This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

There's still room!

This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home:

An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

a weekend retreat-conference

led by Jane Carol Redmont

at Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center

Byfield, Massachusetts

Friday, August 5 - Sunday, August 7, 2011

Spirituality is not only prayer, but practice. It is the way we walk on the earth, work together, build community, honor our bodies and those of others, celebrate and struggle, and listen to the promptings of the Spirit.

Today’s environmental realities call us to examine anew how we live on this fragile planet as people of faith.

In addition to short lectures, our conference will include time for meditation, prayer, sharing of resources, and personal and group reflection.

We will focus especially on the themes of lament and hope, which will be woven throughout our times of prayer.

We will leave nourished by the insights of theologians –mostly women— from several continents and more deeply aware of Earth’s body, our bodies, and the Body of Christ.

The theologians include Dorothee Soelle, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Ivone Gebara.

Registration information here. Some scholarships are available.

Beth Johnson, reliable guide

Many of you have doubtless heard about the brouhaha about Elizabeth Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, whose book Quest for the Living God was criticized, yea even condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in late March. If you have not heard about the controversy, all the more reason to read the article linked below and links embedded in it.

Prof. Deirdre Good (who blogs at On Not Being a Sausage) and I have written an essay on Prof. Johnson, her theology, and the controversy. The article just came out today (Easter Monday, April 25) at the Episcopal Café. Have a look here (permanent link, will stay up even when article is no longer on the front page) and please feel welcome to leave a comment at the Café below the article.

Holocaust map - Europe and the teaching of 20th century theology

The link to this map doesn't work, but I saved the image as a jpg.

I am linking a Facebook post to this since the link is cranky and refuses to show up on Facebook.

Make sure you click on the image to enlarge it. (Click twice and it will get really big and detailed.)

Post on Facebook:

Map for the little darlings to study. Yeah, I'm teaching a Christian theology course and they are also getting a good dose of theological vocabulary & questions. But woe unto those who study European theologies in the mid-20th century & after without looking this in the face. And without asking whether & how this affects the questions & the language. And how we understand God. And how theology & ethics are related. And what responsibilities Christians bear.

End of speech. I'm off to edit the Tome.

Keep prayin', please

For the wordy request, see here.

Thank you.

Meanwhile, over on one side of the house...

Inside the house, Jane continues to write and edit and pace the floor and +Maya sleeps, plays, and pesters Jane for treats, but only when Jane is in the kitchen.

Shameless self-promotion, Lutheran department (w/ note to folks in Washington State, Idaho, Oregon, & British Columbia)

I know, Garrison Keillor says Lutherans don't do self-promotion, and he is right.  But I'm not a Lutheran, only a member of a church in full communion with the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)  and the [Lutheran] Church of Sweden who was mentored by several wonderful Lutheran clergymembers.  So I'll self-promote, briefly.

The July-August 2010 issue of Lutheran Woman Today, the magazine of Women of the ELCA, is hot off the press.  The whole issue is about prayer and I have a little article in it about praying in song called, amazingly, "Praying in Song."  It is not available online but I gather a few of the articles appear online the month after the magazine is published on paper.  In any case, you are welcome to contact the editorial offices for a copy of this issue or to subscribe to the magazine.  The folks there are very friendly.

A year from now, I will be one of the workshop and and worship leaders at the Women of the ELCA Triennial Gathering, July 14-16, 2011, in Spokane, Washington.  More on this gathering here. The four principal speakers include another Episcopal woman, the writer Nora Gallagher, Liberian peacemaker Leymah Gbowee (now living and working in Ghana), and two other wonderful women.

If you are in the Spokane area or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, narrowly or broadly (from Spokane itself to the coast , up and down from British Columbia to Oregon or inland toward Idaho) and are interested in a piggyback speaking engagement (retreat, lecture, workshop, sermon, all of the above) my cross-country round trip to Spokane is already covered so it'll only cost you local transportation, honorarium & lodging, and you can do coalition funding with a cluster of congregations (think "ecumenical collaboration" and/or "regional cluster") or schools or other groups or institutions if your institution's budget is small.  

You can contact my publicist, Amanda Williams, at Ave Maria Press/Sorin Books, the paperback publisher of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, who will pass on your message and put you in touch with me, or you can leave me a note in the Comments section below with some contact information.

While most of my speaking engagements these days tend to be related to prayer and spirituality, I also preach, give retreats and days of recollection (a.k.a. "quiet days") and offer reflections on theology, social justice, the relationship between the contemplative life and the work of justice in the world, religion and the environment, feminism and the church, ecumenical and interreligious issues, racial justice and reconciliation in the church, and other topics.

A big thank you to Women of the ELCA for welcoming me to the pages of their magazine and to next year's gathering in Spokane!

