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The bishops of the United Methodist Church have composed a pastoral letter entitled, “God’s Renewed Creation:  Call to Hope and Action”, with an accompanying foundation document.   They have asked that the pastoral letter be presented to local congregations. On Sunday, April 25, 2010, marking the Festival of Creation (Earth Sunday), selections from these documents were read in worship by seventeen readers, with accompanying music by piano, the choir and bells.   You can find the complete documents at the website for the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference  http://www.gnjumc.org/651/

(Single bell.)

Jeff:  “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” 

(Single bell.)

Kelsey:  Genesis 1 verse 31.

(Single bell.)

(Choir hums a verse of “Be Still, My Soul.”) 

Jeff:   God’s creation is in crisis. 

Michael:  As the bishops of the United Methodist Church have declared, we cannot remain silent while God’s people and God’s planet suffer. 

Kelsey: This beautiful natural world is a loving gift from God, the Creator of all things seen and unseen.

Michael:  God has entrusted its care to all of us, but we have turned our backs on God and on our responsibilities. 

Jeff: Our neglect, selfishness, and pride have fostered:

(Single bell is rung.)

Kelsey: pandemic poverty and disease,

(Single bell is rung.)

Michael:  environmental degradation and climate change, and

(Single bell is rung.)

Jeff:  a world awash with weapons and violence.   

Kelsey:  We must see and respond to the ways in which these particular threats interact with one another.  

Michael:  For example, we cannot address global poverty without addressing water shortage made worse every day by global warming. 

Kelsey:  We cannot stem the proliferation of weapons without examining dwindling natural resources or minerals as causes of violent conflict. 

Michael:  We cannot talk bout the need for health care, schools, roads, and wells without re-evaluating the amount of money we spend on weapons. 

(Michael and Kelsey sit down.  Bob Keller and Anna take their places. Bells begin.  )

(Bells: “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”  Two times through.)

Jeff:  We must prepare our hearts and minds by turning to God, placing all anxiety, loss, and grief before the One who is our every present help in time of trouble. 

Anna:  And, with God’s grace, we remember the story that guides and sustains us, holds us accountable, and gives us hope. 

Bob:  It is the story that begins with God’s loving gift of creation and culminates in God’s promise of renewal for all. 

Anna:  It is the story of the Word made flesh, the Incarnation, God’s presence with us. 

Bob:  It is the story of Jesus’ ministry to the most vulnerable, his denunciation of violence, greed, and oppression, and his call to discipleship. 

Anna:  It is the story of resurrection, of the triumph of life over death, and of the promise of new life in Christ. 

Jeff:  And it is the story of transformation, from old to new, from woundedness to wholeness, and from injustice and violence to the embrace of righteousness and peace. 

Bob:  We have a role to play in this story, but we have not faithfully performed it. 

God entrusted us with creation. 

Anna: But, instead of faithfully caring for our peaceful planet and its people, we have neglected the poor, polluted our air and water, and filled our communities with instruments of war. 

Jeff:  We have turned our backs on God and one another. 

Bob:  By obstructing God’s will, we have contributed to pandemic poverty and disease, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of weapons and violence. 

Anna:  Around the world, we feel the effects of this interconnected trio in different ways and to varying degrees,

Bob:  but there is no doubt that we all are experiencing elements of the same storm. 

(Bob and Anna sit down.   Andee and David take their places.  Anita begins playing her meditative piano piece.)

Jeff:  The storm builds as powerful forces swirl together… to impact poverty:

(Single bell is rung.)

David:  The global economic crisis,  as systems built upon self-interest and fraud devastate the global economy; the resource crisis, as food, water and energy become scarce; the justice/poverty crisis, as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen; the global health crisis, as millions die of the preventable diseases of poverty like malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; and the refugee crisis, as millions of people are displaced by violence, natural disaster, and loss of jobs. 

Jeff:  To impact the environment:

(Single bell is rung.) 

Andee:  The energy crisis, as oil reserves run out within two or three decades; the climate crisis,  as increasing greenhouse gases threaten to scorch the earth and desertification erodes productive land, polar ice melts, fire seasons lengthen, and coastal floods and severe storms increase in number; the bio-diversity crisis, as at least one-fifth of all plant and animal species face extinction by 2050.

Jeff:  To impact weapons and violence:

(Single bell is rung.) 

