Simple-minded Connections

Here is where we start from-

In all Western Societies and the US is no exception we have developed a taste for endless analysis as if the very act of self-reflection by itself has the power to magically transform society. It is following a major tragedy that this taste for analysis – now the major activity of news reporting in an age of 24/7 news coverage reaches a climax.

What I have been observing over the last week- and not for the first time – is our simple- minded approach to making connections. We have three core ingredients to the endless news coverage of the Tucson shootings:

The current vitriolic atmosphere of political rhetoric and commentary
The evil the lies at the heart of any criminal act of violence
The unbalance of heart and mind commonly referred to as mental illness

The argument goes around – and around as to the existence or absence of connections between these three core ingredients with reference to the shootings last Saturday in Tucson. Some voices seemingly from the left clearly see powerful connections between all three. While other voices seemingly of the right seem to see no connection between them any of them.

What I find so frustrating is that both positions are grounded in a simplistic view of connection as cause and effect. This is a weakness in our Western worldviews so influenced by the scientific paradigm where things are observed to connect or not according to the laws of direct cause and effect. To my way of looking at the world this is too simple.

Spiritual traditions have always recognized interconnection between all things. Nothing exists in isolation from everything else. However, this sense of interconnection cannot be reduced to chains of cause and effect. To my mind the three ingredients noted above all impact at multiple levels upon each other. The manner of this impact is difficult to determine which is why spiritual traditions stress the importance to take care with every thought and every action knowing the there flow from every thought and action a mysterious chain of unforeseen and unintended consequences.

Violent political rhetoric pushes on the boundaries of what is considered acceptable and even normal in wider social discourse. As levels of anger rise in the general populace social inhibitions towards violent outburst weaken. Societal stresses impact upon the emotional formation and stable development of social units at the levels of community, family and the individual. Saturday’s shooter is responsible for an act of unthinkable criminal violence. He is now also revealed to be a person with a poor mental and emotional health history. His target was a political figure and in a sense the other deaths seem collateral to this central motivation in that he knew his primary target.

I spent 20 years of my ministry working in the field of mental health care, 18 months of which were here in Phoenix. My current preoccupations as a pastor to a growing and diverse urban congregation concern the relationships or interconnections between emotional experience and spiritual health and development. I believe all of us find our healing within healthy and healing communities. Its the community and our membership within it that offers or denies each of us the potential for our healing and capacity to thrive. The 17th century Anglican priest and mystical poet John Donne remarked ‘no man is a island’.

But where are we to end-up?

Currently a truth about our society is that mentally disturbed individuals of a psychopathic disposition continue to become more and more disturbed until some of them trigger the reactions of the criminal justice system which by default has become the main institution that deals with serious mental illness of many kinds. After the huge progress beginning in the late 19th century and gathering momentum in the 2oth in understanding the roots and causes of mental illness can we really intend that we as a society should return to a situation where mental illness is once again something to be ignored until it becomes a matter of crime and punishment?

January 13, 2011 0

Musings on the Annunciation

With the Episcopal Church’s adoption of the Three Year Lectionary, there has been a loss of significance concerning the lighting of the pink candle traditionally done on Advent III and the proclamation of the Annunciation. The candle is still lit on Advent III accompanied by a gospel about John the Baptist with the gospel reading for the Annunciation now occurring today on Advent IV.

On Advent Sunday the lectionary moved us back to the first of our three-year cycle of readings. This Advent we have been hearing from the Gospel according to Matthew. Note the wording here the wording that each sunday announces the proclamation of the Gospel hear the holy gospel according to — –.Each Gospel writer or Evangelist although following a general outline has a theme and a context that is particular to the time and place in which they lived. Although the Evangelists are constructing their narrative under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they are writing after the facts – so to speak. Or put another way they are setting the facts into an overarching narrative about God’s action in the world. Writing after the fact is an important point to which I will return later.

Matthew is a Jewish writer writing for a Jewish Christian context and so sets the local story about Jesus of Nazareth into the historical context of God’s call of the Israel – the Jews to be his people. In Jesus the promises that God makes to Israel are finally fulfilled. In Jesus the Law of Moses and the prophecies of Isaiah are fulfilled and for Matthew the symbolism of Jesus is that he is the new Moses, and also the Emmanuel spoken of by Isaiah. But not only the law but all human desire and longing is fulfilled and made compete in Jesus. This includes our individual desires and longings.

