Does It Matter

The first time I ever chanted a Divine Office (the worship service prayed by Catholic monks several times each day), I was 18 years old, a freshman in college, visiting a group of college students who did this twice a week and called themselves “Monks.” I loved the silence. I hated the Psalms.

Martin Luther said, “For every man, on every occasion, can find in the Psalms that which fits his needs, which he  feels to be appropriate as if they had been set there just for his sake…(pardon the male language).” I found this rather difficult to swallow as an 18-year-old. What I found, instead, were anger, misguided nationalism, and comfort given only to those who are righteous.

St. Augustine didn’t help: our “Abbot” of teh colleg monks group quoted Augustine as saying something like, “Every prayer that has ever been prayed can be found in the Psalms.” Well, you can guess what an 18-year-old male’s response to THAT might have been!

I was an intermittent college-monk at best. In the process of reading books on spirituality,  I discovered, thanks to Thomas Merton, Zen Buddhism. There was also a professor who was similarly interested in Eastern spirituality, so I bounced back and forth from the silence of Zen to the quiet chants of my brother and sister monks. I loved the fact that with Zen, the fewer words, the better.

My mother’s response to my interest in Zen (I think we had about a six-hour conversation about it one Friday evening!) was, “Let me get this straight: your chosen spiritual path includes sitting still AND being silent for long periods of time?” Those of you who “knew me when” know that both of those things seemed quite impossible.

The little Trappist monastery that I frequented my junior and senior years in college had monks who became my teachers. There was Brother Jim, who taught me Zen in a more disciplined way, and Brother John, who loved the Divine Office, especially the great silence after it was over. Brothers Dave, Al, and Tom all taught me as well, just not as directly. It was John who directed me to pray the Psalms more intentionally, more slowly, and with more focus. He said that the Office was the beginning of his prayer time, and that the time after the Office was where real prayer occurred. The Psalms and silence, the scripture and the prayers, all laid down a pathway to where a real encounter with God was possible (not to say that the Office itself does not offer an authentic experience of God).

Years later, as a young full-time pastor, I realized that I had fallen into the same hole that my two favorite professors had warned us about: getting so busy doing the “work” of the pastor that I failed to do the personal work that would keep me grounded, the work of prayer, the work of actually being with God in an intentional way (I defined prayer a few years ago as “the way we and God love each other directly”). Looking around in the attic of my soul, I was reminded that the Divine Office was a good place to begin.

As I pulled out my favorite Bible and started the prayer, “God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me,” followed by the doxology, I was grateful for the grace given me to enjoy that moment: it made me want to keep going. Although distracted by a desire to transform one of the rooms in my house into a chapel, I prayed the office with pretty decent focus. Yes, I did leap up from my meditation cushion and begin straightening the room; but as soon as I had done enough to satisfy my need for “sacred space,” I lit candles and incense, and once again sat cross-legged on the cushion and began another office.

I received the four-volume collection of The Liturgy of the Hours for Christmas one year, and I was set. I also discovered a Trappist monastery outside of Atlanta, The Monastery of the Holy Spirit, and began making monthly treks there to pray the office in the silence of the huge monastery church, sometimes with the monks, sometimes on my own.

The words of Luther came true for that 31-year-old as they could not have for the college freshman. Once you have lived a little life and felt the disappointments, betrayals, and even the successes that happen to all of us, the  prayers found in the Psalms really do come to life! Yes, there is still the bad stuff; I was overjoyed to find Psalms Anew: In Inclusive Language, translated by Nancy Schreck and Maureen Leach in 1986 ( my original copy still goes with me, battered by over 30 years of travel in my car, suitcase, and backpack). A few years ago, I connected online with http://www.divineoffice.org and learned to download spoken daily offices to my phone.

It is said that Fr. Matthew Kelty of Gethsemani, in his latter years, used to loudly whisper the Jesus Prayer whenever a Psalm was chanted that he didn’t particularly like (usually the violent ones). None of us loves all the Pslams.

Yes, much of what I need can be found in the Psalms, and the Divine Office is a great place to use them. For some people, they are still too violent and male-oriented. For me, I just keep finding God hidden in little nooks and crannies in them, and there seems to be something new always. Praying a daily office is helpful in my quest to spend time with God each day. And I’ll add that praying the Psalms has helped me also to find the prayers in so much of poetry, sacred or not.

