lenten journal: bear with me

In my post yesterday I quoted from Bruce Springsteen’s keynote address at South-by- Southwest, which I would like to repeat:

The purity of human expression and experience is not confined – there’s no pure way of doing it; there’s just doing it . . . . At the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that is what’s valuable.

After seeing him in concert last night in Greensboro, I must report the man walks the walk (rocks the rock) as well as he talks the talk. At 62, the Boss shows no signs of slowing down or gives any indication that the point of his evening is to leave it all on the stage. If rock and roll were a religion, Bruce would be a Pentecostal evangelist. With his clarion call still ringing in my ears, I heard the music start all over again when I read this sentence in Art & Fear:

To make art is to sing with your human voice. (117)

May I offer a mash up, if you will? There’s no pure way of doing it, there’s just doing it; at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your faith that is what’s valuable. To make faith is to sing with your human voice.

Here is one of the reasons Jesus matters: he was fully human, which is to say being human is not a bad thing, not an evil thing, not a destructive thing. Being human is who we were made to be. Bruce sang, and a coliseum of voices along with him, of what it means to be resiliently human:

we are alive
and though our bones are alone here in the dark
our souls and spirits rise
to carry the fire and light the spark
to fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

The reason we all sang along, or at least one of them, is because he sings about the truth of life that lives amidst the contradictions and grief, of the light that shines indefatigably in the darkness. We are the dry bones singing and dancing. Every damn day. It is the melody of art and faith, our best song in our human voices, embracing the life we have been given to live. Back to Art and Fear -- Bayles and Orland close their book by saying:

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot – and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice. (118)

I’m a quote ahead of myself. I need to back up a page or two to the set up for the paragraph you just read:

Answers are reassuring, but when you’re onto something really useful, it will probably take the form of a question. . . . Over the long run, the people with interesting answers are those who ask interesting questions. (112-113)

Not long after I re-read those words, I came across my friend Jimmy’s thoughts on his Facebook page this morning:

It didn't seem questions had much place in my faith tradition. I remember asking questions, but, there were always answers. Life is not a math challenge where all the numbers add up to a simple resolution. Neither are questions.

Jesus is the answer, says the old gospel song, backed up by all sorts of good intentions. No. Jesus asks the questions. Where are your accusers? Do you want to get well? Do you love me? Jesus calls us to embrace the uncertainty. Consider the lilies. Walk the second mile. Take care of the people who can’t take care of you in return. Love your enemies.

Oh – there’s one more thread in my tapestry: this line from Mary Oliver’s “Spring,” which graced the Writer’s Almanac today:

There is only one question
How to love the world.

Wait. That’s not fair. A good line from a great poem deserves to be seen in its natural habitat. Here’s the whole thing.

Somewhere
      a black bear
           has just risen from sleep
                and is staring

down the mountain.
     All night
          in the brisk and shallow restlessness
               of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
        flicking the gravel,
               her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
        the cold water.
              There is only one question:

how to love this world.
    I think of her
        rising
               like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
        of the trees.
              Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
        and its music
             and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
       down the mountain,
            breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
    her white teeth,
       her wordlessness,
            her perfect love.

The fact that I went to Baylor notwithstanding, I love a good bear metaphor. And I’m back to Lyle, or at least his cover of Steve Fromholtz’s song:

some folks drive the bears out of the wilderness
some to see a bear would pay a fee
me I just bear up to my bewildered best
and some folks even seen the bear in me

Oliver’s bear comes lumbering out of hibernation into a world exploding with possibilities and dangers, callings and contradictions, reminding us we follow a similar trajectory: sometimes bewildered, sometimes uncertain, sometimes hungry, sometimes hopeful, and always called to love with all the force and fervor of a bear looking to break a winter’s fast or Bruce belting out the final chorus of “Born to Run.”

We are alive. And human. And are called to love the world: to relish the uncertainty, to dance in the dark, to make faith by singing in our human voice:

everybody has a hu-hu-hungry heart.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Sic 'em, Bears.

lenten journal: the question is . . .

My little school is imploding.

I have much the same feeling as I did when I worked in my first restaurant which was a small tea house owned by a woman who had always wanted to own a restaurant, so she found an empty space, took out a second mortgage, spent a lot of money, and lasted six months because she didn’t really know what she had gotten herself into. Though my school has been here six years, it is still trying to find its identity, which has proven to be quite illusive leaving us with predominant daily question of “How do we survive?” which is not a question that fosters growth and learning.

Our foxhole perspective sent me back to something I read in Art and Fear a few days ago.

It is an article of faith, among artists and scientists alike, that at some deep level their disciplines share a common ground. What science bears witness to experimentally, art has always known intuitively – that there is an innate rightness to the recurring forms in nature.

Science advances at the rate that technology provides tools of greater precision, while art advances at the pace that evolution provides minds with greater insight – a pace that is, for better or for worse, glacially slow. . . . [a]nd while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

[I]n art as well as in science the answers you get depend upon the questions you ask. (104)

To give some context to the passage, the authors weren’t out to foster a divide between science and art as much as they were using the distinction to say some things about the way art tells the truth by contrasting with how science tells the truth. More about that in a bit. First, I want to go back to the statement in the last sentence: the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.

