Rev. Anne Howard2013-05-21T14:08:13-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=anne-howardCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rev. Anne HowardGood old fashioned elbow grease.Doing the Beatitudes for Lenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13074752012-03-05T15:16:13-05:002012-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/Please join the HuffPost community in "A Lenten Journey" for reflections throughout Lent, and join our online Lenten community here.
I got an email the other day with the subject line "Need Something New for Lent." I opened the email to read a note from a friend: "I'm done with giving up wine or chocolate for Lent. I want to take something on, instead of giving something up, and I figured you might help me. I want to do the beatitudes for Lent. Where do I start?"
Well, I'm not so sure the beatitudes are something to "do for Lent" but I figured my friend was game for something new, and the beatitudes are all about a new way to live in the world, so I wrote right back: "Start right in the middle. Get your bible, read Matthew 5:1-12, especially verse 7. More later."
So here's the "more later."
OK. Start right in the middle of Matthew's list of wisdom sayings: "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy." This is tricky. It seems simple enough: do mercy, get mercy. The first half matches the second half, palindrome-like, offering a sort of Golden Rule in the middle of the beatitudes. It's a bit like looking in the mirror.
But it's tricky because if we really "do" this beatitude, we might change our way of seeing. First, when we offer mercy to another something happens that can give us a kind of rear-view vision: we begin to see the mercy that is piled up behind us already, the acts of care and kindness and forgiveness -- bushel baskets of them -- that have been given to us through the years. Or we might offer mercy to one in need and see that looking right back at us is our own need for mercy. Or, third, a call to us for mercy can hold up a mirror that makes us want to look away, because we see reflected there our unwillingness or our inability to offer compassion. Mercy is complicated.
Maybe that's why the adjective merciful shows up only once in the four gospels, only in this line. Nevertheless, right in the middle of the beatitudes, Jesus is saying that being merciful is blessed, that is, "commended by God," and that the merciful receive mercy. We give and we get, all in the act of compassion.
Jesus tells lots of stories about our need for mercy and the value of compassion. These stories, or parables, are the ones we know the best, the ones that have become part of the western lexicon, the ones we assign capital letters: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan. The Unforgiving Servant is Jesus' parable to instruct Peter about the need to forgive without limit -- "seventy times seven."
Through all these wisdom teachings, we hear again and again the one word that best describes God: compassion. And again and again the moral of the story is clear: be compassionate, be generous, be like that forgiving father with his prodigal son, be like that Samaritan who goes out of his way to help the one in the ditch. And don't be like that awful unforgiving servant, who received mercy and yet withheld it from his fellow workers. Be compassionate, as God is compassionate, be merciful as God is merciful.
But it's not so easy. Even Jesus struggled with mercy, at least once. Matthew tells the story of Jesus traveling to the coastal towns of Tyre and Sidon, where a Canaanite woman of that region approaches him and cries out: "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David, my daughter is severely possessed by a demon."
But it's Members Only.
She begs for help, Matthew records: "But Jesus did not answer her a word." His disciples also urge him to ignore this foreign woman, and he assures them he will not bother with her, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
This woman is an outsider. She is a "triple outsider" to Jesus: she is foreign, she is a Gentile, and she is female. Three strikes against her. She is beyond the pale. And even worse, she should not even be speaking to Jesus, a Jewish male, in public. Women, foreign women no less, were never to address men in public. But her daughter is sick, and no convention is going to stop her. She comes and kneels before him and says, "Lord, help me."
Jesus answers, "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."
Ouch. These aren't words we like to hear; Jesus doesn't exactly shine in this story. He refuses to heal the woman's daughter; indeed, he calls her people "dogs." This is not a portrait of the inclusive compassionate friend of the outcasts, the one who eats with tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus is the one we expect to break social taboos, but instead we hear him uphold all the codes about shunning the one who is different. Jesus says he is not about to throw the children's food to the dogs. After all, he can hardly keep up with all the requests to heal his fellow Jews, much less the foreign Gentiles. And it has been a long day of jousting with the Pharisees and scribes before he ever got to Tyre and Sidon. There are limits to mercy, to compassion, right?
But she is undeterred. "Yes Lord," she says, "yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."
"O woman," Jesus says. All of a sudden, it's as if he remembers who he is and who God is always calling him to be. The Canaanite woman has held up a mirror to Jesus. He sees that the barriers between Israel and Canaan, between Jew and Gentile, between male and female are barriers that need to come down. He sees that she is in need, and at last he says, "Yes."
Sometimes we all, even Jesus, need a "Canaanite woman" to reflect ourselves back at us, to remind us that God's mercy, God's compassion, knows no bounds. Sometimes we need someone to help us see with fresh eyes.
So if you want to take on the beatitudes for Lent, start right here in the middle. See who's been kind to you. See who you've hurt. See who needs help. Look, and look again: the blessing comes when we see the world with fresh eyes. ]]>Christians Clapping for Death?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9559522011-09-14T16:42:09-04:002011-11-14T05:12:01-05:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
I'm talking about the crowd sitting under Air Force One at the Reagan Library, listening to the Republican Presidential debate.
When moderator Brian Williams noted that Texas Governor Rick Perry has presided over a record 234 executions during his term of office, the audience burst into applause -- some of the biggest of the night, according to the applause-o-meters of the blogosphere.
That was shocking enough, applauding at the deaths of 234 human beings. I don't care if you are a supporter of capital punishment. Who applauds death? Who are these people?
The Texas governor got more applause when he expressed his certitude about those executions, noting that a majority of Americans do support the death penalty. "Americans understand justice," Perry said.
Really? Do we understand justice? I won't take up the argument for or against the death penalty, I just wonder how folks can applaud the killing of people, even people guilty of heinous crimes.
