Chattering Prayer

 

A Poem/Reflection for 20th Sunday after Pentecost                     St. Mary's Episcopal, Gatesville, NC October 23, 2022                                                                          Thomas E Wilson Guest Presider

Luke 18:9-14

Chattering Prayer

This week, I have been reading reviews and interviews of Jon Meachum's new book, And Then There Was Light, a history of Abraham Lincoln, with special emphasis on his views of slavery and emancipation. Lincoln grew up morally opposed to slavery, but he was also a leader of a divided nation, who needed to walk a thin line between toleration of, and abhorrence to, its practice; seeking guidance in prayer, as he put it, “to do right as God gave him to see the right”. Lincoln's earlier hopes for a solution was to chatter about sending black people back to Africa, which is a way to avoid a moral question, but it will not get rid of the shadow of slavery. Yet, he chose to come to grips with that shadow, pull it into the nation's light and tries to find a new way to live as a community. However, while slavery was ended officially; its shadow lived on.

Martin Luther King Jr, in February 1962, finished a speech on the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, a hundred years after the Emancipation with that shadow of slavery: racial bigotry and prejudice, still alive, by quoting a Black slave preacher: “We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was.”

In today's Gospel lesson. Jesus tells a story about two men, divided people, who come to the Temple, two thousand years ago to pray. Two thousand years, two people who ain't what they wanna be, but I know both of those men, here in North Carolina, here in the 21^st Century. Intimately! I see them every day in the mirror.

On my best days, I go before God and I get very quiet. I listen to my breathing. I am aware of the oxygen coming into my body on each breath. I am aware that the Oxygen is something I cannot produce. It is a gift, a gift from the power greater than myself. It goes deep into my lungs. The oxygen enters into the capillaries and then into the blood stream where is goes to every organ of my body. Along the way, the oxygen gives life to the blood. It also picks up the carbon molecules, the trash of the blood and brings it back into the lungs where, on each breath exhaling, it breathes out the poison of carbon dioxide. Breathing in God's gift of life and setting free from my body the poisons I carry inside me. If I refuse to acknowledge that poisons are inside me, then I begin a downward spiral. God is not up there, somewhere, high in the furthest Heavens; she is as close to me as my heart and lungs and blood and every part of my body and thoughts, and I haven't done a thing to earn it. Living is a grace filled blessing. I ain't what I ought to be, ain't what I want to be, but I am what I am, a man who doesn't deserve such love freely given, pouring over me and through me, abundantly.

On my less than good days, I am like the Pharisee in the story and am filled with chatter. One of my beloved niece's is a Buddhist and she relates that when she begins to enter in meditation that the biggest problem is the amount of chatter in her mind that she has to deal with. It is a pattern that happens to all of us. When faced with ultimate truth and reality, we chatter about things that are passing away. The Bible talks about this in the story of Elijah who wants to hear God listen to his chatter about the pity party he is throwing. There is an earthquake and there is fire and God is not heard in those events, but finally Elijah hears God in the silence. Like Elijah, Jesus also had to get away from the temptation of chatter. I chatter because I assume that God is not as bright as I am and I want to avoid the silence. My chatter is about all the things I want fixed. There are people who need to be fixed, good and proper. There are bank accounts that need refilling. There are desires I want met and exceeded promptly. I assume that God owes me. God ought to thank his lucky stars for me. After all, I am a priest, a damned good one. I do my bit keeping this universe running smoothly. I give God his marching orders and I go over them more than once just to make sure this dim divinity gets it right. I send God on his own little way. I have to tell you I only do that on the days of the week ending in the letter “Y”.

We are in the middle of an election cycle right now and if you have a fondness for chatter you will thousands of opportunities every day as you listen to ads full, as Shakespeare says, “of sound and fury signifying nothing”. You will see and hear a lot of shadow work.

Chatter usually happens as a defense mechanism when we are aware that we don't want to accept something; like our own shadow. The shadow is all those things that we don't want to accept in our own being. We deny that we have those traits, trying to push them down, out of our existence and thoughts. One way to do that is to deny that they are in us and and therefore projecting them on to another person as alien to our own pure being. The Pharisee sees his own shadow in the Sinner. He chatters to his God that he is absolutely free of that shadow and pleads for God to punish that sinner. If you want to get a hint about your own shadow; look at the traits of people that most provoke negative energy in you. The thing about your shadow is that it is always with you. As the song goes; “Me And My Shadow”

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to
And when it's twelve o'clock
We climb the stair
We never knock
For nobody's there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue. 

“And then there was light” is a phrase from the Genesis  story of the new creation. For us when we 

allow the divine light  into our chattering darkness, then we are able to claim our shadow and be free. 

And at the same time: “We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna 

be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was.” 

Chattering Prayer

“I ain't who I ought be”

is the echo I hear in prayer

when there is no one there,

to point out what's to see.

I'd prefer no one else notices;

so I point out the one who

I love to hate, thru and thru,

on whom I want the focus is.

It's easier to have scapegoats

upon whom I can lay my sins,

except underneath; we're twins,

words coming out other throats.

The one I want to hate and see;

is really only just a mirror of me.