And, as St. Augustine said, the Pslams do contain all our human prayers, even those we wouldn’t admit to praying. Yes, the prayers for new cars and enough money for tuition and good grades might not be there in obvious ways, but there aren’t many of us who haven’t prayed in some form or another the most violent of those ancient human prayers, as well as the better ones, and especially the desperate ones – “How long, O God…”).

Praying the office also keeps my ego out of my prayer better than anything else I have found. But that’s another matter for another day.

I grew up going to church every Sunday. Our family church day began with Sunday School, to which we were always late, followed by morning worship. The evening began with youth group, then snacks (eventually this evolved, by the time I was in junior high, to a light supper), then evening worship. When we were old enough, all of us except my father (who made a joyful noise when he sang, the best that can be said of his vocal skills) took their place in the church choir, which my mother sang in from the time I was tiny until the present, possibly even before that.

Church attendance was never optional. A fever would not free you. Mother may argue that she would have NEVER sent a child to church with a fever, but I would then argue that her thermometer was always broken on Sunday (sorry, Mother – I know that’s not true, but certainly how I remember it)! You had to be visibly sick on your stomach to get out of church. Visibly. No visual evidence, no reprieve. Church was not an option for us. We were not free to choose the training our souls received any more than we were free to get behind the wheel of a car without a license or shoot a gun without Uncle Herman to teach us as he had our mother. We went to church to get our souls educated (Mother was sick with pleurisy once, and I taught her Sunday School class – ghost stories! So much for soul education, although it was a lot of fun!). We were brought up in the church as much as in our schools, and what we learned in school was one thing, and it was important, but what we learned in church shaped and  informed all those other things. Church wasn’t ever just the walls and steeple: it was the hammer and anvil that shaped us, that earth under our feet, and it surrounded and protected and loved us into an understanding of life that was, in modern terminology, holistic.

Occasionally, a young person asks me if being part of a particular church is necessary for faith. I tend to say, “No. But there is something good about belonging to a community of faith. Don’t miss out on that. Find your place.”

I once was approached by a young man asking to be baptized. I was a seminary student and working part-time at the church, and I usually noticed new faces at worship. I told him I was sorry I did not remember seeing him. Turns out he had not been there, or to any other church: he was simply calling pastors and asking if they would baptize him.He had been reading his Bible and learned that unless he were baptized, he would not be “saved.” Being a good and diligent seminary student who had not been sleeping the day we discussed baptism in my pastoral theology class, I told him that there was more to baptism than that. I did not do the baptism. He left me and found someone, hopefully, who would.

My answer now would be different from what it was then. I was trying to be true to my theology in those days. These days, I try to think more about being true to God and to what a person might actually need, instead of somehow being true to a particular theology. I learned a little of that from Will Campbell.

I was ashamed when I finally got around to reading  Campbell’s Brother to A Dragonfly; seems you CAN baptize people outside of the church, just as you can marry them, bury them, counsel them, and do all manner of things that do not have to be part of what Campbell calls “the steeple.” While I still think my seminary professors made some good points about why we should not just be dropping bodies into water anywhere, I tend to agree more with Campbell: sometimes we need to do “church stuff” to people because the church has rejected them and they still need that stuff!

People need to be baptized not just to join the church but also because baptism symbolizes new life: a mystical transformation that  has living psychological benefits. People need to be married by a pastor because it means God is present in their lives, and some people won’t ever be closer to a minister or to God than they are that day (I admit that I have often said I won’t do a wedding without counseling, and from what I have seen and experienced, counseling is not a good luck charm that makes the marriage work: if they’ll do it, I’ll do it; if not, and they still want God’s blessing on their union, I’ll do it, by God!). People need to be buried by a minister because ministers should be signs of hope in the world, offering solace to the living and giving meaning to the lives of the deceased and pointing to the fact that there is more to life than what we see and feel.

One of my college professors suggested that if anyone who believed that the words at the communion table actually turned bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus should be out on the street corners, offering Jesus to everyone who passed by. He shocked some of his students from the more apostolic traditions. But it’s true, and some of my Roman Catholic friends would now agree with him. Why leave him in the church  to be ignored?

I have plenty of friends who are bringing up their children outside of the church. They are doing a pretty good job. They miss out on some good things, from the support that comes whenever there are life troubles (in a good church, at least), to the good friendships that form as we walk our faith path together. Sad for them: I am the closest thing to a priest they have, and I frequently hear, “If you were pastor of a church, I’d attend.” I don’t for a minute believe it. In many ways, they have their communities around them, and those people can be, many times are more, supportive than church “families.”