I wonder if these same happy clapping people, who "understand justice," also understand that Texas' health system is a kind of death row itself: one-quarter of Texans lack health insurance, the highest rate of uninsured in the nation.
The stats on health care in Texas are nearly as shocking as the applause on Wednesday night. Over the last decade, while Perry's been in office, working Texans have been priced out of health insurance. Insurance premiums have risen more rapidly in Texas than they have nationally. Texas ranks 40th in child health care, and infant mortality rates have risen in Texas, while declining nationwide. The numbers go on and on.
Any clapping out there yet?
So back to my earlier question: Who are these people? What do they care about?
As a pastor, I want to know, are they people of faith? Christians? My fear is that many of those clapping hands could have been Christian hands, the well-known base of the Republican party. I'm hoping that's not the case. I'm hoping that the followers of Jesus, who died at the hands of political executioners, would not be the ones applauding executions.
Can you imagine Jesus clapping?
I imagine Jesus weeping as that applause broke out, as he wept for Jerusalem. Folly is something to cry about.]]>The Debt Limit: Crowd-Sourcing a Miracletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9132712011-08-01T13:39:33-04:002011-10-01T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
We can get a glimpse of another way to respond to a crisis in the so-called "miracle story" of the feeding of the five thousand, one of the Jesus stories recorded in the Christian Scriptures. This way might not work on Capitol Hill, but it does offer a glimpse of a way toward the common good:
With this story from Matthew's account of the life of Jesus, we enter the realm of miracle. This story of the loaves and fishes shows up in all four gospels, in Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. We know that is not the case with other events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Each of the four gospel writers tell their story of Jesus in their own particular way, for their own particular community: only Luke and Matthew tell stories about the birth of Jesus, only John talks about the raising of Lazarus or the Samaritan woman. Matthew presents the Sermon on the Mount. When Luke presents some of that same material it is called the sermon on the plain.
But something about this feeding story captured the attention of all the chroniclers who gathered up the stories about this Jesus and recorded them for their communities. They all kept alive this story of the loaves and fishes. This is an important story. It was a story the early Christians told whenever they gathered to share some bread. They broke bread and remembered that day when bread was miraculously blessed and broken and shared all around. They broke bread and remembered that day, and they remembered the ancient stories about bread raining down from heaven on their ancestors, the bread called manna. They broke bread and told the story about Elisha and the barley loaves feeding hungry men. Bread miracles, hungry people getting filled up and satisfied, are important stories.
Wonderful stories of miracle and faith, stories of human hunger and divine satisfaction; miracle stories, true stories about God's abundant grace. But there are two problems with miracle stories. First, We get the wrong idea about the nature of miracle. And second, we get the wrong idea about the nature of God.
So first: how do miracles happen? What's going on here?
Now, I am a devoted student of modern biblical scholarship, of all that's gone on in the last 200 years right down to today's Jesus Seminar. I am grateful for the work of so many people like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Riceour and Paul Tillich and Sallie McFague and Elizabeth Fiorenza and Dom Crossan. I am really grateful as a pastor and a preacher and as an observer of human life that Marcus Borg has managed to make biblical scholarship palatable and accessible for all of us, and especially for so many who had given up on the church. Thank God.
So, I don't believe in a supernatural transcendent being that swoops down out of the sky and intervenes in human events like a genie rubbed out of a bottle. But something happened with those loaves of bread, and those portions of dried fish, something that caused them all to cherish this story and pass it on. What was it? Did Jesus say something and multiply all the loaves at once? Or did it happen gradually, as the loaves got passed around? Did the loaves grow? Did they multiply like the broom of Disney's sorcerer's apprentice? Did the baskets fill up and keep filling up as each person reached in?
We don't know. Matthew doesn't tell us. And neither does Mark or Luke or John or anybody since.
What Matthew does tell us is that this miraculous feeding of the 5000 plus happened at a lonely place apart, a place, Matthew says, that Jesus finds right after he gets the news about John the Baptist. John is dead at the hand of Herod, his head served up on a platter.
Jesus had been telling the people about the new way of God, he had been using images like the found treasure and the mustard seed to describe the abundance and the sheer joy God intends. Jesus had been announcing a new day where the grieving rejoice, the poor inherit the goods, the good win in the end, and then he learns that John, the prophet who baptized him, is gone. The ways of the world, the ways of Herod, kill off the prophets of God, cut them down in the prime of life. Sobering news for Jesus, for all the disciples. And Jesus withdraws to a quiet place.
And the people follow. Just when Jesus might need to be alone, the crowds close in. And Jesus, showing them the largeness of God's heart, has compassion. Anyone else (myself first on the list) anyone else would send them all home. But he leaves his boat, goes ashore and mixes with them, blessing, touching, healing. Even at day's end, when the disciples want to call it quits and settle down for the night. This is when the real healing begins. Jesus knows they need food, and perhaps more than food, they need the nourishment of each other's company. They need not go away, he says. You give them something to eat.
And we move into miracle. No waving of a magic wand, no "Abracadabra, here's bread." Just "They need not go away. You give them something to eat." These words, not the incantation of a mere magician, these words are the words of miracle, the words of the kingdom of God.
Jesus works wonders here as he hands the task right back to the disciples. He asks them to stay, to gather up what food they have, and then he blesses it. He gives thanks, there is food, there is plenty, for all. And there is, more than enough.
There is something miraculous here, to be sure, something far more miraculous than the multiplication of loaves of bread and pieces of fish, something far more miraculous than numbers. The disciples start passing the food, as if there is enough for everyone, and somehow there is. Now, we don't know how this is so. Perhaps they all really like this idea of being together here in a quiet place and they decide to share the pocketful of olives or raisins or bread or dried fish that they each carry; perhaps everyone reaches into their pocket for their own piece of bread and adds it to the basket as it passes by.
