Praytell

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

There is something in your life that gently asks, or even insists, on re-framing.  The experience that looked “that way” wonders what would happen if it found a way to appear “this way.”

This re-framing of life is a good idea.

It is also a necessary part of life itself.

Only then can the experience that brought about grief, the relationship that came to an unexpected end, the numbers who claim their version of reality . . . only when we re-frame these experiences can we find a way forward.

Last night a group of about 35 Muslims and Christians met for dinner.  The conversation topic of the evening how do we make ethical decisions.  A Muslim spoke about the Koran as the definitive word, occasionally re-framed by scholars, analogy, and subsequent writings.  A Unitarian spoke about the half way between Christians and Muslims.  A Christian spoke about the love of Jesus as the key to the realm of God.

We discussed the topic over dinner.  We all agreed that family, friends, and faith were instrumental in the teaching of ethics.  But something else struck me.

“I think time has been the greatest teacher of my life.”

“Time?”

“Yes.  Time.  There are so many things in my life that I once thought were right.  But then, with the passage of time, they turned out to be not so true after all.   Time always brings me to a new opinion that re-frames one experience or another, turning loss into gain and gain into loss, just as Jesus said.

First Frame: The post, the hill, the barns

As usual, for me, it is in painting that I realize the point. It is no fun to frame perfection.  Beautiful things, at least to me, happen when we wonder what will happen if the ranch whose shapes I came to love looks this way:

Second Frame: The post, the hill, the barns

But maybe not.  Maybe the same shapes spring to life this way, as the trees, the sky, and the building shadows catch my eye.  I realize the sky and the fields are friends, reflecting each other, caring for each other, and that the trees, born of the earth and reaching for the sky, are a mixture of the two.  And so, it looks this way:

Frame Three: The post, the hill, and the barns

But then again, maybe not.  Although the scene hasn’t changed, my heart has, my imagination has, my renewed search for light itself has, and so, this time, the colors re-frame it this way as clouds do indeed touch the earth.

Frame Four: The post, the hill, and the ranch on a quiet afternoon

Unless of course it isn’t that way at all.  Something else may be waiting to happen.  As it is with color, paper, brush and hand, so it is with our lives.  We do not, indeed we must not, re-frame life once and for all.  Oil spills, unemployment, fires, war, recessions all frame and re-frame life.  The unexpected selling of a beloved house or ranch, the mending of broken trusts, it all requires re-framing.  The facts alone will not do.  Throughout our lives we re-frame, and are re-framed, always in search of what just might be.  And so, maybe the ranch looks this way.

And you?  How do you see it?

May the God of life bless you as you too re-frame nothing less than life itself.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

To Touch the Rain

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The skyline of downtown Minneapolis is enshrouded in mist after yesterday’s torrential rainstorm.

But, as usual, life knocks at the door in all kinds of ways, prompting me to gather, summon, and engage the spirit’s work once again.

Not long ago I found a website called “RealAge.”  Its premise is that our numerical age may not be our “real age” at all.  The premise made sense.  Like you, I know people in their 30s who look to be in their 60s.  And people in their 70s who look to be in their late 40s.

So I filled out the questionaire knowing full-well what the outcome would be.  I may be just a bit past 60, but my real age would probably be 34.

It was a delight to answer the questions.  No, I do not eat fast food.  No, I do not drink sweet soda.  No, I do not eat fried food.  Yes, I only cook with olive oil when necessary.  Yes, I have friends I care about.  Yes, I exercise almost every day–a three mile run, five or six miles on the bike, half an hour of weights, and laps in the pool when I can.  See!  I haven’t aged a day.

Okay, so I’ve had two heart attacks.  And two strokes.  And have been a Type One diabetic for 54 years now.  Big deal.

“Your real age is 84,” I was told a few hours after submitting my answers.  “Stop all that exercise!” they advised me.  “Glad you’ve got friends,” they added.

Oh dear.  Once again sweet illusion met the statistics of an actuarial table.

“I’m going to the gym,” I said.  “I don’t care what they say.  If I’m going to meet my maker I’d like to do it in a sauna, or on the bike trails.”

When I left for the gym the clouds were grey, the humidity heavy, a building resident told me it was going to rain later on.  They he added that he just planed to die here, either “here” or “over there,” he said pointing to the nursing home.

“Well, may as well live while you wait,” I said.  He quoted the serenity prayer, took another drag on his cigarette, and wished me well.  People love nothing more than quoting a prayer to a pastor.

