In Which He Attempts to Write a Blogpost Again

 I recently saw somewhere an interview in which world-famous NASCAR driver Danica Patrick observed, “If you’re looking at the wall, that’s where you’re headed.” (For those unfamiliar with NASCAR, the wall’s not a good thing to be headed toward.) Her observation mirrors that of leadership guru Simon Sinek, that the human mind is incapable of comprehending negatives. As evidence, he challenges us not to think of an elephant. (Aww, too bad.) So skiers, he says, who focus on trees are more likely to hit one (or at least more likely to find their experience defined by them), while skiers who focus on even a path surrounded by trees are astonished to discover how much path there actually is. More than enough. The challenge is that walls and trees represent big threats to things that are important to us. They are understandably challenging to ignore. But ignore isn’t quite the right word, is it? If Sinek is right about the brain, we can touch the negative by attending the positive. We can acknowledge the trees, in part, by attention to the path.

One time I found myself at a national gathering of campus ministry leaders. If anyone has reason to fear big (and often financial) threats, it’s campus ministers who hold holy space with teenagers and largely rely on the support of those outside the community. Conversations at leadership gatherings about fear of not having enough money, or losing the money one had, were frequent. At this gathering I got curious. What is the path of each heart surrounded by these daunting trees? “If you got $50,000 today,” I went around the room asking, “what’s the first thing you would do?” I had realized that, while I needed to navigate the trees, what I longed for was to learn from the paths of others and allow the imaginations of others to inspire my own; to open my heart to the path of God’s revealing in the context where I showed up each day and prayed to live in faithful community.

Experience and observation suggest that it’s easier to name the trees than the path. Will there be enough? is an easier question to ask than for what? To answer the latter question is to share a path, is to share your heart. It’s vulnerable and sometimes scary. Sometimes we don’t know. “Lord,” said Thomas. “We don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?” We see what gets in the way, but of what? We’re not always sure. I shared with a friend one time that I prayed for a life determined by the waters of baptism and shaped by the Easter Vigil. His blank look suggested he did not share this prayer. But then his face opened. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. (Fair enough.) “Tell me what that’s about for you.” And we were together, for a few minutes, on a path.

Don’t get me wrong. Some trees need naming. At one time or another, most do. But the path is what inspires to overcome them, the possibility of what could be.

Where do we look when we’re looking to what could be? Danica asks. What vocabulary do we draw from when we share our hearts and hopes? Not just individually, but in the communities (families, schools, organizations, churches, etc.) of which we are a part?

In his book, The Way of St. Benedict, Rowan Williams describes what we called the “currency” of a community: “All communities need a medium of exchange, a language that assures their members that they are engaged in the same enterprise. It involves common stories and practices, things that you can expect your neighbor to understand without explanation, ways and styles of doing and saying things.” Williams goes on to describe the experience of an English priest visiting a university mission, attempting to discover “what the currency of the university is.” After days of observation, the priest concluded, “What did these people exchange with one another when they met? You’d be surprised – they exchanged grievances. So the currency of that University is grievance.”

Williams goes on to shift the metaphor of exchange into one of circulation in the body, both an individual body and a body like, say, the Body of Christ. What do we put in circulation? With what do we inspire the life and being of the body, mindful that what we put in circulates through, becoming later what we receive. “If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance.” Meanwhile, the lives of so many communities are aided, if not healed, as members circulate instead the currency of goodness, positive expectation, and kindness.

Other currencies Williams names includes anxiety or censoriousness, pressures to conceal truths in the name of “peace,” on the one hand, and “a habit of stable determination to put into the life of the body something other than grudges” on the other. On the point of accountability before Christ, Williams observes that leaders of (not only) Benedictine communities are in unique position to put into circulation “the habit of hope, trust in the possibilities of compassion.”

