CHRISTMAS

Over the years we all have heard people attempt to define the real meaning of Christmas. Yet, the meaning of Christmas is so deep and so personal words truly fail when we try to get at the root of this celebration. That does not mean we do not make an effort to explain the truly unexplainable. Thus:

A friend of mine sent me a story that reminded me about the meaning of Christmas, or at least one of the many meanings of Christmas – it being quite difficult to make the meaning of Christmas so concise. In truth the story has nothing to do with Christmas and yet it has everything to do with the meaning of Christmas.

The story is about two brothers who lived on adjoining properties but who were at odds with each so much so that one brother brought in a bulldozer to create a creek between their properties. The other brother decided to do the other one better by hiring a carpenter, who providentially appeared on the scene, to build an eight-foot fence alongside the creek so that he would see neither his brother’s face nor his place anymore.

Both brothers were away for the day. The carpenter worked all day on into sunset and built not a fence but a bridge spanning the creek. When the brothers returned to their homes that evening, they were shocked, especially the creek builder who, before his brother could utter a word, crossed the bridge, extended his hand in friendship and praised his brother for such an act of brotherhood. When the carpenter turned to leave, both brothers asked him to stay as they had more work for him. The carpenter thanked them but said he had to go as he had more bridges to build.

Christmas, in more ways than one, is the celebration of the birth of The Carpenter among us. Jesus came to build bridges where humanity has built creeks and walls and fences. Jesus came to remind us that we are all brothers and sisters one to another no matter who we are, where we live, the color of our skin or anything else that might differentiate us one from another. We are all God’s children and nothing we say or do will ever change that, creeks, rivers and oceans, walls and fences notwithstanding.

Christmas and our Christian faith is all about building bridges where there are fences, building bridges where there is a gulf. Christmas is about bringing us back together where we have drifted apart. Christmas is about being the first one to cross to the other side to bring reconciliation and peace. Christmas is about being willing and daring to build the bridge and take the first step.

Like Jesus we are all called to be carpenters. That is the mission and that is the ministry Jesus has given to us and which we, in and through our baptism, have accepted. It is neither an easy mission nor often a pleasant ministry to fulfill as we have all discovered over the years. But it is a wonderful, joyful and exhilarating opportunity to live the meaning of Christmas each and every day of our lives. May we accept it and dare to live it to the fullest.

Merry Christmas.

WHAT IF THEY CANCELLED CHRISTMAS?

They won’t, of course. The Powers Who Are, whoever they are, would never, ever cancel Christmas. What would we do from Halloween until after all the After Christmas Sales? The world’s economy would take a nosedive. Heaven forbid! Or what if Christmas became just like Easter, a day so downplayed that if it were not for cards, candy and lamb, it would be no different than any other Sunday of the year? No, as long as there is commerce, there will be Christmas.

This is not to bewail and bemoan what has become of Christmas because The Powers Who Are do not control Christmas. They may have blackmailed some merchants into emphasizing the word “Christmas” instead of “Holiday”, but that did not alter the truth that Christmas for all intents and purposes for most people, especially the merchants and The Powers Who Are, is a holiday and not a holyday. The holiday can be cancelled. The holyday cannot.

So They can cancel the holiday. We will celebrate the holyday. We will celebrate it, much to The Powers’ delight, by giving and receiving material gifts, tangible signs of what this holyday is all about, namely, God’s love for us which we manifest by our love for another, for others. Yet, as limited as my observation honestly is, I would assert that we holyday celebrators are altering the manner in which we are demonstrating our love, altering it in such a way as to make the secular holiday almost into a holyday.

What we are doing is giving material gifts in the name of those we love to those who truly need to receive those gifts. Each of our daughters has told us that the best gift they received from us last year, and I am sure will be this year, was the one we gave in each of their names to those in need in our community and in our world. I have been the recipient of many such gifts and I am thankful. They make Christmas truly a holyday.

For many, many people, and not just The Powers Who Are, Christmas is a once-a-year holiday. For us, for you and for me, Christmas is an every-day-in-the-year holyday that we celebrate once a year but which we try to live out every day of the year. We live it out not only in gift-giving but, even more importantly, in the daily giving of our time and talents whenever and wherever they are needed.

Christmas, the real meaning of Christmas, cannot be cancelled. It can only be lived or not lived. The truth is that we choose to live it by giving ourselves, of ourselves, in some very secular and some very sacred ways. And it is in our living out the meaning of this holyday that we celebrate it.

May our celebration of Christmas this year be joyful and deep. May the gifts we give and the gifts we receive remind us of God’s Gift to us. May that Gift be a daily reminder that the greatest gift we can ever give to another is the gift of ourselves in whatever way that gift may be needed at that moment in time. May we never forget that the real meaning of Christmas is the giving of our love every day of the year so that we make every day a holyday, make every day Christmas. May it never be cancelled, at least not by us.

 

ON THE ONE HAND...

Recently I received and email from a friend which began: "Subject: Safety Statistics." It described The Safest Place on Earth. It warned that we should certainly avoid riding in automobiles because they are responsible for 20% of all fatal accidents. Moreover, we should not stay home because 17% of all accidents occur in the home. We must also avoid walking on streets or sidewalks because 14% of all accidents occur to pedestrians. And we should avoid traveling by air, rail, or water because 16% of all accidents involve some form of transportation.

I was pleased to learn that only .001% of all deaths occur in church, and these are usually related to previous physical disorders. Therefore, logic tells us that the safest place to be at any given point in time is at church! Bible study is safe too. The percentage of deaths during Bible study is even less. The conclusion: for safety's sake attend church! It could save our lives!

Maybe we should make this information widely available. It could be a good evangelism message, bring people to church, expand our membership and all that. After all, most of us have been taught from infancy to be safety conscious. What better way to put into practice what we have been taught?

On the other hand while reading over and article on Church history, I came across the following bit of historical information.  At the very beginning of Christianity to openly profess to being a Christian was to invite persecution, suffering and even death. It was not until the Edict of Milan in 313 that persecution stopped and going to church became safe, at least for most people.

What I leaned was that of the 318 bishops who gathered at the first Council of the Church in Nicea in 325, a dozen years after religious freedom was granted, only about a dozen of those bishops had not lost an eye or a hand or did not limp because of a missing or atrophied foot or leg caused by torture. Those bishops must have uttered to themselves the thought: "I know His truth is marching on. But why do we have to stop so often to bandage up the soldiers?"

History has also taught us that if it is easy to live out our faith, if it does not cause us some form of pain or discomfort, when the going does get rough, it is easy to not live out our faith.

All of which leads to the question: do we really want to preach a faith that does not cost us anything, a faith that is easy to live? Is that the kind of faith we are now living?  The truth is if living out our faith seems painless, it probably is. It may also mean that we are not truly living it as we should.

No one wants to live in pain, but it is sometimes required if we are to do what we know in faith we must. The truth is, when we are truly living out our faith, we will be bloodied in one way or another. So much for church being a safe place to be!