Karl Barth and Thomas Merton - and Mozart

Note: I am writing this post on the weekend of December 11-13 but back-dating it to the day of the anniversary, the day I thought of it.

Karl Barth, considered by many to be the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, author of the The Epistle to the Romans and the Church Dogmatics and principal author of the Barmen Declaration, and Thomas Merton, writer, Catholic convert, Trappist monk, spiritual seeker and teacher, died on the same day in 1968, December 10, and today we remember them both.

I remember them especially through the lens of Merton's short essay (from his journal) at the beginning of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, one of two books that influenced and moved me during my conversion to Catholicism, which was also my time as an M.Div. student at Harvard Divinity School. The other book was Thoughts in Solitude. The Seven Storey Mountain never did much for me.

Here is the essay.


Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart.

Barth had always been piqued by the Catholicism of Mozart, and by Mozart's rejection of Protestantism. For Mozart said that "Protestantism was all in the head" and that "Protestants did not know the meaning of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi."


Barth, in his dream, was appointed to examine Mozart in theology. He wanted to make the exam as favorable as possible, and in his questions he alluded pointedly to Mozart's masses.

But Mozart did not answer a word.

I was deeply moved by Barth's account of this dream and almost wanted to write him a letter about it. The dream concerns his salvation, and Barth perhaps is striving to admit that he will be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by his theology.

Each day, for years, Barth played Mozart every morning before going to work on his dogma.: unconsciously seeking to awaken, perhaps, the hidden sophianic Mozart in himself, the central wisdom that comes in tune with the divine and cosmic music and is saved by love, yes, even by eros. While the other, theological self, seemingly more concerned with love, grasps at a more stern, more cerebral agape: a love that, after all, is not in our own heart but only in God and revealed only to our head.

Barth says, also significantly, that "it is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us." Some, he says, considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs (but Burckhardt "earnestly took exception" to this view). At the same time, Mozart, the child prodigy, "was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word." He gave his first concert at the age of six.

Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word."

Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.

Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

New York: Doubleday/Image, 1965, 1966

pp. 11-12

Updating the book list, and a plug for Anita Diamant's new novel

I am digging out from under all manner of things. In the midst of this and the usual house-cleaning, literal and metaphorical, that accompanies the advent of Advent, I am updating this blog. I hadn't updated the reading list at the right in months. It isn't complete, but it gives you a snapshot of what I'm reading or re-reading these days.

The Aquino and Rosado-Nunes book is composed of the proceedings of the first Inter-American Symposium on Feminist Intercultural Theology. This was the first ever formal gathering of Latin American and U.S. Latina feminist theologians. Some social scientists also participated in the meeting. Why is this book significant? Because, one of its introductory essays notes, for the first time in the history of Christianity in the Americas, feminist theologians of the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean were able to meet together to share our common concerns and visions about the present and the future of our theological work, on the basis of intercultural hermeneutical frameworks. ("Hermeneutical" in this case means "interpretive.")

The book by Renate Wind (which is way overdue at a certain library in California) is a biography, the first, I think, of the late Dorothee Sölle. {This next sentence added a day later after the original post:} Wind has previously written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer; it's not surprising she would be drawn to Sölle, who in so many ways was spiritual and theological heir to Bonhoeffer. The eco-books by McFague and Ruether (the Ruether one is an edited volume featuring writings from Asia, Africa, and Latin America) are triple-purpose books: they are part of my reading and referencing for the Big Tome; I have students reading a couple of them; and I am looking at them as I ponder my sermon for this coming Sunday, the first in Advent. I haven't preached since September. What does the environmental crisis have to do with Advent? You'll find out after I preach. Unless the Holy Spirit sends me in another direction.

I actually cheated by listing Anita Diamant's new book, Day after Night, because I read and finished it last weekend. Anita gave it to me last Friday when she came to my talk on prayer at Harvard (about which more later) and I started reading it that night and finished it on the first of my two plane flights the next day. It's both deep and a page-turner.


I am just starting Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which a colleague lent me. "It's about a woman who dresses up as a man so she can work as a Catholic priest, so you can see why it made me think of you," he said. (!) The priest in the book is a member of the Ojibwe Nation, as is Erdrich.

You may or may not have noticed that these are the first fiction books I've listed in eons, or perhaps ever since I started blogging. I am starved for fiction and haven't let myself read any, except for the occasional mystery novel, in something like four years. Ridiculous. Just because I've been trying to finish a work of non-fiction doesn't mean I shouldn't be reading fiction. I find reading fiction life-giving. Do you?

Not so random theological quotes

I am convalescing. Whether or not the bug was H1N1 is unclear, since I have half of the symptoms from the "nope, it's not H1N1" column and half the symptoms from the "yup, you got it" column. Either way, I have been sick, without a fever but with a lot of lung involvement and some head and nose heaviness as well. The latter went away relatively fast; the former is lingering. Much better the last two days, though.