David:  The weapons crisis, as the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical attack looms and precious resources are poured into the sink-hole of futile arms races; the small arms crisis, as roughly 639 million arms and light weapons circulate the world and the illegal small arms trade is estimated at close to $1 billion; the “security” crisis,  as global military spending surpasses 1.2 trillion dollars in 2007, with the United States spending 45% of this amount.

Andee:  Despite these interconnected threats to life and hope, God’s creative work continues. 

David:  Despite the ways we all contribute to these problems, God still invites each one of us to participate in the work of renewal. 

Jeff:  We must begin the work of renewing creation by being renewed in our own hearts and minds. 

(Piano stops.)

Jeff:  We cannot help the world until we change our way of being in it. 

(Jeff initiates  “Spirit of the living God” sung acapello.  David and Andee sit down.  Hwa and Bob take their place.  At conclusion of singing one verse, Hwa reads.)

Hwa:  Today, the human family is awakening to alarming news: 

Bob Adams:  after several thousand years of a stable climate that enabled us to thrive, the earth is heating up at an accelerating rate. 

Hwa:  Climate change poses a particular threat to the world’s poor because it increases

the spread of diseases like malaria and causes conflicts over dwindling natural

resources. 

Bob Adams:  Easy access to small arms ensures that such conflicts turn deadly, and the specter of a nuclear war that would destroy the earth continues to loom over us. 

Hwa:  Clearly, we have arrived at “a hinge of history,” a revolutionary time of great

challenge. 

Bob Adams:  We turn again to the ancient wisdom of our scriptures and remember the

ringing challenge of God: 

Hwa:  “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” 

Bob Adams:  Isaiah chapter 43, verse 19.  (Bell rings once.)

Hwa:  Do we not see signs that God is at work in this crisis?

(Anita begins playing again.  Hwa and Bob sit down. Jack and David Kinsley take their places.)

Jeff:  As the earth is transformed, God has blessed human beings with the capacity to read the signs of the times and to respond with intelligence and faith. 

Jack:  Learned scientists and experts monitor the change that impact our very survival.  They are clarifying the measures we must take immediately to save our forests, oceans, air, human and animal ecosystems. 

David:  More than that:  God has inspired human beings to envision new futures and to invent the tools necessary to make them a reality: 

Jack:  Technologies to replace fossil fuels with energy from the wind and sun; new forms of transportation, “green jobs,” and guides for cutting “carbon footprints.” 

David:  Thousands and thousands of person in faith-based and community-based coalitions, congregations, businesses and farms are already acting for change in quiet, persistent and profound ways. 

Jack:  Even further:  God is bringing people together to plan and to act upon emerging

realities:  

David:  Villages, towns and local governments urge and guide neighbors to share common cause; cities, states and nations identify the special needs of their citizens and

implement solutions; the United Nations and international agencies research global

problems, identify solutions, and shape the organizations to address them. 

Jack:  Public leaders are working at a feverish pace to reshape the rules of engagement between humans and the earth. 

David:  Empowering all of this is an amazing network of globe-circling monetary, industrial, transportation and communications systems such as the human family has never before known.

Jack:  Finally:  Christian and interreligious communities are speaking out boldly on the

interrelated nature of the present crisis. 

David:  When we see all of creation as one body, we know that our collective health cannot be realized as long as some still suffer.

Jack:  We are no more secure than the most vulnerable among us; no more prosperous than the poorest; and no more assured of justice and dignity than those who live in the shadows of power, void of fairness and equity. 

David:  As disciples of Christ, who showed special concern for the most vulnerable members of society, we must open our eyes to the ways in which environmental degradation and violence particularly hurt the poor and marginalized. 

(Jack and David return to their seats.  Piano stops.  Ese and Garrett take their places.)

Jeff:  Why is all of this happening?  Because the peoples of the world are reading the signs carefully — we see clearly that God is doing a new thing, and that God is inviting the human family to participate in transformation.  

(Bell rings once.)

Ese:  “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

(Bell rings once.)

Garrett:  Jeremiah chapter 29 verse 11.

Ese:  It is understandable to look out on this broken and suffering world and feel despair. 

Garrett:  But the brokenness and suffering are not the complete story. 

Ese:  They are part of our experience, but not the sum total of it. 