THERE'S HOPE FOR US ALL

Whenever I read the Bible and think about the cast of characters I find on almost every page, I realize that there is hope for me; there is hope for all of us.  If the truth were told, it is a motley bunch that God chose to be his representatives in this world, to speak God’s word to the world, to help bring about the salvation of the world.  Almost every person we encounter in scripture, if not every single one of them, is flawed, and some rather mightily flawed!

The truth of the matter is that no one is perfect; we are all flawed.  The further truth is that God so often uses those very flaws to accomplish God’s work.  My suspicion is that we often take our gifts for granted but are well acquainted with our shortcomings.  We work on those failings.  Sometimes we work very hard on them.  And so often it is overcoming those things which we consider deficiencies by concentrating on them that we tend to shine.

In the Christmas story everyone involved seemed to be flawed in one way or another.  Neither Mary nor Joseph would have ever considered themselves capable or worthy to become the parents of such a child.  They must have worked every day, worked hard every day to be the very best of parents. They may have done so in fear and trembling because of their responsibility, but they did.

The shepherds, of course, were at the lowest end of the respectability scale in society.  Their smell was a reminder of their low esteem and probably helped keep their self-esteem even lower.  But that did not prevent them from becoming the first to give honor and pay respects to their Savior.

The Wisemen somehow knew they did not have all the answers even though others looked up to them as bastions of wisdom and knowledge.  They came looking to find true wisdom, even Truth Himself. 

All the others in the cast of characters in this story were ordinary human beings, from the inn keeper who helped in the best and probably only way he could by offering them at least a warm place to stay for the night; to Herod who was a living reminder that selfishness always gets in the way of doing what is good and right, to anyone else who happened upon the birth. Each and everyone was a flawed human being.

All of us would have fit right in somewhere.  We would be no better or no worse than anyone else.  The baby we would be seeing in that manger came to give us what we all always need: hope.  Because of his life and death and resurrection we all have hope; we all have the ability to overcome our weaknesses and failings and sins and become, in our own way, instruments of salvation.  We do that by telling the Christmas story through our very lives.

May this Advent Season be a reminder that God uses us to be today's heralds of God's hope for the world in Jesus.

 

 

REFLECTIONS ON REFLECTIONS ON GROWING OLDER

Over the years the genesis of many of my reflections have been snippets I have gleaned from a newsletter Martin Marty used to publish and which I truly miss called Context. For some reason I’ve saved many of the issues. While rummaging through my files I found a piece in which he listed six reflective quotations about growing older They are found below with my reflection on each of the reflections.

George Eliot: "It's never too late to be what you might have been." That is, unless we die before we get started. We might not be able to do what we wanted to do long ago or even want to do today, but we can always be or become the person we might have been had we begun earlier. It is very tempting to believe that we are too old to change but the grace of God knows no time limit.

May Sarton: "Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light." We also become lighter. As we age, we get rid of a lot of the garbage we have been carrying around thinking it was important at the time when, in truth, all it did was hold us back from growing up and growing closer to our God and to one another.

Lyn Hall: "We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves." We discard all the phoniness we had wrapped ourselves in trying to be who we were not or who we wanted to be or tried to be for whatever reason we tried and simply allow ourselves to be who we are. We discover that we have wasted a lot of time, money and energy in the pursuit of foolishness.

Dorothy Sayers: "Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age." No one in his or her right mind wants to be 16 or 26 or 36 or whatever age we once were again. The best age to be is the age we are right now and to live it to the fullest as best we can, gracefully with grace. Besides, those who live in the past, which is dead and gone, are not really living. They are simply vegetating through life, which is no way to live.

Carl Jung: "Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin -- and certainly a danger -- to be too much preoccupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself." We discover, as we grow older, that had we paid more attention to ourselves, especially to our bodies, we might feel better. Now we have to think about our bodies and souls, not to the detriment of others, but because we have no other choice.

And finally, for what it is worth, and it may not be worth much except that it comes from two former Yankees: the one and only Casey Stengel who opined, "I'll never make the mistake of turning 70 again." Casey was Yogi Berra's manager and mentor, Yogi, the one who observed, "It ain't over till it's over" and "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Need I say any more?

THE REAL ISSUE

I saw a license plate holder the other day on a car that was passing me. It read: "I am an orthodox Christian." I wondered what it meant. Did the owner of the car mean that he or she was member of the Greek Orthodox Church, for instance, an Eastern Christian, that kind of Orthodox Christian? Or did the driver mean that he or she held the usual -meaning true - and right Christian beliefs? That’s my, to be honest, biased guess, but I really do not know.

What I do know, or at least am convinced about, is that there is no true orthodox Christian. None of us holds all the truth, believes all of the truth, understands all the truth, because we do not know all of the truth. The real and honest truth is we are all heretics, all of us. No one has a complete handle on the truth either. As soon as we think we do, we wander off into error. Faith is not completely and totally explainable or understandable. And as soon as we try to explain the faith, define the truth, we set ourselves up for failure.

Jesus never tried. He told us that he and the Father are one. He never explained what he meant, nor could he, so he did not even try. But sometimes, for whatever reason, we try and we get ourselves into trouble. Jesus told us to love everyone. We don't. And we know we don't. And then to justify ourselves we try to explain why we don't love someone and why it is all right not to. Paul told us, learning from Jesus, that there are no distinctions within the Body of Christ. We make them and we make them based on our perception of our differences.

The problem is not that there are differences. We are all different even as we are all equal in God's sight and should be equal in the sight of one another. We are all sinners in God's sight and should be seen as all sinners in the sight of one another. But, as we know, as any orthodox person will tell us, there is sin and there is The Sin - and we all know what that Sin is these days, don't we? There is truth and there is The Truth. My perception is that those who call themselves orthodox mean that they have a handle on The Sin and The Truth.

The problem, I believe, these days in the church and, I dare to say, in the political world in which we live, purports to be over The Sin to which every other sin pales in comparison. Those who are orthodox know The Truth about The Sin and they are willing to divide the church (and the country) over it, and are doing so, thank you very much. I wonder what God thinks. I wonder what Jesus would say, Jesus, who hung around with the best and the brightest and the worst and the so-called dregs of humanity and never made any distinction between anyone.

The truth of the matter is that the truth is being obscured behind the rhetoric of orthodoxy: “We are the true believers (Republicans, Democrats, etc)”. It always has been and always will be. The truth is that the real issue is not orthodoxy or Gospel truths. The real issue is about power. It always has been and always will be no matter how much anyone protests otherwise. That is THE TRUTH.

TAKE LOVING NOTICE

One of the great pleasures I have had all my life is to have been blessed, and continue to be blessed, to live in parts of the country where there are four seasons. Sometimes the winters are too long. Sometimes the summers are too dry or too wet or too hot. Sometimes the springs are too short or too cold. Sometimes the falls are not as pretty as I would like. But I get to experience and revel in the changing of the seasons, and not only to enjoy the changes but to live in and through them.

The anticipation of the seasonal changes is always important, especially when the season we are in has become just a little too much: too long, too cold, too hot, too whatever. What is more important than the anticipation is the living in the moment. Because even the moment, no matter how much we may dislike that moment because we are too tired of such moments, is worthwhile.