I am back at work at my theological writing during this fall break (which gave me the time to be sick and sleep and now gives me the time to think a little). I'm up against a deadline, so the time for coherent posts has not yet returned, but I'll share with you some quotes from the works of authors I have been reading and about whom I have been writing.

So this first. We're not in light material here.

To believe in God means to take sides with life and to end our alliance with death. It means to stop killing and wanting to kill, and to do battle with apathy which is so akin to killing. It means an end to the fear of dying and to its counterpart, the fear of failure. To take sides with life means to stop looking for some neutral ground between murderers and their victims and to cease looking upon the world as a supermarket in which we can buy anything we want so long as the price is right and the system is preserved.

******-- Dorothee Sölle, Death by Bread Alone
********(German original 1975; English, 1978)

Reminder:

But he answered, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

More Sölle:

****Taking sides with life is not an easy or simple thing, It involves a never-ending process of change whereby we constantly renounce the self that is dead and enamored of death and instead become free to love life. To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names. Religion can mean the radical and wholehearted attempt to take sides with life. ...

****What I have to say is said from a particular point of view. I am a Christian. When I seek help against that ever-present death by bread alone I turn instinctively to Jesus Christ, learning from him how to fight and conquer death. I do not claim, however, that this way is the only way to do so. I know many Jewish, humanist, socialist individuals and groups who, with the help of other guides and patrons and saints, fight the same battle and have similar experiences. As far as I am concerned it is not important or necessary that we all embrace the same faith, perhaps some common faith of humanity, What is important is that people be able to communicated and share their religious experiences.

****Turning to religion must not mean turning away from each other but rather turning to each other. When I try to say what Christ means to me, threatened as I am by the strangling death that is all around us, I am trying to speak about the steps that can lead all of us out of the prevailing state of death. The recollection of Jesus derives its power not from “one-way” slogans and bumper-sticker theology but from what that recollection says about happiness, peace, love, and justice. It speaks of those things not as requirements or demands to be imposed upon humanity, but as things that can and do happen in the lives of each of us. One of the things the Jesus tradition says is that learning to love means also–indeed primarily–learning to die, and therein lies the offer of finding our identity.

**** Jesus took sides with life. He battled against death wherever he found it: the death of outcast lepers with whom none would speak, whom none would touch; the death of the publicans whom society held in utter contempt; the physical death of those who had not yet begun to live. Here note must be made of something without which Jesus’ relationship to death cannot be understood. Neither Jesus nor those who, like him, battle against violent death looked upon a physical death as the worst thing that can happen to us. They feared a life that is ruled and controlled by death more than they feared death itself…. For Jesus and others like him natural death is by no means the greatest enemy.

****But Jesus’ attitude toward death and that of others like him is contrary to ours. We prefer to cling tenaciously to the “honeysweet Christ.” We want no part of the Christ of vinegar and gall. We accept more or less as fate the kind of death that surrounds us in all its forms, the kind of death imposed by society’s structures and forces; war and starvation; robotized, impersonal existence; the monotony and routine of going through the motions of living. But what we struggle against is natural death from sickness and age, regarding it as our bitterest foe. It is natural death that we fight and resist with every means at our disposal. …

****The desire for a future life and for some form of continued personal existence is most deeply rooted in the resistance to death of those who have not lived an authentic and genuine life. The only weapon against such death is that of love. Those who die without ever having plunged into the stream of love die a hopeless death. Death can be accepted only by those who know what it means to live. Only they can take sides with life against the death that comes by bread alone.

****Being a Christian means that we have passed from death to life. We have gone beyond death. In the case of a Christian, the biological order of birth followed by death is reversed. The Christian dies first, then [s]he is born. Passing from death to life, the individual Christian will not need such a crutch as the hope of reunion in heaven with loved ones. Nor will the Christian need the crutch of a hope for continued personal existence in a heavenly realm. Absolutely nothing –not even the knowledge of our transitory personal existence—can separate us from the love of God.

************-- Dorothee Sölle, Death by Bread Alone


Discuss...

Image: "Jesus of the People" by Janet McKenzie

Dorothee Sölle on the church

As promised in the post below.


I believe in jesus christ
who was right when he
like each of us
just another individual who couldn’t beat city hall
worked to change the status quo
and was destroyed
looking at him I see
how our intelligence is crippled
our imagination stifled
our efforts wasted
because we did not live as he did
every day I am afraid
that he died in vain
because he is buried in our churches

from "Credo"

in Dorothee Soelle

Revolutionary Patience

translated by Rita and Robert Kimber

Maryknoll: Orbis, 1977

*****In the face of the Christian church and its role in the First world, I feel alienation, aversion, disgust, and sometimes even shame. I see this empirical church as a structure "from above," based on injustice and continually betraying it s own truth. I often think that the church is like Judas, who handed Christ over to the established religious authorities. Sometimes I think that the church is like the other disciples who, discouraged and defeated, left Jesus alone and fled. And then there are times when I think the church is like Peter, who denied that he had ever known anything about peace and justice. Very seldom do I see the church, like Peter, shedding bitter tears.