Got to the gym.  Ran the miles.  Worked the weights.  Went to the pool.  Took the sauna.  Went outside.  The skies were black.  It was pouring.  Who knew gray clouds could hold that much water?  Cliches should always be avoided in good writing, but I’m here to tell you it was raining cats and dogs.  I had no raincoat.  If I went home I was going to get wet.  Very wet.

“So?” I said to myself.  “It’s summer.  This is a warm rain.  You were just in the pool and you didn’t mind water there.  Why worry about it now?”

Went outside.  Unlocked the bike.  Stayed under the awning.  Got to the curb.  Started riding.  Felt the rain.  Felt the water.  Got on the bike trail.  Another rider, also without a raincoat, says, “Where you going?”  “Just a few miles,” I said.   “I’ve got to go to . . .”  We laughed.  Riders waiting out the rain underneath the bridges gave a chorus of encouragement.

On 27th street a car in water up to the top of its tires had stalled.  A young woman was pushing it, alone.  I stopped, parked my bike and asked if she needed some help.  She said that would be fine.  We pushed, and pushed, laughing at the rain, the drenching of warm water.

It had been many years since I have been drenched in warm rain.  Most of the time I think, “Better get a raincoat.”  I realized there is a bit of fear in that perception.  What if you get wet?  But yesterday, the fear fled.  What if you get wet?  So what?

The rain.  The exhileration of saturation.  The laughter.  The people.

Hmmm . . . since I’m 84, better feel it and love it while there’s still time.  Besides, the baptism removed a good 30 years from my real age.

Take care,

Larry

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Forest Reaches for Sky . . . Sky Reaches for Forest

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I don’t know quite how it happened.

But happen it did.

Last week, when I checked into my e-mail, as all modern creatures do, I noticed I had 30 new e-mails.  I am well aware that this is nothing to brag about.  One of my sons receives over 300 a day, each portending a decision, a contract, an approach to the survival of a cause or a company.  My e-mails are far more pedestrian, no less meaningful, but they have nothing to do with “business.” Instead, they have something to do with life, and the perceptions of life we both search for and share.

So, with just a hint of, “Oh my,” I opened them.

The list went something like this.  aspqeeuzc had nothing to say.  Neither did aspleknsigmcve.  Nor did asclskek.com.  And so on.  Each was utterly meaningless.  Somewhere, in Shanghai, or New Delhi, or Tuscon, Arizona, a computer said, “Hit.”  And so it did.

I realized, once again, the commencement address in Big Timber, Montana, four or so years ago.  “You are not a number.”  You are not the number “hits” your site receives.  You are “not” your income.  You are not your address.  You are not your credit rating.  You are not the number of “hits” your blog receives.  You are not your health.  Instead, you are a human being.

I realized anew, how much spiritual emotional, and physical work it takes to be a human being.  It is so easy to live in fear.  Fear organizes our perceptions as few other things do.  It works.  It may be the devil’s work, but it works.  The immigrants are going to overtake the country . . . keep them out.  And so on.

I try, as best I can, to keep political orientation away from these pages.  When I have been the most ideological in my life, I have also been the most opposed to my conscience.  But I will say that when benefits for those unemployed due to Wall Street’s excessive greed have been suspended, it strikes me as something cruel beyond the pale.  My first instinct, is to say that those who voted to suspent the benefits should take no pay for the next year.  Period.  Voting should be a shared experience.

Thus my caustic response.

But it is born of something else.  For 13 years, I have the good fortune to interview mission agencies around the United States.  There was one in Washington that stays with me.  They had a single mission.  Let the lawmakers experience the consequences of their votes.  It was not mean-spirited.  It simply tried to led an experiential modality cut through the ideological dissonance of our day.  And so they took lawmakers to Head Starts in Washington DC.  They took lawmakers to hospitals, and let them hold a baby trembling from the crack and cocaine its mother took when she was still pregnant.  It tried to say, “If you vote, this is who will be affected.”

I was impressed.

I realized how many good ideas I have had that have been ideologically correct, but devoid of the human condition. The IF-THEN approach to life does have its logic.  But devoid of experience, its meaning is elusive, impenetrable, and perhaps even useless.

“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus said.

As usual, he was right.

May the God of life grant us the courage to follow such a course, even if it means wading through Spam.

With love,

Larry

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Roads, Hills, and Skies

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I have shared with you before that we live in a building that is no stranger to death.  We came here not because we are retired, but because it was an open apartment with a beautiful view of the city.  Besides, we didn’t really “move” here, we came here and it turned out there was an open apartment in this HUD-funded building.  We took it.

