Nos Nunquam Movere

Nos Nunquam Movere, or so our informal family motto goes.  We Never Move.

This was not always the case.

As a Foreign Service brat, I moved every four years.  From DC to Nairobi, when I was a toddler.  From Nairobi back to DC, when I was about to go into first grade.  From DC to London, when I was in fourth grade.  From London back to DC, as I turned thirteen.  At eighteen, I moved to Charlottesville and college at UVA.  There, I shifted spaces every year.  One year in a dorm, and then three different rooms in my fraternity house.

After graduation, I moved to Williamsburg for a year to live with my fiance.  Then back in with my parents in Northern Virginia, where we lived for six months after getting married.  Then into an apartment in Arlington, followed by another three years later.  

We bought our home back in nineteen ninety nine, and the whole process came to a halt.  

Parties, or so Prince Rogers Nelson sang about the year we moved into Annandale, weren't meant to last, but we've lasted.  Twenty six years, we've called the same little suburban rambler home.  It was close to grandparents, when kids came along.  It's close to aging parents, now that the offspring are grown.    It's been right sized for us, cozy with four souls, spacious for two, walking distance to stores and restaurants, but kinda quiet.  Around us, the faces have changed, as neighbors have moved out, new neighbors moved in, again and again.  We remain.  Rache and I have both sacrificed the arc of our careers to the comfort of place, choosing again and again to remain.

This isn't the standard for Americans.  Here in this country, we move, on average, once every eleven years.  More when we're young, less as we age, but we're always on the go.  Always pulling up stakes, heading for better ground, always seeking greener pastures and new vistas.  

If you live that way, there's much that you gain, but there are also experiences you do not have.  There is much that you miss.  Your sense of connectedness to the land, and your ability to see the world changing around you?  That doesn't happen when you're in constant motion yourself.

When you set down roots, you see the wear of time, cast against longstanding memory.  You know the ebb and flow of seasons.  Sometimes change is for the good.  Sometimes?  Not so much.

There are a pair of towering poplars near our carport that simply weren't there when we moved in.  I remember when they were saplings, twenty years ago.  I considered cutting them down, but relented.  They're not nuisance trees.  They're indigenous and vital to the local ecosystem.  Now they reach sixty feet skyward, casting shade in the summer and providing sustenance to the few remaining butterflies.  They are good and lovely.  

But across the street and at the top of a small rise, the seamless green canopy that graced the neighborhood two decades ago is now irregular, where a score of chestnut oaks struggled and perished.  That was part of a mass die-off all across the Mid-Atlantic, one that played out over three-quarters of a decade.  Changing climate, dontcha know, as our world shifts fast enough that if you hold still you can see it.  

There are other benefits to remaining where one is.  One can think longer term, and taste the fruit of seeds planted many years prior, seeds both metaphoric and actual.  Thirteen years ago, I dreamed that my yard might one day be more than just an expanse of grass, and made my very first stab at growing a garden.  Today, I sit out on my sheltered porch on a misty morning, and see flowers and beans, tomatoes and squash and okra and a panoply of herbs.  Over three hundred square feet of raised beds, added in considered iteration over time.  Time is so necessary for growing things, and some things take more than a season.

More than a decade ago, I planted a couple of blueberry bushes just to the right of our front door.  Six years ago, I put two apple tree saplings into the ground in our front yard.  Five years ago, I put some asparagus rootstock into the soil of a raised bed, just to the left of our driveway.

It took three years for the asparagus to produce.  It took five for the berries to really start popping, and ten for me to figure out how to keep the birds away.  One of the apple trees, this year, is heavy with reddening Fujis. 

For the ancient Biblical prophets, the gift of patiently appreciating and harvesting from one's place was a mark of a just culture, and of the great blessings of God's purpose.  

When times are hard, the prophets proclaimed, you let roots run deeper.  Like Jeremiah, you buy that field, claiming a deeper stake in place and the potential of the future.  I have, as the prophet Isaiah promised, planted my gardens, and stayed long enough to eat of them.