Jeff:  Amidst corruption,

Garrett:  there is honesty;

Jeff:  amidst greed,

Ese:  there is generosity;

Jeff:  amidst killing,

Garrett:  there is compassion;

Jeff:  amidst destruction,

Ese:  there is creation;

Jeff:  amidst devastation;

Garrett:  there is preservation;
Jeff:  amidst apathy,

Ese:  there is righteous indignation,

Garrett:  holy dissatisfaction,

Ese:  and a passion for the possible.  If we look carefully, we see seeds of hope that can be cultivated by God’s Spirit. 

(Ese and Garrett sit down.  Denise and Kate take their places.  Choir starts humming #528 “Nearer, My God, to Thee”, two times until ending below.)
Jeff:  In East Africa, dock workers refuse to off-load a foreign vessel carrying smuggled small arms.  Doing what they can to stop the killing in their continent, they also send word to other dock-workers who refuse the shipment when it arrives farther south. 

Denise:  United Methodists from Lage, Germany forge a partnership with a people in Cambine, Mozambique to install solar panels on the local maternity hospital and a theological seminary. 

Kate:  In a number of United States cities, people of faith are joining together in a dynamic program called “Heeding God’s Call” to reduce gun violence.

Denise:  John Welsey insisted,

Jeff:  “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social.  No holiness but social holiness.” 

Kate:  Ours is not solely a private faith, but one that also orients us toward God and the needs of our neighbor and world. 

Denise:  We feel the energy in thousands every day in our United Methodist connection. 

We are strengthened and inspired by the Toberman Neighborhood House in San Pedro, California, which provides services for gang prevention and gang intervention, family counseling and mental health, child care, and community organizing. 

Kate:  The Toberman House is one of 100 national mission institutions founded by the women of the Methodist tradition in 1903 and still supported by UMW Mission giving. 

Denise:  Since 14 were killed during a workers’ strike in 2004 in the Philippines, members of The United Methodist Church have organized weekly to visit workers, hear their stories, witness, struggles, visit the Congress, circulate petitions and renew their resolve to work for justice and peace. 

Kate:  These life-changing experiences of sharing strengths, fears, and vulnerabilities, as well as faith and love, empower young people to choose hope amid discouragement.

(Choir’s humming comes to an end.  Denise and Kate sit down.  Bert and Fred take their places. 

Jeff:  Stories about our disregard and destruction of one another and the earth more frequently grab the headlines.  But acts of perseverance, compassion, care, positive innovation take place every day in every corner of our world. 

(Anita begins playing meditative music again.)

Bert:  Right now, there is someone writing a letter to oppose a discriminatory practice or to advocate on behalf of workers treated unjustly or to support the ratification of a weapons ban. 

Fred:  The United Methodist Committee on Relief is setting up disaster response centers and training to “prevent a bad thing from becoming worse.” 

Bert:  Someone is sitting by a bedside to provide comfort in a community center, a trainer prepares a doctor to use methods of nonviolent resistance in order to make a change without violence. 

Fred:  Somewhere, there is a new school opening and a new well functioning. 

Bert:  People are unpacking boxes of medical supplies and mosquito nets. 

Fred:  Children are educating their parents about global warming, and organizations are examining their carbon footprint. 

Bert:  New forms of transportation are coming on the market:  hybrid cars and plug-in cars and hydrogen cars and cleaner burning diesels that do not give children respiratory diseases as they roar through neighborhoods. 

Fred:  With the tools of ecumenical organizations congregations are doing energy audits, recycling materials, replacing energy-guzzling appliances and installing solar panels and wind turbines. 

Bert:  No matter how discouraging things seem, no matter how overwhelmed and anxious we feel; no matter how apathetic or cynical we become, God is already at work in the world.  (Piano ends.)

Jeff:  We must only open our eyes to see God’s vision, open our hearts to receive God’s grace, and open our hands to do the work God calls us to do. 

Please pray with us.

Bert:  (Slowly.)  Powerful God of grace and mercy, (bell rings)

Fred:  Make us wise as to how fragile and dependent and connected we are, (bell rings)

Jeff:  That in the indulgence in the destruction of others, (bell rings)

Bert:  We inevitably destroy ourselves. (bell rings.)

