Bishop Dan's Blog

The Right To Exist

2012-01-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

“Ever since the “Holy Land” was invented as a pilgrimage-center by the
Empress Helena in the fourth century, it had been the scene of acrimony
and violence among the rival religious groups. . . . Throughout four centuries
(15th- 19th) it had been the task of the Ottoman sultans to impose, for the
sake of civil order, a culture of mutual tolerance . . . . Where religious difference
was in question there really was only one political option: live and let live. Muslims
and Jews were nearly always able to accept this in relation to one another
and to the Christians. The followers of Christ, however, while finding
it possible to live at peace with . . . monotheists of the Islamic or Jewish
persuasion, could not always resist outbursts of violence against their
co-religionists (fellow Christians) . . . .” A.N. Wilson, The Victorians

For a long time, it seems, Christians have been more tolerant of other people of other faiths than we are of each other. Strange, how proximity breeds intolerance. I suspect it is that the closer people are to us, the more they make us nervous about our right to be here.

Today, a sticking point in the search for peace in the Holy Land is “the right to exist.” Israel insists on one key point before making major agreements with its neighbors – that the neighbors acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Palestinians want to be recognized as a state with the right to defend its borders and preserve its sovereignty, which is essentially the same thing. The situation is admittedly complex. Both God and the devil are in the details. But the threshold question they cannot seem to get past is simple: acknowledging each other’s right to be present.

To deny someone the right to exist is the primal attack. In Madeleine L ‘Engle’s sci-fi book, A Wind In The Door, the galaxy is threatened by death-eater-like beings called Echtroi who go about x-ing or un-naming things, denying their existence. L’Enlge insists on the innate value of each of us and on our right to be here. She challenges us not only to acknowledge that each other belong on this earth but to actively defend each other’s right to exist.

One may well wonder: why is this an issue? Why do we deny each other’s right to exist? Why is there genocide? Why is there war? Why are the different oppressed? Why are English speakers so distressed by the sound of Spanish?

If we are secure in our own place, confident that we belong on this earth, we can allow others to be here too. We can even enjoy the wild diversity of creation. We can delight that God is a unity who proliferates into diversity and that the diversity of creation is rooted in one existential ground, God. But if our self-worth, our sense of belonging, is fragile, then the presence of someone a bit different from us becomes a threat. We need to be the only ones here; or if we cannot be the only ones, then the others must be entirely like us. By being like us, they reassure us that we are the right way to be.

One way to avoid feeling threatened by people who are different is to avoid them. In his book, The Big Sort: Why The Clustering Of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop demonstrates that our nation is dividing up into smaller and smaller conclaves of people who look, think, and live more and more alike. Our gated communities are populated by racially, economically, socially, and politically similar people. The new social ghettos are far less porous than the ethnic neighborhoods of old, perhaps because they so intentionally formed out of fear of encountering someone different.

We invest a lot of energy and money so that we can at least pretend each other do not exist – to make for ourselves a seemingly safer but smaller and less interesting world. A political consequence of this fragmenting of society is the polarizing of our politics. Each congressional district has a cohesive ideology and elects people to represent that ideology. A think tank that rates congressional representatives as liberals, conservatives, or moderates notes that the number of moderates has steadily declined until the current congress, which for the first time in their studies, does not contain a single moderate. The moderates are the folks who broker the deals and work things out of gridlock. Without the moderates to negotiate the compromises, each side seeks to make the government work by subjugating the other.

The Episcopal Church, in keeping with the Anglican tradition of moderation, the via media, tolerance, and our identity as a “bridge church” has traditionally resisted such polarization. We have been a people who worship and serve together out of personal affection and a common form of prayer – not theological or ideological agreement. How has that played out in Nevada?

I am continuing my pastoral questioning of the divisions in our Diocese that keep us from flourishing in God’s mission. I am also continuing to look for whatever bonds of affection might run counter to those divisions. The first thing I sense here is a quiet respect for each other’s right to exist, a willingness to sit at the same table. It isn’t a bold statement of conviction. It’s more of a tacit assumption which is probably better. Even this tacit acknowledgement runs counter to secular culture. The divisions in Nevada are not merely North and South. There are divisions of East and West, urban and rural, mining and ranching. The groups so divided resent each other’s presence most grievously. So it is a spiritual accomplishment to be a diocese of people, parishes, and missions that accept each other’s place at the table.

But there is a residue of resentment, a suspicion that others do not respect us, a prickly defense against those who might do harm. That confused me at first since I have so rarely experienced any group here actually hostile to any other. But the sense that someone does not want us here is not pure fantasy. There is real history to our nervousness about each other.

There have been times in the past when people in larger churches said that the smaller churches should be closed – which naturally lead to people in smaller churches saying that larger churches should be closed or rather broken up into small churches. There really were people proposing to close Camp Galilee. Others suggested that saving Galilee could be best achieved by preventing or stopping ministries in cities. Seminary trained priests thought the locally trained should not be ordained; the locally trained thought the seminary trained should not be called. Parishes have divided internally over whether to engage in spiritual renewal of the congregation or commit to mission serving those outside the church – as if either project could succeed without the other. We also participated in “the controversies” as they say – meaning national disputes over the roles of women and LGBT persons in the church. Both sides of “the controversies” eventually tried to exterminate, excommunicate, or deport each other – though those issues have not divided Nevada to the extent that they did elsewhere -- perhaps we had too many other kinds of differences to identify with.

Two things here strike me as noteworthy: First, we stopped x-ing each other years ago. Second, we still feel at risk of being x-ed by our fellow Nevada Episcopalians. For example, I have found only one seminary trained priest and one locally trained priest who actually speak ill of those who were trained differently. But it is not that unusual for me to find clergy who suspect that they are secretly disrespected by clergy of the other species. I never hear people from one area speak ill of the churches in another region, except that they suspect that the people elsewhere think ill of them. It is as if the bullets have been removed from the flesh, but the wounds have not yet healed.

Where then do we go from here? I am sure of only one thing. It is good to trust in God’s grace. It is good to know that we belong here, that God has claimed us as beloved children, that God has named us (Isaiah 49: 1), sealed us with the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked us as Christ’s own forever. We don’t have to x each other to claim a space. God has given us our space, our right to exist. We know that, we feel it, and we believe it. That is why we have stopped x-ing one another. But what about the wounds that are not yet healed? I do not know the answer to that.

At John 5: 1-17, we read about a man who had been ill for 38 years lying near a healing fountain. Jesus, with his insight, did not assume the obvious. He asked. He said, “Do you want to be healed?” (v. 6) The man’s answer was equivocal. Do we want to be healed? We may have grown accustomed to the wounds. We may have identified with them. We may not be ready to part with them just yet. We are not x-ing each other. We trust in God’s grace. That much is good. Do we want to be healed? What would happen if we were? Who would we be if we were? How might that healing take place?

Christmas, Christopher Hithcens, Sneeering, Testing, And Praying Today

2011-12-23T11:08:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens’ death on the brink of the Feast of the Nativity sets my mind spinning about the mysteries of birth, life, death, and how we understand them.

I wish Christopher Hitchens well as a person but have major issues with the meaning of Christopher Hitchens as a cultural icon. Some of the media have called him an “intellectual.” He did attend Oxford for his undergraduate education, but does not seem to have pursued any post-graduate studies or done any real academic training beyond that basic liberal arts education. He was a journalist in the contemporary sense, not so much a reporter of facts as a commentator. His commentary rightly chastised Christians for failing to live up to our highest aspirations and then gilding our flaws in religious pretense, but Hitchens drew unwarranted theological conclusions from his chastisements. The “new atheists” by and large have not brought the same weight of philosophical reason to the table that an earlier generation (e.g. Bertrand Russell) did.

To the end, Hitchens maintained his posture of sneering, bored supercilious attitude. The sneer has been au courant for nearly 300 years now. When Holman Hunt painted The Light of the World, the most popular painting of the Victorian Age, Thomas Carlyle castigated him for this naïve portrait of faith. Sneering became fashionable in the salons of 18th Century France, and has remained the ego armor of choice ever since. Hitchens was consistently faithful to his essential face-set sneer. It has become a socially prescribed way to achieve and maintain status to mock and demean innocence which may be painted as naïve. Another option, which lacks the social sanction afforded to sneering, is to join with the “naïve,” to live and die in the attitude of prayer.

The tension between sneering and praying calls to mind another great believer and disbeliever, Anthony Flew, who truly did neither. Flew, a real intellectual, was a philosopher of science and was the leading voice of atheism in our time. His was a scientific atheism, a genuine scientific atheism, not the hackneyed leaps to the wrong conclusions we see in Dawkins. Flew started from a stance of studied neutrality. His only commitment was to “follow the evidence” wherever it might lead. Eventually, it led him to believe in “God,” by which he meant an intelligent and purposeful Creator. The “new atheists” were aghast and burned him at the journalistic stake for “apostasy.” I am not kidding. The new atheists really called Flew and “apostate” from their true faith – which of course is what it is.

In the end, I am not with Flew either. But there is a contrast worth noting. The attitude of sneering is an ego-armor, a defensive pride in looking down on believers and belief. I object to sneering as a spiritual practice precisely because it protects the very ego which Buddhism would disintegrate with awareness, Islam would surrender through obedience, and Christianity would sacrifice for the sake of a selfless life lived in Christ and for others. The one thing modernity and post-modernity have in common is their deification of the ego which most ancient spiritual traditions regard as the problem. Worse yet, sneering builds up the ego at the expense of others. There is violence in it.

Scientism such as Flew’s could be egoistic but it is not inherently so. It can be rigorously honest and courageous. It can be a heroic quest for truth. I have to admire that. I would have to admire it in Flew even if it had not led him to theism. I can admire, but I cannot join. Scientism deifies a method of knowing truth. The problem is it assumes one method of inquiry is capable of knowing, proving, and expressing everything. If I may use an analogy from the scientific world, it is like doing astronomy with a microscope, and so denying the existence of stars. Leave religion out of it for the moment. There is truth in poetry, art, and music that is beyond scientific reach. There is truth in the ancient stories and yes, truth both apprehended and expressed in rituals for which there are no words. Forgive me for this quotation from my youth, but it is still true. “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. The things which are essential are invisible to the eye.” Antoine de St. Exupery.

The God I believe in cannot be proven or disproven by experiments. But here is the situation I find myself in. Suppose God could be disproven in some rational way. Suppose pride in being right or perhaps integrity in following the truth compelled me to admit that faith is false. What then would I do? A parallel question: truth aside, what if faith simply loses its last vestige of social credibility and disappears. Suppose the church dies out from under me?

Here is my problem. I have known the story so long, performed the rituals so often, they are more part of me than my very heart. When I have been in trouble I have called on God time and again. Each time God has delivered me. “How can you say that?” skeptics may wonder. Sometimes my salvations have been almost miraculous. Sometimes they seemed completely miraculous. Other times, they came in reasonable, even ordinary, ways. All I know is I cast myself on God’s mercy and I received mercy. When I was at the bank of Red Sea with the Egyptian Army charging – not just once but time and again – the Sea parted. It has happened as a kind of promise that when death itself takes hold of me, even that Sea will part into God’s mercy. I do not know what that mercy will look like. I take the traditional images of life after death as a fair portrait of mercy. But whatever form it takes, if it is God’s choice; it will be fine with me.

So, if logic should compel me to deny God or if I were the only believer left, I would still have to believe. I cannot and will not adopt the option of defensive psycho-violence or a too small way of knowing. I will admire the logicians like Flew, regardless of their conclusions, but I am not one of them. They practice a monotheistic reverence for the scientific method while I am an epistemological polytheist knowing truth in various ways. Ultimately, I am one who prays. This is my advice: If one does not want to wind up like me, an old man praying, one had better stop praying at an early age. There comes a point of no return, a time when prayer has been answered with so much truth and grace that one is honor bound to keep praying even if the last blessing has already been bestowed. The Church, the fellowship of believers, a flawed lot -- but no more flawed than I am -- has carried me thus far. I hope they will be with me to the end, but if they are not, Jesus has been too present, too real, for too long – so that “Though none go with me, still I will follow.”

I have to admit the priority of my faith. I could be fooling myself to avoid the tension between faith and integrity. But the arguments for God – not just Flew’s intelligent purposeful creator but the God of infinite mystery, the God of beauty beyond the reach of our aesthetic imagination, the God of truth beyond all our ways of knowing, the God of goodness beyond our highest moral aspiration – makes vastly more sense to me than the small minded reductionism of modernist and post-modernist secularism. St. Anselm called theology “faith seeking understanding.” I am with Anselm rather than Flew. I do not start intellectually neutral. My commitment is to God as I have known him in Christ Jesus. I am with Anselm and Augustine, “Credo ut intelligam” I believe in order that I may understand.” If understanding did not buttress faith for me, then I would go with whoever (it was not Tertullian) said “credo quia absurdum est” I believe because it is absurd. I would not really believe something simply because it is absurd, but if it is absurdly hopeful in the face of despair, absurdly good in the face of evil, absurdly profound beyond the banality of our experience, then those absurdities would at least makes me want to give it a fair hearing. So count me with Augustine, Anselm, Kierkegaard, and William James (The Will To Believe). An existential posture has to go deeper than the head level. We choose to believe or we choose to disbelieve as an act of will, not intellect, then find our reasons after the fact. Having sat on a pillow long enough to watch how my heart and mind work, I know the Buddhist teachings of abidharma are precisely true. Feeling first – then thought – then perception. It works opposite to the scientific method.

And all this leads to the Star over the Stable. I believe in that Star over the Stable this Christmas – not as a provable or disprovable factum of history, but as a picture of something truer and better than science can test or words can express. When people are sorted either by God or social scientists, list my name among those who go to a stable to pray.

Surprises at St. Jude's

2011-12-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

Today was my first Sunday visit to St. Jude’s the parish. I have visited St. Jude’s Ranch many times and have celebrated the Eucharist with gatherings of our deacons there in the Zabriske Chapel. St. Jude’s graciously hosts our deacon conferences at no charge. But this was my first Sunday visit, marking the actual return of St. Jude’s to the Episcopal fold. Bishop Katharine visited and Kay Rohde celebrated there, but the priest who served St. Jude’s was of a schismatic persuasion and was not willing to attend those services. So much of the congregation was not there either. Today, St. Jude’s is in some sense our oldest, in another sense our newest, Latino parish.

The first surprise of the day was the turnout. Attendance at St. Jude’s is often around 15 to 20. On a big Sunday it breaks 40. Today we had 80 people, which packed the Chapel. They were engaged, singing the Spanish hymns a capella, fully participating in the liturgy using a Spanish translation of the Book of Common Prayer. Some of the attendance was no doubt due to the three baptisms – one early elementary schoolboy and two teenage girls. When I baptize older children and teenagers of Latino families, I always know there is a story there. I don’t know what it is, but there is a story. We are doing something important.

After the service I did a little demographic research about where the congregants reside. Many of them are, in fact, from Boulder City. When we began work on restoring our ties to St. Jude’s, I was assured that there is only one Latino family living in Boulder City and they attend St. Christopher’s. It turns out there is an invisible Latino population in BC. I am not being ironic. It really is true. By patronizing different businesses, etc. it is quite possible for ethnic groups to inhabit the same space with minimal awareness of each other’s existence. But, as I expected, many of them lived in Henderson. Neither of our churches in Henderson has a Missa Espanol so the 20 minute drive to St. Jude’s works for them just for convenience. But a significant minority drive to St. Jude’s from Las Vegas. There are no more community churches. We are all destination churches. People drive to where they choose to worship.

The next surprise came when I asked the teenagers, Cheyenne and Mia, in Spanish “Do you desire to be baptized?” They looked at me blankly. I thought it was my pronunciation; but Fr. Leslie explained that they did not speak Spanish. Oh my! Flashback to the ordeal a few years ago when I agonized over preparing and delivering a French sermon in Haiti only to learn afterward that the congregation did not speak French. They spoke Creole. So I found myself fumblingly trying to translate the questions I was reading out of a Spanish Prayer Book back into English. There goes another stereotype.

After the congregation finished receiving the sacrament, they brought the children up for blessings. I have never done more blessings of children, not even at our largest Latino congregation in Las Vegas. There was a hunger for blessings.

After the service, Christina Vela, the Regional Program Director for St. Jude’s (that means she runs the Nevada campus – there are two campuses in Texas) came by to meet me. That is a very positive gesture. If I am correct that Nevada Episcopalians share a sense of call to help at-risk children, then restoring our historic commitment to supporting St. Jude’s is a top mission priority.

Relations have been being maintained by folks like Sherm Fredericks who serves on the St. Jude’s Board. Connection with the parish restarted in earnest through the work of Fr. Bernardo Iniesta-Avila and his wife Lolita. It has been carried on by Fr. Leslie Holdridge. I am enormously grateful to them for their work at times when it was not at all clear that anything would come of it. They walked by faith and not by light; but the light is dawning. No worship space in Nevada has a holier feel than St. Jude’s. I feel blessed to have been there today and am eager to return.

Christmas Message 2011

2011-12-16T19:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Nevada Episcopalians,

I write to express my hope that your Christmas season, in all its aspects – church, family, friends, and home – will be a time of grace and blessing, that you know in your souls the serene hope of God’s good news for us.

The Scriptures and the Carols for Christmas are exuberant in claiming that this event makes all things right. Through Advent we have sung of an absent but hoped for God:

O come, o come Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.

In step with nature’s season of the long nights, we darken the room for the lighting of the candle. On Christmas Eve, we will exult:

Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled.

And:
Joy to the world, the Lord is come . . . .
No more let sins and sorrows grow
Or thorns infest the ground. . . .
He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness. . . .

We celebrate a sunrise, a dawn, an experience of grace. Like most Episcopalians, I love this celebration. Of all the branches of the Christian family, we are the ones most devoted to the Feast of the Nativity.

But I sometimes wonder two things. First, I wonder if our heads and hearts align. Do we understand what we are celebrating? In the theology of the Western world, salvation is something that happened on Good Friday to pay a debt incurred at the Fall in Eden. In that theology, the birth of Jesus is just a necessary preparation for the real action scheduled for 30 years later. To make such a to-do over Christmas makes no sense. That is part of why the Calvinist Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, banned the celebration of Christmas for the 40 years of his rule; and the brilliant Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon concurred that we should not be so exuberant over the set up for tragedy.

The second thing I wonder is whether we believe our Scriptures and our Carols deeply; or is it a night of just pretending it’s all alright. Agnostic professor Bart Ehrman attributes his disbelief to the disconnect between the Christmas celebration of “Peace on Earth, Good will toward men” with our experience that two thousand years later sickness, crime, poverty, prejudice, and death are just as real as they were before – in a sense, more so. Sins and sorrows still grow. Thorns infest the ground.

So what are we celebrating? First, it helps to broaden our theology a bit, to stretch it farther to the East and farther back in time. The great Eastern theologians, the same ones who gave us the Nicene Creed, taught that the Incarnation itself was part and parcel of our redemption and salvation. God in taking on human nature changes it sanctifies our very being. By entering more deeply into our world, God makes it holy. That is why the Creed links salvation to the Incarnation:

For us and for our salvation
He came down from heaven.
By the power of the Holy Spirit,
he became incarnate of the virgin Mary
and was made human.

And our Eucharistic Prayer says:

When we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death,
You, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ your only and eternal Son
to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us,
to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

Human life becomes God’s life; God’s life becomes human. The temporal is imbued with the eternal. This is not to deny or diminish the salvific power of Good Friday. Western Theology has got that right; but the power of Christmas – and Easter and Pentecost for that matter – are at least as much a part of God’s great drama of our redemption.

But what about our experience? Can we really believe that something important has happened when so much still seems so wrong in our world? Christians have never claimed that the power of sin in the world is already vanquished. The fulfillment of our hope lies beyond the reach of our mortal lives and beyond the reach of unfolding history. St. Paul tells us that this world is still under the sway of “the powers and the principalities of this present age.” C. S. Lewis says our world is “in enemy hands.” But the end of the story has changed and we are given a foretaste of our destiny in the joy of Christmas. In a novel, the meaning of each chapter depends on how the book comes out. All our present delights and regrets, successes and failures, take on their meaning from a story; the story of our lives, the story of human history, the story of the whole cosmos has been decisively changed.

At Christmas, we touch holiness. More than that, we are touched by holiness. At a little Episcopal Church in Texas a long, long time ago, I attended my first liturgical worship. I was a teenage Presbyterian with minimal understanding of what was happening. It was not a dramatic conversion experience. But in a quiet way, I touched holiness and was touched by holiness. I didn’t know it then but the course of my life was changed. Christmas after Christmas over the years, I have received grace. My prayer for you is that you will touch the holy and be touched by the holy, and so be drawn closer to your destiny in union with the God and Father of All.

Bishop Dan

Having Our Cake And Eating It Too: An Amateur Question About The Payroll Tax Gridlock

2011-12-15T15:24:00.001-08:00

I am not a political scientist and am even less of an economist, so this is just the naive question of an amateur.

We want to continue the tax cut for working people not just for their direct benefit but to stimulate demand for the sake of the whole economy. Everyone agrees on that. The question is how to pay for it.

The leading proposal is a tax surcharge on the rich. The objection is that if the rich have less disposable income, they will not invest in businesses that would employ people. That may or may not be true, (we gave the largest most powerful banks all that bailout money thinking they would actually loan it to small businesses -- didn't happen) but let's assume it is true. The rich need more money so they can invest in job creating businesses.

Other recent news stories disclose that the richest 1% of the nation contributes a ludicrous amount of money to fund political campaigns -- way, way disproportionate to the rest of us, more money than average people earn all year.

So here's what I am wondering. If we extended the tax cut for working people and paid for it by a surcharge on the rich, maybe we could put a cap on individual campain contributions. Then instead of bearing the unfair and noxious burden of paying for all those annoying tv ads, the rich could use the money they save to invest in businesses that create jobs.

My idea is no doubt unconstitutional, but by the time that issue gets to the Supreme Court, the economy will have been saved and everyone will be happy. But what do I know?

Addendum: Undead From The Mizpah

2011-11-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

Morning at the Mizpah in Tonopah, home of the Muckers. I lugged my luggage into the elevator where I met a seemingly normal woman who asked if I had stayed here last night. That struck me as an odd question to ask a stranger in a hotel elevator but what do I know? Maybe it's done in Tonopah. "Yes," I answered.

"Did anything happen?" she asked with arched eyebrows.

"Hmmmmmm," I thought in a cloud shaped word balloon.

"Nothing in particular," I said. "Was something supposed to?"

She told me how her family had seen an ice chest lid open all by itself -- as in with no one else around. It turns out the Mizpah is famously haunted. I owned up to seeing a couple of UFOs last night but no evidence of specters. The conversation continued with the desk clerk Victorina, an exceptionally nice lady who watched my bags while I dashed upstairs for another load.

According to Victorina, the nonpaying spooks of the Mizpah include two ghostly miners, two children, and a lady in red. The Mizpah has been on that tv show about real ghosts -- which explains why the tv at the Mizpah bar shows Ghost Story instead of a football game.

By now I was in uniform so I told her I could dispatch the five wraiths. I've done it before. But I acknowledged that for marketing purposes it might be better to keep them. One thing for sure: on my next visitation schedule I will be at St Mark's, Tonopah for All Saints Day so I can spend Halloween at the Mizpah -- but I have to say I spent one Halloween at the Hotel Nevada in Ely and that was pretty wild!

Live From The Mizpah: Moonlight, Music, And The Grace Of Surreal Juxtapositions

2011-11-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

Here at Tonopahs's newly reopened Edwardian (built in 05 during a mining boom -- think Lilly Langtree) elegant hotel, the Mizpah, I remember the desert night drive that brought me here. Music catches the theme. It starts with two words from a new Paul Simon song --"thank you!" sung in the voice of a car wash worker who has just gotten a tip and is exclaiming his gratitude for all to hear -- "thank" plosive with surprise -- "you" drawn out and with an upward inflection to show more gifts are hoped for from others who hear how much their generosity will be appreciated. I myself have given alms to panhandlers, sometimes against my better judgment, hoping for the "God bless you" they so often bestow -- for while I vacillate in my belief in the efficacy of the priestly blessings, I hope the blessings of the poor may expunge my sins. I say that car wash guy's thank you for so many things in my life including a certain surreal set of juxtapositions that keeps me perpetually off balance, perplexed, and delightedly amazed. Music on that theme to come.

After 3 days of inspection and consultation from nationally important Latino Ministries people come to Nevada to see what we had done for God's mission with the money they entrusted to us -- 3 days that actually warmed my heart with the gentle joy of this mission -- I got up this morning at 4:30 to catch a plane to Reno and was still late for the Camp Galilee Board meeting. The Board consists of devoted people who sweat the small stuff but for a big mission. Then, after some dawdling in Carson City -- I buy all my pipes in Carson -- I began the 4 hour drive to Tonopah where I will preach and celebrate for God and 6 to 8 people tomorrow.

Just East of the Fernley roundabout, 2 things happened at once. To my left an almost full moon rose into a heavy bank of dark clouds. The thickest clouds shrouded the moon while the moon back lit the others. Strictly speaking, it was lovely. But an association with a life crisis in years past has left me -- I admit this is crazy -- afraid of full moons. So when the moon broke through I did what I always do. I stared at it straight on and said "Surely it is God who saves me. I will trust in him and not be afraid . . . ." In case you are not already persuaded I am unhinged, I will tell you what was happening over the pasture to my right. Two small flying objects, which are still unidentified by me' were executing impossible maneuvers. They had bright blue, green, white, and red lights. One was roundish. The other was shaped like an airplane. It sometimes spun wing over wing rapidly. Both darted at acute angles. I am not saying the A word. A navy air base is at least as close as Fallon. All I can say is whatever those things were, they were amazing.

Remember I got up at 4:30 after 3 intense days of Latino ministries review and drove to the Las Vegas airport which is strange enough in itself. It had been a day of meeting with a board of directors and 2 priests "in transition" as we euphemistically say. Now, as I drove between a beautiful but threatening moonrise and a UFO exposition I was listening for the first time to "The Goat Rodeo Sessions" -- Yo Yo Ma and friends performing original bluegrass compositions with post-modern arrangements for a classical string quartet rendition. Did I mention the surreal juxtapositions of my life? And I said "thank you!"

Awhile later I went over a hill and came to Walker Lake. My old enemy the moon -- just one night waning past full -- spread a milky sheet of light over the gently rippling waters -- a "kindly light" if ever I did see one -- and I said, "thank you!"

As I drove on through the jagged desert, I edited tomorrow's sermon in my mind -- all about waking up and keeping watch for three great wonders that define the very value of life. Then I composed a rant which I hope to deliver at next week's gathering of Bishops of Small Dioceses -- a rant at the Church Medical Trust, a rant so angry that if I get a chance to start it I am sure I will be gagged and carried out before I get to the best parts.

Then I came to Tonopah and the stately old Mizpah where I talked with the drunks at the bar about Macs vs PC's, boxing (Manny Paquio of course), the perils of on line translators when flirting with Scandinavian women, race relations, and all the things that occupy the minds of people who drink at the Mizpah on a Saturday night. As I end this day, knowing tomorrow I will proclaim the gospel by such lights as are given me then drive back to Tahoe to debrief summer camp with 2 bishops and 3 chaplains then fly to Salt Lake where I will insult and abuse actuaries, I say, Thank you!"

Sitting In A Zen Garden In Pocatello I Ponder The Oddness Of Life

2011-10-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

On a soft Autumn afternoon, under blue Idaho skies, I sit in a Japanese gazebo in the Zen garden of the Pocatello airport. I live in Las Vegas, the neon capital of the Western Hemisphere. There is no neon here, just stillness. Inside the airport, there is no one at ticketing, no one in the closed cafe, no other passenger. Eventually, a pleasant young woman in a TSA uniform comes out to join me. She is not checking to see if I am a security threat. No, instead she tells me her life story and many of her hopes and dreams. She is from Preston on the Utah border but would like to live in San Diego someday. She was in Athens, Georgia once for training back when she was in the car business, and was captivated by the green antiquity.

After she goes, I remember this weekend at the Diocese of Idaho Convention. I was the after dinner speaker. I began, "It is a sweeter thing for me to be here than most of you can imagine," then told them the story of how 30 years ago God had saved my life from cynical despair through the gracious agency of the Episcopal Church in Idaho. "I was born here," I told them, "through an at risk spriitual pregnancy and an arduous labor." It was a sweet thing to be here and the people this weekend were as kind and human as ever. I told them that "when I could not see God, I saw you." The truth is I still cannot see God anywhere so clearly as in the rumpled, fallible, oft-times maddening collection of people who stumble along together as the church. It takes better spiritual x ray vision than I have yet achieved to see God behind the opaque pride of the arrogantly disbelieving and the spiritually advanced alike -- though I still try.

Here I saw a few old friends from those distant decades. I saw newer friends whom I know from national gatherings of those who try to be the church in the wild and sometimes lonely places like Pocatello, Blackfoot, Arco, Austin, Eureka, Ely, and Pioche. And I met new people: a retired admiral with bushy white eyebrows who settled in Idaho Falls after giving up his life on nuclear submarines; a tall handsome middle school teacher who discovered how rich he was while teaching English in Turkey; a lawyer who was once a high roller in the state bar but now serves as the chancellor for this church.

I flew here 3 days ago, changing planes in Salt Lake, waiting for my connection in "the back 40" where all the planes are going to Great Falls, Helena, St. George, Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Grand Junction. I don't know what possessed me to ever leave the West. "How could I sing King Alpha's song in a strange land?" I did not tell Jesse these things. How do I know what she needs? Perhaps she too needs an exile from this arid spaiousness; perhaps for her an urban exile in San Diego or back in the land of green antiquity. I suppose I did. And I know I may leave this land again someday. Out here even the mountains are transitory. They erupted recently in geological time and may collapse in some seismic shift one of these days. As the Bishop of Idaho often says, "Life is short. There is so little time to be kind."

So this is not my life forever. Today, it is given to me to sit in a Zen garden at an empty airport in Pocatello and shake my head over just how odd that is.

The Family Of God In Lincoln County, Nevada

2011-10-09T17:25:00.000-07:00

Don’t get me wrong. I love Las Vegas. The sheer surrealism of living here amazes me every day. But sometimes it is just too much. Saturday things had been frenzied in a good way with our booth at the Pure Aloha Festival and Convention preparation going on at the same time. Then there was a barrage of the kind of incoming criticism that just goes with the turf of my curious (double entendre) vocation. But God provides. Saturday afternoon, Linda and I headed out for Pioche. But not so fast there kid. We took the I-15, little knowing it had been narrowed to a single lane for road construction. Trapped. It took forever before we could escape the jam. When we did, we had escaped onto the Las Vegas Strip. Arrrrgh! It was a tortuous odyssey wending our way to the I-95. But eventually we made it. We were sprung!

Then it was a lovely drive through the autumn afternoon up the 93, through my beloved Pahranagat Valley, through the Joshua Tree forest, along the pastures, to Pioche, once the wildest town in the Wild Wild West.

Dinner at the Silver Café. Then up the hill to Christ Church where Nick had unlocked the lower level and turned on the heat for us to spend the night in the bedroom they keep ready for itinerant preachers and roving prophets. The dog Fichu was beside himself. The steeply sloping back yard of Christ Church is his favorite place on God’s green earth. He did miss the cats that used to live across the street but they had moved on. There we spent a quiet evening, me reading A. N. Wilson’s eloquent biography of the Puritan heretic Milton.

Morning brought biscuits and sausage gravy at the Silver Café. A rangy young working man was making sweeping generalizations about the evils of socialism while an older working man was responding with a nuanced analysis of the pros and cons of the President’s Jobs Bill.

Back to Church for an early morning vestry meeting. They handled their business expeditiously and informally. As the Treasurer put it “We don’t know Robert.” His rules of order did not impede the good Christian folk of Pioche from getting on with the mission.

They had a challenge. The church musician Louie was missing. That is not unusual. He sometimes goes on walk about. To accommodate his wandering ways, they are buying one of those nifty machines that play hymns to support congregational singing, but it isn’t here yet. So they called Norma to drive a few hours down from Ely to provide the musical accompaniment on a xylophone. It was excellent. The gathered assembly of about 20 people sang right along.

The road from the 93 down to Pioche is an adopted highway, adopted by Christ Church, as a sign conspicuously announces. Civic responsibility, the Church engaged with society, the Christ light shining in a mountain village. After seeing the sign, Linda and I scanned the roadside for litter intending to stop and pick up any scrap we might find. But Deacon Kathy Hiatt and the laity of Christ Church had beaten us to it. The road was pristine.

At the vestry meeting we learned that this little congregation recently gave money to Episcopal Relief and Development to help the tornado victims in Joplin, Missouri. They support a missionary family in Chile. A thank you poster on their wall marks a donation they had made to UNICEF. They voluntarily give money above and beyond their diocesan assessment to support Ministry Development throughout our diocese.

Christ Church was founded by the first missionary bishop of Nevada, Ozzie Whittaker, who celebrated the first Pioche Holy Eucharist in a saloon, using the bar for an altar. This congregation was nourished for many years by Deaconess-in-Charge Jenny Hesmark whose biography is now being written by Karen Wilkes of St. Christopher’s, Boulder City. Christ Church was the star of Bishop Wes Frensdorff’s Total Ministry innovations in the 70s. Then they were shaped in the faith by the devoted ministry of their priest, the Rev. Jean Orr. Jean was called to priesthood by this congregation in 1975 – that’s right several years before women’s ordination was allowed in the Episcopal Church. Jean served until she was past 90. It was my privilege just last week at St. Catherine’s, Reno to confirm Jean’s grand-niece, Sophia Bedel.

When things get rough, it’s good to find the family of God to take one in and boost one’s hope.

Listening To The Heartbeat

2011-10-03T15:31:00.001-07:00

“You look happy,” she said. She was the cashier at Maxi’s Café across from the B gates in the Reno airport. It was Sunday afternoon and I was buying a tuna and caper half sandwich when she said, “You look happy.”

“I am happy,” I said. I was happy. But I was surprised that anyone should say I looked happy, especially at the airport where my usually dour demeanor descends to anxious and morose. But I was so happy that it showed and I knew why. All weekend long, I had been listening to the heartbeat of the Church.

It started as I was “leaving Las Vegas” Thursday afternoon. I’d just finished a speaking engagement on Faith and the Practice of Law at the UNLV Law School. Things were swirling in the diocesan office and among various people in the city. They were scrambling to put together an evangelism booth at the Pure Aloha Festival to be held in the Silverton Casino the following week. We wanted to use this event to publicize our new Filipino/ Pacific Islander ministries which will kick off in January. Ellie was revising the diocesan evangelism brochure to focus on F/ PI evangelism. She was calling our people to find out how to translate Aloha into Tagalog and Igarot. The replies were coming with proposals to add floral designs. She added floral designs. More languages of the Pacific were suggested.

People at different congregations, people who three days ago had never heard of each other, were e mailing back and forth several times a day to coordinate the staffing of our booth which will be open all hours for four days. They were Filipino (Tagalog), Filipino (Igarot), Guamese, Anglo, Cuban, Mexican-American. It was a flurry of trying to do the impossible in too little time. But they were doing it with joy.

Context: we were already in full tilt panic getting ready for convention when Tom Walsh said, “What about the Pure Aloha Festival?” Within a day, we had rented what may be the first evangelism booth in a Las Vegas casino. But, hey, we are the 9th Island. Of course it’s impossible, but what would Eddie Aikau do? (If you don’t know, it’s only because you are not from Hawaii. Google Eddie Aikau). As a thousand bumper stickers say in Hawaii, “Eddie would go for it.”

Arriving in Reno, I drove straight to the Grove for the Empty Bowls Benefit to raise money for the St. Paul’s Community Food Pantry. Donning my “Bishy D” apron, I served bread, cookies, and ice cream. The place was packed. Many beautiful bowls were purchased. I bought one. A film described St. Paul’s efforts to combat hunger in Reno and Sparks. What the St. Paul’s congregation does each week is an incredible level of ministry driven by an inspiring degree of dedication.