Being a “pastor” is not necessarily a paid position. Being “church” doesn’t always have to do with walls, crosses, baptismal fonts or pools, arguments about the color of sanctuary carpet, or the style of music you sing. It does, however, have something to do with understanding the world,  how we all fit together,  how we learn to relate to God and how God relates to us. Real church is about the living of our days and nights, not what our denomination is, or whether the steeple is in decline, or politics, or even theology. Are people hungry? Go feed them. Are they sick or in prison? Visit them. Are they mentally unstable? Love them and accept that the church must be for them or for no one.  Are people challenged? Be their friend and advocate, and make them feel their worth as children of God. Just try to love, and you’ll be the church (operative word here: “try:” even Jesus suggested there are times when you need to kick the dust off your shoes and move on!).

Mother always made me listen to sermons, then asked when we got home what I had heard. I asked her once, “How do you know you’re doing the will of God?” Her answer has sufficed all these years later: “If you’re doing something loving, you can’t go to far from the will of God.” Talk about church shaping your life!

Church: at its best, it stands for so much more than the brick and mortar or whatever material it’s made of. At its worst…well, we’ve seen that, too: the Crusades, support of slavery, nationalism, exclusion of people, and the list goes on and on.

At its best, though, it can be the True Realm of God, where all are welcome, all are fed and housed, all are really seen and acknowledged as children of God. I like it when it is those things. And when it’s not, I’m okay with sleeping in.

It’s probably more than a pet peeve. Actually, it’s fairly serious. And I’ve said this for more than 28 years in front of the high schoolers that come to camp here at Christmount.

I’m a guitar player and occasional singer (my wife is the real singer in the family, and I’ve always been some kind of musician, so I’m reticent to say “singer” in talking about myself). Growing up in the 60’s and graduating from high school in the early 70’s, I was, as many of us were, influenced by folk singers and protest singers and the “message music” of musicians like Simon and Garfunkel, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Crosby Stills and Nash, and so many others.

So, I’m standing with my guitar in front of a bunch of high schoolers about 20 years ago, and someone asks me to sing a peace song. My brain rushes into the old archives searching: “Draft Dodger Rag,” by Phil Ochs; “Where Have all the Flowers Gone, by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson; “Golden Ribbons,” by Jim Messina; “For What It’s Worth,” by Stephen Stills, “Oh, Camille,” by Graham Nash; and so many others. I settled on “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” and it’s become one of the most-requested songs for me at high school camp bonfires since then.

I introduced the song this way:

I’ve been singing this song since I was your age. It makes me sick to still be singing it in a world that hasn’t got the brains to figure out how to end all this hatred and all these wars. I mean, we can build computers that hold the Library of Congress in a device the size of our palms; we have communication devices that make Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise look like they are living in the Stone Age. But we cannot, no , we REFUSE to stop hating each other. So I’m gonna ask you to please, please, make a world where I don’t have to keep singing these songs. Make a world that is different.

Well, those may not be my exact words, but that is what I conveyed that night, and usually these days I just mumble something like, “I hate that I keep having to sing this song because no one has figured this stuff out yet.” “What stuff, Jamie?” “Peace.”

Oh.

I read today that famous quote, “Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

John Lennon said it well, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

Peace, of course, includes feeding the hungry (especially the children), housing the homeless (oh, no: let’s build more million-dollar houses into the sides of mountains to increase our tax base!), looking after the elderly and sick, disarming ourselves, helping those with psychological problems, and sharing the wealth. Cleaning up the environment would be nice along the way. Stopping hating folks because of skin pigment would be a great place to start. And the list goes on. After all, what else do we really have to do with our lives?

I’m not guiltless in any of this, by the way. But every now and then, something (some One), makes me stop and think.

I just thought I’d share it with you.

Billy Graham died yesterday morning. Last night, the local news in Asheville had nothing but his life and the weather for the 30 minute time slot at 6:00 PM. Thinking about his legacy today has been common in many conversations.

I’m as guilty as anyone for dismissing him when I was younger. There will be plenty who will dismiss him today – I’ve already seen tweets and Facebook comments by people who didn’t know much about him that are full of what we come to expect: divisiveness, hatred, jealousy, and a tendency to focus on the negative.

