Settling Into Lent

We enter the bright sadness. Sad for all that is broken. Bright for what God will awaken. But now the earth is silent and sorrowful.

The calendar tells me I am well into Lent. However, I don't know how well I'm into the practices and fasts I've taken on; they're coming, but it's been harder than last year to create the space I want (but resist).

This year, Miska has chosen for me (each of us choose the others' practice) to be off the computer every night by 8:00 and to have 30 minutes of silence 5 days a week. The computer has been no biggie, but the silence has been more difficult. I've fallen asleep. I've daydreamed. I've chased rabid thoughts around in mental circles, kind of like our dog Daisy when she performs her nightly ritual of chasing her tail in mad whirls.

But at least I've shown up, and I know I want more. Grace and quiet and longing invite me in.

I've put a daily Lenten post on Twitter. Here is a taste:

Lent is...a preparation to rejoice in God's love...casting out what cannot remain in the same room with mercy. {Thomas Merton}
  
Ashes are the end of things. The end of what we can make of our world. Our schemes and disguises mercifully burnt to the ground.

The beginning of repentance is homesickness. {Will Weedon}
 
We thrash. We flail. We angle, primp and prop up. Then in shame, we douse and we shrink. Will someone save us from ourselves?

Snag all of them throughout Lent, if you like.

Sunday Liturgy: Cry to the Lord

A Litany from Deuteronomy 26:5-11:

We are small. We are empty.

We cry to the Lord.

We are strangers and aliens. We are misfits.

We cry to the Lord, the God of our ancestors.

 

We have worked so hard to hold our life together.

We lay down our life, and we bow before you, our God.

 

Do our words just drop into empty space? Does God see us?

The Lord hears us. God sees our affliction and our oppression.

 

Dare we hope?

The Lord will bring us out with a might hand and an outstretched arm.

 

Will we always feel like a stranger, an alien, an outcast in this world?

All of us - and the aliens who live with us -- will celebrate God's bounty.

Lenten Tweets

Rest assured, the irony of this post's title is not lost on me. Perhaps no two words in the English language belong together less.

I've resisted Twitter. I've gone back and forth and then back and then forth. I don't need more noise. They tell me writers must avail themselves of such things, but I don't want to use these mediums merely for marketing. And, of course, no one cares one whit to know that:  

12:07  I'm leaving for lunch now 

12:11  I'm driving to lunch

12:19  I'm sitting in line at Burger King because Wendy's was packed, man, packed!

12:21  Dude, can you believe these lines!?! Still sitting in line. Catching up on facebook, though, so that's cool

12:23  Burgers are yummy, yo

12:31  Heading back to the office, filled and fulfilled

12:33  Listening to 80's tunes in the ride, and 80's rock!

12:38  At the office, 3 hours and 17 minutes to quitting time - but only 91 seconds to my next tweet.

Oh my, we can barely wait.

This week, I'm at a conference in DC; and in this room filled with young culturally-savvy turks, the computers (mostly mac, of course) are constantly humming and the phones (mostly iphone, of course) are constantly zinging. It makes me dizzy. Some of these chaps amaze me with their ability to quatro-task

Still, I've had this thought of offering a daily Tweet during Lent. I hesitated, knowing I would instantly lose my aspiring Ludite, anti-tweet cred. But Lent is for giving up and surrendering. Strangely, for me, I think this means I'll tweet. For Lent.

This Lenten season is going to be important for me, I feel it. I'd love to share it with you. If you'd like to get the tweet each day over the next 40 days, you can follow me here. And if you have no idea what twitter or tweet or follow me mean, well, that's quite alright.

Sunday Liturgy: The Lord is With You

At All Souls, the community where our family lives and loves, we have a shared liturgy each week. Liturgy is "the work of the people," and we believe that encountering God is something we do together. We all pray. We all question. Together, we all sit listening to the cues of grace. A good bit of what we do comes from the Book of Common Prayer and the Lectionary - we join the chorus of God's people in other places and in other generations. 

However, we also create our own movements. Somewhat regularly, I'm going to post one of our original pieces. Use it for your own reflection and pondering. 

This week, I share our litany (where a leader reads the first lines and all the people respond) from the Old Testament reading. One of our tasks as a Christian community is to learn how to hear the Bible, how to allow the text to submerge us in its narrative. We have no desire to blandly take in the words. We want to wrestle and wrangle. We want to awaken our curiosity, bring our questions. We want to see where the text will take us.

OT Reading | Judges 6:11-24

Is the Lord with us?

The Lord is with you

Is the Lord with us? Is the Lord with Haiti, with the forgotten or the shattered?

The Lord is with you

But I am so full of fear. My soul has shrunk. I am empty, no courage.

The Lord is with you, mighty warrior

I cannot do what is before me. I am empty, no faith.

The Lord is with you, woman of strength

Rise up, people of God.

The Lord is with you. Today. Tomorrow. Forever, unto the end of the age.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr is much en vogue (not that he was ever out). Obama lists Niebuhr among his most influential philosophers, and certainly Reinhold left an indelible imprint on the theological and political direction of the last century (not to mention his infamy as the author of the Serenity Prayer). Eager to be a man of the times, I recently purchased Richard Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (3 stars) at one of our local used book shops.

