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 1st 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.
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