Jesus digs questions. He likes to ask them to us and I think he likes us to ask them of ourselves. Rev. Daniel Groody points out that in the four Gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions, only directly answering three. On the other hand, he asks 307 questions.
Groody put together a devotional booklet, “Daily Reflections for Advent & Christmas: Waiting in Joyful Hope 2019-2020.” He suggests daily Scripture readings and then provides reflection, meditation, and a prayer. It’s a cool and meaningful way to guide us through Advent. A perfect coffee companion in the mornings.
Groody quotes Martin Copenhaver and then adds something of his own:
“‘Jesus is not the ultimate Answer Man, but more like the Great Questioner.’ And through these questions Jesus holds a lantern to our hearts.”
In studying and discussing the Gospels and reading commentary, one of the first things to become clear is that God, through Christ, is after our hearts, first and foremost. Everything else follows. Our hearts function best when they are full of joy, wonder, and they/we are after the right things. Groody goes on to say, “Answers can foreclose new discoveries, but questions open up new possibilities.”
Both Jesus and Groody are speaking my language. In 47 years, I have more questions and fewer answers than ever. But also more than ever, I’ve come to love the questions, the seeking in and of itself. It (the seeking) gets me up in the morning, sends me into Scripture, sends me into nature, connects me to people, and opens me up to wonder and mystery.
Groody quotes theologian Bernard Lonegran, who said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who need certainty and those who seek understanding.” I’m not big on anyone who tries to reduce the world to two kinds of people, but I like the distinction between needing certainty and seeking understanding. Probably there is a bit of both in each of us.
In his book, “Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems,” Gary Snyder writes:
The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks Warm. Sky over endless mountains. All the junk that goes with being human Drops away, hard rock wavers … A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen.
Snyder strikes me as a seeker, not of certainty, but of experience, wonder, beauty, and understanding. Discovery is not about certainty.
Advent is a time of waiting, of staying awake, of readying ourselves. It’s a time of hope, and just finishing a study of Brene Brown’s book, “Daring Greatly,” she points out that we can’t know hope without struggle.
Part of our struggle as people, is the need to know for sure, the need to be certain–and yet, certainty precludes faith and mystery.
So on a gray, sleety, rainy Monday morning, I am going to sit in the questions, take a cue from Groody, and try to stay open to new discoveries.
“I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.” – Ernest Cline, “Ready Player One.”
Ernest Cline lured me in with Oingo Boingo, got me to sit down with Atari 2600, and handed out popcorn with 80’s pop culture references in spades. For the better part of two summers growing up, I had a boombox covered with skateboard grip-tape and anarchy symbols on my 13-foot Boston Whaler. The cassette tape that lived in the boombox was dubbed from vinyl records: on one side was Bob Marley “Exodus” and on the other was Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party.”
I can’t tell you how many times we listened to that song. I can hear the music over the wail of the outboard motor with the boat planing. Cline conjured up the beginning of Dead Man’s Party and I was there.
Ready Player One’s main character Wade Watts is born into a crappy existence where virtual reality (the OASIS) is much more inviting and compelling than real life. And the more he learns about history and life in general, the further he is convinced that life is a raw deal.
“I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as ‘the human condition.’ It was not good news.” – Ernest Cline, “Ready Player One”
Map of the world of Greyhawk. Yeah, definitely spent more than a normal amount of time pouring over, recreating, and drawing my own maps on graph paper.
Cline walks us through the interior minds of any of us who grew up immersed in pop culture and fantasy during the 1980s. And he also walks us through our current culture and the pull of virtual/screen reality over the world around us. He both maps it and travels the terrain. I’ve been mulling over a comment from Brene Brown in her book “Daring Greatly,” when she says:
“I have found that the most difficult and most rewarding challenge of my work is how to be both a mapmaker and a traveler.”
Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
I’ve been fascinated by maps for as long as I can recall, and it could have started with the map of Greyhawk above. But it’s not just the map itself–hiking through the White Mountains more than 10 years ago, and seeing where we were on the map, there was just something inherently cool about it. Maybe it’s a combination of knowledge and adventure, which multiply into some sort of lived truth. It’s also the idea of charting the intersection of imagination and culture, say in Cline’s case, which made reading feel like both a revelation and an adventure, and left my head spinning.
In the mornings, when I read or pray, my mind, heart, and soul soar and dive and question and sit in awe and wonder. That’s part of being a traveler, making an interior journey. For me, there is then something in the act of trying to write down what I am seeing, feeling, wondering about; the act of writing becomes an act of mapmaking. I try to do the same thing when my mind wanders somewhere cool while running or whatever I am doing (hence always having a notebook and pen in my pockets).
