An Independence Day Prayer

In the midst of our celebrations for Independence Day, let us also embrace an attitude of reflection and a spirit of growth.

Here is a prayer of confession from a July 3, 2011 service at a United Methodist Church. I found it poignant and pertinent.

Peace and blessings, everyone.


Source

Dear God, we read our Declaration of Independence with humility today:

We have proven unworthy of freedom and equality, and of having and sharing the rights to life, liberty, and happiness.

We accused Britain of refusing to pass laws to encourage migration to our shores,
but we have done the same thing.

We accused Britain of depriving prisoners of a trial by jury,
but we have done the same thing.

We accused Britain of quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,
but we have done the same thing to others.

We accused Britain of economic tyranny and greed,
and now we see these same forces in ourselves.

We accused the Native Americans of undistinguished destruction,
but we have poisoned the trees and plants of Vietnam.

We accused Britain of aggression and violence,
but we, too, have not always chosen the path of peace.

Dear Lord, You have so richly blessed us,
and, at our best, we have responded to your abundant grace.
Have mercy on us, and heal our blindness and self-deceit,
especially in this time of prayer.

Amen.

Clinging to Hatred

I just read a really well-written post about hatred at the blog Christian Girl at College. It is particularly poignant in light of the complicated response to the death of Bin Laden.

Click here to read Midwesterndiva's thought-provoking post.


Image Source

And here is the response I wrote to her post and the subsequent comments, an interesting discussion on judgment and righteous anger/hatred:

At the risk of proof-texting and skipping around Bible verses in a way that does justice to none of them, this conversation reminds me of the warning against hypocrisy in Matthew 7:5 and Luke 6:42 - taking the plank out of one's own eyes before attempting to remove the speck in someone else's.

When we are called to hate evil, we are called to hate the evil in our own hearts and at our own hands just as much as we hate evil elsewhere. There is too high a price for assigning a point system based on human understanding of which acts are more evil and thus which people are more evil.

If we justify our hatred of people who have murdered and terrorized, perhaps we are not as different as we think from those who justified their hatred of the people they then murdered and terrorized. This frightens me, yes, and it is difficult to look at my own life and realize that even if I have never killed another person, I have certainly been angry with others and perhaps unjustly so. The best I can do is to reconcile that in myself and strive to live out the love I have unduly received.

Love Wins in The Shoes of Happiness

Today Bob Edgar of Common Cause came to speak to our Ministry in Non-Parish Settings class. He was a great speaker with many quotes and words of wisdom to share. I'd like to pass along this one.

This is a poem called "Outwitted" by Edwin Markham, from The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913):

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.


Image Source

Ten Rules of Peace

Peace activist Father John Dear has been arrested 75 times in acts of civil disobedience, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu has nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.




Ten Rules of Peace
according to Fr. John Dear, based upon the work of Henri Nouwen

1. Peace-making starts with prayer. Let Jesus disarm your heart.

2. Peace-making requires resistance to war and violence.

3. Peace-making creates community.

4. Peace-making requires serving the poor and marginalized.

5. Peace-making means accepting weakness.

6. Peace-making requires nonviolence.

7. Peace-making demands social justice.

8. Peace-making makes connections.

9. Peace-making leads to gratitude.

10. Peace-makers follow a nonviolent peace-making Jesus. Jesus was not passive.


Fr. John Dear is an excellent speaker and author who spoke at Drew last semester. Check out his website at FatherJohnDear.org and his autobiography entitled A Persistent Peace, among his other works.

The Spider Prey Paradigm Shift

As a kid, I was immensely allergic to mosquito bites. The Hives of Wrath reached the point that my mother was once wrongly suspected of abusing me.



Suffice it to say that I grew up loathing them. For a kid in a family of campers, mosquitoes were the Enemy. This massive monstrosity in Manitoba no doubt would have sent me into hysterics:



In my mind, a flyswatter was actually a mosquito-squisher. It was justification to me that the world hated them as much as I did. Or more - because, despite how much I despised them, I was rarely able to kill them myself.

During my teenaged years, when my skeeter-hunting skills (e.g. height, eyesight, and reflexes) should have been at their peak, I once enlisted my grandmother to take down a mosquito in the bathroom because I couldn't bring myself to bare my flesh in the shower knowing that that sucker was out there.

Even then the irony of that scene did not escape me.



Just the same, it was her attack model that I attempted to replicate years later. One fateful day, I was alone in my apartment and a sizeable mosquito happened along, hovering near the ceiling.

I knew it was only a matter of time. It was either me or that mosquito - and I wasn't keen on letting it be me.

I put on my big girl panties and wielded a rolled-up magazine, dreading what I would have to do as soon as it flew within reach. I tried in vain to talk myself into a murderous rage. That blood-sucking beast was going down. I had to believe it. I took a breath and raised my weapon.

Suddenly, a stealthy spider that must have been waiting in its super-secret Spider Cave in the corner of the ceiling launched outward and snatched the mosquito mid-air.