Σέσωκέν: Soul Made Whole

 

A Reflection and Poem for XVIII Pentecost            St. Thomas Episcopal, Ahoskie, NC

October 9, 2022                                                        Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 Psalm 66:1-11 2 Timothy 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19

Σέσωκέν: Soul Made Whole

Last week in the Lesser Feasts and Fasts, we remembered William Tyndale, who in 1526 translated much of the Bible into English. Throughout the centuries in England parts of the Bible had been translated into Old and Middle English, but the church grew leery of lay people reading scripture and forming their own opinions. It reached a crisis point when John Wycliffe issued a translation which was banned and a couple years after his death in 1384, his body was dug up and burned as a heretic because he said that scripture should be trusted rather that the Popes. The fear of the church leaders was that if people read the Bible they might use it to make changes in the established order of church and state. In 1401 under the reign of Henry IV, heresy was re-defined not only as a theological offense handled by the church but a crime enforced and punished as treason by the state.

Tyndale wanted to translate the Bible so that an English plowboy could understand the words of scripture. Tyndale was declared an outlaw and heretic for his push for translation and had to hide in Europe away from the wrath of Henry VIII. In Germany he came into contact with Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German and Tyndale turned his exile as an opportunity to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale finished his Greek New Testament translation and some of the Hebrew Testament, and Henry VIII banned its publication in England in1530. In 1536, Tyndale was betrayed, tried and put to death by the Roman Catholic authorities in Europe for heresy for translating the Bible.

Henry VIII, in the meantime, had picked a fight with the Roman Catholic church and was excommunicated in 1538. In 1539 Henry declared himself the Head of the Church in England, and had an English Bible, called the Great Bible, to be read in English churches. The New Testament of the Great Bible was basically Tyndale's. In 1549 the First Book of Common Prayer was written and used standardized spellings versions of Tyndale's Early Modern translations. These standardized versions were brought forward in the 1611, King James Version of Scripture.

I want to use one verse from Luke's Gospel for today: 17:19 when Jesus says to the 10^th Leper, the Samaritan leper: “And he sayde vnto him: aryse and goo thy waye thy faith hath made the whoale.” Tyndale was translating the Greek word, “Σέσωκέν”- “sesoken” as “made whole”. In this last Century, modern English Biblical translators, wanting translations to be easily understood by today's readers translated “ sesoken” as “made well”. Not a bad translation; but I want to argue that while doctors make us well: the goal of God is not just make us well, but to make us whole, body and soul complete. Whenever I pray for someone to be healed. I envision, yes, a relief from symptoms, but beyond that to an opening into a new life. In this Gospel story for today, all ten of the Lepers were “made well” but only one was recorded as being “made whole”,

Lets take a look at what life was like for a Leper in the time of Jesus, and in most of human history. People who were lepers were seen as “impure” people who must be isolated from the community. Leprosy, which modern science sees as a bacterial infection, the Hebrew testament of Leviticus saw as a sign of God's displeasure, a spiritual disease, if you will. If you had the disease you were to be cut off from your family and any way of making a living; a social death from the community for the rest of your life. Many lived with a raging anger against God and God's representatives and the idea of a just God was seen as a sick delusion. Living away from the protection of the law; there was no protection from stronger human predators. Longing for some sort of human companionship, many lepers connected with fellow sufferers, like the group of 10 in the Gospel story for today. Food was made available by the variable acts of charity, or by family compassion, thrown at you from a distance. If you had no one to provide charity to you, you soon died; cut off from your past, in a miserable present and no hope for a future. The one advantage is that you knew that there was no reason for hope. Knowing the boundaries of no hope, helped you to try to make yourself as comfortable as possible.Your only way out would be if you appeared before a Priest, the very class of person who pronounced judgements of banishment from normal human society. If the Priest examined you and pronounced you “clean” from God's punishment then you were able to live into a new present. However, you carried the past wherever you went. Even if you returned to your old community; many of the former neighbors and family would regard you with suspicion that God's displeasure might return and so the present and future were always contaminated by the past. It was hard to believe in a loving God

The closest modern situation to being a Leper would be as an inmate serving a life sentence without parole in a prison. It is a time when your past is painfully irrelevant, the present is full of threat and any future is never in sight. With a fear of stronger predators, there are gangs in the prisons, exploitation is a daily occurrence and casual cruelty is the norm. It is hard to believe in a loving God. Almost every prisoner says upon release that they would never go back in as an inmate. However, according to the North Carolina Justice Center, North Carolina’s three-year recidivism rate is 40% and nationwide there is five year recidivism rate of 70 %. People do not plan to go back in, but they have learned on a daily basis that fellow human being are cruel and God is indifferent. They do not want to go back but at least prison is something that you can used to, a kind of home. When the state will tell you that you have paid your debt you leave, but you are far from being “made whole”.

Being made whole is to examine one's life, past and present; it is a journey, one step at a time. Writer, Brendan Gill. said, "If the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined past is not worth possessing; it bears fruit only by being held continuously up to the light, and is as changeable and as full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, as the future."

I think of people who I have worked with over the years who have addictions, bad enough to go into treatment programs. According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 40 to 60 percent of people who receive substance use disorder treatment relapse at some point afterward.  Relapse is part of the understanding of the disease; you can get a certificate of completion but recovery is a life long, daily work in progress. The 12 step program for addicts to move toward wholeness is:

Step 1 We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Step 4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7 Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8 Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step 10 Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

About 30 + years ago, I was working in a church in Virginia and I scolded my parish that they were not getting involved enough in the community; doing ministry outside the church walls.. I told them that I would take a tithe of my time as their Rector, paid for their tithe money, four hours, one afternoon a week, and volunteer in the community. Paul's, my older brother's, life fell apart due to addiction and not wanting to admit or work on the addiction. In shame as his life was falling apart, he committed suicide. One of my parishioners in the church was a counselor at the local treatment center and invited me with my earlier Master In Social Work degree to join him for four hours a week to co-lead treatment groups as a way of my own healing my grief, of working to be “made whole”.

