Saturday, December 28, 2013

Connections to the Divine and our Souls

A Reflection for I Christmas    All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC December 29, 2013     Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Welcome to the 5th day of these 12 days of Christmas. I have been reading a lot of explanations for the symbols for the 12 days of Christmas and you pays your money and you take your choice. So many ways to explain things which we experience each day!
 
The Jesus movement tried to figure out what happened when they looked back at their experience. 
This Jesus was fully human who walked, talked, worked, sweated, belched, and bled like them, 
but there was something special about him, almost like a connection to God as if God were living 
inside him. He was indeed different when, on the third day after he died, he showed up in the space
 between them, nail holes and all.  How does anyone explain that? Sometimes when you can’t 
explain things with regular words, you use poetry and images. John tried that tack in the preface of 
his Gospel when he started off with these images:
 
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and 
without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,
 and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
 did not overcome it. . . . He was in the world, and the world came into being through him;
 yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did 
not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to
 become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the
 will of man, but of God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we 
have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. From his 
fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; 
grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, 
who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known. 
 
 John sees his experience with Jesus as if he is entering a new creation, using echoes of the creation 
story in Genesis where God speaks and there is light - the beginning of creation in that explosion of 
sound. John echoes that the Spirit of Christ is what God spoke and became flesh as Jesus and became 
light for all people.
  
I love those images, but I also have this other side of my brain that likes things to have some sort of 
logical pattern. Through those images and what I know about science, I am drawn to the Big Bang 
theory of creation - almost 14 Billion years ago, the explosion of the will of God to create a thing of 
joy, this universe of which we are a part. In this explosion, a tightly coiled ball of energy containing
 the core of all matter and spirit is unleashed to be what it is created to be. Galaxies, planets, rocks, 
gases, light, dark, animals, plants all evolve out of these building blocks. One human person's  DNA
 is 7% similar to bacteria, 15% to mustard greens, 36% to a fruit fly, 50% to bananas, 85% to a Zebra
 Fish, 98% similar to Chimpanzees, 99+% with other humans. Doesn't that explode your mind? 
We are so connected, one to another, at the basic level and to the world, the universe, the dream 
of God, in which we live and move and have our being.

We spend so much of our time trying to find the differences between people - things like color, religion,
 national origin, social and economic status - but God sees us all connected. I think what God does in 
the incarnation is to show us how interconnected we are with the rest of the creation. The divine comes
 and lives with us.  John uses the Greek word  SKENOO which means literally “Cast his tent among us”
. 
Here John is echoing the idea of the Hebrew Testament image of the “Tent of Meeting” the 
Tabernacle, where God lives with us in the Exodus of our lives. Imagine that God lives with us in the 
sacred space between us.

Do you remember what it was like when we first started to host “Room at the Inn” for the homeless 
 at our church? Some people were scared, but when we sat down together across a table for dinner or
 breakfast, we found people just like us.  They may have had more bad luck or made some bad 
decisions, but we were connected as fellow journeyers on our shared Exodus.


One time I was talking with a friend in jail,  and he said that he never thought that he would end up 
with people like those with whom he was sharing cells. He told me that he had come to see them as 
people to watch out for, but they were full human beings, and he was learning what it meant to love 
the enemy as yourself. If you see the fact that God loves the other as God loves you, then it seems 
appropriate to see them as connected to you. This is true on the level of depth psychology. We reach 
healing when we understand that everything we find difficult in others exists within our very selves. 
The more passion with which we “dislike”, the greater we are trying to distance ourselves from the 
thing we want to deny in us. When we deny the wholeness of who we are, the good and the bad, the 
light and the shadow, then we stop fully living and we just go about existing.   

In my Dream Group Training, we have been reading a lot of books.  Last month's book was by C. G.
 Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Jung was a Protestant Pastor's son and, for that reason, he 
saw more than enough of the shallowness of religion,  and one quote from the book stands out: “As 
far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the 
darkness of mere being.” Jesus  showed us what it is to fully live a human life and, as John says he 
was the light which the darkness could not overcome.

But Jesus did not just come to connect us to each other; his ministry is connect us to the divine, the
 numinous, that which is beyond our ability to define.  It is not our creeds (which divide us) that save
 us; it is the relationship to the mystery which Jesus lived into which he called us to follow. Again to 
steal from Jung, (actually from James Hollis' quote from Jung):
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling 
question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we 
avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real 
importance… The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has 
for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. … If we understand and feel that here in this
 life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, 
we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody 
that, life is wasted…. 
 