*****Nevertheless, I have never regarded myself as post-Christian. I have also experienced something other than what I have just described. I have seen the church in a group of women who did not flee, who stayed, and on Easter Sunday went to the tomb because the one who had gone was not dead for them. However, my overwhelmingly bad experiences have changed my image of the church. It is not a house for me any longer; instead, it is a tent for the wandering people of God. Then tent is not always where I am, but sooner or later I encounter the tent people again --on the street or in the courtroom. The sacred is not so much a building or an institution as an event, something that happens. Not long ago Daniel Berrigan, in conversation, employed the image of an umbrella that shelters us from the cold rain. Sometimes it opens too slowly, and we are left standing in the rain. Sometimes it is not very effective. Still, it is there, and I would not want to be without it. But the image of the church that continues to impress me most is that of an old woman looking for food in a garbage can --an unmarried mother with bent back, unattractive, unhealthy, of indeterminate age-- my older sister, whom I need and who needs me.

*****I suspect that the post-Christians do not want to have anything to do with the dialectic of a religious institution. But it is just this self-contradictory experience of the church as traitor and the church as sister that stares me in the face, and I have to live with it. Post-Christianity seems to me like a slick formula that covers up the two-sided encounter with the church and reduces it to the "church from above." Then the church from below is forgotten, and with it what tradition has identifies as the "mystical body of Christ."

Dorothee Soelle

The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality

Translated by Linda M. Maloney
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990

Photos:
Homeless woman and bicycle, Oslo, Norway (BBC)
Dorothee Sölle

And so we return, with bits of theology, of the readable kind

I am back in North Carolina and will be easing back into blogging with bits of theology, since I have been immersed in theology for most of the summer. Not treatise theology, but theology that often speaks in narrative and poetry and liturgy. A bit of treatise theology too, but not much.

Her Grace the feline bishop, who received food and water and cuddles from a series of cat-sitters (or as the Rev. Liz Zivanov calls them --the term actually came from one of her cat-sitters, Dr. Elizabeth Drescher-- au-purrs) was mightily peeved at me when I returned. First she gave me the silent treatment and pretended to ignore me. That lasted about thirty seconds, tops. Then she yelled at me. All this time I sat still on the floor and waited for her to come to me. Eventually she did and began by sniffing my feet. (They and their shoes had been in California and on two airplanes and in a car belonging to the best friend of the Adorable Godson --both boys picked me up at the airport-- so there was plenty to sniff.) Then of course she climbed on me and we had a good snuggle. She scolded me on and off for several hours and slept on my chest at night. Now we are back to normal, whatever normal is.

I am happy to be back with +Maya Pavlova. I am not so happy to be back in muggy weather with bugs ready to bite the minute you walk out the door, after six weeks in the Mediterranean climate of Northern/Central California.

So, on to a little theology. It will be readable, I promise. It's not my writing, it is that of others, for your pondering pleasure (or distress -- theology should disturb as well as console).

Oil painting by Harry Simpson

On the road again

I will be on the road again for a while, about ten days, while Maya Pavlova enjoys her friendly cat-sitter. It's a bit of a theological expedition. I will have some e-mail access but I don't guarantee any blogging or Facebooking. Still, you never know.

Go forth into the world in peace;
be of good courage;
hold fast to that which is good;
render to no-one evil for evil;
strengthen the faint-hearted;
support the weak;
help the afflicted;
honour all people;
love and serve the Lord, '
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Blessings of summer to friends in the Northern Hemisphere, blessings of winter to those in the South!

Words of theological wisdom from Ivone Gebara

From the Brazilian ecofeminist Catholic theologian Ivone Gebara:

I find myself in the grip of a strange feeling that will probably shock my readers. I should like to "rest" the earth I live on and the earth I am so that other things can be born. We live at a time when our life patterns, our paradigms, our theologies, and our spiritualities are tired. We are asking too much of our creativity in trying to deconstruct, re-create, redeem, and insert other traditions into ours. Would a time of pause not be an advantage, a time of personal and perhaps even collective silence? Would it not be a good idea to "rest" so that new ideas that could guide our steps, the fresh shoots that will feed our hopes, might in fact emerge? We live in a whirlwind of ideas, of difficult situations, of tribulations and violence of all sorts. It seems that no one is being understood in this vast Babel! It seems as though we are in a collective war, trying to survive at all costs by eliminating others.