A couple months ago, one of former parishioners in the parish from which I retired three years ago, whose wedding I had performed, asked me to help bring a deeper spiritual dimension in the treatment center they started. Each Monday morning, I visit that local addiction treatment facility and co-lead a group of residents on a relationship with a Power Greater than themselves. The problem is not about quitting the uses of their addictions but about beginning the journey to become whole. A couple weeks ago, with today's lesson in mind, I asked them if they could give thanks for the time when their lives finally fell apart for them, breaking apart any denial, telling them they needed to go into treatment. It is only when we realize that our lives are a mess that we can begin the journey to wholeness.

In the Gospel lesson for today, nine of the 10 Lepers go blithely away to go back to their old life, and they may or may not fit back in. They are cured of their physical illness but only one of them realized that he had a spiritual disease at the core of their physical malady.. Only one of them was made whole to become reconciled to God and fellow human beings. The journey to wholeness begins by learning how to give thanks and enter into a relationship to a power greater than oneself. The 10^th Leper had a Spiritual awakening. The 10^th Leper began the relationship by giving thanks. It was a journey of faith and Jesus told him that his faith had made him whole. Jesus made the others well but the 10^th Leper found his faith had made him whole.

Faith is one of those words I want to change from a noun to a verb. In Wilson's world, “Faith” is not something you have as an object you own and keep locked up, but something you do each day of your life. If I ran the world we would say, “I faith”, “He or She faiths”, “We are faithing”. Faith is the lookin not at creeds, but at the examination of conscience of living in community where the space between each of is Holy Space. We are made whole by connecting to our neighbor, our deeper self, and the Power Greater than ourselves.

Σέσωκέν: Soul Made Whole

When in a somewhat comfortable trap,

at least knowing where boundaries are,

rules and norms, not needing to look far

into the future, past; or any reality crap.

Then, longed for, but unexpected, doors

are opening into a new time and space;

with a choice to feel sun on your face,

or longing to a return to same old chores.

Are we ready to live redeeming that past,

rejoicing in present and hoping in a future;

bound tight together with a spiritual suture,

working each new day in a recovery to last?

The hard truth is that we are only made whole,

not by relieving symptoms, but a healing of soul

St. Francis 2022

A Poem and Reflection for a Feast of St. Francis                    St. Andrew's Church, Nags Head, NC

Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider                                           October 2, 2022

St Francis 2022

My brothers and sisters, I have a confession to make. Lets get it out of the way first. I am probably the only person in this building to have had a series of arguments in my head with people over political issues. I know that is shocking to you, and you will probably ask your Rector never to invite me back. My own political persuasion is that I think that Bernie Saunders, the Senator from Vermont, is much too conservative. I don't usually tell parishioners my own political persuasion, and I usually keep my mouth shut. However, there is a part of me that wants to “straighten people out” by pointing out how foolish they are to think differently that me. I usually stop when I remember the warning of Jesus when he said that if I were to call someone “Raca”, the New Testament Greek word for “Fool”, then I am committing murder in my heart, as part of a crusade to “fix” people.

Aldous Huxley warned : “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treat.”

“Crusades for good causes”, and more than we would like to admit; they keep happening and often with the blessing of the religious institutions. Francis of Assisi was involved in a couple crusades. He wanted to be a soldier and he signed up for the Fourth Crusade to “battle for Christ, reconquer Jerusalem, and to allow Christians to take back the fabled True Cross of Jesus.” However, he had a malarial attack and had to return to Assisi. When he recovered, he signed up to join the battles against the neighboring town of Perugia in Umbria. He was not a good soldier and was taken prisoner and thrown into a dungeon. He father had to pay an excessive ransom to get him out. Francis, knowing that being a soldier was a lousy career path for him, and hating his father's occupation as a cloth merchant, did not know what to do. In his confusion, he had a conversion to follow Christ.

Fifteen years later, The Fifth Crusade was declared after the 4^th Crusade ended in disaster. The only thing the 4^th Crusade was for Christians to kill other Christians as the Roman Catholic forces laid siege to the Christian Eastern Orthodox Capital of Constantinople and replaced the Latin Rite as the official religious services and Italian merchants got richer. That is the thing about so-called religious Crusades; there is always more than one agenda. Francis felt the call to join that 5^th Crusade, but not as a soldier but as a follower of Christ to being peace and converting the Egyptian Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.

The plan was for the 5^th Crusade was to invade Egypt, overthrow the Sultan and and capture the “Holy Land” from the south. The Crusade had some good military leaders but they were constantly overruled by the Papal Legate. Which made the invasion more of a nuisance that a real threat. The Sultan had already offered to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, return that city to the Crusaders, and pay them some money to get rid of them. However the Papal legate wanted a complete victory and annihilation of Muslims. He wanted a battle to the death. By the time Francis arrived in Egypt, the Christian army of about 100,000 men was trapped on the banks of the Nile after al-Malik al-Kamil had opened the dykes and flooded the area. The Nile was bloated with the bodies of Christians and Muslims. Disease was rampant. Yet, Francis got safe passage on his way to the camp of the Sultan. The Papal Legate was hoping the Sultan would relieve him of this meddlesome Monk.