At this point in this post, I’m mindful that I’ve

• o   written for longer than I intended (if you made it this far, my deepest gratitude),
• o   probably glossed a good bit of a favorite author’s (Williams’) thoughts, and
• o   risked conflating 2 ideas, the tree/wall idea with currency and circulation,

so I’ll just end briefly by suggesting that the connection, for me, is the invitation to risk reflection on our habits of contemplation and contribution, individually and in the lives of those to whom we’re bound in love. So many of our thoughts are thoughtless (the fruit of unexamined imitations or habits). I say school’s not cool because it’s the cool thing to say. But in the space of an unthreatened heart, how do I understand the path? The good life? What holy yearnings has God planted in my heart? What do I believe the trees obstruct or diminish? With whom do I risk sharing the heart or vision God’s given me for the good and the true and the beautiful? What are my habits of circulation, both shared and individual? What do these habits convey about the path I pray God to be on? What opportunities to circulate the joy of the new thing God is doing does this day present?

I have a sign on the wall I face in my office that says, “Look for the Good, the True, & the Beautiful.” I have a prayer book that says, “Seek and serve Christ in each person.” I have, we have, been given all that we need (more than enough, even) to circulate the abundant life of new creation in, for, with one another. In the One Body we share. What a calling. What a gift.

Christ the Flower

A meditation for Good Friday. 

Once upon a time there was a forest full of trees, but it wasn’t so much The Trees as this One Tree that caused the trouble. You know the story. The garden, woman, man, and fruit. Serpentine transgressions. I wonder, when they would look back on the events years later, were they haunted by the what fors and whys? Or the absence thereof. It’s hard to even tell from here just what it was all about. Was it gluttony, lust, or pride, I wonder? Poisoned peek a boo with God. Selective hearing, maybe. Exile, swords of fire.

A friend tells, “avocado.” Avocado? Yes, he says, the fruit that undoubtedly, to his mind, marked the sin. He was probably projecting, but I sometimes ask myself what fruit would be shiny enough, just ripe enough, enticing enough that I would dismiss, neglect, put down God’s voice of love to me.

Well before too long, the man and the woman were themselves made fruitful, found with child, but that had long stopped being an obvious good thing. The hiding from God had hit them hard. And without clear means for mending, their offspring hit each other harder. Whole cities built on the blood of brothers. And it’s fruit again, the parent’s sin, the cry of Abel’s blood. And Abel’s blood’s still crying. Good God, is Abel’s blood still crying.

And every night on channels one through ninety-nine, hell, any screen you carry to the toilet or wherever else you go, you can see him, hear him, they call him different names now, but you can still hear Abel’s blood. And it’s the echo coursing through the whole Hebrew Scriptures. Where it’s Abram and Sarai, Moses, Elijah, Deborah and David, Elisha, Esther, and Jonah, God bless him, and Nahum and all of God’s prophets, his judges and kings, the high priests of the people, trying to give God back Abel’s blood.

Sometimes I pray when I hear it, and sometimes I laugh when I hear it; other times, when I hear it, I sink into my sofa and drip through to the floor, the weight of the sadness slaying my tears and as heavy -- oh, as heavy -- as the endlessly flickering light is blue against the wall.

They sprinkled blood, not Abel’s, on their beaten, wooden, doorposts that first, last night called Passover; that first last night in Egypt, just as God commanded. Prefigured Lamb of God. The Egyptians were howling; God, he was faithful, and the Hebrews walked out on dry land. Pillars of cloud. Columns of fire. God broke the bondage. And the Hebrews walked out on dry land.

But college freshman everywhere will tell you, when they’re talking to you at all, that unexpected freedoms are the hardest kind to handle. And the people who walked free from their mud bricks in Egypt had a hard time believing that the One who had freed them from their mud bricks in Egypt, would keep them, could keep them, from their mud bricks in Egypt. That they would be cared for. That God would bring them home.

And so, in an ironic twist, somewhere along the wandering road, somewhere among the endless, numbered, days that followed, the people who wandered in wilderness griped one time too many, and God brought back the snake. You know, the one that started the whole mess in the first place. He brought him back. With friends. Snakes to bite their heels. Some were even dying.

