Praytell

Congregation of Shadow, Snow, and Light

Monday, July 12, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

For the past month, we hear the words spoken time and again, just waiting to see the beautiful game unfold once again.  And, time and again, the beautiful game is up against spartan simplicity that cares not for flow but wants to win.  Efficiency must trump beauty.  The idea is not to play a beautiful game, the idea is to win. Numbers, not style, tell the story.

I confess I am a bit of a romantic.  As soon as numbers begin to tell the story, I sadden just a bit.  A litany of rebellion rises within me.  I do not want the low prices at Walmart to tell the story if they mask the wages paid to those in China who make those garments.  Numbers tell a story, but rarely the story of the human heart, no matter what our blood pressure readings may be.

There are those of us for whom the beautiful game is the game.

I recall a story of my great uncle, Henry Carrell, who was the track coach at Phillips Exeter Academy during the 30s and 40s.  I only met him a few times, but took his stories to heart when I too became a track coach.  The story that stayed with me went like this.

Exeter was in a tight meet against perhaps Andover, as they were the Harvard and Yale of prep schools in those days.  The meet came down to the high jump.  Whoever won the high jump would win the meet.

Going for a new height, the Andover jumper hurt himself and could not take his second try at that height.    All Exeter needed to do to win the meet was to clear that bar.  It was clear they could now win the meet.

At that point, my great Henry withdrew his jumper from the meet.  “It would not be right to win against an injured opponent,” he reasoned.  If my advantage comes at your loss, something beautiful has been taken from the game.  Andover won, if numbers tell the story.

As you can see, I am an incurable romantic.  If the story isn’t entirely true, it should be.

When my son Ben visited last month, he and I went to a Yankees Twins game in the new Target stadium here in Minneapolis.  Before the game, the camera crew zeroed in on the crowd, finding families, kids and couples, and showing them on the huge digital screen.  People saw themselves and laughed, some kissed, some were embarrassed in a fun-spirited way.

“It never fails,” said Ben, who worked with minor league teams for some years.  “Whenever they do that, everyone loves it, the whole crowd smiles.  Pure fun.  It is pure goodnatured fun.”

It was a good game.  Romantic that I am I do not remember the score.  But I do remember those smiles, that crowd, those families, those folks enjoying the June evening.  It was church.  Yes, stained glass windows are beautiful, but they pale in comparison to the beauty of the faces in a congregation of friends who come to renew their lives in the presence of a loving God.

For me, that’s the beautiful game.

And what a game it is.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Home

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Ben, your question about faith and religion shimmers in my imagination.  Sometimes it appears as a mirage, disappearing only to reappear as desert sands reflect the sky in imaginary lakes.

You mentioned there are times you have prayed, only to later realize that there was no magical answer, that the reasonable response of a caring human being is sufficient.  I understand this.  And actually, there is a way in which I share it.  After my first stroke, Kirby, my physician, and a member of our church, said that we should pray.

“Okay,” I said.  “But it’s not going to do any good.”

He was shocked that the pastor who baptized him and his first child on the same day, would say such a thing. I said it because I knew what was done was done.  After King David’s son died, he didn’t grieve much.  When asked why, he said, pretty much, “What’s done is done.”

As long as we tie prayer to specific events we may be engaging in magical thinking.  But it is through prayer that we can find a way to find our way through a sea of forced options.

Part of being a pastor means, and meant, that we share in the deepest moments of human life.  We see the reconstruction, indeed the resurrection of life in light of and in the midst of those losses.  The death of a young girl in our church, Abby, stays with me.  It was not an event to be overcome.  It was not a tragedy that could be turned back.  In the ensuing years, I saw the emergence of her family in light of what happened.  It was difficult, caring, and loving and beautiful in a sacred way.  It was full of faith, both lost and found, and is a story continuing to be told and shared in so many ways.

The operative word, then, is creation.  And re-creation.

It is a domain far beyond “fix.”  It is the realm of the sacred, whatever that is.  It is a place of hard-earned hope, a place in which the perishable meets up with the unperishable in unexpected moments.  Religion is nothing more, or less, than a library of those moments.