Fast forward to Friday morning: I made my way through the line of people waiting to receive food at St. Paul’s, Sparks. Inside, I found Fr. Kirk and his son Cooper who had just come back from a night sleeping on the streets in cardboard boxes. It was an experience of solidarity with the homeless and also another fundraiser. They had sponsors like in a marathon benefit. By acting in solidarity with the homeless, they raised money for ministry to the homeless.

Then it was Saturday night. Off to Carson City (arriving late) for the Bristlecone Mass at the Brewery Arts Center. I swear half the town was there to see St. Peter’s performance of a jazz mass written by one of their own members. It was a composition with profound liturgical theology. It went from the words of institution “Do this in remembrance of me” to a song about Jesus being present as a homeless person pushing his shopping cart in the streets, pulling his coat together against the cold. This Mass understood what the incarnation that happens in the Mass means. It concluded with the eschatological welcome song “Come on in.” Along with music by a top class jazz trio and excellent solos supported by the Sagebrush Chorale, there were dancers (square, ballet, interpretive), mimes, and a juggler. The only place I have seen anything remotely comparable to the Bristlecone Mass is at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This was missional music from a missional church whose Circles of Support program provides a comprehensive array of services to families transitioning from homelessness.

Sunday morning I was at our newest free-standing congregation (the Latino ministries are hosted by existing congregations), St. Catherine’s, Reno. At 9 a.m., they had a Family Eucharist – 25 people present – almost all young parents and their children. They were a lively, joyful group singing “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” At 11, the larger congregation came to support three youngsters for their Confirmation. Among them, it was my privilege to confirm the great grandniece of the Rev. Jean Orr who served Christ Church, Pioche so well, so faithfully, and so long. All three of the confirmands were completely engaged and delighted to take this step in the Christian life.

All the while, the calls and e mails about the Pure Aloha Festival evangelism booth kept flying. The Evangelism Team was burning the candle at both ends to roll out our new evangelism logo which is still top secret in Nevada but Bishop Katharine and the communications people at 815 are cheering loudly and demanding t shirts.

So how was I “listening to the heartbeat of the Church?” Those words are a paraphrase of Philip Newell’s book on Celtic Christianity, Listening to the Heartbeat of God. And they refer to the end of one of Bishop Katharine’s best sermons. At the end she said, “The heartbeat of the Church is ‘mission, mission, mission.’”

Live From Quito 6 (Part B) The End

2011-09-20T19:28:00.002-07:00

In addition to the dramatic resolution of the crisis in Ecuador Central and taking the first step toward a major restructuring of the church, we adopted a pastoral teaching on the environment, particularly about how environmental degradation hurts the poor. A lot of the education sessions had been preparing us for this. It is incumbent on us to share what we learn. A pastoral teaching is one way to do that.

As I look back over my descriptions of this time with the House of Bishops, I see that I have missed much of the quality and feel of what has been happening. The missing pieces are obvious. I have not told you that we celebrated the Eucharist together every day, that we began each day with Morning Prayer followed by Bible Study, that we stopped in the middle of each day for Noonday Prayer, that we ended each day with Evening Prayer, or that we said Compline once. I did not tell you of the special prayers said at other times for people in need or the many prayers of thanksgiving. I did not tell you of the moments of silence for disaster victims, for family members who died this week, for bishops who died since our lasr meeting.

Scripture, prayer, and sacraments were, as always, the supporting structure of all we did. Simply, we continued in the fellowship of the Apostles, the breaking of bread, and in the prayers..

A bishop is a bishop not because of personal gifts and talents. Nor is it enough that a bishop be elected. A bishop has to be plugged into episcopacy. That starts when three or more bishops consecrate him or her. But it does not end there. The authentic exercise of episcopacy depends on connection to the gathered assembly of bishops. Each individual bishop represents this body, which is immensely wiser and holier than any of us could ever be on our own.

Live From Quito 6 (Part A)

2011-09-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

The crisis in Ecuador Central was resolved today. The settlement is complicated but this is the crux of it: Bishop Ruiz, the Standing Committee, the Legal Representative, the Chancellor -- in short the entire diocesan leadership -- will resign, ceding all authority to the Presiding Bishop until they can have a convention to elect new leadership. Bp Katharine has appointed Bp Victor Scantleberry to serve as interim bishop and oversee a process of reconciliation.

Coming to Quito was not easy. It was a long flight for many of us. Quito is the most dangerous airport in the world. One bishop was mugged yesterday. Today a bishop spouse was hospitalized with altitude sickness. A lot of us have been impaired to varying degrees by the altitude. But if our presence helped bring about this step toward peace, where before there were threats of violence, it was worth it. Though the crisis is past, the troubles here did not begin recently and they will not be resolved soon. But this was a big step. We gave our friend Bishop Luiz Fernando Ruiz a standing ovation. We laid hands on him, his wife Tanya, and their baby for healing at the closing Eucharist. You can see the toll this ordeal has taken on them.

Today the new Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Center (815), Bp Stacy Sauls, made the case for a major restructuring of the the Church. We suffer from "death by governance" (Bishop Katharine). Up to 45% of the church budget goes to overhead. We have 75 standing commissions. He gave examples of ways to save millions of dollars from governance so we can redirect that money to mission and social ministries at the local level. We do not have a specific substantive proposal,but a proposed resolution for a special commission to create a restructuring plan to submit at a special convention. Note the point is not just to spend less. It is to redirect money and human resources from governance to mission, from centralized to local, while streamlining the governing bodies of the Church.

The same goals are behind our proposed canon to merge our two diocesan governing boards. Western Kansas and some other small, financially challenged dioceses are dong the same thing this year.

Live From Quito 5: The Losses We Endure

2011-09-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

Disasters have been a major theme of this House of Bishops. We heard from the bishops of Vermont and Albany about the flood, from the bishop of Western Missouri about the tornado, from the bishop of Texas about the drought and wildfires. It has been one hard year! They expressed their appreciation for the prayers and support of the rest of the church in helping them through these catastrophes.

The Archbishop of Japan showed a DVD and gave a heartbreaking report of their triple disaster -- earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation. The bishop of Haiti updated us on the slow process of rebuilding their broken nation after that earthquake. He was deeply grateful for our support and to Bishop Katharine for her repeated visits to encourage and console the Haitian people.

The bishops have been very solicitous for the people of Reno involved in the air crash. They assure us of their prayers.

All of this is probably why I found tears in my eyes at today's Eucharist when we sang Thomas Dorsey's hymn written late one night in 1932 in an Atlanta hotel after he learned that his wife had died in childbirth and the child had died too while he was away.

"When the darkness appears and the night draws near
When the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Precious Lord take my hand, lead me home."

Live From Quito 4

2011-09-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Just a few highlights from today: one of our guest bishops from another church in the Anglican Communion told us that once when he was a new bishop he asked his wife, "Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that I would be bishop of this diocese?" She replied, "Darling, in my wildest dreams, you do not appear."

An English bishop informed us of issues in the C of E including the upcoming Synod which will decide whether to admit women to the episcopacy. He indicated that many in England believe the discussion of the Anglican Covenant has been helpful but see no need to actually adopt the Covenant. He made no prediction of the outcome and did not say how he would vote. My prediction: we will endorse the core values in the first three sections of the covenant but not the sanctions in section four. I also predict not many other churches in the communion will sign on to the Covenant.

The bishops from Liturgy & Music reported on the same sex blessing liturgy drafting process. Enormous work has been done. Massive input has been received. More revising is probably ahead. My opinion: this rite will be approved in some form. There will be controversy about it. But whether it is a bloody controversy depends on which book we put it in. If we do this in a way that effectively compels all dioceses to use the rite, there will be real crises in several dioceses that oppose it. If we do it in a way that authorizes but does not compel its use, it will be used by most dioceses, and the ones who oppose it can dissent in good conscience without a major crisis. There will be upset but we will get through it. I also predict that whatever rite we authorize will be imperfect. Both the rite and the theological supporting document will be revised after a few years of experience.

We had reports and a panel discussion on the economic, environmental, and migration challenges facing our Episcopal Dioceses in Latin America. I was particularly struck to hear that restrictive immigration policies and deportations put people in a vulnerable situation. In that situation they become prey for sex traffickers. I had not made the connection between those two issues -- immigration and trafficking -- which are both major concerns in Nevada.

Live From Quito 3

2011-09-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

Denver is 5,200 ft above sea level. Visitors to Denver are warned to take various precautions about the altitude. Quito is 9,200 ft above sea level -- 4,000 ft farther into the sky. That takes a little getting used to. I am over my illness now and have moved on to the altitude issue.

Given my marginal health, I did not go on the field trip to the Colombia border on Saturday. It was 11.5 hrs on a bus. The people in Tucan were grateful for the visit of those bishops and spouses who made the journey. But I passed.

My Saturday began congenially. I had breakfast with the music leader for the House of Bishops, Dent Davison. He is at the Cathedral in Chicago these days, but it turns out he grew up in Hawaii. We talked about our plans in Nevada for Filipino/ Pacific Islander Ministries, and he told me about a wonderful resource of traditional Christian music from the Pacific. The day ended with a dinner outing of the Province 8 bishops and spouses/partners. As providence would have it, I sat across the table from the bishop of Hawaii, who serves all the way to Guam. So we did more brainstorming about how to connect with our new mission field, Pacific Islanders living in the desert. In between, I caught up on paper work and church e mails. A very productive day!

This morning was the most important thing we have done so far. We went to Church! That is always the most important thing to do, but today it was even more so. The Diocese of Ecuador Central has a history of big time trouble. In March, the Standing Committee in one fell swoop ousted the bishop. Since then there have been threats of violence -- conflict like we do not see in USA church life. Bishop Katharine and her staff have been negotiating a resolution to the crisis. Today both sides celebrated Holy Communion together. Bishop Katharine preached a wise, calm, faithful sermon directly into the conflict. The antagonists met at the same altar because we were here. What Woody Allen said about life is definitely true about episcopacy. "90 per cent is just showing up."

Live From Quito 2 (Part B)

2011-09-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

We had a panel of Liberation Theologians on Friday afternoon. They were ok but mostly stating the obvious. I rarely speak at HOB meetings, but this time I asked what I considered to be a provocative question. Their replies were totally non-responsive. So while I did not like their answer I still like my question. Maybe you can do better with it:

The U.S. context for church, mission, and theology differs from Latin America in that the U.S. has had a large, strong, prosperous middle class. The Episcopal Church is overwhelmingly a middle class church. But the middle class has been declining and shrinking for years. Wealth disparity is on the persistent rise. The recession has shrunk the middle class further. Economists predict that the recovery will continue the tend. New jobs will be very high or low paying, not much in the middle. We are becoming an hour glass economy and society -- all haves and have nots -- not many have somes. Our way of being church, the people we evangelize, our liturgy and music is all shaped by being the church of a class that is ceasing to exist. Who is God calling is to become, what is God calling us to do in this shifting context?

After the panel, Prince Singh (Rochester) invited me to join him in a search for hats in Quto. We had a great time. I got a black wool South American cowboy hat. Prince wanted a leather hat. We asked some friends the Spanish word for leather but it turned out they gave us the word for skin. Fortunately we discovered the mistake before asking directions to a skin shop. After our purchases, we ate Ecuadoran food al fresco under an awning during a heavy rain storm. He and I are about as different as can be. Rochester and Nevada are about as different as can be. But we love comparing our experiences. So different in every way on the surface but with the same gosspel in our hearts.

We hurried back through the drenching rain to an Indaba conversation about the draft proposal for rites of same sex blessings and the supporting theological statement. There were 35 of us gathered for this special discipline of honest gentle sharing. What people said is confidential. But there are several noteworthy things that marked the meeting. 1. There were not two positions. There were at least 35 distinct viewpoints. Some will vote yes and some no. But their positions are all complex, nuanced, and intelligent. 2. I was surprised to hear some of the opinions coming out of the particular mouths expressing them. People had changed and grown as they struggled with hard and subtle issues. 3. I was impressed by the intelligence, wisdom, and compassion of every single person in the room without exception. 4, I continue to be amazed at the ability of these people to express strong feelings which put them at odds with each other but to treat each other with the utmost respect as they strive to understand the differences. It is as if they really mean their Baptismal vows!

Live From Quito 2 (Part A)

2011-09-17T00:59:00.000-07:00

After a mostly sleepless night, I headed down to the hotel cafe. By God's good providence I ran into Kee Sloan there. Kee is suffragan bishop of Alabama and was recently elected in a landslide to become the next diocesan bishop. He and I were College for Bishops classmates and both have the awkward position of being moderates in a church that supposedly espouses moderation but has a hard time living into that identity in a polarized society. There is no one in the church I respect more than Kee for his kindness, courage, and honesty.

Morning Prayer was followed by Bible Study. We worked with how to follow Jesus' clear and emphatic teachings about social justice in our context. Jesus' teachings run contrary to the Spencerian political ideologies so popular in many of our congregations and many of our members trust Darwin and Spencer more than Christ and Moses in the public square.

I then bailed on the teaching session. It was on Scriptural Foundations of Liberation Theology. I have read quite a bit of that already and was unable to stay awake. Actually, I think the Latin American Liberation Theologians do a pretty good job with Scripture but Walter Brueggemann does it better. As you may have gathered we are focussing on Liberation Theology since it is so important here in Ecuador and throughout the continent. In short, I took a morning nap.

Over lunch, I joined about 10 bishops from wildly different diocese to discuss how best to do the ordination discernment process. There are plenty of good ideas around. This was interesting to me as we are working on refining our discernment process in Nevada. One thing we all agreed on today: we need a process that opens hearts and minds to find God's will. That means processes that generate wisdom and insight -- not yes or no judgments on people.

After lunch I met with Chaplain Simon who prayed for my healing and gave me good pointers on a healthier lifestyle. He is in D.C. now but hails from the Dominican Republic. He seems to have real ties to Haiti as well. At Morning Prayer he taught is the Haitian Creole liberation song O Bodye.

Live From Quito 1

2011-09-15T17:40:00.000-07:00

This experience is marred by my feeling lousy. It could be the 2 root canals I had the afternoon before my flight, or the antibiotics I am taking, or the altitude, or being too old to travel this much. But I wouldn't miss it. Connecting with the other bishops is so energizing, edifying, and spiritually important.

it is spiritually important because this is how we form and sustain the church. The church is not at heart an authority structure. It is a web of relationships. Human friendships with people in other dioceses --not canons or commissions -- expand our identity beyond Nevada. Relationships make us bigger and bigger hearted. Each day I pray for this diocese Ecuador Central and it's bishop Luis, for the diocese of Machakos (Kenya) and it's bishop Joseph, and for the diocese of Santiago (Philippines) and its bishop Alexander. Knowing, appreciating, and praying for each other is how we form the church. We do some of that in Nevada. Many of our priests this year resolved to pray on a daily basis for 5 other priests. That's a start. I wonder what other networks of people might undertake to intentionally get acquainted and pray for one another.

Today we began with Holy Eucharist and a great sermon by Bishop Katharine on our duty as Christians to act and advocate for peace, reconciliation, and justice. Leading the church in the way of Jesus is bound to get resistance from those our scriptures call "worldly minded" (meaning that their secular ideologies trump their faith). But that resistance does not compare with the risks taken by Christians in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines when they defend the poor and the outcasts. We need the Anglican Communion so they can inspire us with their strength and courage.

After the Eucharist we had small group check in followed by a report from the Medical Trust on our insurance premiums. That is a big problem for some dioceses including ours. They are working on it.At lunch, I slipped off with two buddies, Prince Singh of Rochester and Scott Mayer of Northwest Texas. We compared notes on Bishoping and told stories from our dioceses. This too is how we keep the chuch knitted together.In the afternoon we heard from a Kansas theologian about the place of peace and justice advocacy in the Anglican tradition going back to the 17th century on up through 19th century when Bishop Charles Gore grounded social justice in the Incarnation and the 20th Century's Archbishop William Temple who tied justice to the sacraments. Then we head from a Brazillian bishop about the church's on the ground experiences with social justice ministries.

After a pleasant dinner of Ecuadoran dishes most of which I did not recognize I have called it day well spent.

Bishop Felled In Comstock Shootout

2011-09-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

After celebrating Ozzie Whittaker (1st bishop of the missionary district of Nevada & Arizona) Day, I hung around Virginia City which was thronged with tourists for Labor Day Weekend. Half the town was in Old West costume. I met up with Ken who plays the good guy Marshall in the gunfight show and we hatched a plot against one if the other actors. It went like this:

A volunteer is always called from the audience. Marshall Ken helps her shoot the bad guy Kyle. But another actor, Lefty, falls and Ken tells her she has missed the bad guy and shot innocent Lefty instead. Unbeknownst to anyone but Lefty and Ken we arranged that Lefty would not fall.

I was sitting in the front row. When the shot was fired I clutched my chest and fell splayed into the hay. Ken exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! You not only missed the bad guy! You shot Bishop Dan! He's the bishop of the Episcopal Churchall all over Nevada! You are in deep do-do!" I couldn't see the reactions because I was technically dead lying prostrate and slack-jawed across a hay bale. Reports are the volunteer from the audience handled it well enough but bad guy Kyle was pretty surprised.

It was a great day at St Paul the Prospector. We commissioned one of the flock, Christy Anne Strange, to serve as lay chaplain to the Sheriff's Department. After the service, we dedicated the Western Missionary Museum. They have quite the collection of artifacts and records there. The museum now has a docent and a gift shop. "The scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven brings out of his treasure that which is old and that which is new." A new museumm does both at once. Quite a way to mark their 150th anniversary!

For those who may not be Nevada church history buffs: it was important for me to get shot on Ozzie Whittaker Day. When Ozzie was elected Bishop of Pennsylvania, somebody took a shot at him during his installation service in Philadelphia. He survived and had a good long episcopacy back east to balance out his long years in the saddle between Virginia City and Tombstone. "Whistle back a memory. Whistle back where I wanna be ... To Tombstone Territory."

Even The Help Bleaches Reality: We Are In The Room

2011-09-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Let me say this up front and clearly. The Help is a great movie. What it says about race relations in the South is not only true about 1963; it is still true in only slightly subtler form in pockets of society today. Viola Davis was brilliant and deserves an Oscar. If you haven’t seen The Help, do so right away.

But something bothered me. The book is about a Black perspective on White culture. The movie includes that. But, compared to the book, the movie is about a White perspective on Black people and their perspective on White culture. The author, Skeeter, becomes a principal character instead of the teller of the tale. They did not adapt the book into a screenplay; so much as they wrote a screenplay about the white person writing the book. As one who loved the movie – but loved the book more – I just wonder what that is about. Was the book, The Help, too Black for an American audience, in the opinion of Hollywood – despite being a best seller?

The Entertainment Industry, more than the news media, tells us who we are. We see ourselves reflected in their eyes. What they think we will pay to see has a powerful influence on who we become. That’s what makes the change from the book to the screenplay troubling. The screenplay was good – but bleached.

I recently heard an NPR interview with the man who adapted the book Soul Surfer for the screen. The book is the memoir of Bethany Hamilton, a young surfer who lost her arm in a shark attack. Bethany tells the story of how her Christian faith empowered her to get back on the surfboard and become a professional champion surfer.

Well, that is a great story but a bit too Christian for the big screen. So what to do? Change the story of course. Her Christianity is acknowledged this way: The devastating injury causes her to doubt the existence of God. Her youth group sponsor shows up and tells her God had a purpose for sending the shark to chomp off her limb. (Not the most appealing of theologies – God using sharks as Manchurian candidates to cripple young people.) But her vague faith in something – influenced by Native Hawaiian animist religion – gives her the courage to make a comeback. They want to show that she had faith – but do not want to say what she believed or who she had faith in.

The screenwriter was amazingly candid in acknowledging his cynicism. There is a “faith based market.” So they wanted enough spirituality to appeal to that market – but did not want to be so Christian as to offend the secular audiences. Bethany could be spiritual, but not too religious.

I have two concerns: First, I am troubled by the censorship of my own beliefs. Second, the movie just isn’t true. I understand society is rather secular – but it is not as secular as Hollywood portrays it. For instance, Bethany Hamilton is a Christian, but Hollywood will acknowledge that truth only in hushed whispers. They would feel so much more at ease with her as a neo-pagan animist.

Thinking back over classic television series, there have been a few explicitly religious ones – very few. But did you ever wonder if Magnum P. I. went to church? How about the Partridge family? This isn’t new. There is no acknowlegement that faith is part of the lives of normal/ normative people. The Entertainment Industry has been portraying life as secular for a long time. They tell us who we are. We believe it. Then we become it.

I don’t necessarily want screenwriters to be our evangelists. It’s just that we are in the room. I am troubled that they are so embarrassed by our presence that they pretend we aren’t here. Do they think that if they ignore us long enough we will just go away? Do they think that Black voices cannot speak for themselves, but must be mediated through White translators or at least have a White person standing there giving them permission to speak? Only on occasion does the Entertainment Industry dare to hold a mirror up to the world. Most of the time they paint a picture of us instead – and the picture is a bleached, monochrome, religionless, raceless, political convictionless, generic American -- far less engaging and less human than the truth.

But for those who are offended by my criticism of The Help, let me reiterate: The Help is a great movie. What it says about race relations in the South is not only true about 1963; it is still true in only slightly subtler form in pockets of society today. Viola Davis was brilliant and deserves an Oscar. If you haven’t seen The Help, do so right away.

Compatriots

2011-08-10T21:32:00.001-07:00

I sit with my 96 year old mother in her assisted living facility. She is not dying – not right away – but is in end stage congestive heart failure, has seriously high blood pressure, and seems to have had some mini-strokes. We are sitting in the common area where she does not like to be. She has been on the border of agoraphobia for decades. Her ability to focus and communicate is limited, so we have little to say.

A group begins to gather for worship. I offer to push my mother’s wheel chair back to her room where we can continue our non-conversation. I do not recall her being in a church except for a funeral or wedding since 1959. She has never joined the services at this assisted living home. I don’t know why she avoids corporate worship. I suspect she doesn’t get the worship and doesn’t like the corporate. She has never spoken of it. In our family, religion is a private affair. I offer to facilitate her escape.

To my surprise, she says, “Can I stay and hear it?” She does mean hear it – like hearing the mass – she does not sing and is quite blind – also deaf, but they sing loudly. I say “yes” and push her chair into formation with the gathered assembly – wondering what shift has happened in her and why. We are sitting in a worship service together for the first time in 50 years.

We sing from the Baptist hymnal. While we sing, the demented old lady sitting next to us reaches over and steals from my mother’s shoulders a ratty-looking towel which she has wrapped around herself for warmth. The geriatric thief turns the towel to her own use. But my mother still has an attractive blanket worn like a shawl around her shoulders, so it is ok. We sing:

“Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer!
May I thy consolation share,
Till, from Mt. Pisgah’s lofty height,
I see my home and take my flight.
This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise,
To seize the everlasting prize . . . .”

What is my mother thinking as we sing this? Of my father, of my brother, of herself?

Then the pastor speaks. He is from Myrtle Springs Baptist, the little country church where I walked down the center aisle any number of times to Just As I Am. He is a pudgy young man in a knit shirt and sneakers. I am grateful to him for being here and so I think charitably on his vague abstract message about how Americans should be grateful to God that even when things are bad here, they worse in developing nations. I am not grateful for that. But I am grateful to him. He has spoken of spiritual things to my mother and he is from the church of my childhood.

At the end of the service, he passes through the throng shaking hands. He comes to me and I say, “When I was a boy, I attended Myrtle Springs. It is an important place to me.”

It is an important place to me. Those words hold memories of Royal Ambassadors, sword drill, Sunday School, of friends now departed, of Brother Tate shouting his ruddy faced robust gospel, succeeded by Brother Bob whose message was friendlier but less interesting, memories of the choir’s red headed soprano just a year older than me, the one I stared at but never spoke to.

“When I was a boy, I attended Myrtle Springs. It is an important place to me,” I said.

“That’s very nice,” he said and walked on by.

Double whammy. I had just been dismissively patronized the way old people are. He was in his patronizing-the-old-folks pastoral mode and was not able to shift gears fast enough to respond to me – bright, energetic, colorful character from Las Vegas that I am – and so he responded to me as he had to all the others. I learned something about my craft, about listening to people of any age and responding to them as if they matter.

But that is only one of the whammies. The other whammy is not about age. It is about shared places which is actually my point. During my long decades spent East of the Mississippi, I would on very rare occasion see someone get out of a car with an Idaho license plate. I eventually learned better, but at first I would speak to them. It was like seeing a long lost family member, so I would speak, saying,

“Idaho! I lived in Boise for over a decade, had a law office in Eagle, practiced in Canyon County too. Where were you? Did you eat Austrian Food at Peter Shott’s, drink beer at the Burger & Brew? What was that jazz piano player’s name?”

And they would stare at me like a panhandler at best, more likely someone about to pick their pocket.

In Las Vegas, I have twice at the gym seen someone with a Texas Longhorn shirt, and I have said something like,

“Hook ‘em horns. I’m a Texas Ex. When were you there? Ever eat the schnitzel at Sholz’s Beer Garden?”

They have looked at me nervously and moved away. Even Texans, the mega-cult of all mega-cults, the ultimate granfaloon, refuse to exchange the secret handshake based on sharing a common place in our past. These are not ordinary places. They are special places. To have been there is formative. To have been in the same place, when it is such a place, is to have been formed somewhat together.

There are still a few places where those bonds can be invoked. New Yorkers still recognize each other.

“I’m from New York.”
“The City?”
“Yes.”
“Which borough?”
“ Manhattan.”
“I lived there in the late 80’s.”
“No kidding. Where?”
“Chelsea. Corner of 9th and 20th. How about you?”
“Upper West Side.”
“Cool. I used to work at John the Divine.”
“O yeah? . . . . .”

Places in common are precious in a transient society. This year I confirmed a woman in Henderson who turned out to be a lawyer with a Master of Divinity, and is now an aspirant for Holy Orders. There she was in Henderson, Nevada, and right away the first time I met her she said,

“I’m from Macon, Georgia.”
“No! How is that possible?”
“Lived there from birth through college.”
“What high school?”
“Southwest.”
“So you knew Marcia Aldridge?”
“No.”
“Oh that’s right, she was at Southeast. Which college? Macon State?”
“No. Mercer. I had Mary Wilder.”
“You’re kidding. She was at St. Francis.”
“I know.”

We are not just inhabitants of places. We don’t just own, rent, or pass through them. We imbibe them. They become part of us and we become part of them. And we can never fully leave them. Not by moving a thousand miles away or staying in exile for decades. They are woven into our identity.

To have shared a place in our past is a bond. It may not make us friends. But it makes us compatriots – and that is a relationship. It is a relationship so rarely recognized that I just had to look up the word to make sure it means what I thought it did. It does. That pastor and I are compatriots. I could tell him a thing or two about his home if he would listen. And he could tell me what’s happening now. Those Idahoans and New Yorkers are my compatriots. The woman from Henderson and Macon and I are double compatriots.

Before long my mother will be buried in the same Texas earth where my grandparents, father, brother, most of the family I have known, and a goodly number of friends are buried. Even if I lived in Istanbul, Texas has a claim on me; and I, on it. Those who are bound to the same land are bound to me; and I, to them.

And what of those who share a place now? What is our tie to each other? There is a moral and metaphysical answer which is true regardless of what we acknowledge. To deny it is to cut ourselves off from reality. But the social and political question is: what tie will we own? Is our presence here an inconvenience or an asset to each other? Regardless of that, is our sharing of this space sacramental? Is the kingdom in fact among us waiting for us to live into it by acknowledging our earthy human bond?

The Angry Whopper: Sacrament Of Our Day

2011-07-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

Burger King has “unveiled” its newest work of culinary marketing – “the Angry Whopper.” Actually, the burger sounds pretty good and I am apt to eat one. As you have probably surmised, it is the regular old Whopper with some spicy substitutions like jalapenos and pepper jack cheese. But here’s what I’m wondering: why is the Whopper “angry”? Why not hot, fiery, spicy, searing, etc.? I gather that BK figures people want anger enough to pay for it, even at lunch. They want an angry lunch.

This isn’t entirely new. Think back to the theme song of the 60’s classic western The Rebel.

Johnny Yuma was a rebel.
He roamed through the west.
Johnny Yuma the rebel,
He wandered alone

(So far it’s just Kant and Kierkegaard’s solitary individual with a sawed off shotgun. But here’s what puzzles me):

Fighting mad
This rebel lad
He packed no star
As he wandered far
Where the only law
Was a hook and a draw.

Ok, “no star . . . the only law was a hook and a draw” -- we are celebrating the heroism of anarchy, living the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short” life in Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all – sounds like Congress and sometimes the Church). But what was Johnny Yuma fighting mad about? I watched the series faithfully, and found Johnny to be rather cool headed. But the theme song promised us he would be “fighting mad.” Why did they make such a promise utterly unsupported by the script or the acting? Whenever I wander far “where the only law is a hook and a draw” as is the case in some urban neighborhoods, I am not angry. I’m mostly nervous. So why was Johnny misrepresented in the song as “angry”?

Now even our hamburgers are imbued with rage, which calls to mind the punk rock 90s classic “Rage” by Henry Rollins. Do you recall the lyrics? To this day, I know every line by heart. It went:

Rage, rage, rage, rage, rage.
Rage, rage, rage, rage, rage.
Rage, rage, rage, rage, rage.

My wife teaches Property Law to first year law students. Typically, disputes arise as to the degree to which the individual’s property rights should be constrained to accommodate the needs of neighbors or the common good (e.g., zoning regulations) -- issues over which students differ according to political ideology. The more conservative students tend to get pretty worked up over things like zoning. My wife has on occasion asked them where the anger comes from. They are unable to articulate the cause of their emotions, but the question itself makes them all the angrier. What is this about?

Remember the Gulf Oil Spill. What were people actually angry at the President about – not so much any policy he had or had not adopted – they were angry that he was not sufficiently angry. With each passing year, anger grows more normative. Remember Sean Connery’s James Bond. He used to have a jolly good time blowing up the bad guys and saving the world. But Daniel Craig seethes with hatred. With him, it’s personal.

In the psycho-spiritual model I believe in, emotions are emotions. They are all natural and human. The core self or the soul looks upon those emotions, either inside us or outside us, with interest, patience, and acceptance, balancing our feelings and preserving our capacity to live rationally and in harmony – harmony both with each other and with the various parts of ourselves. But what happens when one emotion is elevated above the others, when one emotion is given the place in life that is the natural province of our serene center?

In Buddhism, there are 6 realms of being. We each live our life predominantly in one of them, but we experience all 6 realms each day as passing passions or moods. They are the realms of:

The Divas – blissed out
The Diva Locis – blissed out but crazy and erratic
Human – rational and choice making
Animal – controlled by sensuality
Hungry Ghosts – driven by insatiability – constant sense of scarcity
Hell Beings – consumed by fear and loathing

In the Buddhist model, it is the lowest realm of being that has become the pinnacle of spiritual aspiration in our popular and – God help us – political culture. When Clay, Webster, and Calhoun saved the nation in 1850 through Compromise, they acted rationally in a way which is hard to do in a society that buys anger for lunch.

Half Moon Reflections On A Week In The Life

2011-07-09T22:42:00.001-07:00

On this half-moon night in Elko, I sip a Gentleman Jack in JR’s Bar while a sweet-voiced old guy with a white mustache and a red baseball cap sings “I thought I loved you then” at country karaoke night. A heavy set man plops down on the bar stool next to me. He is a sniper just back from Iraq, sent home because he is too old, but he has 479 confirmed kills. He wants someone to say they appreciate it, so I do, and get dizzy from the moral ambiguity of life. My glass is empty so I leave while a less romantic, more maudlin C & W favorite is on the karaoke machine. The desk clerk is singing it quietly as I go out the door into the night where the bright half-moon light -- which does not frighten me (I am only phobic of full moons) – is shining down into the clouds below.

And I remember bits of this past week. There was a whirl of news media around a scandal where I was, by virtue of my position, the appropriate point person. Bishops from all over the United States sent me messages of support and encouragement. I met 3 times with the congregation involved and was so impressed with their calm, their compassion, and their wisdom. All the things I was supposed to bring them, they already had in abundance. Even crises can be full of grace.

Thursday I was at an Army National Guard base for the commissioning of 1st Lt. Teogenes Bernardez, Jr. (our own Fr. Jun) as an officer and a chaplain. Friday I welcomed the Filipino Convocation of Episcopal Asian Ministries to a youth and young adult gathering in Las Vegas. There I discovered to my dismay that I was scheduled to be at St. Thomas, Las Vegas the next day – but I was also scheduled to be at St. Thomas the Believer in Lovelock. A calendar disaster of the first order!!! But I looked up and there, provided by the Lord like the ram with his horns caught in the bush on Mt. Moriah, was Bishop Botengan, retired from the Philippines. I asked him to save me by covering the Las Vegas service and he did. God is amazing. The one time I need a bishop; there actually is another one in the state.

Having resolved that crisis I dashed for the airport to catch a plane to Reno – not a minute to spare. But before I could get away, the Asian Ministries coordinator for Province 8 gave me a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, a present from the Bishop of Hawaii – perfect – it was supper! Yes, I ate an entire box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts while driving lickety split to the airport.

Then it was off to Fallon – arrived just shy of 11 p.m. -- from which the Very Rev. Trudy Erquiaga and I headed out bright and early this morning to Lovelock Correctional Institution – home to our largest most Spirit-filled congregation in central Nevada. Yes the gospel is alive and well behind the barbed wire. Baptized two (full immersion), confirmed three or four, received one. Preached on Romans “If a person is in Christ, he is no longer under condemnation.” You can’t preach that anywhere else like you can in prison.

Then eastward as far as Elko. I called the people in Wells (situated about an hour on beyond Elko) to remind them I will be there tomorrow. Up to now I’ve had the impression they didn’t much want to see me. Some say they are afraid I will close them because they are so small. But today on the phone they were perfectly friendly. It’s a four person congregation, the faithful remnant of a church that split over controversies in years past. Two couples meet at our church each Sunday to say Morning Prayer. I like that. Also Wells is the former home of Elias, the mad prophet hitch-hiker who anointed me for this job when I gave him a ride in Georgia the week before the election. Closing them is unthinkable. I hope to tell them that.

Now here I am in Elko at my beloved Gold Country Inn. It was almost full when I arrived. There is a Western Shoshone reunion here this weekend. But I got one of the rooms with Moose curtains and bedspreads.

Today Trudy asked me how I am liking my job. How can I answer? Chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. Moose bedspreads. Gentleman Jack and an old guy singing “I thought I loved you then.” Prison church. Two old couples church. Filipino youth church. Army National Guard rituals. I don’t deserve this life. It is just too amazing.

Colts In A Ditch

2011-05-28T16:39:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, as I was driving north into Fallon on 95, I saw a horse pasture to my right. It was a fenced pasture with a deep gulley inside the fence. The gulley had a steep slope, one that could be negotiated by a mature horse but not a colt. Two colts were lying along that steep slope. My guess is they frolicked along the edge, fell in, could not get out, and collapsed in exhaustion and despair.

Most of the mature horses in the pasture had gathered around. Several were at the top of the gulley. At least four horses had come down into it and were standing over the little ones. They were standing as if at attention, majestic in a posture of defense. They were guarding their young and calling out for help.

I called Dean Trudy Erquiaga on my cell phone (it’s alright I have Bluetooth). She called the Churchill County Sheriff’s Department, who in turn called the Highway Patrol. That’s as far as I know of the story but I imagine it came out alright. Fallon is the sort of place where a horse in need can find a friendly human hand.

But I can’t get out of my mind the picture of those horses standing over their colts. It was a thing of beauty, a thing of character. That image leads me inevitably to a sadder, contrasting picture – the state of children in Nevada and the response of our adult population.

