Reflection for June 5, 2011

Ascension

(1994)

We’re all familiar with Gulliver’s sojourn among the Lilliputians, a people who stood only six inches tall. We’re not so familiar, perhaps, with the reverse experience he had when he found himself among the Brobdingnagians, who averaged seventy feet tall! There he stood in a field of wheat forty feet high, while a line of Brobdingnagian reapers approached wielding seven foot sickles. Realizing he could be squashed under foot or cut in two, Gulliver screamed as loud as he could, whereupon one of the reapers stopped short. He looked at Gulliver as we might view a mouse and then bent over, picked him up and held him within three yards of his eyes.

The Brobdingnagians treated Gulliver gently as a curiosity. Eventually he was able to converse with their king and boast about England’s empire and political institutions. He failed, however, to realize that this gigantic king could evaluate all Gulliver said from a much higher vantage point. And so, far from being impressed by Gulliver’s account of English history, the king was appalled. To him it appeared to be nothing but a petty “heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, hypocrisy, cruelty, envy, lust and ambition could produce!” He could only conclude Gulliver’s countrymen “to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth!” Embarrassed by this assessment, Gulliver tried to impress him with the achievements of European science and technology, inventions such as gunpowder and cannonballs (and we might add hydrogen bombs). This too left the king amazed at “how so impotent an insect would entertain such inhuman ideas.” He then ordered Gulliver, “if he valued his life, never to mention these things again while in his kingdom.” Gulliver privately ridiculed the king’s reactions as shortsighted, forgetting that it was he who was short and therefore shortsighted in this land of benign giants.

Which brings us to this matter of Ascension Thursday coming up. In our creed we say of Jesus: “For us and our salvation he came down from heaven.” We believe that Jesus came into our world possessing a much higher vantage point from which he could well perceive how small we are and how small we often behave - our human pettiness and its often vicious consequences. He came to unmask these limitations, to lift us up out of all this lethal pettiness and myopia, to share with us his higher and therefore more profound vision of reality, his bigness of mind and heart.

“And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself,” he says in John’s Gospel. And St. Paul plays upon this same theme in his Letter to the Ephesians, where he prays that we may all “grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s way of loving”, where he speaks of our attaining a maturity “measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ.”

And have you ever noticed how often Jesus takes his disciples up to a mountain top - to pray, to deliver his Sermon on the Mount, to be transfigured before them, to be elevated on his Cross (which becomes for us our ladder to heaven), and finally to carry our gaze even higher as he ascends into the heavens themselves? All in his effort to entice us toward a taller, wider, all encompassing, compassionate view of things - to make of us a race of spiritual giants similar to those Gulliver ran into. You know, of course, where Gulliver ran into them - along the coast of northern California near a place called Cape Mendocino, which leaves all of us who live in this region today with some pretty big shoes to fill.

Reflection for May 29, 2011

Our feet reluctant . . .

Last Sunday the lectionary spoke of the first seven deacons, the first in the list being Stephen. The Acts of the Apostles goes on to tell of Stephen’s long public speech in which he spoke up boldly for Jesus until his enraged audience, as one translation says, “dragged him out of the city” and stoned him to death.

But who was dragging whom? Because Acts also says that a man named Saul was present at this execution only later to be dragged – himself - out of his role of persecutor to become the martyred Stephen’s successor, the Apostle Paul. And from then on what did Paul become? A drag upon the original apostles who at that time had a limited, even timid sense of the scope of the Gospel – until Paul confronted them with the equal inclusion of Gentiles around the table of Christ.

Sometimes (or maybe more often than not) we ourselves have to be dragged toward our Christian destiny – dragging our feet in the process. As I look back over my own life (and you can do the same) there was a time when I had to be dragged out of my reluctance to BE, to engage wholeheartedly with Christ’s call. Oh, I followed – but with baby steps, hesitant, never in full stride! Like Peter, like the first disciples, we are all like that.

And then, having completed seminary training, six long years to say nothing of six prior years in a minor seminary, I was sent on to study Sacred Scripture. Graduate school! After so many years in a classroom! My heart wasn’t in it – or my brain. But I had no choice, being under a vow of obedience. So I went half-heartedly to classes in the Semitics Department at Catholic University until my major professor (a real Prussian) shook me up with a phone call saying, “If you are not into this in earnest why waste my time and yours? Drop out!”