So Matthew opens with a long genealogy which locates Jesus in line of decent from Abraham. The message here is that Jesus emerges out of and is the completion of an historical relationship between God and the Jewish people.

The Birth of Jesus

Matthew begins with ‘the birth of Jesus took place like this’ ….

Mary discovers she is pregnant while engaged but not yet married to Joseph. Unlike today sex before marriage is not an explanation for her pregnancy.
Joseph is shocked and in two minds about what to do. The Law allows him to take her to court and have the engagement annulled. Or he can deal with the matter quietly and send her back to her family without a fuss.
While trying to figure out what to do he has a dream in which God tells him to marry Mary because her pregnancy results from an action of God’s holy spirit. Joseph is also told to name the child Joshua – savior of the people.
In the dream Joseph is told that the birth of Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise made through the prophet Isaiah – a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name will be called Emmanuel – God is with us.
Joseph listens to his dream, marries Mary and does not consummate the marriage until after Jesus is born.

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth

In liberal theological circles its fashionable to describe the doctrine of the Virgin Birth as a myth. There is often confusion over meaning of term ‘myth’. Is the VB a version of a myth similar to others found in the classical religions of the Mediterranean?

No the VB is not a myth like the conception of Apollo or Hercules. The way Matthew tells the story there is a marked absence of the literary convention of the heroic tale. Its an ordinary story rich in biographical detail in which we see the protagonists as two perplexed, frightened, and ultimately courageous human beings. They struggle to understand what is happening to them and this struggle forces them to move beyond the conventional frame of their society into the uncharted territory of an encounter with the divine. The most important detail in this story is that Joseph heeded the call of the luminous moment (Interpreter Bible). Although Matthew does not mention it the same theme is picked up by Luke, who implies that Mary could have said no! The message of Gabriel to Mary is that of an invitation that requires a willing response on both her’s and Joseph’s parts.

Does myth of the VB mean a story that fills the gap left by an incomplete scientific understanding of human procreative biology? If Matthew had had a biological understanding of the possibilities and limitations of human procreation would he have told the story like this?

If we think Matthew is offering us a pre-modern explanation of how Jesus was conceived then we miss his point completely. Matthew presumably knew enough about sexual procreation to know that what he was writing seemed highly improbable if understood as a biological explanation. Have you seen those paintings of the Annunciation that depict a ray emanating from the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove or from the mouth of Gabriel and entering into the ear of the BVM. Is this a kind of Star Trek beam me up Scotty kind of sexual penetration with laser ray? Hardly! I noted earlier and said I would return to the point that Matthew is writing after the fact. Matthew is not depicting a supernatural biological event. He is constructing a narrative that accounts for what he and his listeners already experienced as being true. This truth is that in the birth of Jesus God has come into the world and everything has changed as a result.

Does our scientific understanding of human biology now mean that we use the word myth to view the VB as a kind of fairy story which is no-longer credible to the modern mind?

The Narrative of the VB, which occurs in both Matthew and Luke comes to be understood in the early Church period in a variety of ways. This variety of interpretations later recognized as heresies increasingly gave concern resulting in the need for an Ecumenical Council to thrash the truth out once and for all. The result was the Nicene Creed in which the Church states that Jesus who is the pre-existent second person of the Trinity was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit – came down from heaven – and became incarnate from the Virgin Mary – and was made human. Like Matthew the Nicene doctrine emerges after the fact so to speak as an affirmation of the essential experience of the Early Church.

Again this is not an explanation of a process its a statement of a belief. A belief that has arisen to account for a lived experience that in Jesus the God of Israel has created a completely new relationship with humanity. This relationship is a new covenant in which the human and the divine while remaining distinct are equal participants in a relationship – a relationship which mirrors the equality yet separation of the relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the ‘persons’ whose relationship makes up the Trinity. By the time of the Council of Nicaea the Church has the gospel of John where Jesus makes the point over and over again that if the Father and he are one so then the Father and we are one through him.