This situation makes me think of the biblical story of the Flood. The raging waters have swallowed everything, but in the midst of them floats an "ark" preserving all different species of life. There had to be hope, perhaps hope over a long time, before the dove could fly out from the ark and return with a fresh branch, a green shoot, the sign that new things were happening. I take this myth in the form of a parable not in order to insist on the destructive nature of our actions in the century just ended, but to say that perhaps we have to keep quieter, perhaps we have to look for fewer "spiritualities," so that values that are truly vital can emerge in our lives. I fear that our anxiety to appropriate a feminist spirituality may be vitiated by so many events that destroy us physically and our cultures that we shall not be capable of actually touching the human roots that sustain our existence. Without realizing it, we are beginning to seek to appropriate in a feminist form the elements that mattered most in the masculine spiritual tradition: witness, martyrdom, holiness, imitation. All these still come very mixed in with the masculine models of a patriarchal Christianity of domination and conquest which, although it has helped thousands of people, has also been an instrument of oppression and destruction of as many others. I believe life is inviting us, for a time, to a certain "suspension" of new spiritualities, to a patient wait for what will come, to a voluntary silence or greater care with our words and our theories. We should not be in a hurry, or we shall find ourselves simply using the same discourse "feminized."

In this sort of "retreat" from theological babble, we should be preparing ourselves, I believe, for a strategy of accepting the newness that is being begotten in the depths of the earth, in the depths of ourselves, a newness full of surprises and still imperceptible to our reason. It is a sort of collective begetting, a hazardous pregnancy with no definite birth date. We are in a time of waiting, experiencing anxiety and even dread at what might arrive, intervening with care just so that life may be respected. All we can do is to protest, through organizations and outside them, at the massive destructiveness that continues to threaten our hopes of life. All we can do is be grateful for the chance to caress our daughters, sons and grandchildren, hoping that our longing for love and solidarity can be the food they receive from us today. But we still cannot even stammer the name of the new forms of hope waiting. There are just the things that sustain the humanity in us: friendship, affections, solidarity among all, waiting for the new day that will come.

I believe that this is the only possible way forward in a situation of flood and darkness. People need to feel in the first place that there are hands guiding ours, that there are hearts beating with ours and moving beyond the old divisions. We need to know that there are others dreaming with us of a better world. History has shown that this time of waiting in solidarity has in fact existed before and is still in existence. In the near future it will be capable of proclaiming that some fragile "green shoots" can now be glimpsed. And life, all forms of life, will be able to flourish in the farthest corners of the earth.

Ivone Gebara, "Feminist Spirituality: Risk and Resistance," trans. Paul Burns, in María Pilar Aquino and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In the Power of Wisdom (London: SCM Press / Concilium, 2000), 41-42.

Photo: Atlantic forest landscape at the REGUA Reserve, Brazil. Click to enlarge.

On the road again

I am headed for Boston tomorrow to visit the intrepid Parents of Acts of Hope, this time for a week, which means the stay won't be All Parents All The Time and I will also see a few friends, including Deenie.

I lived in the Boston area for 15 years and for three years a few years before that when I was in divinity school, so I have many dear friends there, from my old church (where I served on staff in my Catholic days and where I continued as a member after leaving the staff to go and work on my first book) and many other places. Those include the Episcopal Church, since the Diocese of Massachusetts and its cathedral are where I got to know the Episcopal Church, though I didn't become an Episcopalian till some years later when I was living in California. The Boston friends now include two of my Ph.D. classmates who got teaching jobs there. So, despite moving away, I have more peeps there rather than fewer. The city doesn't call itself the Hub for nothing.

After that I am headed to Halifax for the annual convention of the CTSA, which I had to skip last year for the first time in 15 years. (CTSA stands for Catholic Theological Society of America.) I've never been to Nova Scotia and I'm excited about the trip, though you don't get to see much during conferences. But I'm arriving in Halifax a bit early and leaving a bit late, so I hope to see the sights. I'll also get to see some of city since I will be staying in altnerate housing (staying at the hotel is so much better during conferences, but I just can't swing it without a roommate or two and I made plans too late to find roomies) and there will be bus rides involved.

Two very nice humans will be taking care of Her Grace the feline bishop while I am away so I am feeling a manageable level of guilt about leaving town so soon after my last trip.

Photo by Paul the BB.

Trinity as practical doctrine

A relational ontology* focuses on personhood, relationship, and communion as the modality of all existence. This secures for Christian theology a basis for a theology of God that is inherently related to every facet of Christian life. To say that the doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical implications for Christian life makes sense when the theology of God is removed from the realm of speculation on God in se** to the real of reflection on God-for-us as revealed in creation, in the face of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit who brings about communion between God and creature.