Suddenly to save face or to please I began to concentrate – but once I advanced to studies in Rome, the subject matter of Scripture had become so fascinating, so redeeming, so liberating, so energizing! I who had been dragging my feet (perhaps like Saul before Stephen’s execution) was now being dragged out of my hesitation by the depth, vision, experience of God’s Word. I felt like I had come of age, stopped being a child. No more baby steps. Now it was a matter of strides down an endless passage of ever new transforming vistas.

Often we need a jolt like the one my “Prussian” professor gave me – to get serious about life, about our creed, about why we are here in this world. In that scene where Stephen is dragged out of the city to lay down his life for the Gospel it says the people throwing stones “laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul” (the future Paul). I wonder, when he later thought of that moment in his life, whether he may have had thoughts (as I do) along the line of Emily Dickinson’s – expressed in her lovely poem:

Our journey had advanced / Our feet were almost come / To that odd fork in being’s road / Eternity by term // Our pace took sudden awe. / Our feet reluctant led: / Before were cities, but between, / The forest of the dead. // Retreat was out of hope; / Behind, a sealed route, / Eternity’s white flag before, / And God at every gate.

Reflection for May 22, 2011

The Image

“As I sit at my desk, I know where I am. I see before me a window; beyond that some trees; beyond that the red roofs of the campus of Stanford University; beyond them . . . the roof tops which mark the town of Palo Alto; beyond that the bare golden hills of the Hamilton Range. I know, however, more than I can see. Behind me, although I am not looking in that direction, I know there is a window, and beyond that . . . the Coast Range; beyond that the Pacific Ocean. Looking ahead of me again, I know that beyond . . . my present horizon, there is a broad valley; . . . a still higher range of mountains; beyond that . . . the Rockies; . . . the eastern seaboard; . . . the Atlantic Ocean; . . . Europe.”

Thus begins a book called The Image by a noteworthy economist and Quaker mystic named Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993). He goes on to extend his image of the world, visualizing it as a globe and then a small speck circling around a bright star, which is the sun, in the company of many other similar specks. And of course he sees the sun as one of millions of other suns or stars in one galaxy among millions of other galaxies. Beyond placing himself within his knowledge of space, he can locate himself in time as well. He lives amid milestones of dates like his birthday, 1776, 1066, the span of civilizations like Rome, Greece, Assyria . . .To sum up, he has a sense of where he is in space and time – that goes far beyond that known by even his great, great, great, great grandfathers. And how does he arrive at his sense of where he is in space and time? By way of messages delivered in so many ways – via science, religion, literature and history.

He is also aware that at any time new messages might stretch his current image of the world, so much so that he might be severely shaken before he can assimilate the change and regain his equilibrium (as when Columbus discovered America and Galileo proved the earth circled the sun and science denied the world was created in seven days and the Church switched to the vernacular Mass and I took courses at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome).

But isn’t this what happens throughout biblical writing? Take the Tower of Babel story. Everyone spoke the same language, which means they lived in a closed universe, so sure of themselves that God made their world multi-lingual so that their cohesiveness disintegrated. Yet out of that confusion came Abraham to open us up to a new, more profound vision of who and where and what and why we are.

Or take the character Job. He conceived of his world as a courtroom. God was the judge, Satan the prosecutor, and human beings liable to punishment if they went astray. Then what happened? Job had never gone astray and yet he suffered drastically. As a consequence his understanding of his world collapsed. He fought hard to maintain it, demanded a hearing before God to protest the injustice of his plight. What happened? God became a tornado that whirled Job about amid so many strange, new images of the universe that Job shut up and, taking in the magnificence of it all, bade a silent farewell to the cramped quarters of his courtroom world. He was ready to submit to a whole new image of God and creation that would require a heart, an awe, an imagination as big as both!

Reflection for May 15, 2011

Camouflage

(from 2003)

Jane and I had just begun to climb the path to the summit of Corona Heights in San Francisco. Corona Heights is a low hill topped by prominent rocks above Market Street which presents the viewer with a grand display of the Mission district, the Bay and, to the left, the skyline of San Francisco, which on this day in the strange light of a sunless sky looked like a vast Cubist painting, what with its rectangular buildings of every size and shade and its Transamerica pyramid. Jane and I go there on every anniversary of our son Philip’s death because it overlooks where he lived and died on Duboce Street and because the last time we saw him we were driving up Market Street and he pointed to the Heights and said that was his favorite place of retreat and if he ever had to live on the streets that’s where he’d stay.