Gaiman goes on to give his own take on things hidden in old books:
“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.”
So many times it’s the old tales. When we study the Bible, I am always taken to these other places, God journeys, that almost always end up also describing something I am currently feeling, or a feeling I know. So the journeys become linked; the traveling is not alone.
Maybe the act of reading, the act of imagining, the act of praying, is also an act of connecting. It can be connecting with the past, connecting with the writer, connecting with God. But we are forming connections. We aren’t the first or the last to find or feel them. But in the same way that we benefit from what these cultures, writers, and artists have left behind–the maps they have given us–maybe we are compelled to chart out our travels, our journeys, so that we can leave them behind for others to do the same.
Maybe we can help make some better news for the human condition.
If you take Jesus at his word, loving our neighbors is a big deal. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they record the same to-do list from Jesus, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40 NIV)
These are important. And if we take to reading, studying, reflecting and meditating on, and praying on Scripture, we’ll find new depths and heights for how to connect to and love and obey God.
I’ve got to say, the Bible is my favorite book. That is not a statement I could have made 10 years ago. And part of the reason I say that is that I’ve spent the last three years reading Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s versions of the Gospel, slowly, chapter by chapter, studying with different groups, using the help of N.T. Wright’s “New Testament for Everyone” commentaries. And we’ve prayed, laughed (a lot), cried, wrestled with things, been confused, found grace, found ourselves in the stories, found God and Christ in the Scriptures, found poetry, and soared to new heights of feeling and depths of understanding. I can’t recommend it enough and it has become one of my favorite things to do. We’re currently studying John’s Gospel and, wow.
But about this loving our neighbor thing: what if our neighbor has no interest in the Bible? And there are plenty of big reasons they might not (disdain for organized religion being one). One of the best things we can do is look to Jesus for an example. Jesus is constantly reaching out to the lonely, the outcast, the disenfranchised, the unclean, the sick, the marginalized–the people who the “church people” of the day wouldn’t have anything to do with. And when he reached out, he didn’t tell them to go to church, read their Old Testament, etc. He heard them. He met them where they were. He healed them. He loved them. He knew them and spoke to them. In the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, who society would have told Jesus he had no business talking to, Jesus talks to her, tells her things about who he is and who she is; the woman is amazed and tells others he “told me everything I have ever done!” He told her HER story.
At a time where we don’t know our neighbors, or their stories, and in many cases, maybe we don’t know ourselves the way we should, it’s our sacred duty to recognize the divine in each of us. In a 2018 sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, Brene Brown reminds us that,
“If you are a person of faith, you are called to find the face of God in every single person you meet.”
Brene Brown
Sometimes that is not the easiest thing to do. Especially when we disagree with someone, maybe don’t like them; or if they look, think, love, or act differently than we do. A key way to know someone is to hear their stories; to understand who they are. Brown shows one way of doing that in a short, narrated cartoon video about empathy. Sometimes it is no more simple, and no more profound, than just being there.
Brown says that empathy fuels connection and cites Theresa Wiseman’s four qualities of empathy: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotions in others, and communicating that. If we want to love our neighbor as Christ both told us and demonstrated, this is a pretty solid beginning.
Part of the problem is that this isn’t an easy thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. And it isn’t always easy. We need all the help that we can get.
This fall, we’ve had two evening classes reading and discussing Brown’s book, “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.” It’s been interesting, hearing some folks who are not church-goers, who say, “A church discussing a Brene Brown book? Wow, that’s really cool, I’d love to be a part of that.” And some folks at the church, who wonder about discussing a book that isn’t the Bible and doesn’t talk directly about the Bible or God in the way that we are used to. And both of those things are great and right and fair discussions to have.
I love the idea of thin places–places where heaven and earth are closer, or places where we are closer to God. There are absolutely physical places in the world where that space exists. But I think it that space can also be a state of mind or emotion. And when we feel vulnerable, that is one of the places–being exposed, and truly seen and heard, where we feel our need for God and for each other. Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”And she points out that love for us feels uncertain, incredibly risky, and leaves us emotionally exposed.
She points out that, “vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
This is not easy stuff and it’s not necessarily a feel good book, in that it asks us to look past all the barriers we build to protect ourselves and be open with ourselves, each other, and with God. Being open to God is to be vulnerable, to put our hearts out there, which is the business God is in: the battle for our hearts.
Brown gets the title for her book from Teddy Roosevelt’s famous speech, about the “Man in the Arena:”
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…”
God calls us not to be on the sidelines, but in the arena. He tells us that Jesus has come so that we may “have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). He wants us to get to know Him and get to know each other. And He knows it is a struggle, a journey to get there, one where we lay down our old lives to have a new life in and through Him. And that it’s worth it.
