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.