John 6:24-35

My conversation with God is very often bedeviled  by the kind of miscommunication taking place between the crowds and Jesus in this Gospel passage. In my experience seeking God involves a process of peeling back the layers of my expectations. It is only at the end of this circuitous and lengthy process of identifying and confronting my own expectations that I am anywhere near ready to hear something other that what I have been anticipating hearing.

In the ancient prayer known as the Regina Coeli or prayer to Mary Queen of Heaven there is a passage which in the traditional translation of the prayer  goes something like this:

to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we sigh,  mourning and weeping, passing through this vale of sorrows.

Now this prayer is very close to my heart. It is one of the two constants, the other being the Lord’s Prayer which form the bedrock of my daily conversations with God. My love of the Regina Coeli  dates back to my days as a spiritually enthusiastic youth. In those days I was what in the Church of England  is referred to as a brain-dead Anglo-Catholic. In my late teens and early twenties the label brain-dead Anglo-Catholic fairly summed up what I appeared to be.

Alas, the enthusiasms and idealism based on certainty  which marked this phase of my spiritual journey have long since dimmed. The current label that might better apply to me is brain-alive Anglo-Catholic. This is a more difficult space to inhabit. Nevertheless, despite the increasing use of my brain in my spiritual life, I continue to cherish the Regina Coeli prayer, no longer  however, in its traditional rather florid translation. The increasing use of my brain in my spiritual life has led me to personalize the prayer’s wording. I have replaced:

to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we sigh, mourning and weeping, passing through this vale of sorrows, 

with:

to you do we cry, children of Eve in exile, mourning and weeping, passing through this veil of illusions. 

Illusion operates to allow us to only see what we expect to see. For the battle to expose my illusions forms the terrain upon which my spirituality is daily worked out. This change in wording reflects my growing awareness that in my conversation with God, its my expectation of what I want or need to hear and to have that forms a veil of illusion. Trapped behind this veil of illusion my experience of being a child of Eve in exile is only strengthened.

I am acutely aware that the way I experience and see the world is highly colored by this veil of illusion. In my seeking God, the place I need to start from over and over again is in the recognition that what maintains my experience of exile from God is my veil of illusion. A veil formed and endlessly maintained  through the projection of my fear of deprivation and my craving for satiation.

A veil of illusion separates the crowds from Jesus throughout John’ Gospel. The passage we heard today typifies this and gives us a clear sense of there being two conversations going on simultaneously. The crowds having been wowed by his feeding of the 5000 demand to know from Jesus  “Who are you? Are you the celebrity who can meet our needs?”  Jesus’ response to them is to ask in turn “What have you come for?” And so the two conversations unfold along parallel lines. The crowd talks about their craving to be endlessly fed with free bread, motivated by the perpetual fear of being hungry. To their questions Jesus responds with God’s invitation to become truly satisfied by bread that does so much more than fill the belly. It’s the bread that gives life. And what is more Jesus identifies himself as that bread. Eventually this frustrates the crowds so much they turn on him and we will hear more of that next week.

Are we able to use this passage to reflect upon how our own fears and cravings drive our desire for relationship with God and our membership of the Church?  As people shaped by an American culture entering the first phase of the 21st Century it should not surprise us to discover  that at one level there is little that differentiates us from the crowds following Jesus in John’s late 1st Century Palestine. At this level human nature remains remarkably consistent across the flow of history. However, the themes that universally echo across generations in specific historical and cultural contexts take on particular intensity in our time.

It has been an interesting week in which we have witnessed the Chic-fil-A fiasco, a rather unpleasant reminder that we are a society where Christian faith continues to be perverted into perpetuating hostility towards expressions of difference. We also witnessed the death of Gore Vidal, that great apostle for the toleration of difference. Gore Vidal provoked enormous hostility from the political Establishment all his life. He was a particular kind of prophet hated by establishment classes everywhere, i.e. an insider, one of them who exposed their corruption and hypocrisy. Strangely enough, a common theme links these two events.  In the week of Gore’s death we yet again have been witness to a dramatic example of the use of executive power and the corrupting power of money to promote the prejudicial dynamics of exclusion and violence, dynamics against which Gore protested all his life.

