Looking to Restore My . . . Soul

There is a commercial on the radio these days by a local auto dealership which is trying to drum up some business for its service department.  The service manager says that he figures the world is divided up into two types of car owners: those who bring their vehicles in for regular servicing, changing the oil, refilling the tires, inspecting the brakes, checking the fluids, etc., and then those whose vehicles only come in on the back of a tow truck.  He is happy to see them either way, but those who come in for regular servicing end up paying a lot less and have their cars last lots longer.

I think that in some very real ways the church is to battered souls what that auto dealership service department is to the vehicles they sell. 

You see, I think many of us attend faith communities  because we know that our souls are battered and bruised, depleted and run down, and we know that we need at least the regular tune-up, if not a complete overhaul.

Others go because they have neglected the regular nourishment and care of their soul, and yet have somehow sensed that this might be the last stop, the way-station of last resort, the one place where that healing which they may have all but given up on might be found.

And often what unites both kind of folk, the ones who come in for regular maintenance and the ones who come in with their soul hooked up to the back of a tow truck, is the idea that perhaps it is there that we will learn how we can restore our souls.  That if we can manage our busy schedules enough to get here, if we can make it to Bible Study or adult education or a retreat or a mission trip, then we might manage to restore our souls.

            Joan Chittister recounts an ancient story about the spiritual life which may be of use to us here:

A young monastic came upon an elder one day sitting among a group of praying, working, meditating people.

“I have the capacity to walk on water,” the young disciple said “So, let’s you and I go onto that small lake over there and sit down and carry on a spiritual discussion.”

But the Teacher answered, “If what you are trying to do is to get away from all of these people, why do you not come with me and fly into the air and drift along in the quiet, open sky and talk there?”

And the young seeker replied, “I can’t do that because the power you mention is not one that I possess.”

And the Teacher explained, “Just so. Your power of remaining still on top of the water is one that is possessed by fish. And my capacity for floating through the air can be done by any fly. These abilities have nothing to do with real truth and, in fact, may simply become the basis of arrogance and competition, not spirituality. If we’re going to talk about spiritual things, we should really be talking right here.” (“Wisdom Distilled from the Daily”, pps. 1-2).

            The internet, the bookstores, the entire world is full of those who offer one fad after another which all share the promise that if we would just sign on and follow their program we will have all the answers to the struggles of life. And church can be no exception, telling us that the path towards spiritual wellness lies through meditation, or mastery of particular prayer practices, or attendance at specialized retreats, or some sort of Lenten study program. And just as fad diets more often than not fail to deliver on their extravagant promises, so too more often than not these spiritual fads fail to deliver what people who are looking for a new perspective, new meaning, and new hope are yearning for. 

As the ancient story reminds us, our souls will not be restored “out there” somewhere, and not through our efforts alone.  Restoration of our souls is not something that we do, but is something that is done for us, and it is done where we are. The psalmist tells us not, “I restoreth my soul”, but “He restoreth my soul.”

Maybe this is one of the greatest arguments for infant baptism. Look what happens: a child, far too young to have any intention about it, far too unformed to even have a conception of wanting to be ushered into a new community and a new life, is washed cleaned and refreshed and renewed and empowered though the waters of baptism.  So too we need do nothing to have our souls restored. This is grace, a free, unmerited gift that our Good Shepherd offers to each and all of us: “He restoreth my soul.”

            “He restoreth my soul”, and so might end a worthy – but inadequate -- sermon on the 23^rd Psalm.  You see, the soul is not restored as an end in itself, so that one might lean back in the recliner, put up one’s feet, and with a contented sigh settle in comfortably for the duration. 

Life is a journey, not a destination, and the restored soul is expected to renew the pilgrimage. For

·        there are paths of righteousness – roads of right-living -- to be walked;

·        there are valleys of danger to be negotiated, for peace and justice and abundance for all will not come in on their own and unopposed;

·        there is a table at the last to be looked forward to;

·        and there is that final safe harbor at the end of the day, where one might dwell in the house of the Lord, all this life long, and forever. 

