Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Like Making Sausage?



I’m working on the mandala.  For now, all I have are the words of this new faith statement written in a square spiral—if that’s possible—around a largish canvass.  What you see is what I have thus far.  I now have some idea of how I might be able to make these words fit.  In the coming weeks, I’ll paint colors over them and then put the words back on top.  My goal is a painting, a visual mantra for my office, a mandala whose circles invite me to remain centered and whose words call me to deeper reflection on what lies near the center.  In the meantime, I think I will be writing about leaving one kind of believing and embracing another.  That seems to be the theme that has arrived.

And at this point, I want to note something about where this blog seems to be going.  I thought about waiting to take a picture of the mandala until it is finished.  Who, I thought, wants to see a bunch of words painted in a hurry with only a promise of more?  So revealing the process is also a part of this.  In fact, I’m beginning to think it is close to the heart of what I am learning.  So here’s my disclaimer to the faithful in my parish.  If it makes you uncomfortable to know that your priest is still working on all of the basics, like, who or what is God, who was Jesus, who is Jesus, what does it mean to have joined others in gathering around ancient stories—if my questions about such things make you uneasy, then you may want to look away.  Maybe working out faith is like making sausage.  The end result is ok, but you don’t want to see it happening.   I am fascinated with this process, and with the invitation to share it in its unfolding.  I can’t wait.  I am trusting the process and the writing and the moving forward in a new way these days because I believe there is a force, a power in the universe that has something to do with love.  It has something to do with us……. 
JB

Monday, March 17, 2014

Amazing Grace

I believe there is a force, a power in the universe that has to do with love.  That power has something to do with us, it is present in us and around us and between us.  Somehow, it is for us. It becomes tangible in our caring for others and in fleeting moments of perceived connection to something larger, grander and deeper than our day to day experience.  Our attempts at community, contemplation and reflection can open us to a sense of its presence.  

After I wrote those words last week, I went on to say about them, “that feels like solid ground.”  Had I waited a week to post, I might have said they felt like an open field at the end of a dark woods, or a deep breath after a long dive.  I am still reeling from the impact of those words.  Of course, it wasn’t just the words, but the sharing of those words that has opened a new world to me.  I am, as my friend said last week, out, and nothing will ever be the same.  Thank God.


The words I found last week were new to me.  I had, at times throughout my life, reflected on what I believed, by rehearsing what I might say to someone who asked about my belief.  That reflection had always involved some sort of attempt to reconcile what I thought I could honestly claim as belief with what seemed to me to be the beliefs of the church I serve.  Those two lists never matched and they never came together in a satisfying way.  Sometimes I would end up feeling, deep down inside, though I don’t think I really understood it until this week, that I needed to find my way to the Church’s belief or disqualify myself as a priest.  It had seemed so obvious, so natural, so easy to tell others they are welcome in the Church regardless of what they believe.  I am still surprised at how right it felt to say that to them while I really didn’t believe it for myself.  It felt last week as if this new core belief statement had just appeared suddenly out of nowhere.  I now understand that I have been working on that statement all my life.  

I am also beginning to see that those few short lines about what I really do believe have the power to provide a new context for some of those other ideas I had to let go of.  Not only that, but this whole experience of becoming honest about belief has much to teach me about the faith that seemed so complicated.  

I have a long list of “church” words in my notes for this blog, words about ideas that have caused me trouble and about which I plan to write.  Among them, is the word, “salvation.”  Salvation has been on my troubling words list for some time.  When I’ve heard  the church say “salvation” I have heard judgement, and the threat of hell, and Jesus paying a debt for us.  Not believing in hell, salvation has always seemed a bit anachronistic.  I’ve wondered if it isn’t time to be through with the whole notion of salvation.  I did have a glimmer of hope for the concept years ago when Don McLean asked, in his song “American Pie,” if music could save my mortal soul and I was able to answer an enthusiastic “yes.”   Otherwise, it just isn’t a topic I’ve felt any inclination to talk, much less preach about.  

That was last week.  Today, I think salvation might be the telling of old stories.  It might be getting honest about wearying struggles, about claiming your own truth.  Today, as I write these lines, I feel—having chosen my own truth, my own beliefs over some other list I thought someone else might want me to believe—as if I once was lost but now am found…..was blind but now I see.  Salvation is, for me, this afternoon, a pretty powerful concept having to do with freedom and acceptance and honesty.  I wonder what other words I might be able to salvage from my scrap heap in the wake of having come to solid ground.

I set out a couple of months ago to write for others who might be struggling with this whole belief thing.  Now I know I am writing for myself as well.  Who knows where this will go?  I am grateful for the feedback many of you have given on these posts, and particularly for those who tell me they have lived with the sorts of questions that have shaped my journey and who, with me, keep working within the questions because there is something here we need.  I’m thinking about painting this new faith statement around the edges of a mandala on this snowy afternoon.  I’ll send you a picture when it’s done.    John Baker

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

On Coming Out to the Bishop


I was eating lunch the other day with a clergy friend.  We had gotten together to talk about belief, and the Church, and our evolving understanding of what Christianity is about and I began to tell my friend about the challenges of growing up in Memphis,Tennessee, the buckle of the Bible belt.  I said that even as a child I never really believed in hell and that had led to many difficult conversations with friends at school.  I told of other things that people, even in my easy going Episcopal Church, took for granted, things I was not so sure about.  I had wondered, for instance, why we worshipped Jesus when he never seemed to want that kind of attention.  I told my friend about how for most of my life I had felt I had to be careful about telling people what I really believed, that I was afraid I would get caught believing all the wrong things. I told her also about a recent conversation with my bishop, one in which I told the bishop that I had come to a place in life where I realize I can believe whatever I want and about how freeing that realization is.  My friend looked at me and in a very pastoral tone said, “That must have been hard for you all those years keeping that secret. And now you’ve come out to your bishop.  That must feel  pretty good.”  I was grateful for such a caring response from someone who understood what I was saying better than I did.  

