now. Kings are gracious. Ladies are gracious. You can have gracious manners. But the collect is aiming at something much deeper than that. For in the wording is an understanding that we do indeed have no power in ourselves to remain steady on our path. We may have the best intentions in the world but those intentions curl around on themselves so easily and we find ourselves doing the very thing we vowed not to do. We have "undulations" in C. S. Lewis's phrase from The Screwtape Letters. We have spiritual mood swings that make it nearly impossible for us to stay on the unbelievably demanding course that God asks of us. The situation would be completely hopeless is not for Grace. Because at the time we need it, help is always available. It's only a breath away, if we only open ourselves to it.

Grace is an utterly mysterious and equally utterly palpable force in our lives. I am more and more convinced that absolutely nothing in my life comes to me but for it. It's hard to remember this in the moment. When I have a really good class with my students I can inwardly crow about what a gifted teacher I am...but those gifts are just that...gifts. Such as I have, they are not mine but rather bestowed on my by my God. Indeed, one of the things that we discover if we try contemplative prayer is how rare true contemplation is...and how mysteriously bestowed upon us it is. And yet Grace is around us....ever present. We are literally swimming in a sea of Grace, in which God is continually bathing us. If we can get outside ourselves and the circumstances of our day to day lives we can see this. But for most of this it is hard to live like this continually. I know for myself, the best I can get is to feel blest on a sunny morning as I'm walking to work. But let a car fail to yield to me when I'm crossing the street, and all that splendid grace becomes instantly invisible.

The grace of seeing our failings is just as mysterious, even if at the time it feels less beautiful than contemplation or joy. But it is just as much a gift of God. Compunction, the ability to feel the full weight of our sins and of the ways we have failed and strayed from our intentions, and from God's intentions for us, is a grace just as everything else is. It can be deeply painful, seeing ourselves and all of our myriad inner contradictions all at once. The Russian esoteric thinker G.I. Gurdjieff said that without preparation, a man would go mad if he saw all his inner contradictions at once. So we are equipped with inner "buffers" which allow us to function quite well, without real self-knowledge. And when we are ready, appropriate forces from outside give us the strength and ability to see some of these inner contradictions clearly, which allows us the opportunity to amend our lives. I believe that what Gurdjieff was describing was akin to compunction, which can only come about through the grace of God. Left to our own devices, we would never see the shocking totality of our inner landscape and would lull ourselves into a false sense of our own virtuousness. Thank God that we are not left to that and that with Grace, God allows us to grow and mature as people of faith.

 

So yes...this week's collect is a call to radical faith...not faith triumphant or militant, but radical trust. But these is also an acknowledgement that we cannot find this faith, or stick to it, by ourselves. It takes openness to Grace for this to happen. But just as contemplation, or joy or all the good things God gives us are only a breath away...so too with compunction. If we ask...we shall receive. We just need to be prepared to receive what we ask for.

First Sunday in Lent
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be
tempted by Satan; Come quickly to help us who are assaulted
by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of
each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through
Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

So there it is right at the outset...one of the "hard" words for most contemporary liberal Christians. Temptation, like sin and repentance is not particularly popular in our culture. But unlike sin, temptation has been tamed. It's been co opted by Madison Avenue. We are told to "give into temptation" in myriad ads about chocolate, cookies and even fiber bars. Temptation becomes an island in an inane reality show, or an all inclusive resort. It is made to seem such a little thing.

And yet it is given a major place in the gospels. The first two things that all the synoptic gospels agree upon is the Baptism of Jesus by John, and then his successive temptation in the wilderness. Just this sequence suggests how important a concept temptation is. After the glorious decent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus you'd think he'd be ready to begin his ministry in some triumphant gesture. That's what one of us modern people would do. But no...he disappears for forty day, living in the desert without food or drink. And at the end of it he is tempted by the devil.

Here's another hard word for us moderns. The devil doesn't have much truck with us or we with him in the modern world. He seems hopelessly medieval. And yet he represents in the temptation stories so much that we value in modern life. He tempts Jesus with food...physical needs met, then with extravagant gestures or "specialness"...the angels themselves would swoop down and keep him from falling off a high place. And finally, worldly power beyond Jesus' wildest dreams. Father Thomas Keating in his book Invitation to Love likens these three temptations to the major concerns of our False Self...Safety and security (the bread), affection and esteem (jumping from the parapet) and power and control (the kingdoms of the world). So Jesus in these forty days is showing us that it is indeed possible not to give in to our False Selves, and that in resisting these temptations, great or small, we are taking a giant step toward God and the serving of God's purpose in our world.