Our dropout rate, our domestic violence rate, our divorce rate -- all the facts are consistent and emphatic. Thousands of Nevada’s children are lying in a ditch, exhausted and in despair. If we start with their families, the adults are often broken themselves. One way or another, many children today do not have families watching over them. We preserve our ranking as the state with the lowest number of young adults with post graduate degrees by remaining the state with the lowest percentage of preschoolers who are read to daily by an adult. The schools and social service agencies, already operating on a shoestring, are now being drastically defunded.

It’s always easy to blame the politicians. Partly I do – but I don’t’ think they lied to us. They have been clear on their priorities and we have elected them. I can only say that the adults who run our state, the adults who vote, the adults who advocate for this interest group or that – the adults of our state are leaving the children in the ditch. The current political expression of child neglect mirrors the chronic neglect of children in their homes.

I am not the one to find a mission for the Diocese of Nevada. My place is to listen to what’s on the hearts of people both inside and outside our church walls. What I hear is deep concern for the children. What I hear is a desire to find a way to stand together and watch over our children. I see it happening in different ways in different churches and communities. St. Matthew’s and St. Paul’s, Elko partner with Communities in Schools; St. Peter’s works through Food for Thought and there are other parish/ public school partnerships; several congregations have taken up advocacy about child sex trafficking. We are beginning to restore our partnership with St. Jude’s Ranch for Children. Some of us have engaged in legislative advocacy for the public schools where we deliver food, shoes, and school supplies. We are seeking grants to begin Episcopal Children’s Services in Nye County to transport at risk children to their service providers (transportation the Sheriff can no longer provide because of funding cuts.)

There are no doubt many ways to take action. But the image that remains in my mind is of those horses watching over their young. Already, the Episcopal Church in Nevada is moving into that posture, standing over the fallen in the ditch – guarding and calling out to those with the power to do more than we can do.

Leadership Is Making Something Happen

2011-05-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ron Heifetz in his book, Leadership On The Line, tells the story of Lois. She lived on a Native American reservation where nearly everyone over 12 drank alcohol. She started going to the meeting lodge every Tuesday night. She told her friends she was leading AA meetings. But when they peeked through the window, there was Lois sitting all by herself. When people challenged her about this she said, “I am not alone. The spirits and the ancestors are there with me. Someday our people will come.”

Lois sat alone in that room for years. After three years, a few people joined her. After 10 years, the room was full. Leadership is doing what is needed -- not what is demanded.

Two years ago, there were no Sunday Schools for children in Nixon, Bullhead City, Ely, or Elko. There were no Sunday Schools because there were no children. There were no children because there were no Sunday Schools. But determined leaders in each of these communities started Sunday Schools. The adult teachers sat in empty rooms and waited. Today, there are vibrant Sunday Schools in those four churches. The children are present and they have brought their parents.

Who might need the grace of God? Who might need the love of Christ? What form might that grace need to take for someone?

Nevada has the highest divorce rate in the nation. This is not just folks flying in for their divorce then flying back home. Our people get divorced a lot. Might there be Nevadans hurting from their divorces who might need the support of a group. There’s a ready template. http://www.divorcecare.org/. There’s a special version of it for the children. A church could extend that ministry to people regardless of where or whether they worship.

Might the offering of periodic Recovery Masses or healing services mediate grace to someone with an addiction? Last year I asked all our churches to observe a Recovery Sunday each year. One initially said it would be too expensive. Another is waiting to figure out if any of their present members need such a thing. But many of our congregations have observed at least one Recovery Mass and they plan to do it again. At our recent priests conference several priests requested the resources to offer a Recovery Mass. We might someday become a church explicitly for people in recovery, a church whose commitment to being “inclusive” would intentionally include the addicted.

Leadership is doing something new. It’s being out in front which necessarily means being alone at first. It’s risk taking because the new thing may fall flat. But it’s where the action is, where life happens.

There are a few business management folks in our diocese who want us to announce a strategy. Maybe someday we can do that. But that strategy depends on what is in our people’s hearts. I am still waiting to learn that. For example it does no good for me to say, we ought to offer Divorce Care unless it is in someone’s heart to minister to people in this particular pain. What other needs are out there? Needs of the vulnerable elderly? Needs of abused children? What about the deaf? I I have been told (elsewhere) that “we don’t offer signing in our worship because we have no deaf people.” That’s like not offering Sunday School because we have no children.

I don’t know a fraction of the needs that surround the church. All I know is what the church needs. We need leaders with the imagination, the compassion, the courage, and the initiative to make something happen. If our hearts are open, the Spirit will move us to right action.

Willl The Episcopal Church Survive? God Knows.

2011-05-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

Will the Episcopal Church survive? God knows.

The allusion is to Ezekiel: “’Son of Man, can these bones live?’ ‘O Lord, thou knowest.” Ezekiel 37: 1-14. Life and death are God’s business. So is the future.

But some of our folks have been reading that if the Episcopal Church continues to lose members at the same rate we did in the past 7 years, we won’t last past 2060. Numbers and trends can be made to say all sorts of things, especially if you skip the facts of the story.

We have not been losing members randomly or through being boring or spiritually irrelevant. In fact, up until 2003, we were the only mainline denomination that was growing. In the past 7 years or so we have gone through a major controversy over gay inclusion. We did the right thing, in my view. We were true to an honest reading of Scripture and we acted faithfully on our theology. We were true to our beliefs. But it cost us the attempted secession of the Dioceses of San Joaquin, Ft. Worth, Pittsburgh, and Quincy. It led to the loss of congregations in dioceses that remained in the church, and the loss of members from congregations that stayed in their dioceses. Statistically, it was not a tsunami but it did make a notable dent in our membership for the past 7 years.

That controversy may not be completely over. But it has certainly lost a lot of steam. Much of American culture seems to have gone our way, and other mainline denominations are reaching similar conclusions to the ones we have reached. Even internationally, more and more of us are agreeing to disagree and get on with serving Christ.

As for the future and the doomsday predictions based on “current trends,” we would have to come up with a series of new controversies as divisive as the one of the past 7 years to keep up that rate of schism and chaos. I’m not sure we are that creative. Besides, new controversies don’t seem to be what we are doing these days. We are more interested in moving on beyond the old liberal-conservative point and counterpoint. We are settling down to the business of being the Church in the 21st Century. Everyone from Alban Institute to the Evangelism and Congregational Development folks are teaching how to close the door on old fights and live into a newly invigorated mission. See for example “Changing the Conversation” in Alban Weekly for May 16, 20111, weekly@alban.org. The controversies of this decade have been hard, but they have brought us to a deeper understanding of the faith and a deeper appreciation of each other – those of us who are still together in this battle scarred old Church.

So what does the future hold for the Episcopal Church? God knows. I only know what I see here today in Nevada. I see children’s Sunday Schools in Ely, Elko, and Nixon where there were no children just three years ago. I see young adults at numerous congregations where there were no young adults three years ago. I see active campus ministries in Reno and Elko. We had churches packed for Easter this year that had not been full for years. Epiphany, one of our newest and demographically youngest congregations, is looking for a larger building because they are regularly over crowded. The Grace in the Desert juggernaut of growth goes on.

I see more and better parish web sites and Face Book pages. I hear our ministries recognized on NPR. Billboards are going up outside Ely and Fallon. Our Latino ministries happen in existing churches so we don’t count them as new parishes. But if you consider a worshiping community as a congregation, then we have seven brand new congregations all growing rapidly. We are offering small church music workshops and initiating a program of emergent ministries for miners and energy workers to rebuild our rural ministries. A plan for evangelism in Asian ministries is on the drawing board.

It isn’t all rosy. One of our well loved small congregations in Reno closed last year. But I see its former members now actively engaged and strengthening the other 3 congregations in Reno, one of which is a fairly new parish. Another of our small congregations went from about 24 to around 12 this year over a local fight. But some of those dozen folks have found their way to another Episcopal congregation in the area that was on the ropes a few years ago but now is coming back strong.

What does the future hold for the Episcopal Church? “O Lord our times are in your hands.” God knows. I don’t. No, I don’t know our future. But I know our mission and it is not perpetually checking our pulse. Our mission is being faithfully present in a culture where people are lost, alienated, lonely, and despairing. Our mission is shining the Christ light of hope into the dark corners of society – corners darkened by poverty, sometimes economic, more often spiritual. I believe people need the Episcopal Church and I believe God loves it. If God did not love it, it would have surely died long ago from all the things we’ve done to it in our human frailty and ineptitude.

What is God doing in the Episcopal Church? We have a lot of wind out here in the High Desert. Jesus said “God is wind.” John 4:24 “The wind bloweth wherever it listeth and you hear the sound of it; but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goest. So it is with every word that is born of the Spirit.” John 3: 8. The Church is God’s word born of the Spirit on Pentecost, reborn of the same Spirit with each and every baptism. Where is the Church going? Wherever God wills.

A Little Pilgrimage: To And From The Sacred Lake

2011-04-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

Whenever I have driven to Pyramid Lake, I have taken I-80 through Fernley and Wadsworth. This afternoon, for the first time, I took Pyramid Lake Rd. out of Sparks. Unlike I-80, it does not pass alongside the mountains but goes through them – rolling hills, with sharp vertical mountains jutting up among them, the road rising, falling, and winding its way deeper into the high desert.

It was an interesting enough drive, but I did know the road having driven it the opposite direction toward Sparks. I knew the road going one way, but had never driven it into the Rez. As I came around one of the mountains, the Lake was suddenly there. I found myself headed directly toward it. The water was huge. It doesn’t look that big from any other vantage point. A vast expanse of water the most striking emerald color I have ever seen.

I was awestruck and afraid. Why afraid? It felt like when you stand at the edge of the roof top of a tall building or on a high bridge like the one at Royal Gorge and you are afraid of falling but also have a terrifying urge to jump. Rudolf Otto said that experience lies at the root of religion. He called it the “mysterium tremendum; mysterium fascinans” – an encounter with something that at once frightens and fascinates – the kind of terrifying beauty from which you cannot look away. That’s what the Bible means by “fear of the Lord” – not dread of punishment but a trembling in the presence of something immeasurably strange and wonderful.

There are more spectacular places in the way the Rockies are spectacular. But no place on earth touches me in this Rudolf Otto way half so much as Pyramid Lake does. On a completely different dark and windblown day three years ago, I visited the lake and described that encounter this way:

SHELTER
The wind,
resolute, indomitable,
swoops over bare snow mountains
down, down onto Pyramid lake,
blue water skidding
away from shore, not to.
Windblown vapor,
mist twin, not spray,
races across, above
the breakers
toward island peaks – how far?
I stand,
then kneel
at the edge,
dip my fingers
into mysterium tremendum
and cross myself with fascinans.
Then turn,
boots sinking
in wet sand,
face wind-grit stung,
straining toward
any shelter
I can find
from God.

It turned out to be one of my very few published poems.

In a completely different way today, I drove around the mountain and found myself suddenly, abruptly (like that word “immediately” that begins so many sentence about Jesus in the book of Mark) and unexpectedly face to face with holiness. It felt as if I might drive off the hillside and sail right into that green water the way I hope someday to fly into God.

After the meeting of Paths Crossing, I drove home along Sutcliff Rd. The sun had set but the sky was still light in places though mostly covered with clouds. A light rain was falling. Clouds covered the mountain tops and swirled slowly in the wind. It was mysterious rain cloudiness with the lake beside me. It wasn’t startling now. But I was intensely aware of is deep presence even when I could not see it. God is rarely glimpsed but impossible to forget.

Riding The Range On A Fine Spring Weekend

2011-04-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

I drove into White Pine County listening to Ranger Doug’s Classic Cowboy Coral, feeling thankful for Sirius radio when the Spanish language cd’s have over taxed my brain. After awhile I had heard enough of Gene Autry and The Sons of the Pioneers, and switched to Andrea Bocelli singing Cor Te Partio and Jasha Heifetz. I take my musical vacillations as proof that we are made up of diverse subpersonalities. My subpersonalities have little appreciation for each other’s music.

I arrived in plenty of time to check into the Hotel Nevada where they recognized me on the computer, if not by face, as a regular. Last time I was here, it was Halloween. Looking back at my blog posts, I seem not to have described the amazing bar scene at the Hotel Nevada that night. Right out of Star Wars. Incredible costumes on characters of all ages, many of whom would have been pretty colorful without costumes. Saturday afternoon in mid-April, things were more sedate.

When I drove to St. Bart’s for Margaret Bath’s slide show presentation on her mission trip to Kenya with Melvin Stringer’s Kenya Keep project, the first thing I noticed was that there was nowhere to park for a long way around the church. The second thing I noticed was that the parish hall was packed with people. The third thing was that the people included young adults and children. This was Saturday night at church. And in Ely there are options.

The slide show was splendid. It was not the old pity and guilt kind of thing we used to get on TV with Sally Struthers. We saw a lot of beauty and fascinating culture. We saw a land that is trying to get it right – protecting its environment, struggling unevenly toward democracy, working constructively with religious and cultural diversity. We also saw the Kibera slum, one of the world’s largest and poorest centers of urban blight with devastating impact on human lives. We saw the Emmanuel Clinic supported by Kenya Keep alleviating that suffering in Kibera. We saw schools where Episcopalians are sponsoring children for a better life. It was a presentation about poverty and affliction but surrounded by hope and an opportunity for us to make a difference.

To my bishop’s eye, there was something else noteworthy about this – a shared mission between St. Bart’s, Ely and St. Tim’s, Henderson. A diocese is not a regulatory body. It is a partnership (koinonia) in God’s mission. A diocese does not exist in a static way. It is always becoming, forming anew, like fresh skin cells. Margaret’s trip with Kenya Keep was an occasion of our becoming a diocese anew.

Breakfast at the Hotel Nevada. Generous portions. Good prices. Waitresses engaging in witticisms about people with bad altitudes needing altitude adjustments in the form of stiletto heels. I barely noticed the man sitting a stool away from me, but after he left my waitress told me he had bought my breakfast. What do such things mean? My guess is that I was the beneficiary of a gesture of thanks to God for some blessing in his life. Had he not done this, the waitress might not have asked my name and where I am from. She told me about a traveling preacher she knows who lives in Tonopah and also works in mine safety. “Oh, that would be Ken Curtis, I said. He’s sorta one of ours.” A grouchy mustached man sitting down the counter glowering over allegedly hard biscuits explained what Ken does at their mine. We all agreed that Ken is an exemplary person. Before long the waitress owned knowing Fr. Red and Paula Sims. I told her about the Kenya presentation by Margaret – of course, she knew Margaret and Tom, and said the former cook at Hotel Nevada went to St. Bart’s. I opined that “They are good folks over there.”
All I said. Evangelism – all starting with the generous gesture of an anonymous man – who, btw, was only there this morning because his coffee maker broke. Rare to find such generosity in a man with a broken coffee maker.

It was a good Palm Sunday complete with receiving into the church a new young adult. We got the perfect photo of Fr. Red with a mother and baby for the planned billboard ad. Then we dashed to make a house call for a home communion, receiving another new member, and anointing a St. Bart’s veteran member for healing. He is facing a possible major surgery late in life. The new member was his daughter in law who was serving the Lord at home with the gathered family.

Then off to Eureka to celebrate Palm Sunday with St. James. Along the way I listened to Hillbilly Jim’s Moonshine Matinee with included Whisperin’ Bill Anderson singing “The Tips Of My Fingers” and Baldomar Gomez Garza (aka Freddy Fender) singing “Wasted Days And Wasted Nights.” St. James is still a small gathering – 8 people this time – but we sang “the blood songs.” Fitting for the day.

Then it was on to Austin for a working dinner with Frank Whitman, our Lay Chaplain to Miners and Energy Workers. We ate at the Toiyabe Café where I had my customary Ortega Burger. There is a lot of shifting of roles along the Highway 50 Corridor these days. Frank and I were strategizing how to respond to the coming molybdenum boom in Eureka, the geothermal and mining surge around Austin, and the challenge of population growth and social services reductions in Tonopah. A productive meeting. Things are exciting in Central Nevada these days.

Then it was on to Tonopah. I am now safely ensconced at Tonopah Station. Tomorrow Deacon Clelia Garrity and I will sit in on a meeting of Attorney General Reps, county officials, and ecumenical leaders to discuss how this community can find ways to fend for itself as the population surges while state services are being withdrawn. I’m just here to listen, but it sounds like we need to do something.

A Strange But Prophetic Day On The Strip

2011-04-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

We were an unlikely crew of protesters: a deacon from St. Matthew’s attending her first demonstration; a deacon from Christ Church chiefly known for her pastoral and charity work; a lay person from Christ Church; a priest from Epiphany, Henderson who despite her California roots was born considerably too late to even remember the Free Speech movement; and me, the Mad Hatter Bishop. But there we were on the Strip on a bright April Day carrying signs and passing out pamphlets on the moral blight of human trafficking and child prostitution in Las Vegas.

It may have been for the best that my colleagues were not veteran demonstrators since this was a different kind of event. First, we had to register for the Rally. Our organizers were really organized. We registered on line well in advance. Then we were required to sign liability waivers in case we twisted an ankle or got poked in the eye by a sign. Then we had to sign in at the registration site, where for a $25 donation, we got a red Not For Sale t-shirt and a bottle of water.
Someone eventually helped me realize that social activism has a new paradigm modeled on the marathon.

As we walked from where we had parked our car in the Harley Davison Café parking garage, people were already stopping us to ask what this was all about. We gave them pamphlets and explained the cause which they readily supported.

Then we took our places on the island at the corner of Harmon and Las Vegas Blvd. Other parts of our Diocese of Nevada family were elsewhere on the Strip. There were 4 venues in all. Ellie and her daughters were standing for justice at the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Blvd. At Harmon, we were not alone. There were a group of amiable teens of diverse ethnicity – Latino, African-American, Anglo, and Asian. The Asians were my favorite. They were vigorously chanting, “Stop Human Trafficking” while shaking their signs up and down like the folks who advertise tax preparation services.

A truck with a mobile billboard kept circling past us. The bold billboard, with boldly dressed people on it, proclaimed “Hot Babes Direct To You.” While it was stopped at the red light, the Rev. Helen McPeak got a pic of me holding my Not For Sale sign along with the billboard. Eventually, the guy driving the truck and the demonstrators began waving when he went by.
This is a strange world, at least a strange city.

The pedestrians gave us a mixed response. One tourist from Florida was supportive. We had a pleasant talk and she took a pamphlet. A couple of hours later, she came back, having just won $200 at a Casino, and wanted a pic with me, helping me hold the sign, as way to give God the glory for her winnings. It did not seem the time to engage in theology about God and gaming. I just welcomed her support.

Many took pamphlets. One man who refused a pamphlet was wearing a t-shirt that said “Father Of The Year.” After he had turned down a pamphlet from one of the teenagers, Dcn. Carolyn Shannon stopped him, and said, “Now, wait a minute. You’re the father of the year. You need to know about this.” He took the pamphlet.

An Imperial Storm Trooper also walked by. I could not remember whether the guys in white worked for the Evil Empire or Princess Leia’s rebels. I asked one of the teenagers. But she had never seen Star Wars. I felt old.

We achieved our brief moment of fame when Channel 3 and Channel 5 filmed us for the evening news. It was a surreal but inspiring day in what promises to be a long term effort that is shared all over the Diocese. On the last Sunday in March, the following Episcopal Churches observed a Sunday of Witness Against Human Trafficking: St. Bartholomew’s, Ely; Holy Trinity, Fallon; St. Martin’s, Pahrump; Trinity, Reno; St. Paul’s, Sparks; St. Matthew’s, Las Vegas; and Christ Church, Las Vegas. (Did I leave anyone out?) The Rev’s. Red Sims and Kathy Hopner wrote collects for the occasion.

Epiphany, Henderson will host the Interfaith Service to raise awareness of issues of children’s well being, with a special focus on the sexual exploitation of children, on Sunday, May 22, at 5 p.m. Improved legislation would be a good thing. But the main goals we need to accomplish are to make this crime a priority for enforcement and prosecution and even more importantly to build a Safe House for care and rehabilitation for the young victims. To learn more, go to www.notforsalecampaign.org and www.nevadachild.com.

Our advocacy efforts on this issue are part of an overall priority of caring for children in Nevada. Our restored relationship with St. Jude’s Ranch For Children, our partnership with Communities in Schools and other one-church-one-school initiatives, the participation of congregations in Family Promise, our partnership with St. Luke’s, Leogane to vaccinate Haitian children against disease are other examples of our efforts to serve and speak out for children here and around the world.

The Seven Last Words

2011-03-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

It is a 500-year-old tradition of the Church to reflect in Holy Week on the Seven Last Words of Jesus, the poignantly short utterances of Our Lord from the Cross. They were short utterances because they had to be gasped by a man dying of asphyxiation. It is difficult to consider these verses together because each of the four Gospel accounts of the Passion has its own special perspective. None of the accounts includes all seven utterances, so to pulling them together risks a certain blurring and incoherence. Still, considering the statements together is a spiritually important exercise since all of them are part of our tradition. My friend, Jocelyn, in the Episcopal Diocese of Santiago has asked me to write a brief reflection on the Seven Last Words, so this is my attempt.

1. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

This statement of forgiveness is found in Luke. In this Gospel, Jesus is a healer and a reconciler. In him, God becomes the archetypal victim of all human cruelty and sin for a special reason. Sin is committed against victims and only the victim has the moral right to forgive the wrong. God sitting serenely in heaven cannot morally forgive sins which God has not suffered. But without forgiveness, there is no way forward into new life. Without forgiveness, sinner and victim alike are ensnared forever, the sinner in guilt, the victim in grievance. In Jesus, God became the victim so that he could forgive. Injury gives rise to a claim, a right, to vengeance. But acts of vengeance are a new violence creating new victims and so the cycle of retribution continues. It can end only when a victim says “It stops here. I will forgive rather than perpetuate this.” Anwar Sadat going to Jerusalem after the death of his brother is a modern example. Antigone is an ancient one. Jesus is the archetype. God in Jesus took the wound of sin upon himself so he could forgive all sin and set us free from our guilt and our grievance alike, both prisons of the soul. But we can claim our freedom, live into our freedom, only when we follow the example of our way shower, our Savior and Liberator, Jesus who in his agony showed mercy to the merciless.

2. Truly, I say to you, this day you will be with me in Paradise.

These words are also in Luke, the Gospel of healing and reconciliation. The dying thief acknowledged his guilt and, offering no excuse or defense, asked for a small mercy. “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Simply to be remembered by a just person was all the immortality he hoped for. What has that to do with us? To live a human life is to incur guilt. To be human is to be fallible at every level, physical, moral, and spiritual. Moreover, to live a human life is to live in a network of relationships that constitute personal, moral obligation. Those obligations often conflict, so that to do what is right by one person is to hurt another. The moral philosopher Martha Nusbaum called such situations “tragic choices” in her book, The Fragility of Goodness. No one lives this life without guilt. It is hard to acknowledge our own sin. Our egos compel us to justify ourselves. But our desperate efforts to preserve our self-image as good people are at odds with what we know to be true. It is an agony to admit to ourselves and to others that we are guilty. The dying thief admitted his guilt. That is all he did. He had no opportunity to turn from his evil path and live a pure life. He had no chance to “go and sin no more.” He had no opportunity to earn his salvation with good works or piety. “Could my zeal no languor know, could my tears forever flow, these for sin would not atone. Thou must save and thou alone.” The dying thief simply asked for a crumb of mercy and Jesus promised him paradise. Salvation cannot be earned by fallible people such as ourselves. Salvation depends on grace alone, the infinite mercy of God revealed in Jesus. Many great spiritual teachers have said wise and helpful things that have helped me in my life challenges. But as the years have passed, as the weight of guilt has inevitably grown heavier and my efforts to justify myself have proven increasingly futile, I find nothing sufficient but this promise of Jesus to redeem me – not for the sake of any good thing I might ever do, but simply for the sake of his mercy.

3. Woman behold your son; behold your mother.

John’s Gospel alone relates that Mary and John stood at the foot of the cross. His mother and his best friend were there for him. They were drawn to this place of pain by their devotion to him. It is unlikely that they would have been close to each other before Good Friday. But Jesus redirected their mutual grief into a relationship. Tradition tells us that they remained close for the rest of their lives, that Mary spent her final years in Ephesus where John led the Church and wrote this Gospel. I have visited the house outside of Ephesus (Kusadasi) where tradition says that Mary lived. Who knows if that is historically true, but thousands of Christians, including Pope John Paul II, have visited that small shrine to remember the lasting bond John and Mary formed at Calvary and honored to the end. Whether it is vestiges of Mary’s presence or vestiges of the pilgrims’ presence, that spot is palpably sanctified by reflection on the tenderness of wounded healers, the bereaved living on with and for each other. But what does this say to us? Many Christians are devoted to Jesus. Their spirituality is a heart-felt longing for him. But in this moment Jesus actually redirected the attention of John and Mary away from himself and toward each other. Life is laced with grief and escape into otherworldly spirituality is a denial of life, a refusal to live the life we have been given because sometimes it hurts. Jesus did not invite Mary and John to escape. He did not say, “Don’t worry. This is really ok.” It was not ok. But he gave meaning to their grief by teaching them to console each other, to support and sustain each other. The spirituality Jesus taught from the cross was one of compassion, commitment, and personal engagement with each other. If we have grief, the way through it is to turn our grief into compassion for one another.

4. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Mark and Matthew give the darkest versions of the Passion. For them, the Cross is a disaster. Redemption comes with the Resurrection, but the Cross itself is a horror. In their dark account, Jesus does not speak with confidence of being that day in Paradise. He feels abandoned and betrayed even by God. He cries out his complaint, but he does not curse God or abandon God, even though he believes he himself has been abandoned. This is the most profound expression in Scripture of obdurate, invincible love of God for God’s own sake. In Job there is a verse which is sometimes translated (perhaps not an accurate translation of the Hebrew but a spiritually profound one nonetheless) “Even though he slay me, I will trust in him.” Most of us love God for our blessings. We love God for what God has done for us or for what we hope God will do for us. In truth, this is loving ourselves and using God as a means to the higher end of our own well-being. But to love God without hope of our own gain would be another matter altogether. It would be to lose ourselves in the sublime light of a value supremely higher than ourselves. And that would be the ultimate liberation – the liberation from compulsive self-absorption. I am not capable of that kind of love for God, but I can aspire to it because Jesus revealed it. There is a second point in this utterance. Jesus was up against the experience of meaningless suffering. After the Resurrection, we see Jesus’ ordeal as the most meaningful suffering in history. But at the moment when Jesus felt forsaken, his suffering seemed altogether futile. Religious people are all to quick to tell the afflictedis that their suffering is actually ok because God doing something good in it. But suffering is often just suffering. Evil really is evil, not part of God’s plan. Jesus did not hang from the cross expounding platitudes about providence. He experienced disaster as disaster. It is only after we face that kind of despair head on as he did that we are able to rise from it as he did. The Cross alone is a catastrophe. God made meaning of it in the Resurrection. Instead of pretending that the horrors of life are not really horrors, we can call them what they are, and then make meaning out of them by rising from the grave of despair to live for others.

5. I thirst.

It is no surprise that Jesus said these words. Anyone who has sat at the bed of a dying person and put ice chips to their lips knows of the thirst of the dying. During crucifixion, Jesus would have been seriously dehydrated. It is no surprise that he said, “I thirst.” But it is surprising to me that John included this utterance. Johns is the spiritually lofty Gospel. Someone said that “In John, Jesus’ feet never seem to touch the ground.” In Mark’s earthy Gospel, these words would be natural; in John, they seem out of place. But there they are. I don’t know what possessed the spiritually minded John to include them. But this is what I make of it. When our mortal life does not satisfy, then we turn our eyes to the transcendent. The medieval theologian Boethius said that tragedy is where we find God. In the Jesus experience on the Cross, there is a spiritual thirst that John would have found worthy of his Gospel. “As the deer longs for the flowing steam, so longs my soul for you O God.” Psalm 22. But John knew that spiritual longing, like spiritual truth, were not free-floating in the clouds. Spiritual longing is enfleshed. “The Word became flesh . . . .” So there is a spiritual and a physical aspect to every longing. All desire, as St. Augustine taught us, is a partial expression of our ultimate desire – which whether we know it or not, is for the true end of all desires: God. When we hunger, thirst, or long for any earthly thing, it is an incarnate form of our longing for our Source and our Destiny, our Highest Good, the Ultimate Beauty. “O God you have made us for yourself,” Augustine wrote – but that is a misleading translation. It does not mean God made us for his own amusement or use. The word “for” means something more like “toward.” It means God has made us so that our longing is toward God. The “repining restlessness” (George Herbert) in our hearts, the perpetual dissatisfaction that keeps us uneasy, is the magnet and iron attraction drawing us toward God. That makes sense of the rest of the sentence. “O God you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Jesus’ all too physical thirst and his longing for peace and consolation in the heart of God were one. It is the same for us in all our desires.

6. It is finished.

In John, these are Jesus’ last words. When I was a parish priest, my congregation observed Holy Week devoutly. The stripping of the altar was the most solemn ritual of the year. We then sat in one hour shifts with the reserved sacrament in a Gethsemane Garden though the night. At 9 in the morning, the hour of the crucifixion, a small group gathered around the altar in silence and slowly, reverently consumed the reserved sacrament. All year long, the sanctuary light burned beside the reserved sacrament, representing Christ’s presence. But now his sacramental presence was gone – the light extinguished. I placed the chalice on its side and said “It is finished.” We left in silence. Ending is tragic. But there is a beauty hidden in the tragedy. There is another meaning in these words. Sometimes they are translated, “It is accomplished.” You might say, “It is complete.” “It is perfect.” “It is made whole.” In his death, Jesus set something right. He brought a broken world together. The word “salvation” is often confused with pardon. It is actually much more than that. It is to be made whole, to have the fragments of our lives drawn together. It is to have the random joys and sorrow, the triumphs and the tragedies, the incidents and accidents which are like the scattered pieces of a puzzle assembled into a picture we can understand. When the final chapter in our meta-narrative has been written, everything that came before makes sense. Everything falls into place. In this moment of supreme sacrifice, meaning was restored to life. The chaos became a cosmos once more as God intended. The evil, the violence, the pettiness and greed -- all that makes a mess of life was swallowed up in that sacrifice. At the cost of the life of humanity and God, the fragmented universe was made whole.

7. Into your hands I commend my spirit.

These are Jesus’ last words in Luke, a final expression of faith. Jesus has completed his mission of healing and reconciliation. His purpose has been fulfilled. That is “a consummation devoutly to be wished” -- to have accomplished all one has been given to do. But it is a terrible moment too because one no longer has a purpose. One no longer has a claim of right to exist. One no longer has anything with which to bargain with reality, nothing left to offer. Jesus was at that moment empty, as it says in Philippians. Having nothing left in himself, he entrusted himself to God. Most of my life, I have thought I had something to offer the world, even something to offer God. But there came a time when I felt I had nothing left to give, that my continued presence on the earth would probably do no good. Like the dying thief, I had no justification. That’s when I prayed the words of Jesus, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” It seems God had a few more things for me to do and I am doing them as I am able, “with God’s help.” But from that time, I have known that it’s all grace. Every day is God’s gift. My spirit is in God’s hands, dependent on his mercy and his will. Each of us comes to the end of our rope from time to time – sometimes in big ways, other times in small ways. That is when we can pray these words of Jesus; these “Turn it over. Turn it all over” words – a prayer that is not so much spoken as exhaled into God. There is a peace in that surrender like no other. It is a letting go and floating in God. Dying to self is the only way to live in the Spirit. That is the message Jesus taught us with his last breath.

Who Is My Neighbor? Muslims In America

2011-03-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel, The Lacuna. It’s about a good-hearted young man who grew up in Mexico, became a popular American novelist, and was then done in the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era because as a teenager he had been a cook for Diego Rivera. It all seemed so odd. I wondered if Peru has a problem with Un-Peruvian Activities. I wondered what an Un-Italian activity would be? The story was about a historic oddity when we had panicked over the spread of communism to China and Eastern Europe. We look back and shake our heads in wonder.

But today I tuned in to see the House Commmittee On Homeland Security hearings investigating Muslims in America. This strikes me as more disturbing than McCarthy. Here the “association” that makes one suspect is a religious association – an association protected by the 1st Amendment’s “free exercise clause.” I can live with the intrusive searches at airports and the surveillance of all sorts of communications. I am grateful to the Department of Homeland Security for its remarkable success in stifling terrorism. But this action of the House Committee is a troubling intrusion of government into religious practice.

Bob Herbert’s editorial “Flailing After Muslims” in the March 8 New York Times expresses most of my concern. He says of our past instances of demonizing religions, races, or ethnic groups, “there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed now.” Despite the committee chair’s claim that Muslims do not cooperate with law enforcement, Herbert notes that of the 120 Muslims accused of terrorist plots in the past decade, 48 were turned in by other Muslims. What he does not say is that targeting Muslims is fodder for anti-American propaganda and actually increases our risk of attack as well as diminishing our credibility in international relations.

So I am all the more struck by the generosity of spirit in Akbar Ahmed’s excellent article “Fair To Muslims?” also in the March 8 New York Times, in which as a Muslim he says, “The topic is urgent and the hearings overdue . . . . Muslims should embrace the chance to explain their beliefs fully and clearly.” Ahmed paints an honest and mixed picture of the situation today. Having traveled the length and breadth of our land studying the experience of American Muslims post 9-11, he has heard the stories of school children called terrorists, women attacked for wearing the hajib, and mosques vandalized. He has heard Bill O’Reilly compare the Koran to Mein Kampf.

But he has also heard Muslims say that America is the best country in the world to be a Muslim and heard a Nigerian Muslim say that Thomas Jefferson is “at the top of my heart.” Ahmed writes of the slow, steady process of reconciliation that has been achieved through interfaith dialogue over the years. So I will try to open my mind about the House Committee on Homeland Security hearings. God may bring good out of it. As Job said to his brothers, “You meant it to me for evil, but the Lord used it for good.”

I am very pleased to see strong Muslim participation in Las Vegas Valley Interfaith. Here Christians, Muslims, and Jews are not looking for bomb making materials in each other’s closets. We are working together to fight the sexual exploitation of children. Neither terrorists nor congressional committees will distract us from the real mission of mediating God’s love to a hurting world.

Envivo De Michoacan V: The Magnificent 7 Reconsidered

2011-02-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

My image of Mexico came mostly from the Magnificent 7 and other such westerns. Hapless peasants in white pajamas and sombreros run about intimidated by sadistic banditos with ammo belts strapped diagonally across their chests until heroic blonde Americans (think Steve McQueen) set things right.

Today Mexico looked rather different to me. I visited the oldest University in the Americas, The College of St. Nicholas, founded here in Morelia in 1536. That is precisely 100 years older than Harvard. It is a beautiful place with a magnificent court yard. This college town which today has 100,000 students in programs of higher education is a manufacturer of ideas, a builder of minds.

Today I visited the oldest Music Conservatory in the Americas. Yes, here in Morelia once again, founded in 1754. During WW II, great musicians fleeing Europe took refuge here. This is a world class center for classical music. I listened to the students practicing. It’s not all history. Magnificent music is happening here, now.

I visited elegant buildings that were turned to public use as libraries and cultural centers after 1767 when the Jesuits who had built them were deported in a single night on orders of King Charles III of Spain. Why? Charles said it was “for urgent, just, and necessary reasons which I reserve in my royal mind.” Many suspect it had to do with Jesuit teaching that all people were equal and sacred in the eyes of God, a humanist doctrine which upset the Spanish caste system. But it was too late. Those ideas had already been planted in the Mexican soul. I walked past the special prison built during the 1810 revolution to hold all the priests, monks, and nuns who were participating in the revolution. It was a prison just for priests, monks, and nuns. It was large.

Today I visited a 16th century church built for African slaves in Mexico. I didn’t know there were African slaves in Mexico. There were, but slavery was banned in the Mexican Constitution decades before we abolished slavery.