A crisis might change this, I know.  The time will certainly come when mortality will move me to another shore.  But for now, I'll remain, and enjoy the pleasures of holding fast to what is good.

Jorge Bergoglio Changes Again

The first thing I learned from Jorge Bergoglio was that people can change.

He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.  

Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior.  He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.

On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop.  He was conservative, eh?  

But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing.  "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself.  It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking.  It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.

And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.

So I committed myself to reserving judgment.  Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.

In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different.  His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.  

At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play.  Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call.  In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed.  Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness.  He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock.  Love for neighbor.  Care for the poor and the stranger.  A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.

This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls.  Not that Francis was "progressive."   He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.

Francis did his job ably, and with integrity.  He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally.  As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis.

  

Lengthening Lent

Lent ended, and nothing changed.

This was a good thing, at least so far as my Lenten disciplines were concerned.  For years, my approach to Lent had been to give up my much beloved hoppy fermented beverages.  It was a nontrivial way to mark the season, and both made every evening 1) a reminder of another commitment and 2) tended to involve me dropping a pound or seven.

But this year, my focus had been a bit different. It had struck me, as the years had gone by, that perhaps celebrating the Risen Christ by banging back some beers on Easter afternoon just didn't mesh with the theology I was endeavoring to live out.

Finally, He is Risen, so I can get back to drinkin'?

Just seemed not quite right, somehow, as if I were celebrating an Easter that fell on 4/20...and in which the primary lectionary reading was drawn from the Fourth Gospel, Twentieth chapter...by lighting up the big ol' doobie I'd been denying myself for 40 days.  It'd be a strange time to be a pastor in Colorado these days.

This last year, I'd already backed way off my modest but regular alcohol consumption.  It was part of a personal discipline to reduce my total body mass, and laying off of what tended to be several hundred empty calories nightly seemed a great way to help cope with that.  That's been good for the self-care, but it's not the primary focus of my Christian walk.

And so, this season, I've made other changes, shifting habits and patterns in ways that I plan to continue.

For example, I committed to a little more frequency and intentionality in my prayer disciplines.  And that change hasn't changed, now that we're out of that liturgical season.  Nor should it change, I think.  It's actually rather important that it not.

Because the entire point of the season of Lent isn't preparing you to not be in the season of Lent.  It shouldn't be a time that leads you back to the place that you've already been, a few pounds lighter.

Easter, and the preparation for the promise that it represents, should go rather deeper into us than that.

Dusty Hymns and Songs We've Forgotten

There's a new hymnal recently out for we Prez-bee-teer-yans, one I've heard the rumblings of for a couple of years now.  Within my own teeny tiny church, folks have been asking when and whether we might be making that shift.

Honestly, I don't know.  The whole idea of hymnals in this era continues to strike me as a tiny bit strange and a tich archaic.  I mean, shoot, I love so many of the old hymns, but the hymn as a modern musical form?  Hum.

More new hymns?  I just, shoot, I don't know.  In the now obsolete "blue" hymnal, I almost invariably steer away from the hymns that draw their provenance from the early 1980s.   While I'm typically down with their theology, the lyrics feel like First Church of Portlandia earnest progressivism, and the "new tunes" tend towards lnoodly, indistinct abstraction.

I'll reserve judgment about the new new stuff until a copy lands in my hands, though.

I was musing about our pursuit of new music and the place of the old during the last week, when I had a conversation with my thirteen year old about forgotten songs.  Because even as the old hymns fall away in a wash of Christian Contemporary Music, other music is also fading.

As we drove to his drum class, he connected his iPod to our car radio, then scanned through the artists.  He'd been comparing playlists with his friends at school, particularly one he'd just put together of some of his favorite artists.  He's the fruit of my loins, and that means he's a bit of a mutant, so the playlist in question was entitled "'Nam,"

'Nam?  Shoot.  I was five years old when Saigon fell.  Such an old soul, he can be.  But list was appropriately named, a compilation of his favorite artists from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of my friends knew any of these musicians, he said, a bit put out.  They'd never even heard of them.  He panned down the list of names that bear no meaning for his peers.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  Creedence Clearwater Revival.  Janis Joplin.  Jimi Hendrix. Meaningless.  You could be making those names up, and his friends wouldn't know the difference.

