In her novel, Run, Ann Pagdett introduces us to a fourteen year-old girl named Kenya.  Kenya lives in the projects of Boston – a difficult and sometimes dangerous place — just a few blocks from the beautiful brownstones and prestigious universities of Cambridge but a world away nonetheless.  We also learn that Kenya possesses a rare athletic gift.  She is a track star – a real prodigy who runs with power and grace.  

One day, Kenya takes the city bus to Cambridge, to the campus of Harvard.  She has come with one goal in mind: To run.  Kenya manages to talk her way past the gate attendant checking for Student ID’s and onto the beautifully manicured track of Harvard University.
 
Padgett writes that at first, Kenya kept her workout light swinging past “gently jogging sorority girls” and a “step lunge guy” who “moved like a mechanical doll.” But, then, “Kenya let herself float forward.  Every step became “a leap,” Kenya’s legs “like scissors opening wide.”  As Kenya ran “like a beautiful, infallible machine,” all the other runners on the track began to stop their own workouts and simply watch her.  As Padgett says, they did this “the way dancers will stop when the soloist steps forward to dominate the stage.” (Ann Padgett, Run, Harper, New York, 2007).

I wonder if we are to encounter the Easter story of John’s Gospel (John 20: 1-18) in a similar way.  Everywhere we look people are running and if we allow our imagination to take hold, it is beautiful to watch.  Mary Magdalene runs with all her might to bear witness to the other disciples that the stone has rolled away.  Peter and John race each other through the garden to see if what she has told them could be true.  

As the runners on the Harvard track stopped to watch Kenya in all her beauty and grace, so should we.  As the season of Easter begins, we watch Mary and Peter and John.  With their exuberance, they show us how the resurrection is to be received into our own lives.  Like Kenya, they allow us to see what is possible through the disciplined training that we in the church call “discipleship.”  I see these three disciples pouring out their hearts on that first Easter morning, and I stop and stare.  I say to myself something those persons on the Harvard track must also have thought, “If only I could run like that!”  And then I realize, I can.  I, too, am called to be a disciple.  If I will let myself “float forward” into the mystery of the resurrection, my heart – and yours – may “open wide” and really run.   

“Holy Spirit” by Hildegard of Bingen, Risking Everything, 110 Poems of Love and Revelation, p.15.

Holy Spirit,
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
you are our true life,
luminous, wonderful,
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.

My favorite line in this poem is “awakening the heart from its ancient sleep”: Hildegard of Bingen was a German abbess of the tenth century.  She founded two monasteries and is remembered for her mystical theology and religious poetry.  This seems somewhere between a poem and a prayer to me.  I am drawn to the images of redemption and grace.  Yet, its the last line that speaks of our Lenten journey.  The goal of  all this self-reflection is not just self-awareness.  Rather, as we consider our “mistakes,” and “wounds” we are also reminded of God’s love and care.  We neglect this.  Like Jonah in the bow of the boat, we fall asleep and miss so much all around us … so many signs of grace.  As in the classic fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” our  torpor is a kind of death. Perhaps during Holy Week we will open ourselves to God’s spirit with the hope that our hearts will awaken again.

WERE YOU THERE?

In his native England, Julian Barnes is a public intellectual in the best sense of the word. A literary editor and television pundit, Barnes   has also written many well-received books including eleven novels.  A few years ago I read Barnes’ memoir, Nothing to be Frightened Of.  Despite the e sunny title, this book is a confession of Barnes’ lifelong struggle to come to grips with his mortality.  I found it powerful, at once deeply philosophical and deeply personal.  Ever since,  I have intended toread one of Barnes’ other novels.  When The Sense of an Ending arrived on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I received more than I imagined.  This beautifully written book – winner of the Man Booker Prize – complements his earlier memoir on mortality.

If Barnes’ memoir tried to come to terms with the limits of time, with the reality that for each of us, time does come to an end, his latest novel wrestles with “time’s malleability,” how it “bends and doubles back” throughout the course of our lives.  On the first page of The Sense of an Ending, we meet Tony Webster – a middle-aged, divorced retiree – sharing a reflection that is both deeply philosophical and deeply personal:

We live in time – it holds us and molds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.  It takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.  Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing never to return.  (Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, Alfred A. Knopf, pp.4-5).

When we first meet Tony he has just received a very strange gift.  A woman he met only once – the mother of a long-ago college girlfriend – has bequeathed to him a diary that belonged to another friend from his youth named Adrian Finn.  Reading Adrian’s diary, leads Tony to reflect on his days in secondary school as he and Adrian banded together with two other boys to endure the awkward years of pining for girls and competing for the attention of an admired schoolmaster.  He recalls how the gifted and well-rounded Adrian outpaces the other members of their little group.  Adrian receives a scholarship to Cambridge and then innocently wins over Tony’s girlfriend after the two had broken off their romance.  That’s when Tony remembers something else, something that fills him with remorse.  A poisonous letter he wrote the new couple wishing them nothing but heartbreak and misery.  Tony then begins to put the pieces together and comes to recognize the destructive role his letter came to play in Adrian’s life and with every member of his girlfriend’s family.