This place is rich in culture, music, architecture, history and religion. A ciudad authentica, the real deal, with much to teach and much to admire. I wonder how that Magnificent 7 image of Mexico may shade my attitude toward the Latinos I encounter in Nevada every day. How has my benighted knowledge of Mexico shaped my assumptions about Latinos? I don’t know the answer to those questions. But I am glad that when I encounter Latinos in Nevada next week, the veil of false stereotypes will have been somewhat lifted from my eyes.

Envivo De Michoacan IV: Mi Historia Es Su Historia

2011-02-03T13:16:00.000-08:00

The 3rd largest organ in Latin America was silent at mass on Sunday. That was a disappointment. But the chant was beautiful. There was a good cantor in some invisible place. The people chanted back as directed. The acoustics of the 18th Century baroque building (redecorated in neo-classical style afterthe Revolution) were lively so the resonance was rich. Can sound, vibrating not just through the ears but the whole body, heal and revive the soul? I felt stronger for having been there and grateful for such a good place to say prayers for people and churches in Nevada.

After mass, I took myself across the street to the Hotel Virrey y Mendoza for brunch al fresco. It was my second meal away from my host family home and the first “nice meal” out since I’ve been here. I had Huevos Tarascan (Huevos Rancheros with a different salsa and some sliced of avocado -- Tarascan is a word for the Purhepecha – a word now generally out of favor). It was a truly excellent meal (for the rough equivalent of $16 US including tip), a leisurely brunch under the arches of a hotel built in 1744. The hotel has hidden doors and secret passageways where people conspired about revolutionary plots in 1810. The old churches in Morelia are connected by underground tunnels which were dug for the same purpose.

The age of the place made me think of our history. I read recently that a disturbing number of young adults do not know from whom the United States won its independence. We cannot know ourselves as individuals unless we know the people and the land to which we belong. We cannot know the people and the land unless we know their story.Without history, politics is like doing psychoanalysis with a victim of amnesia.

But even those of us who think we know our history may be missing huge parts. For example, just what was Nevada’s role in the 1776 Revolution which we celebrate each July 4? Nada. We were not part of the original 13 colonies. Do we want to trace our connection to Sam Adams and company through our church history? Better not. Anglicans were on the wrong side of that one, so our bishops skedaddled to Canada. Or is it our genealogy? A few of us can trace some such tie. One of my ancestors was in on the American Revolution, but most were not. Some of my ancestors were still in Germany and others would soon be learning to write from Sequoia. So what is our history if history belongs to the land?

Well, we weren’t involved in 1776 because at that time we were part of Mexico, a colony of Spain, not England. Most of the population would have been First Nations people. Spain owned us and governed us but did not pay much attention. Precious metals had not been found here yet, but they had been found further south.

Then came the Revolution of 1810 led by revolutionary priests. Fr. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was the first George Washington figure. But he was executed in 1811 and the torch passed to his friend, Fr. Jose´ Mari´a Morelos y Pavo´n. Fr. Morelos simultaneously led the military campaign, formed the first Mexican Congress, and wrote a Constitution that contained provisions comparable to the U.S. Bill of Rights and the 13th and 14th Amendments. A half Spanish, half Indio person, he was his nation’s first real leader. He was eventually captured, then executed by a Spanish firing squad in 1815. This city bears his name. So does the street that runs parallels to the street where I live in Henderson, but I had no idea who Morelos was until now.

There were other heroes of that revolution. The bravest and most defiant revolutionary was Maria Gertrudis Bocanega de de Mendoza de Lazo de la Vega (Gerturdis Bocanagra for short, but maybe you noticed she had the same last name as Zorro -- same fight). Gertrudis Bocanegra was the daughter of a Spanish aristocrat (more Zorro parallels, hmmm) who was converted to the cause of the indigenous people by her nanny. After her husband and brother were executed for smuggling guns to the rebels, Gertrudis died a fiery death at the hands of the Spanish army in the public square of Patzcuaro while hundreds of citizens nearly rioted in protest.

We were not called Nevada in 1810. That name was given us by the U. S. Commission on Territories in the late 1850’s when we were separated from Utah. In the early 1850’s, maps called the Great Basin “the mystery land” or “the unknown country.” The only places with names were Washoe and later the Comstock. But in 1810, the name for our land was Northern Mexico, and people in Michoacan were fighting and dying for our independence.

I love the stories of what happened at Lexington and Concord as much as anyone. I have stood in the Old Manse from which you could have watched the first shots fired. I have visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the home of Paul Revere in Boston, the Bunker Hill Monument, and the rest. I claim what happened there as part of the story of my land. But what happened here is part of our story too. If we don’t know this part our how our land came to be what it is today, we are missing a part of who we are as a people.

Envivo De Michoacan III: Before The Next Teardrop Falls

2011-01-28T21:01:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to learn Spanish ever since 1975 -- the first time I heard the late great Baldemar Garza Huerta (stage name: Freddy Fender) on my car radio singing “Before The Next Teardrop Falls.” In case you don’t know the song, it is one of those dreadfully sentimental Country Western oldies. Freddy sang the first verse straight and it was as bad as always. I was on the verge of changing the channel when he sang the same verse in Spanish. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard.

Si te quierre de verdad
Y te da felicidad
Te desea lo mas bueno pa’los dos.
Pero si te hace llorar,
A mime puedes hablar
Y estare’ contigo quando trieste estas.

Does it get any better than that? Not in the world of Tex-Mex music. But as the years went by I came upon Neruda:

Inclinada en las tardes iro mis tristes redes
A tus ojos oceanicos.
Alli se estira y arde en la mas atla hoguera . . . .

Whether in print or given voice, this language held a beauty that was inaccessible to me. My upbringing was a bigger trap than my lack of language. I could never bring myself to devote the time and effort to learn Spanish simply because it is lovely and has feelings and ideas embedded in it that cannot be expressed in English. What’s more, I am bad at languages. Just awful really – and afraid of them.

So I feel enormously grateful to the many Latino Episcopalians in Nevada for giving me final push I needed for this experience. The joy and vitality of the worship and community life of our Latino congregations is just too good to miss. I hope I will be of greater service to our fastest growing congregations, but I am sure of this: their spirituality is already an energizing, life-giving blessing to me, and I will be better able to receive that blessing as I understand more of the language of Neruda, Lorca, Marquez, and the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.

After 2 weeks of living in Morelia, studying Spanish every day, I feel different in more ways than having just learned some verbs. Learning the language while living in its home culture is somehow transformative in a way it will take some time to sort out. Before coming here, I really didn’t know Hidalgo and Morelos from Profiro Diaz. I had no idea that there was a culture in Mexico the Aztecs never conquered, the Purhepecha who still live here and who ruled Michoacan, the place of fishermen, for 1,000 years, that they built pyramids as temples and the people worshiped outside – loudly so their gods could hear them -- or that images of sun and moon flank images of God above church doorways preserving the place of sun and moon in the pre-Hispanic religion of this ancient place.

Despite my weakness in language, all the individual attention from the some of the best teachers I have ever had has made a huge difference. I have learned so much! I am a long, long way from conversant in Spanish. That will take much more than 3 weeks. But I have the foundation now to study at home. Before coming here, the prospect of even starting something like Rosetta Stone was overwhelming. Now I believe I can do it, especially knowing I will have the support of my Latino brothers and sisters.

One of the big surprises here is that there are so few American students. All the violence along the border that is so exhaustively covered on American news has scared the Americans away. My school, the Baden-Powell Institute, http://www.bpimorelelia.com/, had about 30 Americans at a time until recently. Now you could count us on one hand. This is a long way from Juarez. I feel safer here than in Las Vegas. This is a beautiful city, untouched by urban renewal, full of old style Spanish architecture, no tall buildings, a magnificent Cathedral with the 3rd largest organ in Latin America, good food, and friendly people.

I hope to come back again and again in the years to come.

Secular Humanism Is Impossible: Does The Soul Exist? What's At Stake?

2011-01-25T18:39:00.000-08:00

Secular humanism is impossible.

Well maybe not. There may be a way to get there that I don’t know. But I say “it is impossible” to draw attention to a massive contradiction, a huge crack in the foundation, of contemporary atheism.

The problem arises if we start with the amateur philosophy currently being attempted by some biologists. They have presented arguments against the existence of God that I addressed somewhat in my previous post “Belief vs. Unbelief: Cleaning Up the Playing Field.” These biologists are eager to reduce reality to a mechanical material basis as opposed to a personal spiritual basis. That is understandable because they want reality to fit the language they speak, to fit the methods of inquiry they use. It is extremely inconvenient for those whose language has no word for “snow” and whose field of inquiry is the Sahara desert to consider that something such as snow might also be real. To be fair, the biologists’ discipline has been under attack by fundamentalists for decades. The shouts of the fundamentalists echo in biologists’ ears, so they are – perhaps understandably -- responding to those shouts rather than to the softer voices of a reasonable faith.

But here is the contradiction for a secular humanism that relies on the work of these biologists to deny God: the same biologists are equally committed to denying the existence of the human soul. This much is consistent. If the universe is devoid of meaning, value, truth, beauty, goodness, and spirit, then humankind as a part of that universe must be equally worthless. They argue that our religious sentiments, along with our feelings for each other, our appreciation of art, and our moral values are all just bio-chemical processes. They assert that, although I may think that I love my family, my feeling for them is just a set of biochemical processes triggered in my brain when I am with them. It doesn’t really mean anything about our relationship. Philosophers call that kind of argument “reductionism” – saying that something we generally regard as significant is actually insignificant. Please understand, I am not saying all biologists are reductionists. Quite the contrary. Francis Collins, for example, is one of our foremost bio-geneticists and a defender of faith in the midst of science.

The result of reductionist reasoning – which I intend to challenge – is that humanity is no more important than anything else. Consciousness does not matter. Sentience does not matter. Our capacities for philosophical interpretation, artistic expression, and most certainly religious intuition do not matter. The content of our minds – hopes, dreams, aspirations, compassion, etc. – are of no importance since they are just bio-chemical processes. Herein lies the contradiction for secular humanism, which makes an ultimate value of humanity, something science has proven to be worthless.

Do human beings matter? Does life have value? Is our presence on this globe is of any importance? These are large questions. I would hold that we can have value only if value itself is possible. Linguistic philosophers would call that “a necessary truth.” It has its own internal logic. Human life can be meaningful only if the universe as a whole is meaningful. Given that any individual life is brief, and the universe will outlive our species, it is very difficult to make a case that a life has lasting meaning unless it is part of a larger meaning, albeit a mysterious one.

But for now, I will limit this inquiry to the reductionist scientists' main point of attack – the existence or non-existence of the soul – which they rightly see as connected to the existence or non-existence of God. Again, they have found that our thoughts and feelings correspond to demonstrable bio-chemical processes. Therefore, they reason, the soul is a mumbo-jumbo hoax.

Their point calls for two basic responses. The first is to challenge their philosophical interpretation of their findings. (One can be a perfectly adequate scientist without being particularly adept at philosophy of science, just as one can be a fine athlete without being a terribly astute analyst of the sport for TV commentary. The biologists might be as adept at philosophy and theology as philosophers and theologians would be at biology.) The second is to ask what we mean by the “soul” since the thing they claim does not exist may not be what we mean by the “soul” anyway.

First, let’s look at their interpretation of the demonstrable fact that thoughts and feelings correspond to bio-chemical processes. The bias of reductionists is to construe this correspondence in terms of a materialistic (stuff that has a chemical composition is real; things that do not have a chemical composition are not) mechanical (cause and effect relationships like billiard balls or falling dominoes, as opposed to personal interaction like people dancing) explanations.

However, even the staunchest atheist philosopher, David Hume, said that such causation is merely a hypothesis. Mechanistic cause and effect of the sort the reductionists assume is philosophically questionable, to say the least. And the greatest skeptic of all time, Renee Descartes, would have pointed out that the observations of their experiments and certainly the interpretation of their findings are merely descriptions of the bio-chemical processes in the brains of the reductionist scientists. Their own observations and interpretations, are by their own admission, mere bio-chemical processes occuring inside thier own skulls. The biologists have no basis for claiming objective truth for their own biochemical processes that deny the truth of someone else’s experience. (A case of needing to take the plank out of one's own eye.) Everything they observe may well be, as the Vedic philosophers would have put it, “a dream in the mind of God.” I do not accept the views of Hume, Descartes, or the Vedantists. I merely note the huge mountains the reductionists have ignored rather than climbed over.

To put a point on the issue of causation (which is the basis of the reductionist argument): If two things happen together, how are we to say which has caused the other? If I am in a room that is 95 degrees and begin to sweat and so remove my sweater, what would the bio-chemical analysis say? It would say my bio-chemistry caused the room to become hot. Take for example two lovers: did their inner biochemistry cause them to love each other or did their love affect their biochemistry? Is it a new or surprising discovery of science to say that my heart beats faster when I see the one I love? Does my pulse rate cause the feeling of love or did my feeling of love affect my heartbeat?

My challenge to the biologists’ materialist/mechanist leap of faith is this: Suppose two people feel kindly toward each other, admire each other, and remain devoted to each other’s well being. A musical composer might observe them and write a sonata to express the relationship of these two people. That would be a spiritual way of expressing what is happening. The composer would see the dynamic between the two people as essentially personal and relational rather like music. The reductionist scientist would observe the same dynamic and describe it in terms of bio-chemistry, thus reducing their relationship to the material and mechanistic.

Ah and who wins? Obviously the biologist, since scientists are the high priests in our time. (Who ordained them?) They have the greater authority. (Who gave it to them?) But wait. What about the physicists? Are not the very molecules the biologists study made up of atoms and the atoms of sub-atomic particles? According to the physicists, these atoms and sub-atomic particles are not behaving like a material mechanistic reality. Rather, they behave personally and relationally. According to the physicists, these two people, at their most basic “material” level, are quite spiritual, and their connection to each other appears to be an expression of their essentially spiritual nature. (See e.g., Tervethick, “Quantum Spirituality”; Winter, “Paradoxy: Spirituality In A Quantum Universe”; Aaron, “A New Reality: A Wakeup Call To Life’s Mysteries”; Zukov, “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”; Capra, “The Tao Of Physics.”)

It seems that any event may have layers of interpretation: spiritual, then material, then spiritual again, and so on – a vertiable parfait of interpretation -- as if perhaps spirit and matter are inter-related, as the scientist theologian Pierre Teilhard Chardin said and as the doctrines of Incarnation and Sacrament teach.

Events are only what they are. True. But what are they? We cannot perceive an event without interpretation. (See Martin Heidegger & Hans Gadamer.) And we interpret through the lens of our own worldview. There is no way out of that for any of us. We can only try to be aware of the subjectivity of the lens through which we look at things. The reductionists who deny the soul, and with it the meaning of life, are the epitome of Eurocentric rationalist arrogance – not in reaching a facile conclusion but in failing to see the limitation of their perspective. This is the attitude that gave us colonialism, with all its barbarous cultural genocide. It is incongruous to see the surge of such arrogant materialist rationalism in the Post-Modern world, which is supposed to be beyond that kind of pseudo-objectivity.

Now to the second response: what do we mean by “the soul”? The thing the reductionists purport to have disproven is a non-material vaporous entity that can be infused into a body and slip out of the body. It is ostensibly immortal since it does not die but floats away when the body dies. That may in fact be a common idea of the soul, but is it what Christianity means by the word? Is it what our theologians teach?

A bit of history: Various ancient peoples believed similar, though perhaps not identical, things about a life-force that animated living things, especially people. They believed that this life-force came from somewhere before birth and went somewhere after death. We find that belief in ancient Egypt, Greece, India, Ireland, Mesoamerica, and generally around the globe. No one seems to have had a very clear explanation of it, but the belief was important for them.

Plato gave the soul real significance in philosophy. He thought that the material world was real only in a secondary, derivative way. The basic reality was abstract. The soul was an abstraction, a spiritual reality which manifested for a time in material form as the body. Plato’s view of the soul influenced Judaism through Philo and it influenced Christianity through Sts. Justin, Augustine, and others. Was he right? I don’t know. But if he was, then the biochemical processes the scientist observes are not an anomaly. They are precisely what Plato meant by the material manifestation of a spiritual reality.

If the soul as Plato undertood it is too speculative for you, Christians in the Middle Ages felt the same way. They turned away from Plato toward the ideas of his student, Aristotle. For Aristotle, and then for St. Thomas Aquinas, the soul was not in the least bit spooky. The soul was essentially the blueprint for the body. It was the shape of our material selves. To say that emotions have a physical pattern and form -- the form observed by biologists -- is not to deny the existence of the soul as Aristotle and St. Thomas understood it. Quite the contrary, it is to describe the soul. For Plato, their findings would be the footprints of the soul. For Aristotle and Thomas, they would be a description of the soul itself.

There is a third view of the soul, one which I find more helpful than the vague-life force of the Ancients or either Plato’s or Aristotle’s more philosophical descriptions. It is the view we find in several schools of psychology, though it goes by different names. Some psychological schools use the word “soul.” Others call it the Self, the Personal Self, the Core Self, etc. One really needs to have done the exercises of these disciplines -- or even better, to have practiced Buddhist meditation -- to grasp what they mean by Soul or Self. The Soul, in this view, is essentially a capacity to observe the world but more importantly to observe one’s own inner dynamics from an emotionally centered “still point.” UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Daniel J. Siegel describes this capacity in neurological terms that the biologists should be comfortable with. (See Siegel’s books, “Mindsight” and “The Mindful Brain.”) It is this core of our being that does not change. It has the extraordinary capacity to observe the fractured parts of ourselves, each of which has its own neurological hard-wiring. By force of its differentiated observation, it brings compassion and healing. The Soul is not the processes the scientists observe so much as it is another observer of the same processes, but one who watches with a kinder eye.

The interesting claim, which I readily grant partakes of faith, is the transpersonal psychologists’ belief that the universe has a Cosmic Self which underlies all the interpersonal dynamics from nations to quarks – and that the Cosmic Self and Personal Self are inextricably connected. (See e.g. Roberto Assagioli, “Psychosynthesis”; Firman and Gila, “Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of The Spirit.”) This Personal-Self-to-Cosmic-Self connection is perfectly consistent with the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and directly in line with the mystical insights of Lady Julian of Norwich. How ironic that the reductionist scientists have grasped the same point, the same connection. The soul, if it exists, is of God. They have realized that to effectively deny one, you must also deny the other.

If, indeed the Spirit of God blows across the deep (Genesis I), that divine wind will not be registered by a meteorologist’s instruments but by a harp. The right tool for the right job, after all.

Belief vs Unbelief: Cleaning Up The Playing Field

2011-01-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

The revival of atheism these days strikes me as a natural response to religious violence, bigotry, and hatred in the world. But I confess to growing impatient with the current debate between the atheists and the believers. With few exceptions, our contemporary voices are shrill and thin as compared to people who were carrying on the same argument at a deeper level and with greater integrity a few decades ago. Forgive me for sounding like an old fogey, but today’s argument sounds like the religious equivalent of what we might hear on Fox News or MSNBC. It is mostly facile name-calling.

Does it matter? Quite possibly not much. It is unlikely that anyone has ever been argued into believing anything of importance very deeply. Either one experiences God intuitively or one does not. Of course the culture either supports or suppresses experience by shaping its interpretation. Hence, people in 17th Century France were apt to have visions of the Blessed Virgin while in Tibet they would entertain visions of dancing Dakinis. Today the chances of experiencing either are greatly diminished by assumptions about reality that France inherits from left bank existentialism and that Tibet is being force-fed by China. Our world view assumptions are shaped more by artists, scientists, and parents than pop religion or anti-religion pundits. Still, the debate is part of the background noise of our lives and I find its tenor irritating.

Christian, Jewish, and Islamic beliefs are all discredited by violence and bigotry perpetrated in our names. That kind of bad religion led to the anti-religion of Communism and the neo-pagan national religion of the German “Christian [sic]” Church in the 20th Century. In that bloodiest of centuries, atheism proved to be more lethal than religion had ever dreamed of being. See Alistair MacGrath, “The Twilight Of Atheism.” We have learned the hard way that when religion is taken out of the picture, we torture and kill each other over political and ecnonomic ideology. In the absence of religion that admits it is religion, we form secular religions, state-worship with flag rituals, sainted martyrs of the state, holy places (usually battle fields) and temples of the government, and sacred texts that can be viewed in the sacred city by pilgrims. The creed is taught by secular rabbis in public schools. See Robert Bellah, “Habits Of The Heart.” All this is forgotten by the pop atheists. (I do not include in this category one contemporary atheist writer, Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose book, “Doubt: A History,” is nuanced, honest, and decent.) Bad religion is invariably rooted in a bad image of God, which inevitably leads to bad behavior in the name of that bad God. When Christopher Hitchen, et al. attack such bad religion, they are in good company. Our great 1940’s Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said, “If you have the wrong idea of God, better that you were an atheist.” Amen.

So what would I like to see in the debate? I’d like to see Philip Pullman’s straw men pulled from the game so we can speak face to face, not through avatars, seeing each other as we are and not as caricatures. I’d like to see us begin with a definition of terms so we can see what’s truly at stake. I’d like to see a distinction between theism and monotheism. Frankly, I’d like to see the debate between theism and monotheism move to the fore since it is vastly more interesting, albeit admittedly less fundamental.

This is where I would begin. The fundamental question is one of value. Does anything matter? Is one painting more beautiful than another? Is it better to be happy than sad? Is life better than death? Is a forest better than a slum? Or are all things truly equal? Is the field of reality flat? This is absolutely foundational to the discussion, because once one admits value into the field of reality; one is at grave risk of experiencing such things as love, reverence, and awe. Values are fraught with that peril. Hence, the great atheists of yesteryear (Sartre, Camus, Russell) faced the issue head on and insisted that nothing matters. The field is flat. There is no such thing as beauty, meaning, or even truth. They did not prove their claim. They did not even offer warrants or evidence for it, but they asserted it with the seductive smoky-bar cynicism of post-War France and it was persuasive. The world, which once was a lake in which one could dive, became a frozen pond, on which one could only skate. (Camus)

I respect the integrity and the intelligence of those atheists far more than the illogical twists of today’s true believers in unbelief (Eric Hofer, “The True Believer”). See, for example, “Hysterical Scientism: The Ecstasy of Richard Dawkins,” by Marilynne Robinson in the November 2006 issue of Harpers, www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081282; or more generally www.atheistdelusion.net. The atheists of the past century began at the honest starting place and they followed their premise to the ultimate and inescapable issue of suicide. If reality is in fact devoid of truth, beauty, and goodness, if there is no meaning to life, is not suicide then the inevitable response, the only authentic response? They argued, again without logic but with a heroic and compelling rhetoric, for a self-made value of the solitary individual shaking his fist at everything. Camus, “The Rebel.”

So let us begin with asking if anything matters. Let us ask if the behavior of some people, say perhaps Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King, Jr., is in some respect better than that of others, say Jeffrey Dahmer or Pol Pot. Let us ask if there is anything worthy of reverence or love? Then if there is, we may ask, “What is the basis for our holding one thing in greater reverence than another? In what value are our values grounded?” At the most basic level, we notice that there is something rather than nothing. The universe is here. It is vast and wonderful. Perhaps we are in awe of it. How could we not be? Then we ponder that if the universe has a source (which, in light of the Big Bang, it apparently does), even, especially, a mysterious source, that thought may evoke our reverence.

If something evokes our love and reverence, then we are, despite ourselves, theists – perhaps not classical theists, but we are people who bend the knee to something of value. Is that the God of monotheism? Not necessarily. But we are theists. As a matter of definition, I would say that if one holds that the value of all things is rooted in one supreme value, one highest good, then one is a monotheist. If one holds that things have independent values that are not bound together (for example that beauty is independent of truth and truth is independent of beauty -- that our source and our destiny are both awesome but are not related to each other) then one is a polytheist.

Some of today’s self-proclaimed atheists elevate various things to the status of an ultimate value. Some, who also call themselves “humanists,” regard the flourishing of our own species as the ultimate value against which everything else must be measured. Naturally, others, such as deep ecologists, find the elevation of our own species as the ultimate value of the cosmos to be arbitrary, illogical, reprehensibly self-serving, and turgid with hubris – a collective self-worship. Some take the“scientific method” to be the ultimate truth, thereby repudiating values grounded in art, literature, and the religious imagination. If you cannot scientifically prove that Beethoven’s sonatas are beautiful, perhaps even better than “The Horse With No Name” or “Achy Break-y Heart,” then in fact Beethoven’s sonatas are not of value. Ironically, these folks are actually monotheists. In an amusing turn of rhetoric, when the greatest true philosophical scientific atheist of our time, Anthony Flew, converted to theism, the pop atheists accused him of “apostasy.” They actually used that word. Flew, a lifelong devotee of the scientific method himself, adamantly denied their accusation that he had departed from the true way of scientism and insisted that his belief in God was just the place he found himself after “following the evidence,” starting with the Big Bang. See Anthony Flew, “There Is A God.” For both Dawkins and Flew, the existence of God is “a scientific question.” (Dawkins actually used those words in his debate with geneticist Francis Collins). Dawkins and Flew just come to different scientific conclusions. Francis Collins says that God’s existence is either true or false, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a “scientific question.” Though Collins is one of the world’s foremost scientists, he has not “drunk the Kool-Aid” of scientism. Different methods of inquiry are better suited for different questions. It’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.

Still, it is a huge leap from polytheism, as I have defined it, to monotheism. It is a huge leap to say that truth, beauty, and goodness are connected. “Beauty is truth; truth, beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” said young John Keats shortly before he died. What a claim! And to say that goodness is inextricably bound to truth and beauty makes the claim even greater. Now add the notion that this sea of truth/beauty/goodness was the spawning ground of all reality, and that changes all our assumptions and our experience of everything. “Surely the strange beauty of the world must rest somewhere on pure joy,” the American poet Louse Bogan wrote. Now add the notion that this “pure joy,” which is born of the truth/beauty/goodness which is our source, is in fact our destiny. Such monotheism is rather overwhelming, at least to me.

Now, the God I have described, you Barthians will be quick to point out, is not necessarily the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; nor have I said a word about Jesus. In fact, my faith does not begin with nor is it rooted in the things I have been saying about value. My faith begins with and is rooted in experience, not one great “see the light” experience but an osmosis experience of God in prayer, worship, and daily life. I worship God because I cannot breathe without God and that experience has taught me far more about the Creator/Redeemer/Sanctifier God than I could know from all of philosophy and science put together.

Since I have tried your patience too long dear reader and have come to the end of my own energy, I will stop here. But I will offer this hint for your own musing. If the reality in which we live partakes of the personal – thinking, feeling, willing – and not merely mechanical processes, then where does the personal come from. What does the presence of the personal tell us about the source and destiny of the universe? What does the presence of the personal tell us about the nature of truth, beauty, and goodness? Think carefully on these things – very carefully -- because they could lead you to consider strange and wonderful things about Jesus.

Envivo De Michoacan II

2011-01-19T19:03:00.001-08:00

Every day I forget that my purposes for what I do are only my purposes. God invariably has larger plans. Today I set out to study Spanish, and so I did -- in the morning – more irregular verbs and rules for when to use and when to omit articles. (Those who speak languages are strictly bound to obey the rules; but those who create the rules make up exceptions at will. Where is the justice in that?)

This afternoon, I was supposed to go with the other students on a guided (in Spanish) walking tour of the city. But the tour was cancelled so I walked alone and found myself at the Cathedral – a beautiful old Gothic building. Along with a scattered group of clearly devout people, I spent some time praying in the nave, then went to pray in the Lady Chapel which was crowded with people praying fervently on a Wednesday afternoon. It is a holy thing to be surrounded by so much reverence. As I began to leave, I heard the beginning of mass at the main altar so I stayed for worship. It was an unexpected blessing.

I then walked back to the school for Conversation Club, an informal gathering for casual discourse, the point of which is to practice one’s language. I went to practice Spanish, but found myself at a table of young Mexicans who needed to work on their English. So we spoke English most of the time, as we sat outside on the roof the school, the darkness falling around us.

One of the young men at my table is an artist, a sketch artist who wants to become a “real” artist and his passion is to paint sacred art. He was a bit shy about this since his teachers and fellow students have told him he is in the wrong century for that kind of painting. This issue set me off and I found myself giving a lecture on theology – how religion is a language about the ineffable mystery, it is a set of symbols pointing toward things that cannot be spoken – and art can sometimes suggest the mystery better than words – Caravaggio was the greatest theologian of his day.

Then I rambled on to what we mean by “God” and how for the past few centuries we have identified “God” with dominating power – and if “God” means our highest value and God is defined by such power, then we worship power. The effect on our souls is to make us power mongers and that is the religious root of violence.

But an older view of God as the Supreme Beauty has been reclaimed by contemporary theologians beginning with Hans Urs Von Balthasar. We call to mind the greatest beauty we can imagine. Then we consider that there may be a beauty beyond that, something we cannot touch even with our imaginations, and in that thought we begin to approach God. Such a view of God opens us to pay attention, to apprehend beauty, to be transformed by beauty. The transforming power of spiritual beauty is the meaning of the beatific vision in Dante.

I noticed this group of young people was utterly and completely with me, caught up in my spontaneous sermon on faith and the visual arts. The artist was genuinely inspired. So I said to myself, “And I thought I was just here to study Spanish. Maybe God intended to nurture my soul with the silent reverence of those people praying in the cathedral. And maybe God gave me a message someone needed to hear.” I actually believe God did. Maybe someday someone’s soul will be touched in some blessed way by a painting, and they will be grateful for this work by Rivera (his name, like Diego) but will never know that Rivera’s approach to painting drew in a small way on spiritual guidance he received from a nameless American cleric in Morelia circa 2011 – or that the nameless cleric spoke out of the silence he had just experienced among the nameless faithful gathered to pray on a Wednesday afternoon in the Cathedral, people who prayed for their own purposes, not knowing that God intended their piety to touch a foreigner who would in turn touch a young artist who would someday touch someone not yet born.

Envivo De Michoacan

2011-01-18T14:55:00.000-08:00

Of course I am here to learn Spanish in the best way possible, I believe – several hours each day in class – so far my classes are one on one (I may have a classmate soon) -- living with a family that speaks Spanish, and negotiating life in a strange city where it seems no one speaks English at all. It is sink or swim, and since I cannot swim, I am immersed.

But I am learning a lot more than irregular verbs. This is a psycho-spiritual experience and a socio-political eye-opener. The content of all of that is barely beginning to be revealed. So far I can say it changes my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams at home, but here I am dreaming a lot, suenos extranjos, strange dreams with camels and chimpanzees. Something is up deep in my psyche.

On a more conscious level, it is a different experience to hear the word “foreigner” applied to oneself. At home we are citizens. Abroad we are, in our eyes, tourists or pilgrims. But to those around us, we are foreigners, sojourners. The identity of the “foreigner” is at the heart of Jewish spirituality and ethics. “Give shelter to the foreigner for remember you were once foreigners in Egypt.” It actually goes back further to Abram who was sent to wander “in a land you do not know.” As Christians, we inherit that identity. We are citizens of the Heavenly City, not the Worldly City (St. Augustine) “This world is not my home. I’m just a-passin’ through.” Those words caution us against attachment to or identification with worldly pursuits or undue anxiety about worldly problems. But they also remind us that we are never to claim a land as ours so as to say to another, “you are a foreigner while I belong here and (more insidiously) here belongs to me.” Our true rootlessness, our sojournerhood, is so easy to forget in a place where we have a paper that evidences our “right,” our “claim” to land, where we have a driver’s license, and a voter registration card – all to “identify” us and identify us with the place. But when one is called a “foreigner,” it changes the way we look at the sojourner in our midst when we are at that place where “we belong.”

It is hard to be in a different culture, where you cannot assume anything, where nothing can be done by habit, but every step must be thought out so as not to offend or cause some debacle. It is hard to have to struggle to remember even the few words one knows in order to accomplish the simplest exchange like the purchase of a bagel. It is hard to use currency in which the numbers are way out of line with the values in the currency one knows. That is what it is like for the immigrant in the United States. Do they do right or do they do wrong to come to Nevada for work? All I can say is that they do not do it lightly.

Most of our immigrants face larger challenges than these. Most come, not from the northern states, but from far to the South, near Guatemala. It is not an easy walk or a short one. They know that many die in the Arizona desert. Do they do right or wrong? I can only say it is not a choice that they make lightly.

Again, I am receiving remarkable hospitality here. I say this as one who has lived nearly two decades in the cultural capital of the Old South, where hospitality is a matter of pride celebrated in Southern Living Magazine. But the South offers no welcome, no “mi casa es su casa” comparable to the warm hearted caring of the people here in Morelia.

A little about the city: Morelia has been here since the 16th Century. Antiquity and Spanish elegance define the city, patently in the Center City square, but subtly even at the corner Farmacia. It is not a skyscraper city, but it is a huge college town. There are multiple institutions of higher learning including graduate schools in law, medicine, architecture, accounting, etc. There are 100,000 students in Morelia. Like students in the United States, their challenge is employment. They will soon have degrees to prepare them for jobs that do not exist in the present economy.

However, I met an interesting man this morning at the coffee shop. Although from Morelia, he is either an American citizen or permanent resident alien. One way or another, he has a home in Sacramento and the legal right to work and pay taxes in California. But here he is. He came to Mexico from the United States to find work.

Western Spirituality, Aelred, Special Loves and Honoring

2011-01-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

What’s Western about Western Spirituality? The key figure, in my judgment, is today’s saint, Aelred of Rievaulx.

Eastern Spirituality, for all its wisdom, troubles me with its tendency to flatten reality, to say things are “just thoughts,” that our preferences are bogus. It tends to dismiss experience and life.

Western Spirituality sets everything in the context of agape, which roughly corresponds to the Sanskrit karuna, an unconditional compassion and appreciation for all reality just for being real. But beyond that “unconditional positive regard,” Western spirituality – at least the best of it – affirms life in its particularity. It says, to quote Fr. Rick Milsap, “things matter, people matter, life matters.”

St. Aelred was a 12th Century Cistercian monk. In the monasteries, there was a ban on “special friendships.” Monks were to appreciate each other all equally and all the same. Very Eastern. Flat. Aelred, when he became abbot, rejected that rule and encouraged “spiritual friendships.” All were to hold each other in agape. But there was also room for particular bonds to particular persons – soul mates so to speak.

Hundreds of years later, in his classic little book, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis wrote about the spiritual value as well as the perils of romantic love, family love, and friendship all of which needed to be rooted in unconditional love of reality, agape. The point is he valued and affirmed particular exclusive loves as authentic human spirituality. And of course, those are just some broad categories of love. There are as many loves as there are lovers and beloveds.

Western Spirituality does not extinguish desire, but teaches us to have desire without being consumed or controlled by it. Western Spirituality invites us to appreciate things in their own unique being. First Nations peoples call it “honoring.” Native poet Joy Harjo writes:

“We matter to somebody . . . .
I’d rather understand how to sing from a crow
who was never good at singing or much of anything
but finding gold in the trash of humans.”

The trick is to find the gold in each other. The gold we find in another person is always their own unique gold. The joy lies in being the one to find it. A world where things shine is better. Living in such a world is a matter of paying attention to the good – a discipline of honoring.

Tying The World Together

2011-01-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

Today I have been involved in a mission that felt quite ordinary, humble. But an old friend put a grander label on it this week, a label that is actually true. I had called my friend, a priest in New England, to ask him about a priest who might apply for a job in Nevada. I called him because I trust his judgment. His good words about someone I don’t know allowed me to trust the stranger. My friend also talked about the duties of bishops. One of those duties, he said, is “tying the world together.”

“Tying the world together.” That in fact was what I was doing when I called him on the phone. That is what I have been doing today in Los Angeles. Bishops from the West including the Pacific met here at the Cathedral Center. We spent half the day and some of the night telling each other about our lives and the lives of our dioceses. It was an exercise in knowing each other. We do this every January. Tomorrow, we will talk about loftier matters of polity, liturgy, and theology. But today was not lofty. It was humble (humble from the same root as humus – earthy). It was the ordinary life of Christians today.