Fred:  Give us the grace to be thankful for what we have, (bell rings)

Jeff:  And the willingness to share.  (bell rings)

Bert:  As your church labours in the world,  (bell rings)

Fred:  Cause it to be more interested in your reign of righteousness  (bell rings)

Jeff:  Than in its own survival, (bell rings)

 Bert:  So that the world may grow into a kinder, gentler, safer place in which to live.  (bell rings)

 Fred:  In Jesus’ name, Amen.  (bell rings.)

On a web site about the philosophy of Victor Frankl, I came across the following social commentary that struck me as insightful. We pick up as the author is describing vacuum of meaning that is the common experience of people in our culture:

And when does this vacuum open up, when does this so often latent vacuum become manifest? In the state of boredom.

Boredom is the main symptom of this illness. To see if society is sick one has just to observe how deeply boredom – in its many forms and manifestations – overflows peoples’ lives. Sometimes it becomes unbearable, and then its companions: addiction, depression and aggression, become the threat not only to the individual but also to society as a whole.
Just a glimpse of the state of boredom among Americans – a significant segment of American society – does not leave any doubts that the crisis of meaning has overwhelmed this great nation.

Robert Kaplan (1994), a noted American journalist gives a vivid picture of the existential vacuum that has engulfed America:
When voter turnout decreases to around 50 percent at the same time the middle class is spending astounding sums in gambling casinos and state lotteries, joining private health clubs and using large amounts of stimulants and anti-depressants, one can legitimately be concerned about the state of American society. We have become voyeurs and escapists. Many of us don’t play sports but love watching great athletes with great physical attributes. It is because people find so little in themselves that they fill their world with celebrities. The masses avoid important national and international news because much of it is tragic, even as they show an unlimited appetite for the details of Princess Diana’s death.

An important symptom of the sickness – and it can be observed not only in America – is the willingness to give up self and responsibility, which Robert Kaplan even sees as a “sine qua non for tyranny.”

Perhaps tyranny is not something that threatens America today. However, the most serious problems in America, that haunt the nation, are direct consequences of that boredom triad.

*Addiction to illicit drugs is one of the most pressing problems in America today. President George H. W. Bush, in 1989, called drugs “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation.” Later, President Clinton termed drugs as Americaís “constant curse.” The street cocaine market in the United States has been stable for years and totals over $35 billion a year. Approximately 1.5 to 2 million people is regular cocaine or crack cocaine users. Although, in percentages, the numbers of ethnic minority drug users are higher, the market itself — and that is what is important even if one only wants to stop the spread of drugs — is sustained mainly by whites, middle and upper-middle class whites.

America has spent and continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to stop the supply of illicit drugs. But it is the demand for drugs that makes the problem so serious. In fact, it is the problem. Naive attempts to curb the demand, like the Just Say No to Drugs! Campaign launched in 1986 by the then First Lady Nancy Reagan, have miserably failed.

Gambling – through numerous state-supported lotteries, and legal and semi-legal casinos spreading in America like mushrooms after rain – is pandemic. Other forms of addiction, among them the addiction to video and computer games (especially among children), and to the Internet, are also wide spread.

*Depression has reached the proportion of an epidemic in America. Some 20 million people suffer from depression. It has been accepted as something unfortunate but natural. One in five children meets the government criteria for mental health help. And depression among children grows at an astonishing rate of 23% per year!

In 2001, three million American teenagers thought about committing suicide, and one million actually attempted it. According to medical authorities, in most cases the leading cause was depression. The use of Prozac and other psychotropic drugs skyrockets. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly makes on Prozac over $1 billion annually. And no voices are heard even hinting on the possible existential causes of this epidemic.

As for *aggression, it finds its realization in proliferation of violence – both in the media (movies, TV, video and computer games) and real life. It is a general belief in this country that Hollywood deliberately engulfs America with violent movies. But it is, again, the problem of supply vs. demand.

Why do people like and want to watch these kinds of movies and TV programs? The reason is exactly the same as that, which, two millennia ago made the Roman mobs pack the Coliseums where gladiator slaves killed each other, or were thrown to wild animals. This reason was and is boredom.

A powerful factor that also feeds aggression in America is the proliferation of firearms. It is now threatening normal life in our cities and towns. In my view, the desire to “bear arms” is not so much a result of Americans’ deep-laying mistrust of government as a potentially oppressive institution, but as a response to high level of the boredom-born aggression in American men – a vicious circle.