* ontology: the study or concept or understanding of being.
** in se: Latin for "in itself" [herself/himself/godself].

If you ponder this passage, you'll see that it is not as dense as it seems at first.

With thanks to FranIAm for drawing my attention to this quote from Catherine Mowry LaCugna's God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991, [pbk] 1993), 250.

That conversation took place today. Two days ago, on Saturday afternoon, I wrote this Facebook update:

Three friends from East, South, and West strolled on a yacht club boardwalk talking about the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. Srsly. Now we are writing. (Two theological works, one novel.) Tonight: silliness, boogie-ing, pre-nuptial and natal day (the groom's) festivities.

Who knew? Unlike Paul the BB, I am not among the 0.5 percent of preachers who like to preach on Trinity Sunday. Maybe this will change! I did once write a little something on the Trinity, to my own surprise.

I'll be on the road on Trinity Sunday, two weekends from now, so this is a little advance resource -- though there is never an inappropriate time to ponder the mysteries of the Trinity. (Another thing I thought I'd never say.)

Speaking of FranIAm, if you are a liturgical Christian (or perhaps even if you are not), you will like her "Ascension to Pentecost" series.

Or you can just ponder the Rublev icon.

You've got to stop and smell the magnolias

Enough already with all the work. You've got to stop and smell the magnolias.


More from one of the reporters on the scene here.

The "theology" label below is because we really did, as the reporter notes, walk by the water discussing the Holy Trinity. Three of us.

Perichoresis at noon and boogying at night. Come to think of it...

And here is a photo of the happy couple (with their permission). Wedding tomorrow. May Godde continue to bless these two good people, their love for each other, and their work in the world.

Photo 1 by Paul the BB. Photo 2 by FranIAm.

Prayer Posse alert for the Adorable Godson

Cross-posted on Facebook:

Those of you with a spiritual practice, do send prayers, good vibrations, incantations, and meditations of healing to my godson Robbie (aka Lopi) who was assaulted and robbed yesterday and is in hospital bruised and with broken leg.

This was in Greensboro, just before I left town. In cheerier news, I have arrived at destination and have begun frolicking with friends. A quiet afternoon of writing now. More frolicking this evening.

Please pray also for Robbie's attackers.

Atheists have got it all wrong - in some of the same ways as fundamentalists, says Eagleton in new book

Very good article about Terry Eagleton's latest book. MadPriest may have posted about the book already since he keeps a watch on this issue, but this article is hot off the virtual press in today's edition of Salon.com.

...Atheists of the Ditchkins persuasion have raised valid points about the sordid social and political history of religion, with which Eagleton largely agrees. Yet their arguments are fatally undermined by their own unacknowledged dogmas and doctrines, he goes on to say, and they completely fail to understand Christian faith (or any other kind) except in its stupidest and most literal-minded form.

A few years ago, I read an article by a Roman Catholic theologian who wryly observed that the quality of Western atheism had gone steadily downhill since Nietzsche. Eagleton heartily concurs....

....Eagleton further argues that not only is the Ditchkinsian version of traditional Judeo-Christian belief a travesty, in which God is envisioned as an unproven and improbable creature like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster, but that this strain of post-Enlightenment atheism cannot comprehend the character of religious faith at all. The creedal declaration "I believe in God" is a statement of action and will; it is performative rather than assertive. ...

... Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself," he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living."

Read on.

The intensity of academe

There's a lot of it.

Three "final class of the semester" down, one to go.

Usually we teach three courses a semester at my school, but I had a fourth, or really a fraction of a fourth course, just a once a week, one-credit colloquium with our religious studies majors. The other three courses are four credit courses.

Tonight's class got out at 10:20 p.m.

One more tomorrow evening, not quite as long because I am going to let people out early.

Now begins the grading marathon. I am also on deadline for a Big Academic Tome I am writing. Not so great timing but there you have it. Maybe if I read and grade three hours a day from tomorrow on and write the rest of the day I won't have to pull any all-nighters next week when grades are due for seniors (May 6) and for everyone else (May 8). My birthday is May 7. It used to be well timed when I was younger and schools ended in June. Now it's always in the middle of finals!

Sorry to bore you with Facebook-like trivia (though, to be fair to Facebook, there are also great professional and personal conversations and reunions there) but I know some of you friends are not on FB, and I'm feeling the need to connect to the "outside world" a bit as the academic walls close in a little more this week and next.

I have to cook up a sermon for this coming weekend, too. One very anti-Jewish reading from Acts (yo, crucifixion was a Roman punishment!), the 23d Psalm, a request from the first Epistle of John that we love one another, and the Good Shepherd reading from the Gospel according to John. Ooookaaaayyy. Let us pray!