There’s plenty to dislike. To lump him in with people like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson (although Robertson has recently said that he thinks assault weapons should be banned, so there’s some hope for the man, I suppose) is a huge mistake, though. Here are some things I think about when I think of him today:

1. He didn’t care what Christian tradition you landed in. His organization invited church members from everywhere to come and volunteer to help in different ways at his revivals. And all those folks who “came forward”  at the end of the service? Those folks were asked what Christian tradition they were part of; the volunteers wrote it down, then contacted churches of those particular traditions with names and addresses for following up with them. When Graham said it wasn’t about him, he meant it. His organization wanted all those thousands of folks who were moved by him to have a community to belong to, not just come forward to accept Jesus on television.
2. Famous for meeting with Presidents from Truman to Obama,  he was rarely seen as for one political party or another. He was probably, for the last thirty years, more Republican than Democrat, but he gave advice and care to any President who asked him. Listening to the Clintons, Obama, and George W. Bush last night, I realized that Graham did more than just rub elbows with the great and mighty: he treated them as he did everyone.
3. I was in the doctor’s office in Black Mountain years ago – back in the 1970’s – when Graham walked in for a standing appointment to get a shot of some kind. I was sitting and reading while a friend was with the doctor, and when the door opened from the outside, in walked Billy Graham. As he went to the receptionist’s window, he looked at each one of us – there were only three or four – sitting in the lobby, and he did not ignore us: for each person who met his eyes, he smiled and nodded. There was a kindness and genuineness that went beyond the Hollywood fame that one thought he would probably have; I halfway expected him to sit down and start chatting with me, and he had actually began looking for a chair when the nurse came out and said, “Mr. (yes, Mr.) Graham, we can take you now.”
4. A few years later, he changed his opinion of the idea of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, a term used during the height of the nuclear arms race. It was the American policy, to make sure if we did not survive, no enemy would, either. Graham had gone along with the policy for decades, but suddenly, he changed his whole outlook on it, and gave him some credibility with the peace community. And it ended up giving us some credibility as well.
5. Living near his home in Montreat, and in the community where he and Ruth spent their last years, it is hard not to encounter people who were friends of his. While I did not see him very much, he went to church with several friends of ours. I once taught a Sunday School class at the church I attended in my early days here, and every class began with a 5-minute check-in with how Ruth and Billy were doing, as though their welfare was the concern of every person in the class. I had to make time in the lesson plan for the “Billy and Ruth” news. They were discussed as though they were our next-door neighbors. In many ways, they were. While tourists wanted to see his house and asked directions ( I always just said, “Montreat,” and pointed north), most locals gave them their deserved privacy.
6. He did NOT succomb to the temptation, in these latter years, to have “The Billy Graham Show.” That, in and of itself, is a miracle among evangelicals. It sets him apart in ways that may be too subtle for the simple to understand.

Billy Graham had his faults. Seeing a photo of him with Joel Osteen last night made me want to scream. Seeing photos of him with Nixon and Reagan was not much comforting, either. He set the stage for televangelists, and especially the ones currently flashing their faces on the screen. But he was more than that, and there was a genuine humility to the man which one rarely sees these days, be you liberal or conservative, evangelical or other.

I’m not blind or stupid, and this blog is not about hero-worship.

It is, however, about respect. I realize that respect is discounted these days. But it’s the number one reason that we Americans will never be united again as a nation. It’s why we won’t ever solve our gun problems or our political issues, or our faith divides. Respect is not as important as possessing some “correct” idea and ideology.

I know that there were some major differences theologically between us. But Graham’s reputation as a person who simply cared for God’s people, wherever they were, is something that’s important, it’s what really matters, not how he influenced evangelicals. At a time in history when one’s theological guesses are as divisive as one’s politics, it matters that we  remember one who could put all of that aside whenever he was one-on-one with another beloved child of God. All it ever required for Graham to love you seems to have been for you to be breathing. I’d be okay to die with that as my legacy.

If I’m wrong or naive, that’s just what it is. I am just one person trying to see the good in another. Sometimes we can learn from how things appear to be. I, for one, hope that my picture of Billy Graham is close to the truth. He taught me some things about humility in his later days that I hope never to forget. No one’s perfect. He would have been the first to say so. But everyone’s loved by God.

And he would have been the first to say that, too. But hopefully, not the last.

