A Poem/Reflection for 20th Sunday after Pentecost St. Mary's Episcopal, Gatesville, NC October 23, 2022 Thomas E Wilson Guest Presider
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 21st 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”
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.
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