A longtime cyberfriend Molly Wolf wrote this a while back and it still holds true: "C.S. Lewis got it right: God wants us to live in the present, not the past or the future, because this present moment is as close as we're ever going to get in this life to what Eternity is like. The Market, the geese -- the river flooding, two kids intent on their sandbox play, a cat sleeping with her tail over her nose and her paws neatly bundled, two blanketed horses standing side-by-each in a field, an old woman dozing on the bus, two young lovers swinging hands and giggling, a drift of leave, a tangle of flowering maple: we are given such an endless number of God's creations to take loving notice of; and taking loving notice leaves us with such happiness and peace. What on earth keeps us from spending more time at this business of loving notice, when it costs absolutely nothing and gives us so much?"

What indeed! If the truth were told, however, we allow too much to enter our lives which will distract us from living in the moment and taking loving notice of all that surrounds us. Personally, I never really want to rush the seasons, yet I find myself rushing through the seasons. And in my hurry to get to who knows where, I miss so much of that which will add meaning and depth to my life right here and right if only I would stop. If only I would stop, not just to smell the roses but to take loving notice of them, even a long and loving notice.

To take loving notice means that I have to look beyond the beauty of the flower and the aroma that it gives off. It means that I have to come to the realization that the rose, this rose, was created by God because God loves me and gives it to me for my pleasure and enjoyment at this very moment in my life, a life that it often seems that I am rushing through.  To take loving notice means to know and see and understand the love that is at the basis of all that is good and Godly that surrounds us.

The season is changing. We are moving from fall to winter. Now is as good a time as any and perhaps better than most when we can make and take the time to take loving notice of all that surrounds us, the changing of the leaves, the nip in the air, the shortness of the days – what we seem to take for granted but really should revel in and give thanks for. 

FOR ALL THE SAINTS...TO REMEMBER

Dag Hammarskjoeld, one-time Secretary-General of the United Nations, once observed: "In our era the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." Dorothy Day, that great Roman Catholic Social Worker, observed "When they call you a saint, it means basically that you're not going to be taken seriously." If they were and are both correct, where does that leave us?

First of all, they remind us that there is nothing we can do to become holy, but we cannot become holy without doing something. Doing good works is no guarantee in and of itself of growing in holiness, but we cannot grow in holiness without doing good works. Holiness is a by-product of doing what our faith demands, namely, loving God and neighbor and self with our total being. That, in essence, is the basic message of the Bible whether we realize it or not.

Love is a transitive verb. It demands action. We love in deed, in doing loving actions. When we love actively, we grow in holiness. When we grow in holiness, we become holy, saintly. Saints, of course, at least in this life, are not totally holy nor are they totally sinless. Saints are human, just like you and me. Granted, we would probably never consider ourselves saints, at least not on the order of Peter or Paul or Francis of Assisi or Mother Theresa. In fact, we probably would never even consider ourselves a saint. I mean, how dare we, sinners that we are! But we truly are – both sinners and saints, as incomprehensible as that may seem.

Dorothy Day reminds us that when we live a saintly, holy life, we will not be taken seriously. Others may admire our good works, but they will think us to somehow be a little off center, even foolish. The Apostles were considered fools, I am certain, by their friends and family and colleagues for dropping everything and chasing after some itinerant preacher. “Are you crazy?” they asked. Francis was considered out of his mind for giving up a comfortable, rich life to walk naked into a life of poverty.

So, too, when we do good deeds, holy acts. Our motives will certainly be questioned by those not prone to giving of themselves to others. They will assume that we do what we do from some ulterior motive for some hidden or perceived reward and not because we truly want to do good and live a holy life.

Well, so be it. But the awful truth is that they are absolutely correct. There are indeed times when we do good works for selfish purposes. It is also the truth that there is always something good for us in our good works for others. No good and holy act is totally and purely selfless. Nor can it be.

All Saints Day, which we just celebrated, is a reminder that we are all saints in spite of our sometimes less-than-pure motives. It is also a reminder that we all do good acts because we are holy people no matter what others think or believe.  Finally, it is a reminder that we can never cease doing good until we are called by God to be a Saint Forever.

LISTENING

I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't listen very well. I have this ability to turn off the sound. Not all the time, mind you, but often enough I am deaf to what others are saying, especially what my wife is saying. It's not that I've heard it all before or I think my wife has nothing to say. (I may be dense, but I am not that foolish!) It's not that I think what another has to say is not worth listening to. It is simply that sometimes I shut off the sound and retreat into my own little world.

Then there are the times when I am listening with only one ear as it were. I hear what is being said, hear the words, the sounds, but I am not really listening. The words seem to go in one ear and out the other. My thoughts at that moment are, for some reason, somewhere else. I also do this with my wife. As you might suspect, I am often in deep trouble with my wife.

Listening is an art. It does not come naturally, at least not to me. I think we have to learn how to listen. That is not to say that there is some trick to it. Rather, we must be prepared to listen. There are those who say they can listen to someone while doing something else. I'm not sure I believe that because I know I cannot. I've tried it often enough - with my wife, of course – to know that I am an abject failure. When it comes to listening, I can’t multi-task.

There are a couple of reasons why we need to listen to others. The first reason is common courtesy. When others speak to us, we need to give them our full attention. Even if we think the other person has nothing to tell us, we need to listen. The truth is, as we have all discovered, is that we have learned more from some of the unlikeliest people than we have from those we considered founts of wisdom.

Another reason to listen is that the person talking to us has a need to talk to us. Why they have that need is sometimes not obvious. We may simply be the closest ear. But they have that need and we need to be open to them. There are many times when I have simply been the ear. Complaints were being aired because they needed to be aired. The one complaining did not expect me to resolve the issue. He or she simply needed a sounding board.

Another reason we need to listen (or learn how to listen better) and that is that a universal truth holds for all of us: we do not have all the answers. No one does. We do not know all that we need to know. And because experience is a universal teacher, the lessons others learn can be helpful to us, if we would only listen. We can always learn something, often, again, from those we least expect.  I wonder how much knowledge I have missed obtaining because I was not listening.

Maybe I am an exception. Maybe most people are good listeners. Maybe I simply needed to remind myself that if I am to truly live out my faith, if I want to be the person God wants me to be and who I want to be, I have to be able to listen to others who may be speaking God's word to me.

THE PROBLEM OF GOOD

The problem of good? What problem, you ask? We're all familiar with the Problem of Evil and we all have a problem with it, from the greatest atheist to the greatest theist. Even if we can explain evil, understand evil, know evil's insides and out, we still have to live with it and, thus, deal with it. It is in this dealing with, coping with, enduring and trying to overcome evil that causes every human being difficulties no matter what we believe or do not believe.

The truth is that the problem we have with evil is the same problem we have with good. It truly is the same problem, but we often to fail to see it that way. It is easy to see the problem we have with evil, especially we believers. It is that age-old question that has no satisfactory answer, at least not for believers: If God is all-good, where does evil come from? To put it another way: Why does God permit evil when God the all-powerful can prevent it?