There are lilies of the valley blooming in my garden, though, or rather, the landlady's garden. It is a surprise garden. I moved in the first of September and I never know what is going to pop up. First it was daffodils and jonquils and narcissus. Then the dogwood tree bloomed deep pink against the silver grey-green bark. (It is now pale pink and growing leaves.) Then the rains came and produced green plants whose name I do not know and some of which are probably weeds, including poison ivy if I am not mistaken (I have started weeding - with gloves - and looking up plants online), flowers new to me here and there, and two rows of lily of the valley, just a touch early for le premier mai. Meanwhile, the rhododendron burst into red bloom. What the French call boules de neige (literally "snowballs") and is either viburnum or white hydrangea came out almost at the same time. The tall trees have been shedding yellow pollen. And who knows what's next?

A sermon for the 2d Sunday of Easter

Here is Sunday's sermon, preached (twice) at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Greensboro, North Carolina.

Student Christian Movement meeting, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2002
Photo: Peter Williams, WCC (World Council of Churches)

Revised Common Lectionary

Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31


Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one
claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was
held in common.
***************Acts 4:32


The Resurrection
may have been a one-time occurrence for Jesus,
but for us,
it is a life.
And it is a life
for Christ in our midst.

Easter is not just one day
in our church.
It is a whole season.
Not only do we have 50 days to let the joy sink in
–or to lift up our hearts, or both—
but we probably need those 50 days
to reflect on what it means
to live after the Resurrection,
to live the Resurrection,
to live after Easter
and be Easter people.

How will we live?
Who and what
will we become
after the Resurrection?

Today’s lessons,
especially the first one from the Acts of the Apostles
and the Gospel story
but also, in a more subtle way, the passage from the First Letter of John,
show us that post-Resurrection life
is a particular kind of community life.

They are not just about what happens to us as individuals
after the Resurrection.
In fact, the Resurrection is not
primarily
about what happens to us as individuals.[1]

I want to invite us today
to reflect on what our life as a community looks like
after the Resurrection:
the community of the friends of Jesus,
the community of the friends of Christ
who is risen and present.

Our focus on this second Sunday of Easter
has often been on Thomas.
There’s nothing wrong with that:
many of us can identify with Thomas,
the one who wants concrete proof.
And for the author of the Gospel of John,
writing a generation or two after Jesus
for a no longer quite new Christian community,
the statement “Blessed are those who have not seen
and yet have come to believe” [John 20:29b]
is an important one in a church where most people
were not eyewitnesses,
not contemporaries of Jesus and Mary of Magdala
and Thomas and the rest of the Twelve;
that generation had passed away.
So believing
without that live connection to the beginnings
was important.

We can see other indications of how late the Gospel was written
in the odd and frightening language about “Fear of the Jews”
which makes no sense as language from Jesus’ day,
since Jesus and his friends in the house with the closed doors
were all Jews.
That language was born of a kind of family feud,
much later, when church and synagogue
were going their separate ways.[2]

But back to our friend Thomas
And to what this Gospel story
might mean to us today.
This is not just the story of Thomas.
We can read and hear today’s Gospel
and all of the Scripture readings
to discover how communal
and how bodily
the experience of Resurrection is.

Let me say that again:
Today’s Scripture passages reveal to us
how communal and how bodily
the Resurrection is.

We have a preview
of the communal experience of the post-Resurrection life
in one of the preceding scenes in the same Gospel of John,
the crucifixion scene.

There we see and hear Jesus
helping to create a new household,
one not based on ties of blood,
as he speaks from the Cross
and tells his mother Mary and the Beloved Disciple
that now they are each other’s mother and son:
they are family.

And indeed, the disciple,
whom many have identified as John,
takes Mary into his home.
Jesus’ legacy
is a relationship,
a new kind of family.

If we think back to what we celebrated
in the holy days of Triduum,
the three days that are really one celebration,
Jesus’ legacy to us is deeply and widely communal.
His legacy is the washing of feet and serving of each other;
his legacy is the meal we celebrate in his memory and with his living presence.
They are meant to shape us and build us
again and again
into a body of believers and doers,
a community of friends of Christ
and friends of each other.

Jesus’ resurrection legacy is communal as well.
The texts today
have more than hints about living in community.

They speak of two of the most difficult realities to negotiate in our world
which are also
two of the most essential:

material possessions and reconciliation.

Think about it.

Material and economic realities:
Food,
water,
shelter,
safety,
health care,
and enough money for basic needs.

All this is part of “distributing to each as any had need.”

That’s not easy to do.

And there seems to be a connection
between being “of one heart and soul”
and not laying claim to private property.
I’m not giving you political ideology here,
I’m just having a look at a passage from the Bible
and how we might understand it!
So stay with me.