Moses said, “Have mercy, God,” and God heard and had mercy, had Moses make a separate snake, this one made of bronze, and put it on a pole; the people were told to look on the snake on the pole in order to be saved. And the ones who did were saved. And some millennia later, the disciple Jesus loved, the one called John, he saw that snake, and called it Christ. The sinless one becoming sin, that we might see salvation.

Which brings me to a second tree that caused the trouble. One tree from the forest. You know the story. A garden. A man. With some women and men. Where they found him, with their swords and flaming torches. Does this sound familiar? Exiled Son of God. Or at least that was the goal.

The disciples had swords, too, but there would be no battle here. No second spill of Abel’s blood. The cup first drunk at Passover, now come before the Lamb. And Peter, who would have fought for him, would not, will not, die with him, and the cock crow names the hour.

They gave the man a trial, the people did. Or close enough to one for their intentions on that day. And they dressed him like a king, and pranced before the powers, and the powers lost their power in the madness of the night. The night as dark as blood. The day that looked like night. And they crucified our Lord.

Once upon a time, this mother, she could smile. But darkness knows no friend.

Two trees by which to see the grief, to hear the cries and taste the blood of wars that will not cease. The rivers flowing blood. Infernal blue lights flickering. But eyes to see and ears to hear pick out the pin-prick hope against the darkness, amidst the blood, if faint, if far off, flickering. And this is the pin-prick hope -- God’s own happy sadness – this is the moment, the instant we see it, when despair itself loses hope -- this is God’s secret: the two trees are one tree and his wounds heal the first.

Christ the flowering blossom of the tree we left for dead. Christ the first flower of creation made new. Christ, that flower which, trampled underfoot by us, did not withhold its fragrance, but poured it out all the more. In him, this one, the love and logic of God, the grain of the universe, all revealing. Where there, in God’s heart, it is mercy and mercy all the way down.

The flaming sword extinguished now, Life’s tree holds high its fruit; and Christ himself, pressed, crushed, for us, becomes the very wine of heaven.

And heaven prepares the song.

Amen.

A Prayer for Protection (Learning to Fear the Right Things)

Prayers for protection are ancient and good in the Christian tradition. And there is a lot in the world that might lead us to seek out protection. But from what? And for what? 

These are not just a philosopher's questions. These are questions that matter for how I will learn to talk to my children. About God. About fear. About the life that is life.

Our answers to these questions reveal our most dearly held priorities and, in turn, shape our prayers for protection. But at least one significant challenge to making reflective space to consider these questions is the sense that there's no time for that. The threats are at hand! Just get the protection in place already. Some days we get up and live lives of largely unreflective reactivity, performing fears so old we don't remember where we learned them.  

But whether we take the time to explore them or not, these questions will linger and share invisible, unnamed space with us. They will haunt us. Haunt us until we turn to them and discover, in the faith, the alternative to reactionary fear that God has revealed in Jesus and opened to the people called 'church.' 

Stephen Colbert recently quoted the poet Robert Hayden in an interview with Dua Lipa, 

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

So I was delighted the other day to stumble on this new-to-me hymn from the 6th century church, which paints the alternative to prayers for reactive protection to unnamed fears by its engagement with the invisible questions - from what? for what? - to sketch understanding of the harms from which we rightly ask God's help to save us. Sharing it with you and, maybe also, with my kids:

Now that the daylight fills the sky,
we lift our hearts to God on high,
that he, in all we do or say,
would keep us free from harm today:

Our hearts and lips may he strain;
keep us from causing others pain,
that we may see and serve his Son,
and grow in love for everyone.

From evil may he guard our eyes,
our ears from empty praise and lies;
from selfishness our hearts release,
that we may serve and know his peace;

that we, when this new day is gone,
night in turn is drawing on,
with conscience free from sin and blame,
may praise and bless his holy name.

To God the Father, heavenly Light,
to Christ, revealed in earthly night,
to God the Holy Ghost we raise
our equal and unceasing praise.