An enforced library isn’t much of a library.  There are always new books to be written, and a variety of languages with which to write them.  To say, “only this,” and “only that,” is akin to saying prayer isn’t real if it doesn’t “fix this” or “fix that” right now.

I write on a day in which forced options regarding the welfare of your grandparents are with us and must be chosen.  I wish both faith and religion could turn the clock back.  Neither can.  But both can instill a moment of hope that we will find a way to love, to honor, and learn.

That’s my prayer.

That’s my hope.

That’s what the people I’ve loved and tried to serve have taught me.

And so, thanks be to God, and thanks be to them.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Faith and Religion.

Which comes first?

What worlds of meaning do they create, hope for, and enforce?

Is one the “good cop” and the other a “bad cop?”  Do both require training?  Do they work together, or do they attack each other?  Are the errors of religion over the ages, particularly its violence and tendency to judge others as lost covered up by relying on faith?  Can faith rescue religion?  Can either be anything but self-serving?

And so, Ben, your question raises a new set of questions.  It will take some time to find the right one.  I used to start sermon preparation on Tuesdays.  In Grand Marais Tuesdays were my day to be at the nursing home for a Bible study.  I loved those times.  Half the room dozed, others would say odd things from time to time, sometimes we’d laugh, sometimes we’d bring current events into the discussion.  But it always gave me a chance to say, “Here’s a story.  Could anybody here use a little bit of hope?  Good.  Here’s this week’s story.”

There was a woman there in a wheel chair who made a habit of saying, “Thank you” with an undiminished exuberance throughout her entire day.  I have never forgotten her, and the realm of appreciation in which she lived.  It may have been the only realm in which she could live.  But no matter.  At the nursing homes, questions began to spin, lines of thought began to emerge.

Then on to Wednesday morning.  A discussion.  Six, eight of us, reading the same story which had deepened by then.  More stories.  This time our stories.  More questions.  More appreciation of both life and the fact that we were trying to figure it out.

That’s where I am with your question about faith and religion.  You asked it five days ago, and it is sifting its way into my mind, my memories, and my soul.  In three or for days it will have found wings, just as sermons did, much to my surprise.

In seminary I took a class called “Perception and Belief.”  Roger Shinn taught it, and I wanted to study with him.  After my heart attack, after seminary, he came to the hospital and sat beside your mother, gently, quietly, hopefully as we waited to see what would happen.  Thoughtful, caring, and rigorous in his pursit of ethics, the study of what we do with our beliefs.

Which comes first? he asked.  Perception?  Or belief?  Do beliefs form our perceptions?  Of course they do.  Or do perceptions form our beliefs?  Of course they do.  Give one person a bad experience with the government, and that person is likely to believe that all government is corrupt, evil, incompetent, and a problem.  On the other hand, if we believe in something like forgiveness, in something like the greater good, in the fluid realm of imperfection, our perceptions go a different direction.  Instead of saying, “evil,” we’ll say, “misguided.”

Perception and Belief.

Faith and Religion.

Working through your question as a new day begins and the same scene finds different colors.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Shelter in the Pyrenees

Minneapolis, Minnesota

If you are new to these pages, you will not know how they began.

It was five, six years ago.  Our children had become adults, moved away from home and launched their own lives–Tim, our eldest, our twins, Ben and Andy, identical in so many ways moved their separate ways, and Emily, our daughter.

One Lent I decided to send them a daily Lenten reflection.  It is not easy to have a pastor as a father.  We make all kinds of assumptions.  “They’ll get it,” I’d say.  “He’s preaching again,” they’d say.  Then wondering began.  “Did they know?”  “Do they realize?”  “Should they realize?” And so on.  And so a stream of letters, each a reflection on life, and sometimes a take on scripture.

That’s how it began.

Last week, Ben came home for a week.  On crutches, before his impending surgery, he came home.  And so we got to talking.

“I just don’t get this religion thing,” he said.  It was not an uneducated thought.  About to receive a Master’s degree, he’d been reading.  And the more he read the less convinced it became.  It seemed to him that religion was a good idea gone wrong, a self-justifying construct that too many interpretations to be called truth.