Perhaps the core characteristic which marks the current operation of American culture is the intensity of two particular illusions. Why is it that in the midst of the most prosperous society the world has known the illusion of scarcity  increasingly drives our fears? We have religious leaders who present salvation as something rationed to the professing elect as if there is not enough to go around.  Why is it that those who are so sure they are saved cannot feel secure in their salvation unless they can identify those who are to them clearly not saved? Girardian ideas of scapegoating and sacrificial victims come to my mind.

We continue to vote for politicians who promise us what can’t be delivered thus reenforcing a specter of scarcity and using it to frighten us into keeping them in power. If there is not enough to go around then I need to vote for the politician who promises to either deliver more to me and my kind or allow me  and mine the means to grab what I need before others take it away from me.

One illusion inevitably gives rise to a second and in some ways its counterpoint. Going hand in hand with the illusion of scarcity is the illusion that our needs require to be satiated. This results not from the experience of having enough of what we need, but from the belief that we need more and more and more of what we need – hence there is never enough. This is a dynamic I will explore further in the Fall.

The illusion of scarcity is a fear. The illusion of satiation is a craving. Both projections hide God’s invitation. Both perpetuate our experience as children of Eve in fearful exile in a world of sorrow. These illusions are mine and they are yours. If we can begin to explore our  illusions and peel their layers away one by one, perhaps then we can become open to God’s promise.

The promise is contingent on our courage to faith. To faith is what it says in the Greek. This sounds odd in English where we speak of faith as possession, something to have or not have rather than an action, something one does. Perhaps the Greek comes closer to the English sense of trust. Trust is something we have the courage to do or pull back from doing through lack of courage.

Jesus identifying himself as the bread of life is God’s invitation for us to trust, rather than fear. If we truly begin to hear this then we discover that satisfaction results when we can give up the illusion that what we need is to be satiated. Freed from the illusion of living in a world of scarcity we begin to discover that there is not only enough for all, but what we are promised by God will be sufficient for us.

In commenting on last week’s Gospel (Mark 6:1-13)  I noted how faced by the impoverished imaginations of his family and their neighbors Jesus came up against a real limitation on what he was able to do. Mark tells us that Jesus could do no deed of power there.

I refer you back to my pervious blog entry The Familiar: a Barrier to our Imagining. Mark begins Jesus’ ministry with his baptism by John. He draws this first phase to a close with the sending out of the disciples to become participants with Jesus in his ministry. He follows this with the beheading of  John. Why does Mark place the beheading of John here? Well, there seems to me an implication that ministry of necessity will involve encounters with power and the powerful. Like John, Jesus and his disciples go on to discover that such encounters can prove fatal.

If you are like me this is a very uncomfortable realization. I have spent a lifetime perfecting the skills that  have helped me avoid becoming the object of abuse by the powerful. Nan is a friend of mine. Like me, we both spent many years working within the British National Health Service. Now, you don’t work in the NHS and avoid seeing the daily exercise and abuse of political power. She once asked her CEO the question: “what would be your resigning issue?” He replied ” I hope I am skillful enough never to find myself in such a situation”. The CEO’s answer captures the assumption that resigning issues can be avoided through adroit skill. A very modern attitude we might think, or is it?

Nan’s question and the CEO’s response reminds me of the popular English tavern song  The Vicar of Bray. You may know of it but if you don’t you can find the words and tune at: http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/song-midis/Vicar_of_Bray.htm

The song tells the story of a Vicar of  St Michael’s Bray, a small town in the Royal County of Berkshire just upstream from Windsor Castle. The song chronicles his boasting about the way he has kept his benefice despite the sudden rip-tide like shifts in the of political currents that characterized the period from around 1660 when Charles II returns after the death of Cromwell to the accession of the German, George I in 1714. This is a man who has no compunction is changing his political allegiances to suit the tenor of the times. Like Nan’s CEO, we surreptitiously admire his skillfulness while more consciously disapproving of all flip-floppers.