Not even Hendrix, I asked?  Nope.  And then, as if to drive the dagger deeper, he said, and none of them had ever even heard of Pink Floyd.  It's music that is receding, an increasingly distant ship's smoke on the horizon.

That may change as they grow older, and their base of knowledge expands.  I mean, shoot, I'm not sure I'd ever heard any CCR when I was 13 beyond ads for KTEL compilations.  But then again, it may not.  Those tunes may fade into obscurity.

As human beings have learned to store and keep music, and recordings have become part of our collective memory, the volume of our musical memory just keeps expanding.  Even if you've got complex tastes and an appreciation for the sounds of other generations, there's only so much we can know.

And so we move on, and we forget.  Sometimes, that's for the best.  But sometimes, it means we lose track of our context, and drift away from stories and songs better not forgotten.

Dust in the wind, I suppose.

Why Love Wins

My reading list is insane.

Here, I'm not complaining about how many books are in the holding pattern.  I'm saying, "It's insane," as in, DSM-certifiable.   Having just dispatched statistician Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I'm now most of the way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.  Pascal is flawed but undeniably delicious, a delightful mind whose prose shimmers with a salon-sharpened wit.

The next book in the rotation?  A pastel-covered book by popular bestselling Christian author Stormie Omartian.  It's titled The Power of a Praying Cat, or something like that.   And yes, that's her real name, although I'm invariably tempted to write that surname O'Martian.

And then?  Then on to Rob Bell's Love Wins.  See?  Totally crazy.  Wild!  Wanton!  Utter chaos!

That last one I've been meaning to read for a while, particularly as my little church handed Bell's book out to our graduating seniors as they went off to college.  It seemed useful, a gracious and rational counterbalance to the callow dorm-room anti-theism they're likely to encounter.  But I hadn't read it.  Mostly, I've read reviews, some fluffy support, some raging bile, others more measured and balanced.

What intrigues me from my pre-reading, though, is that while Bell makes the theological case for the victory of God's love over all things, he doesn't appear to make the leap into the created order.

Of course we want love to win.  It's love, dammit.  But does it?  If we look out at the world, it often doesn't appear to be the case.  Love is for the weak and the bleeding hearts.   Love gets its [butt] kicked after school.  Love is cut down by AR15 fire as it puts itself between the children and the shooter.  And the kids still die.

Look out at the world.  It's red in tooth and claw, savagely Darwinian and seemingly loveless.  Partisanship wins.  Snark wins.  Hate wins.   But love?  Is there a rational case for the victory of the compassion that is at the heart of what Jesus taught?

Here, my wildly profligate reading has stirred a thought, one I'm chewing over in my mind.   Love wins because love is stronger.   Love is much, much stronger.  Why?

Because love can adapt, and hate cannot.   Love can change, and hate cannot.

A sentient being governed by love as a defining principle will approach another being as having something to offer.  It will encounter a new reality as a new opportunity.   If you love another, you can see from their perspective, moving beyond the confines of your subjectivity into a place in between.  We don't do that perfectly.  The existential walls between us are high.   But we can, nonetheless, get there.  With a little help, sure, but we can get there.

The individual governed by love does not exist wholly within themselves.   They may not embrace everything they encounter, but they're open to new things in every encounter.  That means that when the [poop] hits the fan, they're smart enough to duck, or to at least to close their mouths for a moment.

Love learns.  It grows.  It adapts.  It does not cling to biases.   That means that when the world changes, Love is ready.

Hate?  Hate doesn't do that so well.  Hate only knows one thing: itself.  A being governed by hatred is a being ruled by the self it already knows.  Difference and the Other are to be destroyed or subjugated.  Hate defines itself by rigidly clinging to what it is.  Hate wants power.  Hate wants control.  It seeks to dominate the world, to force the entire universe into the narrative of itself that is the only thing it is willing to hear.