Last Saturday, the Deans of the Diocese of Nevada and I met on line and did the same thing. We talked of each other’s lives and the goings on in the parishes so far flung over our high desert. We groaned, laughed, and advised each other. But most importantly, we connected and in connecting, we were tying the world together.

And isn’t that what we do when we eat from one loaf, drink from one cup, celebrate the Holy Communion, when we say “The Lord be with you” -- “And also with you.;” when we confess our sins and our faith alike saying not “I” but “we;” when we pray for each other and this earth we share? Are we not trying the world together?

I exchanged messages tonight with a priest in Reno, a seminarian in Berkeley, a bishop and a community development worker in the Philippines – tying the world together. It isn’t gravity that keeps this orb from flying apart. It’s the act of knowing each other, caring for each other, wishing each other well.

Christian Speech And The Arizona Shootings

2011-01-10T18:15:00.000-08:00

Having heard a lot of confessions, some as a priest, some as a lawyer, I am rarely shocked by words. But I was taken aback by something I head in my parents’ living room a few years ago. My background is what sensitized me to this particular statement.

When I was in Junior Hi in Texas, in the early 1960’s, it was not at all unusual to hear the other kids talking about how somebody needed to kill John Kennedy. His murder was a popular fantasy, but one taken lightly – until Nov. 22, 1963. The following days, for those of us who lived them, can never be forgotten. The flag draped casket, the riderless horse, Mike Mansfield’s eulogy “And she took the ring from her finger and placed it in his hand.” It was the first wave of national grief, but not the last in that bloody decade. That time marked me in a way I had not fully grasped until a few years ago.

I was in my parents’ living room when one of my young relatives began talking of how he wanted to assassinate President Clinton. He wasn’t planning it. He didn’t express the intent to actually do it. But he thought it would be highly satisfying. He wanted to do it and said so freely. That is one time, I was truly shocked. Despite all the years that had passed, I felt myself once again to be a Texan, to remember the shame that the President had been murdered in my state, and now to hear this young Texan, my kin, eager to relive that evil day was more than I could grasp. I was not polite.

I don’t know what to make of the murders in Arizona. I don’t know whether there is any direct connection to any ideology or the political rhetoric of our time. But I do turn to my faith and what little I know of human nature to help me reflect.

I start with the premise that God does not make murderers and does not send people out like Manchurian candidates to do evil. And I take to heart the message of Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic, Moral Man, Immoral Society in which he said we are each much better as individuals than we are as a society, that society, though necessary to fully human life, is fallen and makes us do things that are beneath us. Mobs commit atrocities few individuals do. The lone gunman is not lowered by a machine onto the human stage. The lone gunman is formed in a society. The most broken fall prey to our darkest passions and perform the darkest acts on behalf of the worst sentiments in our collective spirit.

My young kinsmen never took at shot at President Clinton but he gave voice to something that we have neither owned nor extinguished. Sometimes a broken person is too weak to resist it and becomes its agent. Language is our best way to know what a society believes, feels, and values. My young kinsman said the murder of a leader is good. The rhetoric of our contemporary politics is violent, murderous – “the second amendment alternative.”

Christianity is, in an important sense, a special language. It is the language we speak to suggest, to hint at, to point toward “things to deep for words.” It is a language of creation, appreciation, mercy, and reconciliation. That makes it a language quite at odds with most contemporary political language. Yet it is not anti-political. Politics is by definition the practice of a common life, a sharing of authority, a caring for each other. It is the so-called “political” rhetoric of our time that is actually anti-political. It is the language of faith that makes an authentic politics possible.

This is why it is absolutely essential that Christians speak on matters of the common good, that we speak in the public square, that we articulate the demands of justice. Christianity is not a political ideology, as much as some on the left and the right alike, have claimed. Christians do not necessarily agree on matters of politics and economics. But Christians speak (or when they are true to Christianity should speak) of these things in a distinctively Christian way – a way that is non-violent, because Christians live in hope, and violence is always an act of despair. (Robert Cover, Violence & The Word, Yale Law Journal).

The voices of violence are shouting in our time. The anger and contempt are in long supply. And we speak too little, far too little. Sometimes, I see people in the church behave as if they were at a town hall meeting spewing hate. I see the ways of the world informing the Body of Christ, while the Body of Christ muzzles itself rather than inform the ways of the world. If Christians speak, and Christians are obliged by our Baptismal Vows to speak, on matters of justice, we speak differently in two ways. First, we speak in prayer – prayer for guidance, prayer of intercession, and prayer of contrition. Second, we speak prophetically – but prophetic speech is not simple or easy.

To speak prophetically is to say what we believe to be God’s will. To speak prophetically, we have to subordinate so much. We have to subordinate our pride, our ego, our self-interest. Above all we have to sacrifice our political and economic ideologies. This is particularly hard for leftists with secularist anti-religious ideologies and for rightist with Darwinian ideologies – both of which are challenged by Christianity. It is hard, hard, hard to resist the temptation to paint the face of Christ on whatever already fits our ideology.

Then, having died to self that we may speak for God, it is incumbent upon us to speak reverently. That means refusing to claim we know God with greater certainty or precision than we really do. We must be able to say “Thus sayeth the Lord – I think.” (Niebuhr, On Christian Tolerance) If we subject all our other beliefs to God, and acknowledge our uncertainty of God’s will, then we will, of necessity, speak more gently and listen more attentively to one another.

Clearly, not all Christians have spoken with the kind of non-violence and humility. We have the regrettable Battle Hymn of the Republic in with “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword” etc. Christian violence is an oxymoron but one that has too often obscured the light of Christ. Our first duty is to repudiate evil spoken in the name of Jesus and to claim the truth of our tradition.

If we add our voices, along with the voices of peace, wisdom, and hope from other faith traditions, we can, by grace, counter at least some of venomous voices that poison souls, especially the souls of broken, vulnerable people.

In the wake of the Arizona shootings, I hope we will speak to God, to each other, and to the world in an authentically Christian way. I hope we will pray for the victims of violence and the perpetrators of violence who wound themselves most grievously. I hope we will repent of our own violence, our own intemperate words and deeds – knowing that every word and action ripples out into the world in good and evil ways greater than we intend or foresee. I hope we will rededicate ourselves to mercy and the mission to reconcile all people to each and to God in Christ.Dona nobis pacem.

Interpreting Reality As World Making

2011-01-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

It is fashionable in some circles to say we make our own lives with our attitudes. Whatever we are like inside manifests in our outer circumstances. This morning it snowed in Las Vegas. I suppose according to the “manifest” theory, it was something in my attitude that caused the snow. Oddly enough, it seems a couple million of us fell into the same mood at the same time since it snowed on all of us, “the just and the unjust alike.” Maybe the notion that we create our own reality is a big of an exaggeration. But there is something to it.

Experiences make up our lives and we are constantly interpreting our experiences. So much depends on interpretation. Suppose for example, I am on a multi-lane highway. I turn on my left blinker signaling my intent to change lanes. The car a little behind me in the lane to my left accelerates and passes me. What happened? I might surmise he was a competitive driver who wanted to get ahead of me before I got ahead of him. Possible. But maybe he was concerned he was in my blind spot and was dashing for safety. Or maybe he figured that if he hung back waiting for me, I would hang back waiting for him, and we would both waste time dilly dallying, and by passing me he was actually allowing me to change lanes quicker and more safely. Or maybe he just noticed he was late and sped up without even noticing my blinker. Which interpretation I put on the anonymous driver’s action is up to me and says more about me than it does about him.

Is everything interpretation? No. Some things are facts, or at least direct experiences. But we interpret all of them and the interpretations we give determine the flavor, the texture, the quality of our lives. All of our interpretations flow from one basic interpretation. It is our comprehensive interpretation of reality itself – our understanding of why there is something instead of nothing, of why it is as it is, moves as it moves. Our belief or disbelief in God is the fundamental interpretation on which everything else depends.

I received an e-mail recently from someone trying to decide whether God exists. She may have been inviting me to try to persuade her of God’s existence. But here’s the kicker. The question is wrong to start with. Christian theologians, going back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas (and really much farther back) have not said that God “exists” – not the way anything else in the universe exists. God is not such a thing. Many Christians never get past the children’s Sunday School picture of God as “the man upstairs.” Even if we aren’t so naively anthropomorphic as to think God is a man, we are apt to think he is a being along with the other beings in the universe, only bigger, stronger, smarter, and older. Like the abominable snowman or intelligent aliens, such a being might or might not exist. However, if such a being does exist, he is not God. Orthodox, traditional theology teaches that God is not a being along with all the other beings, just bigger. Our best contemporary theologians agree. As Kathryn Tanner says, “God is not a kind of thing among other kinds of things.”

God is that out of which all being arises and into which all being sinks when it ceases to be. St. Paul said, “From him and through him and to him are all things,” and “In him we live and move and have our being.” In Christian doctrine, God is the source, the destiny, and the meaning of reality itself. St. Augustine saw God as the ultimate object of all our longings. The 20th Century Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, wrote of God as the source and the destiny of reality, “the whence and the whither” – “whence comest thou? whither goest thou?”

Likewise we believe, or at least hope, that there is some deep sense to reality, some order, some meaning. We believe that there is truth and that the truths we know, and the truths we do not yet know, may be ordered within an overarching, comprehensive structure of Truth which we cannot know. We value things. Indeed, we hold that things actually have intrinsic value. And of all that is valuable, there must be that which is most valuable, ultimately valuable, something that finally matters. Just so, we delight in beauty, believing, or at least hoping, that there may be a greatest beauty beyond the reach even of our imagination.

Each of these things – source, destiny, meaning, sense, order, truth, value, beauty – could be its own object of devotion. Each could be regarded as a god. But monotheism rolls all of this, and much more into the unified concept of the one God. Monotheism teaches that there is no final conflict between truth and beauty, that our source, our destiny, and our purpose are all one. All of this is in God. To put a point on it, God is very big – far too big to fit inside the universe. God does not fit inside anything. Everything must fit inside God. So God is not a being among other beings, a value among other values, a power among other powers.

To believe in God is not to believe that a particular thing exists. It is to believe something about all our experiences, to trust, to hope, to risk our fate on something deeply true in reality. To believe in God is to affirm truth, beauty, goodness, that life has meaning and value.

To believe in God is an act of interpretation. Interpretations are not facts. But that does not make them entirely subjective. Some interpretations may be more reasonable than others, more plausible or probable than others, and certainly some are more helpful than others. Philosophers and theologians rarely offer “proofs of God” anymore. Since interpretation always smacks of mystery and God, as the meta-interpretation of everything, is infinitely mysterious – God is not subject to proofs. Instead, philosophers like Alvin Plantinga now speak of “warrants for faith” – meaning reasons to justify believing in God, lines of thought demonstrating that faith is reasonable.

A wonderful example of such a warrant for faith is Anthony Flew’s book, There Is A God. Flew was the leading atheist philosopher of our time – a real philosopher unlike the pop atheists (Dawkins, et al) on the bookshelves today. But Flew ultimately concluded that God is the best explanation for the existence of this universe we experience.

Now back to the power of interpretation: We control some of our experiences – the things we do. We do not control others – the things that happen to us. But we interpret all of them. My assumptions about human nature, or at least Las Vegas drivers, will determine the motives I attribute to the person who zipped around me when I had my blinker on. That interpretation will shape my mood for awhile. My mood will shape my further interpretations of the next events as well as my behavior and indirectly the way people respond to my behavior and then my interpretation of their responses.

So what did I believe about today when I woke up? Did I believe it would be an episode in a Darwinian power struggle or the closely related Marxist class conflict? Or was it to be a random, meaningless exercise in futility acted out in an existentialist void? Or is it the Day the Lord has made for us to rejoice and be glad in it? And what of these people I encounter? Are they my Darwinian rivals for survival, human commodities to be used for some gain, or brothers and sisters in Christ?

Experience is just raw data until we interpret it, and our interpretation is a matter of will – as William James called it “the will to believe” – guided by reason. So let us ask two questions: First, is it plausible, is it reasonable to believe that the universe has a source and a destiny, that all this actually has a raison d’être? The vast majority of people who have lived on this planet have thought so. The greatest philosophers and theologians have thought so. Second, is it helpful to believe such a thing? How will I experience life with God and how will I experience life without God? What difference might faith in God make to my behavior, to the kind of person I become?

There is an objective world. We live in it every day. I cannot pretend the other cars are not on the road except at my extreme peril. But that world affords me only the raw data for interpretation. After that, I have it in my power to create a godless universe or a godly one in which to live this life, “to make a very hell of heaven or heaven of hell.” Such is the power of faith. “Faith” is the foundational interpretation which can make or break a life. That’s why sometimes Jesus did not just zap people with healing energy but rather told them “your faith has made you whole.”

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 9

2010-12-10T06:23:00.001-08:00

It was a sad parting in Santiago. As much as I’ll be glad to be home, it was hard to say goodbye to new friends – both human and terrestrial. I’m going to miss white cranes lifting and lowering their wings slowly as they fly just a few feet above the green rice plants while water buffalo wade through the fields.

I boarded a small plan to Manila. The only thing eventful about the flight was the flight attendants’ delight that I was reading Noli Me Tangere, the first of two Philippine classic novels by the revolutionary hero, Jose Rizal. The works of Rizal and other Filipino writers were banned until the 1970’s along with patriotic Philippine folk songs, but the children all learned the words and music to “America the Beautiful.”

The adventure began when I got to Manila. Someone from the National Church Office met me at the airport and dropped me off at my hotel at 1 p.m. with the intention of picking me up later, at a time TBA, for dinner with the Prime Bishop and National Church Office staff. But the hotel said I was too early. So I left my bags and ventured forth a-foraging. I lunched at the Tree House, an open air restaurant serving barbecued chicken. As I waited in that decidedly tropical ambience, the radio played “Walking In A Winter Wonderland.” The next song was an excellent cover of the R&B classic “Just My Imagination.” Manila is by the way totally decked out for Christmas in ways I cannot begin to express. One example is along one downtown street there is a 30 foot structure that is a cross between a Christmas tree and a pagoda, with large snowflake shapes of white lights along its sides. Pertinent to my story, crèches are everywhere, absolutely everywhere, some rustic, some bedazzled.

While waiting for my room to be ready, I also stopped off for a ventoso style massage. Best massage I have ever had!!! It was a spiritual experience. I was in one mellow mood when I got back to the upscale hotel. Then they told me I had no reservation and the hotel was full. Homeless. No phone. No phone number. Nada. What to do? I needed a drink – of coffee – my drug of choice, so I went to Starbucks. A little caffeine settled my nerves. I reasoned that eventually they would have to come looking for me, maybe send the police. And the place they would start looking is the last place I had been seen – the upscale hotel. So I went back there and hung out for several hours. It was a Joseph and Mary moment – no room in the inn – but at least I wasn’t in labor. I commended myself a bit for remaining as calm as I was about the whole situation, but then I thought Joseph and Mary probably weren’t too calm. Faith isn’t always calm. It’s more about God being faithful whether we are calm or frantic. God is there with us regardless of our mood. That’s why all the crèches in Manila pertain to today.

Eventually, the mortified National Church staff showed up and took me downtown to a less upscale but more my style kind of hotel. I’m on the 9th floor over a busy downtown street with lots of honking and whistling down below. Reminds of seminary days in New York.

Hunger had become a factor and the dinner with the PB and staff was canceled due to my MIA status. I’m having breakfast with the PB instead. So I went looking for more food. I found a Korean restaurant and to my naïve surprise discovered that not only the servers but the clientele were all Koreans. The cooks however were young Filipinos. Not sure what to make of that. I ordered something I didn’t really recognize but felt daring, until I realized that there were no forks. I had not seen a single chop stick in the Philippines. They don’t use chop sticks in Santiago. But here it was all chop sticks and I have used them in years, never was proficient.

Whenever I was sure no one was looking, I speared the food. Occasionally the food landed on my sleeve and I would discreetly wipe my face and snag the food with my tongue as it went by. Little by little, by hook or by crook, I ate most of it, even the rice. The music in the Korean Restaurant – Ann Murray “Just one touch and then it happens . . . .;” Abba “Dancing Queen” just what we were listening to while driving North, also the Eagles “Hotel California” and John Denver “You Fill Up My Senses.”

So when I fly away tomorrow, what will I bring back with me? It may take awhile to answer that. Certainly a different impression of how they do church here and a lot of inspiration and ideas for how we might do church better. (This really is role reversal from the old missionary days. We can learn more from Santiago on most points. There are a couple of things we have more experience at and can share.) There is some possibility, just a faint glimmer of a possibility, of some funding from her to help us get started with an Asian ministries outreach like we started Latino ministries last year. Bishop Alex is working on it for us. We need this decidedly Christian country to support some missionary work in our not so Christian land.

I have a new Philippine vest I intend to wear with my purple clergy shirt, so Asian people in Nevada will see it and think “What is that white bishop doing wearing a Philippine vest, here in Nevada of all places?” They will ask me about it and I will tell them about Asian ministries in Nevada. I will explain the Episcopal Church and say “It isn’t just for Igarot anymore. We have thriving Ilocano congregations in Santiago where we just ordained a non-Cordilleran” – this will all make sense to them if they are Filipino – “and,” I will continue, “there are growing Tagalog congregations in Manila and we are in full communion with the Philippine Independent Church. Our priests and their priests go to the same seminary, you know.” In other words, I’m getting ready to do a better job of evangelism to Nevada’s growing Asian population.

Beyond that, there’s the spiritual thing. “Spirit” is not about emotions. It’s about connections -- connecting to each other in God through Christ.” I am more connected now. I have heard dozens of stories that are not in these journals. I have told the people of Santiago stories – stories about our diocese, stories about Nevada, my own personal stories. We have shared life and that is the essence of communion. I feel deeply blessed by my time here and I will return looking for opportunities to share the blessing from this watery world with my fellow desert dwellers. The Deans and I talked of connecting congregations to congregations, ECW’s to ECW’s, joining their diocesan education person, Andrea, to our Parish Educators Google Group. “It does not yet appear what (this) shall be but when (it) appears it will be like him (Christ.)”

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 8

2010-12-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

My last day in Santiago was dominated by the retreat I facilitated for the clergy and the diocesan staff. My self-review is that parts of it went quite well. The preface on post-colonial theology generated good discussion and report back in the plenary session.

I then did the theoretical presentation for my exercises on psycho-synthesis and bio-spiritual focusing. The response was mixed. Some folks were nodding and definitely engaged if not downright intrigued. Others were bored. The first exercise went ok, but just ok. The second went better and they had great one on one dialogues afterward. By the time we got to the transpersonal self guided meditation, almost everyone seemed deeply engaged. It felt profound. Then the free association of God’s children meditation went quite well and the loving kindness mediation seems worked exceptionally. It was moving when they meditated on the blessing, “May all persons in the Dioceses of Santiago and Nevada be filled with loving kindness. May they be well. May they be peaceful and at ease. May they be happy.” So once we got past the theory, which some liked even that, it went well.

The deans met with me over lunch again and we continued to plan how to build a network between our dioceses. They told me more about how the deaneries work in the Philippines. The deanery is a key unit of church life here and the deans have a substantial role – more so than in Atlanta or Nevada. They really make things happen, like youth ministry. The ECW meets for the deanery and at convention. ECW lives beyond the parish boundaries here more than in Nevada. I learned much and was prodded to do more with what I already know.

There was a wonderful farewell. The clericus gave me a large woven cloth. They also gave me the banner welcoming me to the diocese in Ilocano. There were many mutual expressions of appreciation for each other. I kept promising to return until I realized how much like Douglass MacArthur I sounded. After the retreat, two young adults, Andy Burns (a YASC engineer) and Jocelyn Ittiw (an agricultural engineer doing community development work) interviewed me. Good questions. I over answered them because I enjoyed the young people so much. I want to be them when I am reincarnated.

This has been a fantastic visit. I feel changed by it in ways I cannot describe. I regret having to leave tomorrow though I do enjoy Manila as well and look forward to meeting the Prime Bishop. I am also just exhuasted.

But I fly away laden with loving gifts -- a Philippine vest, wood carvings from Ifugao, a framed ceretificate from the dedication of St. Joseph the Worker, as well as the woven cloth and the banner they gave me today. The generosity of these good people exceeds even thier reputation.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 7

2010-12-08T06:29:00.000-08:00

This was tourist day. Bishop Alex, his adult daughter, Maria, and Padi Nancy picked me up just past 8. First a definition of Padi: It means Nancy is a priest. No Padi is not derived from Padre – no etymological connection whatsoever. It is not Spanish, but Ilocano – a Filipino language from the plains area around Santiago. It is a gender neutral title for a priest. Filipinos have the most gender inclusive version of English I’ve ever encountered. They use the masculine and feminine pronouns with total disregard for the gender of the person being discussed. It’s a little confusing to an American, but quite delightful.

As I was saying, before language took me astray, three wonderful people picked me up this morning and drove me up, up, up into the mountain forests. We stopped by one church and then dropped in at another, Padi Nancy’s, St. John’s in the Wilderness, to have coffee. Then on to the Banaue rice terraces, the 8th wonder of the world. Along the mountain sides, they have constructed earthen terraces. Irrigations systems which I cannot get my mind around keep these terraces flooded with water just like rice paddies on the flat lands. So they raise rice on the mountainsides. They are huge. It is an engineering marvel. Now when do you suppose they constructed these rice terraces? The oldest ones are from about 2,000 B.C.E. They were centuries old when God spoke to Moses. And they are still in active production.

I couldn’t see all of them because there was rain and heavy fog. But the rain and fog were pretty amazing to this desert rat. The foggy mountains were mystical and mysterious. The rain was cold and made sitting on Padi Nancy’s porch drinking coffee all the cozier. On the way back down the mountain, we stopped off at the Las Vegas Café. However, there was not a buffet. By the way, I said something amiss in a previous post. I said I had stopped for lunch in Turo Turo. Well, it was actually San Jose. Turo Turo is not a place but the name for the Filipino version of fast food. It means literally point point. There is no menu, just a deep bowls of food and you point at what you want.

When we got back to Santiago, I had dinner with the 6 deans. We had a good talk about the joys and challenges of their ministries and how deaneries work in this diocese. They are a good deal more active than our deaneries or even our mission districts. They have formal structures with officers etc . And they are responsible for implementing diocesan programs.

The deans’ main interest they wanted to discuss was forming congregation to congregation partnerships between Santiago and Nevada. They are not looking for financial support. Quite the contrary, self-reliance is one of their core values. They are looking for a spiritual partnership. They want to know our people and be known by them. It’s about friendship in Christ. We are going to exchange lists of congregations with brief descriptions, then set up small committees on each side to match up congregations and give them some direction for how to start the relationship. How to continue it will be up to the congregations. They are very enthusiastic about making these relationships happen.

The Asian Journals of Bishop Dan: Part 6

2010-12-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

This is the preface to the Advent Retreat for clergy and dioscesan staff I will be facilitating tomorrow:

Our advent retreat is Watching And Waiting: The Practice Of Soulful Attention.
There will be some teaching and some exercises.
The purpose is strengthening our souls’ capacity to heal and reconcile
our lives and the lives of others through curious,
compassionate, observation.

But as an American offering a retreat in the Philippines,
I need to say a little first about post-colonial theology.
I need to say this because the American role in your history has been oppressive.
Through Bishop Brent and others,
it has served to convey the gospel,
particularly the Anglican brand of the gospel,
but our colonial power distorted the gospel and in some ways,
made it harder for you to know Christ – not easier.

So I need to say a little about the need for a post-colonial theology
to overcome the obstacles we and the Spanish created for you.
I will say only a little because I know only a little.
But I need to say something because your generation’s challenge
is to work out a post-colonial theology in the Philippines.
The work has already begun.
Sr. Mary John Mananzan, for example has been at this since the early 1980’s.
But as movements in theology go, that is pretty recent.
What’s more the theology that matters most isn’t academic articles.
It’s what you do when you teach, when you preach, when you lead churches.
You develop a theology while giving pastoral care.
Most critically you develop a theology when you reflect
on the economic and community development work you are doing.
Such efforts have to grounded in faith
and linked to sharing the gospel
if they are to survive and flourish.

When you form a cooperative, process coffee, or manufacture soap,
when you help people come together to support each other,
then you ask “Where is God in this?”
You read your Bibles and ask, “What part of the salvation story
do we hear as an echo in our community development work?”
You look at the Holy Mass through new eyes and ask,
“How does this ritual express what we are doing in the community?”

You develop a theology of the cross as you address human rights issues.
You are doing post colonial theology in your liturgy
as you develop indigenous prayers and rituals.
You already have Filipino intellectuals writing post-colonial theology,
but, more importantly, you are all already theologians
doing your theology in this unique context.

What I have to say about post-colonial theology is relevant
to our Advent retreat for two reasons:
First, post-colonial theology does not yet exist as a doctrine.
Important work has begun; most of it is still emerging.
We are watching and waiting for the birth of this new theology in our time.
Christ is about to reveal himself in a new way;
so in Advent 2010 we wait for that revelation
as people in 4 B.C.E. awaited the messiah.

Second, because of who I am, because of my culture and our history,
I am unable to teach a theology that is true for the Philippines.
I can only express my personal regret and apology for the American occupation,
and I can teach spiritual practices that will help you pay attention
to your own experiences,
and pay attention to the situations arising around you,
then to tell the truth about what you see.
If you pay attention in this context and tell the truth in this context,
that will be the best theology for the 21st Century Philippines.

I understand just two things about post-colonial theology.
First, it isn’t about making Christianity politically acceptable.
It’s about telling the truth.
When we describe God as Trinity, we mean that God,
the heart of reality is a mutual loving relationship.
God is a dance and an embrace.
God is not a king or general barking orders.
God is more like a cooperative than the general of an army.

God does not dominate the world, but loves it into being.
And when the world falls away, God responds not with dominating power
whipping us into shape but with the suffering, reconciling love
manifest in Jesus Christ.
That is the gospel. It is a gospel of love and freedom.
Such a gospel cannot be imposed.
We cannot impose love and freedom.
So whenever the gospel is imposed, it is twisted.

It is twisted by colonialism but it is not made completely false.
It is a miracle and a grace that the gospel is so strong
it can survive even the twisting.
The truth of the gospel is so bright,
it shines through the clouds of colonialism.
I can see in your worship and in your service to each other
and the community that you have received the gospel very well indeed.

But the task of separating what is truly Christian
from what is just American or Spanish is essential to your mission.
The task of growing a Filipino Christianity is still a work in progress.
As you grow a unique Filipino Christianity, you are making the whole world richer.
You help us see the true faith better.
You proclaim the gospel in a new language
which we Americans may not understand but we can admire its beauty
as we admire your art.

The second and last thing I know about post-colonial theology is this:
The post-colonial world is still new.
The social structures are unsteady on their feet like a newborn lamb.
Vestiges of the old power system distort the newly emerging society.
Post-colonial theology has to speak to these realities
if it is going to have anything to say that people care about enough to hear.
That is what our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in Latin America
have been doing – and getting in trouble for it
– as some of you have gotten in trouble for it.
It is the same task – to discover what the gospel says in the Philippines
about the distribution of wealth,
about political killings and violence against dissidents,
bout the rights and dignity of women and children,
about human trafficking, about care for our earth.

Before beginning our Advent retreat proper,
I want to suggest to you two subjects for reflection.
They will not give you answers to any questions.
Rather they are meant to spark your imaginations and free your thinking
to come up with your own new theological ideas.

First, I invite you to ask yourselves a “what if?” question.
We have the history that actually happened.
Christianity began in Jerusalem, then became the dominant religion in Europe.
Catholic Christianity then came to the Philippines with the Spanish.
Anglican Christianity came later with the Americans.
That’s how you got the brand of Christianity you got.
My friend Demi Prentiss, an educator in Texas, says:
Christianity began in Jerusalem as a relationship.
In Greece, Christianity became an idea.
In Rome, it became an institution.
In America, it became a business enterprise.
So that’s what you got.

But I just recently learned that Christianity spread from Jerusalem
to the East very early.
Christianity was a living wisdom tradition in China from at least as early
as the 300s until the 800s.
Christianity was first called “the Way” which sounds a lot like “the Tao.”
Christians were respected by Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists
as fellow sages.
They were having a wonderful, rich interfaith dialogue.
All this lasted through the reign of the Khans.

It was after the Khans fell from power,
that the Ming Dynasty stamped out Christianity in China.
It had been a rather different Christianity from the evangelical version
taken there by American missionaries in the last century.
Now here is my “what if?” question.
What if the Mings had lost and Christianity had not
been crushed in 9th Century China?
Then the Philippines would almost certainly have received the gospel
from China instead of Spain and received it centuries earlier.
What would that gospel have looked like and what would it have become?

Second thing to think about:
You may well already have thought this through.
Perhaps I am saying it just so you will know that I am thinking about it too.
I am just now reading your great novelist and national hero, Jose Rizal.
But I gather his novels are quite critical of the Church.

When Rizal was asked if he intended to attack the faith, he said,
“I am aiming at the friars,
but since they were shielding themselves
behind the rites and superstitions of a certain religion,
I had to free myself from it in order to strike the enemy behind it.
Those who abused its name must bear the responsibility.”

Any post-colonial theology in the Philippines
must take Rizal’s critique of the faith seriously.
We must hear the voices of the prophets in our own countries.
But there is an irony in the life of Rizal that also deserves to be noticed
as you develop your theology.
Here was a rebel who spoke against the Church.

But he was a man, who gave his life to telling the truth,
to justice and to healing
to challenging authority and exposing hypocrisy.
For his integrity and his compassion, he was martyred.
No one has more clearly walked in the steps of Jesus;
no one has more faithfully followed Jesus’ way.
A theology for the Philippines has to take Rizal into account
– not in just one way, but in two ways --
both as a challenge and an inspiration.

-- Thanks to Fr. Joe Duggan for helping me correct substantive mistakes in the first drafts.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 5

2010-12-07T04:49:00.001-08:00

It was another festive dinner -- this time with the diocesan staff and the clergy who had gathered from around the diocese and from other dioceses – some had driven from Manila (9 hours) to get here for the ordination of the transitional deacon. These folks really show up for each other.

One retired priest, when prompted, shared a recollection from the Marcos days. He was on the government enemies list. One day someone told him the death squad would come to his house that night to kill him, so he stayed in another town. When he came back, his home had been burned. He said there were several such death threats over the years, but he figured he would die when God was ready.

Today, we ordained (yes, I got to be in on it – asked questions – hands on the head, the whole bit) Baby Auhra A. Galope as a transitional deacon. I know our context is different, but their discernment and formation process is so different from ours that it has to say something. She became an aspirant in 2002. She finished her 4-years of seminary in March, 2009. She then served as an intern lay pastor until today. I asked the bishop if there was some reason for the nearly 2 years between graduation and ordination, expecting him to explain why it had been so long. Instead, he told me there was a pressing need for her services so was on the fast track. It is normally over two years. She will now serve as a transitional deacon for two more years before being eligible for ordination to the priesthood. We are talking about a 10 year track to priesthood going at it full time.

It was a splendid service. In addition to ordaining Baby Auhra, a sparkling eyed diminutive young adult as the first non-Cordilleran clergy person to serve in this diocese, we dedicated the brand new St. Joseph’s Church. Their stained glass West window commemorates St. Joseph the Worker, showing him not with carpenter tools but plowing with a water buffalo.

We also had baptisms, confirmations, and receptions. I got to do the receiving. 11 new Episcopalians. The open air church sat 150 people. It was packed SRO plus chairs and people standing outside for a marathon liturgy in hot humid, often raining weather. The high point for me, after the ordination and the receiving, was the offertory. We sang a rousing version of Standing On The Promises while the new deacon censed the altar, the altar party, and the congregation. I have never seen incense used while Standing On The Promises was being sung. I loved it!

After the liturgy and lunch, we had a full afternoon of presentations. First, the MC invited the Senior Warden to say a few words about the construction of the new church. He took the mike and sang Victory In Jesus in mellifluous soulful tones! Asian Gospel! The last time I was so moved by a song, it was a Filipino singer at St. Luke’s, Las Vegas, singing Why Me Lord – I recall doing a blog post about it. There was of course playing gongs and dancing galore. There were more speeches and more songs.

At one point, the cutest little girl – about 6 with a missing front tooth – wearing a pink ballet outfit came over and placed a pale blue ribbon around my neck. The blue ribbon held a circle of pink ribbons enclosing white daisies. I wore it proudly the rest of the day. The children were simultaneously fascinated by me and shy with me. The afternoon was full of children and singing, dancing celebration.

You may recall I visited another brand new church yesterday, and stopped by yet another one with the paint barely dry on my way back from dedicating St. Joseph’s. The faith is on the move in the Philippines.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 4

2010-12-06T02:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I had dinner with Bishop Alex Wanadag and a young engineer from New York who is here with the Young Adult Service Corps doing community development work with the diocese. We then shared a traditional Filipino breakfast this morning before joining the diocesan staff – about 18 of them – for Morning Prayer.

After the daily office, the staff told me about the things they do. There is a major push on evangelism. The Episcopal Church has traditionally been identified mostly with the Igarot tribes, but is now drawing members from other tribes as well, especially in this diocese. The other big push is on Christian formation, specifically “lay enhancement” (particularly training lay preachers and Eucharistic Visitors) and continuing education for clergy. All of the clergy come to the two clergy retreats per year. I was about to explain that our clergy cannot do that because of our vast distances. To set up my explanation I asked Bp. Alex how long it took the most distant clergy to get to the retreat. He said, “It’s about a two days’ walk.”

Next I heard from their staff members who work full time in community development. There were 6 of them. They have more people working in community development than our entire diocesan staff. Community development includes a variety of projects like: forming agricultural cooperatives, setting up micro-credit small business and agricultural lending to free farmers from usurers, building a warehouse to store agricultural products without charge to the farmers, converting a water project’s power source to solar for cost savings, working with Heifer International to provide livestock to farmers and overseeing the farmers’ passing on the offspring of their gifts to other farmers.

Community development begins with the diocesan worker living with the community for a few months to learn their needs and earn their trust. They then do Asset Based Community Development analysis: what could this community do together for economic support? The diocese then offers training – first in the values of Christian living essential to being a cooperative, then in business methods and financial responsibility, then in the enterprise itself.
The government has also tried to form these cooperatives but theirs fail while the ones established by the Episcopal Church survive. The difference is the Church builds a real community with relationships and values.

I was inspired by the enthusiasm of the whole staff about how they were overcoming poverty through creative enterprise and Christian values. Instead of offering band aid charity to the poor, they are putting people on their feet. Self-reliance is a core value they practice and teach. Their challenge is to keep the social ministry tied to evangelism so that they nourish the souls as well as the bodies of the people. It is a challenge but it is a front burner priority for the community developers. This is, by the way, closely related to what we are trying to do through PICO in Reno and Las Vegas Valley Interfaith with our community organizing efforts. It is so inspiring to see the Episcopal Church here going beyond maintaining its Sunday morning operation and going beyond hand-out charity, to make a lasting difference in people’s lives and transform the society and economy around them.

This afternoon, I visited two small open-air churches. One had a large concrete slab used for drying the members’ grain and a warehouse for storing it. The priest, Fr. Tando, also showed me their health clinic. They have no doctor so they use herbal remedies, massage, and acupuncture. They grow their own herbs and have begun a major herbal soap business. Fr. Tando is also a bee keeper and has hives there on the grounds. Poor farmers can’t sustain the church with cash so honey and soap sales go to pay the bills; and the farmers can give more since they are not paying a warehouse to store their grain. Other churches are helping farmers convert to organic farming. Some are helping their coffee farmers who have been selling raw coffee beans to big companies process the coffee for sale themselves.