When Tony realizes this, he experiences an emotion more painful than regret.  He feels remorse.  He then describes the difference: “Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you.”  He feels “the strength of the [original] bite.” Something he did forty years ago and the wound is fresh again because time is pliable.

This helps me understand the Lenten spiritual, Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  This plaintive hymn evokes something deeper than regret that such a terrible thing happened to Jesus.  It calls for remorse.  We feel the sting of recognition that somehow you and I participated in the crucifixion.  We share responsibility for the death of our Lord.  As the Lenten season draws to a close, time becomes pliable.

Were you there?  pleads the spiritual, when they crucified our Lord?  Yes I was, we must say, I was there and as the soldiers did their work I held the nails for them.

The Butterfly Effect

Mark Ralls ~ March 15, 2012

Intricate webs of relationship link all of life together.  This truth is sometimes called “the butterfly effect.”  This concept goes back to a mathematician named Edward Lorenz who demonstrated in mathematical terms how one seemingly insignificant action can have unexpected influence on far off events.  His demonstration led some philosophers of science to ask a bizarre question: Could the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a chain of events that ultimately results in a Texas tornado?

I’m not smart enough to even venture a guess about that, but I do believe that our moral influence is much more powerful than most of us ever imagine.  This is one of the themes of Stephen King’s new novel 11/23/63.  The novel begins in a diner.  The proprietor, Al Templton, summons one of his customers, a burned-out and recently divorced English teacher named Jake Epping, for an urgent meeting.  Al is close to death and he must share his secret with someone before it is too late.  The pantry of his diner is actually a time portal that bridges the present to September 9, 1958.  In less skilled hands, such a worn-out premise would come off hokey, but King brings a philosophical depth to the question of time travel.  Thisin part due to the author’s fascination with “the butterfly effect.”  Al suggests as much in their first meeting.  He proposes to Jake that if he remained in the past until the fateful day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he could dramatically alter the course of history. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” he tells Jake, “this is your chance.  Save Kennedy, save his brother.  Save Martin is Luther King.  Stop the race riots.  Stop Vietnam, maybe …. You could save millions of lives.”  Jake takes the challenge and goes back in time with the goal of changing history.

Yet, it’s a long wait from 1958 to 1963.  So he moves to a small town in Texas and becomes a teacher once again.  One of the more touching themes in the novel is that Jake rediscovers his love of teaching.  In one especially touching chapter, he directs a high school drama of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, helping a shy football player discover his remarkable dramatic gifts. His little production becomes a conduit for change in that little Texas town.

Like George Bailey in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jake is blessed with the opportunity to see the difference he has made in the lives of others.  When he returns to the present, he is able to reconstruct the arc of the lives of those he met fifty years hence.  One of the things he discovers is that it is, in fact, his smallest acts – not only preventing a presidential assassination – that have changed the course of history.  Like a butterfly flapping its wings, even Jake’s smallest acts of compassion and friendship ripple through time and alter history.  Jake unleashes the butterfly effect.

Of course, the moral of the story is so do we.  All of us have the potential to change the course of history.  And, more often than not, this potential lies in simple expressions of mercy and random acts of kindness.  A reflection I once read from an Episcopal priest suggests as much.  “When I was young,” he said, “I wanted to change the world, but the world did not want to be changed.  So in discouragement, I decided to change my community; but to my disappointment, my community did not want to change.  As I grew older, I decided that perhaps at least I could change my family, but alas I could not.  Finally, as a last resort I decided to at least change myself.  And then I realized that had I begun by changing myself, my change might have influenced my family, my family might have influenced my community and my community might have begun to change the world” (qtd. In John Izzo, Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder, p.166).

the weight of an anchor. I am

frayed where it would be highly useful – 

and this I feel perpetually — to make a point.

I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.

Only, I don’t know how to concentrate –

I know only the look of someone concentrating,

indistinguishable from nearsightedness.

Dan Chiasson

It is hard for you to be near me,

my silly intensity shuffling

all the insignia of interiority.

Knowing me never made anyone a needle.

“Thread” by Dan Chiasson The New Yorker December 22 and 29, 2008, p.57

Frayed

Yesterday – Ash Wednesday – marked the beginning of Lent.  During the weeks to come, we are called to reflect on our sins.  But, what is sin?  The Bible doesn’t try to define sin.  Instead, it describes sin with a cluster of metaphors.  Sin is getting lost, missing the mark, turning away.  Dan Chiasson, who teaches poetry at Wellsely College, offers another potential metaphor.  My favorite line of this poem reads:  I am frayed where it would be highly useful … to make a point.  That’s a good description of sin.  Sin leaves us frayed.  And, as Chiasson suggests, we feel this perpetually.  Sin lies at the heart of our discontent.  It is the cause of our restlessness.  As a result, we experience a myriad of feelings rooted in regret, shame and alienation.  Most of all, we experience a general anxiety called guilt.  Guilt is a vague sense that we are “frayed” in precisely the parts of us where it would be most helpful to make a point.