Francis began by his standard greeting; “May the Lord give you peace.” The Sultan replied “wa alaikum assalam”, which means “and upon you be peace.” There was discussion; the Sultan repeated his offers for the Christian army to leave with some dignity and politely refused to convert to Christianity. The Sultan's advisors wanted the Sultan to kill this meddlesome intruder, but al-Kamil refused, saying to Francis “I will never condemn you to death-for that would indeed be an evil reward to bestow on you, who conscientiously risked death in order to save my life before God, as you believe.” The Sultan's guests stayed for a week.and al-Malik politely refused to be converted to Christianity. The war was not stopped as the Papal Legate wanted total victory; and as the war went on he got total defeat. Sultan al-Malik allowed the defeated army safe retreat back to Europe. Francis was not converted to being a Muslim, al-Malik was not converted to being a Christian, but there was peace between two men who disagreed. Two people who saw in the other the facts that they shared the underlying truth that they were both created in the image of God, and that the space between them was Holy Ground.

There is another story of Francis. It is related in a book called “The Little Flowers”, a collection of the popular legends compiled about a century and a half after Francis' death. One story is the “Wolf of Gubbio”. a municipality near Assisi in the Province of Umbria. Scholars suggest that the core story of Francis going to Gubbio to offer his help to the residents who feared a bandit in the hills, known as the “Wolf of Gubbio” The core story might have been that Francis saw the Bandit as a fellow human being , a thief, but who was afraid of not having enough food. The way the story evolved was that the “Wolf of Gubbio” became a real wolf who was raiding the sheep folds and later developed a taste for humans. The leaders of the town had a plan to form a large group of villagers to hunt down and kill the wolf. Francis feared that many people would be injured trying to kill the wolf. Francis offered to search for the wolf and talk with him as a fellow creature of God. As Francis entered the hill country, the wolf spotted him and came aggressively up to Francis. Francis knew no fear and began to speak to the wolf. He said that he knew the wolf had been injured and was unable to hunt in the wild and was obsessed with having enough to eat. The wolf shared his fears with Francis. Francis suggests an option that he accompany the Wolf to the town and Francis would ask if the inhabitants would, out of mercy, feed the wolf. Francis and the wolf walked to the edge of the village , where a fear filled crowd met them with threats of violence. Francis asked for mercy, that gift from God deep inside all people created in the image of God. The villagers agreed reluctantly and the wolf was fed.The children grew fond of the wolf and would ride on his back. When the wolf grew old and died, the heart broken members of the town put up a statue of their friend, the wolf, a fellow creature of God.

Francis, in life and legend, saw Holy Ground in the space between he and fellow images and creatures of God. What do you see?

This Tuesday night is in the Jewish Tradition “Yom Kippur”, 10 days after the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah. The tradition is that God has written in the Book what will happen to each person in the coming year. However, in God's mercy, each of us has 10 days to pray that mercy will be given to ourselves and others, so the book can be changed. Since Yom Kippur this year falls on October 4th, the day of the Feast of St. Francis, may I suggest that in the next two days that we pray for our enemies and the ones with whom we disagree, for they also occupy the same holy ground we do.

St. Francis- 2022

Standing across from an enemy, saying

“You and I do not agree, but the space

between us is filled and growing apace,

with spiritual energy without our praying,

or wishing it so, due to centuries of shalom,

salaam and peace uttered by our forbearers,

sharing loving hearts instead of sour glares,

making it possible to claim that safe home.”

St. Francis shows us with Sultan al-Kamil

from Egypt, wolves from Gubbio or fathers

grieving sons by claiming them as brothers

sharing words of respect; not threats to kill.

The space between us is watered by the tears

cleansing from fear and hate throughout years.

Bridges 2022

 

A Poem and Reflection for Pentecost XV              St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Ahoskie, NC

September 18, 2022                                                 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider

BRIDGES 2022

The Gospel lesson for today, Luke, 16:1-13, is a parable that Jesus talks about an audit of a manager who has cooked the books, the financial records, of the owner. Jesus did not do moral fables, he did parables The difference between a fable, an imaginary story where the point is the moral lesson made, and a parable is that the parable contains an action showing God's freedom and the point is in the twist at the end.

If this story had been a standard moral fable, the manager would have been locked up until he repaid every last cent, proving that crime doesn't pay. In the parable, the master laughs, there is no punishment; for the point of the story is not about what you get but who you are. What kind of life are you leading? Is the point of your life to be successful. or is it to be faithful? The audit is not about money but about character. The audit is an invitation to walk onto the bridge to a new kind of living.

I live on the Outer Banks and we have just completed yet another Tourist season, when most of the cars in the Western Hemisphere, filled with people, cross the bridges to pay a small fortune to taste what we residents have every day. Many residents complain about the influx. There are others, in the hospitality business, who know that they must make a profit in this short season to make a living. This year has been rough because the usual influx of summer lower wage workers from foreign countries needed to keep the businesses profitable, have not been available for several years for various reasons, but are not available now, because there is no place the workers can afford to stay since rents are so high. You have to keep wages low if you have any hope for making money. Before the year is up, every employer is going to undergo an audit to determine if she or he can open again next year.

Everything is more expensive. There was an article in the local paper that reminded us who live on the Outer Banks, as if we residents didn't already know, that once you cross the bridges onto the islands, gasoline prices will rise about 40 cents a gallon. The State Attorney Generals in previous years at the urging of candidates for public office, investigated if this was illegal “price gouging”. The rulings were that this is the cost of doing business in the reality of a tourist economy.

We undergo audits all the time, and the audits are always changing, depending on where we are in life.. Playwright, Samuel Beckett said:“In the afterlife, we’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.”

