The Temple Door

This is excerpt #4 from, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith"



Danielle Trussoni writes of her travel in Vietnam. Is she a pilgrim or a tourist? Her father had been one of the countless tragedies that war left in its wake and now the daughter has come hoping to make some sense of his broken life.

One hot afternoon, Danielle finds her way to the doors of a Buddhist temple. An old monk invites her in. He asks her if she is a Christian. She says she was raised Christian but has no idea what she believes any longer. He looks on her with pity. "You must discover this. It is important to know who you are." When she was about to leave, the old monk offers three joss sticks of incense and tells her that she must pray. "Pray for what?" She asks. "You will know," he said, "when you begin."

As she tries to pray, and through the haze of the incense, Danielle recalls the family movies of her childhood. Before her parents split up, they used to gather in the evening, kids in their pyjamas, to watch 8mm film projected on the wall. Her father always said those were the best years of his life.

She recalls watching those movies again after graduate school. One scene stands out. Her father is walking along side of her as she learns to ride, holding the bar of her bicycle seat. She recalls falling and skinning her knee, but the actual event is captured on film. She doesn't fall. Her father had been there to catch her. Danielle realizes that her memory is inaccurate, coloured by later conflict.

Danielle prays for her father's illness to disappear. She prays that all the terrible things that happened in war would never happen again. She prays for peace.

Some of the most important discoveries come when we are in a strange place. The experience of dislocation allows us to explore in ways we don't when we are in a familiar place. You don't have to step out of your present context to gain perspective, but sometimes it helps.

Peter

What's past Jersey?

This is excerpt #3 from, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith".



Seth has been visiting with Jeffrey twice a week for several months. Jeffrey is in the Juvenile Detention Facility in the South Bronx. Seth is trying to teach Jeffrey and the rest of the class to meditate. Jeffrey sits in the back and rarely says anything. He appears completely disinterested. Seth asks, "What it's done for you?"

It turns out that Jeffrey meditates every day in his room. Seth is taken aback.

"...every night I go into my room and I read for a while. Then I turn out the light and do the breathing stuff you taught us. In, out, in, out. Fifteen, twenty minutes. Then I do my prayers and go to sleep...There's this place I can get alone in my room. I get into the zone...It's like duhhhh. You know what I mean... I can have everything I want in there, total freedom. It is real strong, like I was...well you know, like at peace."

"..but they don't let me stay in there. The staff kicks out...All day long we got to sit out here on this unit. It f... sucks...I can't be happy out here. All this noise. The TV is blaring all the time...And people always coming up and bothering you...No peace, man. No way I can be in the zone out here.."

Seth says, "That's why it's called a practice. Inside your room you got it, man. And that's great, keep it up, (but it) isn't about finding a place and escaping, that's too easy. The real training is, can you do it anywhere, anytime...the peace is within you, Jeffrey, not within your room."

Seth tells him that he used to live in the quiet woods and meditation was easy. When he came to New York it was tough, but "I didn't put my head under a pillow.."

Jeffrey wants to know if the forest is in Jersey. Seth says, "It's way past Jersey." Jeffrey asks, "What's past Jersey?"

Peter


You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.

God? Goddess? Positive Life Experiences!

This is excerpt #2 from, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith". On the back cover comes this recommendation - "In a world river by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, sceptical testimonies and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt, of religion lost and found and lost again."

"Zen Mind, Alkie Mind" by Martha G

Martha says she didn't go to AA to get sober or find God. She was 21 and she went to meet guys. She wasn't big on the serenity Prayer or the the Our Father which she had learned in Latin in Grade 1 and never really used since. Neither could she go with the goddess which worked for some of her female AA friends.

Eventually she realized she was damaging herself with alcohol and needed help to stay sober. God still didn't make sense to her and when her father died she no longer tried to make that connection.

On reading that, I wonder if maybe that will change in time. Jung says that for many people the spiritual journey does not make sense until the second half of life. But maybe Martha is already on that journey.

After 21 years of sobriety, Martha says, "It matters less and less what I believe and more and more to me that I show up, a day at a time in my life, and listen to the stories of others doing the same thing...AA is short on absolutes...but the AA Big Book suggests that if you stick around, your life will change and get better."