We kept it.

But people die here, a lot.  “We come here to die,” one man said to me one morning as I read the paper in the sun room.  His observation led to a question about faith, and a life-filled response that encouraged him to keep hope–not that he would live forever, but that his life mattered.

This week the librarian died.

That is not at the core of my thought concerning these words and this column.  It is elsewhere.  I am touched by the way this building in which few of us knew each other’s names, much less each others’ histories, with the way care finds its way.  I’m about to set out on my bike, once again.  “She died,” a man and woman shared with me as I passed them on the sidewalk.  The conversation went in its usual ways.

“Of what?”

“Heart attack.”

“She hadn’t been well.”

“Oh dear,” I said.

Today, looking over a storm that approached from the northwest, as all storms do here in the land of lakes.  I shared that I was sorry to hear that she died.  Who would do the library?

“She wouldn’t go to the doctor,” someone said.

“Why not?”

“Too expensive.  She just didn’t want to incur the bill.”

“Oh dear,” I said.  I realized that her story was mine, there are times I too prefer to go it alone rather than bringing massive institutional intervention into my life, to say nothing of the bills.  I know how specialists work:  the recommend tests, expensive tests, just to cover the bases.  Or at least that how I’ve perceived it.

“I’d been checking for her,” said one woman.  She had taken the time to Google medical care for indigent women.  She knew there was something that could be done.  And she had been looking for it.  All to no avail.  It was too late.  The good news didn’t arrive.

This may seem like a sad story.  But it isn’t.  Instead, it is a story filled with compassion.  More than she knew, people cared.  More than she knew, people did what they could.  In so many ways, we are a “church” without being a church, unless “church” means compassion.  Which, of course, I think it does.

The world may be cold.  It may even be brutal.  But more than we know, more than we realize, there is a depth of care that surrounds us all.

“Thank God we have a president who is not immune to stories like her’s,” I said.  “He gets it.  This Health Care Bill, it is for people like her.  I am so grateful.  I know it will take time, but I am so grateful.”

“Me too,” said another.

You see.  We’re not here to die.  We’re here to live, to care, and to hope.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Somebody asked: What's It Like?

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Last night, I had the strangest dream, I’d ever hoped to see . . .

So goes the lyric to one of Woody Guthrie’s best songs, one that has stayed with me over the years.  Every so often it reappears in a gleeful reassurance of nothing less than life itself.

I am staggered by the one-dimensional approach to disability that has claimed the day and lost the cause in so very many ways.

We are intent on installing elevators.  We are intent on large-print bulletins.  We are intent on access.  I have nothing against this.  Indeed, in one of my ministries, we risked more than we had to install an elevator.  We knew we were living in an aging town, and that the day would come when that elevator would be needed.  And so it was.

We did the right thing.  I tried to lead the right thing.

But in so doing I missed the true calling of church.

Once we are “in,” what do we have to say?  What is on our hearts?  What has our disability taught us about God?  In time, of course, we all become disabled.  Some of us lose our vision, others our hearts, others our nerves, others our metabolic harmony.  Something disables us all.  Those of us with identifiable disabilities simply get there first.

When you thank about it, this early encounter with limits has the capacity to teach us a great deal about God.  There is a sense in which those of us with disabilities are taking the Advanced Placement Class in understanding life itself.

My father, some years ago, shared with me a sentence I have never forgotten.  “I’ve pretty much figured out life,” he said.  “But nobody asks.”

It strikes me that we make a great effort to include everyone, but neglect to ask them what they have learned about life.  Instead of the curious question, we want them to “fit in.”  But what is the point of fitting in if what we have to give is neglected?  The quiet tyranny of the “normal” wins once again.  Noblesse oblige takes precedent.

But “Last night I had the strangest dream.”  Those living with dementia were asked to share the nuggets of life that have stayed with them.  Those with half a brain were asked to share how the God of life came to their aid after a long exile from the “real” world.  Those disabled by grief were actually asked what they have learned about God.  Those too frail to walk, were asked what they think about scriptures in which the lame are healed.  Those fighting cancer were asked about the Spirit’s call in a time of despair.  For a moment, the “well” sat silent, perhaps in awe, of just how viceral life can be.

Last night I had the strangest dream.

We asked those who are “up against it” to speak.

“I’ve got it pretty much figured out,” said my dad.  “And nobody asks.”

Last night I had the strangest dream.

We asked.

