Forgiveness

"When somebody you've wronged forgives you you're spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience.

When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you're spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride.

For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other's presence."

This entry in Frederick Buechner's volume, Wishful Thinking, is at the same time succinct and powerful (as, by the way, are most of Buechner's reflections.)

Forgiveness will trip up even the most faithful of Jesus' servants.  As much as we rely on God's forgiveness through our Lord Jesus, we are challenged to turn around and offer the same sweet gift to those who have wronged us.  Just so you know, this is no different for me than it is for you.

I've given this some thought.  I think there is a secret chamber in my heart that depends on God to forgive me........because that is who God is.  I stand before the Divine Creator and reiterate my frail humanity, mentioning the forces that led to my wrongheadedness.  My prayerful confession can include everything from 'I didn't get enough sleep' to 'he's such a demanding person' to 'Did you see what she did to me first?'

Of course, even I have to admit times when there is no excuse unless one includes laziness, or crankiness, or just plain meanness.  When I take the time to truly consider the broken places in my relationship with other humans and with God, I am full of excuses and explanations.  At some level I want to be left off the hook.  In some secret chamber of my heart, I expect that God will in fact forgive and I can move forward in wholeness.

I feel much less obligation towards my fellow frail human beings.  I am hurt by their actions or words or neglect and until those hurt feelings disappear, I find it difficult to truly forgive.  At best I can slowly wipe the slate clean, a little at a time, until the sin disappears.  The larger the hurt, the longer and more difficult is this process.  I've been at this a long time and I am not sure that I am getting any better at it.

But this I can say.  With each passing year, my grief has grown.  I am grieved when I stand before God seeking forgiveness - not because God loves me less but because I am more acutely aware of the fractures I have caused.  Furthermore, I am grieved when I must confess that I have withheld forgiveness from another.  My inability to forgive becomes a much greater offense than that done to me in the beginning.


Now my conversation with God is more about my blindness to the humanity of others and the hardness of my heart.  My confessions are no shorter, just a bit more focused as I struggle to live out the forgiveness that nourishes my life.

All of this sends me back to Buechner's original quote.  He reminds me how life-giving forgiveness is: not just for the one who has erred, but for the one who forgives as well.  Forgiveness is a font of never ending blessing.  It surprises me that I need to be reminded so often to stop and drink deeply.

Walking with ........the role of compassion

What does compassion require of us?  

For many, compassion is a sentiment which pulls at your heart strings, triggered by touching stories, personal injustices and at times, puppies and small children.  The weak or powerless move us to a compassionate response so we paste a link on Facebook,  write a check, or volunteer some hours to a cause. 

Taking the time to reflect on those people or situations that move us to compassion would be a good spiritual exercise.  Take a couple of days and make a running list of what has moved your heart, what has brought to the fore your 'that's not right' response.  

How many of your items were from your own neighborhood?  Your state?  The nation?  The world?

Who moved you to a compassionate response?  Were they children?  Women?  Teens?  Men?  The Elderly?  Did they all look like you?  Share the same beliefs?  Speak the same language?

What situations prompted your injustice meter?  Hunger?  Addiction?  Abandonment?  Violence?

Were there situations that only led you to argue quietly within?  The homeless person with a sign at the intersection for example.  Did you find yourself saying..."If I give them money, they will only use it for drugs"? "How do I know they are really homeless?"  "Why can't they get a job?"  Not that I am condemning these internal conversations, I am simply asking that we all be truthful with ourselves.

What did it take to move you beyond 'thoughts and prayers' to a concrete action to right the wrong and support the suffering?

At its core, the word compassion means ‘to suffer with or alongside’.  Although we might begin at a distance with a news story or chance encounter, compassion calls us to move closer.  We are to suffer  alongside those whose plight has challenged our sense of justice, to walk with them.  Compassion feels the pain of others, and ultimately, requires action on their behalf.  In the end, a life of compassion is a life of action for others. 

The quintessential example of this in the Bible is Luke's story of the Good Samaritan (chapter 10).  Lots of folks saw the beaten victim of robbery laying on the side of the road.  Priests and officials, plus, I would expect some ordinary citizens trying to get to the market.  They looked, they saw, and yet, 'passed by on the other side' of the road.  The Samaritan (who, BTW, every Israelite thought of as less worthy) stopped, bound up his wounds and provided for his care.  The Samaritan whom no one would have called 'neighbor' acted as neighbor to the anonymous man.