I have a little black book. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I even purchased it while I was with Renae shopping. It’s one of those Moleskin lined blank books that fits in the back pocket of my jeans: a perfect place for my little black book! All I have to remember is to carry a pen. For those of you younger than forty, pen and paper is what we used back in the cavedweller days of my education (except for the mathematicians and scientists, who used pencil, since their disciplines changed constantly while I was growing up: no one ever heard of “New English,” but New Math and Quantum Physics change daily!).

My little black book is full of quotations. As someone who has to stand up in front of people all the time and talk, I learned over the years that not everyone wants to be limited to my particular brand of wisdom. Plus, I haven’t found that many people running around quoting me constantly (proof that there is still some native intelligence in this country and in Christianity, despite everything we do to prove the exact opposite). But the people in my  little book are quite quotable!

My mother was famous for her quotes when we were growing up. She went from the occasional cliche to the deepest wisdom available. I remember that she had pleurisy when I was in high school (she asked me to teach her Sunday School class for four or five Sundays while she was laid up, and there are actually people alive who survived my brand of teaching: I told ghost stories, and still their parents let them come to church! But that’s a story for another day). We were all worried about her and would sit on her bed and ask her how she was and what we could do for her. She would look at us (I realize now that she was quite young, probably in her late thirties) and quote her favorite pastor, “Roger always says, ‘This, too, shall pass.'” And we believed her and knew that we could face anything if we had the  right quote. She also foretold the weather: “Red in the morning, sailors take warning; red in the night, sailors’ delight!” I still dread the days when the morning sky is pink.

Since it’s Lent, I thought of sharing a few  quotes, words my campers here at Christmount have heard summer after summer in one form or another since 1989. Forgive me if I don’t interpret them for you. Enjoy!

Thomas Merton said, “The spiritual life is, first of all, a life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, wrote this incredible thought: “The essential thing in heaven and earth is…that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”

I keep reminding myself of this from Thomas a’ Kempis in The Imitation of Christ: “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”

“See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little,” – Pope John XXIII

“Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.” – Alice Walker

“A life without a lonely place, that is, a quiet center, easily becomes destructive.” – Henri Nouwen.

And my hope for each of you today, from Christopher Robin to Pooh (via A. A. Milne):

“Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Blessings, my friends.

Think Lent, think fasting. It doesn’t matter how many other things you do at Lent, “giving up” something is pretty much how folks think about this christian season.

Do you fast? Fasting usually is about food, and not eating as much, or any at all, for a certain time period. In recent years, though, fasting is a synonym for giving up anything. Some people call intentionally not watching TV “fasting from television.” Others fast from social media (then why are you reading this?). There’s fasting from certain kinds of thinking. You can fast from griping, or complaining about other people’s driving, or fast from pure hatefulness. You name it, you can separate yourself from it by fasting.

You can fast from being a news junkie. You can fast from being mean to people. You can fast from staying up late. You can fast from being lazy.

Fasting is a discipline: it’s difficult. It takes attention. What makes it difficult is that so many of the things that we need or want to give up are part and parcel of who we are.

I have a friend who told me he was going to give up complaining about everything. He was successful. It was such a hard thing, though, that he thought about it all the time. As we discussed this, I suggested that every time he considered his complaining, he might not waste the moment but offer his thought as a prayer.

Fasting in and of itself can be good for us, but during Lent, whatever we do should be moving us closer to God. Fasting from the dark side of our psyche can be such a struggle that we need God to make it possible.  That is sort of the point: not just to give up something, but to use that something as a trigger to remind us that God is present.

In Centering Prayer, we use a word or phrase to bring us back into the presence of God called prayer. We don’t think about the meaning of the word: it’s just a tool to tap us on the shoulder and remind us that we are supposed to be focused on God. Fasting does the same thing: when we realize, “Hey, I’m not supposed to be drinking a soda right now!” we are then to consider why we gave up soda in the first place, which is to have this moment and turn it over to God.

It’s easy to forget that the early Church recalled Jesus in the wilderness before his public ministry began and based Lent somewhat on that. Taking 40 days (not counting Sundays, which are always feast days that remind us of the resurrection, a day of celebration) to fast from spiritual laziness usually enhances our faith journey. Keeping it secret from others keeps us humble and makes it about God, not us.