Whatever it was, they all eat and are satisfied, full, blessed at the end of the day in the company of the one who gives them this amazing sense of plenty, this feeling of abundance in the face of loss. They don't feel hungry anymore. Imagine that. What a miracle. What a day. They had started off in a place of need, probably sad and afraid with the word about John, tired, sick, anxious, in need of healing, in need of compassion, in need of nourishment. And here they are, at day's end, full and satisfied with more than enough left over. They feel so full that they can be generous with each other. They feel large enough to give something away. What could be more miraculous?
Somehow, we don't know how. Jesus introduces this incredible, amazing, miraculous sense of plenty, abundance. Not only are their bellies full, but their hearts are too. So full that they keep telling this story again and again, to anybody who will listen. This is a story of the kingdom, just like those parables about seeds and pearls and treasure. This time, they feel the treasure in their own bodies, in their own spirits.
This is a miracle. We have no explanation. "How" is not the right question.
And, to get to the second problem with miracles, the problem about the nature of God: nobody gets let off the hook. Not the disciples, and not the crowd, all 5000 men and even those who did not come into the count, those who did not count, the women and the children. All of them are part of the collecting and passing and blessing and breaking and eating and giving. Jesus doesn't solve it with the wave of a hand. He says, in that piercing gentle way that nobody could ever forget, 'they need not go away. Let's all stay together in this.'
There is no superhero in this story. Nobody, no superman, swoops in and fixes the problem. Nobody gets to sit back and wait for some lightning bolt. Nobody gets to say: well, I've worked for my bread. God will provide for them. I'm tired, I'm hungry, let's eat; well, okay, let us pray for those less fortunate. Send the crowds away. Send the problem away. That makes sense. But nope. This does not make sense. God's new way does not make sense. It makes miracle. Listen:
"They need not go away. You give them something to eat." Miracle: a man full of the spirit of God, full of God even when he is full of grief. And this man, this amazing remarkable divine human Jesus invites the disciples to share in creating abundance. Not me, you, he says. Not my bread, yours. Not sometime or somewhere else, here, now. Stay, stay with all of them, stay with all of it, all that makes you so tired at the end of the day. You can do it. Stay with it. Collect it all up and bring it all to me. The miracle here is not a loaf of bread multiplying by dozens, not changing one loaf into ten or ten into hundreds. The miracle is not even full bellies. Miracle is allowing God's spirit to change us, to move among us and within us so that we change. It's just like bread and wine. Miracle is not that it changes into body and blood; the miracle is that it changes us. Collect it all up and bring it all to me. "They need not go away. You give them something to eat."
Imagine that. Everybody in it together, meeting the needs of all, serving the common good. That's the miracle we need.]]>I Am Not A Bible-Wavertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8890312011-07-06T12:43:09-04:002011-09-05T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
Let me explain. The other day, I was describing my work to an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile. I explained the mission of The Beatitudes Society as "equipping the next generation of progressive faith leaders to advocate in the public square for justice, inclusion, compassion and peace."
"What do you mean 'advocate in the public square'?" she asked.
"Show up, speak up, enter public conversations about issues that matter to people," I answered. "You know, the kinds of issues you and I have always cared about: the environment, war, health care, immigration."
"Really, Anne?" she said, "Really? Why would anyone want to hear from church people? When church types show up in public, they just wave Bibles at each other -- liberal wavers and conservative wavers. Your Bibles are your bumperstickers. We don't need any more screaming bumperstickers."
Ouch. My friend is right, of course. We don't need any Bible-wavers. We never have.
And we sure don't need any more screaming. My inbox and my Facebook feed fills up every day with screams from my favorite progressive organizations and people, faith-based and otherwise. I can tune in to all the screaming I want from my favorite progressive news and nooz broadcasts and from The Others who are not my favorites. There is no end to the trading of screams, as we've just witnessed in the Capitol Hill back-and-forth about the federal budget.
What we do need are some voices of reason. We do need folks who can join the public debate, and speak about our budgets and our schools and our workers and our children and our planet and our wars with some facts (not just slogans) and some grounding in ethics and morals and, yes, even religion. This doesn't mean waving Bibles.
It means, first of all, keen attention to our inner lives, so that we can speak with authenticity. It means recognizing our self in that other, and seeing the shadow within ourselves, acknowledging both our better and our lesser angels. It means holding opposites in tension through the long process of reaching understanding. It means not jumping to resolution of differences but spending time on bridge-building. It means remembering that the common parlance of all the world's great religions, as Karen Armstrong and so many others have championed, is compassion.
And it means not screaming, but listening.
Among the emails in my inbox this week was one about the "inward work" of being a democracy, from Krista Tippett's weekly foray into the public square at On Being. The email included some lines from her 2003 interview with philosopher Jacob Needleman in which he said, "Shouting is not thinking." Quoting Isaiah (without waving a Bible), Needleman says, "Come let us reason together" and describes such moment of reasoning: "I spoke to some members of Congress not long ago. We had a very quiet evening together and we started opening up. ... And they said, in effect, you know, 'We never get a chance to do this. We're in there trying to, you know, speak to television cameras or make points with electorates or with lobby groups, but we never...' I said, 'You mean you never come together and just reflect together?' And they said no. To me, that's the dirty secret of America at the moment. That's the problem."
That is a dirty secret. It was dirty back in 2003, and even worse, it's not all that secret now. This story from Needleman breaks my heart, but it doesn't surprise me.
How about we imagine some new ways to get together and "just reflect together?" How about we show up, put down our Bibles and our bumperstickers, and listen to each other? We can do that in local conversations about our libraries, our parks, our kids' health, and we can do that in our blogs and our Facebook posts. We can listen to one another and talk about what we need to build stable and healthy communities. We can't wait for folks in Washington to do it. We have to show them how. I pray it's not too late.]]>Grads: You Are Not Amazingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8755422011-06-15T03:11:54-04:002011-08-14T05:12:02-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
We are gathered here to celebrate you graduates -- you ascend to a new height today with the conferring of these graduate degrees.