So temptation isn't a little thing at all...it is the means by which the Devil, who is present in our False Self just as truly as God is present through the Holy Spirit in our True Self. Or at least the Devil uses the False Self system as the earpiece by which he communicates with us. Therefore there are no "little" temptations. C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece The Screwtape Letters depicts Hell as a fiendish bureaucracy in which little demons are constantly barraging us with suggestions which don't seem so bad in themselves but which serve to separate us from God and our fellow humans. This is a very clever but pointed picture of our inner life. The myriad little temptations which we succumb to yank us away from our intention, so that without realizing it, we even end up doing the exact opposite of our original intention.

Scholasticism in the Roman Catholic church has left us with, among other things, a cataloging tendency when it comes to sin...some are venial and some are mortal. I think that the above picture shreds that scholastic tendency. All sin is venial and all sing is moral. Even the most serious sin is venial when sincerely repented of, and even the most trivial sin is mortal when it's accumulation leads us in the opposite direction of our original intention. The situation would be hopeless...except, as the collect suggests, the answer doesn't lie with u.

For God's grace is such that it can bridge the gap that develops between us and God...that space is never less than a breath away. Just turning to God, aware of how powerless we are over our own passions can help restore the balance in our lives. For God ardently wants us back. All we need to do is turn again...as Thomas Keating says to "change the direction in which you are looking for happiness." It is so easy to fall back into old patterns, even though we know that the old patterns have not helped us in the past and hold no hope for our future. God's path is new...and is always new. It is unfamiliar to us, even though we have "known" it from a young age. It is counter cultural and counter psychological, yet to choose it changes everything.

Happiness lies here...we just have to choose it.

Ash Wednesday

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have
made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and
make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily
lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission
and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.

Ok...gonna try this again cause I was such an amazing success last time....

Like any good Episcopalian I went to church tonight to get "ashed". It's a tradition in the church that I didn't grow up with but which has become meaningful to me. But holy days like this do seem to bring out the crazies in New York. All of a sudden everyone becomes a preacher. And the hellfire and brimstone sermons become more frequent.

So on the subway home this man was preaching of God's awesome love and the devil's snares. He was confronted by a young woman who wanted to ask him to relax on the devil part. They both got into a shouting match that ended with him calling her Satan's minion and then spitting on her, accompanied by the foulest language possible. She was not innocent either and in fact started the swearing first. It was also obvious that he was pretty unstable and despite the pleas of other passengers she continued to prod and poke at him. It is the kind of incident that is classically New York...and in fact probably one of the things tourists flock to this city to see. One could shake one's head and take a bit of an ironic pose about it and then go on about your business. One could secretly tape it and put it on YouTube...it's the stuff that viral videos are made of.

But for me it was sad...a sad missed opportunity for all involved including myself, to really reflect the endless love and mercy of God. For if we really believe the opening of this Ash Wednesday Collect,. then indeed God hates nothing he has made...street preachers, antagonists, jaded and bemused New Yorkers...then all of the players in this little drama were God's children. And in fact each of them were teaching a message about humility and how difficult it is to for any of us to achieve.

First there is the street preacher. He obviously was a sincere man who had been blessed with a deep conversion experience. He was passionate about the love that he'd found with God and deeply wanted to share it with the subway car...whether or not we asked for it. But his experience of God was limited...and he was deeply attached to it, as it were the whole of God. When confronted by the woman, he could not see past his own viewpoint and ultimately had to turn her into a demon to keep himself together. As he argued with her he kept saying about all the "good he was doing and the media attention he was getting." He was so wrapped up in his own message he forgot to ascribe any of his "good" to God, where all good comes from.

The woman had her own issues. She was obviously fed up with his often obnoxious volume and frequent allusions to the devil. But she was enjoying her role as antagonist too much. Rather then ignoring an obviously unstable person, she kept twisting the knife in father until he broke and spit at her. I was at one point afraid it was going to get really violent.

I kept wondering what would happen if he could just see her as the voice of God for him right there and then...if he could accept that maybe the way she was provoking him was telling him something valuable about himself and his own unresolved issues...his arrogance and lack of humility. Maybe he was telling her something about her own normalcy and lack of passion...and maybe that her complacent certainty was not quite the thing either. And maybe they were telling all of us jaded New Yorkers that there these moments that make us uncomfortable might be the moments where we can find real lessons. Maybe it was a challenge for us not to the players in this drama as Maury characters or reality tv, but rather as Jesus himself, live and in person, right in front of us on the R train.