 This Christmas Season, let us go beyond the story of the baby in the manger and start living into a 
world in which we are interconnected to the infinite and the finite in ourselves and in others, and 
the Other.




Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Hope of Wonder: Christmas 2013

A Reflection for Christmas Day 2013
All Saints’, Southern Shores
Thomas Wilson
Hope of Wonder

On this Christmas Morning we hear the Gospel lesson of Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the shepherds, where Mary takes all these things in her heart and ponders them. Let us follow her example and take all this into our hearts and see if we can see with the eyes of each person here in this tableau.

What does Jesus see? I remember when I saw my grandchildren for the first time and their eyes grew wide as they tried to take it all in, but it is wonder and beyond taking in. How wonderful it would be if we could hold on to that sense of wonder. I am reminded of William Butler Yeats and this poem, Among School Children, where he, in his sixties, walks through a classroom and wonders about the children and how:
… the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.


I think Jesus saw all things through the eyes of wonder all of his life. He did not dismiss people into categories but saw in each person the presence of the Divine, as he himself was fully human and fully Divine. This is the secret of life - when we know that every stranger we see is full of mystery, every person we think we know has greater dimensions, everyone we love is full of surprise as we go deeper in relationship. To see all the earth as a precious gift is to walk on holy ground and make all things sacred. This is a Holiday when we focus on the things we received this day. Maybe we can really make it a Holy Day when we can see all that we have overlooked and see those things again with the eyes of wonder and thanksgiving.

I see myself reflected in the old Shepherd who comes to worship the Christ child. Part of me wants to say “I have seen it all before.” After all, I go through this every year and, to use Yeats’ phrase in the same poem, I have “sixty and more winters on [my] head.” Yet can I step away from the pose of knowing it all and enter into the hope that I am still trying to go deeper in the meaning of this event? Even if I had “sixty and more winters” still to go, would I ever understand the depth of mystery of how God loves me – and you - so much that God comes under our roofs and lives with us.

I see Mary looking at me, wondering if her son will turn out like me, this old shepherd. Again back to Yeats’ poem, and in stanza 5 he writes:
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Does Mary have dreams about her son and does she wonder about how he will turn out? The world can be an unfriendly place and every parent wants to protect their children from all the things that go bump in the night. Every pain and injury inflicted on my child by others I feel and wonder why I was not able to keep it from happening. Yet even in the blessing of birth there is pain; so it is in every day of life there will be opportunities to encounter the shadow and grow through it. We pray that each assault to our child’s psyche will heal and that they will be stronger for it. Here is Mary and her son is born in a stable, far from home, and laid in a manger, in an occupied country run by a tyrant. The cards seem stacked against him, and yet there is hope.

Finally there is Joseph, the one who is absolutely clueless, and yet he shows up and does the decent things, taking on burdens that are not his. Why does he do it? He does it because, clueless or not, he knows how to love and, if Woody Allen is correct and “80% of success in life is showing up”, then Joseph is a success because he shows up.
The message I get from my meditation on the Christmas tableau is to show up, love fiercely, protect the vulnerable, and look in wonder at all things.

May you Bless and be blessed this day and every day.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Telling Stories



A Sermon for Christmas Eve 2013 
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC                
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Isaiah 9:2-7                         Titus 2:11-14                       Luke 2:1-14
Telling Stories
“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” So begins the Gospel lesson for tonight which Luke wrote to give a history of the Jesus movement. History is not lists of chronological events with people, places and things, but the meaning of the events.

A couple months ago the Don and Catherine Bryan Cultural Arts Series sponsored a visit and lecture by David McCullough - author, historian, narrator, two time Pulitzer Prize winner, winner of the National Book Award, Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom - and one of my favorite authors. He was here also to research the Outer Banks and the work of the Wright Brothers for a book which will be published next year about the quest of fulfilling the dream of manned flight.  I like the way McCullough does history for, while the facts provide the skeleton, he also searches for the stories that people remember which provide the meat and sinews of the body of the work. Stories may or may not be factually correct, but they are the contemporary participants’ and observers’ attempts to find truth and meaning. 

