Where you go, I will go

Tis the season for weddings and that will continue on through the fall season. couples will be fretting over getting the right flowers, music, poetry and maybe even scripture texts for the readings.

It doesn’t get used so much these days but over the years when presented alternative texts, people used to choose the words of Ruth, “Where you go, I will go.”

Athalya Brenner in a recent Interpretation magazine wonders why this text has been romanticized. Not only was Ruth a female, she was also a foreigner and a migrant worker which put her in a precarious position. Brehner says, “There is nothing romantic about being a fugitive, or about seeking economic asylym. What Ruth needed is what aliens and immigrants need today - human rights. Unlike civil rights, human rights are primarily matters of physicalities like eating, sheltering, multiplying, speaking and breathing.”

We appropriate stories from other ages to our own uses, but taken in their original context, their message is far more challenging and provocative than a superficial reading would indicate.


Peter

Prayer - From The Heart, Or Not At All

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Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith

Barak Obama left a prayer at Jerusalem's Western Wall. Stephen Prothero admitted to reading this private communication, if it was indeed private. I mean what celebrity puts a prayer in the most famous prayer site in the world and expects it to remain private. Some seminarian stole the prayer and published it. Prothero says he was struggling with how to pray himself and so gave in to that common but questionable habit of looking over someone else's shoulder to read what was not intended to be public. Turns out it was nothing remarkable. In the end the only true prayer is one that emerges in honesty from one's own heart. It needn't be pretty or erudite or even polite. It does need to be real.

Prothero says that if he was to return to the Western Wall today he would leave a prayer for Obama and McCain. He'd pray that each of them would listen to what the Wall has to says about power and vulnerability, and the delicate and dangerous dance between them. That's Prothero's understanding of transcendence -"the significance of any human being, however large, is dwarfed by the mystery of millions of things we will never fully understand, not least the practice of prayer itself."


Peter

Revitalization Realization

This past Sunday, we had a meeting of the congregation to deal with some unexpected news about our anticipated CE Hall revitalization. Already on a tight timeline to get this done before the cold weather returns; already committed to a carefully debated cost estimate, expecting to be passing the final motions that would give the project the final go ahead, it was a shock for all of us to discover there were new expenses that increase the budget by about $400 k.

The good news, and let's remember that is our raison d'etre, is that none of us has to carry this burden alone. We have the wisdom of our community to lean on. We have experienced and sensible committees that are meeting to help us find a way though this situation. We have a history in this congregation of rising to clear some serious hurdles. And there is this fairly significant presence in our midst called , God. "Have a little faith" is a refrain that keeps reasserting itself into exasperated conversations.

I don't know what the outcome will be, but I am guessing that "having a little faith" will be important.


Peter

Banana Slug Psalm by Meera Subramanian

from Believer Beware

"We found the tree - a fir wolfy with age, cloaked in lichen - and collapsed into the soft earth, looking up into infinity from its base. From there on the ground, from the vintage of an unbeliever, I imagined that this is what finding God must be like. Or rather, not finding but feeling found.,,My friends and rose, to see if we could circle the tree, all four of us with arms stretched taut, faces pressed against the rough bark, linking our hands to form a current. That's what God is, right? something so big that you, alone, can't wrap your arms around it. Something that stays with you, no matter where you go, right?"

I heard Stewart McLean on the radio today speaking about the first time he saw a beluga whale. Watching this great creature, only a few feet away, moved him and others present, to tears.

Meera and Stewart experienced what Celtic Christians called thin places, places where the boundaries between ourselves and the world fall apart, where the sacred shines through. Our souls long for this connection with nature with a capital N. Is it happening for you?