Bp. Alex and I had a serious talk this morning about the human rights situation here. I don’t think it best to blog about that, but one story is public knowledge – except that I somehow missed it. Did you? On Nov. 23, 2009, there was a massacre here in Miguindanao. One political leader had warned a potential rival that if he announced his candidacy, he would be killed. So the rival sent his wife (figuring in a Muslim region women would be safe) to make the announcement accompanied by a convoy of journalists. The entire convoy of 57 people was abducted and gunned down in broad daylight. 32 of them were journalists. 42 were women. That case was unusual because of the numbers, but political killings here are frequent and usually go unpunished. Human rights violations are being addressed this week by a group of visitors from the World Council of Churches. Participating in or reporting on the political process here is not for the faint hearted.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 3

2010-12-05T02:32:00.001-08:00

Sunday began for me at 4:30 a.m., up early to pack and get ready for Church. The 6:30 service was Holy Mass in the National Cathedral's side chapel. It was a service at once simple and high, as a side chapel Cathedral service should be. I believe this is my favorite form of the Eucharist. Two young men in albs assisted an old white bearded priest, who presided at the liturgy of the table facing liturgical East – which is to say the altar was against the wall. He reminded me a bit of the Rev. Canon Edward West who was this sort of priest at my beloved Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. (Here I resist the urge to go on a long tangent about Canon West.) The liturgy was close to our Rite 2 Prayer A with a few variations in the ECP BCP. I loved it! It was just so Episcopal! I miss services like this so much – no personal idiosyncrasies, no egoistic surges of “creativity,” no attempt to mix other liturgical season into Advent, no carving on the liturgy to make it acceptable to someone’s theological sensitivities – just the ritual reverently prayed by two dozen early risers, with a solid competent Advent sermon by one of the young men in an alb. There are many wonderful ways to celebrate the Eucahrist. I respect them all and enjoy most of them, but this one is my favorite.

After Mass, the old priest, who turned out to be a seminary professor, invited me to breakfast at the student café. He talked at some length though I only understood some of it, for he mumbled a bit and seemed more interested in his ideas than he was in either me or himself. He was not so much communicating as pondering aloud. I did not even learn his name, only that he was an American from Maine but had spent most of his adult life in Asia and planned to be buried here under a tombstone which will say “I lie here in protest and hope for the resurrection.” He also quoted someone – was it Ramsey? – who said “A priest is someone who stands before God holding his people in his heart.”

Then it was on the road with my driver, Wilson. Having a sidekick named Wilson keeps me feeling as if I am in the movie Cast Away and that my experience of Wilson as the son of a miner, husband of a working wife, and father of three children, one of whom is autistic, might all be my own delirious projections onto a soccer ball. If you haven’t seen the movie, just disregard this paragraph.

The drive was long and wonderful. Once out of Manila, we drove through rice paddies and sugar cane plantations – the sky sunny with a few clouds, the weather warm and humid, coastal. The cd player brought us Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton “Islands In The Stream” -- Abba, “Dance With Me” – Elton John “Daniel” (personally significant because of my brother’s death in the 70’s) – The Carpenters “I’m on the top of the world, looking down on creation . . . .” – Ann Murray – “Just one touch and then it happens. I fall in love again. . . .” Somehow you hear all that differently while driving through rice paddies.

Then it was up into the mountains, where lush tropical forests were interrupted by villages and more rice paddies – didn’t know rice grew so high up. Today I have seen my first water buffalo and my first ox carts. In fact, these may have been my first oxen. Where are the oxen in America? I know we used to have them. There were security checkpoints on the road. Wilson tells me they are looking for illegal logging and guerilla insurgents. I haven’t seen either – just water buffalo, oxen pulling carts, and the occasional goat.

We stopped for lunch at Angelina’s Eatery Ihaw Ihaw (which means the food is roasted over coals) in Turo Turo a village consisting of two, maybe three buildings. I had chunks of pork over rice. Wilson said it was a typical Philippine lunch. We ate al fresco under a thatched roof. As we left, the owners told Wilson I was the first “foreigner” who had ever eaten there. I hope I behaved well. Wilson said he would get flack from the National Church Office for taking a visiting bishop to lunch there. I’m glad he did.

As the sun was setting, we arrived in Santiago City, capital of Isabella Province – the last region to succumb to the American military in the 1920s. One of the diocesan clergy helped us find our way to the Gatian Hotel & Resort. I cannot figure out what sort of place this is. I have a simple suite in a compound that has lots of bright Christmas lights. Outside my window is a multi colored star of lights with more lights circling it in a progressive round flow of red. (Keeps me from being too homesick for the Fiesta Casino sign that flashes outside my window in Henderson. By the way I did put up last year’s Las Vegas style Christmas tree and ornaments before commencing this Asian odyssey.) Inside there are sticker signs. One is a sticker on the door to the bedroom saying “Jesus never fails” and one on the mirror says “Jesus Loves You. John 3:16” – which is not exactly what John 3:16 says, but the point is good anyway.

There is a Gideon Bible and towels so I am content. There is also an unplugged floor lamp. Remembering what happened to Thomas Merton, I plan to leave it unplugged.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 2

2010-12-04T06:03:00.000-08:00

Today has involved car rides all over Manila, revealing way too much to take in, much less express. This morning I was amazed to see a salon advertising in big bold letters “skin whitening.” I had already been put off by all the Shape, Cosmopolitan, etc magazines on the stands here. They don’t seem to belong. But “skin whitening”? That troubled me. I am sure most people here would not do such a thing, but that is should be an issue is sad.

The first long ride took me to a complex of buildings and grounds that included the Cathedral, the National Church offices, St. Andrew’s Seminary, Trinity Episcopal University, an Episcopal school, a teaching hospital, the homes of various church personages including the prime bishop, and some rental property the church owns. Lunch was Filipino cuisine shared with about 8 or so staffers. We had a good talk, comparing notes on church life and discussing people we knew in common. I have come to suspect that everyone in these islands has some connection to our Fr. Jun, Teogenes Bernardez, Jr.

I then took a jaunt around the grounds with the chaplain for the university. There is a lot of Episcopal school presence in the Philippines and the faith is taught there. Each diocese has a diocesan school. They central office has a priest whose full time job is Christian Formation and Evangelism. No wonder there are about 200,000 Episcopalians here. All their churches are overflowing with children and they all have Sunday Schools. They could use more money to sustain their mission, because so many of the Episcopalians are poor. But they are spreading the gospel big time. The chapel of the seminary was excellent, lovely light – and there were many outdoor crèches made from local materials, palm fronds etc. – simple, creative, holy.

We then visited a bookstore where I picked up the classic novel by the martyr of the Philippine Revolution, Jose Rizal, revolutionary, novelist, ophthalmologist. I also got a book on Culture and History by another intellectual giant of the Philippines, Nick Joaquin; and a book of stories from the Revolution.

Leaving the bookstore I slightly pulled a quadriceps while dodging traffic. This was a cultural mistake. I did not realize that in Manila a car cannot hit you if you show it your palm; so I was trying more athletic means of self-preservation.

I then accompanied about 20 seminarians and college students to tour a new, state of the art hospital. As we drove along the road, we passed a scene that pierced me. It was an old woman with straight white hair and a weathered face, sitting on the sidewalk. Her face was turned down and to the left, twisted aside as one does to hide grief. She was crying. A little girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old, stood to her right, stroking her hair. You could see in the child’s face how inadequate she felt to the task of consoling the old woman.

Not too many blocks later, we were stuck in traffic. That happens a lot. An older woman leading an even older (as in probably her father) blind man walked between the cars with a begging cup. I rolled down the window and gave them a little money. I know that is not always the thing to do. But the old man’s blindness was compelling and the old woman with the little girl was still on my heart.

The hospital was high tech and state of the art. The staff was justly proud of it. By the way, their chaplain also knew Teogenes. But some of the seminarians were troubled that the location and the pricing of the upscale hospital made it a facility “just for the foreigners.” In fact, few Filipinos would be served there. It is for the higher rolling diplomats and corporate executives from other countries. We talked about health care systems. It sounded as if the Philippines has more extensive insurance coverage for the employed than we do – but they have more chronically unemployed.

There was a difference in the attitude both of the visitors and the hospital staff. It seems to me that most Americans rather prefer to avoid hospitals, that they are a little afraid of them, that the smell morbidity. But these students were having a great time, laughing, taking each other’s pictures, enjoying being shown how things work. The staff members who were showing off their workplace were deservedly proud of their technology. An American hospital staff would be proud too. Yet, there was a difference. I wonder if the Americans have an unspoken anxiety behind their pride, a voice in their ear reminding them “this is serious stuff.” The staff members here in Manila were more like chefs on the Food Channel showing how they do their magic. All in all, it felt more like touring the Hershey Chocolate Factory than a place of morbidity. I hope it is clear I mean something good. There was a lightness and happiness in the project of healing. There was professionalism and caring – but an element of worry had been removed. I wondered if I might be getting a glimpse of why so many of our good nurses in Nevada are from the Philippines.

At the time when the mood may have been the lightest, we passed two women in the hall, one crying inconsolably while being held by the other. We knew someone they loved had died. And we passed is silence with respect. I was not surprised that the students were respectful. I did note that, despite the fact that several of them had just finished CPE, none of them broke into the women’s grief with officious pastoral “support.” The absence of anxiety was matched by an absence of codependency – all the while, wisdom and compassion were fully present.

I talked with the seminarians about many things. But here’s an interesting one: they wondered if I would send our seminary students to their seminary, St. Andrew’s. It struck me as an excellent idea. They do program relating to economic and community development that are way ahead of what any of our seminaries do. They have good practical hands on educational opportunities. A semester here would do more to deepen and expand spiritual experience. The cost is quite low. And it would prepare seminarians to do Asian ministries and evangelism. This deserves further pondering.

The Asian Journals Of Bishop Dan: Part 1

2010-12-03T17:23:00.000-08:00

Here at last. It took a long time – longer than the 19 hour flight. I have wanted to go to Asia since 1966 when I was captivated by an episode of I Spy in which Robert Culp portrayed a Southeast Asia warlord resisting the modernization and westernization of his world. Then came my young adulthood spent immersed in Eastern religions, mostly Buddhism. So here I am, following in the footsteps of Gary Snyder, Thomas Merton, William Johnston, and so many personal heroes. The title of these blogs by the way is a tongue in cheek reference to The Asian Journals Of Thomas Merton. My posts will be less enlightening than Merton’s, but I hope that, unlike Merton, I’ll make it back alive.

The flight was uneventful except that there was so much interest in the hat case I was carrying. It has a cowboy hat and belt, my presents for Bishop Wanadag. Passengers, flight attendants, and customs agents were all curious. “What is in that?”

I arrived at 4:15 a.m. in the rain. The temporal math has me confused but I think I gained 8 hours but lost a day. It seems to be Saturday. My schedule said I was to be met by an NCO. I had images of the Sergeant from Gomer Pyle. But it turns out NCO meant National Church Office. I was met by Betsy, the secretary for the Prime Bishop, the Most Rev. Edward Pacyaya Malecdan. However, we did not find each other for awhile, so I was wandering about the cab stations pondering my fate having no one’s phone number and no working phone in my possession. I then heard my name paged and all was well.

NCO Betsy who has served 4 Prime Bishops and Wilson the driver got me to my hotel where I freshened up and had an excellent breakfast of fruit, sardines, saffron rice, eggs, and a darn good sausage.

I then checked out the TV and found too many American channels, but a lot of international news – then came across a channel that is mostly in Japanese, I think, but I saw this program in English called Tzu Chi This Week. It was all about interfaith programs doing good things, mostly in the Philippines – helping victims of fire and flood, providing medical and ophthalmological care to the poor, etc. – Buddhists and Catholics together. There was a banner across the bottom saying “Many Ethnicities One Love.” The first segment showed a group of South Africans performing traditional Zulu dances in a hospital here. The South Africans, wearing surgical masks because the patients had infectious diseases, were saying words of encouragement including something about the “Buddha spirit” – which shows they weren’t really Buddhists. Buddhists would say “Buddha nature” – not “Buddha spirit.” They were spreading hope and love, doing their best to speak the religious language of the people they were there to help.

I now have to figure out the exchange rate and sally forth in search of an ATM to get some pesos. Next on the agenda is lunch with the national church staff. I have a church service at an outrageously early hour tomorrow morning. Then Wilson and I head north toward Santiago City. My sense of geography here is extremely uncertain. But I think Santiago City may be in or near the Isabella province where there was a major typhoon in late October. It this turns out to be wrong, I’ll recant in a subsequent post.

To learn more about this church I am visiting, check out http://www.episcopalchurchinphilippines.com/ecp. (This link inexplicably does not work. But go to the url. It is there.)

Why I Am Going To The Philippines

2010-12-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I will board a plane to fly 19 hours to Manila, then ride in a car 9 hours north to Santiago, a transportation hub and See City in the mountains of the northern Philippines. If you had asked me a month ago why I was going to do this, I would have said it is because the Diocese of Nevada and the Diocese of Santiago are companions, and such visits are what you do. I expect why I am actually going will be revealed to me when I get there. God works that way. We think we are doing things for our own reasons, but it turns out we are doing his mysterious will accidentally. “Direct us in all that we do to the fulfilling of your purpose.” But already I am getting a better sense of it.

I am not going to Santiago to do anything for the people there. I do have a cowboy hat to give Bp. Alexander Wanadag and I will lead an Advent retreat for the diocesan staff and the clergy of the diocese. But those are just courtesy gestures. I will participate in an ordination, help consecrate a church, and have dinner with the primate. But those are things they are doing to include me in their ecclesial life. It could all happen without me. The real reasons are deeper.

I am going to express the caring respect of Nevadans for our brothers and sisters who live the Christian life in these distant island mountains. I hope to visit the Philippines in an authentically Christian way. That is important because of colonialism. Christianity came to the Philippines as a medicine mixed with the bitter base of colonialism.

Spain imposed conversion to Christianity, and the friars ruled the people harshly for hundreds of years, actually preventing them from learning Spanish or how to read and write. It was a ruthless subjugation that brought the word of grace. Then the United States acquired the Philippines in 1898 in the Spanish-American War. But no one asked the Filipinos. We were engaged in military conquest of the Philippines until 1902, during which 200,000 Filipino civilians and 20,000 soldiers died from combat or disease. Their guerilla resistance continued on the mountain regions I will be visiting until the 1920’s.

The United States and Japan fought in and over the Philippines during World War II and the local people paid a heavy price. They participated with Americans as prisoners in the Bataan death march, and it might be said that we “destroyed (Manila) in order to save it.” Certainly the United States was a more benign ruler than Spain had been or than Japan would have been – but we have nonetheless been an imperial power like Rome to Galilee.

While all of that was happening, the Episcopal Church spread the gospel albeit in the colonial context. It started with a military chaplain to the occupation force celebrating the Eucharist in 1898. Then the Brotherhood of St. Andrew sent missionaries. In 1901, we established the Philippines as a missionary district of the Episcopal Church. (Remember we in Nevada were a missionary diocese until not so long ago.) That missionary district flourished and became the Episcopal Church in the Philippines, an independent Province of the Anglican Communion in 1990 – only about 20 years after Nevada became a full-fledged independent diocese.

I met Bishop Alex on a bus headed from Kent to London at Lambeth, 08. He knew our priest, then deacon, Teogenes Bernardez, Jr. I found Bishop Alexto be a man of great dignity and mischievous wit. We talked and I asked about the possibility of a companion diocese relationship. His first impulse was "No." He explained that their independence was important to them, and they did not want to receive the largesse of a wealthy American diocese. I said, “Then we are the companion for you, because we have nothing to give.” Thereupon a series of meetings and visits culminated in each of our dioceses adopting companionship resolutions.

I want to visit the Philippines as a friend, representing the friendship of the Diocese of Nevada. We are not oppressors and not benefactors. We are friends in Christ. I hope this will be a sharing of the gospel and a sharing in the gospel uncontaminated by colonialism. Finding the authentic faith is harder when it has been presented by a dominating power. Ask our First Nations Peoples about that. Being there on an equal footing is the all important point.

I also hope to learn something while I am there. I know I will learn a lot, but I particularly want to learn how we can strengthen Asian ministries in Nevada. For starters, I’d like to be a better bishop to the Filipino Episcopalians already in our pews.

I am also thinking of evangelism. The Asian population of Nevada is nearly twice the national average. Asians accounted for 2.9% of Nevada’s population in 1990; 4.5% in 2000; and 6 % in 2008. That is already over 156,000 people. There is presently a movement of Asian Americans from urban centers from the East and from California to the Mountain West. I am grateful for the Asian worshipers in our congregations, but I estimate about 155,900 of them are missing. We have been blessed with Asian ministries that were self-started. But we have not set out to deliberately invite Asian Americans to worship, pray, and share with us in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Frankly, I am not sure where to begin. I hope with this trip I will begin to learn.

God willing and the angels of information technology cooperating (do you suppose if the Annunciation happened today, Gabriel might just text Mary?), I’ll report in as the adventure unfolds.

Christ Church Is Alive! Let Christians Sing!

2010-11-22T13:18:00.000-08:00

The rumors on the diocesan street about Christ Church, Las Vegas are all about division and decline. All I know is what I see.

Yesterday, at Christ Church, there were close to 60 people in attendance at the 7:45 a.m. service. Granted, that does not pack such a big worship space. But it was a lot of people for 7:45 a.m. under any circumstances. They are nearly two years deep into an interim period and numbers always go down during interim periods regardless of how well loved the interim may be. So I was surprised and impressed by the early service.

I missed the Spanish Mass at 9:30 because I was socializing with the good people of CCLV in the parish hall, now served by its remodeled kitchen. I talked with a number of folks, but mostly with two young adults, one of whom I had confirmed last year, the other of whom is a 2 L at the Boyd School of Law, UNLV. Yes, there are young adults and college students at Christ Church.

At the principal service, I lost count of how many teenagers we confirmed. All I can say for sure is that it was a most impressive group – by far the largest group of confirmands I have had this year at an English speaking service. There were also 2 adult confirmands – one of whom was young adult, specifically another UNLV student. There were also four teens from the Latino congregation at St. Luke’s. Hurray for St. Luke’s too. But most of the youth were Christ Church kids. Let me add, they were strong in spirit as well as numbers. They were engaged, intelligent, and attentive when I met with them before the service. They had clearly been blessed with good Christian formation.

I don’t’ know the attendance number, but the church looked about ¾ full to me. It was a crowd! Yes, they were there for confirmations – or a lot of them were – but that counts. It was a mighty impressive turnout of engaged people who sang out and said the prayers with gusto. And another thing: they were, as they always have been, a diverse lot by any standard. There were black, white, brown, and Asian people. There were folks who looked well to do, folks who looked poor, and folks in between. This congregation looked considerably more like the city in which it resides than most Episcopal congregations.

If you are in Nevada, you have heard about the controversial new organ. In my experience, saying “controversial” and “new” about a church organ is redundant. Any new organ is controversial, and the better the organ the more controversial it is. The Christ Church organ, the largest in Nevada and certainly one of the best, is inevitably controversial. But the voluntaries before and after worship were magnificent. At the principal service, the congregation staid in place for the postlude, spell bound by the music, then broke into spontaneous applause.

“When in our music God is glorified
And adoration leaves no room for pride,
It is as though the whole creation cried
Alleluia! Alleluia!”
Hymnal, 420.

How much is that worth? How much is it worth multiplied by the long life of a tracker organ which will inspire souls for generation after generation?

Then at 5:00 Linda and I joined the Latino congregation for a Fiesta in the parish hall. It was absolutely packed. The food was delicious and the people were warm hearted. This group has been worshiping together for only 9 months but already the feel of community is emerging. Wondering how the Anglos are taking it? Several Anglos took me aside in the morning to say, “Thank you for sending us Fr. Bernardo.” Some described their own new spiritual experience and joy from worshiping with the Latino congregation. Even though they did not speak Spanish, they got it. They understood at the heart level.

Then came the evening Eucharist. I’d say the church was about 4/5 full. We baptized and celebrated children’s communions. Again I could not keep track of the initiation rites. More than in the morning. Now here’s what struck me. We were not baptizing babies. We were mostly baptizing teens and pre-teens. Latino families whose children have not been baptized long before this age have definitely been alienated from the church. We are not moving people from one church to another. We are bringing people from unchurched and estranged lives into the fold. I wish you could have seen the faces of these young people – joyful, devout, sincere. They were not going through the motions, not just doing what was expected of them at a certain age. It was ritual marking new commitment to Jesus.

This Latino congregation along with Latinos from All Saints’ and St. Luke’s are the heart of Latino support for the Las Vegas Interfaith community organizing effort. Anglo clergy from Christ Church are joining the struggle to make the Valley into a place where we know and care about each other. Of course, Christ Church continues to be the core of our urban ministries to the homeless and now to the new poor of the present recession.

They are doing all this during an interim period, during a recession, and in the aftermath of a traumatic conflict two years ago. This congregation is resilient, inspired, and inspiring. I give thanks to God for their witness.

Interfaith Relational Power For The Common Good

2010-11-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Episcopal Church is involved in interfaith broad based community organizing in Reno and the Las Vegas Valley. Our efforts are really quite simple, but people have a hard time grasping it. This is such a different approach to our common life that it is like speaking a foreign language. It isn't starting with a divisive issue and gathing the people who agree to fight with the other side. Interfaith organizing believes relationships and knowledge lead to a different kind of power -- relational power to heal society instead of dominating power for win-lose controversies. It is a different way of being a people together. The statment below is how I explained our goals to a meeting of Las Vegas Valley Interfaith attended by 254 people from 72 different churches, mosques, and synagogues two weeks ago.

From what Charles Redmond has told you
of our accomplishments so far,
you can see we are here to do something new
– something different.
We are here to change things at a deeper level than usual.

Usually when we set out to do some public good, we start with an issue.
People who care about the same issue
get together, take a stand, win or lose, then go home and forget it.
Relationships have not been formed.
People have connected to causes, not each other.
The basic pattern of fragmented, broken community has not been changed.

This is different.
Instead of starting with issues, we start with people.
We are forming a network of relationships
among Las Vegas Valley people who ordinarily
would not know each other.
I have new friends here I would not have known
and my life is already the better for it.
We intentionally cross the lines of race, religion, and politics.
We are Muslims and Catholics, Methodists and Jews.
We are Democrats, Republicans, Greens, and Independents.
We are black, white, brown, and Asian.

We are knitting together this diverse community
by hearing each others’ stories.
We are learning together how our government,
our economy, and our schools work
so we can make them work better.

We have no ideology except grass roots democracy
– common people taking responsibility for our common life
– and working for our common good.
We will stand shoulder to shoulder to meet the issues of this decade,
and we will still be standing shoulder to shoulder
in the next decade when new issues arise.
Divided, we are too politically weak to make our voices heard.

But together, we can make a difference
in the foreclosure crisis, the decline of our schools,
the plight of families in which a member is undocumented.

This Organization has a broad but clear purpose
– a better life for families.
Our Valley is not yet a family friendly place.
We have children in Las Vegas growing up
-- some on the streets; some in rent-by-the-week motels
-- children without a sliver of a chance.
We are an international hub of human trafficking.
Young lives are being derailed by gangs.
Tonight, you have heard some of the stories
about how life goes wrong here
for children, youth, and the elderly.

But together we can make this Valley blossom
for all our families and all our faiths --
just as broad based community organizations have done in Phoenix,
Tucson, San Antonio, San Diego, Nasville, Charlotte, New Orleans.
Las Vegas is next.

This big job takes broad-based, long term commitment.
To be stable and strong, we have to stand on our own feet.
We have to be self-supporting and self-sustaining.
That means we need the churches, mosques, and synagogues
to sign on, to commit both time and money,
just like we expect the people in our congregations
to sign on and commit.

We all have other pressing demands on our time and our budget.
But you have heard the stories and there are countless more.
What are these lives worth to us?
What are the children, the elderly,
and ordinary families worth?
What is it worth to set our Valley free to flourish?

Churches, mosques, and synagogues cannot change this Valley
if we remain divided -- feeding a hungry person here,
speaking out on a particular issue there.
But together, we can be a formidable force for the common good –
built to last, uniting people of all races and faiths as friends.

Sojourner Dream Of Grace

2010-11-15T17:25:00.000-08:00

After giving a sermon on the spiritual journey at St. Stephen’s yesterday, I flew back to Henderson and had the most beautiful, healing dream I can remember. I was moving to Nevada. Much of the journey was on foot and I would stop in small towns along the way. The beauty of the dream was the kind and gracious way several people helped me. I feel like a new person today.

In waking life, the road was hard last year, to say the least, and the hardness has continued to weigh on me until now. My dream was a channel of grace and peace.

We are all on a path, often not of our choosing. We would prefer to stay in Abram’s home, Ur; or in Jerusalem, like the apostles who did not leap into fulfilling The Great Commission, but instead set up shop in Jerusalem until driven out by persecution. One way or another, we are all on the road, pushed out of our nest. I don’t know where the road leads. The song says it, does it not? “I know not where the road may lead . . . . (only that) I walk the King’s Highway.” But regardless of the destination, grace happens when people are kind to us at the way stations.

Perhaps that is the wisdom embedded in the spiritual practice enjoined by the law of Moses to welcome the alien and shelter the sojourner, remembering that we are sojourners ourselves. As we go about being the Church, we might do well to think less on sustaining our institutions, to think more about the literal and spiritual sojourners around us, and find ways to extend a bit of consolation.

Slightly Bitter, Mostly Sweet Big Meeting

2010-11-10T10:02:00.001-08:00

Last night’s organizational meeting for Las Vegas Valley Interfaith was on the whole a big success. I didn’t count the number of churches, mosques, and synagogues present but it was by far the largest yet – and the diversity is increasing. The evening began with music from a great Gospel Choir singing “How Excellent Is Thy Name.” Then Dr. Aslam Abdulah chanted the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic as our invocation. Evangelical Protestants were spontaneously murmuring surprise and appreciation of that beautiful gesture. Roman Catholic Bishop Pepe was there with a pledge of $60,000 in support of our efforts. We heard moving stories from real people about real life challenges in the Valley. I gave it my best shot to explain how broad-based community organizing changes communities at a deeper level than charity or single issue advocacy. People seemed to get it. I got Amens and was interrupted by applause, which feels good anytime but especially when it’s the teaching piece of the program. We received in one night half the pledges we need for the funds we have to raise by May.

I was so proud of the turnout from our Latino/ Hispanic congregations! They may well have had the strongest turnout of any congregation of any denomination. Without them the attendance would have been disappointing. With them, it was something to celebrate. I'd call them playmakers. Fr. Hilario, Fr. Bernardo, and Dee had speaking parts done to perfection. Fr. Bernardo is going to Phoenix in the next couple of weeks to be trained as a community organizer.

I was especially pleased to see a strong turnout of lay people from both St Thomas’ and St. Luke’s along with their priests. Fr. Tim told me afterward he would be taking this mission to the St. Thomas’ vestry so they can decide how best to support Las Vegas Valley Interfaith. It is inspiring and deeply gratifying to see St. Thomas moving on from a leadership role in our recent convention to a leadership role in our most important social ministry in the southern half of the diocese. Christ Church, Las Vegas was also present, represented by three clergy and a clergy spouse.

There is much to celebrate for the mission, which I am confident will transform the character of the Las Vegas Valley in the profound way that can be accomplished only by an interracial, non-partisan, interfaith coalition. This is exciting.

Personally, I also feel rather like President Obama the day after the mid-term elections. The absence of most of our Episcopal churches, including some I had expected to be on board, is definitely a message – I’m just still sorting out what it is. Shakespeare said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men (sic) which when caught at the flood leads on to destiny.” I saw that tide last night, saw it growing deeper, wider, stronger – and saw most of our congregations missing it. I feel responsible for that but am not at all sure what to do next. Thankfully, two of my colleagues may be showing me the way.

The Rev. Candace Lansberry, District Superintendant for this district of the United Methodist Church; Fr. Bob Stoekig, pastor of Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Church in Boulder City (he spoke to our deacons earlier this year); and I will be meeting soon to talk about how to introduce the same listening process within our parishes that we have used to build our interfaith organization. Perhaps that process will deepen relationships in the congregations turn the ignition for participation in our religiously pluralistic community. In the meantime, I’ll keep my hand on the plough and hold this in prayer along with our other diocesan missions, all our congregations and their leaders both lay and ordained.

Children Blessed To Be At St. Barts/ St. Bart's Blessed By Children

2010-11-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

The children’s Sunday School at St. Bartholomew’s in Ely is my idea of important news. It isn’t overflowing like St. Mary’s, Nixon or Epiphany, Henderson – both wonderful too. But they definitely have something good going in Ely.

Of course they have had children’s Sunday School before but part of small church life is the demographic blips. Every few years, the Sunday School declines or even dies for want to children. It is as natural as the seasons. The rebirth of the Sunday School, however, does not happen so spontaneously. That takes initiative. Kim, a relatively new member of St. Bart’s, has taken the initiative.

Last Sunday, there were 4 children. Sometimes they have 5. Having no Sunday School room, they gather in a corner of the Fellowship Hall while the grownups are engrossed in the Liturgy of the Word upstairs. The kids sit on the floor for now, but Kim and Fr. Red are planning to get a rug or a carpet remnant for them to sit on. Such a thing makes a big difference. It welcomes the group into a defined space, holds them there and focuses attention – far less wandering off.

There is a board on which they have the words for their simple song – “Jesus in the morning” – one of my favorites. Then Kim converses with the children about one point from the Gospel lesson. Colored construction paper chains hang under each child’s name on the bulletin board. Every Sunday when the child attend Sunday School and learns a new lesson, they put a new link on their paper chain. The paper chains make visible their growth in spiritual intelligence. They also encourage and reward attendance, which judging by the paper chains is pretty good.

The point of this week’s Gospel lesson (Zacchaeus up the sycamore tree) was generosity. For their craft, the children created basketfuls of ghost treats. They hooded lollipops, with tissues, tied around the neck, and faces painted on the tissues with magic markers, thereby making ghosts. The kids then came upstairs to join their parents for the Liturgy of the Table. As people were leaving the nave, the children formed a receiving line giving away the ghostly lollipops to the grownups. After everyone else had left the nave, Kim gathered the children to make sure they got the connection between the Gospel lesson and their exercise of generosity in giving away the lollipops. The children also made large pin-on name tags for themselves and for the adults to wear – big help to the visiting bishop.

There are bigger, better-equipped Sunday Schools, but that isn’t an option for St. Bart’s. It may be just as well that it isn’t. As Professor Susannah Singer told us at Convention, Christian formation depends on context, context, context. I cannot imagine any Sunday School program working better in this context. They are doing what works for them – and from my conversation with the children, it is definitely working. They get it. What’s more, Kim is making the children and their activities visible to the adults, as with the ghost candy and the name tags. Children are mysteriously invisible to adults in church. The Rev. Kathy Hopner tells me she has talked with congregations who explain they do not have a Sunday School because they do not have children. She then points at children running about and says “What are those?” When the kids are the receiving line, they are harder to ignore.

Children’s ministry at St. Bart’s is not limited to the offspring of adult members. The Girl Scouts are reactivating in Ely as well, and guess where they meet? Most every Tuesday night, there’s a Girl Scout Meeting in our Fellowship Hall. That is an outreach ministry to the community and a soft evangelism in that it keeps us on the radar screen of Ely’s awareness.

But it isn’t all for children at St. Bart’s. They are soon revving up the new course using the Marcus Borg video on an Adult Faith, facilitated by MDIT (Ministry Developer In Training) Norma Engberg. The course used a workbook to structure people’s reflections on what they have seen and heard. This same program is being used at St. Martin’s, Pahrump and is, I think, available for Church Publishing Co. They are an alert, thinking congregation at St. Bart’s. I just did a sermon there that most preachers would not dare try – too theologically sophisticated. But the folks at St. Bart’s got it right off. Our people are plenty smart enough to deal with challenging material. They want to be challenged because that’s where the growth happens. I am very pleased that St. Bart’s, along with St. Martin’s, is undertaking this study.

Then there are softer spoken kinds of formation going on too. I noticed this year’s poster for Episcopal Relief and Development on a bulletin board too – a visible reminder of the world’s need and the Episcopal Church’s response. That too is soul shaping, consciousness raising, awareness instilling symbolism. I would be so glad to see that poser up in all our churches. Thank God and the people of St. Bart’s for remembering.

Windmill Ridge Reverie: I Shall Not Wear Purple

2010-10-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

When I am an old man I shall not wear purple. I shall retire to the Pahranagat Valley and dwell not too far from the lake. I shall not wear purple – but dark brown and burnt orange – except in summer, robin’s egg blue. If they will have me, I may for a time ride circuit to churches which may not now exist and some that do, until my vocation fades and my absences are the greater blessings.

And I shall be obsequious to the Sharps, the Whipples, and all the valley thanes. I will develop a Druidic devotion to a tree, perhaps three, remembering the oaks of Mamre and hoping for a visit. I shall tend them gratuitously, officiously, and like a kind woman, they will tolerate my attention.

Eventually I will be buried beneath the thick mat of fallen reeds along the lake shore. Strong young people will cover me with a cairn of stones they have wheel barrowed from the nearby hills, forgiving me my incorrigible devotion to the Church and its arcane beliefs because they know I meant no harm. When the cairn has sunk into the soft and sodden decay of reeds, my faults and failings will be forgotten even by myself. This is not a sad reverie I indulge here on Windmill Ridge, but hope for a personal peace on earth and with the earth, that I may find joy in heaven.

Live From Las Vegas V: The Bishop's Address

2010-10-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

We have had a remarkable year in Nevada.
Some congregations are growing in attendance.
Hispanic Ministries has taken off like a rocket.
Education, formation, and outreach programs are on the rise.
Most of our congregations are either living in harmony
or managing their conflicts creatively.
Despite the economy, we are getting along just fine financially.
There is much to celebrate.

All of us have a part to play in making the church work.
I want to thank each and every one of you for your part.
But I want to say a special word about vestries.
I want to thank our vestry members specially
because we have not always treated you very well.
Neither diocesan leaders nor the average person in the pew
know much about what vestries actually do.
But, at the highest echelons of diocesan governance,
odd fantasies about vestries sometimes arise.

We sometimes imagine that our vestries are running amok
in flagrant violation of the canons if not the 10 Commandments.
Meanwhile folks in the pews imagine that their vestries
are acting without a sliver of sense,
spending money like Louisiana fraternity boys
on a weekend in Vegas
This habit of blaming of vestries for all that goes wrong
or even for the inevitable struggles of being the church
is self-defeating.
Eventually, the best and the brightest among us
will figure out its more fun to sit in the pews throwing rotten fruit
than to sit up front with the vestry ducking.
Besides which, it just isn’t true.

The vestries I have met these past 3 years have been
conscientious, faithful, servants of God and God’s people.
Vestries are the backbone of our church.
So the best thing we can do for God’s mission
and each other would be to cut the blame
and give our vestries some trust and support.

We can do that if we make two simple attitude adjustments.
The first is in how we understand our problems and our challenges.
The truth is all our problems come down to one.
Whether it manifests as needing more money to maintain an old building
or someone to teach the Sunday School,
these are just symptoms of our one basic problem.
It is a problem with /our doors//.

I do not mean we need to paint them red.
That is my friend Andy Weeks – not me.
I don’t care if your doors are chartreuse.
The problem is that there are too many people outside our doors
who need to be inside them.
The core problem – the key challenge – is just that simple.
We have the people on the wrong side of the doors.

But what shall we do about it?
That leads to the 2nd attitude adjustment.
Back before Las Vegas was the entertainment capital of the world,
we were in another business.
What was it? The name of the street we are on tells us.
Rancho. The Las Vegas Rancho.
We were a ranch. That is our tradition.
And we know something about ranching.
Not much because we are now lounge singers and black jack dealers.
But we have watched Bonanza.
Is there anyone here who has never watched Bonanza?

