Archive for 2002
This promise is immense. All the food you can eat—and not just to fill you but to fascinate you with flavours; wine to intoxicate and delight and lift the heart; oh, and the utter defeat of death and ruin’s rout; the end of pain and decay; the passing of shame, of fear, of loss. And all this … for all. For friend and foe; for lover and orphan; for those we have lost and those we have never found. Ancient and modern. Far and wide. The party couldn’t be complete without them, without every soul of every nation and every age. And they’re coming. Walking, running, dancing. Coming. And in among them—as surely as already there to greet them and welcome them home—the one they have known and loved, each in their way—their God, our God, God in as many shapes as souls have stories. This is the bash of the century, any century, all centuries; the party to end all parties.
But when? … And where?
Here and now—or sometime, someplace, very like it. The invitation comes to ordinary people doing ordinary things. Hard at their ordinary work or daydreaming down the road or watching videos with ice-cream melting in the bowl. In twos and threes, look at them, creating, talking, speaking. Around a table passing time, passing salt. Laughing, listening, crying, sighing—breathing our best. Crossing the road, or opening the door, or sitting like this in a circle, one with another, waiting for a final guest to make the meal complete.
He is here already. Always. Now. Taking the place we leave for him in plate and cup, in lips and heart. Familiar and fascinating and easily overlooked. Guest and host and gift.
He is here. He is most truly here.
October 13th, 2002
This afternoon the director of this place asked me for a few moments of my time. Now maybe this is just me but my first thought was “what have I done wrong?” Not, as it turned out, “please could you get me out of this double-booking Rob?” But “you’re not keeping up to standards”. Isn’t that strange? I hate to parade my pathology before you but I was amazed at myself and amazed at how much I remain a creature of the Law. Because that’s what Paul is coming in so hard and heavy against the Galatians about. They have abandoned the good news of salvation for another set of standards they can’t help but fail to meet. Because if the gospel is to be good news for us it has to lift the burden off our shoulders and not lay it on heavier than ever.
The good news is that, whatever we might be tempted to think, the standards are gone, the Law is dead. If we are in Christ we cannot be condemned—even by ourselves…
So how does Jesus answer people like me—and like the lawyer—who are eager to justify themselves? He tells a story to confuse us: a story in which all the standards are dropped. The baddies are the poor buggers who have made a living out of the Law, out of being law-abiding themselves and policing others lives as well. And the hero is someone who, by the law’s standard doesn’t stand a chance—is ruled out of court before he starts. The Samaritan stands for all of us who fail to live the Law, fail to live lives of honour and holiness, fail to be good citizens, good fathers, mothers, children, priests. The Samaritan is Hitler, is Saddam Hussein, is George Bush or Tony Blair, is you and is me. It’s all about the company we like to keep. And it’s our choice—will we keep company with outlaws and crazies, will we claim kinship with the dirty, the damaged, and the depraved—or do we know our place too well, savour our goodness too much, do cling to our hope of doing better next time.
Wouldn’t it feel better to give up, to stop justifying our existence, wouldn’t it really be good news if we could take pity on ourselves and all the other poor failures too?
October 7th, 2002
We are going to be hearing a lot from Job in the next week so it might be a good idea to put his story into some context.
The Book of Job deals with probably the hardest question in theology—why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a hard question in two ways: first because it is pretty much an intractable one. Not only is it difficult in itself—I’ve never heard and answer that satisfies—but any answer you try to give so easily shades over into obscenity. How am I supposed to speak about your pain without undervaluing it and betraying you? I never do know how you are feeling or what you are suffering.
And that’s the second way this problem is intractable—it isn’t found in theology books—it’s not like the theology of the Trinity which is complex and abstruse and … who cares. This question is asked by a grieving mother who has lost her baby. By a heartbroken man whose wife has died. By the child who can’t explain the pain of her cancer. By our friends and our neighbours and our lovers—by our own aching hearts.
So how does the book of Job handle this mess? Well … it tells a story. This is the only book of the bible which makes no claim to authenticity—it is as plainly a fantasy as if it began with “once upon a time”.
But a story has certain advantages over a treatise. If the author tells it well enough we get caught up in it—we begin to care about Job, we let our own lives emerge to colour his, we enter his experience. And we ask the question his way. And we see what happens.
Job gets an answer, of sorts, at the end but you might wonder whether it is much of an answer when you hear it. Yet if you enter the story enough to care at all … then maybe there in itself is the seed of the only answer that counts.
If the story draws us in and defeats the distance we make to keep from pain, if it puts us in touching distance of compassion, then maybe we learn a little about love, a little about ourselves, and a little about God.
September 30th, 2002
What a miserable first reading! Full of foreboding, ripe with the warning that good times always end and fancies flee away. Yet it is poetic—beautiful in a way—it moves me even though I don’t want to go where it is going.