And so I'd like to begin by saying: you are not amazing. Despite your accomplishments, your regalia, your degrees and pedigrees, you are not amazing -- but you might be. Let me explain.
The Dalai Lama, in his book Ethics for the New Millennium -- the book that was chosen this year for the UCSB Reads program -- said,
There is nothing amazing about being highly educated; there is nothing amazing about being rich. Only when the individual has a warm heart do these attributes become worthwhile.
Well, I think it might be nice if your expensive education were to prove worthwhile, so I'd like to talk about the temperature of your hearts.
By warm heart, the Dalai Lama of course is not talking about the way you feel about your puppy. He is talking about an ethical principle that he sees as necessary for the peace and well-being of our fragile planet. He is talking about that imperative that is at the core of all the great world religions, about something more important than the practice of religion -- he's talking about compassion.
In his book, as you know, he presents a long list of disciplines for achieving a practice of compassion. It's a daunting list. I recommend each and every virtue he names -- but I know it's just darn hard to master them all. And I'm aware (in my work with The Beatitudes Society with graduate students across the country) that the practice of compassion is not something that we naturally accumulate along with our degrees.
So today I want to offer you a short list, just the elementary basics -- a toolkit for compassion. And because I know that commencement speeches are as forgettable as wedding sermons, I want to offer you a brief mnemonic device -- the S-A-Ts. I want you to remember the SATs -- not your high school SATs, but something new to tuck into your toolkit -- along with your diplomas, resumes, job applications, and cleaned up Facebook Profiles.
First, "S". S means stop. Stop what you are doing. Stop working, stop pushing, stop achieving, stop producing. Stop texting, typing, clicking and twittering. Stop on a regular basis. At least once each day. Stop once a week. S means stop -- it comes from something the ancients called Sabbath -- the early Hebrew notion that workers ought to get a respite from oppressive overlords at least one day a week. Stopping was so important to them that they included it in their creation myth, in their definition of the Creator: on the seventh day, the story goes, God rested. The Hebrew word "rested" translates "exhaled." God exhaled. Remember Sabbath, remember something you already know, deep in your bones, remember to exhale.
We have trouble remembering to exhale and we have trouble remembering that Sabbath was a time meant for rest, refreshment, delight. Over the centuries, we got it all wrong. Sabbath became a set of "thou shall nots:" do not work, do not dance, do not play cards.
The academy has done a bad job with the notion of Sabbath too -- we know that sabbaticals are really only time away from classrooms and committees; time that must be justified by publication. Not time to exhale.
But the beauty of Sabbath persists across cultures. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk, rings a small bell throughout the day in the Buddhist community of Plum Village, a "mindfulness bell." When the bell rings, it is a signal for all to stop, to take three breaths, and then resume work.
Sabbath means you take time out to engage in the things that feed your body and soul: you eat, you dance, you listen, you make art and music and love and prayer.
You might stop for one full day each week; or it might be an afternoon, a moment. Whatever it is, if we are going to check on the temperature of our hearts, we all have to stop.
Working without stopping, Thomas Merton said, is a form of violence -- one that we have perfected with our 24-hour days. This violence colors the way we gobble up resources; it hobbles our capacity for creativity and clear judgment; it tears at the fabric of our relationships. I am told that the Chinese pictograph for busyness is composed of two characters: Heart-plus-Killing.
Stopping is the single most live-saving thing we can do -- the most counter-cultural act of resistance we can mount. We stop, so that we can pay attention:
"A" is for Attention. Be aware. Take a look at where you are. Did you see that cormorant over the lagoon -- have you ever noticed one? Did you notice the look in your mother's eyes when she saw you today in your funny hat? And how about the way you feel right now inside your own skin?
And what about the world beyond your own little sphere? What do you allow into your field of vision, your range of care?
This is the reason Thich Nhat Hanh rings the bell. Be here now. The bush is afire, Moses discovered, and took off his shoes to dance. Heaven is here, Jesus said, and invited everyone to a party; this is the only moment we have to love one another. This moment matters.
Pay attention to what counts: What do you love? Is the work you are about to do with your new degree truly your vocation -- that place where your deep joy meets the world's great need? Or is it just what everyone expects you to do?
One last letter, "T". T is for thanks. Practice saying thanks. Start by thinking of all the people who helped you get here today. You know who helped you believe in yourself. Say thanks for them. And you also know who stood in your way, the ones who made your way a little rougher. Say thanks for them too; they were your best teachers, and there will be many more like them along the way.
Saying thanks reminds us that we are contingent beings. We are not alone. You are, I am, more than a solitary mouse-clicking unit staring into a flat screen. We depend upon one another. We know in the 21st century that we can no longer live in our old myth of Western individualism; we do not ride alone on our ponies into the Western sunset. We are learning, after all those cowboy movies, what our great-grandparents knew and Ayn Rand didn't -- we are better when we stand together, when we recognize our common ground, when we raise a barn roof or build a school or design a national health care system together for the common good.
Most of you were born around the beginning of the 1980s -- you spoke your first words in that decade known as the "me" decade; and here you are in a new century characterized by a new vocabulary: you live a reality shaped by words like network, internet, linked, global, web.
Saying thanks is one simple way to be mindful of your complex web of relationships, and of that pulse of Compassion that beats at the heart of the universe.
That's it, the SATs. Three letters -- and one last quick thing, a picture, a snapshot to paste to the lid of your compassion toolbox; it's a picture of your Wild Space.
Wild Space is theologian Sallie McFague's term for that part in each one of us that does not fit our consumer culture's definition of the good life.