What does this all have to do with the Ash Wednesday Collect? We, to me these moments of strangers rubbing up against each others corns are moments of missed connection. And missed connection...missed mark is really what sin is. It is are failing to live up to the radical nature of God and the radical message of Jesus. And that message is that God is love and Love is everywhere. And that doesn't just mean those who are easy to love. God is present in the angry, the petulant, the borderline, the mentally unstable...and we almost ALWAYS miss it.

But the good news is that, again, God hates nothing he has made. and that means that in our failure to respond with compassion, we are not condemned, but loved. We can try again, determine to live out the love we profess with our faith...and we will most certainly fail. I know I do time and time again. But the good news is that God doesn't seem to demand that we get it perfect...just that we try, sincerely...that we humble ourselves enough to realize that we are no better than the people whose instability amuses us...or frightens us. The adversary isn't the devil...it's another human being who is just as sad lonely and confused at heart as we are if we are honest. And God loves us both...he doesn't take sides.

So far from being a depressing thing, as this collect looks on the outset, it is actually full of hope...which springs out of it's pretty dark penitent language. And as we start the Lenten Journey, hope can only be a good thing.

Holy Lent to all!

Lent 3

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This is yet another collect that begins with things that I think are hard for modern people to believe...and may have been hard for anyone at any time. The first statement of this collect puts us right in the thick of it. We acknowledge that we have no power to help ourselves. It amounts to a complete realization of our own utter powerlessness. This is something that I think either people just don't believe, as we tend to ascribe all of our accomplishments to our own abilities and worth, forgetting that these abilities come from God in the first place. Or we pay lip service to humility, but really believe that we are the source of all the things that come to us. Our work produces our money...it buys our food...our housing...our possessions.

And this materialism isn't just about material goods. When we help someone else, we feel good about it because WE helped. We imagine the glory goes to us. We even imagine when prayer is answered that somehow it's answered because WE deserve it. Through our efforts in prayer, or the righteousness of our lives we have compelled God to reward us. Even if we intellectually accept the idea that nothing happens without God's gift of grace, secretly we know that we've earned that Grace through our own efforts. This sort of Pelagianism is insidious. It's actually rewarded by our culture and enshrined in the Puritan work ethic, which, though the Puritans certainly believed in Grace, in practice could really make people believe in their innate right to God's reward.

But our collect reminds us that we have absolutely no power...none whatsoever, outside of God to really effect change in our lives. We may want to reform ourselves...change some element of our lives. Without the help of God we will perhaps start out alright, but within a short span of time will already begin sliding back into our old habits and ways of thinking. Left unchecked we may even find ourselves reversing our intentions and quite soon living out a life opposite of the one we resolved on living. As we are we haven't got the energy to break out of our false self on our own. The habits of a lifetime rewind on themselves continually.

The second part of the collect is particularly interesting to me. We ask God to defend us physically from adversity. But then we also ask him to defend our souls from evil thoughts. Again, this part of the collect can sound hopelessly old fashioned to modern people. After all, we are aware that our thoughts are constantly running from one thing to another, and that an angry thought about the person who is blocking the entrance of the subway, or not moving fast enough on an elevator can hardly do us real harm.

The collect reminds us that thoughts do actually matter. The things we think in a sense shape our life...and not just the big things, but especially the little thoughts. You may be the most peaceful person in the world, yet inside your mind you are constantly seething with hostile and angry thoughts about others. It's only a small step to letting out the poison in your brain. You might be as chaste as a nun and yet inside be a mass of lustful thoughts. While idle lustful thoughts are pretty natural, they can lead you to objectify people, which can change the way you react to your fellow creatures. Jesus even alludes to this idea in the famous "lust in your heart" passage. He reminds us that our righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees...a pretty tall order really. Jesus reminds us that it is what is inside that counts, that thoughts really do matter.

Indeed, our personality is shaped by in large by how we think and by the little thought tapes that loop around in our minds over and over again. Thoughts assail our self-image, creating either inflated egoism or poor self-esteem. Depression can be connected to the negative thoughts that run around our heads all the time. Our habits of mind are powerful, and shape our destinies in powerful ways...and the negative habits can indeed truly hurt us.

The problem is how to fight against thoughts. Trying to block them with our wills doesn't work. Modern psychology has shown the negative effects of repression, which hurts the soul as much as the negative thoughts do. It is like trying to hold a lid on the boiling stew of our thoughts...you can only hold it down for so long and then all those thoughts will explode out with renewed vengence. All the "efforts" that we can make with regard to these thoughts will come to naught if we rely on ourselves. This is where God comes in.