The answer we give is always the same: free will. Because God created us with free will - and only God knows why God did - we are now free to do good or to do bad. And we often do bad, deliberately, with malice aforethought. Now that may be a satisfactory response to the "why" of the problem of human evil. It does nothing, or very little, to give a satisfactory answer to the "why" of natural evil like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods or to that fact-of-life of simply being in the wrong place and the wrong time. The truth is we will never understand evil fully, not in this life, no matter how hard we try, especially when we try to explain the evil we ourselves do.

Yet, what evil always seems to boil down to is that it is a God-problem. God must ultimately be held responsible for natural evils because that is the way God created this universe and God must also be at least be held as an accomplice to deliberate human evil because God created we human beings with the ability and the freedom to do evil, to be selfish and bad.

That being said (and probably also being debated: is he, meaning me, right about that or is he a heretic?), what goes unsaid is that we humans, while trying to foist at least a little of the responsibility and the guilt for human evil upon God's shoulders, so often give God little or no credit for the good we do. That is the Problem of Good. We are so often tempted to take all the credit for the good we do and take as little blame as we can for the bad we do.

We can't have it both ways. Either we give God the credit for creating us good with the ability to do bad or we take all the responsibilities for all the good and all the bad that we cause or do. I will grant that I may be making a mountain out of a molehill here. We usually do give God some of the credit and thanks for the good we do and the good done to and for us. My point is that we need to become a little more aware that doing good may come naturally simply because of the way God created us; but because we are prone to also be selfish, doing good is the result, and only the result, of the grace of God. And thanks be to God for that.

JUST BECAUSE IT'S FREE DOESN'T MEAN IT'S FRIVOLOUS

I remember that old Smith Barney (I think it was) commercial where John Houseman (I think he was the actor) used to opine that whatever Smith Barney did they did it the old fashioned way: they earned it. Nothing frivolous about Smith Barney. No freebees with them. If it is free, it really is not worth anything. We get what we pay for -- and all the rest of those sage bits of wisdom we were raised on.

For the most part those words of wisdom are true perhaps because we make them true and have learned from experience that, in fact, there is much wisdom and truth in them. The old saw among clergy is that a parish in debt is a parish alive. If there are no real money worries, the people tend to become lax. That is not always or even for the most part true, but we tend to believe it anyway, maybe because most churches always seem to have money problems. Or, if for instance, we are given a free ticket to some event, even an event with a hard-to-get ticket, we are prone to not take that event as seriously as the one we paid full price for and had to scratch and claw just to get in line to be able to purchase that ticket.

The real truth, of course, is that the most important possessions we have as far as our faith is concerned are free gifts. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, to earn them -- like life itself, like the grace of God, like forgiveness of sins, like eternal life-in-death. Yet because they are free, we often deem them frivolous in that we truly do not appreciate them for what they are nor make use of them as we should nor believe them to be as real as they are.

It is not that we take them for granted. Would that we would. We would be better off if we did. We would be more content with life and be better able to deal with the trials and tribulations that come our way.

Rather, instead of assuming that God always forgives us and living a life of The Forgiven, we sometimes cannot understand how God or anyone else could ever forgive us for something we just said or did. Instead of assuming that God's grace will always be enough, we sometimes act as if the situation is hopeless and we are helpless. Instead of believing that the bad can be redeemed, we give up hope., and so on and on and on.

The free gifts of God are simply that: free. But that is not what is important. What is important is not that we did anything to deserve or earn them. What is important is that they are gifts of God. Because of that, they can never be frivolous, or undervalued. In fact, we cannot put a price on any of them. They should be so valuable that we treasure them as we would treasure the most priceless material possession we might wish to possess.

From a human point of view, which is the only view we have, perhaps because these God-given gifts cannot be grasped like we can grab hold of the world's most valuable diamond or cannot be earned by the sweat of our brow, we often fail to realize just how valuable they are. We do so at our own loss.

A FALSE, SILLY OR SUPERFICIAL FAITH IS BETTER THAN NO FAITH AT ALL

Believers believe. Believers don't know. Believers would like to know but can live with not knowing. That is not to say that believers are stupid or foolish or are prime candidates to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. It is simply to say that believing is better than not believing; having faith, even a weak faith, is better than having no faith at all.

People of faith, for example, believe that there is life in death, that resurrection to eternal life takes place when we die in this life. Believers have absolutely no idea what heaven is like, none whatsoever and are okay with that. If any believer says that she or he does, offer to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge and check her off your list of people to talk to when having doubts.

However, all believers, we, you and I, have some vision of what heaven, eternal life, is like. We try to imagine what it means to be raised up in death, to live forever, to be able to see God "face to face." We know, know, we will be totally surprised by what we will indeed experience in death, that our present vision will pale with what we will experience.

But we can live with both not knowing what eternal life is all about and knowing that we are in for the surprise of our lives. For in the final analysis having a false, silly or superficial vision of heaven is better than having no vision at all.

Some would object, of course, especially those who do not believe. But that's all right. That is their problem, their problem. But, in a very real way, it is also our problem. We believers have an obligation to share our belief with unbelievers. But the essence of our faith is resurrection in death to eternal life. How do we convey what we believe to another when we have no way of describing what we believe except to echo Paul and say that our minds can neither imagine it nor explain it?

What we do is try even as we fail; and fail we will. We will never be able to give more than a silly or superficial vision of heaven and the one or ones we do give will, of course, always be false. But it is not our inability to explain the unexplainable that is the issue. What is is that we have enough faith to defend the unexplainable and do it not by words but by deeds. We explain our faith in eternal life by living out our faith as fully as we can in this life.

What keeps us going is our willingness to accept that our vision of life in death, no matter how silly, superficial or false, is better than no vision at all. That vision encourages us when we doubt and fills us to overflowing when we are at the top of our faith. That vision is also what encourages those who do not believe whether we believe it or not.

If we have any doubts, consider Paul who taught his faith by living his faith and not by explaining it. Yes, he tried. But in the end he knew that the only proof of what he taught and believed was the life he lived. That was enough for him and that, in the end, is enough for us.

RIDING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT

It is probably safe to say that 99% of the time that I am in a car I am doing the driving. It is not that I do not trust anyone else to do the driving for me. My wife is a better driver than I am. It is not a macho thing either. I do not have a need to be in control. It is simply the fact that most of the time when I am in a car, I am driving. Now that we are down to one car because we now have found no need to have two, we share the driving; but I still do most of it.

On those rare occasions when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I rediscover the truth that I miss most of what I would have seen had I not been driving. I see things that I never saw before even though I have passed them hundreds of times. That is as it should be. If I were to look around while driving to see all those sights I see when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I would not have a driver's license. I might not even be alive to ponder such thoughts. 

The truth of the matter, however, is that I need to leave the driving to someone else more often than I do, literally and figuratively. I suspect we all do. It is so easy, all too easy, to get tunnel vision, to see everything from one perspective. When we become so myopic, we also so easily insist that what we see is really the truth, the whole of reality. But the truth is that we don't know the half of it because we have seen or experienced even less than that.