I am thinking of another time, back in those days of not saying everything I believed.  I had somehow ended up as the leader in a small discussion group on a retreat weekend.  Eight of us were talking about our understanding of God and our lives and our hopes, that sort of thing.  A woman across from me said, kind of sadly, that she had been reading the Bible and her reading had led her to believe that God might let someone go to heaven for a while and then change his mind and send them on to hell.  I came out of my chair when she said that.  Partly because, as the leader, I was sorry to hear the conversation go that way, but mostly because what she said had offended something deep within me.  I crossed to her and looked her in the face and said, no, that couldn’t be the case.  God isn’t like that.  

Now, I try not to claim to know the mind of God, and I don’t have much use for others who say they know the mind of God.  But in that moment, I was up and had spoken before I knew what was happening.  It was a visceral response about something I believed so deeply I couldn’t help but respond.  I responded as I did also because I hurt for her.  It happened in a split second, something, hidden and powerful, and life affirming became real and present in concern for another.  That something was a core belief, exposed by her words, and it had to do with the reality of a love that is always better than we expect.  That belief was real and compelling in that moment, and it required that I try to share it with her. 

I’ve only been saying those words I spoke to the bishop, the ones about believing what I want to, for a short time, maybe for the last year.  They still feel right.  And, having found those words, I continue to ask myself what it is that I do believe.  The best I can tell you today is that it is something like this:  

I believe there is a force, a power in the universe that has to do with love.  That power has something to do with us, it is present in us and around us and between us.  Somehow, it is for us. It becomes tangible in our caring for others and in fleeting moments of perceived connection to something larger, grander and deeper than our day to day experience.  Our attempts at community, contemplation and reflection can open us to a sense of its presence.  

That sounds pretty close.  That feels like solid ground.


When I spoke to my bishop, I think I was still focused on an old list of things I don’t believe.  It was as if I was confessing my unbelief, and there was some relief in that.  I see now that I was also telling her that I have identified a core of belief that feels right, that rings true for me and within me, and against which all those other ideas, the ones we Christians tend to argue about, the ones I was worried about not believing all those years, must be tested.  I have been preaching for years that you don’t have to believe everything the Church teaches, that belief is something you work out over time, in a faith community, and that your belief may not look like what you think the Church expects you to believe.  I’ve said all those things.  And, as is often the case, I see today that I have been preaching to myself.  

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

A Sinless Lent?

I’m not imagining here a Lent in which no one sins, I do understand that we are all human.  I’m just wondering what it would be like to go through the whole season of Lent without using the word “sin” or “sinful” or the one I’d really like to try to live without, “sinner.”  Who knows what the church might learn from such an exercise?  

I took painting classes some years ago from a painter who, when he came around to critique my work, would often say, “too much white.”   I finally began to understand that colors lightened with too much white start to look grey and washed out.  Too much white can kill a painting in a hurry.  I have since talked to other painters who know the temptation to use too much white and how difficult it can be to learn to get by without it.  Some have told the story of being challenged by instructors to try painting without any white in order to learn other ways of making a painting work.  

So what if on Ash Wednesday we shifted the language of Lent.  Instead of “lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness,” we might “remember the call to love and renew our commitment to follow Jesus.”  Don’t both of those statements end up in the same place, wanting to go forward participating more deeply in the good?  Don’t both statements say that we want our lives to be worth something, to live into a standard we believe in even though we sometimes lose sight of it?  

The traditional language of sin is so often not just about what we do, but about who we are.  To define ourselves as sinners, as happens often in our prayers, especially in Lent, seems to me to be a pretty harsh and unhelpful judgement.  I have looked out on congregations of folks I know to be struggling with all sorts of misplaced guilts, all kinds of burdens and questions….I’ve looked out on a Sunday and said to myself, “they don’t need to hear this stuff.  They just don’t deserve it.  It doesn’t apply.”  This harsh judgement of humanity is tied to the idea of original sin.  The idea of original sin has been around since the fourth century, and for many of us, that’s about sixteen centuries too long. 

I keep meeting other Christians, most of them clergy, who, like me, have given up on the idea of original sin and the language that flows out of that doctrine.  Many writers are reminding us of other veins of thought running through ancient tradition, lines of thinking that challenge the idea of a fallen humanity defined by sin.  Matthew Fox wrote his book Original Blessing as a counter to the idea of original sin.  Other writers are mining the Celtic tradition which sees God permeating all creation, meaning that at our center we too are still essentially good.  

Of course we screw up sometimes, of course we break the hearts of others and of ourselves.  When that happens, the language of sin can be rich and descriptive of the situation in ways that help lead to reconciliation.  But that language has to be used sparingly or it can take over.  

I don’t actually think we can escape all of the “sin” language during Lent.  We can, though, try to imagine, when we hear it, what the language would sound like and what it’s message would be if it were turned around.  When we hear, “We have not loved others as ourselves,” we might try to hear that we are not only called to love others, but must be capable of that love or we wouldn’t be discussing it.  When we hear of our “forgetting” we can move quickly to a new call to remember, which again must be possible for us, or why mention it.  Maybe in the midst of all that penitential language, we will begin to hear that we really can love well, care deeply, match our actions to our best hopes, live thankfully……..you get the idea.  And those good qualities and possibilities we find within ourselves, and not our sinfulness, will be the story of who we are.  


John

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