McFague suggests that we discover our Wild Space this way: imagine a circle. Within that circle is the model of the dominant culture: white, Western, male, middle-class, heterosexual, educated, able-bodied, successful. Now, put your own image of yourself over that circle. Some parts may fit that model, some may not. The part of us that falls outside the circle is our Wild Space.
The parts that don't fit may be obvious: race or gender. Some aren't so obvious: surviving a failure, or a loss, the struggle with addiction, or simply our refusal to buy into convention. Anything that causes us to question the dominant culture's notion of success is our Wild Space.
It's our Wild Space that allows us to question our definitions of power and so discover more egalitarian ways to relate to one another. Our Wild Space allows us to re-imagine the way we consume the earth's resources and so live in such a way that cares for our planet and our neighbors. It's our Wild Space that allows us to create an alternative vision of the good life. Wild Space is our hidden key to the practice of compassion.
So that's the tool kit:
Stop. Pay attention. Say thank you. And keep an eye on your Wild Space. I bet your heart will not only warm, it will light on fire.
And then you might just be amazing. I hope so. God knows we need you, our planet needs you, to be nothing less than amazing. ]]>The Government Shutdown: We're All In This Togethertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8462372011-04-07T14:03:23-04:002011-06-07T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
And here we are, a year later, and times are even tougher, because the common good is under attack, right under the dome of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
We've got people in Congress threatening to shut down our government to score political points. Thousands of Americans are hanging in the balance -- from hard-working federal employees who won't get paid to people across the country who will lose their jobs as the economy plunges back into recession. Families' livelihoods are at stake here. This is not the time to score political points, but time to do serious problem-solving -- together.
So we need our leaders to step up to the plate with the moral integrity to hold opposites in tension while moving toward creative compromise, for the good of all people. "We're all in this together" means that I recognize the "other" as one like myself, knowing that we all have both our better and our lesser angels, and it takes all of us to build a world of justice, compassion and peace.
As an American, I care about reclaiming our democracy, about holding our elected officials accountable for their commitment to the common good. As a Christian, I care first about those who have least. I can't expect the Congress to share my faith values, but I do know that most Congressional representatives claim some religious affiliation. So I want them to remember that all the great religions of the world hold compassion to be the core of all human interaction. Shutting down the government, punishing innocent families and slashing apart our frayed safety net is far from compassion.
Honestly, sometimes I think the gravest threat to our democracy and to our national decency exists underneath that beautiful dome on Capitol Hill. It is time to restore our democracy, our integrity and our morality. High time.
Originally posted at Faith in Public Life's Preach-a-thon.
]]>Japan, Nuclear Power, and a Sense of Shametag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8410702011-03-29T09:30:02-04:002011-05-29T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I worked with a nuclear disarmament group -- the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race -- and we spent considerable effort educating religious folks about the dangers of nuclear power plants, the horrors of nuclear war, and the mostly unknown reality of radiation sickness caused by our bombs dropped on Japan in August of 1945 and the ensuing tests in the Pacific and the southwestern American desert.
We showed people film footage taken in Japan in the earliest days after the August 6 bombing of Hiroshima and the August 9 bombing of Nagasaki. We used materials from the keen scientists at Union of Concerned Scientists. We brought in bold doctors from Physicians for Social Responsibility. We prayed prayers of confession for the evil unleashed in those bombings of 1945. We lit peace lanterns and folded origami peace cranes. We taught people how to write letters to the editor -- this was back in the day of print media.
But the stockpiles grew. The nuclear plants got built. And here we are in 2011, with the consequences we used to imagine now streaming a daily reality through our computer and TV screens. Japan is once again a horror story.
So I find myself remembering a day in the early 1980s when I was discouraged, feeling that it was futile to protest the nuclear arms race when the nuclear stockpiles rose higher each day and the weapons budgets swelled bigger each day, and every day our country sold more and more weapons to more and more third world countries. I went to speak with a rabbi, one of the founders of our organization, a wise man who always listened to my questions with care. "Why?" I asked him. "Why do we bother to keep working for social and political change? Our efforts are so puny and nobody cares, nobody listens, nobody can change anything."
Rabbi Beerman listened, as he always listened to my questions and complaints, and in his gentle, quiet way reached into his desk and brought out a picture of his new grandson, Matthew Benjamin. He asked to see a picture of my new baby son Benjamin Michael. He told me to think about these two little boys who would graduate from high school in the year 2000. He told me to think about what we owed them. And then he asked me: "If we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to another, what are we?"
The rabbi's words have been resonating within me with every news report I see from Japan, especially with two bits of news:
One, a report about something that is referred to as "the Japanese spirit," the notion of group responsibility called yamato-damashi. This is the notion that the common good matters more than my personal well-being, that is, that "we are all in this together." Or, as the rabbi said, "If we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to another, what are we?"
And a second bit of news I heard on the radio -- a report I'm hoping is not true: within hours of the news of the radiation leaks in Japan, all of the iodine tablets in the United States were bought. American pharmacy shelves were empty. But American home medicine cabinets from California to Kansas to New Jersey were amply stocked, just in case. Meanwhile the Japanese, in serious need of these iodine tablets, had none left. We've kept it to ourselves.
"If we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to another, what are we?"
So I'm having a little déjà vu. I'm seeing again the scenes of suffering I've seen before. I'm feeling again "how could we?" And I'm asking again the rabbi's question:
"If we cannot cultivate a passion for what one human being owes to another, what are we?"
]]>A Smudge of Ashestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8294392011-03-09T12:03:33-05:002011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
As evening rolled around, I decided to duck out of the campaign office and sneak down the street to the church. I knew it was Ash Wednesday, and I was curious about the ashes business. I wasn't a real regular at the church in those days. But I was intrigued by a church that cared about social justice and would take a public stand on something like nuclear disarmament, and so I had just started attending. And I liked the sermons.