To the run-down, depleted, un-nourished soul, that journey might seem at best terribly daunting. To a restored soul, a soul refreshed and renewed and empowered, that is an invitation to a journey of a life truly worth living.

            This is the Good News for each and every one of us. He restoreth our souls; and he sends us out into the world to be, in our own turn, his good shepherds, bringing healing and nourishment and care and justice to God’s sheep wherever they might be found.

He restoreth our souls, so that, in our turn, we might be restorers of the world.

Climbing out of Hell(-Roaring Canyon)

If you had asked her at the time, our daughter Julia would have said that she was the one to suffer. She would have been right, up to a point, but the rest of us had it hard as well. It was my fault, really. But the guide to hikes in Yellowstone National Park had made it all sound so inviting, even if the name of the hike, “Hell-roaring Canyon”, should have given us pause.

            And yes, maybe it was a mistake to start after a big lunch; maybe it was a mistake to set off in the heat of a late-summer’s afternoon. And maybe we should have noted more carefully that the initial leg of the hike was all downhill, meaning that the return hike was going to be a lot more difficult.

            The hike was as beautiful as advertised on the way into the canyon. Down we ambled through a Douglas fir forest, the pine needles cushioning our footfalls, the chipmunks scurrying onto the path in the hope of a handout, the rays of the sun scattering through the branches overhead. Soon we emerged onto a steeper section, too steep for trees, and down a series of switchbacks we went, sagebrush high all around, the vista opening up wide before us. The trail descended sharply until it reached the canyon floor and once again disappeared into the forest. Across the valley rose a series of mountains; the river, which we could hear but not see, obviously lay somewhere in the trees at the base of those mountains.

            The first sign of trouble came when we arrived at the valley floor. Julia, who at the time was six years old, had been lagging behind, and now came to a stop. “I’m hot. I’m tired. I want to go back.” I gave her a swig of water, cheerfully pointed out that the river was probably just ahead through the trees, and off we went. The roar of the river grew louder and louder, and then suddenly there we saw a steel suspension bridge; below it, a hundred or more feet straight down, the river, suddenly constricted by sheer canyon walls, rushed in a whirl of white water over and around boulders the size of small trucks. The noise it made was deafening – Hell-roaring Canyon was aptly named.

            It was a fine place to stop for a snack and some more water, and so we found a place in the shade to sit and gird ourselves for the trek back.

            It did not take long for trouble to rear its head on the way back up. Julia was hot; her feet hurt; she was tired; she couldn’t go a step further. We tried reasoning with her; we tried cajoling her; we tried threats (“We’ll leave you here for the coyotes to eat!”). Nothing was working, and so finally I sent Katie and Christie, with Camden in a backpack, on ahead. I would work on getting Julia up.

            It was work. Hard work. I tried everything to get that girl up the trail. Like, “Okay, let’s take it in small bites – can we make it to that next piece of shade twenty-five yards up ahead?” That worked for a while. And then, when we reached the section of switchbacks, and we could see the rest of the family ahead, I tried playing on Julia’s competitive nature: “Heh, if Katie can do it, you can, too.” But after a time the heat and the exhaustion were getting to my little six-year old; she was running out of gas. So I went to the bottom of my bag of tricks.

            “If you could have anything to drink or eat, or you could do anything once you got to the top, what would it be?” I asked. Without hesitation she replied over her shoulder, “I would dive into a swimming pool filled with a root beer float!” “That sounds great,” I answered, continuing the slog up the trail behind her, “But I think I would drink an ice-cold lemonade the size of a water tank before diving into the ocean.” And back and forth we went, trading visions of what awaited us at the top of the climb, putting one foot in front of the other, clawing our way out of Hell-roaring Canyon, until suddenly there we were, at the top.

            How often is it that we find ourselves, either through our own doing or simply by chance, at the bottom of our own personal Hell-roaring Canyon? When we find ourselves trapped in a destructive pattern of behavior that takes us round and round, an addiction, a cycle of blame and recrimination, a morass of self-pity, an eddy of aimlessness. Or a tragedy strikes out of the blue – a child dies, cancer strikes, the company folds, the hoped-for deal falls through, the word “divorce” is first spoken.