Peter

You’re Not In Oz Anymore

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From Believer Beware;

You’re not in Oz Anymore which amounts to Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet interviewing Velvet

They met at the AGM of a few thousand witches, druids, and magick -workers. The gathering happens at a campground called Heartland, about an hour north of Kansas City. Velvet is not her real name but it’s the name she goes by in her coven of elf-witches. At first this sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons chapter but the more you listen, the more you get the sense that these folks take this all very seriously. Here’s what Velvet says,

“ There’s a list of elven gods this long, but I don’t even worship ‘em. I worship Hecate and Loki. Hecate and Loki are both ‘dark deities.’ I hate that term. The deal is they teach really hard lessons. And they’re not lessons you want to learn. People want Magick to be all flowers and rainbows. And life is not all flowers and rainbows. I’m sorry. Neither is is it all death and such, but people don’t even want to face that Loki has a tendency to teach by playing a trick, and once you pick it up you go, ‘You know, I should’ve known that.’ Hecate is more of the opinion of ‘Smack, okay you’re in this situation, now get out of it. Okay you learned something, didnt’cha?’

It’s not just the cosmos that is stranger than we could have known. So are the religious groups living all around us.

I sympathize with Velvet trying to explain what brings meaning to her life. I find myself in her shoes on a regular basis. I suppose for a lot of people today, elf-witches are no wierder or scarier than Christians.

And we don’t have to fight ‘em or convert ‘em or join ‘em. We can love ‘em. That was what this morning’s service was saying to me. Listen closely enough to our neighbours to find out what we share, and if we don’t get turned off by the strangeness, we might learn something.


Peter

Believer Beware: First-Person Dispatches From the Margins of Faith

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"Please Don't Feed the Prophet" by Daniel S. Brenner

"I don't know what kind of person you are, but maybe you don't believe that God loves you any more than Barney the Purple Dinosaur loves you..."

Daniel's dispatch is a stream of consciousness rant on the seeming impossibility of making a connection with a loving God. He ends with this story;

"There was a child born whose mother did not give her milk. Nor did she give her love, nor think of her as a miracle as she lay in the cradle. A bitter woman, she was, a tormented woman, her mind had been warped by the selfishness of those around her and she saw her child only as a burden, a chain, an affliction.

Yet in spite of the mother's neglect, the child grew. For in her dreams each night an angel would come and feed her. First the angel fed her letters, all the letters of the languages of the earth. And these letters nourished the child.

And as she grew the angel began to feed her words. And this was good. She grew more and soon the words grew into poems, and the poems begat songs, and the songs begat stories upon stories.

Soon the child was grown up, and she walked the earth filled with the letters, words, poems, songs, and stories from the angel. And in small groups, people would gather to hear her. Some men wanted to hunt her down and kill her for her stories frightened them. Some women wanted to slit her throat from jealousy. Her stories spoke of the deep shame of her life, the silent pain, the loneliness. And when she spoke, those who heard her felt a nourishment they had never felt, a mending of all that had been shattered. She roamed from place to place and spoke in her quiet way, a cross between whispers and lullabies. Where is she now, this child fed from the letters of angels? ... She had disappeared. Wandered off deep inside your soul, calling out to your right now to join her. She's getting ready to tell you a story.



Peter

Believer Beware

I've always had a connection with Doubting Thomas. He's the sceptic among the believers and many of us can identify with that. Many of us hear a statement of belief and our response is "Yes, but...." I think Erik Hanson would understand that.

Eriks grew up in the Evangelical Covenant Church. But by the age of 22 he had developed an uneasy relationship with that group of believers. Other influences had been working on him. So when he found himself as a counselor at a camp designed to bring about a born again experience among teenagers, it was a most awkward situation.

Hanon writes,

"From Kierkegaard I knew that Truth is subjectivity, from Nietzsche that Christians were pop Platonists, and from Rene Girard that the New Testament revealed the scapegoat mechanism secretly present in all other myths. I knew Christianity, like life, was something far more complex and messy and hard and weird than you could explain to teens in a week. And I knew that it was condescending and wrong to make teens feel dysfunctional if they did not have a Jesus experience in just the way the CHIC had preordained for them."

Here's to the revolutionaries in the crowd, the protestors in the group, the divergers, those who ask the pointed question. You are walking alongside the One who wrestled hard with the tradition and found himself in the loyal opposition. Jesus loved the tradition but he sure did not see it the way the traditionalists did.


Peter