Besides food, we can fast from anger; fast from selfishness (if we don’t see ourselves as selfish, though, we’ll miss a lot of opportunities here!); fast from ignoring the hungry and poor, (go buy some food to donate, then do so). I could go on, but the best thing I’ve seen about this recently is from Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber and the House for All Saints and Sinners’  list of 40 things to do to keep Lent holy:

http://www.nadiabolzweber.com/sermons/40-ideas-for-keeping-lent-holy-2.htm

It is a helpful practice to put a sign somewhere in our house or work (or both) to help us remember. I call these my “external hard drives” that help me be present for Lent daily. My wife, Renae, taught me this with her scriptures written on paper and taped to the bathroom mirror for her to use during each day to call her to time before God.

Fasting: it’s more than giving up. It’s an act of remembrance and prayer.

I wasn’t always steeped in Buddhist thought. It took me taking mysticism courses in college and being part of a contemplative Christian prayer group there to point me in that direction. Being a card-carrying member of the Thomas Merton Fan Club didn’t hurt any in influencing me, either. Compassion is just a great word, and the Buddhists seem to use it lots. I like that.

Christians talk about “being saved” way too much. Now, I’m not saying Buddhists are right and Christians are wrong. But there seems to be something that we over look in our faith, and compassion is as important to Jesus – maybe even more important – than salvation (after all, it does seem that every time anyone asked him “What must I do to be saved?” he tended to answer in absurdities – go and sell all you have, leave home behind, even the familiar “You must be born again,” – which we do not hear the way the first people heard it, since we have heard it far too often, but just try to imagine what the first hearers must have imagined!).

There aren’t a lot of litmus tests to prove someone is a Christian. Some people get caught up in how wet we get. There seems to be nothing in the Bible that actually tells how the act of baptism works, and you find  plenty of paintings of all kinds: Jesus in the Jordan River, soaking wet with a dove or pigeon flying over him (the Greek word for those birds is the same, according to my Southern Baptist Bible Professor); John pouring water from his palm onto Jesus head; and even Jesus looking pretty dry from the waste up. That same Southern Baptist Bible Professor said that the Greek word “baptidzo” (sorry for the bad transliteration) meant, “To put under water.” But then he laughed and  said, “Remember, that’s a Southern Baptist translation!”

No, there’s more to faith than humidity.

For me, one litmus test is found near the end of the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus tells the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (and I can go on and on about the tongue-in-cheek insult Jesus gave to his listeners by calling them “sheep,” but you’d have to have spent some time around both sheep and goats to understand, so forgive me, it’s just not important here). We always want to think of ourselves as the ones on the right hand, the sheep. We want to think that we have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned, and by extension, treated all people fairly and kindly, and looked after all those who society either ignores or goes out of its way to marginalize. For me, “I  want to be in that number….”

Sometimes, we get too literal here – doing only those things. Jesus only hints at what he means, although it would be great to only do those things listed: what he is talking about is compassion. According to the dictionary, compassion is a sympathetic reaction to someone’s distress AND THE DESIRE TO ALLEVIATE THEIR SUFFERING (my emphasis). It’s not enough to feel sympathy and sorrow; part of compassion is action taken to ease suffering.

Christians supposedly believe that all of us, and everything around us, were created by God. Which means we are part and parcel of each other.Maya Angelou said it more eloquently, “While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.” “It ain’t just about me,” one of my campers once said, when asked what they understood about mission and service to others.

Compassion: it’s not just for Buddhists anymore. Christians have been remiss about using the word enough, but Buddhists actually refer to the Buddha as “the Compassionate One.”

Let’s recognize the  Compassionate Jesus more often. I think it matters in how we see ourselves. The Talmud teaches, “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” “Compassionate” would not be a bad way for a Christian to be known.

I almost put an exclamation point after the title. But no, let’s keep it calm.

Stephen Stills, in “Daylight Again,” wrote these words, “When everyone’s talking, and nobody’s listening, how can we decide?”

Many monasteries have the reminder, “Please Keep Silence” on signs around the sanctuary entrances, in hallways, and other places. Visting school children see the signs, point, look at each other, giggle, and try. Others ignore the signs altogether or speak in stage whispers that don’t fool anyone.

Silence is wonderful. Silence is dangerous. Silence is ambiguous (I was taught by my parents, “Better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and romove any doubt.”).