So we know something about ranching.
We know the situation where we go out in the morning
and find the horses have gotten out of the coral.
What shall we do?

There are two basic approaches.
One is from CSI – Las Vegas.
We hang around the corral, dusting it for prints
and gathering DNA samples,
trying to figure out who left the game open.

The other approach comes from Bonanza.
We go out and round up the horses.

So I urge you all in this coming year, when troubles or challenges arise,
do these two things:
First, remember it’s really about the doors.
Second, ask yourselves, “What would Ben Cartwright do?”

But all that leads to a deeper question:
Why would anyone want to come inside our doors?
What do we have to offer?
There is plenty of good food at the restaurants,
fellowship on a bowling team, and the Comedy channel
is more entertaining than a liturgy.
What have we got to offer?

There is a difference between a fun time and a good life.
There is a difference between random misery
and suffering endured for a greater good.
There is a difference between a pleasant mood and joyful spirit.
But our culture is in danger of forgetting these differences
which are as fundamental
as the difference between right and wrong.

During World War II , the Jewish psychoanalyst Victor Frankl
was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.
He watched a lot of people die.
He also watched a lot of people survive.
He became intrigued by the difference.
Eventually he figured out what made some people
more resilient than others.

He saw that people who found a larger meaning
in their experience could endure suffering
while people who suffered without insight into a deeper meaning
withered and died.
Meaning is the key to enduring bad times,
and it makes just as big a difference
for how we experience good times.

Happiness in a random world of chaos
is just a lucky break,
a brief distraction from the grind.
But happiness in a meaningful world is a gift from God,
and a promise of our ultimate well-being.

Faith is the heart-felt belief that our experiences all add up to something,
that our lives matter,
that our joys, our sorrows, our loves, and loathings matter.
Faith is trusting that there is a meaning and order to reality
that gives our lives purpose and a value.
We may not know exactly what the answer is
but we live out of our conviction that there is an answer.

Christian faith makes a striking claim about the meaning of life.
It isn’t an abstract principle.
Some of you remember that in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
someone asked the universe’s most powerful computer
the answer to life’s mystery.
Who remembers the answer? The answer was 42.

Well for Christians the answer is not a number.
It isn’t an abstract principle or an idea.
At the heart of reality, something personal throbs
-- something feels, aspires, cares, hopes.
The universe is born from and sustained by
something that is more like a person than a principle.

So it was natural that this foundational personal reality
should reveal itself to human kind as a human being
– as Jesus of Nazareth
who “share(d) our human nature, who live(d) and die(d) as one of us.”
To be a Christian is to know Jesus,
and when we wonder what it’s all about, what it’s all for,
to think of him.

.We live in a changing, challenging time
– a time when environmental and social conundrums
threaten to overwhelm us.
Living in such a time demands spiritual intelligence.
“Spiritual intelligence” isn’t stuffy intellectualism.
It isn’t talking in special language no one understands.
Spiritual intelligence is knowing our story
so that we can know our Savior.
It’s seeing the connection between what we do
at our job each day and the moral order in Holy Scripture,
the connection between Gospel truth and social action
in our neighborhood and the wider world
It’s experiencing the connection between our emotional ups and downs
and the disciplined practice of prayer.

The 21st Century demands wisdom, spiritual intelligence.
But that is in short supply today.
Someone said, “We have mastered the simple secret of the atom,
but we have forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.”
College students ask their professors, “Who came first Jesus or Moses?”
I am not making this up. It happens.
At jewelry stores, a customer asks to see a cross.
The sales clerk says,
“Do you want a plain cross or the kind with the little man on it?”
These are true stories.

Just as schools and colleges are the guardians and bearers
of secular knowledge,
the Church is the guardian and the bearer of spiritual wisdom.
We do not have a monopoly on wisdom.
But our truth is the core without which the adages
of even the best life coaches, counselors, and 12 step sponsors
do not hold together.

Let me say this straight and without apology.
Brothers and sisters, there are thousands of people
in this state who need Jesus.
There are thousands of people who are dying
for want of Jesus.
Their happiness is not joy but distraction.
Their sorrow is not sacrifice but despair.
Their lives wither because their roots have found no water.

What are we doing about it?
Someone said, “The world comes to us looking for Christ
and we give them the Church.”
When people come to us spiritually hungry
it will not do to regard them as potential supporters
for our religious club – as church workers or pledge units.
We need to feed them gospel.
We need to show them Jesus.
Jesus said,
“When I am lifted up . . . I shall draw all people to myself.”
It’s time for us to lift him up.

But we can’t show people a Christ we do not know
and know well.
We have to know our story which begins with his story
We have to know what he did and what he said.
But that is not enough.
To understand Jesus we have to know
the psalms he prayed, the laws he obeyed,
the proverbs he lived by, the prophets who inspired him.
We have to know how the mystics have experienced him
the theologians have explained him,
and the saints have shown him to the world.
We need to eat, breathe, sleep, and sweat Jesus.
That means we have understand his connection
to our experience at home, at work, at the ballot box,
and the football stadium.
We need to take our passions into prayer,
to see God’s hand in the blessings of our lives,
to see our work, our family, and our friendships
as part and parcel of God’s mission.

That’s what Christian formation is about.
But in a recent Pew Survey on Americans’ knowledge of religion,
atheists scored almost twice as well as mainline Protestants.
How are we going to proclaim Christ to people
who know more about him than we do?

I love the stories of young people who see physical suffering
and study medicine so they can do something about it!
Look at the spiritual suffering around us
– the addiction, despair, and moral callousness –
look at that suffering and ask,
what if you could learn something to alleviate it?
What if you could learn the words of life and share them?

Our mission is not to preserve an institution.
It isn’t to keep doors open and pay utility bills.
The truth is we don’t even have a mission.
As Episcopal evangelist Wayne Schwab says,
God has a mission and we get to be part of it.
God’s mission is to save people from despair.
It’s to share the gospel of eternal life.

We have been doing new projects.
We have done some teaching.
We have started some new ministries
that have brought more people to Christ
than we have done in a long, long time.
We can celebrate that.

We are planning more new projects.
We can add up the numbers. We can quantify results.
We can write reports for the church office in New York.
But the meaning of what we do is Jesus.
If we aren’t connecting people to Jesus
we should go home and turn the church over
to somebody who will.
We are here to plant Jesus in the hearts of children,
to give the drunkard Jesus instead of liquor,
and the money hungry business person Jesus
instead of a portfolio.

The prayer for the mission of the church says,
O God . . . remember the multitudes
who have been created in your image
but have not known//
the redeeming work of our Savior Jesus Christ;
and grant that, by the prayers and labors of your holy Church,
they may be brought to know// and worship you
as you have been revealed in your Son.”

This is what we are here to do for each other
and what we equip each other to do for the people
outside our doors.
We know and worship God,
our foundation, our source and our destiny,
our purpose and our delight,
as God is revealed in the face
of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Live From Las Vegas IV: Go In Peace

2010-10-24T16:58:00.001-07:00

A lot of peole who have been at Convention do not stay for Sunday -- quite understandably. The business is done. Those from afar often need to get home. Those from anear worship at their own churches. So there is a kind of intimacy among those who are left, and a comfort in knowing that the work is done and the issues are resolved one way or the other. So it was this morning.

We had the final meeting. Fortunately, things had gone as planned. There were no more run-off elections, budgets, or other matters. Rose Kawai delivered a box of stoles from Bp Alexander Wangadag of the Diocese of Santiago, our companion diocese in the Philippines. We had courtesy resolutions affirming our friends who had made the convention happen.

Worship was like an All Star Game. All sorts of people offered lovely gifts. The readers, the musicians, the acolytes, etc. came from diverse parishes to do a holy thing in a casino ballroom.
However, like an All Star Team, they were not used to playing together on an strange field with unfamiliar leadership. There were some glitches that I felt bad about. I hope no one felt that their gifts were unappreciated or taken for granted. They were all lovely -- the music of the Todos Los Santos, Holy Child, and Convention Choirs supported the readings by Aja, Melvin, and Deacon Mike. Our worship inlcuded some chaos, but God was glorified in the midst of it.

Then I enjoyed a working lunch with our Deans. Despite their meeting all year on line and their working ? It feels like at least a week. I had expected the Deans to be patient in a bedraggled way. Instead, they were eager to to share their experience of ministy and discuss how we can do more together in the future.

So it's done for another year. I feel tired and blessed.

Live From Las Vegas III: Bishop Bugsy

2010-10-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

The business is done: COM restructured; budget passed; elections conducted and appointments ratified; the Charter for Lifelong Christian Formation adopted. But the big events were the Formation Fair which got an enthusiastic response from a diocese that proved hungrier for formation than I had expected. Then there were the Special Mission Group meetings which produced lots of engergy and ideas. I met with the most diverse group of wardens you could imagine -- each great in a unique way. I was delighted that they wanted to meet again next year and to find a way to keep in touch. So we will set up a Google Group for them just like we are doing for Parish Educators. Then I learned the Parish Communicators want the same thing. Amazing. I love seeing people come together. I feel like an ecclesiastical Yentl.

Of course, our keynoter, Dr. Susanna Singer of the Church Diviniity School of the Pacific was great and she seemed to think well of us in return. She did far more than any keynoter I've ever seen -- meeting with and facilitating small groups, fiellding questions, and leading a plenary session.

Tonight at the banquet, we honored office manager Barbara Lewis on the occasons of her retirement and her 80th birthday. Faith and Visual Arts presented awards to our top artists. Then we saw a display of remarkable folkdances from the mountains of the Northern Philippines performed by the people of St. Luke's, Las Vegas. Never ever saw anything like this at a diocesan convention. What a place! What a people!

I may feel like Yentl but that was not my image. Having worn a green hard had that said "2 million green energy jobs now" yesterday, I thought I'd go conservative today with a black fedora I bought last year at the Veneitian. But people said it was a mob hat and now they are calling me Bishop Bugsy.

Live From Las Vegas II: Galilee, St. Jude's, and Splashing Children

2010-10-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

This morning seems years ago. So much has gone down at Santa Fe Station. Good prayer services morning and evening. A tribute to Sr. Faith, an upbeat presentation by UNR students about Vocare. Reports on the Frensdorff School, Camp Galillee's resurgence, new evangelism training and resources, our partnership in Haiti, and more. Tonight we heard Mildred Springer's compelling personal account of the watershed General Convention in 03 and a plug for the Book of Occasional Servcies and Holy Women, Holy Men -- our new book of saints.

The high points of the day were the report from St. Jude's Ranch where we are restoring a parntership in mission to abused and neglected children -- a partnership unnecesarily interrupted by theological differences in years past -- and the report on Latino/Hispanic ministries particularly as it is touching the lives of families, youth, and children. It was a true blessing to have Fr. Anthony Guillen with us from Latino/ Hispanic Ministries of The Episcopal Church and to see the grace, positively visible grace, in the slide show of our own people presented by Fr. Bernardo and Delores. The best pics showed the children spashing in the fountain at Christ Church, Las Vegas.

Tomorrow, God willing and a quorum arriving, we will slog through the business of elections, canons, and one resolution; but the main theme tomorrow will be Christian formation. The Rev. Dr. Susanna Singer, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, will deliver the keynote address and faciliate large and small group discussions. Should be a good day.

Live From Las Vegas I: A Latino Kick-Off To Convention

2010-10-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Diocese of Nevada Convention kicked off tonight with a Fiesta reception at Todos Los Santos. I have been to a lot of opening receptions for church conventions -- but never anything remotely like this. Think of words like packed, loud, joyful, celebratory, festive. There was a large mariachi band, the kind that normally gets paid $400 per hour, playing for us for over 2 hours, just out of piety and personal affection.

Fr. Bernardo and his incomparable wife, Delores, outdid themselves. The feast was Mexcican, Ecuadoran, Honduran, Salvadoran. I spoke with Fr. Leslie who, God and the Standing Committee willing, will be our next Latino priest. I saw Fr. Hilario who serves at St. Luke's now, and with the new grant from The Episcopal Church, will begin model Latino/ Hispanic ministries at St. Matthew's and St. Thomas in the near future. I met his charming, sophisticated diplomat wife, Ruth, who has recently come here from El Salvador and is eager to begin work in Christain formation.

But the most fun was watching Episcopalians from around the diocese who have heard of what is happening here but had not seen it. There were Chuck and Hallie of Carson City dancing to the Latin beat. I saw amazed delight on many a fellow Anglo face. Veteran Nevada Episcopalians said this was the biggest and best kick-off for Convention ever.

A simple point: What we Anglo Anglicans call Latino/ Hispanic ministry sometimes looks a whole lot like Anglo ministry done by our Latino/ Hispanic brothers and sisters. We were all blessed tonight.

Why I Love Nye County

2010-10-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

I rarely drive through Nye County without buying one or more of the local newspapers. There are at least 2: The Pahrump Valley Times and the Pahrump Mirror ("Nye County's only independent newspaper" -- not sure what that means but I sense that relations between these two journalistic centers may not be the best.)

Today's Pahrump Valley Times' lead story was about a huge bust of a burglary ring -- over 3 dozen people arrested in one week!!! (The jail didn't have room for them and had to cut most of them loose on thier own recognizance, to the chagrin of the sheriff.) Who knew there was that much to steal in Pahrump? One of the ring leaders seems to have brought down the wrath of the law on his fellow alleged burglars by allegedly holding up the Kingdom Gentlemen's Club which is the town's strip club in a castle -- I thought it might be something more colorful but that was not stated in this artilce. Another article in the same edition referred to the owner of the Kingdom GC as "the owner of a brothel." Could be a separate enterprise. But if the burglars have started holding up brothels, things have just gotten out of hand. The owner of the Kingdom GC, according to the Pahrump Valley News, is also the publisher of the rival Parhump Mirror and has been convicted of bribing a former county commissioner -- but this is the rival newspaper talking. I know nothing about it myself.

The law was on a roll. In some complicated and indirect way, the massive burglary busts came from leads garnered in the discovery of a "massive marijuana grow opertation" allegedly owned and operated by a single family in two houses. The dad and sons are on the run while mom is either in jail or out on bail.

If that were not enough, U S Ecology (Now doesn't that sound like an innocent green name? They operate a hazardous waste site.) has been accused of 18 EPA violations and fined $497,492. That would cause me a financial inconvenience. U S Eclology denies any misconduct.

There is a controversial move afoot for the city to buy the Kindom Gentlemen's Club. Maybe they could buy U S Ecology while they are at it. Or U S Ecology could take over the canabis farm to raise money for the fine. But would anyone buy pot from a hazardous waste collector?

The political news featured stump speeches given by candidates at the Artemsia Community Center. The content of the speeches was largely ignored becasue of the more colorful Q&A session which sounded a bit like last year's health care town hall meetings. The paper had a big picture of a local lawyer asking a candidate challenging questions while she (the lawyer) wore a sidearm. The story related that at least one other cross examiner from the audience was also packing heat. I do not know why they attend political meetings armed, but I surmise there is a reason.

At a recent meeting, the county commissioners refused to watch a 3 minute dvd a citizen wanted to show them so they could see the flooding in her neighborhood. Bad move pastorally.

Of course there was happier news. The "annual grape stomp" has been expanded to a 2 day event. A crew of firefighters visited Charleston Elementary School. But the big good news is popping at the other end of the county in Tonopah. Great Basin College is planning to open a campus there. The Town Board is considering buying the Belvada (a disused bank) for its new convention center. Solar engery is about the double the population.

I never drive through Nye County without discovering lots of action. I always listen to Richard Eloyan's Ballad of the Nye Country Drifter and imagine bandits hiding around the occasional curves of Hwy 95 as I race through intermittently observing the speed limit. It's a happening place. If Clark County were this colorful Fr. Sherm's Las Vegas Review Journal would not be reduced to covering national and international news we don't really care about.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about the facts of any of this. Nothing. I am just saying what I read in the papers. Nor do I have the least malice toward any of these people. I do not know them. I did read the list of the recently arrested and was pleased not to find the names of anyone from St. Martin's in the Desert. They are too busy providing wholesome fun for the town's teens and knitting prayer shawls. They have no time to grow pot, burgle shady enterprises, or even intimidate political candidates with hostile questions and guns.

A Small Act Of Mercy And Its Unforeseen Consequences

2010-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

A few years ago a woman who had served in the Iraq War came home. The war had done something to her psyche and she could not cope with civilian life. She found herself on the streets of Las Vegas where she was taken in and supported by one of our Episcopal Churches.

I don't know exactly what happened next, but somehow by the grace of God, she got her life together. She is now in Rochester, New York working with the Episcopal Diocese there. This is her project: They have remodeld an old rectory into a home for women soldiers returning from war, a place to help them make their way back. Substance abuse counselling is part of the program for those who need it. Bishop Katharine, who has a daughter in the military, recently dedicated the new home for women veterans.

A delegation from the Diocese of Rochester is here in Canton, Mississippi this week for our annual meeting of the Domestic Missionary Partnership. They told the story of how an act of mercy in Las Vegas is bearing fruit in their midst today.

Live From Phoenix 5 & 6: Africa, Immigaration, Evangelism, And A Ceremonial Paper Weight

2010-09-22T01:19:00.000-07:00

Things have just gotten busy and intense the last couple of days – too much for me to really do more than skim the surface of a few key points.

Yesterday was more education on evangelism – more experts. Really good stuff. If we want to share the good news with a world that needs it, we have some major retooling to do. Exciting possibilities for those who want to take on this mission.

Last night we heard from the Suffragen Bishop for Anglican Communion Relations and also a Bishop from Africa. Very interesting. They stressed that most African Anglicans value their relationship with us. Diocese to diocese, parish to parish, and person to person relations are where the Anglican Communion is communing. They said 90% of the African bishops want to preserve our relationship and some of them act on that at real risk to themselves because of the hostility of their archbishops. It turns out that one African parish is in partnership with the Diocese of New Hampshire (home of Gene Robinson) but it isn’t public because that parish would be in major trouble with their archbishop if it were known. While hostility is in the press, partnership is going on behind the scenes. The hostile archbishops are nearing the end of their terms. What we need to do is just be patient and wait. Most African Anglicans disagree with us on matters of women’s ordination and gay inclusion. But they want to remain in relationship anyway.

Today, we painstakingly worked on the Pastoral Letter on Immigration. It passed unanimously along with an in-depth theological resource document to explain why we take this position as a matter of faith. Another Pastoral Letter on the Environment also passed unanimously.

The most agonizing issue was a Resolution calling for the resignation of the Bishop of Pennsylvania who was convicted of conduct unbecoming a bishop by the Ecclesiastical Trial court but his deposition was set aside by the Appeals Court because the case was barred by the Statute of Limitations. The facts surrounding the brining of the case based on events that happened so long back made it a complicated thing. The political situation in Pennsylvania is a tangle. But the strong majority of bishops felt this action was required for the good of the church and to make clear that we have zero tolerance for some kinds of misconduct. It had to do with the bishop’s failure to respond adequately to a report of sexual abuse by a youth minister when the bishop was a parish priest. The youth minister was his brother. Our resolution has no legal force. It just says what we think. We had no authority to do anything more.

We have had two more Bible Studies, two more Eucharists, several Morning and Evening Prayer services and Compline. It has been good to worship together and to explore the Bible together.

Tonight we closed with a formal dinner. The graduates of the College for Bishops were recognized and given paper weights to evidence our accomplishment. Now that I have my paper weight I suppose that must mean I now know what I am doing. But some of the old hands say episcopacy is a mystery. One never figures it out. That feels right.

Live From Phoenix 4: Sunday In The Valley Of The Sun

2010-09-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

I forgot to tell you the high point of yesterday. Actually, I didn’t tell you about our worship and Bible Study at all. The Bible Study was good. The worship was impaired by bad liturgy at the offices but was great at Eucharist, as always. That’s when the high point occurred.

Bp. Pryor of Minnesota read the Gospel with just the right pause and inflection. Jesus told this series of parables, all of which were pretty paradoxical and strange as parables tend to be, culminating in the parable of the net with all kinds of fish, then someone sorting the fish when they get to shore. “When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to the crowd, ‘Have you understood all of this?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’” That’s when the congregation erupted into laughter.

Today we worshiped at Trinity Cathedral, nice building, great organ, great choir – packed pews. Worship attendance had doubled in the past five years, thanks in no small part to the leadership of their tech-y social networking, blogging Dean, the physicist Nick Knisley.

After Eucahrist, there were wonderful Mexian folk dancers in the garden. The Cahtedral already had a good Latino/ Hispanic Ministry going. Then after the passage of AZ 1070, local law enforcement set up shop next to one of our smaller Latino/ Hispanic Congregations. That itimidated that congregation virtually out of operation. But now Latino/ Hispanic Ministries is all the livelier at the Cathedral. The performance was both beautiful and fun.

Tonight we met to go over the draft pastoral letter and teaching document on Immigration. The teaching document is particularly important because it deals with faith and citizenship in a nation. That has broader implications than immigration. The Roman Church is making a concerted effort to educate their congregations in “faithful citizenship.” For us, that means the Church does not tell the people who to vote for, but Christians should vote and their voting should be informed by their faith.

The conversation was intelligent and conscientious. I was once again impressed with the House of Bishops. There was a change in the quality of pastoral letters a few years ago. In the troubled 80s and early 90s, the bishops apparently liked to pound their chests and shout irreconcilably righteous stands on left and right. Then toward the beginning of this decade, the Bishops began reasoning together. It all goes back to the College For Bishops. Now we collaborate to try to say something to build up the Body of Christ, not tear it apart.

Live From Phoenix 3: Sex, Money, And Hoop Dancing

2010-09-18T22:10:00.001-07:00

Today began with Morning Prayer as usual, only it’s not the BCP. They are doing this innovative stuff that even the most progressive bishops hate. Instead of the Creed, we had an Affirmation of Faith that said Jesus loves children, but it omitted the creation, the fall, the birth, life, and ministry of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, the Church, the sacraments, and our hope for everlasting life. If I had any hair, I’d tear it out.

Then we met with the Liturgy and Music Commission who reported on their work on same sex blessings. They’d have had a lot more credibility if it weren’t for the liturgical atrocity we had just endured. But on same sex blessings, they told us their process so far, their plans for future process, and the principles they plan to follow theologically, liturgically, and pastorally. We discussed it all in small groups and gave them written feedback.

In the afternoon we heard reports on:

Reform of the General Ordination Exam

The formation of The Episcopal Community – loyal Episcopalians who feel pushed out of the Daughters of the King – a good group.

Two groups of bishops separately went to Lambeth last year to consult with the Archbishop of Canterbury – one liberal, one conservative. Today they met with each other and found substantial common ground.

Safe Space For Theological Minorities In The Church – a group developing canonical protection for conservatives in the church generally and also for liberals who live in conservative dioceses – a plan to value and preserve theological diversity in the whole church and in each diocese.

Task Force On Theological Education – a report on improving relationships between dioceses and Episcopal seminaries and on how to know which non-Episcopal seminaries have substantial Anglican studies programs.

College For Bishops Resolution – a plan to separately incorporate the College For Bishops. This College has dramatically improved the unity of the House of Bishops and has improved the leadership of the bishops in their dioceses. Regrettably, the College is on the hit list of some leaders of the House of Deputies. Preserving our good progress may not be easy.

The Church Investment Group reported on a proposal to develop a common investment pool where dioceses, parishes, etc. could aggregate their savings to invest in instruments for higher returns than they could get investing separately.

Project for the Reconstruction of the Episcopal Church of Haiti – the kick-off of a $10 million capital fund drive to rebuild the center of spiritual, artistic, cultural, and academic life in Haiti. Upon touring the devastation in Haiti, Archbishop Thabo of South Africa said, “Africa must help.” We are being asked to join Africa in rebuilding the church in Haiti.

The Theology Committee followed up on its earlier report on Same Sex Relationships. The report has been supplemented by the responses of seven ecumenical and interfaith theologians. It will be published in The Anglican Theological Review to advance the conversation within the Anglican Communion.

Draft pastoral letters on the environmental crisis and immigration reform were presented for study before consideration next week.

There was a lengthy closed session on a pastoral matter.

Then we heard a reflection on our gathering from a guest, the Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt. Rev. James Jones. He commended us for our commitment to social justice, saying that social justice and personal evangelism are two sides of the coin of God’s mission. He expressed his hope that the Anglican Communion which shares our love of justice will learn the practice of kindness, citing John 13 in which Jesus washes the feet of the disciples. He notes that Jesus was doing a lowly job, a job that would have been done by women in that patriarchal culture. He spoke of how Peter’s challenge was to allow himself to receive this kindness and challenged us, as we try to live kindly, to be open to receive kindness.

He then pointed out something I had never noticed. Just one chapter before, Jesus had received this kindness when woman washed his feet. Bp. Jones said that Jesus needed to receive kindness from her so he could give it to Peter. He noted that Jesus' commandment was not to “wash the feet of others” but to “wash each other’s feet.” It was a mandate to mutual ministry, lest service be an indirect form of one-up-man-ship. He also noted that a woman ministered to Jesus echoing how another woman, Mary, had fed the physical Body of Christ, showing how right it is that women today should feed the spiritual Body of Christ.

John 13 is the only place where Jesus calls himself “Lord” – linking his lordship not to miraculous works of power but to humble service. Authentic service is mutual. It is an exercise in what Bishop Jones called “one another-ness.” He said – now note this carefully as I quote these gracious words of an English bishop – “One another-ness will someday transform the Anglican Communion from an inquisition into each other’s credentials.”

Major standing ovation.

Then we went to a Native American museum and watched hoop dancing.

Live From Phoenix 2: Immigration Reform -- Economic Facts In Search Of A Theology

2010-09-17T23:20:00.000-07:00

This House of Bishops began with Bp. Ian Douglas of Connecticut pointing out that we would be dealing with a seemingly wide array of issues from immigration to gay inclusion. But he suggested they are all tied together in that they are part of the changing context in which we do ministry. So he invited us to ask the basic missiological question of contextual theology. Let me unpack that church jargon. Contextual theology is the study of how doctrines are shaped by the situation in which they arise. Missiology is the part of theology that deals with the mission.

So what is the basic question of mission in our context? Someone (I forget who) made the profoundly important observation that “The church does not have a mission. God has a mission in which the Church participates.” The question then is not what our mission is in this new cultural context. The question is “What is God up to?” We are not the ones changing the context. God is. So what is God doing and how can we cooperate?

Yesterday, we dealt with evangelism in general. Today we dealt the Immigration Reform and evangelism with Latino/ Hispanic people. So immigration:
We all have our stories. One of our Nevada Episcopalians who supports Arizona Bill 1070 tells the story of an American citizen rancher who was killed by a drug dealer who came here illegally from Mexico. My story is different. When I was 25, an undocumented worker, at risk to herself and her family, saved my life from two American citizens who had just robbed me and were bent on killing me. Our stories are bound to shape our attitude.

We did not deal with the issue as theologically as I would wish. The Bible Study was not well focused. The texts were not well chosen. We do not do as good a job as we ought in developing the theology behind our social justice stands. This may be why a the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just reported that a very large percentage of Americans say their political convictions on abortion and same sex relationships are shaped by their religious convictions, but hardly any base their views on Immigration on their religion. Yet, the only references to same sex relationships in the entire Jewish law are in 2 verses of Leviticus (actually one verse repeated) while Leviticus alone commands the welcoming of the alien 37 times. The alien seeking asylum and opportunity is a central theme – going from the wandering Abraham, to his descendants indentured in Egypt, to their escape into Canaan – all the way to the Holy Family – Jesus born in Judah instead of his native Galilee, the flight into Egypt, and so on. We did hear one theological statement that is central. I forget who said it. The alien, the sojourner is the “other” who we must dare to know and befriend if we are to befriend ourselves and know ourselves in Christ. The alien spiritually completes us. We needed to develop that much further.

We noted that no one worries much about immigration during times of prosperity, but during hard times we look for someone to scapegoat. That is a major theological issue. Rene Girard argues that Judaism and Christianity are the great spiritual voices speaking against the human impulse to violent blame shifting. That needed more reflection.

What we did learn were some practical and economic considerations. We have 12 million undocumented workers in the US. The cost of deporting them would be $240 billion dollars. That is the deportation alone. The states would then lose most of the $2.4 billion these people pay in taxes, thereby compounding the fiscal crisis in state government. The cost to state government occasioned by the presence of undocumented workers is less than the taxes they pay; so deportation is a net loss to state governments. Undocumented workers have paid $520 billion dollars into the Social Security system which they will never get back. It goes to support us. Economically, the contributions of undocumented workers are a benefit to middle class citizens with high school degrees, and a detriment only to those who have not completed high school. The HOB media brief for today reported:

“Joe Rubio, senior organizer of the Valley Interfaith Program presented an overview of political and economic issues. ‘This country deals with this issue every 25-30 years,’ he said. ‘The last time was 1986 with the Immigration Control act signed by President Reagan.’ While it provided amnesty, it did not provide a means for people to come into this country. Arizona is the main way into this country from Mexico and noted that frustration is on all sides. Arizona Bill 1070 was the flashpoint and he predicts the situation will get more dangerous. He pointed out: ‘There is no way we are going to be able to deport 12 million people’. . . .Immigrants work mainly in construction, hospitality, and agricultural industries. Underscoring the complexity of the issue of immigration, he pointed out, is that there is a benefit to a younger immigrant population balancing the aging population of the United States. His suggestions for the future: ‘We need to work on comprehensive immigration reform. We need to bring 12 million people out of the shadows. It needs to be bipartisan.’ He said the passage of the Dream Act would be significant if it passed. The story needs to be changed to show that ‘people are willing to come here, work hard and educate their children. Immigration has always changed the way this country worked, but in a positive way.’”

The last time we reformed the Immigration System with the 1986 Amnesty, it was a substantial boost to the economy and was part of the prosperity of the late 1980s. Economists project that comprehensive immigration reform would add $180 billion to our Gross Domestic Product.

The Dream Act is far short of comprehensive immigration reform. It is just a chance for children. The Dream Act offers the undocumented workers’ children who have learned English, graduated from high school, and kept clean records the chance to become citizens so they will be eligible to attend college and receive financial aid. That way they can become more productive citizens, earning more money and contributing more to society.

There is no legislative proposal for “open borders;” nor is anyone in the House of Bishops advocating that. But there are more human and less humane ways to enforce the immigration laws. The call for comprehensive immigration reform is largely an appeal for more humane enforcement and a chance for 12 million people already here to come out from shadows. A basic consequence for the Church is that since the passage of Arizona Bill 1070, church attendance has dropped dramatically because the undocumented workers are afraid to drive. Children live in fear that when they come home from school, their parents will be gone. Such fear presents a moral and spiritual issue for the church to address.

So, back to Bp. Douglas’s question: “What is God up to?” What is God saying to us with the presence of undocumented workers? What is God inviting us to do?

Live From Phoenix I

2010-09-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Preliminaries: Here's my emotinoal pattern with House of Bishops. For weeks beforehand, I grumble about having to attend. I have work to do in Nevada. Then I get to HOB and immediately realize how lonely my vocation is. Being bishop is like being ET, the only one of my kind for a long, long way. Then I arrive at HOB and begin throwing my arms around and clinging to everyone I see. It's a community of my own kind. Then a few days into it, I remember I am an introvert and all this bonding makes me feel irrationally depressed and utterly out of place. So this time, I did the first step -- grumbled. Now I am happy to be here. But I'm taking the second step slower, pacing myself to avoid the spiritual equivalent of the pancreatic dump that follows a sugar rush. Still it is very good to be with these folks -- an altogether wise and holy assembly. I still feel that I don't quite fit but they accept me anyway.

About not quite fitting, we are staying and meeting at the Ritz Carlton. I am considerably more at home at the Best Western. But I guess the Best Western didn't have room for all of us.

Today, we had a series of presentations on evangelism that actually turned controversial --though this controversy will never make it into the popular press or the Foxy blogs. On the one side we had the Missioner for Congregational Vitality and the Communications Officer for The Episcopal Church. They presented the first edition of the new Evangelism Tool Kit, complete with all sorts of sociological data about what the unchurched are seeking, what they cherish and what they despise from their previous religous experiences, what they think of us before we meet, how they perceive us on first impression, and if they stay, what makes them stay. It was full of surprises and practical, helpful information. This was such a striking contrast to the persuasive and winsome presentations of two academicians at our last HOB who basically said, "It's over. Just close the doors and cheer for the 'spiritual but not religious'." This presentation was pretty darn hopeful in my book.

Then came the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA who was one of the most powerful and persuasive preachers I've heard in a long time. He didn't have any use for the tool kit or sociology or marketing or any of that. He also thought the seekers were seeking the wrong thing and the finders (folks who stayed in the chruch) had found the wrong thing. He insisted that we need to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ which is the best news ever -- but it turns our lives upside down instead of patching them up as many of the seekers would prefer.

So there it was: one group proposing a medium; the other, proposing a message. As for me, I agree 100% with the ELCA PB that our messsage is Jesus. One could read our Episcopal sociology as advocating our vaguely spiritual message of muddle. I am with the Lutheran voice that we need to state our case boldly and without equivocation. However, rejecting 21st Century communication insights is not necessary to a faithful proclamation of the good news.

We need to know how desperate people are to experience grace -- not a dogmatic sermon but a welcome, an unconditional acceptance. In a nutshell, that was the moral of the story in the Evangelism Tool Kit. People need a safe place for themselves and their children. They need uncondtional acceptance, which is what Jesus is all about but churches are not always about. When we church people are feeling secure about our vital statistics, we are apt not to welcome people at all. When we are nervous about our vital statistics, we are apt to latch onto them conditionally, as pew fodder or pledge units. Grace is welcoming people absolutely unconditionally to show them God's love regardless of whether we ever expect to see them again. Paradoxically, that will win more lasting relationships than a sales pitch for "joining our church." And proclaiming Jesus does not mean shouting about a moral or spititual hurdle for people to jump over. "Believe this or die!" It means proclaiming God's infinite mercy made manifest in a human being who shares our life.

The argument over impassioned gospel proclamation versus engaging the culture where it is goes back to Tertullian vs. Cyril of Jerusalem (3rd C) and carried on into the 20th Century theological dispute between Barth and Tillich. It's a generative tension. God bless it. I pray that we will proclaim the gospel boldly and faithfully to the people who are seeking salvation in terms they can hear and embrace until they are embraced by Christ himself.

Nevada Smith: The American Dante

2010-08-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

Ok, I’ll admit there are some minor differences between Dante’s Divine Comedy and the 1966 movie classic, Nevada Smith. But basically Nevada Smith is a cowboy Dante for Americans.

At about age 20 (“midway upon the journey of my life” –given the short life expectancy of an adventurer in the Wild West), Max Sand loses his parents. They are tortured, mutilated, and then murdered by 3 villains. Sand thereupon becomes “lost in the dark wood” of the myth of redemptive violence. That myth is the basic plot line of gratifying revenge. Think of The Outlaw Josey Wales, Collateral Damage, or most any action movie or TV show you have ever seen. Mythologist Joseph Campbell coined the term and Biblical Scholar Walter Wink says it is the actual religion of our culture. Drawn from ancient Sumer, it is still our dominant belief system even though it runs 180 degrees opposite to Judaism and Christianity. Max sets out to kill the malefactors but the story is about his own spiritual transformation as he becomes Nevada Smith. (Compare Man On Fire in the previous blog.)

Just as Dante began his quest trusting in his own inadequate resources, so did Max. Just as Dante was immediately waylaid by three obstacles – a lion, a leopard, a wolf, representing envy, pride, and greed; Max falls in with 3 ne’er-do-wells who prove to be envious, proud, and greedy. They steal his gun and his horse. Thus Max, stranded in the desert, wanders forth imitating the ascetic spiritual seekers of the Near East and Russia where they are called “poustniks” or desert people.