I heard him.  Maybe.  But my response was less thoughtful than the depth of his question.  Clergy can easily slide back into a verse, a story, a memory, a reflection that provides a context but not much of an answer.  “It’s hard,” I said.  “That commandment, ‘Have no idols before me’ takes on exactly what you’re asking about.  Golden calves are not the problem.  Constructing God in our own image is.”

“But that’s the problem,” he said.  “How can anybody not do that?  And then we get defensive about it, saying ‘this way’ is “THE way.”

Okay, I said.

We were nearing the airport.  I was keeping my eyes on the road, wondering how to receive his question with the integrity and intensity with which it was asked.

“I’d like you to write me about faith and religion,” he said.  He wasn’t asking for an answer.  But he wanted to unpack the difference between the two.  Is there faith without religion?  Is there religion without faith?  Is either necessary?

“Okay,” I said, realizing the depth of his question, and knowing that it couldn’t be answered as we drove up the DROP OFF ramp at the Minneapolis airport.  “I promise.  I will search that out.”  I knew the searching would be not just for him, but for me too.  And, who knows, perhaps for you.

And so, this week an epistle begins.  And this week I am thankful once again for children who do indeed come into their own, and the ties that bind us, that sometimes fray, and then are bound once again.

Welcome to the conversation.

So Where's the Road Go?

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I confess a desire to change the world.

As a child, I regularly thought, “The wars are over.  It’s our turn.”  To this I added, “The extinctions are over.  Yes, the buffalo are gone, just as Sandburg wrote, but nothing else will be soon be gone.”  And so, I tried to devote myself to things that mattered.  One of them was “church,” which for all its shortcomings, still intended to redeem both individual lives and the world itself.  Mission was not a good idea.  It was beautiful, compelling, and even necessary.

Such an outlook is given to serious thought.  Sermons, for example, mattered.  Every Sunday was a new chance to begin again.  Oh my, how I loved those early morning walks to church.  But serious thought has its shortcomings.  Sometimes it is virtually impossible.

Fortunately, perhaps, details and humor runs interference.

Several years ago, here’s what happened.

The nursing home asked our church to take pies over to the nursing home.  I do not know if they were for the residence of the nursing home or for the staff.  In the past few weeks my appreciation of nursing homes has grown leaps and bounds.  The gerontologists do what they can, and the nurses make up for their absence. But my true gratitude goes to the orderlies, those who change the beds, the diapers, who push the wheelchairs.  They, the lowest paid, they are the givers of life.

“Would you help my dad?” I asked one.

“Sure,” came the reply.  Doctors appear and disappear.  RNs are at the desk.  But these orderlies, they hover, check, hover again, check again, moving from room to room like mother hens.  Their presence is a blessing.

But I digress.

Our church was to bring eight berry pies.  At the beginning of worship, that was the announcement.  We had not read the text, offered our prayers, or found the stride of the worship when Joanne announced we needed to come up with seven berry pies.

Worship began.

I should have been thinking about God, about the welfare of our flock, about our ministries of hope.  But I wasn’t.  Instead I was wondering about the eight berry pies.

Hmmm.

Raspberry.

Strawberry.

Blueberry.

Boysenberry.

Blackberry.

Huckleberry.  Okay.  There’s six.

Was there another berry I’d missed?  Maybe gooseberry.  Yes, that’d make seven.  But eight?

“Let us bring our lives before God,” I may have intoned.  It is very important to bring our lives before God.  It can be a life-changing experience.  It’s what we do in worship.  But the truth is I was still thinking about pies.  Are there eight kinds of berries?  During the hymns, I kept wondering.  As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one.  I learned after church that many others were wondering the same thing, counting by fingers throughout the ever-so-important sermon.

Curiosity, you see, not always important things, has a way of leading the spirit.

We knew about the Exodus.  We knew we would organize once again to staff the food shelf.  We knew about the cancer group.  We knew about the confirmands, the birthdays of 90 year-ODs, the Paraguayan street kids.  We knew about all that, and loved it.

But, on that Sunday, it was the search for eight kinds of berries that drew us together.  I have absolutely no idea what the scripture was that Sunday.  But the pies . . . I’m still wondering a bit what the eighth might be.