And when it encounters the deep complexity of God's creation, hate rails and snarls and lashes out.  But what hate does not do, because it can't do it, is change.

Eventually, that means that hate is either destroyed by the change to which it cannot adapt or devoured by itself.

Love is what it looks like when sentient beings succeed.  Hate?  Hate is the defining feature of failed individuals, and doomed cultures, and species that have flirted with sentience and then regressed.

Lord help us.

Learning To Play A New Game

So the other day, I was arriving at my son's middle school, because... um... well... I sort of forget.  I think he'd left something at home.  Given the number of times I have to pick something up or drop something off that has been forgotten, it all gets blurry.

When I arrived, there was a circle of tweeners out front of the school.  They weren't absorbed in their iPods, or milling about aimlessly.  They were playing a game together, actual human beings, facing one another and interacting.   They would strike out comically at each other, either making contact or not...and if not, they'd freeze in whatever exaggerated pose they'd ended up in.

It was not supervised, organized, or parent run.  There were no release forms.  They were just playing, in a self-organized game.

Huh, I thought, as I brought whatever-it-was-I was-bringing to my son.  I wonder what that is.  I don't remember that game.  I really had never seen it, not through my entire childhood, on in any of my years of time around children.

On Friday night, I drove what seemed to be halfway across the planet to my older son's varsity swim meet, at a rec center pool deep in the heart of what had been countryside back when I was in high school.  I was going to be a timer, which is actually a great way to get up and close and personal with the action.  I've done it enough to know that I needed not to wear shoes.

As I waited for the meet to begin, I noticed that while some teens were sitting cliche-oblivious to one another, absorbed in their pocket mind suckers, my older son was standing in a circle playing exactly the same game with a group of other kids.   Girls, mostly.  Smart lad, thought I.  Then, they played what was seemed a similar game, but with different motions and rhythm.  There was laughter and silliness.  It was good to see kids playing together, particularly on that night.

On the way home, I asked my older son what the game was called.  Two games, he said.  The one I'd seen at both schools they called "Ninja."  The other was called "Wa," and it was a motion and rhythm game.  They may have been out there somewhere back when I was a kid.   But they were not part of the life of middle schoolers and high schoolers in Northern Virginia back in the day.  Now, kids are teaching them to kids.  It's part of their culture.

Kids have always had their own folklore, their own stories, passed from child to child as a part of the child-world.  The fables and myths and games of childhood exist in a place apart from the dull and clumsy world of adults.  I fear, sometimes, that our kids are losing that, that we're cramming them so full of prepackaged entertainment product that their minds are becoming consumerist foie gras.

But the games continue...and they change.  That was a hopeful thing, important to see and feel this week in which all has sometimes seemed so trapped and hopeless.  What makes the world so alive when you are a child is the newness of it.  So much of what you encounter is new, and as you encounter it, the process of growing and living requires that you engage with it and figure out how or how not to integrate it into yourself.

And because everything is new to us, a totally new thing...a game, for instance, or a new way of doing something...can be taken in and lived out.

It's a skill we need to better develop, because it would serve us well as a people.  And perhaps that's part of what my Teacher meant when he said we can only enter the Kingdom as little children.

How can we be transformed, if we can never learn to play any new games?

America's Always Done It That Way

America is, or so we are often told by people who should know better, a Christian nation. It's a fairly common refrain among those on the far right, those who would self-describe as ultra-conservative. They see resisting change as a battle against the forces that are gradually, insidiously turning this country into some unrecognizable socialist horror. You know, like the People's Republic of Canada. Change is to be resisted.

I found myself yesterday musing at the irony in this.