PS:  A new color arrived.  Daniel Smith’s Cadmium Orange Hue.  I tried it out, stunned at its simple beauty with ultramarine blue.  And so, today’s painting, is not a painting.  It is a first stroke, an emergence of something new.  I imagine such a stroke in churches across the world, when we actually engage the voices, the lives, and the cares of those living with disabilities.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Elijah's Crazy Mountains

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Elijah was the story.

Biblical scholars refer to it as the “Elijah chronicles.”

They are violent, ever-so human, emotional, tender, and gripping.  Every time I read them, or hear them something new hits home.

There is not enough space here to relate them to you if they are new to you.  But all you need to do is to “Google Elijah” and see what comes up.

When I hear the story, life emerges in all its visceral, unpredictable forms.  Like it or not, the Elijah stories are life stories.

Most people in the Bible have some sort of introduction.  We know about Moses being snatched from the river, we know that Isaiah was the son of Amoz in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah.  We know that Amos worked with sheep.  We know that Jeremiah was the son of Hilkiah. Each has an introduction.

But not Elijah.

He just appears.  Just like that.  Suddenly, there he is.  My NRSV Bible even has a note that says, “The story opens abruptly, leading some to believe that the beginning, with a proper introduction of Elijah has been lost.”

That’s the exactly correct word: abrupt.

The unexpected fall takes but a second.  Abruptly life is changed.  Most strokes happen in a second, though my two took more time.  But whatever the condition, one day we are okay, the next our lives are abruptly changed.  Conditions that appear as unexpectedly as Elijah.  They throw us off balance.

Indeed Elijah himself was thrown off balance.  Wanting to prove a point, and without instruction from God, he built an altar on top of a mountain and asked the priests of Baal to pray and see if their god could light it.  Baal decided not to.  Elijah doused the wood with water and asked his god to light it.  The pyre exploded into flame.  The priests admitted Elijah’s god was better than theirs, so Elijah decided to kill them all.

What?

After the abrupt ignition, violence arrived quickly, without introduction.  Proving a point is more important than the point proven.  This must stop, says the level-headed Jezebel.  We search for Osama bin Laden, she searched for Elijah saying she wanted his head.  Enough is enough.

Frightened for his life, Elijah runs away.  The one who cared not for the lives of priests cares about his own welfare.  Read the newspaper and this same story plays out, time after time.  Those who showed no mercy ask for mercy.

Hidden in a cave, a great wind arrives, with the power of the 29 tornadoes that alit in Minnesota a few days ago.  But God is not in the wind.  An earthquake arrives as abruptly as the Haitian and Chilean quakes.  But God is not in the trembling earth.  A firestorm arrives, as abruptly powerful as the fires the exploded in Montana not long ago, making the air itself almost flammable.  But God was not in the fire.

I know the story.  But this time something new hits me.

God is not in the abrupt violence, just as God was not in the abrupt slaughter of the priests.

But God was in a deep silence.  The violent story ends in a place of peace.

As it is with scripture, is it not also with us?  After the abrupt events that unexpectedly change our lives, do we not all go into a deep silence?

And then, we regroup and start again.  It’s all we can do.

And it is all we must do.

Go ahead.  Google Elijah.  And then, with imagination, Google your soul and see where it leads.

Saturday evening, June 19, 2010

Creation in Cadmium Orange and Ultramarine Blue

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I ran some errands today.

It meant the usual.  Normally I get all that needs to be “gotten” on my bicycle in this ever so bicycle-friendly city.  But today I drove.  I drove through a Jewish neighborhood, though I’d never taken note of that except for the name of stores and a Kosher grocery store.  Today it was different.  Today is the Sabbath.  I saw three, four, five families out walking to worship.  Some of the men had orthodox hats, some didn’t.  But they were all walking.

I found it beautiful.

The Sabbath begins as the day draws to a close.  We offer thanks and praise, and then fall asleep where we are restored.  Our bodies are cleansed, our muscles healed, our tensions and hopes tended to in dreams.  We awake renewed.  “And it was evening, and morning, the first day,” we read in Genesis.

I found the walking beautiful.  For whatever reason, I have never had a job in my entire life that required a commute.  In Maine, New York, Minnesota and Montana work and worship were just a few minutes’ walk away.  Walking to both became part of the Sabbath’s ritual.

The question posed tomorrow’s readings in churches around the earth is important, troubling and unavoidable.  “What are you doing here?” God asked a fleeing and fearful Elijah whose violent triumph proved to be no triumph at all.