That rings true for me. Like many others in the church, I am less concerned with exactly what I believe and more concerned with having my life change in a good way. That church community can help us with that day by day transformation.

Peter



You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.

Jew Like Me

I'm going to try something a little different for these blogs. I'm going to work my way through an unusual new book I'm reading, "Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith" . This is the second collection to come forth from KillingtheBuddah.com. On the back cover comes this recommendation:

"In a world river by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, sceptical testimonies and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt, of religion lost and found and lost again."

Jew Like Me

Peter Manseau offers the first dispatch. After graduation, Manseau worked for an organization that collected Yiddish books. This French-Irish-American who had learned some Hebrew while studying religion at college began to be mistaken for a Jew. In his Yiddish class he'd been called Pesach so that was his new name.

During a Lubavitcher wedding he watched then joined "concentric circles of black-clad hasidim, dancing madly, a most pit of piety." They began to call for the "Rebbe", the late leader who they believe is the messiah and who they also believe will return to them.

I've seen this kind of sacred frenzy a couple of times - in the streets of Jerusalem just outside the old city and in front of the Wailing Wall/Jerusalem West Wall on Pentecost weekend. Young men and little boys dancing, drumming, caught up in the intoxicating ecstasy of the blessed.

Pesach collapsed into a chair. Out of the crowd emerged two hasidim. One was about four feet tall. The other had Down Syndrome. Pesach asked the four foot man, "He's a rabbi?"

"Of course. And you know what else? I think he's more than a rabbi. His voice dropped to a drunken whisper. "I think he's the Rabbe. I think (he's) chained up inside him and we've got to get him out...Wouldn't that be just like Hashem? Hiding in silence, seeing what we'll do"

I like that. It sounds like the transcendent God, whose secret identity incarnation cannot help but surprise us.

Peter



You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.

Who would be a Samaritan to you?

If you saw the film documentary Super Size Me, then you'll remember Morgan Spurlock's method of investigation. He immerses himself in his subject. 30 days of eating super sized meals at McDonald's caused damage to his health as well as a depression.

Spurlock parlayed his way of understanding big issues into a series on Fox television. Each episode of 30 Days placed an unlikely person in an uncomfortable situation, eg. a self declared homophobe has to live with a gay man in San Francisco for a month; an avid hunter moves in with a vegan animal-rights activist.

Most of us tend to surround ourselves with people who think like we do. Diversity is a great idea but not so easy to bring about in our world. If we had the imagination and courage to get to know those who are radically different from us, we might get Jesus's challenge to love our neighbour. Who would be a Samaritan to you?

Peter


You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.

Your Budget - A Theological Statement

Last year in the midst of the recession, Mervin Lehman offered his perspective on why his Indiana Amish community was struggling financially.

"People wanted bigger weddings, newer carriages...They were buying things they didn't need."

Newer carriages? Quaint? Humorous? Certainly, strange to our ears. It would appear that consumerism is able to reach into even the most intentionally austere of religious communities.

Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chair make his own theological statement on the economic crisis, "Unless somebody can find a way to change human nature, we will have more crises."

Nobody has managed that. But at the very least, faith communities can continue to emphasize good stewardship practices like seeing your budget as a theological statement, being intentional about our charitable givings, making an effort to cultivate a generous heart.

Faith communities offer us the encouragement to develop the best part of our human nature. Bank on it.

Peter


You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will make sure they are posted.

Debt Relief - Hope For The Future

On a visit to Haiti I met a young man who saw no hope for the future. He put a face and a story for me on a desperately impoverished and violence-wracked country.

I thought about him again this week when I heard that the last of Haiti's external debt was finally erased. A billion dollar debt was removed this past September.

It had been a tough few years. In 2008, a series of hurricanes struck the island. But it was the huge debt that blocked future progress. The necessary policy changes were made as required by the World Bank and the United sates forgave the huge debt. Haiti joins over 20 heavily indebted poor countries who have finally dumped these terrible debt burdens.

Now people fighting to stay above water can hope that life can improve. Many voices joined together to insist that debt relief for poor countries was necessary. Those voices had an impact.

Peter



You can also send your comments to assistant.webmaster@emmanuelunited.ca and I will amke sure they are posted.