How often is it that our world, never mind our personal lives, seems closer to hell than to heaven – as poverty continues its grip on so much of the world, as we continue to be mired in two foreign wars, as our communities continue to struggle with issues of crime and homelessness, as schools become increasingly run down, and the list goes on and on.

We wake up one day and see that things look a lot more like hell that like the good life, and while we want to get back home, the way there is long and hard and all uphill, and we are not sure how to make it out. And we find that we can be paralyzed by despair, frozen by fear, disarmed by the apparent insignificance of  our puny abilities to cope or to make a difference.

And yet, if we raise our eyes and look up ahead, we can see that we are not in this alone – we can see that others struggle on up ahead, that the ascent can be made, is being made, by others like us. We can see that a friend has found a way to cope with the loss of a spouse, that an acquaintance has learned to find life worth living even with the limitations of a disability or chronic illness, that a co-worker had been able to move out of apathetic indifference to engage life in new ways. And this gives us hope.

And maybe we can see also that there are not only those who walk the same road up ahead of us, but also those who walk at our side, encouraging us onwards, telling us that we can do it, that we need but put one foot in front of the other. That what is important is this one day, and that we can leave tomorrow to God. And this give us hope.

And then maybe if we venture that one step, and then another, we might soon find the welcome shade of a sheltering tree, or the refreshing waters that might slake our thirst at least for a bit, refueling us for the trail and the trials ahead. And this also gives us hope.

But in the end, what gives us the ability to see the journey out of Hell-roaring Canyon through, that allows us to persevere even when the shade trees are few, the companionship scarce, and those who have gone before hard to see, is the vision of what awaits us at the end of the trail. And this gives us a hope beyond all other hope.

Psychologists tell us that hope is fundamental to human life. We hope for a good grade, for praise, for an upturn in the stock market, that our children will be safe, that the cancer will be cured, that love will last.

But there is another hope as well,  transfinite hope, the hope that goes beyond the tangible, hope that is placed in subjects that go beyond our physiological sensing and the material world. Transfinite hope extends the horizons of our vision beyond what we might see.

This is the hope that Paul is talking about in his Letter to the Romans. “Now the hope that is seen is not hope . . .  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” The hope that he is talking about is the hope we have which is grounded in the character of God. We have hope not just in things, but in a relationship. We have hope based upon a relationship with a good shepherd who promises to lead us beside the still waters, to feed us even in the presence of those we believe to be enemies, to restore our souls, and to dwell with us forever.

Today Alana Bell will be confirmed. One can be tempted to view confirmation as a sort of graduation, and indeed if one were to take that view, one might look at this sermon as a sort of graduation address. If so, I suspect you would find it sadly lacking, seeing how most graduation addresses seem to be centered around two topics: first, how wonderful the graduates are, how mighty in deeds and accomplishments and character; and, second, some advice on how those same remarkable people might go out into the world and succeed.

But this is not, Alana, a graduation, for the life of faith is a journey, a life-long project, and not a destination. And my message is not about you and how wonderful you are (although you are all of that, and more), and it is not about your future successes (although I am certain there will be many for you).

It is, instead, about those times in life when it all looks like failure, when it seems you have come to the end of your rope, when you are parched and exhausted and wonder how you can keep on keeping on, how you might ever climb out of your own Hell-roaring Canyon. It is, thanks be to God, about hope, a hope that comes to you as a gift and a promise.

A hope, and a promise, that with the one in whose name you were baptized standing right beside you all the way, all will be well, and all will be well. Amen.