“What are you doing here?” God may have asked me this afternoon.  “Running errands” is a true answer, but it doesn’t have much depth, does it.

The question seems to probe for something deeper.  Are we “just here?” or are we “doing something.”

A woman at the market was selling bread she had made in Iowa.  Her’s was a homegrown operation, and they were trying to expand.  She’d been making bread for many years, she said.

“How many loaves to you make a day?” I asked.

“A few hundred,” she said.  “But we’re hoping to expand.”

So there she was at the Whole Foods Market, trying to get them to carry her bread.  It was expensive.  I almost voted with my feet.

“It’s hard, isn’t it,” I said.  “You have a good product.  You know it’s healthy.  You grind the wheat.  You do the making.  Logic says they should carry it.  But they may just say no, and not even tell you why.”

She smiled.  “Good for you,” I said.  “I admire your courage to do this.  It is hard work.  And here you are, doing it.  I’ll take this loaf, and many blessings.”

“Thank you,” she said.

What are you doing here?

What are we doing here?

It is a Sabbath day’s reflection that asks us to re-engage creation itself.

I reached for paints, and found these once again in my soul.

Saturday, June 16, 2010

Base of the Mountains

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The problem with sermons is that they don’t stop.

They echo.   They keep moving as if to say, “This is what I hoped you’d say.  Why’d you get lost?”

My son Ben asked a question about religion and faith.  Faith might be okay, but religion is so bound with precedent it seems to be an incarnation of death itself.  I respond, asking him to avoid cynicism and to embrace paradox.  We live in an age in which if a person can be caught in a contradiction, it may as well be the end of the road.

Life, on the other hand, is actually interested when we change our minds.  Could that be true?  It wonders.  Could I be wrong? It questions.

I wrote in yesterday’s column that the story of Adam and Eve in the garden is wonderfully creative.  It assumes there is something within us that we must deal with, both intentionally and carefully lest we give in to our lesser nature.

There are those that see this as a guilt-oriented proposition.  I find it creative.  There is a problem before us, what are we going to do with it?  What do we do when we find ourselves not always generous, not always kind, not always aware, not always thinking of the other?  Aware of our shortcoming we can be mindful of healing, the need for healing, wherever we may be, and wherever we are.

In short, we need then to find a way.

Guilt is not a very helpful emotion.  Contrition, however, is.  Shame restricts us.  Forgiveness frees us.  I do not find it necessarily helpful to label all humankind as sinners.  But I do find it immensely creative to ask how we are going to deal with the ever-so-human emotions of:

Forgiveness.  Shame.  Jealousy.  Anger.  Revenge.  Pride.  Greed.  Failure.

If we know these are the emotions we deal with as human beings, we can embrace them by finding a way around them.  Such is the story of faith.  “I was lost, but now am found.”

Yesterday, in Smith Park, in Montevideo, Minnesota, I sat with a circle of friends and heard a friend and her daughter sing, “If I could I surely would, stand on the rock where Moses stood.  Pharoes army, got drownded, O Mary don’t you weep.” Some 30 people had gathered to walk a mile or two to raise funds for people they would never meet.  It was the 25th anniversary of the CROP Walk in Montevideo.

As I listened to Audry sing the him with her daughter, I knew it was a hymn of hope.  The headlines said we needed to practice it.  A million people displaced in Kyrgyzstan.  An oil spill in the gulf.  An addition to that oil.  A scandal here, another there.  A wheat contagion.

And so on.

Yes, this is what we deal with.  It turns out that our assumptions that we have complete control over our lives are not true.  We must reach beyond ourselves.

Around this, it is perfectly possible to organize our lives, and our faith.

For me, this is the good news.  I call it gospel.

Friday, June 18, 2010

A Farm, a Sky, and a Painting

Minneapolis, Minnesota

We are at a point of living discussion.

If one is a compassionate humanist, isn’t that enough?  Why, if we are loving, forgiving, compassionate, and honest is there need for a God?

It is a question I asked once in seminary, that place in which thoughts like these are taken seriously.  “If we can do justice, why do we need a God?” I asked professor Phyllis Trible, in a study of of the book of Amos that both inspired me and widened my understanding of biblical scholarship.

“That’s a good question,” she asked.

It had no answer at the time.

But it has, for me, been answered over time.  You see, we believers have this story.  It is a story of the pscyhe, a story of life, a story of God’s good intentions and our not knowing what to do with them.

It is the story of the fall.  “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” the Purtans in New England wrote on slate boards almost half a millenium ago.  There is something in our nature that makes good intention go awry.  We mean no harm, but . . . harm ensues.  We go into war with the best of intentions, and end up justifying them despite the horrific costs.