But I wasn't interested that Ash Wednesday in anything "too religious." In my 20s, I was proud to declare that my religion was politics. But something drew me to that church that night. Something pulled me inside that door.
I don't remember much about that service. I remember being embarrassed to participate in something that didn't seem to have relevance in the world I knew. I remember thinking my buddies in the newspaper office would never believe this.
And then, I remember the smudge of ashes on my forehead. I remember feeling clean, as if that smudge on my forehead scoured my soul.
And something shifted, a huge seismic shift deep down inside. I didn't know then what the shift was. All of that would begin to come clear in the months and years ahead; it's still coming clear. But that smudge of ashes stopped me in my tracks and turned me in a new direction.
That was the first time I knew that Lent had something to do with direction: a time to take a good look at the direction we've been traveling in and see maybe if it's time to change direction, time to see what in our lives may have turned to ash, what may be leading us to the fire, the spark, of new life.
Perhaps that night I heard those words from Joel: "Return to the Lord, your God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing." Somehow, I knew that I was beginning again, that what had turned to ashes, the things I thought might keep me from God, in fact drew me closer to God. It was a beginning, a meeting of a God I hadn't yet found, yet had always yearned for, a God to whom I could return, a God who would accept me as I am, a God "abounding in steadfast love."
Something began with that smudge of ashes that continues still, although not in a steady, linear progression of improvement. It's been more like a dance, and not always a graceful one. The intricacies of the dance with God cannot be contained in some sort of linear movement from bad to good or tempest to serenity or fear to faith. The dance weaves through this life with twists and turns and surprises and collapses and tragedies and triumphs, all caught up in the complexity of human and divine relationship.
It was the smudge of ashes that invited me into that dance. That smudge of ashes reminded me of things I had learned in my earliest days of Sunday School, and at the same time told me that now I was in startling new territory. I believe now that that mix of the bone-deep familiar and the terror of the untried are the hallmarks of the spiritual journey.
I believe that smudge of ashes introduced me to the power of symbol, the power of a symbolic act to point beyond itself to the truth it represents. I knew that smudge of ash would look silly when I went back to the campaign office. I knew I couldn't rationally explain it. I could not do so today. But something in the combination of inner impulses and intuitions and outer ritual gives us a hint of the divine in our world.
So I could say that God "spoke" through that smudge, through the words and symbols of that liturgy and the actions of that community ritual, right in the middle of that odd Wednesday night gathering. God spoke, not with a clap of thunder, but in the touch of some burnt and crumbled palm leaves. God spoke, and invited me into a life that was brand new and at the same time as ancient as the creation itself.
You never know what will happen when you enter into a community's ritual, its sacred dance. You never know what a smudge of ash, a touch of a hand, an exchange of the peace, a sip of wine or morsel of bread will convey. But it is always an invitation into "another intensity," as T. S. Eliot said, "a further union, a deeper communion." Ash Wednesday is one of those invitations to dance. ]]>Mary Magdalene: A Heroine Of Biblical Proportionstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8330452011-03-08T14:59:36-05:002011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/Huffington Post says, in "celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women past and present." And I've just been asked "who's your hero, I mean, your heroine? Who has led the way for you? Who inspired you?"
Easy: Mary Magdalene. I could say she inspires me for the way that she combined faith and politics and challenged an empire. That is true. But there's something behind that combination of faith and politics that's intrigued me since Sunday School days. It began, I think, the day that I dressed up like Mary Magdalene.
It was nearing Eastertime and the local newspaper wanted to run a special photo on the front page for the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. This was a small town in Minnesota, and just about everybody was Lutheran, at least Christian, so the idea of an Easter photo on the front page of the newspaper was the norm.
My best friend Mary and I were chosen from our Sunday School to pose for this photo and so one Saturday we went with our Sunday School teacher and the photographer to the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, to a cave. Mary and I were dressed in bathrobes and tablecloths, veiled to look like Hebrew women come to the empty tomb. As the photographer was setting up this Easter shot, I remember making a deal with Mary. She could be Mary the mother of Jesus, just as long as I could be Mary Magdalene. (I also remember that Mary had all her hair tucked under the tablecloth veil, and so I was quick to pull out some of my hair, and make sure an earring showed. I figured Mary Magdalene ought to look a little snazzy, a little bold -- at least not quite like the Virgin Mother.)
I wanted, with all my 14-year-old earnestness, to be Mary Magdalene.
I still do. I still want to be like Mary Magdalene. But the reasons have changed.
Back then, I think I was intrigued with the idea of the bad girl as Jesus' friend. I assumed that Mary Magdalene was a woman of the streets, a fallen woman, a prostitute, and there was something there that attracted me, and made me curious about this friend of Jesus.
Later, in seminary, reading new feminist scripture scholars like Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Phyllis Trible and Sandra Schneiders and others, I learned that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute at all, but that church tradition had conflated stories from two different portions of Luke's gospel, combing the Mary who was cured of countless demons with the unnamed woman found earlier in Luke's gospel, the prostitute who anointed Jesus' feet with her tears, and then dried them with her loose, long hair. The church's conflation of the two stories no doubt has plenty to do with the church's views on sin, but that's not my point about Mary Magdalene.
What I wanted to emulate, as a 14-year-old and now, all these decades later, what I want all women to emulate, is her passion, her bold passion.
Mary Magdalene was a woman who was able to listen to her heart's desire. She was able to step forward, to leave behind whatever had held her back, whatever had kept her bound up with her demons, and face into the future with a way of living that challenged the might of Rome and the power of the temple. She was able, out of her desire, to walk with Jesus and the other men through the Galilee, to walk a path not paved (certainly not for the women of 1st-century Palestine), to become, Luke tells us, a disciple along with the twelve men and Joanna and Susanna and the other unnamed women.