Sir Duke, Mardi Gras, and a New Spirit

     The year – 1977. The place, New Orleans, Louisiana, the home of a lot of great jazz. I was there, along with three fellow sailors, for an intercollegiate sailing event, the annual Mardi Gras regatta. So truth be told, we had made the thirty-hour drive as much for the legendary partying as for the sailing. At any rate, we were new to the Big Easy, and come Tuesday morning, Fat Tuesday itself, we set out to drive over to the big parade, Rex, the grand-daddy of them all, the one that ended up down on Canal Street near the French Quarter. But in this era before GPS and cell phones, we got lost, and so we eventually just ended up parking and started to walk. It soon became apparent that we had landed in a part of New Orleans where white folk just did not live or frequent. A big tip-off of this was that everyone we saw was black. Now you have to know that the four of us were all white, from the suburbs, from the North. We considered ourselves to be tolerant and open-minded, and even had friends who were black. But we also had memories of the racial tensions that had violently surfaced during the riots of the late ‘60s, less than a decade earlier, and of course New Orleans was by no means integrated. In fact, as far as we could tell, all the Krewes, the clubs that put on the masked balls and the parades in the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday, were exclusively white. And so despite our cherished open-mindedness, we just knew that we were where maybe we would not be welcome.

            And so we come around a corner, and suddenly are engulfed by a huge crowd.  Pressing forward into us, but not even aware of us, it seemed – all anxiously craning their necks and peering up the street. And then it hit us, right smack upside the head, a blast of music – that tremendous trumpet chorus that kicks-off Stevie Wonder’s just released hit, “Sir Duke.”  

            And then here comes one marching band after another, each topping the previous one in enthusiasm and precision marching – no, that’s not quite right – this was a parade with soul, and while the marchers might be said to have kept formation, in fact they were all dancing down the street. And that soul was infectious – we were all dancing in the street. The parade – all black. The crowd – all black – save for us four blessed white folk who happened to stumble into a place where white folk who thought they knew better would not go. And there was not a shred of racial tension, of apprehension, of fear – we were all, for that short, wonderful morning, bound together by a spirit of joy and community.

            I believe the truth of what happened that day in New Orleans captures the flavor of what that first Pentecost is all about. By “truth”, I don’t mean so much as what “really happened”, but how it felt, what the various elements where, what is seemed like, what it looked like, what it sounded like. The chaos, the amazing variety of peoples that make up the crowd, peoples gathered from all over the nation, from all around the world. And from this diversity, a new community, a community of peace and harmony and joy surely ignited by God’s presence.

            That’s a big part of the meaning of that first Pentecost. At the beginning, the in-crowd, the insiders, the band of like-minded followers of Rabbi Jesus, they are all huddled together in that upper room together, afraid and powerless. And then they are bowled over by a “sound like the rush of a violent wind” – like a might trumpet blast of “Sir Duke” – and they are filled with a new spirit, a spirit that thrusts them out where they otherwise would not be, out into the street among a whole world-wide diversity of peoples, and the Spirit empowers them to reach out across all barriers that divide. Through the Spirit, bridges are built and crossed in a moment, and no longer is there isolation, separation, segregation – now everyone is on the same page, everyone understands one another, no longer are people kept apart by nationality or race or color or gender or background.

            Thomas Merton, in his book Opening the Bible, summarizes the meaning of Pentecost in this way: “That into the confusion of man’s world, with its divisions and hatred, has come a message of transforming power, and those who believe it will experience in themselves the love that makes for reconciliation and peace on earth.”

            This is the jazz of Pentecost. That breaking out of the old forms, that setting aside of the ancient rules, that infusion of spirit that creates new and exciting patterns of the life that really is life, that transforming power that sets us dancing forward together.    The Creator, who in the beginning moved over the waters of chaos and brought forth light and life and a new order, creates still, sending the Spirit to inspire and reconcile and empower and transform.

            So no wonder that some of the onlookers think these Spirit-filled folk were drunk on new wine! Sober folk remain indoors, sober folk stick to their own community’s knitting, sober folk stick to those they consider their own kind.

            But this is what the Spirit does: God’s spirit then, and God’s spirit now, pushes us out from the familiar into the unknown, it shifts our focus from ourselves and our clan to our brothers and sisters who are waiting to meet us out there beyond the comfortable confines of home and club and church, it calls us to wider fields of ministry.