In Jesus our human nature and God’s divine nature meet in relationship yet remain distinct. Nicaea repudiated all heretical explanations, which tried to say either God is masquerading under the guise of being human in a semi divine Jesus (allusions to Classical thinking) or Jesus is a really great and good man – a Buddha-like figure through whom God speaks. The VB is the formula that explains nothing. Instead it protects the mystery of God’s reaching-out to his creation and pulling us into a relationship of equality hither-to unknown and unthinkable. This is a truth we can’t explain but a truth we nevertheless experience the fruits of in our lives as Christians.

Today we live in a world dominated by the scientific paradigm. Science seeks only to explain what it can see. If it can’t see it, it can’t explain it, and so is silent on the matter. As the technologies of observation increase scientific explanations change and advance. For three hundred years the proponents of theology as a competing explanatory paradigm have fought with science and lost every battle. Today fundamentalist Christianity challenges the theory of evolution as if they are competing explanatory systems for the origin of the universe. Science and theology differ. There is no competition between scientific theory and theological belief. Theory and belief operate completely differently. Theory seeks to make the unknown known about. Belief seeks to protect the mystery of what we experience yet can’t know about from being reduced to mere explanation.

As Episcopalians our Church accepts only the teaching of the first five centuries of the Christian Church – which is up to the end of the last great Ecumenical Council. Therefore, unlike liberal Protestants we cannot jettison the VB or any other teaching of the Tradition when it seems to conflict with scientific explanation. The tripartite balance between Scripture, Tradition and Reason which Anglican Tradition upholds constantly propels us into an engagement between our own experience and the teaching of the Tradition through which the Church has come to understand Scripture. This bears a richer fruit than simply editing the Tradition to fit the arrogance of modern minds. We avoid easy explanation as the basis for faith and experience faith as a journey involving a struggle with mystery. I use the word mystery here to describe what we cannot ever know or control and yet dimly perceive and experience. For us the VB is not about biology at all its about the mystery of God’s action in the salvation of the world. It articulates God’s first invitation of the New Covenant. Like all invitations it awaits appropriate response. In this way humanity is invited into a new covenant to with God co-create the Kingdom together.

As Episcopalians sacramental worship lies at the heart of our practice. In this context I conclude with the final stanza from a great 20th century mystics response to the invitation to Rejoice.

Fifteen years old –

The flowers printed on her dress

Cease moving in the middle of her prayer

When God, Who sends the messenger,

Meets His messenger in her Heart.

Her answer, between breath and breath,

Wrings from her innocence our Sacrament!

In her {white} body God becomes our Bread.

Annunciation by Thomas Merton

December 20, 2010 0

The Value of Observation

Last week I had the experience of accompanying my grand daughter Claire to her Montessori School Halloween costume procession. I was struck and not for the first time by the way these preschool children have been taught to conduct themselves. The children approach one another with a directness of gaze and openness of expression that communicates interested curiosity. They have a way of approaching one another, signaling interest and then waiting for the approached child to respond. As I observe them behaving in this way sooner or later a child approaches me, looks me straight in the face and asks “who are you- are you Claire’s Dad”? “No”, I reply. “I am her granddad”. The child then tells me “You talk funny”. Of course what they are referring to is my New Zealand take on what in Britain is referred to as BBC received pronunciation of the Queen’s English. My heart opens under the direct gaze of such curiosity which is devoid of judgement and filled with innocent observation.

Montessori education strikes the modern world as somewhat odd in its description of the educative process as work and its belief in the child controlling the pace of their own learning. I approve of this and have always been impressed by the way Claire has been taught to communicate with the world around her. Long before she could talk she was taught the phrase “I need help”. Armed with this simple phrase she was able to elicit appropriate responses from those around her which avoided the build up of frustrated rage so often seen in little children battling to make their desires known. Like her class mates, she too approaches the world with open-faced innocent curiosity which facilitates observation rather than snap judgement. Observing two children arguing one child simply offers the other the observation, “those are not very nice words”! How different our world might be if we adults could emulate this practice of offering one another observations on behavior. If we could simply report to one another the impact for us of an other’s words or actions we might avoid the escalation of anger and hurt that results from our usual practice of delivering judgements upon one another in accusatory tone and form.

I am left wondering how many of my life’s hard lessons I could have been avoided had I enjoyed the kind of formational start in life that it gladdens my heart to see 5 year-old Claire enjoying?