Ego Psychologist Erik Erikson saw life as a series of Eight milestones of Psychosocial development, from infancy through death, which give bridges for who we might become in life. For instance, the first stage of psychosocial development is the time of infancy, from birth to 18 months. There the struggle is between “Trust vs. Mistrust”. Does the world have a welcoming feel to it for the infant? Is there a sense of knowing that there is a certain order that you can trust? Or is it full of mistrust where you are not sure that you can count on anyone? Each child is doing an audit of the world in which she or he lives, everyday; if you hurt; will someone, come to ease the pain? If you are hungry will someone feed you? If you are frightened, will someone comfort you? How far is the infant going to go on the bridge to the next milestone of the Toddler; Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt.

The last stage of Erikson's Psychosocial development is the time, between age 65 to death, the struggle between “Integrity vs. Despair”. This is the stage my wife and I operate out of. We are in the autumn audit of our lives. The view from this Bridge is to ask; “Did we waste the time in how, or where we lived? Are we bitter that some parts of life has passed us by? What do we do with all this stuff? Is this bridge, finally a time for us to get rid of the baggage of not forgiving the sins of others. Are we where we are supposed to be??

40 years ago in Seminary, I read an article in a theological journal about a proposal to build an escalator to make it easier for tourists to get to the top of the Schwedagon Pagoda of the Eight Sacred Hairs of the Buddha in Rangoon, now Yangon, in Burma, now Myanmar in Asia. This was an article that explores two different ways of pilgrimage. The Western way is the Holy moment is the arrival at the person, place or thing being held in worship and strike that off the Life-To-Do list. The Eastern way is the Journey itself is the purpose where the Holy is experienced in each moment from the beginning to the return. The Western solution in the proposal was to get more people to the Holy Spaces in the least amount of time. The Eastern response was slow it all down, taking one holy step at a time, one holy, liturgical, breath at a time. It is like the question of when does communion begin with God in the Holy Communion Service on Sunday Morning at 11:15 AM the moment of getting the wafer of bread? Or does the Holy begin when one gets out of bed on Monday morning, when one wakes up that morning in each step, each breath, that is taken for the rest of the week?

From the reading of that article I vowed to take each pilgrimage as if the journey is more important than the destination. Is the spiritual life found in the bridges we are on? I wanted to walk barefoot up the steps of each of the four terraces of the Schwedagon Pagoda of the Eight Sacred Hairs of the Buddha in Yangon in Myanmar; one step at a time, up four different staircases, where each step is a liturgical step, and one breath at a time where each breath a liturgical breath.

Yet, there was also a desire for fulfillment of an adolescent fantasies sparked by reading Kipling's poem Mandalay. I dreamed of being in Burma, 300 kilometers South to watch Kipling's “Dawn come up like Thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!” or at least “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea./There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;”. With the present political climate in the place once called Burma; I don't think that is going to happen in my lifetime. But who knows? I can live with the fact that there is no Burma girl who thinks o' me.” Also, I now live on the second floor of a Condo where there are 33 steps, in four runs of: 7 steps and 8 steps, from the parking level to the 1^st floor, 9 steps and 9 steps from the first floor to the second floor. I average a climb up and down about four times a day, 264 steps up, 264 steps down. Two of those trips are walking the dog and usually I am focused on the dog. The other two times, I have learned to slow down, and each step can be a liturgical step, each breath a liturgical breath, to center myself, but I usually have shoes on. And I know “there's a once Toledo girl who waits for me”, who takes the elevator. 

 

This last week, “slow walking over bridges, one step at a time”, is on the news in the Britain, with the long lines of people passing by the casket of the Late Queen Elizabeth, Some are tourists, who want to check off their pilgrimage to do list. However, for many others it is a spiritual pilgrimage to make meaning in their lives. Each step is a liturgical step of facing the preciousness of life, the inevitability of its ending and the hope of something beyond this life.

In this time of Psycho-social development, it is important to come to grips with our relationship with death? Are we afraid of death? I can try to be careful, but we are all on those bridges to keep those Appointments in Samarra; wherever that Samarra may be. In the meantime, none of us are perfect and there is always a litany of mistakes and things “we have done that we ought not to have done, and not done those things which ought to have done. It is one of the reasons we do do confession usually during the Sunday morning service. Examinations of Conscience are not attempts to uncover shame, but to provide a time for an audit of one's days, on the Bridges of life.

In our kitchen at home, there is sometimes hanging a kitchen towel, showing an alluring sexy woman, with a come hither smile saying: “I am going to Hell in every religion.” It is a kind of gift given by friends of the Minister's spouse, so she/he won't take the responsibility too seriously, and to remind her/him that we are, both saints and sinners, in the hands of a loving God, who offers forgiveness for all things.

So, how are your audits coming? Remember, they are graded on an unbelievable curve.

BRIDGES 2022

Magic lines at center of the Wright Memorial Bridge

mark the difference of forty cents a gallon for fuels

from those who are just plain standard visitor fools

and those pegged as neighbors who don't cross the ridge.

It is the casual exploitation of people who are strangers,

you don't ever have to see again due to market forces,

versus awkward contact of neighbor in the daily courses,

like the Temple treatment of pilgrims by money changers.

Every moment and person is a gift not to be squandered,

with less than the full honor as precious gift of the Divine

as if we were placed here together visiting a Holy Shrine

when we into this time and space serendipitously wandered.

Gospel today reminds me, as a manager; I squander so much

by holding back on what I was supposed to cherish, not fudge.

September 11 Keeps Coming

 

A Poem and Reflection On the Occasion of Remembrance of 9/11       September 11, 2022

St. Thomas Episcopal, Ahoskie, NC                                                       Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Presider

Isaiah 61:1-4     Psalm 31:1-5,19-21         Romans 8:31-39          Matthew 5:1-10

September 11 Keeps Coming.