She was able to walk with Jesus all that way, and she was able to be there at the end, to watch at the cross, to stay there with the other women to the bitter end, long after the men had gone, to stay, to wait, and then to come back, that third day, to annoint him one last time. And there, the fourth gospel tells us, in that garden, she heard something, she heard her name: Mary. We might say she heard her calling, her vocation. We might say she heard her heart's desire. And she went out from there to become "the First Apostle," to announce a new way of life and liberation in places of darkness and oppression.
One such place, legend has it, was the palace of Caesar. The story goes that Mary Magdalene staged a protest in the court of Caesar. As the First Apostle of the resurrection, Mary had become known as a woman of influence (and chutzpah), and sometime soon after the crucifixion of Jesus, she procured an invitation to dine at the court of Tiberius Caesar. She had a mission. She went to Rome to protest Pilate's miscarriage of justice, and to announce the resurrection. The ancient tale says that as Magdalene stood up to speak, Caesar was about to peel a hard-boiled egg. When he heard her announcement of the resurrection, he held up the egg and said, "He can no more be raised from the dead than this egg can turn red." And there, in his hand, the egg turned red.
The legend doesn't say how Caesar responded, but icons ever after portray Mary with her bold red egg as a symbol of a voice that spoke truth to power.
So today, I think of Mary Magdalene, as that woman of passion and power who calls to women across centuries and cultures to come out of whatever holds us back or keeps us down, to come out and speak up. Imagine what Mary might say today.
I imagine Mary Magdalene would speak up for children who need classrooms and teachers and textbooks, but only learn the new math of budget cuts; I imagine she would speak up for the young mother who needs the family planning services of her Planned Parenthood clinic; I imagine she would speak up for the woman who puts on a little extra makeup and changes the part in her hair, because she wants to hide the bruises; and I imagine she would have a word for today's Caesars about corporate tax rates. We need her, her boldness, her passion and her red egg.
]]>Elegy for Christina Taylor Green 9/11/01 -- 1/8/11tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8065092011-01-09T22:14:46-05:002011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
She did. She learned what no child should ever learn. She learned that politics in America, or rather, public life in America, has become a place fraught with violence.
Back in the campaign season, the violence was just words, clever phrases from media-savvy public speakers who said things like "don't retreat--reload!" We watched such public figures promote campaigns taking aim, with images of the cross hairs of a gun sight, at other public figures, one of whom was Gabrielle Giffords.
But now it's not just words. Words, as the good sheriff of Pima County Arizona told us, matter. "Vitriol has consequences," Sheriff Dupnik said.
Vitriol has consequence, and so does its opposite. The opposite of vitriol is love.
So, for the sake of Christina, and for other little girls and boys who might yet be interested enough in politics to wish to become public servants like Gabby Giffords or slain Judge John Roll, it's time to meet the vitriol with love.
Really. Love. It's time for us to get busy and start practicing love. And I don't mean sweet sentiment. I mean the hard work of love.
As a preacher, I could talk about the hard work of love by quoting a bible verse about loving the other as our self. I would also quote another preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr. who said "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." I believe that.
But the best way I know how to describe that love is as a mother. What we need in the public square right now, in our places of worship and places of learning, in our Tweets, blogs and Facebook posts and in our supermarket parking lots, is a kind of love that looks something like a mother's love.
The kind of love I'm talking about is tender, and it's fierce:
It means paying attention, knowing what time it is and what the weather's like out there.
It means naming danger when it threatens, and meeting it with savvy and with courage.
It means teaching the difference between right and wrong.
It means being responsible for our words and our actions, and calling on others--like those public figures with their crosshairs--to take responsibility for their actions.
It means showing up, being present, caring, not expecting somebody else to handle it.
It means compassion, knowing that we are all in this together.
And of course it means getting your heart broken, which opens you to hold the pain as well as the beauty of being fully human.
So with our hearts broken open right now, I hope we can meet the challenge of these violent times with the power of love, fierce, tender love. We owe it to Christina.
]]>Epiphany: Light in the Darknesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8038802011-01-05T15:02:49-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
Chopping up the Christmas tree seems an inappropriate way to prepare for Jan. 6, which is also known as Epiphany on the Christian calendar of festival days. As another of the festivals of light that mark northern calendars at this time of year, the day would call for at least the lighting of a candle or two. It's a story, after all, about seeing light in the darkness.
The ancient story about the Magi following their star to pay homage to the newborn baby in Bethlehem has kindled imaginations for centuries, causing poets and painters and songwriters and scholars to embroider the story with layers of intrigue, mystery and meaning.
Some ruminate about the national identities of the Magi, some focus on the meaning of their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Others remind us that within Matthew's story we can hear the echo of the Moses story and see that Herod plays the Pharaoh to this new endangered baby. We can see the machinations of Herod's power play as he seeks to find the newborn one that threatens his toe-hold in the hierarchy of Empire.
It's been said that this is a story for dreamers, a story that asks us to listen with our hearts more than our heads if we really want to get at the truths contained within the words and reflected in our world.
So to prepare for this festival for dreamers, I'm imagining those travelers who dared the darkness for the light of a star, and thinking of those other dreamers who have looked into the darkness, glimpsed the light and followed a star:
Moses, of course, facing into the darkness of Pharaoh's empire and leading his people out of bondage to a promised land.
Or Copernicus, facing into the darkness of ignorance -- and church authority -- and declaring that our own star, our sun, holds the light at the center of our universe.
Or Galileo, who followed Copernicus' light, dreamed a new vision of the universe and suffered the darkness of the Inquisition.
And one who had a dream in our day, Martin Luther King Jr., who lit a way forward through the darkness of American racism.