November 5, 2010 0

Reflections on the Tax Collector and the Pharisee

I would like to begin with a basic psychological observation about the nature of personal identity. We use the personal pronouns I and Me to speak about ourselves in the knowledge that we know of whom it is we are speaking.

That you and I each possess a singular identity is a construction, a kind of necessary myth. The myth of the personality rests on the processes of identification. Identification is the way we associate to particular facets of identity as if they more truly define who we are. Which facets we do and don’t identify with results from forces inside us – the world of our unconscious instinctual desires, unresolved conflicts and fears – and from outside us through the processes of socialization and education.

In reality our sense of personal identity is not singular, but continually shifting coalition of many internal and external variables.

The idea that we have a singular identity is a necessary myth. The construction and maintenance of personal identity, is a process of selection and management. The personality manager is called the ego if we are wicked old Freudians or persona if we are of a more, trendy Jungian bent. The ego/persona is a manager between the forces of inner desire and outer constraint. The quality of our mental and emotional health is dependant on how well our ego or persona has been constructed and how well it manages the job of mediating between inner and outer realities as we struggle to more or less successfully present ourselves to the world.

In societies such as those of the contemporary West we place a huge importance on developing strong and seemingly unified and autonomous ego/persona. For much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries American culture has spear-headed this development but it’s a development that we can trace back to the Enlightenment at the end of the 17^th Century best summed up in Descartes’ dictum cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.

America and the Anglo-Saxon world more generally has become the cultural home of the idea of the rugged and autonomous individual. There is the myth that we can all make it on our own if we are left alone to do so. People assert truth simply on the basis that this is what they believe, or think or feel – and often all three at the same time. People complain to one another ‘you can’t tell me I am wrong because this is what I believe’ or more commonly ‘you can’t tell me I am wrong because this is what I feel’. This has led us to a situation where so much discourse at both the level of society and personal interaction is a chorus of the deaf. And this contributes to another unfortunate consequence – that of polarization. If I believe this or feel that and you believe and feel something different then either you must be wrong because I am always right –a strong autonomous ego/persona, or I must be wrong because I never get it right – a weak ego/persona. Polarization operates not only between people and within in each one us.

In the spiritual tradition ego/persona has generally been regarded as a problem. This is a perception shared across all major religions. And from what I have been describing we can see why spiritual traditions have tended to view ego as problematic. Too much emphasis on it makes social cohesion difficult. And too much emphasis on it cuts us off from the influence of the divine – which for Christians means the creative, sustaining, and sanctifying action in the world of the Trinity.

Religion helps us in supporting our development in two principle ways. In the first phase of life from birth to early adulthood, religion nurtures and helps to support the establishment of firm ego foundations strengthening the boundary around the ego. However in the second phase of life, from the middle of adulthood years culminating in the mid- life transition – usually around the age of 45-50 – the strong boundary around the ego needs to become more permeable in order to allow for a greater flexibility and influx of the divine spirit. Having established strong ego functions we need to begin to loosen their hold on us so to be more open to the process of the final phase of life, which is growing into union with God.

The need for religion and spiritual practice to support us in the transition of the middle years of life is aptly demonstrated as we look around at those of us who are gathered here this morning. Many of us talk about being drawn to this Cathedral as seekers after something we sense a need for but only ever dimly perceive. We stay because here we find nourishment for our hearts and minds through a faithful proclamation and fearless exploration of God’s Word and the balm for our jangled and frayed senses provided by the dignity of our liturgy and the glory of our music.

We are all rather typical of a society, which currently experiences a spiritual hunger exacerbated by our disillusionment with the promises of material prosperity. I always think of the song Is that all there is immortalized by Peggy Lee in which she sings the words:

is that all there is, is that all there is, if that’s all there is my friends then lets keep dancing, lets have a ball and break out the booze.

We see all around us people asking the song’s question and I know through talking to many of you that we feel this question – is that all there is- to varying degrees of intensity in our own lives.

I have tried to show that personal identity is far from the simple and straightforward thing we usually assume it to be in order to open a way to address the gospel reading this morning.