Tonight we tell the old, old, story of Jesus and his birth. It is a story which we learned when we were children passed on to us over the years through the Gospel of Luke. It is a true story; the surface facts might be debatable, but it covers the deeper truth. The editor of the book of Luke takes the skeleton of facts and adds the memories and remembrances of people 80 years after the event of the birth of a son to a homeless couple In Bethlehem. First of all, the family told the story, Mary and Joseph to their children, nieces and nephews, who re-told them to the later generations of family, and not just blood family but the followers of Jesus who had joined the family. They passed it on through Luke, and it is passed on to us, told and re-told for 2000+ years to us members of the extended family.  Can you remember the facts of events 80 years before, or does memory and imagination combine to fill in the details. How about less than 80 years?

Let me tell you of something that happened 65 years and ten days ago, December 14, 1948, “when Truman was President of the United States and 
 
Salvador Castaneda Castro was el Presidente of El Salvador, on a coffee finca owned by the United Fruit Company on hills overlooking the Capital City of San Salvador in that Central American country.” How is that for a beginning of a story? Like the Luke story it lists the leaders of the countries involved but they were far away from where the story begins. We had just moved there a few months before and were waiting for our house in the city to be finished. Castenada Castro was a thug who had come to power when he helped organize a coup d’état 



against the previous fascist El Presidente from 1931-1944, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, under whom he had served as head of his secret police. After three years, a group of young army officers returned the favor and threw Casteneda Castro out with a coup. My parents’ family photo album has a snapshot of people at the finca looking down on puffs of smoke from one fortress firing cannons against another one in the city. There were many times when I was growing up when we would look at the album of life in Salvador and stories would be told about how the cannons mainly killed innocent civilians, and it was one of the reasons we were safely at the finca.  The story continues that my brother, Paul, who was almost three, was thrilled to see the sights and sounds of warfare, and my sister, Anne, who was four months old, was held by my father, or mother, or maid (depending on by who and when the story was told) - but I, almost two, slept through the entire revolution. “Sleeping through the revolution” became a line my brother would use to imply that I was clueless about something or another. “Excitement for noise and carnage” was a line I would throw at my brother. However, the reason the story would be told was to share a deeper truth that my parents wanted to pass on to us. That deeper truth was the fervent hope that, while the world may fall apart, as long as we were there for each other, we could get through anything. That, at times, fragile truth, not always upheld by surface facts, helped form our lives.  It was the Wilson myth; myths are not things that are not true, but stories, not always dependent on surface facts, which are used to explain a deeper reality. That theme runs through our understanding of ourselves in so many other stories the Wilsons would tell. It is also a theme that keeps coming forth in my dreams. Jung has said that “Myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths.”


The birth of Jesus is a fact, Caesar Augustus is a fact, Quirinius is a fact, Bethlehem is a fact; all are facts of where, when, and who, but details were added and expanded by generations of story tellers as they tried to give the event a meaning within the community of faith. Hear how Luke gives the facts, and then listen to the old, old story again and listen to the deeper truth that God is present in all the God-forsaken places of the world, even in human hearts. Listen to the truth that God keeps sending messages of love to all people. Hear the truth that time is not only measured in hours and minutes but in God’s time. Then tonight go home and, in your prayers, ask for help to listen to the truth that God is sending to your dreams. Tomorrow gather with the family and listen for the deeper meaning behind the stories that you will tell and have heard and live into that deeper truth. On Sunday come back to participate and become part of the story that God is telling at this place, this family, this church to fulfill God’s dream.

Merry Christmas, and tell the story by living into it.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Joseph of Nazareth: A Poem of his Reflection


This is a poem I wrote as this sermon and if you wish- you can hear me read it on You Tube     

A Reflection for IV Advent                                           All Saints Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC December 22, 2013                                                       Thomas E. Wilson Rector
Isaiah 7:10-16                     Romans 1:1-7                     Matthew 1:18-25
Joseph of Nazareth
A Poem of His Reflection
Facing my death giving thanks for life with you
Once all planned, and almost not to be in view.
Now remembering day your father my workshop came
Dragging you behind him, face full fury and yet shame.
“Joseph”, said he, “I speak with scattered pride to you
Of promises not honored which were meant to be true.
This worthless one’s mother news to me this day impart
Words that singed the proud peacock feathers of my heart.
She, this one, her mother says has missed two of monthly wound,
Red tent free, breaking the cleansing ancient compact with moon.
She, this one, stands before you splitting my trust from source
So now I ask if in kindness for me, not for her, you give divorce.”