So how do you and I sit with the experience of power? I know that I instinctively abhor the naked display of power. Power is not an aphrodisiac for me. Or do I delude myself? Well maybe you all are about to find out as I assume the mantle of the Dean in-between?

My uneasy relationship to the exercise of power lies in my life-long fear of being a victim of its abuse. What typifies the experience of victimhood is a psychological helplessness in the face of the abusive use of power. Like all of us who carry this fear, I am passionate about justice. What will make me incandescent with rage is to witness the abuse of power, particularly within the varied contexts of  interpersonal relationship. My politics arise out of an instinctive aversion to the comfortable abuses of power enshrined within patriarchal society. My political world view is not the hollow posturing of liberal correctness. My politics are deeply rooted in my personal fears. The political is always personal. If you want to understand my political world view the you only have to remember that as gay man, patriarchy desires to kill me.

One of the ways I have successfully protected myself is by maintaining a stance as the outsider. For example, my experience as an adult has been shaped by my 30 years living in England. Yet, I never once felt disadvantaged by the operation of the class system. The English class system is a complex and subtle system of signals that locates each person in a particular relationship to the sources of power in that society. I protected myself as an outsider. I was after all a New Zealander. Someone from a new world egalitarian society, to whom the classifications of the English class system did not apply.

Yet, you may have noticed that unless you look and listen very closely for the residual signs of the NZ flattening of my vowels I pass perfectly as a pucker Brit. The skill of being an outsider is the ability to maintain a psychological sense of separateness while appearing to pass camouflaged as one of the crowd. So for me outsiderness is a skillful defense. Yet, it is this very defense that perpetuates in me a sense of being vulnerable to the abusive exercise of power. Hiding and protecting myself only increases my fear. The path to freeing myself from fear of the abuse of power is to own my own power.

Life forces us to fashion complex psychological defenses against the fear of being abused by power. For me its maintaining the fantasy of the outsider, which is a fantasy that I am not part of my host societies power relations and therefore cannot be abused by them. For others I notice  the primary defense is their craving of power and their desire to grab as much of it as possible. This orientation to power is just as much rooted in fear. For those of us who have more of the Vicar of Bray in us than we might be comfortable admitting to, we adopt the defenses of the flip-flopper in our attempt to protect ourselves through ingratiation.

My main point here is that because we all live in complex webs of power relations the apparent success of our very defenses also perpetuates our state of fear in relation to power. That fear prevents us living-out  Christian values. Jesus shows time and again that to live the values of the Gospel leaves us no choice but to challenge the abuse of power. We don’t even have to go out of our way to protest a challenge. Being women and men living from our Christian core, informed by the actions of Jesus in the Gospel is enough to be a challenge to the abuse of power. Yet, its only by living the values of the Gospel that  we have the courage to own our own power.

The abuse of power is endemic to the very structures of human society. It operates in families, in the work place. We have recently seen its operation in the corruption of College sports. It operates powerfully in our churches, in government, and of course in relations between nations.

There are many different ways to challenge power. We often carry models designed to limit our belief that we can challenge the abuse of power. We have the model of John the Baptist which is a kind of head-on crash and burn approach seemingly favored by prophets. If this is what we think it means to challenge power then we are unlikely to imagine ourselves doing this.

Personally, I favor a quieter approach which recognizes that there may be nothing I can do about the central abuses of power in society. So I take the courage to own my own power through taking-up my position on the margins of power, working quietly to subvert abuse through identifying with and supporting the abused, themselves.  My many years of ministry among those with disturbed mental and emotional health is the way I have used my outsiderness a gay man to identify with those who are differently disadvantaged by social rejection.

Mark uses the beheading of John the Baptist at this point in his gospel to present us with a painful truth about the exercise of power. Mark is not inviting us to become prophetic firebrands who immolate ourselves through headlong confrontation in the manner of John the Baptist. He is inviting us to understand Jesus’ deeper challenge to power. This challenge lies in accepting God’s invitation to change and thereby inviting others to change. The nature of this change is to become liberated from fear by the greater power of love. This is an invitation that will be accepted by some and resisted by others to the point of violence. Following Jesus may cost us our lives though in our present social context probably not physically, but in some other manner, which in the words of T.S. Eliot will cost us nothing short of everything (Little Gidding).