All segments of our society have been penetrated by the existential vacuum. Frankl also calls it “frustration of meaning.” This sickness, rooted in the meaning of one’s existence, is nearly universal: as the post-industrial revolution spreads worldwide, it infects affluent societies, welfare states, and even the poorest countries.

In America the crisis is exacerbated by the fact that our education does not help people to overcome the infection, but rather enhances its toll. Our younger generation is the victim who suffers most from the crisis. The use of illicit drugs by youths and juvenile crime are steadily on the rise in America today. Their cause is almost without exception the meaninglessness in the lives of our children.

In fact, the very foundations of the American philosophy of life have been threatened. The American Dream – the dream of affluence and success – does not seems to promise happiness anymore. Acquiring wealth and success does not add meaning to life: among the drug users there are more affluent than poor…

The quintessence of this devastating crisis has been expressed in a statement by International Network on Personal Meaning:
In modern society, several forces and trends are converging in creating a crying need for meaning and spirituality. Prosperity without a purpose leads to disillusion and emptiness. Progress without a spiritual direction results in confusion and uncertainty. A winner-take-all economy contributes to conflict and injustice. Violence, conflict, addiction, depression, and suicide reflect an existential crisis. The paradox of prosperity without happiness reflects an unfulfilled spiritual hunger. The intense competition of the new economy results in an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

(Sharon Coughlin called my attention to this article in AARP magazine about McKibben’s new book.  It seems tie in directly with this past week’s sermon.) 

Attention shopaholics and supersizers. Go nowhere near an important new book called Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007). You may never indulge the same way again.

Author Bill McKibben, the Harvard-trained economist and activist who’s forged a career reporting on such hot-button topics as overpopulation and global warming, wants to send a shock wave through our retail-addicted culture. “The idea that more is better, which has been orthodoxy for the past 50 years, no longer matches reality,” McKibben tells me from the rural Vermont home he shares with his wife, author Sue Halpern, and their 14-year-old daughter. “More stuff doesn’t make people happier.” In fact, once our basic needs are met, the very opposite seems to be true.

In the past decade the burgeoning field of happiness studies has overturned many of our basic assumptions about where satisfaction comes from, how long it lasts, and where we should focus our energy. The results of our choices are not as life-changing as we think they’ll be (the novelty passes; the credit card bills remain), and many of capitalism’s long-standing assumptions—that acquisitions improve our lives—turn out to be a load of hooey. Consider a have-versus-have-not example from a visit McKibben made to a factory in rural China, where he spoke with a worker named Liu-Xia. Making small talk, he asked Liu-Xia, 18, if she owned a stuffed animal: he’d noticed that many of the girls in the factory dorm had one on their beds. She began to cry. She couldn’t afford such an item, she said. Later, when McKibben brought her a stuffed dog, “the girl was as pleased as I’ve ever seen a person.” For McKibben the contrast was clear. His own daughter, he notes, has a roomful of Beanie Babies. How could a stuffed animal possibly have the same meaning for her? “In that world,” McKibben says, thinking of Liu-Xia, “possessions still deliver.”
Not so in the United States, where the Eisenhower-era ideal of bigger cars, faster foods, and automatic everything has been nearly as devastating to our nation’s psyche as rampant consumption has been to the earth. Once measured to have the happiest citizens in the developed world, the United States is now number 23, according to research compiled at the University of Leicester. Alcoholism, suicide, and depression rates have soared, with fewer than one in three Americans claiming to be “very happy.” Even more frightening is the trickle-down effect of this malaise on our kids. Studies suggest that today’s average American child reports suffering higher levels of anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in the 1950s.

“All that material progress—and all the billions of barrels of oil and millions of acres of trees that it took to create it—seems not to have moved the satisfaction meter an inch,” says McKibben. “It’s as if we’ve done an experiment in whether consumption produces happiness and determined that it doesn’t.”
The reasons for this paradox are complex. In part, as with McKibben’s daughter, it’s because we all have more than enough stuffed animals in our lives. But McKibben sees a link between our isolated, overstuffed homes and a breakdown in community—the unseen emotional price of cheap goods and big lives. “Our global economy comes at the cost of local economy and human connection,” he says. The pursuit of mammon “has turned us ever more into individuals and ever less into members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.” We scrimp and save for the bigger house, only to find ourselves more cut off from friends and family.