And I think this January of the young immigrants, brought to this country as small children, who still dream of a path to citizenship, and are willing to work for that citizenship with military service or education. I think of their dreams dashed by the Senate's denial of the DREAM Act.
I think of Carlos, the guy who picks up my trash, and what he told me that his young son said upon the election of Barack Obama: "Dad, this means that I can be president, too."
So, on this festival for dreamers, I'm lighting a candle in our darkness for Carlos' son, and all the other brave young dreamers who dare to follow a new star, to imagine a new world.
]]>The Deep Truth of the Christmas Storytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7984032010-12-22T14:25:59-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Rev. Anne Howardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-howard/
Well, I need to walk up the street and knock on his door and say "It's both, actually."
I want to begin by telling him about a group of people who care a lot about truth, and a lot about stories. These people live in Northeast England, dispersed throughout a number of towns and villages, but they come together regularly to do church. They call themselves Christian, Celtic Christians. When they gather, they use the rhythmic cadences and lilting sounds of Celtic prayer. They gather to sing and to pray and to tell stories, the stories of scripture seen through the lenses of their own lives, and they also tell their own stories. They call their place of gathering "a telling place."
A Telling Place, they say, is a spot where heaven and earth meet, a "thin space" where assumed truths are challenged.
I want to tell my neighbor that the church has been, since long before "1 AD," a telling place. I imagine our foremothers and fathers, sitting around a campfire in a Middle Eastern desert, telling their tales of creation, the story about the garden and the apple and the origins of pain and suffering, or the one about the rainbow and the ark and the possibility of hope, or the one about Moses finding his voice and telling Pharaoh "let my people go." Or later, as our ancestors gathered to share bread and wine, they told the one about an encounter in another garden, a stone rolled away from a tomb. So many stories, such a rich collection of experiences and remembrances and imaginings about God; that's what we call the Bible.
The ancients knew, of course, that the point of their stories was not factual truth. They told stories of truth deeper than fact.
Some of our more recent ancestors forgot this deep truth of the stories gathered in the church's Telling Place. With the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, the dawning of the age of science, some took a position that said stories could only be true if they were factually true. They forgot the deep metaphorical truth of the first storytellers and began to read our biblical narrative as if it were biology or geography or history.
In the 20th century, these voices became a loud roar crying out for a literalistic interpretation of the old stories and some of the old laws. These voices still shout, often with anger, with fingers pointing and bibles shaking to damn the one who is different.
But at Christmas we hear the voice of one of the ancient storytellers, Luke, one who told his stories with an ear to the prophets of the old days, and an eye to the realities of his world. Stepping into the Telling Place, Luke tells a story that echoes the prophet Isaiah, a story of a young virgin, a starry night, shepherds, angels, a new baby. We know this story. This is not a story about biology or astronomy.
The deep truth that Luke points to as he steps into the Telling Place is about who these people are in their world -- Mary and Joseph and those shepherds -- and about who God is in the world and what God does in the world.
These are poor people, Mary and Joseph. Luke's mother obviously did not teach him that it is not polite to talk in public about religion or money or politics. He always talks about all three, all the time. Luke cares about who is poor and who is rich and what that means. Mary and Joseph are poor, and that means that they must travel to their birthplace for the census. And where was their destination? Luke recalls that the prophets said Bethlehem would be the birthplace of the savior; that a new messiah would come out of the city of David. In Luke's telling, Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem.
And of course, the emperor, the symbol of power and wealth, the ever-present, ever-tight grasp of Rome reaches into this story. In earlier times it was the grasp of a Pharaoh, a Babylonian, a Greek. Always, the hand of the mighty is on the back of the poor. And this is not right, Luke believes. This is not the way God would have it. It is Luke, remember, who gives Mary the song where she sings "My spirit magnifies the Lord," and says the poor would be filled up, the rich sent empty away. The lowly would be lifted up. God is doing the lifting up again in this story, the lifting up of the poor. And in a later story, when Mary's boy grows up and preaches his first sermon, he says "come to bring good news to the poor" and sometime after that, in defiance of the power of Rome, he proclaims, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek." There is truth in this story.
Luke says that God joins humanity through the body of a poor peasant girl finding shelter in an animal stable. God joins us in a place far from the marble palaces of Rome or the temples of official religion. And the first ones to know about it are not princes or generals or priests, but shepherds. Luke brings in the shepherds for his story. None better to underline his point about the rich and the poor. None lower on the economic ladder than the shepherds. The first ones to know, the first ones to see the way that God enters our world are the ones without homes, without names, without anything to claim as their own, the ones who wouldn't even be counted in Caesar's census. Empty-handed, these shepherds receive the glory that lit the night sky. They hear the angel song, the summons to the dawning of grace.
Luke, in the Telling Place, has given us a true story, with a truth we all know deep in our hearts:
The truth that God is to be found at the edges, in a backwater village with some migrant peasants seeking warmth for the night next to the animals.
God is to be found with those shepherds who count for nothing; and with the homeless teen who walks a street near you.
God is to be found with Mary -- young, poor and vulnerable -- and with a young soldier deployed to Kandahar, wondering if she'll be back home for her 21st birthday.
God is to be found with Joseph, bound to bear the obligations of family and tribe under the oppression of a foreign occupation; and with the unemployed Gulf Coast shrimper, staring at his kids' empty Christmas stockings.
In the Telling Place, where heaven and earth meet and assumed truths are challenged, the story of that birth at Bethlehem does not stay put on the gilt-edge pages of a bible. The truth of Luke's story is that it is still being told in the events of our day, in the events of our headlines and the secrets of our hearts, whenever and wherever any one of us feels at risk like Mary, caught like Joseph, unworthy like those shepherds, scared like that soldier. In those places of utter vulnerability, God comes. That's some story, that's some truth, neighbor.
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