20^th Century Anthropologist and Philosopher, Loren Eiseley, writing in a collection of essays named, Star Thrower, published before his death in 1977, reflected “Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.” Another way of saying this is in his 1957 book, The Immense Journey, writing about the evolution of humans, imagined about the development away from mere stimulus then response, to stimulus, then reflection about a deeper meaning and then response.

“For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.”

The contemplation of self and hearing “with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds”, is what is behind the lessons for today, and the remembrance of the events of, reflection about, and response to, September 11, 2001, as a religious pilgrimage. It begins with a break of the stimulus and the response. The primal response to a stimulus of hurt is to hurt back; if you are attacked, then you immediately run away or need to do a bigger counter attack. “Don't mess with me.” If you are a religious dilettante, you can find justification of “an Eye for and Eye.” But as Gandhi and the Dalai Lama remind us; “An eye for and eye brings us to where we are all blind.” If you take the word “religion” seriously, you understand that the word “religion” comes from the Latin word “ligare” meaning to “bind together'”; literally to bind together again, to bind oneself to others, to creation to something beyond oneself.

However, the interruption between the stimulus, be it pleasure or pain, and the primal response is when there is a contemplation, an awareness of “the whisper of the wind”, the mystery outside oneself which we sometimes call “God”, or part of the “religious pilgrimage” of human life. This time of contemplation which interrupts the primal action of stimulus to response is the time when we ask ourselves important questions before we choose to respond.

These questions include:

If God has given us direction to love our neighbor and to take care of God's creation as the core of a religious pilgrimage; how does that apply to this situation?

The person(s) who did this stimulus; who is he, she or them?

What was behind the stimulus given? What led up to it?

Was it an accident?

Is forgiveness an option?

Will my response hurt, damage, or help others?

Will my response be helpful to bring about a reconciliation or a deepening of a relationship?

Where is the Holy Space?

Will my response break open my heart or shut it tight?

What have we learned from similar situations?

The lessons speak Good news to us in the mist of broken times. The Prophet Isaiah speaks to bind up the broken hearted. The Psalmist calls God her “Tower of Strength”. The Apostle Paul thunders out:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Jesus, in the Gospel lesson from Matthew, has had crowds of sick and broken people come to him looking for healing. They are heart broken and each living creature is contemplating themselves and hearing with their “unaccountable loneliness” the voice of Jesus when he stands up and speaks to them to tell them how blessed they are, for the living God is in the sacred space between them and their illnesses.

19 centuries later, in what is now Poland, Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, counseled, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” This is a continuation of when students centuries before asked, “Why did God write all the laws on our hearts and not in them?” The earlier Rabbis said that we can only understand those laws when the heart is broken open, allowing the truth of them to rest in our broken hearts. Otherwise, it becomes just a collection of legalisms. Any true religious pilgrimage begins in the space between between the stimulus, inserting then a contemplation to listen, then the response in light of that contemplation is called for.

I remember September 11, 2001. I was serving in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Macon Georgia. I left the Rectory on College Street, walking next door to the Parish Hall/ Administration/Education Building, which was originally an orphanage, and arrived at 8:00 AM to check my messages, leave the instructions to the Secretary, pick up the reserved sacrament case from Sunday. At 8:05 I start, that Part of my weekly habit on Tuesday mornings, taking a lovely end of summer- beginning of fall, walk from my office in the Education and office building, walking East quietly and reflectively past the Rectory, and then past the Sanctuary on the corner, turn North down Forsyth street to the next block, to St. Paul's Apartments, on St. Paul's Street, a high rise for independent Senior Living build by the church as part of its ministry. I go in the Apartments' fellowship hall where I would, starting at 8:15 AM, preside over an abbreviated Eucharist with reserve sacrament followed by a Bible Study of the lessons for the coming week. All was right with the world! It was 8:30 AM.

It was during the Bible Study that we received news that a plane had hit a skyscraper in New York City. We thought it was a regrettable accident, so we stopped to pray for this accident and the people involved. Someone remembered that during World War II, in 1945, a B-25 bomber flying in a thick fog had crashed into the Empire State Building. Then the second plane hit the other tower. We did some more prayers and then I went back to the office, changed the phone message to tell callers that the Sanctuary would be open for prayers. Then the 3^rd plane hit the Pentagon. I sent the Secretary home, checked on my wife, looked at the television coverage and the Fourth plane went down in Pennsylvania. I went to be with people if they chose to come to the sanctuary.

I prayed for peace, but part of me was furious about the slaughter of innocents. I thought about the orphans, widows and parents of those who died. In my anger, I wanted to find out who was responsible and wanted to get revenge. My heart was breaking and I went to ring the church bells, slowly in mourning. As the bells mourned I remembered the chorus of the Leonard Cohen song Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It would be nice to say that we as a nation entered into a religious pilgrimage after 9/11. But cries for justice were drowned out, as the screams for revenge grew too loud. We went to war with our enemies and then with another enemy, and then with each other. All sorts of wars are still going on as egos get bruised, truth gets twisted, relationships become weaponized, hearts get slammed shut, as we respond unthinkingly quickly to stimulus. What we are doing today is to see our path in the light of a religious pilgrimage.

September 11 Keeps Coming.

On that September day, everything was promised,

a day where I could be a blessing to those in need,

but then turning into day full of whimpering plead.

“Where in hell are you?” cried Doubting Thomas.