But the only way that we can see from another perspective is to deliberately take another seat. It is truthfully said that we cannot know how another sees life until we walk in that other person's shoes and walk in them for quite a few miles. So, too, the only way we can get another view of the reality that is our life is to be willing to deliberately take a look from another perspective. Doing so may not make us change our mind, nor does it have to because our view may be the correct one; but at least we have something to which we can compare our original beliefs.

That is not to say that what we believe is wrong. It is simply to say that, as someone else has observed, the unexamined life is really not a life worth living. The examined life presumes that we change seats every once in a while and that we change them intentionally and willingly. Those are the operative words intentionally and willingly.  It must be our choice to change seats, if you will. When we are forced to do anything, our first reaction is to resist and resist mightily. If someone forces us to examine our faith by pushing his beliefs on us, we tend to instantly close our minds to what we hear and defend our beliefs with all that we have.

But examine our life and our faith we must if only to allow ourselves to grow in that faith. Faith, like life, is never static. It either grows or it dies. It does not remain the same because faith, like life, is a living reality. Growing in our faith is akin to intentionally asking my spouse to take the wheel so that I can see some of what I have been missing when I have been in the driver's seat. We need to take a ride in the passenger seat of faith -- often.  Move over and see what you’ve been missing!

ENJOYING WHAT GOD'S DONE FOR US

My favorite contemporary theologian, the late Robert Capon, in his last tome, The Fingerprints of God, reminds us, as the title indicates, that God's fingerprints can be found everywhere one looks from the beginning of time and not just at certain specific moments in history.

When we read Scripture, we are wont to believe God's interaction into history is sort of the hit-and-miss variety. God shows up at the beginning and creates the world, intervenes in the Garden, comes back around Noah's time, takes a long break until he makes a pact with Abraham -- and that is only for starters. As for God's being seen elsewhere in the world, or anywhere in the world, or at all, well...only for those who have the eyes of faith to see.

For it is faith that gives us those all-seeing eyes, gives us the ability to see God at work in our lives and all around us, gives us the ability to enjoy what God has already done for us and is still doing for us day in and day out -- which is precisely Capon's definition of faith. He says that "faith doesn't do anything; it simply enables believers to enjoy what Jesus has already done for them." The emphasis is on "enjoy" and on "already done." What God is still doing for us is icing on the cake, if you will.

What God, Jesus, has already done for us is forgive us for sins committed past, present and future. Faith says that we do not have to do anything to have our sins forgiven. In fact, we cannot do anything. Either God forgives our sins in Jesus or we are stuck with them. Anything we might do or want to do or think we have to do to get God to forgive our sins will always come up short and will never be enough.

And if that were the case, if we had to do something to obtain forgiveness, then faith in God would not be enjoyable in the least, and neither would trying to live a faith-filled live -- because that would be an impossibility. We would be worrying every minute of every day that we weren't getting it right, which, of course, is impossible to do anyway.

Thus, in order to enjoy this life God has given us, we have faith that however much we mess up -- and we all mess up big time at times -- we can go on knowing that we have already been forgiven in and through Jesus. That doesn’t justify the messing-up. It simply allows us to be able to pick ourselves up and move on rather than getting stuck in remorse and even fear of some kind of retribution on God’s part.

Capon's irreverent view of this life (and for which I have always enjoyed reading his works) is one giant cocktail party where everyone is toasting God's love and forgiveness. Not a bad picture even if, personally, cocktail parties leave much to be desired. One big pizza party would be more to my liking and imagining, but you get the point.

Because of Jesus's birth, life, death and resurrection and our faith in that, all we have to do is enjoy the fact that we are forgiven sinners. I'll have a slice of pizza to that, or maybe even two. And you?

FIRE AND WATER

Recently I have been rereading Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. It is probably the best work on spirituality that I have ever read. That is why it deserves a reread. There is just too much there to comprehend the first time through.

Rolheiser maintains that in each one of us there is a never-ending desire, a fundamental dis-ease, that will not allow us to be satisfied, ever. It is akin to running with wolves, having a fire in the belly. We cannot explain it; we just know it is there. Spirituality, he says, is what we do with this unrest, this dis-ease, this fire, this desire to keep on running, never standing still, if you will.

But as with any fire, if it gets out of control, we can be consumed by whatever it is that is driving us. So there is a need to have water ready to toss on the fire, not to put it out, but to keep it under control. Spirituality is about how we channel our desires, whatever they are and however we define or understand them, so that we do not get out of control, subsumed, consumed, by our desires. That, in a way, is what sin is all about: it is about giving in to an all-consuming desire to do or say something even though we know that to do so is wrong.

The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, to be unable to do anything, to lose all zest for living, to be a couch potato. Spirituality, then, has to keep us glued together so that we do not roll up into a ball and die. A healthy spirituality keeps us, he says, both energized and glued together.

A healthy spirituality does that. I don't know about you, but it seems that sometimes I am either so glued together that I am stuck or so loose that I am not sure which way to turn. Most of the time I am somewhere in the middle, neither stuck nor loose. Spirituality is about making choices. Healthy spirituality is about making the right choices, or at least making more right choices than wrong choices.

This drive, which Rolheiser calls "eros," is soul, soul that gives us energy. But it is also the glue that keeps us together. It puts fire in our veins and keeps us energized; and it adds water to the mix and keeps us glued together. There is chaos and there is order. It is the creative tension between the two, between fire and water that both keeps us alive and keeps us safe.

All this, I suspect, sounds rather esoteric, and maybe so.  Our own spirituality is something we never quite get a handle on. We know what it is even if we cannot define it or even describe it. We know when we are on fire and we know when we seem stuck in the mud. And we often do not know what to do about either.

And this is only for starters! We do have to recognize what is going on inside us if we want to even begin to understand ourselves. If there is any consolation, even the greatest saints had problems with their spiritual lives. So will/do we.

LEARNING HOW TO RECEIVE

The church is really good at reminding us that it is better to give than to receive. We take up collections every Sunday, have special offerings to purchase a new organ or to build a home for a family. We ask for funds on a regular basis for the Rector to use for helping others and ask for donations to support children in other lands so that they can have a decent education -- and the list seems go on and on and on.

We have bake sales and bazaars, book sales and rummage sales, car washes and spaghetti dinners, and anything else anyone can think of to raise needed monies for needed causes. Then, of course, there is the annual Every Member Canvas that is fast approaching.

All this is not a criticism. It is simply the truth. There are better ways, I suspect, to raise funds, but that is not my issue at the moment. Nor do I wish to debate the fact that it is better to give than to receive. It truly is and we all know it.

But sometimes we can get the impression that there is something wrong in receiving; we sometimes give that impression as well. We sometimes believe that if we are on the receiving end of someone else's giving, we are somehow inferior to, that we are of lesser worth than, the giver. That is nonsense, of course, but we do sometimes give that impression as givers and have that feeling as receivers.

We also often feel that when given a gift, we have to reciprocate somehow in some way. We find it difficult, at times, believing that a gift is given with no strings attached, that it is given simply out of the love.