One wrestling mass, together they plummeted down to the ledge below, where I had an art print and some handouts I'd recently received.



I don't usually keep crucifixes or images of Christ on the cross - I think this may be the only one I've ever had, certainly the only one I've ever placed somewhere readily visible. And now it was serving as the backdrop to the scene unfolding before me.



Once it ascended to the center of Jesus' body, the spider turned the mosquito corpse over and over to embalm it and secure it there.



Of course I could appreciate the natural, biological drive for a spider to kill a mosquito, and I don't hold it responsible for any malicious act.

But you've got to admit that this spider looks vaguely villainous:



And it could have carried off its kill anywhere. Really, it could have. But instead, it had an acute sense of biblical irony.



I learned at an early age that "spiders are the farmer's friend" and that we were to permit them to live in our home, or else release them to the wild. I was a really big fan of spiders when I made the connection that they killed mosquitoes (see above illustration of childhood), and by college I was nominated resident Spider Liberator.

But this experience was by no means a matter of sympathizing with the poor little once-living creature that served as another living creature's food and sustenance. That lesson is a story for another day.

Rather, I was filled with a bizarre and personally unprecedented reverence for the mosquito as an innocent.

Yes, I understood that its death served a delicious purpose for the spider that was brazen enough to catch it mid-air. (P.S., I'd never seen one do that before, but I guess it beats the presumably painstaking process of web-weaving.) But witnessing this entire interaction - and remembering what I had set out to do - rendered me stunned.

Perhaps not for the first time, but the first with such impact, I realized the power I held as a human; realized my inability to comprehend the consequences of the actions I was physically capable of doing. I remembered that the people who actively killed Jesus were people nonetheless; that the people who actively do any harm are people nonethless. I envisioned countless victims of violence in cases in which the offenders had somehow justified their actions: genocide, hate crimes, revenge, retributive human justice.

This experience did not mysteriously transform me into a perfectly harmless being incapable of inflicting pain or making errors in judgment. But something happened that day that forever altered my perspective on the human impulse to judge, to speculate, to assign value, to take fate into one's own hands.

And I just can't erase the image from my mind - a creature whose species has only caused me discomfort and taken my very blood from my veins, hanging lifelessly on a cross alongside the savior of my soul.

'N Syncretism: The Boy Band of Religion

I'm increasingly interested in interfaith work, improving relations between groups of differing beliefs and traditions, and encouraging peace and collaborative efforts. (The environmental justice movement is a prime example of people seeking and discovering "common ground." Check out GreenFaith, Interfaith Partners for the Environment, based in New Jersey.)

But from discussion of interfaith collaboration often sprouts mention of syncretism.

Religious syncretism is the blending of different beliefs and practices into one new Assimilation Beast. The Melting Pot Model, if you will, rather than the Salad Bowl Model, which is my ideal edible analogy for religious peace - as well as for America, the context in which this imagery is more commonly used.



Syncretism has occurred countless times throughout history between all different traditions. It can be an element of exploration or inclusion of new ideas. It can be a result of cultural conquest - not necessarily even a reflection of strength in numbers and "majority rules," but of otherwise dominant, more "persuasive" culture.

Sometimes peace-seekers commend blending, perhaps the way that Boyzone wants the world to "turn out coffee-colored people by the score." Some appreciate the diversity and long for less nominal, homogeneous unity.

Sometimes people are "accused" of syncretism as an offense. In Shalom, Salaam, Peace, a great interfaith book for dialogue between the Abrahamic religions, Allison Stokes speaks of a minister who was thus accused and nearly lost his position in the church.

Judgment of that particular case is beyond the scope of my own ability and authority.

But here is what I think about syncretism:

It's the boy band of religion.

It seems like a good idea (at least to somebody), so they mastermind a group. Someone coaches them until they not only sound eerily harmonious but nearly indistinguishable from one another. Most of their music is in a major key and their lyrics never develop far beyond trite declarations of love. Cue cultic following and media attention.

Then the member bios come out, and you wonder who drew the short stick to get stuck with a favorite color that none of them actually like. Unable to morph into one cohesive entity, they have no choice but to exploit the individuality of the members. They follow unwritten laws like the Power Ranger Principle - that if they're a team whose members just happen to be differently empowered, brightly colored beasts, they will drum up a lot of interest. The Army Wives series and the Barbie company are similarly adept at this strategy.


(I had this realization thanks to an image on Tickets For Two.)


(Meanwhile - Mattel, can we talk?)

Anyway, after they've used their combined powers to defeat Lord Zedd, they suffer a schism. They annul their collaborative union and go their separate ways, and somebody works through rehab and somebody comes out of the closet and somebody goes on to make a solo album and somebody marries a fan-girl and even though no one remembers the last one's name they seem to recall that his favorite color was yellow and he liked liturgical dance.

In light of all that, or in spite of it, I have a theory.