And so . . . may God for give us.

Yes, we got the pies over to the nursing home.  And, Joanne later  told me, she didn’t mean eight  different kinds of berries.  She just mean seven pies, we could choose whatever kind of berry we’d like.

Thanks be to God for this gift of church that seeks to redeem the world and loves the curious search for eight berry pies.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Meanwhile Superior's Dawn Had Something to Say

Minneapolis, Minnesota

It took but a single word to launch the thought.

“Meanwhile,” I wrote to a friend. “Meanwhile.”

Waiting for something to happen.  Waiting for a decision.  Waiting for an appointment that will lead us from the land of too-slow healings, and scripts written by others.  There is not a trace of complaint in those words, they are simply true.

Meanwhile. . . . so much of our lives, and so much of your life, is lived in the time known as meanwhile.  Meanwhile, we do what we can, meanwhile we make ourselves useful.  Meanwhile is not a destination.  Meanwhile is what happens somewhere along the way.

If we can see it not as a failure, meanwhile is a sacred time.

The Jews had been exiled.  They had every reason in the world to give up on the entire notion of God, and good reason to think they had perhaps been worshipping the wrong God.  Meanwhile, they found ways to begin again.  Meanwhile, they wondered what it could be like and even should be like if and when they returned home.  Meanwhile, they wrote what they knew giving us much of the Bible we read today.  Scripture itself was written in “meanwhile” times.  As the Vikings ravaged the coasts of Europe, texts were copied and saved.  There too, beauty and spirituality was a “meanwhile” occupation.

Over and over again, when circumstances are grim, we find meaning.  This is the work of “meanwhile.”  It is the stunning work not of expectation, but of hope.  Meanwhile is the work of hospitality.  Meanwhile, is what we do when the doctor says, “There’s not much hope here.”

A long time ago, Cleopas and another disciple were walking along wondering what went wrong with Jesus.  A stranger appeared.  They walked and talked, talked and walked.  It grew dark.  They invited the stranger to spend the night with them, to share a meal with them.  Meanwhile, little did they know it was Jesus himself.  Meanwhile, there was a lot more going on than they could possibly know.  It was a meanwhile experience.

There are things I am waiting for.

Chances are very good I do not know what they actually are.

Meanwhile, as I wait, as I anticipate, as I move along, meanwhile something else is happening.

“Some of each life is lived in italics, It is that part touched in any way by chivalry, idealism, the deliberate commitment to moral guidance,” wrote the poet William Stafford. “This italics life is a great invention.  It enhances events daily into high drams always leading toward achievement of salvation.”

I could not agree more.

But I’ve found the italics has a companion.  Its name is meanwhile.

In its realm we learn to trust, to hope, to renew and restore our faith.

Meanwhile, many blessings to you in the meanwhiles of your life and the lives of those you love.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Ashland, Wisconsin

There is, in the Great State of Maine, a cottage on a lake shore.

In that cottage, there is a piece of paper pinned to the knotty pine boards that make up the interior walls.  The piece of paper is beneath the sink.  On it is a handwritten note, giving instructions as to how to turn the water on and off when arriving and departing the cottage.

The writing is neat, the penmanship of a box maker as my grandfather was.  I do not know the last time he was at the cottage.  It was at least 40 years ago.  The note has something to do with how one turns the water on and off when arriving and departing from the cottage.  That’s all.  But the note has endured all these years.  Nobody has moved it.  It is right where it has been for perhaps half a century.

This morning, as I was leaving the cottage on Lake Superior, I noted a note taped to the blind in the bathroom.  Each letter, each word, was written in my mother’s unmistakable handwriting.  I have never seen a handwriting like hers.  It is both childish, and mature, showing the workmanship of an artist.  The message on the note was simple:  Do not raise this blind.  To let the light in, turn the plastic rod.

That’s it.

Nothing more than that.  I would bet that note has been there for ten years.  I do not know the next time my mother, now 90, will be able to come to the cottage.  Perhaps never again, I just do not know.