None of us can act every time, in every situation, with equal amounts of commitment and support.  From a spiritual perspective, the problem is not the demands of acting every time, but rather, the emptiness of never acting at all.

When Jesus walked the via dolorosa he provided us with the divine example of what it means to have compassion - to walk alongside those who are suffering, taking their suffering on your shoulders.  

Compassion is not about the weeping that accompanies a poignant TV commercial; it is about taking up your cross with your neighbor.

Love....the only commandment

Love God.  Love your neighbor. 

Some version of this lies at the heart of most religious systems.  Love involves empathy, sacrifice, and concern; all of this is wrapped up in being able to see the unbreakable connection between each of us and each of those we call 'other'.  Love involves relationship.

In 1923, Martin Buber, a German philosopher wrote a book called Ich und Du, usually translated I and Thou.  Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:  first, in the attitude of the "I" towards and "It", that is, towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.  The second approach is in the attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds, where you and I are connected in some manner.

One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships.  In Buber's view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.  A person sitting next to a complete stranger on a park bench may enter into an "I-Thou" relationship with the stranger merely by beginning to think positively about people in general, and thus recognizing the stranger as a person as well.  (thanks to Wikipedia for this succinct summary).

You might not understand what Buber is proposing, but let me put it this way.  We are supposed to love people (thou) and use money (it).  We are prone to love money (thou) and use people (it).

Buber offers us one way to talk about how we get this 'love' thing wrong.  We might think that loving the neighbor requires warm, fuzzy feelings which we often cannot conjure up.  In the end, it doesn't; it requires we sustain relationship with the neighbor.  This is what makes loving your neighbor infinitely ore diffiult than loving God because our neighbors are so very human. They are smelly, nasty, hurtful or in a thousand other ways less than ideal companions. In Sonnet 116,  Shakespeare writes "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds....".  Buber would say that love isn't love when our commitment is to our own comfort and not to the relationship between us.  Love cannot make an object of the other, make it into an 'it', a tool to be used whether for pleasure or gain or safety.  Love requires relationship.

  

Love looks beyond the surface in the neighbor and sees the flawed, scarred, struggling humanity we all share.  Such are the demands of love, that we see worth in every face.  Ergo, loving the neighbor is a tall order on any day of the week.  It's easy to see that loving a God who doesn’t party loudly until 2 am is a lot easier than loving your neighbor who does. 

Yet, it all begins with the neighbor, for how can you love a God you cannot see when you do not love the neighbor you can?  First feed the hungry child and then talk about your love for the Divine Creator.  Love for the Divine Creator is manifest in love for those whom the Divine Creator created.  First, connect with the lost and lonely in person before you talk about connecting with the Divine God who is both mystery and spirit.  

In the end, the commands:  Love God.  Love your neighbor.  are at the heart of our faith only when they are at the heart of our lives.

Making a good confession

Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, doesn't it.  Few people think that the act of confessing has any good in it, mostly because making confession makes us feel pretty bad and how can something which makes us feel so bad be good for us?

 (Just as an aside, I think that is a most foolish question - and we know it - which doesn't keep us from avoiding all things uncomfortable as long as possible.)

We see this dynamic in hundreds of police dramas.  Folks think that if they simply avoid telling the truth that life will go merrily along with no consequences.  Hmmm.  Possibly.  Unless of course, we look deeper than the surface and consider the state of our soul - or spirit if you prefer.

Too few people talk about the freedom that comes with confession - the freedom from hiding, the freedom of being who you actually are, the freedom of walking in this world in truth instead of dragging along a matched set of baggage stuffed with all our wrongs, misdemeanors to felonies.

The hemorrhaging woman in Mark 5 decided to lay down 12 years of pain and anger and sorrow and isolation.  She decided to tell Jesus the whole truth and let the chips fall where they may.  The bleeding had stopped and she was free.  Now she was going to free herself of the stigma and brokenness of the last 12 years.

I have always assumed it was a good confession:  a confession that reached down inside her dark places and dragged them into the light.  But more than that, a good confession recognizes the freedom that has been won, that vast open space where one can live a new and different life.  A good confession not only lays to rest the past, it opens up the future and allows us to breathe deeply.