Conservatives in America tend to be church folks. And church leaders know that the kiss of death for any church comes when it is governed by one particular and pernicious phrase: "We've Always Done It That Way." As a theory for the primary cause of church demise and decay, it's well tested. If a congregation is not open to change, not open to responding creatively to the new challenges in its community and the world, then it will die. It might take a while. But that church will eventually calcify and crumble and fail, because it has ceased to be a living entity.

Here I'm not talking about changing the central governing values of the church. I'm talking about changing the structural and procedural mechanics of church. You know, the crap that doesn't matter. Big, vibrant churches...which, paradoxically, are often the conservative ones...know this. You modify the form, while maintaining the essential content.

Observing the intensity of the resistance to some seemingly obvious and necessary structural changes in our country, I marvel that a nation filled with successful churches should be so ferociously resistant to change. Take, for instance, our approach to transporting our selves and our stuff. A car-based system of mass transportation is obscenely inefficient, abusively wasteful of both our time and our natural resources. But we LIIIIKE it. It's the way we've always done it. It feels comfortable. So even though it can't be sustained, we resist any efforts to change it. Just drill more! Just make more roads...so long as you don't make us pay for them. And keep gas cheap, so we can drive our big lumbering Suburbans just the way the Founding Fathers intended.

We choose to ignore that things are changing. We refuse to realize that the easy and abundant energy that comes from carbon-based sources of energy was the only thing that makes the inefficiencies in our system possible. We close our eyes to the approaching end of the Oil Age. We are, as a culture, like that college-town church that clings to organs and stained glass and high pulpits and robes. It might, for a time, survive. But eventually, clinging to forms and structures that no longer reflect the reality around us will be the end of us. Assuming we're not dead already.

Any halfway competent pastor could tell you that.

Staring Into The Fire

One of the more paradoxical things that one encounters in the reading of mystics like George MacDonald is the juxtaposition of their earthy, grace-filled and open-minded faith with a rather ferocious and intimidating view of the mysterium tremens of the Creator. Though mystics glory and delight in the created order, the One from whom all things spring isn't presented in terms of butterflies and bunnies and huggy bear Jesus, all viewed through a warm fuzzy filter of wuv, sweet wuv.

God, as MacDonald says again and again, is a consuming fire:

He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

In this, MacDonald resonates with Merton and all those who have perceived the nature of God's love, including those few, brief flickers of presence that have formed my own faith. As I meditated on this yesterday, I found myself musing over how the Fire articulated by MacDonald relates to the teaching of the Dark Philosopher Heraclitus.

Heraclitus is the dude who came up with the idea that everything is change. "You can't step in the same river twice?" Heraclitus said that twenty-three hundred years before Disney Pocahontas sang it. He argued that nothing is constant, that everything is dynamic and ever changing, and that it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about being, other than that it changes. He's the father of postmodernity.

In his philosopical poetics, Heraclitus declared that underlying all being was an all consuming, all devouring fire, which he called the logos. Yeah, that logos, the same Greek term that English versions of John's Gospel translate as "Word."

I puzzled over this juxtaposition. There is nothing in mysticism that points to God as the engine of impermanence and meaninglessness. Nothing at all. Quite the opposite. Yet the imagery is so similar...so close...and the influence of Heraclitus on Western Philosophy so huge...that it felt like a non-random connection.

Perhaps it's a question of perspective.

We are creatures of change. As we view and perceive ourselves, we are ever changing. The organic processes of our bodies. The fleeting impermanent moment in which the light of self dwells. We are not the same being from one instant to the next...and yet, paradox of paradoxes, we are, and we cohere.

In our encounter with the One who formed us and in whose love we dwell, we are entering into relationship with that which does not change. As beings who are ever changing, we look at our Maker, and see that glory from the perspective of our own changing. Observing that endless, timeless presence in which lies all potentiality, we see terrible fire and change because we are changing. The Word is not flux and change. We are.

Perhaps, perhaps, we encounter God as we might view the tarmac beneath us as we book along on our motorcycle at 200 klicks per hour. "Wow, the road is moving fast," we might think. But it is not the road that's moving.

Though we perceive God as fire, that may just be...relative.