And you cried, “Joseph it is not for lack of love for you.
But angel came and gave gift from the One who is true.”
“Silence”, your father thundered, “do not with blasphemy sin.
Blessed be he whose name cannot be said out loud or within
Your mad fantasies, soiled one. To distant cousin you shall go
Until confinement, so shame this family will not more undergo.”
Shaken to my core, images flooding eyes so that I burst out weeping,
Seeing my precious, my beloved one, in the arms of another sleeping.
To stop the clatter of demons of hurt, I screwed my courage and said
“Divorce I will grant for the one I love in quiet gentle way and she dead
To heart shall be, with deepest sadness dismantle I our marriage bed.”

You cried out, “Joseph never doubt my love for you is true.
I will to end of life be faithful to the NAME, our son and you.”
For weeks after you father dragging weeping and to cousin sent
I stuffed down all daylight thoughts, but nightly dreams present
Of mercy to be showed of which ignored I for months of three
Putting off decree decision; blaming withered fondness for see
each other not. Finally that night came when Mary’s Angel to bed
Visited, filling room and resident with dreaming of fearing dread.

This was no kindly shade of a domestic children’s sport
But the energy fullness of the unspoken NAME’s retort,
Lover spurned who wished to whisper reconciliation in my ear
But chose visions, tardy unearthly creatures to fill unbidden fear.

“Wake up! Arise! To the hill country go and there on bended knee
Ask forgiveness of a heart so filled with self pity pride, banning glee.
Beg her to return so that you might join in the NAME’s simple plan
To be a guide whose loving hand will help the infant child to stand,
To stand not only on his own feet but to stand under the glorious light
And be the light as each day with powers we summon strength to fight
The Demons of our own short comings, when lacking courage to love
We wrap ourselves in being right, how well I know, wrapped in glove,
So heavy we cannot feel the loss of being human love in this world
When in chaos all around us in faux righteousness we are whirled.

Oh, my wife, how humbled am I that you take me to husband back
When the Intimate Blessed One shown through you forgiving the lack
Of kindly love and then through that love shared we to make three
Outward and visible signs of the presence of the Holy purpose shone
As we combined our strengths to guide our son to be man full grown.
As with all of life, mine I do not understand but give love returned
Full measure and more in thanks for real chance to have life turned.
My beloved wife, bless me as I die as the NAME has blessed me all days
And nights and see me as in long ago safely in that old star’s blessed rays.
There will be another morning many years from now when rise the sun
Will shine on us again; you and me and the product of our love, our Son.



Saturday, December 14, 2013

Magnificat and red boxers



A Reflection for III Advent All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, N.C. December 15, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Today we sang the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, who sings a song of thanksgiving, magnifying the Lord, after an Angel speaks to her and tells her of God’s plan for her. The song she sings is not really her own, but it is her version of an ancient song called the Song of Hannah found in the book of Samuel. It is sung by an old woman with thanksgiving when she is told by a priest during a worship service that God would answer her prayers and she would become pregnant. Two different women - one old who feels as if life has passed her by and the other who has just gotten engaged and is full of hope for the future. For Hannah, the good news will be an answer to years of prayer, and for Mary, the news will be troubling since she is not yet married. They are divided in time by 1000 years of history, divided and yet united in the song they sing. The uniting theme is that they are both loved, and they are asked to bring the spirit of God into themselves and, out of that willing love, bring forth love, bring forth hope, bring forth joy, bring forth justice, bring forth peace. Hannah’s son will be Samuel, who is the one who will anoint David as the King, and Mary’s son will be Jesus, who will be called the King of the Jews. 
 
When Scripture tells us stories of the past, those stories speak to God’s people. The point of these stories is not to give history lessons or to be collectors of trivia or adiaphora – matters of indifference, to stay on the literal level, to stay on the surface - but the point of faith is to look deeper, to go to the core. In the Magnificat, when we look at the core, we find the symbolic center which sings that God rejoices, has joy, in us, and we rejoice, have joy, in God, and in this relationship the world is made a better place. Messages from the Divine are not meant to be stored in one’s own private treasure chest of memory to be hoarded for private spirituality but to be used to change the world.

When Luke remembers this story, the editor is asking the listener to take the song into her or his heart and ask “How can I open myself to the Divine message and give hope, joy, justice and peace?”. Each of us is invited to sing, “The Lord has shown favor on me, I have been blessed beyond all that I deserve; therefore how can I bring forth blessings.” 
 