            So on this birthday of the church, this anniversary of that first Pentecost when the church was breathed into life on the rush of the winds of the Spirit, the question for us is the same as it was for the church way back then: “What does this mean?” 

            What would it mean for us in our individual lives, if we were to wonder how we might take this transforming power that is God’s gift to us and let it move us in new ways? What if we were to let God’s empowering spirit pull us out of our self-centered funk, or let it help us let go of that old grudge, or let us seek the forgiveness that we know we need if we are to move on, or motivate us to let go our attachment to all the stuff we think will save us but which we know, in the end, is really just stuff?

            Pentecost happened long ago, and yet Pentecost happens still. The question for us is whether we will reamin on that sidewalk watching, or get out into the street with the wonderful diveristy that God has blessed us with, and dance.

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On the Road Again – Or, at Least, the Bike Path

It is part of my new “get fit” routine. Biking the Cape Cod Canal bike trail. It has been tough going, but I seem have worked up to ten-mile sessions, which on a fat tire bike gives me a good workout, even with its fifteen gears.

It may be making me physically fit, or fitter, though I think the jury is still out on that. Weight loss, maybe a bit; cardiovascular health, how do you tell?; lower body strength, maybe yes.

But what this new fitness regime has done for me is to make me more mentally and spiritually alive, of that I have no doubt. Mentally, I know a good ride clears out the cobwebs in a remarkable effective fashion. Maybe it is the ever-changing views along the twisting canal, the light off the water, the wind rippling the surface, the nods to roller-bladers and walkers and fishermen with their coolers and rods and bikes outfitted with white fishing rod holders banded to the rear fender. Maybe it is the concentration required to keep on pumping into a strong headwind. Maybe it is just being away from church and family responsibilities for a set period. All I know is that I come back physically exhausted, but mentally refreshed.

But what has been surprising to me has been how these rides have fed my spirit. I have an IPod, so slip the tiny earplugs in, select from one of my custom playlists (New Wave, Alternative Rock, Bruce, Lyle, Rachmaninoff or Beethoven), set my front wheel towards Bourne, and soon find a different kind of spiritual renewal. My mind wanders where it will, my legs pump to the beat, my lungs fill with air and then release it only to begin the cycle again, the sun shines and the wind blows and a sense of peace comes,

something that might even be characterized as prayer,

if only we could let go of rigid ideas of what form prayer must take to be prayer.

Out of Step

Being out of step, I learned at a tender age, can be an embarrassing, even dangerous thing.

Perhaps because my mother saw that I was an awkward, gawky child, and perhaps because she wished I might somehow learn to move with even a modicum of grace, she signed me up for the 4^th grade dance class at the local church. So off I went, penny loafers, newly-ironed trousers, dress shirt and tie, a kid who would rather have been anywhere else in the world but on the hardwood floor at the parish house trying to learn to waltz and fox trot with – yech! – a girl.

It was an order of magnitude too complicated – worrying about what Betsy would think about my sweaty palms, trying not to step on her feet, straining to hear the shouted instructions, trying to keep a beat in my head and feet at the same time. For awhile I thought being out of step was only a danger to others, to my partners who suffered from crushed toes and bruised shins, from those who I bumped into. But one day I learned otherwise as we were taught to square dance.

I admit that I was worse than usual, never could figure out the difference between a promenade and a do-si-do, which might explain why Amy just stood there tapping her toe and glaring at me, refusing to dance. Undeterred, when the caller yelled out over his fiddle “twirl yer partner”, I obediently extended my arm and moved forward towards her, seeking to engage her arm. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back, looking at the ceiling and wondering why my head hurt so much, and how a tiny 4^th grade girl could have picked up kung fu moves at that age.

The cost of being out of step.

I haven’t learned much. Try to follow a guy (God, even tell people about that guy!), who was so out of step that he ended up on a different type of hard wood; who would tell anyone who would listen that true success comes not from fleeing suffering and death, but becoming personally and actively involved in the suffering of the world; who had the crazy idea that to lose your life for others is to gain it.

Guess I really haven’t learned much.