Neither giving nor receiving comes easy. Why that is true, I am not sure. But I do find it to be true. As children we have to be taught to share our toys with others. In fact, as children we find it easier to take than to give, to hoard rather than to share. It takes a lot of time and teaching for us to realize how good it is to share what we have, share from our abundance with those who have less.

What we then assume is that because it is good to give, it must be bad, or at least not as good, to receive. So now we have to learn how to receive and learn that it is just as good to receive as it is to give and that there is nothing wrong with being on the receiving end. That is a truly difficult lesson to learn.

We are on the receiving end more often than we think. We receive gifts of love, kindness and caring; we receive homecooked meals and calls and letters. We receive everyday gifts every day. We receive perhaps as much as we give, and maybe even more.

What we fail to understand, I think, is that a gift is a gift is a gift. Difference in kind or degree or need makes no difference. It makes no difference if I need a meal because I can no longer cook than if I need a hug because I just need one. Gifts are gifts. It does not really matter who gives them or how much we need them. We simply need to receive them thankfully and joyfully.

STAYING GROUNDED

It's hard to be humble when everyone thinks you're wonderful. I am not speaking of myself, of course. Yeah, right. I suspect that we all have a little trouble with humility now and then. We all like to think or want to think that we are a little better than we are and certainly better than others think we are or perceive us to be. It certainly helps when we are having a bad day for whatever reason we are.

It is easy to live under the illusion that because we are not all that bad, that we are pretty good, that we are even wonderful and that God loves us just as we are. The truth is that we are pretty good and sometimes do wondrous things and that God always loves us. In fact, as the late evangelist Luis Palau once very astutely observed, "God is not disillusioned with us."

Oh, that was only the first part of his observation. The second half? "He never had any illusions to begin with." Talk about a blow to our pride. Palau hits us over the head with a sledgehammer with that. But we need to be reminded that we need to stay grounded. God knows us better than we know ourselves. We are mere mortals after all. We are God's gift and we are God's gift to the world -- just like everyone else.

I remember way back when I was first ordained. Humility was not one of my virtues even though I thought I was ever so humble. You see, I had all the answers and I knew I had all the answers. All you had to do was ask me and I would and could tell you what was wrong with the church and what should be done. In fact, there were times when I stood in the pulpit and smugly pontificated about some issue. I had a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do. I am ever thankful to all those kind and loving people who hit me over the head with a sledgehammer when I became too full of myself.

All this reminded me of what a mother of another newly ordained priest said to her son as he was basking in all the praise people were heaping on him. She said, "I used to think priests knew everything. Now I worry because you are a priest and I know you don't know anything." That was a sledgehammer if I ever heard one! Now I have to wonder if my own mother thought the same thing about me. She probably did but was too kind to say it. She simply prayed every day that I would not make a fool of myself and save her from the embarrassment I might cause to the family.

Of course, now that I am older and wiser and more mature and have over fifty years of experience, I definitely have all the answers. Just ask me. Come to think of it, isn’t that what my audacity in writing and sending reflections like this seems somehow in some way to indicate?

Seriously, it is so easy to live with the delusion that we are wiser than we really are or worse than we really are. When I think about it, I am not sure which is worse. Staying grounded, being honest with ourselves both about our failings and shortcomings and our God-given gifts is a never-ending battle. It is only through the grace of God that our pride does not do us in more often than it should.

TWO DOGS

George Bernard Shaw: "A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, 'The one I feed the most.'"

Whenever we do something wrong and then begin to wonder why in the world we did it, our only response -- and most honest response -- is to admit that we must have been feeding the wrong dog. We feed both evil and good, both right and wrong. More often than not we are not all that aware of what we are doing. It is only after we have been caught in the bad or been complimented for the good we did that we come to realize that we made what happened happen.

Good feeds off good and evil feeds off evil. It always has and always will for both. The evil of Hitler's Germany began with a single wrong and escalated into the killing of millions of innocent people by other people who, had they been asked before the evil began, would have insisted with every fiber of their being that they would never do such a thing, not participate in such atrocities, not in a million years they wouldn't. But they did, did they not?

How did they come to the point were doing evil took over their lives? They fed it and fed on it so much so that, in the end, it may not even have occurred to them that what they were doing was evil. They had come to convince themselves that what the evil they were doing was, if fact, a good.

Now we may protest and say that they were only fooling themselves, maybe even lying. Anyone in his right mind would know that Dachau was immoral. If that is true, then what happened is that their feeding of evil, slowly but surely, came to cloud their thinking. Evil overcame good because evil and not good was being fed.

The opposite is also true. We can overcome evil by feeding good with good, by doing good. Remaining strong in the face of evil is not easy. It is always easier to give in. That is why feeding the good dog can never be taken for granted. When we become lax in our attention to doing good, we will stop doing good, stop feeding the good dog and start feeding the bad one.

We know that. But knowing is not enough. Ask anyone who is caught in an evil act why he did it, his first response will not be "because I wanted to." It will be "I don't know. I don't know how I ended up in this mess." Upon reflection he would have to admit that he had been feeding the wrong dog and may not have been as aware of what he was doing as he should have been.

We all make excuses for our sinful deeds, make them to others and make them to ourselves. It may be human nature, and I suspect it is. Nevertheless, we must not take lightly anything we do, good or bad, about which dog we feed.

BE EVEN MORE CAREFUL

We've all heard the old warning about being careful about what we pray for lest that that prayer be answered. We also know the reality of that warning. We've all had prayers answered in the way and to the degree we prayed. And we were surprised because even though we believe in the efficacy of prayer, we sometimes pray hesitatingly. We pray not really believing that our what-seems-outrageous request will be granted by God simply because it seems a little outrageous in the first place.

When our prayer is granted, we are blown away and not only do not know what to say but are almost overwhelmed by the responsibilities that come with the granted prayer. That is not to say that we wish God had not answered our prayer. It is to say that sometimes, after the fact, we come to the realization that more was involved than a simple prayer request and a simple answer to that request by God. That does not mean that strings are attached to our prayer being answered. It is to say that it actually seems that way.

But that does not stop our asking. Even though we don't always, if ever, fully understand all the consequences of having a prayer answered, we will still ask because what we ask for is very, very important to us. Maybe we should be careful in what we pray for; but given the alternative, we will all take that chance.

It may be difficult enough dealing with the consequences of an answered prayer, what is even more eye-opening is the fact that sometimes the answer to our prayer is the one praying. So we are warned: be careful how you pray: you may be the answer.

The fact is, I think, we are always the answer, or at least part of the answer. God answers our prayers because we ask, even if we ask for something for someone we know nothing about except that the person needs prayers. Every Sunday we pray for a lot of people most of whom none of us know personally and know not why the persons are being prayed for in particular. Our task is simply to pray. Prayers for healing, for instance, are answered because we pray for someone's healing. We are part of the answer.

Again, sometimes we are the answer. In the incident where Philip comes up to Jesus to tell him that the people are hungry and need to be fed, he is making a request to Jesus: a prayer. What is Jesus's response? "You feed them, Philip. You answer your own prayer."