I wanted to like this book. I was engaged throughout. The book was technically near flawless, giving a full account of the various seasons of Niebuhr's political thought (and what a roller coaster that was). And Niebuhr is a fascinating man, full of high ideals and impassioned commitments. Like the prophet Amos he loved to evoke, Reinhold always sprinted into the fray, never slow to take up an unpopular (or ultimately doomed) position. For Reinhold, if the idea was right, then consequences be damned. You have to respect a guy who, as an ailing convalescent, responded to the images of Nixon on the television screen by pulling himself up from his bed in order to spit out, "You Bastard!" As Fox said, for Niebuhr, "having no enemies meant that one lacked strong convictions."

Yet, one of Reinhold's certitudes was that the world was full of paradoxes. As such, he was leery of anyone who saw the world always through an ideological lense. This kept true with his religious views. "The point of faith," Niebuhr said, "is a total attitude toward the mystery of God and life, which includes commitment, love and hope." He resisted any faith that removed one from a lived-in reality (thus, his lifelong beef with Barth, though I think Niebuhr was on poor footting there - but that is another story...).

I also respect Niebuhr's willingness to change his mind. From the leftist version of himself pre World War II to the right leaning version of himself post World War II, to every other philosophical space Niebuhr inhabited during the rest of his life - Niebuhr was a fellow nearly impossible to categorize. I like that in a guy.

However, about halfway through I sensed something was missing for me - and it never let up throughout. I'm not sure if I am disappointed with the biographer (Fox) or simply disappointed in the man Fox had to work with. I probably need to read another biography of Reinhold to know for sure.

I heard almost nothing of his family, his kids, his friendships (beyond how they functioned in his career and political workings). For a man who spoke often of the idolatrous evils of modernistic reason, he seemed emotionally flat. He was high on function, but seemed low on relationship. He was constantly busy, his mind sprinting from one idea to another - and his travel schedule matched. Frantic. It made me tired just reading.

I do appreciate Niebuhr very much for his commitment to justice and for his prophetic voice. I'm also quite drawn to his constant sense of paradox, along with his "Christian (political) realism" (a term revived alongside Obama's heavy Niebuhrian influence). However, his personal life holds no appeal for me whatsoever - and the man is the life, not just the ideas. Also, in my opinion, Niebuhr was still far too beholden to modernism. As a result, theologically, he gave away the farm.

I'm thankful for Niebuhr. He offered us much, and we can learn much from his noble ideals. However, I think we ought look elsewhere for better examples of how to engage our world with grace and integrity and lasting impact. And, from a religious standpoint, I'm far more drawn to his brother Richard.

Thaddeus Bogert

A certain character has visited enough times for me to begin to think of him as a friend (at the least). I'd like to introduce him to you...

*****
We rambled into Groten Hall, room 347, at a couple minutes to two. For the rest of our university career (except for this class), we would perfect the art of late, frantic arrivals. However, we were first year students, and this was our first day of classes. Most of us knew each other from freshman orientation, and now we would share First Year Seminar - a bland title for a bland two-credit course, with a bland catalogue description to match: "An introduction to the essentials needed for successful integration to academic life, Tuesdays and Thursdays / 2:05-2:55 / Groten Hall Room 347 / Dr. Thaddeus Bogert, D. Phil."

Groten Hall was the second oldest building on campus, brownstone brick with weathered white Gothic pillars and trim. Because the campus had developed north, out from its original parcel, Groten Hall was now the most remote building on the university grounds. Room 347 was an ample space with windows stretching almost ceiling to floor and offering a view of the old oaks. Amazingly, the room still enjoyed its original dark cherry wood floor, buffed nicely though showing the character of its years.

As we entered (not quietly) and took our seats, we saw Professor Bogert hunched over his heavy desk and baptized in whatever it was he was reading. His grey hair was full but unruly. His glasses hung down on the end of his nose, defying gravity by not tumbling over the edge. His brown cardigan had a couple patches showing its wear. He never looked up, not so much as a flinch or a grunt. He sat dead-still, as if entranced by another world. We continued to laugh and rowdily chatter about everything - and nothing. Proffessor Bogert went on as if there wasn't a single other person in the universe. The only hint we had that he wasn't made of wax was the occasional and slight - ever so slight - turn of his lips. A time or two, we caught a glimpse of what I would now describe (though I'm not sure I knew it then) as the crack of a quiet grin. It was the expression I've now come to know - when something beautiful catches you by contented surprise, like the first cool whiff of Fall or an unexpected kiss.

But there he sat.

And then, at precisely the moment when the clock on the back wall clicked 2:05, Professor Bogert stood up. He stuck his pipe in his mouth and walked slowly around to the front of his desk. He leaned back on the front edge and took a deep pull from his Virginia tabacco. And waited.

The second hand on the clock offered its rhythm. The wood floors creaked with our slightest movement. The walls groaned quietly, thanks to the old boiler-heater. Professor Bogert took another pull. And waited.

Then, beginning at the back lefthand corner of the room, the old professor caught Levine's eye - Levine, the one who sat as far away as possible. He grabbed Levine's eyes and for five or six seconds held his gaze, smiling wide and deep, as if he was pouring a smile into poor, disrupted Levine. And then, one by one, he went down the back row, generously peering into each person's eyes for seconds that felt like days. The clock still ticked, and the floors still creaked. And the old man with the kind, steel eyes took his sweet, sweet time with every single one of us.

We sat spellbound while Professor Bogert took another long pull and slowly exhaled the hickory-tinted smoke. Then, for the first time, he spoke. "The world is more beautiful than you've imagined. The world is more terrifying than you've imagined. What are you going to do with that?"