All Will Be Well

Despite vocal protests from the religious right (see, for example, Rep. Steve King's (R-Iowa) characterization of the timing as an "affront to God"), I cannot think of a more fitting day than the (Christian) Sabbath for a vote on healthcare reform. In the Epistle of James, we read:

“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?” (James 2: 15-16)

In the coffeehouse sermon this morning at First Parish in Lincoln, my friend and colleague Ally performed Meg Barnhouse's stirring tribute to Julian of Norwich, which features the refrain: "All will be well." Sitting in the historic meetinghouse, my mind wandered to the half-truths of that repeating mantra. All will be well - for some. Today's vote in Washington moves us one step closer to actually giving the voiceless and suffering 'things which are needed for the body.' It widens the circle of those individuals who can, with some degree of certainty, rest assured that "All manner of things will be well."

That said, so much work remains. The right to a full and healthy life should not have to be (materially) earned - and until a robust universal, single-payer system is implemented, our brothers and sisters will continue to fall through the cracks into destitution.

Following the morning service, I slipped into the Gurdwara for an hour of kirtan and langar. Overflowing with brilliant shades of majestic purples and cooling greens, the sanctuary echoed devotee Kabir's simple truism:

ਸਾਚਾ ਨਾਵਣੁ ਗੁਰ ਕੀ ਸੇਵਾ
The true cleansing bath is service to the Guru.

No government program can replace the salvific work of inter-subjective relations - of sitting with God at the bedside of those who stare into the deep abyss of human finitude.

All will be well - together.

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On Faith Development

Nineteenth century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing once brazenly remarked that “the great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own." Extending this tradition, notable liberal religious educators like Sophia Lyon Fahs and Angus MacLean have insisted on the latent spiritual potentialities of children and their innate capacity for moral development. Importantly, faith development does not derive, on this view, from the mere absorption or ingestion of pre-packaged doctrinal truths, but rather from an embodied and experiential engagement with life in all of its fullness.

The danger with this approach lies in its tendency towards an empty subjectivism. Without effective structures and support, the child flounders helplessly and gains but a paper-thin understanding of her own religious heritage.

Might there be a middle way? In the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, we read: "In the temple of the mind is the Ambrosial Nectar of the Lord; through the Guru's Teachings, we drink it in" (175). I want to suggest that this scriptural fragment adroitly balances the competing claims of freedom and responsibility. It affirms the ripe sacred vitality inherent in all, which robust religious guidance allows us to pick and cherish.


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Decisions

Recently, I have been immersed in a groundswell of decision-making. Through prayer and introspection, I have attempted to discern God's voice, wooing me in one direction or another. Such deep listening is hard and tiring work.

Then, the other evening, while ensconced in the rhythms of Gurbani at the Gurdwara, I suddenly realized that my focus had been largely misplaced. God was in the outcome, more than in the decision itself. It was my responsibility to choose, knowing that God would accompany me either way. As we read in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib: "That bride, who is absorbed into the True Guru, shall never become a widow" (53).

God will be there, always, blessing the unworthy with virtue.


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A Prayer of Returning

[Written for the new Board transition service of the HDS UU Ministry for Students]


Let us pray:

O Holy One: ever known, yet unknowable –
You who give voice to our words,
And reconciliation to our fragile shortcomings;
You who move our hands to action,
And move our action to what is right and good;
You who provide the thoughts we think,
The sensations we feel,
The compassion we share with one another.
All is Yours; We are Yours; and You are in and with all.

Over the past two months,
We have lost and gained,
We have departed and returned,
We have forgotten and remembered,
We have mourned and rejoiced,
We have scattered and reunited,
And we have come together, on this day, in Your witness, O Wondrous One.
We have gathered to recommit, to reconfide and to reordain ourselves, in Your name,
To the holy work of tearing down walls of estrangement
And building up a fellowship of mutual care and respect.

Gathering as a people of trust,
As a community of deep faith in the bold marvel of life,
We offer up this space as an altar to the gentle thrashing of transformation.

May we grow out of self-absorption and self-importance,
May we sprout into service of this ministry and its audacious purpose,
May we listen more attentively to Your small, still whisper,
As we fall into the future –
May You carry us,
So that we may carry You.

Amen.

Christian Theology: Wickedness

The saga continues...

Having worked with victims of sexual and domestic abuse, Mary Engel has witnessed suffering in its rawest forms. It is from this wounded community that she is "sourced" (D. Williams). Engel proposes a posture towards questions of theodicy that addresses "wickedness," which serves as the catchall term for both corporate evil and individual sinfulness. She initially considers three possible constructive theodical solutions:

1) Sin as distortion of feeling: self-denial, self-blame, moral callousness
2) Sin as betrayal of trust: breaking the sacred bond of trust
3) Sin as lack of care: avoiding responsibility and distorting the self's boundaries

Returning to the crucifixion as the violent slaughter of the God-Made-Vulnerable, Engel arrives at the following working definition: wickedness derives from the "distortion of the dynamic tension between freedom and dependence, or the lack of consent to the dependence and fragility of our lives."