I believe that every human alive or having lived has something to teach someone else - something significant, and often intensely personal for either teacher or taught. Or both.

I believe that interfaith and intercultural peace rest not in syncretism, but rather in learning itself. Learning just one thing from every other person one encounters. Learning one fact, one practice, one habit, one truth, one hope, one idea, one question that either transforms or informs one's perspective, if even just to fortify a view already held. Not necessarily taking up what is learned. Just learning it; respecting the person who taught it.

We need not all practice alike, believe alike, live alike. Some amount of influence and assimilation may happen, but it need not be forced.

In the film Chocolat, Père Henri preaches: "I think we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do - by what we deny ourselves, what we resist and who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create and who we include."

But I don't think that entails syncretism: I think that would mean denying authenticity, denying ourselves the ability to believe in a way that Père Henri's message does not encourage. I think it is not about creating a single world religion that denies, resists, and excludes different expressions of spirituality. Rather, it is embracing, creating, and including others however we can, knowing that we may not understand them or agree with them perfectly well, and still accepting that as a foundation on which to build peace.

This is my personal interfaith creed: I believe I will learn something transformative or informative from every person with whom I share a conversation, and from many more with whom I may never speak.

Perhaps someone someday will prove it wrong.

But if that becomes the case, then I imagine that I will have much more to mull over than the basic idea that I had been wrong about this philosophy.

Mutually Bound

Recently we have talked and read at length about inter-religious connections and ecumenism. This has long been an interest of mine and I wish to explore it much more during my time at Drew.

What follows is an excerpt from something I wrote earlier this year. I share it now as a background as to where I'm coming from - part of why I am here and some of the questions I have brought with me. Perhaps it will be something to refer back to as I learn more over the next few years.

---

How do religions interconnect, and how do we rectify their intellectual aspects? Is it possible for people of different backgrounds to maintain their spiritual strength without breaking down that of their counterparts? This is the theological dilemma which I find most pertinent both spiritually and academically, particularly in the past four years while I studied at Sarah Lawrence, a religiously diverse college. In the final year, I conducted an oral history project on students’ beliefs, faith, and experience. I hoped to encourage both academic and personal dialogue between students and provide a relaxed and respectful atmosphere in which they can explore and express their beliefs. Diverse in every possible way, no two interviewees professed precisely the same faith, yet all shared much in common.

Such is true, I find, of Christian denominations. Can Christians be both spiritually catholic and protestant, if not nominally, socially, or politically? Catholic: broad or wide-ranging; having sympathies with all; universal. Protestant: protesting injustice and corruption; striving for improvement, reform, and objectivity; from the word meaning "to bear public witness." Did Christ not represent all of these qualities?

A Roman Catholic priest once told me that "God does not check your denomination like an I.D. card." In the past decade, the Vatican, the Lutheran World Federation, and the World Methodist Council came together in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, stating that "by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works." In our doctrine and our divides, how do we differentiate the human from the divine? How does Christ bring unity and peace to a world in which Christianity creates further divisions and categories? Most significantly, must we erase these categories – must we be a reconciled Catholic church, or a Unitarian Universalist church, or a nondenominational church – or is it possible to respect human individuality while honoring the universality of the Divine?

As my project progressed I found inspiration and assurance that, though the journey for peace may be a long one, it is possible. It requires a willingness to speak and to be silent, a willingness to listen. With each interview, I learned not only to listen better but to listen to what cannot be heard.

Lilla Watson said, "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." Her words transformed my entire perspective of outreach; although I had not reduced it to charity or good deeds, I had not fully comprehended the interconnectedness of humanity, our sufferings and our hopes. And not only has it affected my approach to serving the poor, the hungry, and the outcast, but it has convinced me that peace in every sense is a matter in which our liberation is mutually bound.

Suncatcher

A reflection written during senior year (2009-2010) as I considered seminary.

---

I often find that the small, seamless moments of daily life are among the most inspiring and truth-bearing. When I opened the shades of the wide window in my final undergraduate dorm, the panes filled with the hues of leaves, and the narrow stretch of wooded wilderness behind the building seemed to pour into the room. I welcomed the natural shade, but nonetheless hung a sun-catcher in the window. It dangled in the only available place – centered on the thick frame rather than within the clarity of the windowpanes, so it seemed doubly impossible that it should ever reflect rays of sunlight, but there it stayed. Its presence seemed to suffice.

One afternoon, I arrived home – everything peaceful, the shades still drawn. But when I stepped into the dimly lit room, I found myself immersed in scattered rainbows. Even with the sun high in the sky, even with patchwork foliage obscuring the view of all beyond it, even as my covered windows seemed to shut out the outside world – light and color filled the room because of a simple glass ornament, in itself barely beautiful to behold. This moment, in its own simplicity, transfixed and transformed me.

I'd like to catch the sunlight in unexpected places – to trust the Lord's will and to embrace the truth that God is there in every moment, whether illuminating the entire sky or peeking between the shades.