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.

 

 

THE GLORY OF THE U. S. A.

July 4 is a National Celebration and for my wife and me it is also now a Family Celebration after so many, many years away from family. We moved again for the last time, we trust and hope and pray, to be near our youngest and her family. We are looking forward to hot dogs and potato salad and all the rest; sparklers and cherry bombs and neighborhood celebration.

And what a neighborhood!: all sorts and conditions of people: young and old, working and retired; all kinds of nationalities and skin color; dozens of stories of successes and failures, ups and downs. This neighborhood is a microcosm of this great country in which we all live and move and have our being.

Of course, every neighborhood Arlena and I have lived in over the years has been much the same whether in mill towns in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, booming communities in the Northwest and Middle America: everywhere one and the same, but each different in their own way. We have been blessed by all those we have met over the years and hope we have in some way blessed them as well.

I thought about all this as we are settling into our new home in our new community as I thought about the Fourth of July. It brought to mind an episode of the old Night Court we saw a while back while binging on the series. It was about a large group of people, all immigrants from all over the world who were in court to be sworn in a US citizens. Judge Harry walked into his courtroom, looked around and shout “We are the world!”

And that we are. And that is what is the true glory of the United States of America. We are who we are, the greatest nation in the world, because each one of us, some how in some way, is an immigrant. Each of us, personally or through our immigrant descendants, has brought something to this country to make it better, to make it what it is. We don’t have to make American great again, it already is. We just have to keep making it better and better for everyone.

Sadly, I believe, so many have forgotten how blessed we are to live in this country. Why do so many want to come here? Why did my grandparents want to migrate from Italy to come here and raise a family? Why did the descendants of all our neighbors wherever we have lived, and some of them themselves, come here to live and work and find a new and better life?

Why? Because they somehow knew they would be accepted and believed in their hearts that they could add even a tiny bit to the greatness of this country. The glory of the United States is that we truly are the world in microcosm. Yes, we will disagree on many issues, but one truth we cannot disagree about and for which we should be proud and for which we should celebrate each day is that We Are the World. Let the fireworks begin!