And so, in two cottages, a thousand or so miles apart, two notes have survived.  Nobody has moved them.  Our family does not have a “thing” about notes.  There have been no discussions about these notes.  But then again, perhaps there has . . . we just didn’t use words.

I wonder why these notes have survived.  But then, something occurs to me.  One is about water.  The other is about light.  In life, we must tend to water.  And, in life, we must tend to light.  One renews, and the other allows for vision.  Take either away and we’re in trouble.

And, both notes are tied to a person.  They are instructions from a grandfather, and a mother.  In scripture, notes about water and light are also tied to a person.  Jesus said, “I am the light, the truth, and the way.”  God said, “Let there be light.”  Those notes have also endured.

In a few moments, I’ll hit the “post” note on my computer.  These words will then be posted.  I do not expect them to endure.

But who knows?

I suspect that you’ll have postings today as well.  If they have anything to do with water and light, and if they come with your name on them, they are about life.

And, that said, they will endure.

Larry

Friday, April 2, 2010

The Vigil

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The stage is empty.

It is as though the words of Shakespeare came true long before they were written.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Pilate has gone back to his palace.  Herod is back in his haunts.  The disciples are nowhere to be found.  There is nothing Mary can do.  There is nothing the beloved disciple can do.  There is nothing the lepers can do, nothing the healed can do, nothing the centurion can do, nothing Nicodemus can do, nothing Simon of Cyrene can do, nothing the soldiers can do.

There is nothing to be done.

And so, in silence, a wait begins.

What’s done is done.

Now we wait.

We just wait.

This waiting.  It is not a singular experience.  We all know it.  We wait for healing.  Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t.  Either way we wait.  We wait, as one poet put it, to get better.

In last Sunday’s paper a dozen or so teenagers were interviewed about the meaning of America.  One was from Liberia.  When she was one year old, she was thrown in a river to drown.  The war raged around her.  She saw, with her own eyes, murder and mayhem.  She was viciously attacked.   When she rolls up her sleeves, people ask, “What happened?”  A war happened.  She waited for it to pass, waited for life.  She waited.  There is nothing passive about keeping hope alive.  To wait with hope is the essence of an Easter story.

A friend “lost” his job.  Why do we turn having or not having a job into a competition?  All the people out of a job, are they losers?  Nothing could be further from the truth, or so it seems to me.   But he waits, in hope he waits, and so do millions of others whose healings have yet to happen.  In hope they wait.  In hope we wait for some glimpse of justice, for something we can trust.

This waiting can be lonely.  Perhaps this waiting should be lonely.  Scripture says that the sky darkened when Jesus died.  It doesn’t say a thing about a star.  Just a dark sky.  One can get lost under such a sky.

Nobody knows what happens today, this Easter Vigil, this mysterious wait.

Did God go looking for Jesus?  Did Jesus go looking for God?  Did the Spirit find them both?  Just what happened?  Scripture says not a word.  It is wrapped in silence.  It is wrapped in waiting.

We also wait.

Waiting is not killing time.

Waiting is not wasting time.

Waiting is taking time, and letting time find its way.

It is good there is no one on stage.  It is good that we pause.

It is good that, we await a little more hope, a little more life, a little more promise, a little more understanding that only time can prepare us for.

And it is good, that the essence of life somehow finds a way.

Soft walking,

Larry

Friday, March 19, 2010

Weather Talk

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Once upon a time, I took weather talk as chit-chat or elevator conversation.  When it’s 20 below outside, we say, “Cold out there,” agree and end the conversation.

In Big Timber, where the wind relentlessly rehearses what a three-week windstorm should be, we’d say, walking outside and trying to not have the door blow away, “Windy,” complain a bit and then go on with our day.

Weather talk seemed like idle talk.

But then, I I began to wonder.  Doesn’t weather surround us with something bigger than ourselves?  In a self-centered age, couldn’t that be a blessing?

The weather, and talk about the weather, began to intrigue me.  Not surprisingly, television didn’t share my intrigue.  It is too hunkered down in EXTREME WEATHER bureaus.  Its spokespeople are paid to commiserate.   Perhaps the fields need rain but, oh no, it’s going to rain today.  And so on.