Suburban sprawl has been an undeniable culprit in our widespread alienation. With population density plummeting, and houses getting bigger, the likelihood of bumping into neighbors drops enormously. “An awful lot of boomers began their adult lives doing extremely idealistic things,” he adds. “Many of these ideals fell away as we became immersed in consuming. Now we need to find our way back.”

There are straightforward ways of scaling down our lives. Consider the local farmers’ market, now the fastest-growing sector of our food economy. The average bite of food an American eats travels some 1,500 miles before it reaches our table. Yet it takes a tenth as much energy to grow foods locally, and shoppers are reported to have about ten times as many social interactions at their farmers’ market than in the aisles of, say, Wal-Mart.

To test his own theory, McKibben decided to see if he and his family could make it through a glacial Vermont winter subsisting exclusively on food produced near their home in the Champlain Valley. The author specializes in real-life experiments: he walked from Vermont to New York for his memoir, Wandering Home (Crown Journeys, 2005). The results of this “year of eating locally” are fascinating. The imperative of finding food nearby, while time-consuming, helped forge bonds with neighbors he’d never met and deepened his intimacy with the landscape. Newly connected to his home, McKibben emerges from his citrus-deprived winter a deeper and healthier man, having consumed not a single processed food. “The winter permanently altered the way I eat,” he says. “It left a good taste in my mouth. That good taste was satisfaction.”
Not all of us can afford to give up the bargain prices at superstores. McKibben-the-economist is sensitive to this, though he entreats us to view expenditures differently. While farmers’ market prices may be a bit higher, local foods are fresher (and tastier) and have less impact on the environment. The idea, he says, is not to forgo bulk-item bonanzas completely but to seek a balance between convenience and the economics of neighborliness. “Efficiency has been oversold as a virtue,” he says. “The ability to produce as fast and cheaply as possible has ruined countrysides and abused people and animals.” Study after study shows that our overreliance on processed foods is contributing to a ballooning national obesity problem.

So how did we get here? McKibben traces our troubles to 1712, with the invention of the first practical steam engine. Overnight the energy produced by burning coal could replace a team of 500 horses walking in a circle. “Suddenly 100 percent growth in the standard of living could be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia,” says McKibben. It also explains how human beings have used, shockingly, more raw materials since World War II than in all previous recorded history.

The toxic effects of this struck him hard during his China trip, where in Beijing the sky was so polluted “you could stare straight at the sun.” In an inefficiently energized world where getting rich means getting dirty, copycatting the American lifestyle could push our planet over the brink. At current rates there will be some 1.3 billion Chinese as rich and consumer-minded as our middle class by 2031. “But if the Chinese owned cars like we do, they would add 1.1 billion cars to the 800 million already on the road,” he says, not even mentioning India, Indonesia, and nations in Africa. “If the Chinese ate meat the way we do, they’d consume two thirds of the world’s grain harvest by themselves. The earth will never accommodate that.

“Of course the poor nations of the world need to develop. But if they do so using our model, the planet will break under the strain. We in the rich nations must change. We need to figure out a world that works for everyone.” Doing so just might make us happier.

Mark Matousek is a New York-based writer who’s never liked to shop. He wrote about Joan Didion in the March & April issue of AARP The Magazine.
 

This time of year doesn’t seem to be the best time for me to write, so I offer other voices; in this case, Richard Rohr, a Fransican priest who wrote the following essay on Monday’s “This I believe” on NPR:

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.

I’ve had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. “Hints and guesses,” as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don’t scare me anymore.

When I was young, I couldn’t tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it’s all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe — I’ve counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there’s a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It’s the people who don’t know who usually pretend that they do. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is — quite sadly — absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

Strongest Dad in the World

 [From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]  

 I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans.  Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

 Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

 Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

 And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.

 This love story began in Winchester , Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

  “He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.”

 But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate.  “No way,” Dick says he was told.  “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

 ”Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

 Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words?  “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school  organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out,   “Dad, I want to do that.”

 Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says.  “I was sore for two weeks.”

 That day changed Rick’s life.  “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

 And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon. 