III

There are two ways to read this parable. On the face of it the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector is a story of contrast between two types of people. The Pharisee is the conventional religious person. He is dutiful, conscientious, faithful, and disciplined – a man who can hold his head up in the presence of the Lord. He has a successful ego/persona presentation that leaves him feeling confident and secure in knowing who he is and that he is generally admired by others around him.

The Tax Collector in contrast possess none of the Pharisee’s self confidence. He is a man who has made those sometimes inevitable compromises with life. He is rather wretched. He feels bad about himself with none of the Pharisee’s inner security nor public social approval. He is terrified as he comes before his Lord in the Temple. Here he can only stand back hang his head in shame.

Yet he is the one of whom Jesus says this man will go home justified.

We all love to judge the Pharisee If we take ourselves outside the context of this parable don’t we really want to be like him. Some of us may feel like the Tax Collector but this is such an unpleasant feeling who of us would actively choose to be in his shoes. We judge the Pharisee and praise the Tax Collector because like good students we already know the teachers desired answer. We all know that Jesus is comparing the Pharisee less favorably to the Tax Collector and we want to get full marks.

But if in the course of a more general conversation with no reference to this parable to alert us – if I asked you to rank the following qualities in a person as dutiful, conscientious, faithful, disciplined and obedient to spiritual requirements and conscious of a responsibility to those around them – Would you not aspire to possessing these qualities? Would any of us really want to be described as someone who is neglectful of duty, is not faithful and makes a living exploiting the weaknesses of others? I will leave you to silently answer that question by yourselves.

What is actually wrong with the Pharisee? He does all the right things and appears to be a good man? The problem with the Pharisee is that he does what all of us have been indoctrinated to do which is to trust in ourselves to be autonomous successfully functioning egos and personas. THE clue is in the first line of the reading – Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves. There is something about self sufficiency and successful functioning that God does not like because it makes us inaccessible because we have no need for Grace.

A second way to read this parable is the one I want to draw your attention to. The two men are psychological types for different facets within our own identities. Both types are in tension within us. We often will appear or at least try very hard to appear to be humble and thereby end up secretly thinking rather well of ourselves. Or we may feel overwhelmed by a sense of failure and throw in the towel feeling it matters little what we believe or do and experience s failure of courage and hope.

In the Collect we ask God to increase in us the gifts of faith, hope and charity: and that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command.

Thinking of the Pharisee and Tax Collector as two facets of identity within each one of us I invite you think about when you come before God – who in you – Pharisee or Tax Collector is doing the asking? Because depending on who’s doing the asking there is a huge difference in the result. The Pharisee in us gets our prayer answered. Those of us with strong Pharisee facets are successful, accomplished, dutiful and faithful and mindful of others and our responsibilities towards them. But we live out these gifts as if they are personal achievements – personal attributes. The gifts of the Spirit are treated like the premiums we can afford to pay into the great salvation insurance policy that will at some point pay out by giving us eternal life. We will get out what we put in. It’s our sense of successful spiritual achievement that shuts us off from God. We become self sufficient and content to follow the rules and obey the laws but having no real need of God.

The Tax Collector in us knows that an increase of the gifts of the Spirit is undeserved. It’s certainly beyond our ability to achieve. For the Tax Collector faith, hope and love are not the expressions of his or her ability to make virtuous deposits into the Eternal Life Bank or pay the premiums of our Salvation insurance. The Tax Collector in us does not claim the gifts of the spirit as personal attributes. When identifying with the Tax Collector figure within us we are aware of our vulnerability, our dependency, of our deep need of Grace. Therefore we have no other possibility than to open from this place of need and deprivation to the hope of acceptance and fulfillment in the Holy Spirit.

The ego/persona is sometimes referred to as a small self. The small self needs to get out of the way to allow the influx of the divine self. This is what religious belief and the spiritual practices of prayer, worship and service lead us to as we negotiated the disillusionment of the second phase of life. In this phase we are called upon to become a conduit for the influx of divine energy into the world. We lend ourselves to God for his purpose and in the words of St Paul in today’s Epistle we become poured out as a libation. Then in the words of the prophecy of Joel the spirit will be poured out on all flesh. If we are sons and daughters we will prophesy. If we are old men and women we will dream dreams. If we are young men and women we shall see visions.

October 25, 2010 0