During Lent, we consider this.  We consider those parts of us that have become too frayed to pass through the needle’s eye.  Such somber reflection is never fun but it is to use Chiasson’s words highly useful.  It is necessary for all those who long to have their lives concentrated into a specific point — the image of Christ.

There would be persuasion need, with assurances made all around, how Rhonda would be the one doing them the favor.  Which was perfectly true.  There are times when a family needs an orphan.                                                                     

The Year We Left Home, 2011
Jean Thompson, p. 247.

In Thompson’s engaging novel, we follow one family – the Erickson’s of Iowa – over a span of thirty years.  We meet the siblings as teens in 1973 and then keep pace with them well into the joys and disappointments of middle age.  One of the siblings is enduring a difficult marriage and doing her best to raise kids of her own.  That’s Rhonda comes into her life.  The victim of domestic abuse, Rhonda really needs a safe place.  What I love about this passage is the awareness that Rhonda is not the only one in need.  “There are times when a family needs an orphan.”

Too often when Christians think of serving the poor we focus entirely on their benefit.  We assume we are helping them out and fail to recognize how they are fulfilling our need.

In his blog, Ministry with the Poor, Bishop Ken Carder that of all the spiritual disciplines that John Wesley insisted that Methodists observe, the most neglected is friendship with the poor.  Carder reminds us that Wesley viewed Bible reading, worship attendance, prayer incomplete without friendship with the poor.  Too often, he says, Methodist churches settle for almsgiving – (writing checks to charities) rather than cultivating intentional relationships with the economically disadvantaged.

My former congregation – Asbury First UMC in Rochester NY — had two remarkable ministries that occurred on the campus of the church – the Dining and Caring Center which served meals and the Storehouse which provided clothing.  I was once asked by the confirmation class how serving as pastor of their church had changed me.  It was an easy question.  I described those two ministries and the friendships that I experienced through them.  I told them how much I regretted all those previous years in ministry when I neglected the spiritual discipline of friendship with the poor.  I told them that my regret was not just what I had failed to do for them, but that I had gone without the wisdom and the witness that they have to share with me.   I remember saying, “I always assumed folks who were struggling needed me.  Now I know that I’m the one who needs them.”

When I read this passage from The Year We Left Home, I thought of these confirmands and their perceptive question.  There are times when a family needs an orphan.  It’s just as true that every church – every community of Christians – needs the poor.  Both are “perfectly true.”

She looks for wiggly fishes,

At least so it appears,

To stuff inside the suitcase

That’s swinging from her ears.

And though she’s very graceful

When flying round and round,

How does she get that faceful

Of luggage off the ground?

     J. Patrick Lewis, “The Beak of the Pelican”
     Hippopotamusn’t, The Dial Press, 1990.

I like this poem because it is childlike and fun.  Most of the poetry I read seems so serious, but this one appears to aim at nothing more than a smile or a chuckle.  And yet my favorite line – she’s very graceful – also gives a hint of something profound.

This summer, Jennifer and I spent a week at Dafauskie Island off the coast of Savannah.  If you want to experience nature, it would be hard to find a better beach than Dafauskie.  On one morning walk, the beach was deserted.  Not another soul, save one–a pelican.   I saw him in the distance and gave a little prayer of thanks that I remembered to bring along Jennifer’s camera.  I hoped to get close enough for a shot.

I was surprised that the pelican allowed me to come quite close and take this picture as he eyed me with a wary patience.  She – as far as I know she was a she – looked very graceful.  Perhaps not physically graceful but spiritually so.  She seemed peaceful, content, centered.   All those missing attributes I had gone on vacation to re-discover.  She was graceful in the sense of a gracious host, welcoming my presence though I surely looked as odd to her as she did to me.

Graceful is a good word for pelicans.  For in Christian tradition, the pelican is a symbol of grace–a sign of Christ.  Ancient observers of the natural world mistakenly believed that a mother pelican would feed its young in a most peculiar manner.  She would pierce herself with her long beak and nourish her young from the blood of her breast.  Ancients thought this because they often stood with their red-tipped beak resting against their breast.

So the pelican became a symbol of grace – a sign of God in Christ who as Augustine noted “gave us life by his own blood.”  Thus we find pelicans in stained glass and crouching above cathedral doors.  I never really got it.  I always thought they looked out of place in church.

Yet, after my encounter with my gracious host on Dafuaskie beach, I am beginning to see pelicans with new eyes.  When I took one step too close, she decided enough was enough.  She flew away.  And as I snapped this shot she looked grace-full in every way.  She appeared as she was – close to heaven and a fitting image of God, our gracious Host.