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.