There in the sagebrush wilderness, Max meets his first guide – Jonas Cord, a gun merchant played by Brian Dennehy (who by the way appeared in the mini-series A Season In Purgatory.)Dante’s first guide was Virgil, a virtuous pagan who was able to help Dante along the way – but only so far. Just so, the gun merchant is not a Christian and is to some extent caught in the violence myth himself. But he has a good heart and just as important, good sense. He trains Max in the use of guns, but also in the life skills needed to do combat with viscous killers. Cord imparts what the Hebrew Scriptures call “hachma,” practical wisdom, knowing how to do the job. That is the foundation for the larger Greek version of Wisdom, “Sophia” -- regardless of what one is doing, even if it is drinking, gambling, and shooting, you need to know how to do it well. That is where Max properly begins his formation.

Max succeeds in killing the first murderer but is injured in the process. He is taken in by the Kiowa. Max is himself half Kiowa. How this interlude fits the story is not clear to me. But I think it may be that the bad guys will consistently characterize Max’s determined quest for vengeance as typical of his Indian blood. So this part of the movie shows the Kiowa urging Max to abandon his quest to stay with them. It may be there to prevent the racist reading of the plot.

Since the 2nd murderer is doing time in a Louisiana prison camp, located in a swamp, Max deliberately gets himself convicted of bank robbery so he can go there too. The brutal camp oddly allows conjugal visits by Cajun women who work in the nearby rice paddies. Granted, this is a stretch of credibility, but it advances the plot. Here Max meets his second guide, Pilar, a Cajun woman played by Suzanne Pleshette (deep sigh from the blogger). She helps Max and the murderer (who Max has befriended) escape in a canoe. In the swamp, Max guns down the unarmed man despite Pilar’s urgent pleas not to do this thing. It is then we know the significance of the crucifix she wears around her neck. She means it. During the escape, Pilar was bitten by a water moccasin. After the killing of murderer, she lies on the shore dying. Max wants to save her, but she will not go with him. She says he has used her to commit murder. She does not want “to die in sin looking at (his) face.” While Max is preparing the canoe to leave, Pilar dies. Her death is a judgment on Max who has lied to and manipulated her for his own violent ends. Then the righteous avenger says “I am sorry.” It is a moral moment. Remember Dante. His second guide was the Christian Beatrice whose death was the turning point in Dante’s life as the Cajun woman’s death ultimately proved to be for Max.

That death in the swamp was a moral moment but not a definitive conversion. Dante views life as the soul’s journey toward God and Harold Robbins who wrote the novel which was the basis for this film apparently agrees. Max is touched but not yet transformed. He continues his pursuit of the last villain, Joe Fitch (Karl Malden). In the vicinity of Susanville I would guess, he falls into the hands of Fitch’s gang who drag him with their horses through a river. Darned if that baptismal imagery doesn’t keep happening at just the right spot in the story (see Man on Fire post). As he comes out of the water, and is about to be dragged to death, out of nowhere, a Franciscan priest, Fr. Zaccardi intervenes, stops the violence, and take the physically and spiritually injured Max to his home, which from the cell where Max stays appears to be a monastery though we see no other monks. Max has met his 3rd spiritual guide.

“But wait,” you say, “Dante only had Virgil and Beatrice.” Not so. Even Beatrice could not take Dante the last leg of his journey to God. The Blessed Virgin was his final guide. Just as Mary represents Mother Church, so Mother Church was well represented by Fr. Zaccardi. He takes Max into the church building. Max has never been in a church before. He is most struck by the crucifix. Fr. Zaccardi asks if Max has ever seen that man (Jesus) before. Max says he has. He saw him on a silver chain. (Pilar’s). Fr. Zaccardi gives Max a Bible, explains the faith, and tells his own story of the murder of his own parents. Max listens but is stubbornly unpersuaded and continues in his hunt for the wicked Joe Fitch.

By the time he meets Fitch, Max’s name is on wanted posters everywhere and Fitch knows Max Sand is after him. So Max takes the new name of Nevada Smith. The first name expresses his memory of the home he seemed to have lost. The second name shows his change from the raw material of sand (perhaps a reference to earth and humanity (“adamah” Hebrew word for humanity formed from the earth) to Smith suggesting a craftsman who forms the raw material into something of value. Eventually, he chases Fitch down and shoots him in the leg and hand, disabling him from doing further harm – but decides in that moment not to kill him. Fitch is furious and taunts Max to finish him off, calls him a weak coward. But Max will not yield to the temptation of redemptive violence. He turns away.

We know what happened to Dante. He received the beatific vision and was “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” What will happen to Nevada Smith? Will he go back to partner with Cord, to live with the Kiowa, or to join the Franciscans? Dante took us all the way on his story of redemption, but Nevada Smith has taken us along the journey only far enough to see the decisive step of turning. Conversion is not a sudden about face. To “shuve” (turn around in Hebrew) or experience “metanoia” (same thing in Greek) is a slowing, then an arching, curving half circle that sets us off in the new direction – headed toward life instead of death.

Man On Fire And The Future Of Faith

2010-07-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

If you have not seen Man On Fire, the superb action movie starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Walken, and Radha Mitchell, and if you want to be surprised at the plot twists, read no further. Rent and watch the movie first.

As I was re-watching Man On Fire last week, I was struck by the power of our meta-narrative, the Christian story, to shape the narratives that move us even in action movies. As this film begins, two retired assassins (Washington and Walken) meet in Mexico. Out of nowhere, the protagonist assassin, John Creasy (Washington) asks, “Do you think God will forgive us for what we’ve done?” Walken’s character answers “No.” Creasy nods “I didn’t think so.” It is a short but absolutely serious conversation. Not a hint of irony. We have met characters who take damnation seriously, because they are living it.

Creasy takes a job as body guard to a little girl (Fanning) and is captivated by her innocence and her seemingly inexplicable love for him. She loves him because he is sad. It is a compassion that he does his best to resist, but is nonetheless touched. He becomes her swimming coach and teaches her the way to freedom from fear. Her swims are baptismal plunges into liberty. Each night as the alcoholic body guard drinks his whiskey to forget, he faithfully reads his Bible to remember.

When the girl is kidnapped and apparently killed, the plot moves into the all too familiar “myth of redemptive violence” (Walter Wink, Joseph Campbell) as Creasy tracks down the killers and executes them one by one. But after each killing, he swims in the child’s pool, a baptismal act in which blood washes from him – the stain of sin or the blood of life?

When she turns out to be alive, the myth of redemptive violence ends. Crucifixion religion leads to perpetual violence. (Rene Girard). But resurrection religion shifts his focus to a life for others. That is the point at which he stops killing to restore his sense of moral order and chooses instead to die to save someone he loves.

It is a beautiful story of a soul saved at great cost. What strikes me is that this story, which simply must be told and which we need so much to hear, could not be told and could not be heard without the context of the Christian story. The question “Will God forgive us?” would not arise. The Bible, the baptisms, the death and resurrection would not signify without the context of the Creeds. So many stories would not be possible without the meta-narrative of the Christian faith -- not just action movies like Man on Fire and cult classics like Easy Rider, but real classics like A Christmas Carol and Les Miserables.

Sometimes I am sanguine about entering the post-Christian era, thinking Christianity is at its best when it is counter-cultural anyway. But then I remember that culture is a channel of grace and that channel will be diminished without our signs, our symbols, and most of all, our story. I understand that W. H. Auden was still a young atheist when he went to Spain to fight in the Civil War. At one point, when the left (Auden’s own side) was triumphant; they silenced all the church bells. On Sunday, when Auden heard the silence, he knew he did not want to live in a world without church bells, and that meant he did not want to live in a world without faith. Even if he did not believe, he needed someone to believe. He needed the culture to believe.

As one who lives neck deep in the institutional church, I am as ambivalent about it as any “spiritual but not religious” person. But I do not look forward to a world without church bells, a world without faith – or worse yet, a world in which faith is abandoned to the hands of the fearful, the bigoted, and the mean-spirited. So I continue to pray and hope against the dry sociological data so ready, so eager to write our obituary, that we may yet live, that bells may continue to ring on Sunday mornings, and that people who believe and people who do not believe will at least know our story.

Is there any reason to sustain my hope? If not, I plan to hope without a reason. (Miguel de Unamuno). But here’s a little thing I imagine. My 2 year old grandson loves to march around the room carrying a cross (or a fly swatter if no cross can be found, but he calls the fly swatter “cross”) singing “knick knack paddy whack” or the ABC song. I imagine him as an old man after the culture has forgotten us still practicing “the old religion” like Obi Wan Kenobi and respectable adults warning their young people to “have nothing to do with that crazy old wizard.” (Star Wars IV). If our story is true, it will be hard to kill.

Art In Goldfield & Tonopah: Contrasting Aesthetics

2010-07-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

The art scene in Tonopah could never be mistaken for the art scene in Goldfield. The main feature in Goldfield – and there is no competition – is right along 95 on the northern outskirts of town. It is a field of car art. There are simply no words to describe what some post-modern sculptor has done there to blow function apart, without obliterating the vestiges of function, while celebrating form for form’s sake. It is a parking lot with cars. But the cars have been mixed and mingled with all sorts of things. One small car sits atop another. One van wears a speedboat for a hat. On the grilles and fenders, the cars are adorned with toys, cattle skulls, whatever you call those curved little metal troughs that you spit (or worse) into in the hospital -- all manner of objects, generally having once had a practical use, now displayed like something from Andy Warhol for the sake of their shape and color – unremarkable when seen apart but amazing in the context of a community of forms assembled according to a design formulated in a uniquely appreciative mind. Yes, Goldfield. Who would have imagined it?

The public sculptures of Tonopah are of a mostly – perhaps not entirely – different order. The Tonopah exhibit is not concentrated in a single parking lot, but adorns the whole downtown. There are two basic kinds of sculpture. One is rust colored impressionistic representations of people from by-gone days. It is a historical theme – like the bronze statues of Boulder City – only the Tonopah figures are deliberately rougher and rustier. The other Tonopah kind of sculpture is arrangements of machinery – cog wheels, beams, mining equipment – which is somewhat like the cars of Goldfield. But Tonopah’s collections of metal are one color while the Goldfield displays are deliberately garish. And there is a deeper difference. Tonopah’s machinery sculptures and human sculptures are of the same color and texture – both roughly rusted. It doesn’t take an art critic to know that this similarity is deliberate and it is saying something. The question is: what? And here context may help to interpret. If I saw this likeness of humanity and machinery in Berkeley, I’d think it was a Herbert Marcuse critique of utilitarian capitalism dehumanizing workers. But not in Tonopah. I may be wrong. There may be some remnant of IWW radicalism at work in this art. But I don’t see it. This looks to me like a tribute to the resilient strength and courage of a mining town where people work like their equipment and with their equipment – together digging a life out of the earth, the iron rusty earth. We are more than what we do, these sculptures say, but we become ourselves while doing. Unlike the post modernist form for form’s sake of Goldfield, Tonopah’s art suggests stories as wild as the West and as human as anything by Zola or Hugo.

Speaking of great writers, not all the art in Tonopah is visual. There’s literature too these days. The best used bookstore I have yet found in Nevada is Whitney’s Books – open well into the evening. Whitney’s also hosts the AA and Al-Anon groups, which strikes me as showing some social conscience. Like any used bookstore, they carry the good, the bad, and the ugly. Someone at some point appears to have been a fan of Rod McKuen – groan. But I picked up two A. B. Guthrie novels and found several by Susan Howatch, as well as lots of classics – all for low, low prices.

So if you should be driving through Tonopah someday, don’t just think of the Mexican food at El Marquis, the historic ambience of Tonopah Station with its 1940’s Coca Cola posters and vintage gaming machines, or the educational value of touring the mining museum. Look around at the public art. And by all means stop in at Whitney’s Books.

Concord To Southwark: Reflections On Unity And Freedom

2010-07-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

July 4 feels different to me this year thanks in large part to the efforts of Canterbury to rein in our Episcopal Church. I have observed the 4th by watching the HBO mini-series, John Adams, and it has renewed my appreciation of what a complex and life-tearing soul-twisting ordeal the American revolution was. It also led me to the following two, somewhat churchy somewhat political, reflections.

Reflection 1: The American revolutionaries appealed to a tradition of freedom and dignity which was their inheritance from England. The Declaration of Independence echoed the themes of Article 37 of the Articles of Religion, “The bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm.” Of course, the Declaration of Indpendence (and the Constitution after it) echoed the democratic themes of the Magna Carta and Elizabeth II’s policies of toleration and freedom of belief and conscience. How ironic that the source of our freedom-tradition had become our oppressor! More than ironic, this is telling. What startles me is that England declared its independence of the political-legal-ecclesiastical authority of Rome in the late 16th Century, then spent the 17th Century becoming a colonial power and wound up being, all too often, a force of oppression.

The American impulse to freedom, inherited from England, found expression in the Declaration of Independence and is heard today in the witty blog title, “The Archbishop of Canterbury hath no jurisdiction in this realm.” But we are no less human than our English brothers and sisters. We spent the late 18th Century claiming our freedom, then the 19th century buying and conquering our way to the Pacific Ocean, then the first half of the 20th Century establishing our own colonial dominion beyond our borders. The point: it is a tricky thing this claiming freedom. When we exert resistance to oppression, the energy of resistance can go awry after the oppressor is out of the way. That same energy can become oppressive. Freedom is good, but a spiritually vulnerable thing. It is guarded not by the continued assertion of the power that won the freedom in the first place, but rather by its restraint.

The defense of freedom with self-restraint was taught more deeply, wisely, and theologically by Reinhold Niebuhr and Langdon Gilkey. It was best practiced by George Washington after the war was won. His army was sick and tired of the ineptitude of the politicians in Philadelphia who had consistently failed to supply them or to pay them. The army officers decided to march on the city, impose a coup, and run this country right. Washington asked the privilege of meeting with them first which of course they granted him. He was after all George Washington. He took out his notes but was unable to read them. Fumbling for his glasses he said his eyes had grown dim in service to his country. And that was the end of the coup. Washington could and would have been the new king if he had wavered ever so slightly in his refusal. But he was adamant in resisting power and so became the American Cincinatus and we became a republic.

Reflection 2: The American identity is rooted in two wars: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War – one war to take a body politic apart; the other, to hold one together. “There is a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them together.” Ecclesiastes 3: 5. Ah discernment – knowing what time it is. One cultural legacy of Martin Luther’s bold stand of conscience is that we tend to make solitary stands of conscience heroic per se. We have a societal tendency toward secession. We like to stand up, make a heated statement, and stomp off. It proves we are brave and of sturdier moral stuff than the rest of the group. Churches, art councils, college faculties, and garden clubs fly apart with the centrifugal force of this self-enhancing assertion, a curious blend of conscience and pride.

Watching John Adams, I was struck by the divisions in the Continental Congresses. There were voices for independence from the get go (like Sam Adams), voices of conciliation and unity to the end (like John Dickinson), and folks who valued peace and unity but ultimately decided that authentic freedom demanded revolution (like Washington). The tension between peace and freedom, mutuality and independence, is a delicate dance performed in families, churches, and nations. Authentic relationship is not achieved by servility, dominance, or stomping out of the room. It starts with being our authentic selves and striving with care and compassion to find how we can be relationship with other authentic selves.

That point has implications for all our relationships. But in the limited context of the Anglican Communion, the question is how can our Episcopal Church be its authentic self and be in relationship with other Provinces that share our history but not all aspects of our polity or theology. Here again, it helps to remember our history. If the English bishops had been willing to consecrate an American bishop, Samuel Seabury, our relationship with Canterbury might be decidedly different today. But precisely because Seabury was an American believing in our independence, that is to say he would not swear allegiance to the king of England, they refused to consecrate him – a refusal echoed recently in the Southwark mitergate incident. Scottish bishops, who already did not swear such allegiance, consecrated him. Hence, we are not the Church of England in America. We are the Episcopal Church which shares history with the C of E, just as the United States shares history with the UK. The concept of a network of churches with this shared history (the Anglican Communion) was the idea of American and Canadian clergy in the late 19th Century. We began having periodic gatherings of bishops for prayer and fellowship, then more recently formed other ways to collaborate in mission. Having ourselves begun this informal spiritual network, constituted by “bonds of affection” not rules and power structures, I am confident we will continue to relate to our fellow Anglicans in a spirit of authentic care.

Istanbul Of The American West

2010-06-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Austin, NV – named for Austin, TX but that’s where the resemblance ends – got its start when Wm. Talcott, a Pony Express agent, discovered silver at this point along the legendary trail that is today Highway 50, “the loneliest road in America.” The silver boom is long gone, but Austin remains the richest source of entertainment in Nevada. I say this with all due deference to the Strip. This weekend was my annual visit to St. George’s, Austin.

Saturday evening began with dinner – a meatball sandwich – at the Last Chance Saloon on the east edge of town. Despite its name The Last Chance is “a clean well lighted place” (Hemmingway) with a homey atmosphere. The proprietor gave me a favorable review of our new priest Darla Cantrell’s first time officiating at a wedding and gave me the card for her bed and breakfast, which is a castle 12 miles out of town. I later learned her husband is building an actual water filled moat around it. It sounded eccentric to me until I learned Austin has another castle, this one built in 1897, modeled after a Roman watch tower. A few weary gold miners were dining at the Last Chance as well. When they left, the miners gave me all sorts of brochures for local archaeological sites, caves, petro glyphs, pictographs, etc. That was pretty hospitable for tired miners on a Saturday night.

I then made my annual pilgrimage to the International Bar, not “a clean well lighted place” – a deliberately darker ambience. Odo the bar dog remembered me – or feigned recollection with the pastoral pretense common to bishops and bar dogs. The crowd was thin this time, but the television was showing The Magnificent Seven so I settled in for a long slow drink watching the complex heroism of Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and the ptsd/ alcohol afflicted Robert Vaughn (the character, not Vaughn himself) unfold for the cause of justice in Mexico. The other patrons were well drillers. Austin is home to quite a gathering of well drillers this year since they discovered a hotbed (so to speak) of geothermal energy. There was much talk of virtues of geothermal in contrast to oil and coal. But the conversation also drifted to Emiliano Zappata and Pancho Villa. I am not sure they noticed the connection to the movie.

At one point a driller from California discovered that someone had written “(expletive deleted) yeah” on the wall. He was greatly offended – not by the expletive per se – but rather because he believed he had coined the term “(expletive deleted) yeah” 30 years ago. He regarded the graffiti as an infringement of his intellectual property rights in the expression.

Back at the Pony Canyon Motel, I fell quickly asleep but was awakened early by the television on the other side of the paper thin wall. It was saying “Thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents. That's right. Only thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents a week.” I hastily showered, dressed, and headed off to breakfast at the Toiyable Café.

The Toiyabe is a wonderful place complete with deer heads. I sat there waiting for my breakfast reading the emotivist rather Zen verse of Alberto Caerero, a heteronym of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – poems written in 1914 generally about how things are only what they are but that’s just fine. Reading Pessoa/Caerero in the Toiyable struck me as perhaps somehow out of step. Then a couple sat down in the next booth. The man was large and white bearded; the woman a bit younger and subtly artsy, but very subtly. They began talking about visual arts in conceptual terms I did not understand. Their conversation turned to matters of technique which I also did not understand, but I could tell the woman was making a case for simplicity. She said something like “I just used pieces of purple cut glass. Some of them were pie shaped. Some were carrot shaped. I put them in triangles and that was enough.” The last part captured my attention. “That was enough.” Caerero’s Zen simplicity seemed right at home.

Then I stepped next door to St. George’s, the quaintest of quaint old brick churches with ancient gnarled poplars in the front yard. You may recall from earlier posts that St. George’s, a building on the historic registry, is also distinguished by its bell tower which doubles as the restroom. Worship at St. George’s was warm and engaged. Their veteran priest, Estelle, has been away quite awhile now with health problems. But their new priest, Darla, the Lander County dispatcher, fighting crime by day and preaching the gospel on weekends, is doing a magnificent job of holding the community together. They sang out the hymns with gusto accompanied by an ecclesiastical karaoke machine. They nodded and facially encouraged me through the sermon. They said the responses with energy and received communion with reverence. The morning could not have been better.

Then it was back to the Toiyabe for lunch with about half of the congregation. The server spoke to each and every one of them by name. One of the congregation, Frank Whitman, is working on a pictorial history of Austin and likes to wander the cemetery looking at tombstones. He described the tombstone of one Kee Lee whose epitaph read “Here lies a good Chinaman.” Ethnic sensitivity had apparently not made it to Austin by the time of Mr. Lee’s death. But the “unfortunate language” (Barak Obama speaking of Sen. Reid) was redeemed when it turned out most of the people at the table had actually known Kee Lee and remembered him with affection and respect as a wise and artful story teller.

Austin refuses to be reduced to any simple characterization. It is a post modern mountain mining town where geothermal green energy is discovered and developed among the ruins of played out silver mines and archaeological relics of human habitation 8000 years ago. It is pride in crude expressions set alongside sophisticated artistic minimalism. This is surely the Istanbul of the American West compressed into a village -- all this without broad band access. Every visit to Austin amazes me and I know I have barely scratched the surface.

Jefferson Starship At The Red Dog Saloon

2010-06-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

An incredible evening with Jefferson Starship at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City. What is Jefferson Starship like on tour in 2010? I will tell you all, but first, for those of you dear readers who do not know this Battle Born State, a word about Virginia City – forget Bonanza. Virginia City was never a cow town with broad dusty streets. It was a mountain top mining town -- the center of the Comstock Lode named for the successful speculator Henry T. Pancake Comstock who struck it rich in 1859, sold his claim, invested in stores in Carson and Silver City, purchased a Mormon wife who ran away, then prospected unsuccessfully in Idaho and Montana where he killed himself in 1870 – no relation to John Henry Comstock, the noted entomologist. For the truth – using the word in a loose literary sense – about Virginia City, better to consult their premier journalist, Mark Twain.

The Red Dog Saloon, an intimate setting along Virginia City’s wooden sidewalks, was filled with boomers tonight. It was the 60+ crowd out in force to hear our old music. A few young folks showed up out of respect I guess. But we were mostly a collection of people who had lived through the Viet Nam era and everything since – it showed on us I must admit.

After the opening act, Jefferson Starship took the small stage. Paul Kantner, David Krieberg, and Chris Smits – 3 old guys who still love their music, playing it now with a seasoned passion. Marty Balin was not around. And of course Gracie Slick has been gone from Starship since 1988 – and lest I go overboard let me acknowledge there is only one Gracie Slick – a pioneer rock singer who was once arrested for attempting to spike Richard Nixon’s punch with LSD. Awful of course, but you had to be there or at least be then. She was one of a kind and is now a painter in New York City.

Instead of Balin and Slick, the old guys were joined by an angular young woman named Cathy Richardson who could have been their granddaughter. But she was a bona fide super star. She wore a sun dress under a black hooded sweater which she put to remarkable use. It wasn’t just the powerful brassy voice that was nothing less than Grace Slick quality; she was a performer in the 1967 sense of the word. She shot her fist up toward the ceiling, sliced the air with her hands, fell to her knees, clapped, stomped, pounded the stage with the mike stand exuding a blend of passions born of that mad era of hope, anger, and desperate aspiration. At one point she turned away, pulled her hood over her head transforming her blondness into an eerie witchy darkness, then turned on us with a rendition of White Rabbit that chilled the blood at “Just ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall.” In the second set, she hammered us with Somebody to Love – an existential admonition to human connection.

The closing song of the encore took a surprising thematic turn for the top band of psychedelic rock. It was a medley of Songs of Freedom, Redemption Song, and Imagine. The lyrics of John Lennon’s atheist anthem were woven into the lyrics of Bob Marley, blended into a proclamation of faith in transcendent deliverance and an invitation to live boldly in the face of all the menaces to freedom, happiness, and life itself. John Lennon no doubt turned over in his grave, but I loved it.

All this on a Friday night in the Red Dog Saloon of Virginia City. I cannot believe this life I have been given.

Walker Lake, Resilience In Reno, & How To Be The Church

2010-06-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Walker Lake was perfectly still, reflecting the mountains and sky the way a serene soul reflects Christ. We were driving past Walker Lake after having flown from Reno to Las Vegas at the crack of dawn to load up our car with the rest of our belongings destined for Sparks. It was surreal, going to bed in Sparks two nights in a row, but with a plane flight and a long drive in between. That’s what I do with a day off. :-)

It had been a good Sunday at Trinity, Reno – a flagship congregation that has been through a lot of change and disruption these past few years. I was impressed by their resiliency and the energy in the room – the lay and ordained leadership and the people in the pews. They sang the hymns, said the responses – worshiped right out loud. Of course, they have the cutest family service anywhere. Then the principle service was blessed with a first class choir that is not too stuffy to get down as we said in the 70’s – I’m not sure what we say now – but they do it.

Saturday had been another Roving Workshop at St. Paul’s, Sparks on Orders of Ministry. Many Nevada Episcopalians have the notion that there are two diametrically opposed models for how to be the church and we are torn between them. I hope these workshops can help us recognize two things: 1. Neither of those models actually exists anywhere in our diocese today. 2. Neither of those models fits the ancient or contemporary Church’s understanding of our shape, our mission, or the nature of God.

I hope one basic insight will emerge from those two facts: A few general principles make up a broad outline of how to be the church. It is a deep and ancient wisdom – but the way the general principles are lived out in each local community is up to that community. Congregations have the freedom to be creative, innovative, and adaptive. We are here to connect people with Jesus “by any means necessary.” These workshops do not say“this is the way to do it” but rather "these are the resources you can use as you find your way."

Holy Trinity -- A Church On The Move

2010-06-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

It was good to be back at Holy Trinity, Fallon today. The first thing you notice is the new sign which boldly welcomes people to worship and fellowship. The second thing is that the Holy Trinity congregation worships with energy. They sing the hymns with gusto, not dragging. They say the responses briskly. They are alert and engaged in prayer.

The next thing you notice is the pictures on the wall in the Parish Hall. Someone values these folks enough to photograph them and display their pictures with their names so people can get to know each other.

These first impressions of a healthy congregation are born out on deeper inspection. This is the first congregation in Nevada to identify someone to be trained as a lay evangelist. They offer a Bible Study, a divorce recovery seminar, a book group, a healing service, a mid-week Eucharist, private anointing for healing after the Sunday morning service, etc. They have 8 folks in the congregation trained as preachers, plus worship leaders and eucharisitic visitors.

Their challenge these days is that their Parish Hall needs to be replaced. Needless to say that is at once painful and exciting -- painful because it means tearing down the building where many special memories were made -- exciting because it promises a better space for fellowship, education, and community events in years to come.

As always, a visit to Fallon encourages me about our present and our future.

Reflections On Oklahoma IV

2010-05-31T10:26:00.001-07:00

The Olkahoma IV National Consultation On Native Ministries is over and I am in the Chattanooga airport sorting it out. There was a lot of pain and frustration in the room. The human lot involves a share of that -- but these folks had more than their share and the form it took for them was a specific brand of oppression called conquest, colonialism, or "the doctrine of discovery."

The question was how to move forward. There were a lot of ideas -- including institutional solutions like separation from the Episcopal Church, a non-geographic diocese for indigenous peoples, an indigenous bishop, etc. There was also a major focus on ordination -- not so much on Ministy of All Baptized. I sometimes had the sense that some wanted to be ordained as a way to be healed and validated. Heaven knows we all need healing and validation, but speaking as one who has been ordained 3 times now, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work for those purposes. I am quite open to all of the instutional options that were suggested, but I wish we could look more at the interpersonal dynamics, local ministries, and a spiritual solution. There will be more conferences. There will be time for all these conversations. The Jamestown Covenant is a good framework for a broader discussion.

One thing came up appropo of my previous post about apologies. The presenter who advocated separation from the Episcopal Church emphasized that the Church has never apologized to Native Americans for our complicity in colonization. This failure was contrasted to the Anglican Church of Canada's apology. I was pretty sure I rememberd that we had and certainly thought we should if we had not. But then a Native American bishop responded in our small group. She had been deeply involved in Jamestown I when Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning and the President of the House of Deputies extended precisely this apology years before the Candadian apology. So we have at least done this -- and under less pressure than Canda was experiencing in that sad time. The issue is not whether we acknowledge past wrongs and ask forgiveness. The issue is amends. How do we go on to create a new relationship out of the ashes of colonialism and conquest?

The ideas for a future all had merit and all had some downsides. My hope is that these different approaches can somehow be integrated into a new way forward for indigenous peoples and that the rest of the Church can make rooom in its structures to honor the unique way of this population. The challenge of being the church -- like the challenge of being human -- is always to live in the creative tension of unity and diversity.

What Was Wes Thinking?

2010-05-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Tonight, on the luxuriantly arboreal and Anglophiliac campus of the University of the South, here in the Rebel’s Rest guesthouse, I iron my clerical shirt, cassock, rochet, and chimere. Such garments wrinkle when packed for travel. So I iron and as I iron I think of the string theorists who aspire to formulate a single comprehensive theory to explain the entire physical universe – and I know that I can never come anywhere near understanding just this day. It has been complex.

I suspect that these two things are important parts of the context: Before I arrived (while I was stranded in airports by Carolina thunderstorms) the people gathered here for the 2010 Native Ministries Consultation were dealing with the “doctrine of discovery,” acknowledging the grievances of First Nations Peoples, what native singer Bill Miller referred to tonight as “historic trauma.” The other part of the context is that we have a really tight agenda which strikes one as a cultural oddity but then that could be stereotyping. I’m just saying that it’s part of the context of the day. Here is one mysterious story from the day.

This morning I talked with a Maori man who told me with some pride about the time he had told off Wes Frensdorff. Since Wes is so highly regarded in Nevada, I was surprised and curious. He told the story of a Roland Allen Conference (Roland Allen was a missionary to China who invented the ministry model on which Total Ministry was based) in Hawaii. The Maori people in attendance felt deeply alienated and excluded at the conference. I am not sure I understand why – but I think that following agendas and sitting around tables for structured discussions is just not what they do in New Zealand. So they boycotted part of the meeting, and then showed up for a session Wes was leading.

The Maori man stood up and interrupted the session, saying he had some things to express. Wes said there would be a time for that later but right now they were going to do what the agenda said. The man was not having it. An argument ensued. I don’t know how it ended, but it included the Maori man saying to Wes. “You’ve told us what to do long enough. Bishop, sit down and shut up.”

About a year later, Wes visited New Zealand. He telephoned the man several times, leaving messages saying he’d like to have a conversation. The calls were not returned. So Wes found someone who knew where the man lived and got them to drive him to his house. Wes met him there and apologized. Just a few months later, he died in the plane crash.

Why did Wes apologize? I feel sure I would have done the same thing at the conference, tried to keep the meeting going according to plan rather than let a heckler take it over with no authority other than the intensity of his feelings. But would I have been right? In one of our meetings today, a First Nations person said we “disguise oppression as order.” Did Wes realize that sticking to the agenda was wrong? Or was it a case like Matthew 5 of being on your way to the altar and remembering that your brother has a grievance against you?

I don’t understand the other man’s anger either. There was clearly some sense of insult in the act of regulating a meeting with an agenda. Was it part of an old grievance, a historic trauma? Was it part of the “doctrine of discovery?” As I listened to the story, I identified with Wes and felt an anxiety as if I were the one being challenged, having the meeting wrested from my control. And when I heard of Wes’s apology, I thought that I would like to apologize like that – even though I don’t know what he was thinking.

Tonight we attended a remarkable concert by the Grammy Award winning Mohican musician Bill Miller. Bill talked as much as he sang because he had a message for the audience. It was that living in historic trauma is a dead end. The historic trauma is real, but the way to life is to claim victory over it. Needless to say, one cannot tell anyone else that about their historic trauma. It’s something we have to come to for ourselves, but Bill Miller was able to say it. He told the story of his hatred of his father, a violent, abusive, drunken man. He looked forward to his father’s death, but when it happened, he discovered that his father had been forgiven by God and found happiness for the first time in his life at the end of his life. Bill was able to forgive his father and found freedom from his historic trauma. He was able to live anew instead of living in his old grievance. It was one of the most moving testimonies I’ve ever heard.

I wonder something about apology. I wonder if anything we ever do is so unambiguously right that there isn’t something to regret in it. Philosophers call it a “moral remainder” – the bad part of even the best things we do. So maybe sometimes the question isn’t whether we have been wrong enough that we are obliged to apologize – asking that just puts us on the defensive – maybe the question is: would an apology help the other person move on beyond their sense of grievance? Would it set someone free?

Episcopal Leadership

2010-05-27T10:44:00.001-07:00

News flash from College for Bishops: The good news is that my scores as a "transfomational leader" are much improved from the marks I got when I'd only been in Nevada for 6 weeks. (Grading was done each time by some of the staff and a few clergy). I'm glad it didn't go the other way.

But the big footnote on that "improved" score is that I don't believe in the transformatoinal leadership model anyway. It's too individual, too heroic, too hiearchical, too top down. We have a program this afternoon on "complexity leadership" which strikes me as far more appropriate for the church, especially a church committed to Ministry of All Baptized. It's about groups working together as equals instead of working under the same boss. Leadership is not top down. It is leading out to each other as equals and, when the administrative structure is hiearrachical, it's leading up, speaking up, offering our insights. Complexity leadership is about the interactions among group members that affect the whole group for good or for ill. This is much more the kind of leadership I believe in -- and most of my worst mistakes have come from having gotten hoodwinked into trying to lead the old fashioned transformational way.

My main job needs to be enabling groups of people to come together for creative, innovative interaction. The Ministry Development Commission has been especially creative and proactive recently. I feel good about my small part in midwifing the birth of that group -- but the creative leadership is being done by them.

Often people think the bishop is a ruler, the one who calls the shots. But that's not what our vows say, and it is rarely what the canons allow. We are more often facilitators and spiritual guides. The whole point of the English Reformation was to shift authority away form purple shirted individuals barking orders into the hands of groups of Christians, working through issues in fellowship.

The Church is a context for people to grow into the full stature of Christ. People don't grow through cow towing to domination. People grow thourgh convesation and fellowship, learning to speak thier own minds then work togther, especially when we don't all agree.

Tyranny is far more efficient than democracy. But democracy is more human. The Church needs to be human, deeply human -- that is better than efficient.

Reflections on Rwanda 1994

2010-05-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

I just finished Left To Tell, a compelling memoir by a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Imaculee Ilibigaza spent nearly 3 months cramped shoulder to shoulder in strict silence with a group of women in a tiny bathroom, while murdering mobs made periodic searches of the house where she was sheltered by a Hutu pastor.

During that awful time she had a profound encounter with God through her desperate prayers for deliverance. Her book is not a theodicy but it is a testimony to the presence of God in the midst of evil and a tribute to the the human capacity to find grace even in the context of horror. Her relationship with God enabled her to survive and to move through grief to to a life of joy. It even set her free to forive the murderers of her family and friends.

Not long ago I read a biography of the German theologian, Paul Tillich, including his escape from Germany just as the Nazi reich was beginning its campaign of violence against those who did not support their hatred. Reading such books in these times compels serious reflection.

The Church has a theology and a spirituality, not a political philosophy. But politics is always susceptible to spirits that are larger and more powerful than ideologies -- sometimes, spirits of mercy, justice, and reconciliation; sometimes spirits of hatred, fear, and blame (Rene Girard). Whatever our political convictions may be, Christians have a duty to infuse politics with a godly spirit and to resist the spiritualy of malice.

The Ugandan legislation imposing death for homosexuality is an example of a spirituality of malice. The Arizona immigration legislation is not as bad as that, but it is plenty bad enough. However, my concern is broader than specific legislation. I would not equate the extremist rhetoric of today's American politics with the Rwandan madness -- but it is deeply troubling -- not in its content, not in its political positions -- it is troubling in its malice, its dehumanizing of those who differ.

Christian may hold any variety of political and economic theories. But we cannot forget each other's humanity, which means we cannot forget when we speak of each other that we are speaking of God's children. Our calling is always to bless and not to curse.

The habit of blessing grows. The habit of cursing grows. They grow in opposite dirctions. Our basic freedom is to choose which direction we as individuals and as a society choose to follow.