Well, back to our ascent of the Heights last Sunday. To make the climb easier the park people had cut some steps into the soil at the path’s lower reaches and reinforced them with wooden four by fours to prevent erosion. We had only climbed a couple of steps when Jane said, “Look, a butterfly.” She was pointing directly to the step in front of us. I couldn’t see anything but she insisted there was a stationary butterfly, which had just closed its wings. Of course that’s why I couldn’t see it – because with its wings closed the butterfly was so camouflaged we could hardly distinguish it from the soil, pebbles and sticks at our feet. As Jane pointed, I looked hard and said, “Where?” And she said, “Wait.” And then the butterfly’s wings opened and I beheld the sudden splendor of a new monarch butterfly in all its orange, black, red and white spotted symmetry! It was like an apparition out of nowhere.

It then took flight but only to alight upon the next step where it again folded its wings and disappeared, became what looked like a sliver of wood. We waited and watched and again it opened its wings and transfigured the ground and repeated this ritual for several steps upward until I got the message and said to Jane, “The butterfly is telling us that Phil is here. We can’t see him but he’s here and if he were to open his wings we’d see him in all his splendor.” And so we continued our ascent sensing that Phil was with us all the way – camouflaged by death but still present with a transcendent beauty.

Is that not what happened to the apostles after the death of Jesus? I mean even when Jesus was alive they failed to perceive who he really was. They imposed on him the camouflage of their own presuppositions. Or take the experience of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus after the death of Jesus. Here they were walking beside him, engaging in conversation with him, but did they see him? No – not until he sat with them at table and broke bread and gave it to them. That’s when he opened his wings and displayed for a moment the monarch he really was! And so it was with all his apparitions to his disciples. Were they not moments when, by opening to them the deeper meaning of the Scripture, he opened to them the essence of who he really was – the Grace of God Incarnate? And in opening his own wings throughout all those resurrection episodes, did he not compel his apostles to lay aside their own camouflage, to open up their own wings, to reveal their own capacity for gracious being? And do not all these Gospel episodes we listen to throughout this Easter season demand that we too lay aside the camouflage by which we conceal (even from ourselves) our own redeemed beauty? I must say, last Sunday’s experience with that monarch butterfly helped me feel (in relation to Philip) something of the joy Mary Magdalene experienced when, assuming the risen Jesus to be only a gardener, she heard him simply say “Mary” – saw him simply open his wings - and realized he wasn’t dead after all.

Reflection for May 8, 2011

Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us!

Way back in the late 1950’s a priest friend of mine told me of a recent pilgrimage he led to Rome – by charter flight. The plane was not a jet but a Lockheed Constellation model with four propeller engines and its well-known twin tail. It was an evening flight and the cost was cheap and my friend and his flock soon found out why. As they settled into their seats, the passengers next to the curtained windows on either side drew back their curtains only to find there were no windows at all. They were in a disguised flying boxcar. They were overcome by claustrophobia, felt trapped – and for how many hours?

What a metaphor for our own journey down through time! We are no sooner born into this world and into a particular culture of this world – be it high society, the working class, secularism, agnosticism, nationalism, tribalism of one sort or another – and without realizing it we are flying through time in a boxcar without windows – the interior of which is the only world we know. Or you could say we are deposited into a corridor of time, a compressed expanse of thought and experience that is ignorant of the wider expanse of God’s creation wherein we may find “fullness of life” instead of cramped minds and imaginations.

You may remember my mentioning Lily Bart, the main character of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Lily was born into one of those narrow corridors known as high society, grew up to seek a wealthy husband and live off the dividends of prosperous ancestors, play bridge, visit the casinos of Monte Carlo, live from one weekend party and opera season to the next, enjoy fancier curtains to cover the non-existent windows of her set’s flying boxcar. And when the blessed opportunity to break out of her containment came along, she couldn’t do it.

As she says to the man who could open up her world: Once – twice – you gave me the chance to escape from my life . . . I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late . . . I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one fits into one hole? One must get back into it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap.

This Easter Season gives all of us a chance to step out of our narrow corridors, our narrow-mindedness into the big world of our Risen Christ – a world of grace and constant revelation. A great theologian of the 20^th century once described the 40 days of Christ’s appearances to his disciples as the intrusion of real time and space into our narrow corridors of time and space, where like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus we fret about recent events, the frustration of our narrow hopes, our preconceptions, even the petty things that bug us.

And along comes Jesus on these Sundays to walk with us, to draw us into his world beyond the shadow of death. He speaks to us in our Scripture readings, he dines with us at our Eucharist, he breaks bread with us – in hopes that in this breaking of bread we may experience a breakthrough into a world of universal grace and beauty – uncurtained, uncramped, uncoffined from this day forth.