“That which I would not do, I do do,” Paul wrote.  The instinct to solve a problem with violence seems to be universal.  I am much-touched by the service provided by American soldiers in defense of the Afghanistan they would like to see, and the civility they would like to restore to that culture.  But I realize that all propaganda, not just ours,  exudes patriotism, which can’t help but be a narrow value defined by the country of the speaker.

And so this notion of a”fall.”

There is something within us that is broken.  We seek revenge.  Each one of us is so beset with “issues” that it is difficult to find a clear way to peace.  Woodrow Wilson wanted peace.  He didn’t get it.  When the Berlin Wall fell, I honestly believed the Cold War had drawn to a close, that the world would be better.  Instead, “we” took advantage of that fall, to preciptate new crises.

There is something in us that is broken.  Relationships end.  Talks come to an end.  Hope is trumped by the all-too-many facts of “despair.”

So what is to be done?

Can a humanistic impulse make sense of this?  Perhaps, in an ideal world.

It is Christianity, and Judaism, that seek to make sense of these failings.  Both ask for redemption.  Both ask for an “out.”

In Christianity, it is called “grace.”  And it is called, “call.”  There is nothing that idealizes this call.  It may well lead to death, as it did in the life of Jesus.  And still, God said, “No.  Life, not death, is the final word.  Hope, not despair.”  And then added, “This is the work of my hand.  I appreciate yours, but on your own you could not accomplish this.

And so, the humanist says,”We can do this.”  The Jew, or Christian says, “Not so fast.  We’re going to need help.  No matter how hard we try, we’re going to need the help we call grace.”

It is with them that I cast my lot.

`

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Shared Sacred

Minneapolis, Minnesota

You asked for a response to your question about faith and religion, and it has been on my heart ever since.  It is more searching than that.  I also heard you ask, “Is there a difference between the compassion of an atheist and a believer?”

I believe there is.  At the heart of non-belief is the idea that we’ll be just fine on our own.  There is no need for something, or someone, who is “other.”  We can be compassionate enough, kind enough, loving enough, and generous enough to hold our own.

There was a book written some years ago entitled, “In the Absence of the Sacred.”  It was an environmentally-based book.  What happens when we do not tend to some sense of the holy, the sacred, the “set aside” places of our lives?  What happens when we are in control all the time?  Religion has so many stains on its hand it hardly has a word to say.  But the devastation of the oceans, the land, the waters of the earth happens in the absence of a sacred voice that just might say, “Be careful there.”  I’ve wondered in a teasing sort of way if God put oil a mile beneath the sea, and eight thousand feet beneath that to keep us from exploiting it.

Faith and Religion.  The overtones of each inform us.  But, given a chance, so do their deeper instincts.  When I read the Ten Commandments, I hear them this way:

About those idols?  Do not construct a god you can control, a god you name.  Life is bigger than that, and humility requires it.

Don’t misuse my name, which is a word of life.   There is something to this notion of sacred and secular.  To live in the absence of the sacred is sad.

Remember the Sabbath.  If 7-11 wants to be 24-7, that’s one thing.  But that’s an economic model chosen to make more money.  You are not slaves and should not be used on a 24-7 way.   We are not to be exploited, or used as a means of production seven days a week.  Let there be time to be mindful of creation itself.

Honor your parents.  You can be nice to them, but go deeper.  Honor them.  Ask them what they’ve learned, ask them for their blessing, realize they are teaching you all the time from the moment you are born until the day they–and you, die.

Don’t murder.  Turn away from the paths that lead you in this direction.  Be mindful of life, and of your emotions that can sometimes run violent.  Forgive, value, and prize others.  That’s what creation is for.

Don’t commit adultery.  If you do, somebody is going to get hurt.  Maybe the children, maybe you, maybe your partner.  Somebody is going to get hurt.  Stay away from that.

Don’t steal.  You’re always going to want more.  More money, more land, more, more, more, more fish, more animals, more, more, more.  I’d like to have you resist that impulse.  Don’t steal from each other, or from the earth.

Don’t lie.  You’re going to get in messes.  Lies make your world too narrow.  They too can be idols.  Trust me with the truth, trust yourself and others with the truth, hard though that may be.

Don’t covet.  Trust me.  Life is not a competition to see who has the most toys, the most things.

But what if you don’t think there is a “me?”

Keep the question open.  Just as we could not see the beginning, we cannot see the end.