Material and economic realities:
There they are.
In one of the earliest communities after the resurrection,
living as Easter people involves particular relationships
to material realities,
to the needs of bodies and communities
-- and, we might add today on this Earth Day weekend,
to how we live on the Earth.

Material possessions… and reconciliation.

Reconciliation: right relationship.
Relationships between people:

Living the Resurrection is about
this forgiving of sins Jesus talks about,
--not just the fact that God forgives us, which of course God does,
but the fact that Jesus Christ,
risen and present among us,
gives us the power and the responsibility and the invitation
to forgive each other.

He gives us the power
and the responsibility
and the invitation
to forgive each other.

The prevention and healing of jealousy, of envy, of broken hearts,
of emotional abandonment and abuse,
of estrangement for reasons of
ideology, personal disagreement, national claims,
racism,
discrimination because of caste or religion
or economic class or social status,
the prevention and healing of
war and tyranny:
all this falls under the umbrella of
“be reconciled.”

Not to use people…
To see them as the image of God…
That too is part of living
reconciliation.

What you bind on earth will stay bound.
What you unbind, what you forgive,
will be
and stay
unbound and forgiven
[today’s Gospel says]
with God’s help,
as we say in our baptismal promises,
the promises we renewed at Easter.

We tend to focus on Thomas in this Gospel,
But what if we focus on Jesus?
Thomas says,
I will not believe
unless I see Jesus in some bodily way, and not just that--
unless I see Jesus with his wounds!

Last month a theologian named Nancy Eiesland [pron. EES-lund]
died at the age of 44.
Living all her life with multiple physical challenges,
she was the author of a book with a challenging and surprising title,
The Disabled God.[3]

In the book Dr. Eiesland commented
on the resurrection appearance in the Gospel of Luke,
but that appearance features the same gesture
as the one we see today:
Jesus showing his wounds.

Nancy Eiesland
“proposes that the image of Christ’s resurrected body, with pierced hands a feet and scarred side, offers a way of seeing God as having lived through the fullness of human experience in a very physical way. Not only was [Jesus’] body broken in life,
but the signs, the symbols, of this brokenness remained after the resurrection.”[4]

“‘In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,’ she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can
identify with, she argued…”[5] —
and “the disabled” means not just 43 million people in this country,
but also most of us at some point or another in our lives,
as we age,
or as become ill or suffer accidents.

Christ crucified and risen
“…is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him…”
It is not a divine punishment
or an opportunity for a cure.[6]

What happens when we view Christ this way?

What happens when we view God this way?

We Christians often have a thing about perfection.
Does Jesus Christ bring us perfection?
Not in the sense of a particular kind of beauty or
bodily wholeness.[7]
We meet in this season
a risen, wounded Christ
in a new kind of community.

We also tend to confuse resurrection
with immortality of the soul.
But the texts here do not talk about
immortality of the soul.
They proclaim
the resurrection of the body
and the victory of God’s justice:
the healing of the earth
and of society.
The resurrection is not,
as my mentor Krister Stendahl put it
in his inimitable way, about what happens to
“little me.”
When we pray as Jesus taught us,
We pray for God’s kin(g)dom,
not for our own immortality.[8]

What we do with our money;
whether we all have food;
how we feed each other;
how we walk on the earth;
how we view and treat each other’s bodies;
how we envision the Body of Christ;
how we go about the hard work of forgiveness
day after day after day:
This is the risen life.
This is Christ among us.
We are the community of Christ’s friends.

Alleluia!
Christ is risen!

[1] See Krister Stendahl, “Immortality Is Too Much and Too Little,” in Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 193-102. This essay was originally a lecture at the 1972 Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College and was first published in the conference proceedings in 1973.

[2] See Jane Carol Redmont, “Fear of the Jews,” Lectionary Reflections for Easter 2 (C), A Globe of Witnesses, The Witness, April 15, 2004. http://www.thewitness.org/agw/redmont041504.html

[3] Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Abingdon Press, 1994).

[4] Nancy Erickson, review of Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God, United Church of Christ Disabilities Ministries 4/7/07, http://www.uccdm.org/2003/04/-7/the-disabled-god/ , accessed 4/18/09.

[5] Douglas Martin, “Nancy Eiesland Is Dead at 44; Wrote of a Disabled God.” The New York Times, March 22, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/us/22eiesland.html?em

[6] Ibid.

[7] I preached the weekend after Susan Boyle became an international sensation after her vocal performance on a British reality show, but chose not to mention her because most of the congregation, especially the one at the early liturgy, was not active on the internet, where hundreds of thousands of people had viewed and heard Ms. Boyle’s performance and read commentaries about her and attitudes toward her before and after her performance. The live audience and judges’ initial attitude and their surprise and delight were a consequence of their perception of Ms. Boyle as plain and ugly; the beauty of her voice and delivery stunned them.

[8] Stendahl, “Immortality.”