And it’s full of a conflict too. It seems impossible to read that piece of scripture in a single voice. It’s more like a chorus or a duet. The first voice we hear is promising and permissive—“rejoice, take joy, listen to your heart, and follow your desires.” But the second is cynical and punishing: rejoice now and you’ll pay for it later!
There’s a hardness there, almost a delight in death: youth will pass, old age will haunt you and even that will be whisked from under your aching feet and no sooner will you buried than forgotten. Vanity, all is vanity! … Blah!
I prefer the first voice, I rely on the first voice: cast worry from your heart, it says, shield your flesh from pain; it is harvest time, a time of plenty, rejoice, enjoy, live!
We each have our own duelling duet inside us, our own two voices each trying to drown out the other and win our hearts. One urges us to life, to love, to living, to ease and to joy. The other bullies us with worry and waste, with fear and difficulty and death. Which is God’s voice? Do you know? Do you hope?
That’s the thing about retreat … maybe the real voice of the real God gets a little clearer, a little harder to resist, a little more attractive. And maybe it gets a little easier to tune out the voice of doom and gloom and loss.
That’s my prayer for us all today: that we might learn to love the voice of God and believe its blessings.
September 28th, 2002
With a parable like this one I don’t know who I like least: Jesus who speaks or Matthew who puts the words into his mouth. “For many are called but few are chosen.” Lousy words to start a retreat because they paint God in such a poor light.
There are two ways of reading these things. You can take it at face value and see God in that murderous king who acts first out of revenge—bad enough—but then out of pettiness which is worse. And where does it leave me? Where’s my wedding garment? and am I in danger of the outer darkness and the grinding teeth?
Occasionally I fall into that trap—where God gets to carry the weight of all my own self-hatred—but, more often—on better days, I read a story like this and get myself into knots trying to find a way to get God off the hook. Can I twist the words to show God in a better light? Maybe the awkward guest was being deliberately disrespectful? Maybe it’s all about whether you will celebrate or not—I’ve used that one myself. But then I catch myself at it and I’m struck by the disproportion of it all. Who am I to be defending God? Isn’t God big enough to take care of himself? Why does it all feel so fragile?
So this afternoon I re-discovered a third way of reading. What if I simply sat with God and told her all about it? About my fear that my own heart is stony. About my embarrassment when I’m associated with a punishing God. About the frustration of homilies that don’t work out. …
And God, being God, said nothing but said it very quietly. For quite a while. And then God, being God, spoke in the way God does—in words that could be your own but carry a weight beyond their size and surprise you—“what if no one came?” That’s what God said.
What, I wonder, if all this—this planet, this splendour, this grace, this gift, this enormous, delicate, breathing, throbbing, burgeoning brightness—were the invitation. And what if no one came?
August 22nd, 2002
What’s the point of the Incarnation if God doesn’t learn something? …
Jesus is having a bad day—maybe a bad month. He’s in retreat—pulled out of Galilee—and come here to the Canaanite territory near Tyre and Sidon and I see him desperate for a break: for time and space. It has been rough for him, these last weeks—with his cousin John slaughtered and his own attempts to think things through frustrated by hungry crowds hanging on his word, begging for his touch. This is his second try. Leave the damned Galilee for a foreign field where no one knows him, no one shares his God, and where no one will bother him. And if the disciples will let him, he’ll rest and pray and see where his call is taking him, where his power and passion are taking him, … and what the price might be.
But then comes the rowdy Canaanite woman shouting, shouting and even here he can have no peace. Maybe he’s angered by the easy way she steals the language of his faith to call him “Son of David” or maybe, like I said, it’s just been a bad day, but something gets him on his high horse. Something possesses him to treat her shamefully. First with silence; then with contempt but … somewhere between snappish retorts he comes to his senses—he learns something: something about faith, something about his call, something about his God. Because something in her full-on reality, in her bare-faced cheek, in her flesh-and-blood desperation, forces its way through his easy answers and gets him to come to, to look and listen and understand.
Fifteen chapters in, she is the first female voice to be heard in Matthew’s gospel and what she says teaches God a lesson.
I wonder maybe what lesson it teaches us? Or, more to the point, let’s turn that around: I wonder what lesson God is waiting to learn from you and me?
What does God need to learn from us that will explode her assumptions? Maybe what it’s like to be a catholic woman longing for priesthood? What it’s like to be gay person pitied by their own church? Or what it’s like to seek asylum and find only mistrust and a cold shoulder? Maybe…
But maybe we say “well God already knows all that.” Yet we give God a chance to know it from the inside … full-on.