Philip did not see himself as the answer to his own prayer. He was so overwhelmed by the need -- to feed over 5000 people -- that he could not see how anything but a miracle could accomplish the deed. Jesus fed the people, of course. But Philip could have fed them in the same way Jesus did. The difference was that Jesus saw Philip as the answer to the prayer and Philip saw someone else as being that answer; so Jesus fed them.

My suspicion is that we are the answer to our own prayers more often than we suspect. Perhaps we need to be careful not only about what we pray for but even more careful how we pray.

WHY?

Why is it that when we can afford to eat anything we want, we can't; and when we can eat anything we want, we can't afford to? I am blessed. I can afford to eat out whenever I want, but I cannot eat out whenever I want because I will eventually look like the Goodyear Blimp and die of a heart attack. Yet, when I was younger and could eat more because my metabolism was better, I could not afford to eat out. The money just was not there to do so.

Why is it that we are better grandparents than we are parents? Not only do we have more time to spend with our grandchildren, we actually want to spend time with them. There were times when I did not want to be around my daughters at all, like at least once a month -- and sometimes more. They were not pleasant creatures. I loved them dearly, and still do, but they were impossible sometimes. Grandchildren, on the other hand, are simply wonderful all the time.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why this is true, I would say that God created life so that there would be a balance throughout. Obviously, it sometimes seems as if we are on some sort of divine seesaw: the times we are up we would rather be down, and vice versa. The times we would like some peace of mind we get chaos, and the times when we can endure chaos because we have the time, we get peace of mind.

The way to deal with it, or at least one of the ways, is to, as they used to say, "go with the flow." No use fighting the rapids because you'll lose. But the rapids eventually cease and the river of life becomes calm again -- until the next set of rapids. Then the cycle starts all over again. It is not a vicious cycle as it sometimes seems, but simply the cycle of life as we experience it.

Throughout it all, thankfully, especially when we least understand why things are the way they are, God is right there. God never leaves us even though we sometimes feel that we are battling the rapids alone. Of course, it is usually only when we've made it through the rapids that we realized that God was the one who got us through safe and sound. Would that we would have realized and sensed God's presence when the rapids were at their worst -- like when the house is overrun with teenage daughters! Sometimes it’s simply too difficult to do so.

Ahh, it's grandparent-time and been grandparent-time for a while now. I have shot the rapids and survived. And even if I can't eat all the food I can afford to buy, I'll enjoy what I can eat and save the money for our grandchildren's education.  And even more in, to spoil them as best my wife and I can, much to their delight and their parents’ sometimes displeasure.  But, then, spoiling grandchildren are a parent’s revenge.

Come to think of it, I guess there are good reasons why God made it so that I can't (and shouldn’t for all kinds of reasons) eat all that I can afford to eat: Grandchildren.  They are a blessing and, thankfully, not in disguise. They are right there, if only in our hearts and minds, to help understand the wonderful and joyful ways God works in our lives.

FAITH-FILLED FEET

A friend of mine passed along a sign he once saw on an Indian Reservation: "The sign of God's presence with you is that your feet are where you do not expect them to be." The late Father Dan Berrigan is said to have put that thought in more earthy terms (edited here to keep this column rated "G"): "Faith is where your 'backside' is," as in "when you are up to you knees in an alligator pond, faith in God is all important."

There are times when we all find ourselves knee-deep in a mess, whether than mess is of our own creation or whether we just happened upon it. In such a situation we are called to respond; we have no choice but to respond. We may not like being where we are, but there we are and there is nothing we can do about it. Crying and bellyaching are a useless waste of good breath at that moment.

It is in that moment, moments like these, that we are called to live out what we believe. It is in moments like these that we discover that we have been placed there or found ourselves there because that is where God wants us to be at that moment in our lives. Of course, it is usually only after the fact that we make this discovery about how God works in our lives.

That is not to say that God only works with us when there is some mess to clean up. It is to say that so often, when we are in such messes, we have a very difficult time being able to see anything but the mess and thinking about nothing else than getting out of it as quickly as possible. Such thoughts often preclude the ability of God's intervention and the working out of our faith.

Dan Berrigan used to put himself into situations most of us would avoid and he used them to speak of his own personal faith. Whether others agreed with him was beside the point. My point is that most of us simply avoid touchy situations that demand a faith response simply because we don't want to get involved. Sadly, sometimes our response is to not get involved and simply walk away leaving the mess to be handled by someone else who will.

The sign on the Indian Reservation reminded my friend, who really did not want to be there, himself having been raised in a rather comfortable New England suburb, that he was there because God wanted him there to live out his faith at that moment in his life. He admitted that it was, as usual, only after much complaining and soul-searching that he finally understood why he was there. That did not make the situation any easier to deal with. It simply allowed him to understand why.

Wherever we find ourselves, there we are called to live out our faith. The good part of all this is that most of the time we find ourselves on safe ground rather than in alligator pits. The more difficult part is to always remember that no matter where we are -- good, bad or otherwise -- the living out of our faith never takes a day off, or at least it should not. The truth of the matter is that like Moses at the burning bush, no matter where the ground or what it is like, we are always standing on holy ground.

WHERE MEANING CAN BE FOUND

Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies: A human life is like a single letter of the alphabet. It can be meaningless or it can be part of a great meaning." I would add (and it almost goes without saying, but I will say it anyway): but it, our human life, we as a person, never stands alone.

A single letter of the alphabet is totally meaningless, even the letters "a" and "i." Capitalize the "i" and it is still meaningless because it has to be defined. And when I define the "I" that is "I," I will define myself in the context of other people. And it is in context with other people that I find meaning in my life and help me to give meaning to the lives of others.

Deep inside of us, in our innermost being, we are quite aware of that truth. Yet it is sometimes important to remember the importance of community in our lives, to realize once again just how important other people are in defining who I am and how important I am in defining other people.

I am, for instance, a priest, husband, father, son, brother, lover, golfer (a poor one at that), and so forth. And like "poor" golfer, all that I am is defined even further: good son, happy father, wonderful husband. The point is that the definition of who I am comes from others and not just from myself. I may think myself to be a ""great" priest. But my priesthood is lived out in community. And it is the community who defines me. They may perceive me to be otherwise than great.

That does not mean that how I define myself is unimportant and that all that is important is how the community defines me. We all have a picture of ourselves in our minds. We think we know who we are; and to an extent, that is very important. Our self-image is vital to our daily living. But who we are truly finds its meaning both in how we see ourselves and how others see us: how we live and move and have our being in community. For, again, it is the community that gives us life just as we give life to others by giving our life in and through and to the community.

There are times in the lives of all of us when we do not think we need the community, read "church," as much as we once did, or even at all. We would be wrong. We need the community more and more, not less and less, especially as we grow older and discover how important others are in our lives. But we only discover that by being in community and, to be sure, by being absent from the community. It is not academic reasoning that opens our eyes or even words in a newsletter. It is our actual experience in being part of a community that shows just how important community life is in giving meaning to our own individual lives.