Don’t run. Stay present. Remain committed. Tell the truth in love. And stand for what is right. Ideally one should have a great deal of courage and strength but not boast or make a big show of it. Then in times of need one should rise to the occasion and fight bravely for what is right (HH. the Dalai Llama)

Servants No-longer but Friends Part 1.

In early February of this year I was invited to preach at St Mark’s Cathedral, Minneapolis. My visit also coincided with a seminar day being given my Diana Butler-Bass a well known writer on contemporary  matters affecting the present day Church and the future of Christianity.

Ms Butler-Basse referred to the Gallup Poles on religious observance. The of the decade from 1999-2009 reveal over this 10 year period from 1999-2009 a marked shift in the way Christians identify themselves in terms of their self description as religious or spiritual.

In 1999 60% of those polled identified themselves as religious but not spiritual.  Whereas only  around 20% of people  identified as spiritual but not religious. A smaller number  under 10% identified as religious and spiritual.

By 2009 only around 10% identified as religious but not spiritual. Around the same proportion as in 1999 identified as spiritual but not religious. The biggest change was the those identifying as spiritual and religious which rose from 10% to 50%.

What is implied by this shift? In John15 Jesus says: I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

Prevalent among main-line Christians even as late as 1999  was the self image of being good servants of the Church.  They identified as members of the institution and served it generously through talents, time, and money. Yet, ask them if they felt a personal relationship with God, were they spiritual, they generally answered no. Spirituality was something best left to the clergy.

Looking around the community I serve at Trinity Cathedral I can clearly see the nature of this shift. While older members continue to serve the institution of the Church with dedication to tasks that need to be done, newer members are cautious about becoming what one X’er referred to as the $ sign in the pew.  At Trinity we are currently experiencing a blossoming of growth. On this coming Sunday, the Sunday after the Ascension no less, the Bishop will confirm, or receive, or reaffirm some 62 people into communion with the catholic faith. A good number of these are young people. Yet, well over half are adults, some 40 or so having recently passed through our Episcopal 101 preparation.

Many of these relative newcomers are not like our traditional Episcopal Church people profile. They tend to be younger than the average age of Episcopalians. They are not our traditional good servant material. They are not religious and are wary of becoming religious. They are predominantly spiritual seekers. Some are new to Christianity. Some escaping other traditions that no longer serve them well. All are seeking an encounter with Historic Christianity. A Christianity characterized by a depth of liturgical expression, a faithfulness to the historic diversity of Catholic Christianity exemplified in the Anglican Tradition, and a generous Christianity seeking to bring the deep wells of Christian spirituality into informed dialogue with the confusions and uncertainties of life in 21st century America.

Other more convicted Christians call the Episcopal Church ‘that easy religion’. A more acurate description is that we are a Church that refuses to offer easy answers to complex questions. And so those who are seeking, yet, not wanting to be mollified with easy answers that either fail to justice to the integrity of their search or actually do violence to that search, continue to come.

Back to John15 and Jesus’ reference to servants no-longer but friends. More in my next post.

To use one of Jesus’ favorite preaching techniques, i.e. hyperbole, the art of overstatement, I feel that if all we had was John 15 then we would have enough to form the basis of Christian Community. THis is community based on the powerful images of the vine and its branches and the commandment to love one another.

Our society is blighted by the demise of community centered upon the doctrine and experience of the common good. The image of the vine and its branches offered by Jesus is a powerful reminder that communities do not fare well when they lose contact with  complexity theory notions of interdependence and interconnection. The recent success of  book and now the film The Hunger Games bears directly on this point. The horror of the society of Panem is speaking to us about our own society.

In the central section of John 15, Jesus offers us a succession of images beginning with: as the father as loved me so I love you, abide in my love. The image here is that of the mirror. The love expressed by God for Jesus is mirrored in the expression of Jesus’  love for us.  The Divine interplay of loving and being loved is likewise mirrored among us through God’s invitation announced by Jesus.