But silence is also wise. By itself, it is only quietness. Combined with a focus on God and others, it is powerful. It produces great ideas, patience, love, connectedness, kindness. If I’m yelling at you, you are not going to listen. If I am lecturing you, you won’t hear (and the thought crosses my mind to remind you that this blog is a “suggestion,” not a lecture).

In meditation, we sit and breathe. We focus. We sit as erect as is comfortable. We watch thoughts come and go, and with experience grows the knowledge that some of them will stick around. We learn patience with ourselves, with others.

Silence is scary, because it strips away opinion, false self, masks, and leaves us only staring into our deepest self. We see the ugly inside us. We see what God sees (Meister Eckhart: “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me”).

It’s been noisy this week. Understandably so. We are, as a people, trying hard to figure out how to end gun violence. Some say it’s the guns; others say it’s mental health. I wonder how many people have sat in silence around this question? Why not? It’s not as though anyone has come up with the genius that will settle things once and for all.

I’m not advocating for silence as a permanent way of life (although we could do with a few more contemplative voices in the cacaphony). Those who think prayer is a waste of time have already stopped reading. Those who think action has to be as swift as we wish God’s justice would be should study carefully the Civil Rights’ Movement.

I was fortunate enough at 18 years old to be introduced to a man who had marched with Dr. King at all the major Civil Rights events. Still green and with straw sticking out of my hair, I asked him, like a doting child, “How did you do it? How did you take all the abuse, violence, hatred, and keep going?” He looked at me what I remember to be a mixture of wanting to get a gnat out of your face and compassion and said what I have remembered all these years later:

We didn’t just show up and march. If you were going to be part of the non-violent movement, you had to come for worship, prayer, Bible study, connection to God and to each other. We weren’t just doing this because we thought it was a good idea. We did it because we had spent time with God, read the Word, and were grounded in Jesus, love, and compassion. Even for those poor people who were standing on the sides of the roads.

There is no action we can take, no ideas that we can put forward, to solve the insanity that we now find ourselves part of. Because we are part of it, no matter which side we land on. Gun violence and its aftermath has become the American Way of Life.

Whatever action we take, on either side, had better have a big ol’ slice of God in it, or nothing permanent will happen. If you think God wants you to have an assault rifle, spend some time holding onto something – some One – older than the Second Ammendment. If you think God needs to use an assault rifle on all those who own them, you might want to think of One who taught you that love is the way.

Either way, before another word is written, before any more hate comes spewing forth from the Left or the Right, somebody, somewhere, needs to be silent. Not forever, but for real (thank you, Bob Franke).

I loved college and seminary, especially the Bible courses. I learned not to be a biblical literalist. I learned some cool things about words and “The Word.” I loved Greek (Hebrew, not so much), learned that the King James Bible translators were pretty good at getting it right (for the language of their time and the documents they had at their disposal – and I still don’t like to use the KJV!), and learned that people’s names meant something to the Hebrew folks (we learned to curse people and say their name so the curse would “stick:” no name, no curse). Okay, maybe you didn’t need to know that.

The word Christ is from a Greek word christos which can be translated “the annointed,” but, according to my Greek professor (a Southern Baptist scholar, so he should know), there was no word in Greek for “annoint,” so the closest word they could find was a word that meant “to smear;” we all got a giggle out of thinking of Jesus as the “smeared one of God” (although we didn’t giggle too loudly until our prof guffawed loud enough to wake the sleepers in the statistics class next door!).

I find that most of us Christians really like to focus on Christ. Christ-likeness becomes in some traditions becomes a characteristic to be desired. My problem with “Christ,” Paul might call it my stumbling block, is that I have no way of knowing what a christ is or does. Granted, I say the creeds, I claim to think of Jesus as fully human and fully Divine, but I’ll be darned if I know what “fully Divine” ends up being.

Now, don’t go talking homoousia to me: I took Greek AND several brands of theology. I know the lingo. I understand substance. The problem is, I’ve never met a christos. What does a christos do? Can I be christos-like? Is it like when I played football in the 6th grade and got chistos-ed all over the field?

A few years ago, I read a disturbingly wonderful book by Reza Aslan, Zealot. It is not for the faint of faith or heart! It began to change my worry about never having met a christos into being fairly sure I had encountered a Jesus!