The temptation in the midst of summer is to take time off from the community knowing that it will still be there when we get back to it. Maybe so, but any time spent away from community diminishes us, both individually and as community. Our community, however we define that word, needs us just as we need the community.

EVERYTHING WORTH WHILE TAKES TIME

Every once in a while I find myself in a hurry. My wife thinks it's more often than that. Be that as it may, sometimes I want to get things done as fast as I can so that I can move on to something else -- and get that done as fast as I can. So sometimes I have to ask myself, "What's the hurry?"

Even if I cannot find an answer to that question, I often have to remind myself that, given modern inventions, I can do so much more in so much less a time than I used to -- like writing and sending this reflection. Not only do computers beat even electric typewriters by a mile, there are high-speed copying machines that make mimeographs obsolete. Look what email has done to snail mail, much to the U.S. Post Office’s chagrin and profit loss and debt.

There are some things, however, that cannot be rushed. I suspect, just thinking without much reflecting, that the most important things in life simply cannot be hurried. They take time. As much as I want winter to end and spring to come, winter ends on time and spring comes on time no matter what I do. As much as I want a cut to heal as fast as possible, it heals in its own time. Life moves at its own pace.

For whatever reason I have been reflecting on resurrection and new life, perhaps because we have recently moved and everything is new. It is sort of a resurrection for us. And so in thinking about resurrection, it is helpful to be mindful that although resurrection always happens in one way or another, resurrection also happens in its own time and at its own pace and there is nothing much we can do about it except bide our time and wait for it to happen -- and then enjoy.

God is always in charge of all resurrections and God has chosen, it seems to me, to allow them to come upon us gradually but never unexpectedly. Spring comes, not all of a sudden, but slowly. The leaves do not appear in full bloom one day after budding. They drop from the trees in the fall just as slowly, allowing us to prepare for the coming next season. Would we enjoy it otherwise?

The difficult part for those of us in a hurry is that we sometimes do not understand that resurrection, like all of life, is a journey from one point to the next and that we cannot get from one to the other without making that journey no matter how long and perhaps painful it may be. The pain endured, necessary as it is, also helps us enjoy the resurrection experience even more.

Knowing all that does not make the pain any less or the journey shorter. Spring comes when spring is to come no matter what the groundhog sees or says in February. Good Friday brought Easter Sunday but it did not skip over Saturday.

We know all that, of course. But sometimes, if you are like me, we need reminded. I need my wife to ask, "What's the hurry?" otherwise I might never slow down and enjoy the journey. You too?

BAD THINGS HAPPEN

Bad things happen. That is a fact of this life. Bad things happen to everyone, good people and bad people alike. There is no discrimination. Some people suffer more bad in their lives than do others. But the amount of bad that happens to us is not in direct proportion to the deliberate bad we do. Good people are not spared their share of the bad just because they are good. And bad people do not receive a disproportionate share of the bad just because they are bad.

In fact, I have seen -- at least outwardly -- more good people suffering worse fates than I have seen bad people. Of course, outward judgements are simply that. One never knows for sure. Nevertheless, it is still true that bad things happen to all of us. Trees fall onto the roofs of good and bad alike. Flying rocks crack the windshields of both. Cancer strikes where it wills.

No one deserves to have bad things happen, accidental bad things. When we do something foolish and something bad results, we know whom to blame. But falling trees and flying rocks and infectious cancer have no cause-and-effect relationship when it comes to whom they will strike. Bad things happen to everyone.

Years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner was in town in which I was serving to speak to a group of clergy. The Rabbi and his wife suffered a tragic bad in their lives when a son died young. This event prompted Rabbi Kushner to reflect on the event and then write his reflections in his best seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Notice, he did not ask why bad things happen. But, in a way, he does. His conclusion is that bad things happen because God is not all-powerful. For if God were, God would not allow bad to happen to anyone, unless it was deserved because of one's foolishness.

But that is the point. Because God has created us with free will, God allows us to do foolish things which will result in bad things happening to us and even to others who do not deserve it. We drive 100 miles per hour and kill ourselves and kill other innocent people as well. God chooses not to stop us from hurting ourselves and hurting others because God chose to create us with free will. God could have chosen otherwise. I don't like that. I wish God would prevent my foolishness.

Thus, when undeserved bad happens to good people, it is not because God cannot stop it. It is because God created the universe that way. However, God did not create us the way God did without also resolving the problem. The resolution is resurrection. There is always resurrection. We can recover from the bad that happens either in this life or in the life to come or both.

If we do not believe in resurrection, we are out of luck. I feel for those who do not because they have nothing left except to endure the bad and perhaps curse God in the process. I can bless and praise God even when bad things happen because I believe there is always resurrection, some how in some way, in this life or in the life to come, there is always resurrection. Believe it!

FRIENDSHIP

Stephen Dietz, playwright: "What do we affect during our lifetime? What, ultimately, is our legacy? I believe, in most cases, our legacy is our friends. We write our history onto them, and they walk with us through our days like time capsules, filled with our mutual past, the fragments of our hearts and minds. Our friends get our uncensored questions and our yet-to-be reasoned opinions. Our friends grant us the chance to make our grand, embarrassing, contradictory pronouncements about the world. They get the very best, and are stuck with the absolute worst, we have to offer. Our friends get our rough drafts. Over time, they both open our eyes and break our hearts."

Years ago Emerson wrote: "Make yourself necessary to someone. In a chaotic world, friendship is the most elegant, most lasting way to be useful. We are, each of us, a living testament to our friends' compassion and tolerance, humor and wisdom, patience and grit. Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormousness of the world."

Friends; friendship; church: maybe the Quakers understand it best, understand what a church community, at its best, is all about, when they call themselves a Society of Friends. In a group of friends we find all sorts and conditions of people: people who don't look alike, think alike, share the same politics; people who come from different backgrounds, different places, different ways of thinking. It is our differences that make us one more than what we have in common. It is in and through those differences that we are able to grow as a person. They open our hearts and minds when we allow them in and do not if we do not.

It is our differences, the recognizing of our differences, the accepting of our differences, that allows friends to be friends. It is this that enables us to listen to the other, and while we may disagree, still be friends even as we point out our disagreement. To do so is definitely not easy. Perhaps that is why we seem to be so divided these days: we only allow those into our lives who agree with us, who we deem to be like us. And for that we are paying a very steep price, it seems to me. So sad.

Perhaps this is even more true when it comes to a community of faith, a church. For that is what we hold in common and what brings us together. All else is mere baggage. We are first, last and always a Christian. As Christians, we are friends: people who are compassionate and tolerant, wise and patient. We get through the bad times with one another and rejoice with one another in the good. Whatever else we are only describes us better. It does not define us any more.

What brings us together for worship and fellowship, for ministry and learning, for all that we do and all that we are -- what brings us together again and again and again, and what makes us want to gather again and again is that we are friends in Jesus Christ. That covers a multitude of foolishness, unreasonableness and even bad behavior on our part. It doesn’t justify our actions or make them acceptable. It is simply the truth. Thank God for our friends.