The most profound human experience of mirroring is that which takes place between mother and infant. Maybe it is for this reason that the central verses of John 15 are appointed for Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.

My first training in psychotherapy was in the school of Object Relations Theory. This most British branch of Psychoanalysis replaces the classical Freudian concept that human beings are driven by their instinct for gratification with a belief that human beings are fundamentally object seeking. Object seeking is a particular psychological way of saying we are driven by a need to express and receive love.

The first object for the infant is the mother. This is an experience for the infant of resting-in, or of being loved. The infant rests-in the experience of the softness of mother’s touch, the sound of her voice, the way she smells. However, principally the infant rests-in the gaze of the mother’s eyes. In mother’s eyes the infant experiences itself in the state of abiding or resting-in in  love.

Abiding in love is a passive experience of just being loved. It is not an active experience of seeking love or loving. Abiding – resting-in being loved must come before the act of loving. Loving only becomes possible when we have first experienced abiding, or resting-in, love. Only then are we formed enough by being loved to express love in loving others. As Jesus is loved so he loves and this then extends into the human community.

The celebration of Mother’s Day needs to be more than a Hallmark sentimentality or a patriotic reference to motherhood and apple pie. Gendered mother’s are the conventional symbol of mothering.  But mothering is not confined to gendered mothers. Mothering is essentially an offering of love through the way we behold one another in love. This applies as much to lovers of any kind as it does to mother and child.

Our lives have been enriched by many experiences of resting-in being loved. I am suggesting that mothering transcends gendered mothers. Mothering is inherent to all human beings and is present in many different kinds of human relationships. What links the different contexts within which mothering occurs is that all mothering is an expression of God’s way of loving.

God is best imaged as the Trinitarian Community of lovers loving and being loved. Jesus’ words haunt us: as the father as loved me so I love you, abide in my love. Mothering is an expression of Divine love. So let’s abide, i.e. rest-in the experience of being loved. This is the gift we not only celebrate on Mother’s Day but which is given and received everyday.

Since the invention of the printing press words have overtaken images as the coinage for understanding our relationship with God. As we move further into the digital age once again words are giving way to images. It is no longer enough for the preacher to offer his or her listeners an exegeses of text based on a study of the meaning of the words. In the digital age as our modes of communication become increasingly image based preachers need to construct mental images from the words of the text. This is how Jesus taught and how spirituality communicated prior to the dominance of text.

John 15 has formed the content for the proclamation of the Gospel over the previous two Sundays. It is image rich and  this blog entry is the first of several entries in which I will be imaging the text of John 15.

On Thursday the 26th of April, my youngest sister Lisa passed from this physical life into the embrace of the love of God. This is my language and what Lisa would have understood a phrase like the love of God to mean is something that I don’t think I know. Always practical, my memories of Lisa are that she didn’t have a lot of use for conventional religious notions of an afterlife. Her energies were firmly focused on the life lived here and now, her children, her family, her job, and her beloved women’s hockey. I remember on a visit home some years ago Lisa turning to me and asking in all seriousness how many sports channels did I watch in England. The fact that I watched none spoke volumes about the difference between us.

Lisa was diagnosed at a relatively young age with breast cancer. The age of first onset seems to be a prime indicator of the likely reoccurrence of the disease. People marvel when I tell them that all three of my sisters have been diagnosed with breast cancer and that there seems not to be a family genetic explanation for this. I have reflected many times on how each of them, Lynette, Lisa, and finally Ali, came to terms with their cancer. Each did so in their own remarkably individual way. The way each has responded speaks to the depth of their character and dare I say the qualities of  their soul.

When we human beings are thrown into a life crisis, the walls which we build to protect ourselves from the storms of life begin to crack. It is only then that the quality of soul emerges. Through the cracks in the walls we are invited to change, to grow and to renew ourselves. In my experience it is soul-quality that connects me to the reality of life being lived-out against a backdrop of something bigger than what I can immediately touch, see, or know. The quality of Lisa’s soul revealed in her a deep commitment to life sustained by her enormous reserves of courage and love.