In many ways, I quite like this provisional theological suggestion, as it incorporates both autonomous and systemic factors. I suspect, however, that post-colonial theorists might wrestle with the very concept of consent, which privileges a seemingly Western notion of empowered individual agency.

Either way, Engel is clearly on to something. I was particularly moved and disturbed by the poetic verses that opened her piece. One excerpt reads:

I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong.

To me, this points to the most convincing answer to theodical inquiry: we cannot solve the problem of evil unless we learn to live with God in solidarity.

Wickedness is real and belies any totalizing explanation. The most we can hope for is concursus Dei. Or, as Bonhoeffer intuits, "only a suffering God can help."

Amidst suffering, all of creation walks with God in a constant "movement toward metamorphosis" (Song). Between the act of violence ("I have been raped") and the transition to meaning-making ("cause I have been wrong" - admittedly distorted, I might add), God clears space for us just to "be-" - with the smallest (Gutierrez), with the Great Companion (Duraisingh) and with all-else.


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Christian Theology: The Cross

I continue this series of posts on Christian theological reflection with an entry on the meaning of the cross. Admittedly, these gestures reflect an inchoate effort at translating traditional Christian symbolics into a language more familiar to my Unitarian Universalist parlance. This dialogical engagement is of utmost importance, I believe. Not only does Christian rhetoric claim significant currency in our culture, but the Living Tradition traces its rich heritage in and through Christianity's winding legacy.

As for the cross:

1) The Cross as Exposure: despite the darkness that covered Golgotha (Matthew 27:45), the crucifixion-event served as a form of illumination. In this way, it was God dwelling in the dark clouds (1 Kings 8:12). The cross cast a spotlight back on the world of violence that nailed Jesus to those beams. It exposed the raw hatred, power-fetishes and brutality simmering below the facade of empire. It pierced the Real and, in so doing, demonstrated the contingency of the Symbolic (Zizek) - the radical possibility of egalitarian re-configuration. Rosemary Reuther refers to this process as the unmasking of idols and proclamation of the good news of "abundant life in loving mutuality."


2) The Cross as Verdict: rejecting Jesus' invitation to conversion into solidarity with the downtrodden, the political and religious authorities cast their verdict. The antagonists in this violent drama should not be overlooked. In this way, the oppositional "verdict of the Father" (Barth), as signified by the resurrection, calls those who encounter the living Christ to similarly oppose the politics of empire and dehumanizing orthodoxy of calcified institutional religion in our time. "The cross means human beings rejecting human beings," C.S. Song writes. This is true. But we, as religious enthusiasts with an eye on current events, must not forget that the perpetrators were those alleging political treason and religious blasphemy.


3) The Cross as Mystery: the most haunting scene of the crucifixion narrative undoubtedly centers on Jesus' desperate cry for God's presence amidst isolation and estrangement. This scene tempers the well-intentioned tendency to view the Calvary story as a triumphalist cosmic victory over evil. As Rosemary Reuther intuits, the horizontal evils plaguing human history are often cast aside amidst enthusiastic fervor surrounding the vertical action of the "god-man" satisfying God's supposed wrath. We cannot succumb to this interpretive temptation. Rather, the disturbing absence of God during periods of the crucifixion-event testifies to God's mysterious and unknowable nature. On the one hand, "God means to put an end to all the crosses of history" (Boff). On the other, we must neither romanticize suffering nor arrogantly claim secret insight into God's will. At the end of the day, "God cannot be owned" (Countryman).


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Christian Theology: The Human

I offer some cursory reflections that bubbled up from the Christian theology course I am currently taking at EDS:

Lactantius once wrote: “since humanity is the image of God…the strongest bond which unites us is humanity.” This perspective tempers, I believe, the misreading of stewardship in terms of exploitation. Rather, redemption involves bringing the image of God to its fulfillment despite the reality of sin - and doing so together.

On questions of theodicy, I am inclined to preference the analogy of sin as a power which holds us captive (much like evil in Greek tragic theater) over and against viewing sin as a hereditary disease or guilt passed down from generation to generation. In this way, I am skeptical of Pelagius’ overly generous faith in humanity’s good works, while similarly cautious not to allow the human mind to crumble under the weight of Augustinian pessimism. Here, I appreciate Delores Williams’ characterization of sin as estrangement from the source of one’s Being, which in the womanist context maps onto a loss of identity and, by extension, connection. Tying the notions of imago Dei and sin together, I arrive at Migliore’s stopgap: “Being created in the image of God is not a state or condition but a movement with a goal.”

It is through grace, then, that we hold fast to, and walk with God (concursus Dei) towards, the promise of pleroma – sharing in the fullness of God’s life in community, in restored and faithful relationship, with oneself, with others, with nature and God. Or, as C.S. Song puts it, “Our world expands!”

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