What keeps us from having that life in all its fullness? The life that we might dream of, or that God dreams for us? What, in our culture, are the things that most stand in our way? If most of us had to name it, it would probably involve fear, shame, vulnerability. We are often afraid of failing, afraid of falling, afraid of being ridiculed, afraid of being exposed. This is true in our personal lives, in our education system, and at work. And in Daring Greatly, Brown helps us to look at this, to name and understand it, and talks about how we can connect with one another and develop a resilience that could allow us to try; to dare.
In the Gospels, Jesus compares himself to a physician, who is not here to help the healthy, but here to help the sick. He asks Peter and his disciples to continue his work. He asks us to continue his work today. And when we can diagnose something that keeps people down, keeps us from knowing each other and knowing ourselves; keeps us armored up, numb, and therefore not open to God or His love for us and what plans He might have for us, maybe He asks us to reach out to people where they are. Maybe he asks us to open ourselves up and help others connect to us and to Him.
And maybe we need to use every tool, every language, every means that He has given us to help do that. It’s a sacred call, to love our neighbors. And to love them, we have to know them, and know ourselves.
There are different paths to come to faith. I know my own did not involve the Bible until it did. And that has begun one of the coolest lifetime adventures there is. And our paths also involve finding God in all of creation, in other people, and in books, some of which are obvious, some of which are subtle, but all of which are part of God.
At our best, maybe we are called to synthesize secular and sacred texts, or to view everything as sacred, seeing with the eyes of a Creator who loves his Creation. Maybe we can create a language and a vision with room for both. I appreciate folks like Rev. Arianne Rice, who in her practice is both an Episcopal priest and a certified Daring Way instructor, bringing together Scripture, faith, social work, research, vulnerability, and empathy. And who may be able to help us, and others, do the same. It’s cool to see Christ Church Charlotte offering classes, lectures, and an evening with Brene Brown; Stonebriar Church in Texas talking about healing from shame; and the Episcopal Church and United Thank Offering talking about return, practice, and gratitude, citing Brown’s work. The point here is not about Brown, but about cases where churches are looking to engage their congregations and communities by being open to new ways of thinking about connection, empathy, vulnerability, and how to be neighbors. It doesn’t change our sacred calling, it engages it on the ground.
I have so much to learn from so many different people. And so much to learn about God’s love, and grace, and Word. And I am grateful for all those in the arena, trying to do God’s work , through their unique gifts, perspective, and place in the world.
There was a stretch where Led Zeppelin’s “Presence” was my favorite album. I would listen to the long songs “Achilles Last Stand” and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” over and over. But that’s not the kind of presence I mean here. I am talking about being fully present.
People make and walk labyrinths to bring them into the present moment; to tune out distractions, all the things that fill our minds and take away our ability to be present. Maybe we need some daily ritual or mental labyrinths to help walk us into our morning, to allow us to connect. Pulling into work last week, it was flowers growing on the fence in front of me.
They stopped me for a couple minutes. David Bailey in his poem “Village in a Labyrinth” talks about just this kind of experience:
“Let me see in a cup of tea, a fire, a fern on a desk, the favorite hiding places of outlandish miracles–how all of this is knit from a nebula’s rainbow, stars reincarnated.”
Hiding places of outlandish miracles. The extraordinary in and through the ordinary.
Fr. Bill Ortt at Christ Church Easton talks about making minutes into moments–when we transform the passage of time into a transcendent experience, something that becomes more than time, it becomes a memory. For those moments to happen, we have to be present, we have to be engaged, and we have to be open.
In her book, “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead,” Brene Brown talks about the openness as being vulnerable:
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
Being open to the moment also means being vulnerable to things being too much at times. We can’t just shut off the valve and close ourselves off, or we cut off our ability to experience those moments we live for. It’s a process: we spend much of our lives building armor to protect us or numbing what hurts us. It’s a balancing act where we will fall, get it wrong, get hurt, hurt others, and repeat. But we work to get out of that pattern, to overcome it, to get it right. It’s part of being human, or part of what Brown calls living “wholeheartedly.”
Being present; making moments; living wholeheartedly. Maybe we can build reminders into our days.
This past weekend, it was a set of stairs that led down to the creek. It was making time to kayak and paddleboard in the shallows, sun and shade of a narrow creek full of sunbathing turtles, low-hanging branches, and not knowing what was around the next corner.
We are all invited to be present, countless times each day. We are invited to pay attention, to make moments, to experience something new, to share something with those around us. The questions become: will we hear those invitations? And will we invite others?