Stubborn, willful, bloody-minded are terms that come readily to my mind when thinking of Lisa. Yet, these are simply the qualities of her determined life-force that would brook no thought of easy defeat.  Over these last months as Lisa fought to delay the approach of her inevitable death, my mind has turned again and again to the Dylan Thomas poem that opens with:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Lisa bargained hard and won a space in which to prepare those she loved most for the time of her dying. For her, relationships were what mattered most. For me, the embrace of the love of God is simply a way of saying that in death the truth about what is most important in this life deepens. What is universally true is that relationships, be they good relationships or difficult relationships, are what most matter.  For me, God is not a solitary being. God is a community within which the interplay of relationships bring joy and delight. God is a Trinity – a Divine Community defined by relationships that share themselves with the life of the Creation and become the model for the way we are invited to live our own lives.

I am not sure what it is I should, or even am, feeling at the passing of my little sister. The distances of time, she was only 12 when I left home, and of location, my thirty years living in the UK, in many ways separated us from each other. At the end of her life in this world I remain separated, this time by immigration processes which currently restrict my ability to travel outside of my current home in the US.

Yet, these limitations of time and space cannot seriously inhibit the exercise of love. For the distances of time and the separations of location no longer inhibit Lisa and I. Lisa’s death acts only to strengthen and deepen my sense of  being in relationship with her. Despite my separation from others who mourn Lisa, I nevertheless rededicate myself to life lived motivated by the primacy of relationship. In this way I incorporate into my own life the priorities that Lisa expressed through her own living, loving, and gifting of love and friendship.

Life raises the question for many: can work be a holy task? For work to become a holy task in the sense that St Benedict intends we require purpose in our work. Purpose begs a further question: do we feel called in our lives? In Friend of the Soul: A Benedictine Spirituality of Work Norvene Vest notes that work has the potential to become a holy task when each of us takes to heart a desire to respond to God and a willingness to see life as the place where that response is formed and acted upon. Is it possible we can experience ourselves not as being limited by lack of control but as able to interact with things beyond our control in a manner that enhances our deeper sense of being called into relationship with purpose and value in our lives?

One of the themes for me this Lent is the notion of wilderness (see my earlier blog on) as a place where we come to terms with the space in which our lives are actually lived. I call this space a wilderness not in the sense that it is empty or barren, although at times it certainly can feel like this, but because it is boundaried by an experience of limitation beyond which we have little if any control over things. So much of the fantasy in life is to equate purpose, meaning, safety, fulfillment in life with having  control over life. I am suggesting that its not being in control so much as being able to interact with things that are essentially beyond our control that matters to us. We do this from the space of wilderness where like in the Sonoran Desert that surrounds our life here in Phoenix, life flourishes in astonishing abundance and variety through skillful adaptation to environmental limitation. Its within this space, this wilderness where we experience our vocation- our call to purpose and meaning.

So much of my own drive in life has been to achieve mastery over tasks and events. No matter how successful I become at this I am always afraid that the next turn of events will finally be the other shoe that drops and life will disintegrate around me. The problem here is that my life is all about me. I fill the whole frame that boundaries the picture of my life. There is no room for a necessary sense of being called, because I am the one always doing the calling. In short there is no room for a sense of being called by that greater than myself. Benedict understood that it is God who does the calling. God’s call is not only to the special, those singled out for purpose, but to all human beings. We experience that call in the context of the space where our lives are actually lived. Because this is the space where God  is already waiting for us with an invitation to live life. That invitation awaits only our acceptance of being called. Vest quotes Frederick Beuchner’s description of vocation as where our deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet. I would reframe that to vocation is also the place where our deep gladness and our own hunger meet. We need to experience the dynamic tension between gladness and hunger, gratitude and frustration. In this tension like the life of the desert we adapt skillfully to life’s joys and demands. Principally those demands come to us as the need to learn how to more skillfully interact with those things that are beyond our control.