Listen to this confession (my characterization, not the author's).  It is an excerpt from Ted Loder's prayer Keep Me in Touch with My Dreams, Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, p96

O Lord,

deliver me

     from the arrogance of assuming

        I know enough to judge others;

deliver me

     from the timidity of presuming 

        I don't know enough to help others;

deliver me

     from the illusion of claiming I have changed enough

        when I have only risked little,

that, so liberated,

     I will make some of the days to come different.

O Lord,

I ask not to be delivered

     from the tensions that wind me tight,

but I do ask for a sense of direction in which to move once wound,

     a sense of humor about my disappointments,

        a sense of respect for the elegant puzzlement of being human,

            and a sense of gladness for your kingdom

               which comes in spite of my fretful pulling and tugging.

I invite you into the gift of confession.  Risk being judged wrong.  Be ready to receive the glory of forgiveness.  Go forth and live life.

She told him the whole truth

"the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before Jesus, and told him the whole truth."  Mark 5.33



It is a story about a desperate woman.  There are a lot of stories about desperate women in the Bible; they parallel the plethora of stories about desperate women filling our news cycle.

This story is about a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years.  Beyond the natural discomfort and annoyance, her continual bleeding left her in an untenable situation with the community.  She was unwelcome until the bleeding stopped and she had ritually purified her body.  She was separated from others, and I would guess, a wee bit suspect.  Twelve years?

But she'd heard about Jesus, and sliding up behind him in a crowd she touched the hem of his garment, believing that in this way the power of healing would come to her.  It did.  Jesus noticed and he insisted on knowing who it was who touched him.

Thus the scene above.  She knelt and told him the whole truth.  The whole truth.

I wonder what she said, don't you?

To speak the truth is to confess.  We find confession uncomfortable because the truth that we are telling is generally something embarrassing or dishonorable or just plain wrong.  The truth we tell is this:  we are not perfect human beings and our actions at times cause pain and suffering to others.

We tell this truth to God not because God doesn't already know about our reality, but because there comes a point in every life when our masks need to fall away and we must own ourselves.  We fear this moment.  We fear that those who hear our truth will reject us, mock or vilify us.  I think we are afraid that we won't like ourselves very much either.  So we seek out a large enough bush to hide behind, just like Adam and Eve who said, "I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself"  Gen 3.10

She told Jesus the whole truth.  I am not sure I would know where to begin, but in the end, where I begin is less important than the very beginning of the thing itself.

Discovering ourselves in all our nakedness is not the worst thing that could happen to us.  Spending a lifetime hiding from ourselves just might be.



The whole story of this woman can be found in Mark 5.21-43

A desperate mother......

She has assumed the position against the side of an SUV; you cannot see her face but she is young in body.  Next to her is another anonymous person whose hands are frisking her body.  At her feet stands her two year old daughter as bereft as any two year old can be, crying with her whole body.

This may be the last time that mother sees her daughter for months; neither will know where the other is.  Some stranger will now bring the toddler meals and change diapers.  Some stranger will turn out the lights.   Someone who is not her mother. John Getty image: Woman with Child

There is no resistance.  Neither is there compassion.

She is seeking asylum in the United States.  She came to our southern border and requested asylum.  They frisked her, detained her, and took her child.

The gospel story about a Syro-Phoenician woman could well be a 1st century parallel to this.  The Syro-Phoenicians were enemies of Israel - and the Israelites would tell you that there was good reason behind the enmity, although one wonders how long a people can carry a grudge.  Regardless, the rift went way back and was a well recognized rule of social interaction:  have nothing to do with those people.  We owe them nothing but our contempt.

So when Jesus refuses the woman's request for healing for her daughter, no Israelite hearing this story would be surprised.  Modern readers are a bit put off by the fact that Jesus manages to call the woman a dog in the process.  "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."  A little harsh.

Yet she does not resist; she allows the comment to pass.  She accepts the role given to her, and yet asks, "Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs" ...and 'for saying that' a healing occurs. Mark 7.24-30

A desperate mother willing to accept the crumbs.

I wonder why we Americans have no crumbs to give the mother who comes to us?  Do we really need to hold two year olds hostage?  Are we that kind of master?

You know how you get.......

God knows how we get, so God tells us to remember......Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.

If I were to summarize the volumes that have been written about this commandment, few authors and historians would focus on the word remember.  Theologians to lawmakers to your grandmother have weighed in on what it means to be holy.  A few groups are focused on which day constitutes the Sabbath.  But few focus on the word remember.