To a whisper of the wind in now empty sanctuary,

the gentle whisperer said, “Now you have a choice;

you can listen to your fear or listen to another voice;

Rebbe Kotzk saying broken hearts needn't be scary.

Your Rabbi has said to the broken hearted; “Blessed

are you knowing you're broken, longing to be whole,

but first is the beginning, in the healing of your soul,

so fear and hatred will be removed from your breast.”

Now is the time, past the time, to listen, slow down,

before we forget we are all standing on Holy Ground.

Soaring With Eagles

 

A Reflection and Poem for 12^th Sunday after Pentecost       Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

St Mary's Episcopal Church, Gatesville, NC                         August 27, 2022

Sirach 10:12-18     Psalm 81:1, 10-16       Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16       Luke 14:1, 7-14

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

From the reading from the Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus; “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord;/the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” The Book was a compilation of sayings and lessons from the compiler's grandfather, a Rabbi in Egypt a couple centuries before the birth of Jesus. It was a popular book among Jews and would have been used freely by Rabbis like Jesus, whose mother, on finding she was pregnant, sang a song, the Magnificat, sprinkled with sayings from this book. Jesus probably was aware of the reading for today and used it as the core of his teaching in the Gospel reading for today. Although popular, it was not considered part of the Jewish Canon of Scripture because there was some question if it was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. The early Christian church accepted it as inspired but there were quibbles about including it as part of the Canon. The Protestant Reformation scholars dropped it for their Bibles, while the Church of England demoted it a quasi scripture category called the Apocrypha.

From the Gospel lesson for today:

Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

The lesson is about how pride, self- love born out of fear, gets in our way in following God. We are so worried about what people think of our image, that it gets in the way of loving either neighbor or God. The Early church considered Pride as the Mother of All Sins, the Chief of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was considered an “Original Sin”, so in the Medieval times, at the time of an infant baptism, the Baptizing Priest would pinch the Baby, so that in the resulting scream the Devil would be expelled to come out and the Blessed Holy Waters would cover the child in the healing holiness. Priests also learned that if you are Baptizing a male baby and you dunk the naked male baby in the containers of warm water, and then take him out, you needed to have the male baby face away from you, or the Altar Guild will be ticked off having to clean the vestments.

One of the high points, every time I come to Gatesville to preside of a banquet of Holy Communion; I am driving through the Great Dismal Swamp and I get a chance to see Bald Eagles, nesting and hunting, living free and wild. When I was a teenager, we were being warned about, what Rachel Carson called, “the silencing of the birds”. She pointed out with the overuse of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, many bird populations were threatened. Action and prayer for changing the way we lived, was a road to the recovery of several species, like Bald Eagles. Every time I come, my banquet was beginning before I ever got to the town limits as I was blessed by the resurrection of the Bald Eagle Population and the sacrifices made to make it happen,. I was their guest, God's guest and the Eagles' guest.

When I drive through the Great Dismal Swamp, I remember how it had a been a haven for runaway slaves, from 1619, when African slavery was first introduced on English speaking soil, all the way to the end of the Civil War in 1865, 246 years of sanctuary. I am driving through Holy Ground, I am an uninvited guest and I am blessed by those who struggle in hope.

By the time I get here, I realize how blessed I am and you invite me to join you in blessing God. I come to the Great Thanksgiving already thankful. Thank you.

Today, when we do the Baptism of Dylan, we invite him as our guest of honor. He has not done a thing to deserve your love, kindness or blessing. For years; he will not be rich or a member of the Vestry. His pledge will not be great. There will be times when he will not follow the sermon. There will be times when he will not operate on your schedule. Yet, he is a gift from God. Your task is to teach by example of word and deed how to love and care for his and your neighbor, his and your environment, his and your church, and his and your Creating, Redeeming and Sanctifying God.

What better place than this area to teach him. This is a place where people, who came longing for freedom, have centuries of history. This is a place where against long odds, Eagles Soar.

Dylan Mack Cloutier; Soaring With Eagles

Dylan's a child whom I will baptize this Sunday.

Saying all the right words, I'll try to get us out in time,

words he (and we) won't understand by reason or rhyme,

but with hope, his heart begins, to break open that day.

Medieval priests pinched a child to let the devil out,

so newly blessed Holy water would cleanse his soul,

as Godparents made promises as a kind of re-sole,

of their boots on the long march against their doubt.

We hope for him to weep for joy as the eagles (bald),

continue to prosper out of town on the Dismal Swamp,

where once they almost disappeared in a past DDT romp,

but now, by prayer and action, that slaughter had stalled.

Make him open. we pray. to live into a new hope,

that into the still promised land, we'll not just grope.

Divisions

 A Poem and Reflection for 10^th Sunday after Pentecost             August 14, 2022

All Saints Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC                     Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Hebrews 11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

DIVISIONS

The Gospel Lesson for today from Luke remembers Jesus warning about divisions. Luke will write more about those divisions in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles; between the disciples on who is the greatest, between Jesus and the Jewish religious establishment, between Jesus and the Roman political establishment, between the Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, between the apostle Paul and the disciples in Jerusalem. Paul and others will write letters about the divisions between Christians in their own churches. History, for the next 20 centuries will tell us about the divisions between theologians over the nature of Jesus, (human, or divine, or a “tertium quid”, “a third thing”). Divisions between Creeds, division between different views of scripture, division between different kinds of worship, East versus West, Latin versus Greek, for or against slavery, different views of “salvation”, different views of end time. You name it; the church has had divisions about it, where we fly the banner of the Prince of Peace and work to destroy those who believe the other side of the division.