One of the joys to me of contemplative prayer is that it is a primer for dealing with afflictive thoughts and emotions. In Centering Prayer we are taught how to deal with thoughts in a way that gives them over quite literally to God. During the period of prayer, we are instructed to resist no thought, retain no thought, react emotionally to no thought and to return to the Sacred word as the symbol of our consent to the presence and action of God in our lives. This to me is the most effective way I've found to break the grip that my negative thoughts can have on me. When I find myself thinking about anything, but especially when I'm thinking about some particularly negative thought, if I can recognize that I'm in the grip of it, not try to block it but at the same time not think about it or let it loop around, detach myself from it emotionally, and then send it away to God through the repeating of my sacred word, the thought loses all it's power and reveals itself to be nothing more than a little blip on the radar screen. Any thought is this in the time of prayer, but even in daily life this is a practice I can do. I find that when I remember to do it, it has tremendous power. It is literally a daily, moment by moment surrendering of my will to God's will.

The Feast of the Annunciation

Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I'll get to this one soon.

Lent 2

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 If the first Sunday in Lent is all about temptation, the second is all about the call to faith or the recall to faith. Faith is another one of those words that gets thrown around in George Michael songs but which is actually fairly mysterious in Biblical terms. Is it merely believing in something? Is it some sort of system of dogma? So many people talk about faith as if it is some sort of checklist...as if accepting an idea, like the inerrancy of the Bible or the primacy of the Pope is what defines faith. But a close look at the readings for this week, along with the collect suggest that something different is going on here.

The Old Testament readings for this Sunday all have to do with Abram. The one for this year is particularly pointed...it is a short passage that recounts the Lord telling Abram to take his family and go where the Lord tells him...no clue about where that is...just a blind journey. This is a pretty amazing thing to contemplate. Abram's family wasn't just one of our contemporary nuclear families. Abram's house included servants, extended family and probably many other hangers-on plus livestock and other household goods. It would have been a pretty large undertaking. Migrations of this sort would probably not have happened except under duress of some sort. The Bible mentions no sort of calamity, war or famine. One assumes that this journey was taken in time of plenty. What would make someone uproot everything he knew just on a promise from a God you couldn't even see?



Abram gives us an example of the kind of faith that matters to God I think. It's a faith that is expressed as complete trust in God without question. As Paul makes clear, Abram's virtue lies not in what he does, but why he does it. His depth of faith allows him to set off to an unknown land on the promise that he will father nations, and then wait for a long time until that promise comes true. God's promises to Abram fly in the face of reason and yet Abram chooses to believe them and to act from that belief. This radical trust is what is accounted to Abram as righteousness...not his adherence to the law or to some set of beliefs or dogmas. Abram chooses to believe a set of fairly illogical promises and is rewarded for it.

So if faith has something to do with this radical trust, than what does our collect mean? Well, the first thing we are reminded of is that God is merciful. This is not the "just" God in this collect...not the punishing vengeful God we are praying to. Rather it is the God who deeply desires our return...the God of Hosea rather than the God of Joel. We petition this God to bring those who have lost the way back to the fold. In other words, everyone who has lost that deep abiding sense of trust in God. If I am honest I recognize that this is a petition first and formost for myself. I would like to live in that radical trust. And sometimes I can...for a few moments. But inevitably I start to worry, or make plans...or my deep seated need for safety and security keeps me from acting in the radically trusting way of Abram. I would like to be an artist...but I want to pay the rent so I teach. I would love to live in Europe...but where will my money come? So I live paying lip service to the goodness of God, but I don't trust him enough to live that out in any real way.

The call to repentence is a call to that radical faith...to reorienting your life from the values of the world...the false self values of security, esteem and power which were so beautifully illustrated in Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, to the values of Christ. The basic message of the Gospel is that our security is in God...our real esteem comes from God...and any power we have is the power of trust in God. All other values lead away from the Good News. So repentence, rather than being a solemn breast beating, can actually be a joyful return. Bring our mind and heart truly back to God and that will be accounted to us as righteousness.

 

And we don't do this alone. Notice that the collect suggests that God leads us in this. We are taught that what we recieve in prayer is a Grace from God and not due to our own deserving. It is the same with repentence. God grants us the grace to see where our lives have fallen away from that radical trust which is true faith. And then God gently leads us back. This may not happen all at once...or even one time for all. It may be a long series of mini falls and mini returns. But the good news is that God is with us...fixed, and unchangable. We may flit around Him, but he leads us gently and firmly to that great unknown future. We just have to take a deep breath and step in his direction.

Lent 1

See....already messing up!