Hymn no. 3 in the Hymnal 1982, Latin, 6th cent.; trans. Neale, Scagnelli, Coffin, and Chandler.

The Art of Understanding: Collaboration, Curiosity, and Removing Old Couches

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

A prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, as found in the Book of Common Prayer, p. 833.

A friend and colleague recently turned me on to the Hidden Brain podcast, where Shankar Vedantam "uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships." The podcast now owns a regular place in the lineup I enjoy on my morning and evening walks. 

This past week, each of the three episodes I chose, mostly at random, brought to mind in different ways the above prayer of St. Francis and especially that phrase woven in among so many beautiful and challenging others, "to be understood as to understand." Each of the episodes explored different aspects of understanding others, the work it takes, the errant assumptions we often make, blind spots, and tools that serve the work. Most of us have known either the experience of having felt understood or, conversely, the pain of not feeling heard/understood. Most of us having experienced varying levels of success in our attempts to communicate understanding to others. Anyway, I was super grateful for the emergence of the unintentional theme. Here's the episode list, in case you'd like to listen or check them out:

• What Makes Relationships Thrive
• The Obstacles You Don't See
• Our Noisy Minds 

In a nutshell, the first episode seeks to establish understanding as an ingredient every bit as important as even more high profile possibilities, like love, in relationships of all kinds. The second begins with the story of a wildly popular furniture maker that initially struggled, despite the popularity, to complete sales. The company tweaked prices, improved product, pulled their hair out. Nothing worked. The eventual solution? Offering to remove the old furniture for customers when delivering the new furniture. Sales skyrocketed. A lesson in perspectives, positions, and understanding. The third episode begins with the story of CEOs at insurance companies, who errantly assume that the variability among their agents in offering premium prices, etc., is about 10%. A researcher comes along who determines that the actual number is more like 55%. A big deal in insurance, and also in sentencing and incarceration, where the assumption that most people, like judges, see the world and make judgments in ways similar to our own perspectives and judgments is, generally speaking, wildly overestimated. The variability between us is a gift (potentially), but only if we are honest about the extent to which it exists in the first place. Which brings us back to understanding, a challenge complicated by the fact, says the third episode, that we seldom fully understand ourselves.

Against the backdrop of this week of walks with this unintentional theme, my family has been planning a memorial for my wife's grandfather, who died this past December. I thought the world of Grandpa Baker and thoroughly enjoyed him, his presence, his thoughtfulness, and our shared conversations. (I was delighted to learn early on that we shared an affinity for the work of Robert Farrar Capon, a theologian and Episcopal priest whom a mentor once confessed "a guilty pleasure.") More than anything, there was in Grandpa Baker a curiosity that opened space for others: other ideas and other people. "Maybe so!" he would frequently respond to a thought or opinion in opposition to his own. "Tell me more about that," was an invitation found in most every conversation.

Sometimes when loved ones die, we discover things about them we didn't know before. Some things just never come up, for whatever reasons. I knew Grandpa Baker worked in education, and that he had done so in pioneering ways. I remember lots of stories, but they were usually one-offs. It was only in reading correspondence occasioned by his passing, from colleagues he had worked with and/or who continued his work, that I learned about his formal contribution to the work of understanding; he and a colleague pioneered the process that became known as The Seven Norms of Collaboration, a pillar of education so foundational that is now simply for granted, but only because they discerned it and wrote it for the rest of us. I share it at the end here.

Collaboration, understanding, is an art. And maybe, says Shankar Vedantam, a science, too. Both. Also a discipline with practices that require our submitting to each other. "Tell me more." And, "It sounds like you're saying _____. Am I hearing you right?" It's good work at the heart of relationships between individuals, communities, and every nook and cranny of life. And I'm so glad for the space these conversations and discoveries from this past week's worth of walks occasioned for me to explore the work from difference angles. 

So. A post full of what have been tools for me. But what for you? What aids have you discovered for the work of understanding? What helps you better live the prayer? Asking not a preacher or exhorter, but as one who is curious. If you are willing, tell me more about that.

I appreciate you, friends.