Or—forget the causes and the clichés—what does God want to learn about you? What has God been waiting to hear from you this week that has gone unsaid because it is obvious, because God already knows? A lot of embarrassment can hide under what’s obvious. A lot of intimacy can be side-stepped for the “already known.” Because even if God does know, God still wants to hear it from our own lips: how much we love him; how hard it is to be a wife, a priest, a son, the one in charge; how it feels to grow old. God still longs to hear from our hearts what we fear, what we desire … and what we fear to desire.
August 18th, 2002
I wonder if any of us can hear those words of the gospel without at least a tiny tremble or a ripple of questioning. Which are we—the sound tree or the rotten? What’s our fruit like? Overripe, or bitter, or mealy in the mouth? How many of us can hear those words of Jesus and glow with satisfaction that we are like the season’s best peach: sweet and warm and bursting with juice? Can you imagine yourself as a perfect peach? Try it! Go on…
Because this isn’t a test of our behaviour—as if we could reform ourselves by effort and make our fruit grow to order. Jesus is just telling it how it is. Virtue, goodness, grace—any of those—can’t be grafted on—they come out of the depths of who we are or they don’t come at all. Most of the trouble we cause ourselves is comes by not letting what is inside us flow out—or pruning the life out of branches until we are bare and barren.
This is good news: a persons’ words flow out of what fills his heart. And, take heart, our hearts are good. What is important is not what we are doing for God but what God is doing in us—has done for us.
What got me thinking along these lines were some words of Peter Chrysologos—old Golden Words himself—from a homily on the incarnation. Listen and imagine yourself as a ripe peach.
“That the Creator is in the creature—and God is in the flesh—brings dignity to us all with no dishonour to the one who made us. Why then are you so worthless in your own eyes if you are so precious to God? Why render yourself such dishonour when you are honoured by God? Wasn’t this whole visible universe made for your home? The light that dispels the gloom is for you. For you the heavens are embellished with sun, moon and stars. For you the earth is adorned with flowers, groves and fruit.
For you.
God has made you in God’s own image, and you in your own person make God present here on earth.”
July 30th, 2002
What does the gentleman in Rome who combined these two readings today hope to achieve by putting them side by side?
The story of the three youths thrown into the fiery furnace seems pretty clear—it is a test of gods. My god’s bigger than your god. King Nebuchadnezzar picks a fight: my gods, ably assisted by a fiery furnace, will knock the socks off you three and your strange invisible deity. We’ll see who has the power to destroy and the power to save. And we, who inherit the story, are glad to know our god is the winner. We have a God who can preserve our lives from anything—even a blast furnace.
Dissolve now from Babylon to Palestine… Isn’t this the same story? Those nasty Jews want to kill Jesus as a test of true paternity—who has the toughest father—the sons of Abraham or the Son of God? And John’s gospel is often read as a tit-for-tat escalation between John’s community and the Jews next door—my God’s bigger than your God.
But if that were true, what would it make Jesus? When it comes to the test—cross not furnace—where’s his angel; where’s his rescuer? Even the strange doings of the third day don’t add up to the kind of victory to convince any but the converted.
This dialogue between the Jews and Jesus can’t be the excuse for anti-Semitism it has been. And Jesus can’t be playing our games: my Dad’ll thrash your Dad. What is on trial here isn’t one god against another but the very idea of paternity, the very idea that our belonging, our fatherland, our heritage is what marks us as God’s own. God’s Own are the sisters and brothers of Jesus in every generation and every land and every religion. It is our fraternity with Jesus that is all in all to us. Jesus undoes all other belongings, un-knits all other paternities, and unravels the web of our sacrificial violence. He undoes it here in words and seals those words with his body and blood on the altar of the cross.
March 20th, 2002
There’s a peculiar feeling about that first reading. I wonder about people who think so ill of God and yet want to draw close.
I thought, at first, I was disturbed by the way they place their disaster at God’s feet: ‘he has struck us down; he has torn us to pieces’. And that disturbance is at least partly recognition—I know the dark thread of my own unfounded fear of God. But what shakes me more, is that, even blaming God for their pain, the people go back for more—glutton for punishment, like an abused wife, like a confused hostage. ‘He has torn us to pieces’, they say, ‘but he will heal us … he doesn’t mean to hurt us really … maybe if we try harder, don’t annoy him quite so much, maybe’. And I wonder if, maybe, there isn’t a trace of that in me too … or in you. ‘If I do this, if I do that, then God will stop hurting me.’ And, if there is, what I need to hear I is here in the reading …
‘What am I to do with you, Rob? What I want is love, not sacrifice; relationship, not empty offering. Love, Rob’.
March 9th, 2002
“It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.” What does that teach us?
What about this: “The Word became flesh and lived among us; He came into his own and his own did not accept him.”
Words and stones: what do we build with them but lives? Lives and poems.
Words, stones, lives, poems: each has a gravity we do well to respect. Here’s Rainer-Maria Rilke:
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
(more…)
March 1st, 2002
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