Weather can be severe.  The Minneapolis tornado that touched down two blocks from here last summer was anything but gentle.  Weather is full of unexpected changes.  So is life.  We’ve all been flooded a time or two, and have somehow endured a drought.  The more I fiddled with the thought.  And then I began to read, to actually read,  the New York Time’s weather report.  To my surprise, I found the text exceedingly evocative.  Listen to what’s happening around us today according to page A18 of today’s paper.  I’ll bet the forecast matches a bit of your life.

“Much of the area from New England to Florida and Central and Eastern Texas has a sunny, delightful day unfolding today.”

Still more will unfold today.  As the advance of cold air “leads to a widening area of snow farther south and east from Wyoming.”  How nice it is to read the full name of a state instead of ubiquitous initials.  The snow will be “disruptive.”  It won’t kill you, but it might be best to meet with the committee’s subcommittee sometime next week.

The snow has a “leading edge.”  So do I.  Life is full of leading edges.  The day will then “progress” towards evening.  Thank heavens!  What weather channel broadcaster would say, “Today we’re going to start with morning and then move towards evening.”  We’re next told there could be some “blinding” downpours in parts of Northeast Texas and that a “few flurries will hover over the western part of the Dakotas.”  I like that.  The Dakotas are one land, but two states with the same last name.  The writer had it right.

But we’re still not done.

“Depending on where these storms stall and strengthen, will determine which part of the central Plains gets the heaviest snowfall.”  Storms stall.  Sometimes life stalls as well as we wait, and wait, and wait for something to happen but can’t get traction.  And then, sometimes, it strengthens.  In the end, “A good deal of sunshine and dry weather will span the West Coast.”  Span.  I like that verb.

We span the years.

Faith spans the years.

Hope spans the years.

Let us enjoy the elevator’s idle conversation and listen to the weather of our lives as life stalls or strengthens, and  morning moves towards evening once again.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

From time to time the wise suggest simple answers to complex problems.  As they do, the “realists” say, “Get real.”

I am struck by memory, a headline, and an experience.

The memory is brief.  The Dalai Lama came to New York City when I was consulting with the Council of Churches in the City of New York.  He came to a breakfast, and offered to answer a few questions.  I will never forget that I did not understand a single word of his prayer, but I caught the careful, and profound essence of atonement, prayer, and hope. Someone then asked him about world peace.

He said that if it was up to him, he’d have the leaders of the United States and Russia, who were then cold-war adversaries, go on a retreat together with their grandchildren.  They would cook food together, do the dishes together, laugh together, play together, and talk together.  Negotiations are one thing:  doing dishes with an enemy is quite another, and a better way to break the ice.

Then I read that Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate, which he found to be a house of ideology rather than a deliberative body.  His suggestion?  Once a month, the senators should get together just to have lunch.  Just to catch up.  Just to break bread.  Just to talk shop.  Just to confide.  Just to connect, eye to eye, face to face, hand to hand.

I have noticed, over the years that church retreats, especially youth retreats, tend to be stuck in a rut.  Kids arrive.  Chaperons arrive.  Everyone sleeps a on a hard floor.  The chaperons turn instantly into cooks and cops.  In the morning there are no showers.  Exhausted, there is no way to wake up sore and begin to trudge through another day.

In Minnesota, and Montana, we did it another way.  We farmed the kids and adults out to the houses of church members.  Each member hosted five or six kids, prepared them breakfast, offered them a cozy place to sleep, and let them clean up in the morning.  There was talk.  Everyone did dishes.  It brought us together.  When we did a banquet at church for the kids, maybe 25 or so church members cooked it and served it with a white towel on their arm. We knew each other.  We cared for each other.  We enjoyed the pleasure of each others’ company.  It was full of life.

I have been to many retreats in my life.  At the best ones, we all do the dishes.  We all sweep the floors.  We scrape the plates.  We dry the dishes.  When this is done for us something elemental is missing.  Hospitality and change, it turns out, means creating a shared experience.

The Dalai Lama, Senator Bayh, and small churches in Big Timber, Montana, and Grand Marais, Minnesota were — and are — on to something.