Divine messages are communicated in many ways - in nature, in the holy space between people, in liturgy, in direct spiritual experiences of visions, in the study of other people’s experiences and dreams as in the Bible, and in thousands of years of other experiences. Divine messages come in so many ways. The word Angel means “messenger” and is one way that messages are delivered. 
 
Most of you know I was gone last week as Pat and I were at the Kanuga Conference Center attending our second of six Intensive Training sessions for becoming Dream Group Leaders. We believe that dreams are one of the ways that the Divine speaks to us through symbols. Dreams have many details and sometimes you want to find out what the details mean, to do analysis of each thing, but the problem is that keeps us in our head and on the surface. What we are learning is that, when we gather in a Dream Group, we are not asked to show how bright we are and interpret every little facet of someone else’s dream, but to look deeper and to take the dream upon ourselves and find how it speaks to our souls, our deep spirits.

Let me give you an example of a dream I had that the group worked with me on and took into themselves. I call it “Red Boxers”
and I dreamed it as we were into the stewardship campaign, which is a stress-filled time for clergy, and getting ready for the dream training, and looking at 5 years from now when I will have to retire. All of these issues are anxiety producers, and we believe that dreams are meant for our health and healing:

I am in Western North Carolina doing a tour of streams and rivers on which to canoe, and this is against the backdrop of the Election of a Bishop, so there is lots of buzzing about the election ( there is no election in Western North Carolina- but I am on the search committee for a new Bishop in East Carolina). The bus that we are on is driving around mountains with lots of beautiful views. We get out and wade in the waters. We stop and get out to pick up some treats made out of honey. The scene shifts, and I find myself entering a church because I am subbing for a priest in a communion service. I look down and see that I am dressed in red - bright red - boxer shorts. Did I feel so comfortable that in the wading I stripped down to boxers? I don’t know and I feel a bit confused, but no one seems to comment. I go into the chapel and find that it has not been set up. There is no chasuble, so I am helped into a small woman’s or child’s poncho with only a small opening. I am not sure that my head can fit through, and it barely makes it. There is no stole, but they take a lace table cloth and gather it together, and it is bulky and clumsy. As I move around with it I am knocking some things over. People come in but not to attend the service - they are coming in to have lunch around tables, and there are waiters taking orders and customers talking and laughing with each other, and I am doing the service. There is no bread and no wine – so we use some coke and maple sugar candy figures.
I wake up.

On the surface we can look at water, which is a symbol for the unconscious, and going to Western North Carolina to go deeper into the unconscious. I was fed honey like John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Stripping down to boxers can mean getting rid of all I hide behind, being vulnerable. In the personal unconscious, the color red can mean passion, love, or danger for, since red is the color of blood, it can mean something that will cost dearly, a sacrifice. Yet in the collective unconscious, red is a color of happiness. That is why Chinese restaurants use so much red in their decorations. In the dream, I am still a Priest and I do the service, but I can no longer fit my very self, my theology, my understanding into the narrow confines of standard worship. I am clumsy and silly looking; can they really afford me, do I really belong?

Dreams don’t come to tell us what we already know but to tell us what we need to know and to give clues to find the way for healing and wholeness. If that is so, then the deeper message for me in this dream is that I am too worried about the church, for the community has gathered together and is being fed despite me. I am not the church; to the contrary, it will continue without me. It is God who feeds me and feeds the congregation. My actions seem to be like those of a woman beginning the second trimester of a pregnancy, when clothes no longer fit and she feels clumsy. What is it that I have inside me that the Divine has planted that I need to carry, nurture, and bring forth? What I am called to do in the meantime is to be faithful and point to the work we are called to do and to the source of all of our blessings. Like Mary, I am to go deeply into myself and give what the Divine has given to me. The deeper message is to sing the Magnificat; 
 
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; *
    for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
    the Almighty has done great things for me,
    and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him *
    in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
    he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
    and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
    and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
    to Abraham and his children for ever.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: *
    as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.
 
That is one of my dreams; take it and make it yours. Take Mary’s and Hannah’s visits with the Divine and make them yours. How are you blessed, having your pride scattered? How are you feeding the hungry with Good things, sharing mercy, hope, justice and love? How are you magnifying, praising, rejoicing? Are you open to hearing God, taking the Divine inside yourself, and then ready to give out of yourself in joy?