   “No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially:  In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

 Then somebody said,  “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

 How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

 Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

 Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own?  “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

 This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon , in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time’? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of  these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

 ”No question about it,” Rick types.  “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

 And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race.  Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”

 So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

 Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland , Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

 That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

 ”The thing I’d most like,” Rick types,  “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”

 Here’s the video…. (DON’T MISS THE VIDEO!)

The poem by Thomas Transtromer that I read in my sermon this past week:

I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road.
Rolled up in the back seat and went to sleep.
How long?
Hours.
Darkness had come.
All of a sudden I was awake, and didn’t know who I was.
I’m fully conscious, but that doesn’t help.
Where am I?
WHO am I?
I am something that has just woken up in a back seat, throwing itself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack.
Who am I?
After a long while my life comes back to me.
My name comes to me like an angel.
Outside the castle walls there is a trumpet blast (as in the Leonora Overture) and the footsteps that will save me come quickly quickly down the long staircase.
It’s me coming!
It’s me!

But it is impossible to forget the fifteen-second battle in the hell of nothingness, a few feet from a major highway where the cars slip past with their lights dimmed.

Whither shall I go from your spirit? Or wither shall I flee from your presence?(from Psalm 139)

Dag Hammarskold: God does not die the day when we cease to believe in a personal (God), but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Joan Chittister, in “There Is a Season”

Where shall I look for Enlightenment? the disciple asked.

Here, the elder said.

When will it happen? the disciple asked.

It is happening right now, the elder answered.

Then why don’t I experience it? the disciple persisted.

Because you do not look, the elder said.

But what should I look for? the disciple continued.

Nothing. Just look, the elder said.

But at what? the disciple asked again.

At anything your eyes alight upon, the elder answered.

But must I look in a special way? the disciple went on.

No. The ordinary way will do, the elder said.

But don’t I always look the ordinary way? the disciple said.

No, you don’t, the elder said.

But why ever not? The disciple asked.

Because to look you must be here. You’re mostly somewhere else, the elder said.

 

I confess: Over the last 10 days, I did not pay much attention to the Amish school shooting. As the mother of an 8-year old girl, I find school violence stories too painful to follow. Despite attempts to avoid this particular news, the stories of the Amish practice of forgiveness eventually captivated me. Their practice of forgiveness unfolded in four public acts over the course of a week. First, some elders visited Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer, to offer forgiveness. Then, the families of the slain girls invited the widow to their own children’s funerals. Next, they requested that all relief monies intended for Amish families be shared with Roberts and her children. And, finally, in an astonishing act of reconciliation, more than 30 members of the Amish community attended the funeral of the killer.

As my husband and I talked about the spiritual power of these actions, I commented in an offhanded way, “It is an amazing witness to the peace tradition.” He looked at me and said passionately, “Witness? I don’t think so. This went well past witnessing. They weren’t witnessing to anything. They were actively making peace.”

He was right. Their actions not only witness that the Christian God is a God of forgiveness, but they actively created the conditions in which forgiveness could happen. In the most straightforward way, they embarked on imitating Christ: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.” In acting as Christ, they did not speculate on forgiveness. They forgave. And forgiveness is, as Christianity teaches, the prerequisite to peace. We forgive because God forgave us; in forgiving, we participate in God’s dream of reconciliation and shalom.

Then an odd thought occurred to me: What if the Amish were in charge of the war on terror? What if, on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, we had gone to Osama bin Laden’s house (metaphorically, of course, since we didn’t know where he lived!) and offered him forgiveness? What if we had invited the families of the hijackers to the funerals of the victims of 9/11? What if a portion of The September 11th Fund had been dedicated to relieving poverty in a Muslim country? What if we dignified the burial of their dead by our respectful grief?

What if, instead of seeking vengeance, we had stood together in human pain, looking honestly at the shared sin and sadness we suffered? What if we had tried to make peace?

So, here’s my modest proposal. We’re five years too late for an Amish response to 9/11. But maybe we should ask them to take over the Department of Homeland Security. After all, actively practicing forgiveness and making peace are the only real alternatives to perpetual fear and a multi-generational global religious war.

I can’t imagine any other path to true security. And nobody else can figure out what to do to end this insane war. Why not try the Christian practice of forgiveness? If it worked in Lancaster, maybe it will work in Baghdad, too.

Diana Butler Bass is an independent scholar and author. Her latest book, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, is published by Harper San Francisco.