And yet it is so easy to forget.  The pressures of this world, the very minutia of staying afloat from grocery shopping to laundry to home maintenance can overwhelm the best intentioned of schedules.  Add in a little leisure plus the necessary hours of sleep and you begin to understand that sustaining a day set apart for Sabbath requires some discipline.  If your life is like mine, post-it notes keep me from losing things down a rabbit's hole.  Perhaps we need an extra bright, extra large post-it that says simply  Remember!

But of course, divine commands to remember point to more than simply managing a calendar and making choices.  A great deal of the biblical story is a process of remembering........remember when you were slave in Egypt......remember when the Lord provided bread in the desert.........remember when David danced before the ark.........remember the meal Jesus shared.   Remembering in this way brings us back to our origins, to those moments in our history when we were formed, our character shaped, our values established.  The prophets are continually sending us back to those formative moments in our relationship with the Divine, and calling on us to remember.

But it is even deeper than that.  This kind of remembering is intended to actually bring us back - to take us back into that moment when it happened for the first time.  We become a part of that first instant - we are tasting freedom from Pharoah for the first time, we are eating bread with the disciples around a table.  It is a kind of remembering where time falls away and we are one across the eons.

Remember the Sabbath?  The day when God saw that all was very good and God rested?  It was the day set apart for human creatures to pause, to catch their breath, to be restored and refreshed....and to remember the Creator God who gave all of this to them as a gift.  Do you remember the first intentions for Sabbath?  How it was gift and not obligation?  How it was designed for you, God's beloved human?

Perhaps now we can grasp the power of the word 'holy'.   Sabbath is a moment to re-connect with the Holy One, the source of life, the giver of blessings.  Sabbath is not a negotiated benefit from the HR department; it is a gift of the divine so that all God's creatures might return to those moments when all of creation was 'very good' and rest was possible. The act of remembering is as important as what is or is not done on that day.  This day of rest is to be sacred - not infringed upon by the day to day drudge,  the 24x7, 365 work of slaves.  You need it.  God knows you need it.

....because you know how you get when you drink not love.

You know how you get.......

Let's start with some beautiful poetry from Hafez, a 14th century Persian poet

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love.....
                              excerpted from Saved by a Poem

You are no good to yourself or anyone else. My mother was prone to say just those words to me when I was seriously out of sorts....cranky would be a good word for it.  Cranky could too easily turn into petulant and nasty and, well, of no good to me or anyone else.

When you have not drunk from the cup of Love you worry yourself and the world around you.  You make a mark which is noticed and sometimes feared.

Why would you not drink?  Why would you stay away from the deep cup of wholeness and peace for any length of time?  Laziness?  Sort of like that wonderful new restaurant you have heard raves about which is on the other side of town....it takes effort to get there and so you keep putting it off with all good intentions.

Or maybe you have allowed your cup to be drained till dry.  You have poured out and poured out until there is nothing left....and you need to get back, you need to drink deeply, you need to be fed.

Whatever the reason, you know how you get when you have not been drinking Love.

more to come.......

Nakedness.......in all its glory

Who told you you were naked?

I find that question so amusing (which, of course says volumes about me I am sure).  The Creator God is walking in the garden and soon discovers that the beloved humans are hiding because they knew they were naked.  (A very good reason I would think).

One taste of the apple and Adam and Eve become painfully aware of, well, everything.  What was beautiful and a blessing just moments before could now be seen for what it was – in all its glory and perhaps with all its rougher edges. 

We have no idea if that paradise we call the Garden of Eden included the cycles of the seasons that we know today.  We have no idea whether leaves decayed and worms ate apples and sunflowers had a time when their heads drooped when their season passed.

We have no idea whether Eve would have made the cover of Vogue or whether Adam would have turned heads down at the beach.  We have no idea whether Adam and Eve were able to nurture each other, allow room for the other to grow and explore, and be strong in the face of unmet expectations.  Our mental picture of paradise is quite static, and without the wonder and messiness of human conception and birth its population would forever remain at two.  

We only know this world, and although we bemoan its imperfections and downright evil, it is the only world whose picture we can paint with any certainty.  We can paint it in all its nakedness.

To be able to see all that there is to see – that is, to know your own nakedness and that of all that exists around you – if you think about it a minute, you might consider it more a curse than blessing.

That might be why we have spent eons trying to find Paradise again.