During one of my first units of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), where I worked as a hospital chaplain, I read an article that talked about how we could help our patients cope with what was going on by helping them to ask better questions. Those who faced difficult diagnoses, for instance, might find more hope in turning from “Why did God let this happen?” to “What will this mean for my life?” The first ends up in blaming or patronization; the second offers room for discovery and growth.

When I read the line about the quality of our questions, I made a note in the margin: what would Jesus ask?

My mind jumped back to the healing stories in the gospels. On the one hand, the disciples saw a blind man sitting at the gate and asked, “Who sinned that this man should be born blind?” On the other hand – and thank God for other hands – Jesus met the man at the pool who had been there for years and years waiting for his chance and asked, “Do you want to get well?”

The answers we get are only as good as our questions.

Instead of asking how we are going to survive or what else could go wrong, I keep asking for the grace to remember that the kids in the building need more from me than fear, bitterness, or resignation. They need me to act like this matters so they can do likewise. They need me to ask questions that call us together and help us figure out how to make meaning of these days, regardless of how much it feels like I’m teaching at Titanic High. I must, therefore, go back and pick up art as a metaphor for life and faith and then reread the following passage:

There is a moment for each artist in which particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will never be. No one else will ever be in a position to write Hamlet. This is pretty good evidence that the meaning of the world is made and not found. Our understanding of the world changed when those words were written, and we can’t go back . . . any more than Shakespeare could. . . . The world thus altered becomes a different world, with our alterations being part of it. (106)

One of our teachers left this week because he got an offer that he was right to take. We had a goodbye party for him on Wednesday. He had been here for almost three years teaching in the middle school, so the eighth graders were only in sixth grade when he arrived. He asked a great deal of himself and the kids and he got great answers from all concerned. At the party, one eighth grade boy said, “You’re the greatest teacher I’ve ever had because you helped me learn to be myself.” That teacher changed the world for the boy and helped him make meaning of the cultural hell we call middle school, which ranks right up there with writing Hamlet.

In a school on its last legs, in a culture built on greed, in a political climate of rage and cynicism, in a world that is broken and hurt, what would Jesus ask?

What will I ask? And then, how will I answer?

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: the peripheral vision of faith

One of the benefits of my style of organization is the joy of rediscovering things. Move a pile of stuff and find a book you haven’t seen in a long time. Such was my fortune a couple of days ago. We did some rearranging here at the house which set me to cleaning up some other stuff and I came across a book that I love not only for its content but also for the memory it evoked.

In 2010, Ginger and I had a chance to go to New Orleans for our anniversary, thanks to our friend Jay. We had a wonderful time in a city we both deeply love. A Durham friend, Leonora, who had lived in the Crescent City sent us on an afternoon adventure off the beaten path and out of the Quarter, down across Frenchman Street and into a neighborhood that appeared to see few folks but those who lived and worked around it. We ended up on Chatres at the Sound Café, which was connected to Beth’s Books and newsstand. It was there, after a rich and quiet afternoon of conversation and coffee together, I found Art and Fear.

This afternoon, I perused the book, mostly rereading my margin notes and what I had underlined a couple of springs ago. Here are a couple of samples – of what the book had to say:

Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue – or more precisely, have learned how not to quit. . . . Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again – and art is all about starting again. (9-10)

As Stanley Kunitz once commented, “The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it to language.” (17)

By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. (26)

To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary (and universal) humanity, as though you would be better off without it. Yet this humanity is the ultimate source of your work; your perfectionism denies you the very thing you need to get your work done. Getting on with your work requires a recognition that perfection itself is a flawed concept. (31)

When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes. (49)

Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done. (69)

I could go on, but then I would use up too much of my quote pool for future posts. The book comes alive for me because I am working to be a better writer and I want to make art with my words and my food, among other things. The other reason is because I think art is an amazing metaphor for both life and faith. I can best make my point with a couple of paraphrases:

When you are lazy, your faith is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.

Each new act of your faith enlarges our reality. Our faith is not yet done.

As I read today, thinking about Lent and what I might make of these days, a couple of sentences I had not previously underlined found their way to the forefront:

Habits are the peripheral vision of the mind. . . . The theory is simple enough: respond automatically to the familiar, and you’re free to respond selectively to the unfamiliar. (100)

Habit is not always an easy word for me, or at least not a positive one, because I most often contrast it with ritual, particularly in matters of faith: habit is repeating things mindlessly; ritual is meaningful repetition. To keep it at church for a moment, we might pass the offering plates as habit, yet the aim is to make the familiar action of sharing Communion be ritual. With that contrast in mind, I came to this paraphrase:

Rituals are the peripheral vision of faith. . . . The theory is simple enough: respond automatically to the familiar, and you’re free to respond selectively to the unfamiliar.

The ashes are familiar, as are the days doing without or adding on as we work our way to the Cross. The road through Lent is well-worn with the steps of those who have come before us. The story is familiar to the point that we have to decide whether to be lazy or engaged. We can make a habit of our devotion and float by on our familiarity unscathed by the magnificent defeat that makes possible the empty tomb or we can make a ritual of all that has been handed down, cherishing each moment as a morsel of grace and focusing on what we know is true such that we see new things – and new people -- on the edges of the story that we have not seen before.

The first song I ever wrote with my friend Billy said:

here’s another picture of life
all of us together in Christ
it’s an open heart
it’s a work of art
it’s the basic stuff
that makes another picture of love

Our faith is not yet done.

Peace,
Milton