In my three quarter of a century of life, I have never known a time without division. Tomorrow, August 15^th, is the 77^th anniversary of the announcement by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito of the acceptance of an unconditional surrender by the Empire of Japan. The victorious forces of the Allied Armies started fighting, having open divisions, between themselves as soon as, and even before, the war was over. Divisions over the future of the countries that had been under the rule of Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan - the losers of the war, or the Colonial Empires of France and Great Britain - two of the bankrupt victors of the war. Divisions between incompatible social and economic systems, systems of economics and governance.

In 1948, my father, who had been in combat in the wars, got a civilian job in El Salvador in Central America. Soon after we got there, there was a coup d'etat where the leader by a rigged election was overthrown by the army, as one garrison on one side of the capital city shelled another garrison on the other side of the city. My parents, their two sons and their infant daughter, fled to a coffee finca on a mountain overlooking the city to be safe and watched in safety the artillery do its work on each other.

Up until two years ago, we as a nation bragged, that we were not a Banana Republic, which attempted coups instead of peaceful transitions of power. So much for that division!

When we moved back to the United States we found a country divided along political, economic, social and racial divisions. My father was a Roman Catholic and my mother was a Presbyterian and the way they settled those division was to raise the children as Episcopalians. However, one way I learned how to be an Episcopalian by singing a song, “I Am An Anglican” about how important it was that we were divided from other Christians.

By the time I went to college, I was trying out being a radical left wing post Christian. I joined a campus debating society and learned how to sneer effectively and score points for whatever side I was on. It made me feel good to hate. Giving me a sense of purpose to sneer. I was with groups that protested the remnants of Segregation and then against our militarization in Southeast Asia. How good it felt to be right and to hate. After my father died, hate wasn't as much fun and I started to return to a Christian view of the world. In the meantime the Episcopalians were fighting each other over prayers books and schisms.

Even my mother tried out a division. When I bought a Subaru, a Japanese import car, in 1981, my mother, who in World War II had stayed in California, near the Marine Base outside San Diego, each day filled with fear that her husband would be killed by the enemy, while my father was fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific from 1941 to 1945, said to me in alarm, “How could you buy that car? Those people ( the Japanese) tried to kill your father?”

Yes, there are divisions. That is a reality but what are we do do with those divisions if we are asked in the middle of the divisions. David Brooks, in a New York Times editorial of July 21, 2022, wrote;

“Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.”

In reorganizing our mind, we learn how to ask questions of the people on the other side of the division. To go even deeper and listen to their pain and their fears. The question for people of faith is to ask where is God in the middle of all this.

In Lincoln's 2^nd Inaugural Address, in the closing days of the Civil War and the country's division, he showed how to reorganize the country's mind and spirit;

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

A century and a half later after that address, one of vestiges of “the nation's wounds”, Racial Discrimination was addressed. Last month a great injustice was faced, reviewed and fixed when Buck O'Neil, a Star Player and Manager for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Baseball leagues from 1937 to 1955, was formally admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. For decades he was not admitted because he was black, and the white Major League teams were segregated. He became a scout for the Chicago Cubs in 1955 and in 1962 the Cubs named him the first black coach in the Major Leagues, but even then, he was not allowed to coach during the games, as 3^rd or 1^st base coach. He had been turned down in 2006 for admission to the Hall of Fame, but he said at the time:

“God's been good to me. They didn't think Buck was good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That's the way they thought about it and that's the way it is, so we're going to live with that. Now, if I'm a Hall of Famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. Don't weep for Buck. No, man, be happy, be thankful."

What O'Neil did was to demonstrate what St. Benedict wrote in his rules for the Benedictine Community, whose members were to actively listen to each other, “listen . . . with the ear of the heart” and prayerfully consider what was said and then act in obedience to God. O'Neil listened and heard what was being said behind the words. He understood that the official words covered the bigoted, racist fear of the white baseball establishment. He knew the truth of his own God given, and Buck developed, skill. Instead of bitter weeping and fury; O'Neil chose to put his energy to joyfully help others to break the barriers.

When I do pre-marital counseling, I ask the couple to bring in a fight that they had. They usually proclaim that they never fight. But, by the third session they agree that all this wedding preparation and the moving in together plans may have been the occasion of a hard disagreement. As we go through the “disagreement”, I ask them each to share what they felt about, or thought of, or meant in that comment they gave and when did the groundwork for the fight start before the disagreement ever came to the surface. Usually it has to do with how they treat one another in being “right” and did they listen to what was really said. I keep telling them “Good fighters, who listen and cherish each other, make good lovers. Lousy fighters, who only want to win, make lousy lovers.”

Jesus tells us what we already know, we live in communities of division. That is part of being human. Jesus shows us by his life that we have a choice; we can either create battlefields of burnt ground or we live in community with those with whom we disagree by treating the space between us as Holy Ground where we “listen . . . with the ear of the heart.”

DIVISIONS

(One) I'm much smarter, brighter and cuter than you,

far more deserving of an Almighty's approval,

as you can plainly see if you give a fair perusal,

how my side is really the only one that is true.

(Two) The other side gives, “So's your mama!” retorts,

as a way of presenting a full reasoned argument,

aimed to move into sulking silence punishment,

before moving into dueling chapters and verses.

(One) I heard the sound of hurt in you, can't we stop

for a moment and just listen to spaces shared?

(Two) Please let us see there is a power that cared,
that we'd find a way to have arguments drop.

(Three) Lets agree to stop the Cain and Abel stuff,

and agree love is much more than enough.