Christos gets a cool birth, wise men, shepherds, angels, the whole nine yards. Jesus gets the first chapter of Mark. Jesus was a carpenter. I’ve known lots of carpenters. I tried to be one once, and my wife still insists that that bookcase needs to stay down in the basement. But my grandfather and uncles were carpenters, artisans in wood. My youngest brother still has a beautiful table my granddad made. Doubtful he would do anything but laugh himself to death over my bookcase.

Jesus was a person,  sort of like you and me (maybe a little better). He sweated. He worried. He looked at the people around him and saw the hungry, the homeless, the lepers and other sick ones, the hypocrits, the failures, the crazies. He felt their pain. He fed them. He healed them. He made them see. He spoke to them so they could understand. He told stories, partied with them, loved them, and taught them.

At the end of a week where once again our young people have found one more reason to be afraid of life, I’m thinking that all the christos-like people are saying prayers of sorrow and wishing them well, along with the families of the dead. Maybe that’s nice. Maybe it’s just all we can think of to do.

But Jesus-like people are praying (as Jesus tended to do regularly) and then trying to figure out what to do, how to be the hands and feet not of some Christos, but of the Jesus who got splinters, who taught fishermen how to fish, who took children in his lap and laughed and blessed them.

He did something. He came down from the mountain, out of the garden, out of the synangogue, and he did something for people to set them free to do the same for others. He ticked off the government rather than got  along with it: you didn’t get nailed to a cross for preaching alone, but for showing people that there’s more to life than collecting more and more stuff. He didn’t teach that the person with the most wins, but that the very opposite, those with the least, had a chance, should be given a chance. He lost his life because he practiced the politics of love.

Maybe that’s what we need to do: get our hands dirty, take on the world by saying “NO!” to senseless violence. Yeah, we need to pray: but as the Talmud teaches, “Never pray in a room without windows.” See more than your eyelids; do more than mumble some churchy words. Go and do. Against the grain. For people, for others, for the least of these, for the children who are afraid, for the parents who mourn, for the rest of us who never know what’s going to happen next.

Jesus has no body now but yours.

Recently, I heard someone say that they had been told that secrecy is a spiritual discipline. It’s interesting how you hear something like this and wonder what the point was. Secrecy is rarely a good thing, especially in relationships. As a matter of fact, in families and friendships, secrecy is the opposite of a spiritual discipline: it’s a discipline of evil, a discipline of selfishness, a discipline designed for harm rather than for growth.

Rarely do we consider secrecy a good thing. Governments that keep secrets from their people are rarely protecting them. Spouses who keep secrets from each other are not doing anything holy or helpful: something’s afoot, something which, when it comes out, usually isn’t good. Secrecy among families, between siblings or parents, rarely is for a good reason.

Yet Jesus taught his disciples some things about secrecy that are good. And during the season of Lent, keeping some things secret is good for our souls.

The Ash Wednesday liturgy reminds us, in the Gospel, that Jesus taught secrecy in certain areas of life (Matthew 6: 1 – 6): charitable giving, merciful (or “good”) deeds, and prayer. From these, we can pretty much figure out that we are not supposed to boast about our spiritual life in any way. He also warned against going into places of worship or even out in the streets (or on social media!) and letting everyone know how holy we are. He went so far as to teach that our public prayer ought to be something like, “God, have mercy on me (Luke 18: 9 – 14)!”

Jesus also warned about our standing on the street corner (or in Sunday School, fellowship groups, or just hanging around in the church hallways) telling folks how Christ-like we are (remember that true Christ-likeness includes that quality that Paul says Jesus had, “that equality with God was not a thing to be grasped,” Philippians 2:6).

Of course, if our Lent amounts to giving up chocolate, let’s go ahead and talk. No one’s gonna be particularly worried that we will go to hell from pride or driveeveryone else crazy with our bragging (I realize this is ungracious for those addicted to chocolate so much that it really is a bad habit that they are using Lent to help overcome, but come on, folks, some of us give it up just so we can say we gave up something, really just a nod in the direction of Lent rather than a Lenten observance!).

However, if we’re running around being holy all over the place, then sitting on our perch and crowing about it, we may have missed the point.

Secrecy is about pride and humility, according to Jesus. Secrecy keeps our boasting and need for attention in check. It reminds us that what we do, we do to become closer to God, and hopefully from that closeness, to have the strength, courage, and love to love and serve those whom God loves.

No, general secrecy is NOT a spiritual discipline; but the spiritual discipline of keeping quiet about our so-called holiness actually IS something to strive for during Lent, and during the rest of the year.