The Life You Save May Be Your Own

There are many reasons to read this article about Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that appears in the current issue of the The Atlantic, and which I excerpted from below.

But here’s one you might not have thought of: It’s written by Paul Elie, who wrote the 2003 book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a miraculous work of spiritual biography that interweaves the life-stories of four great mid-20th-century American Christians: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.

We’re planning a four-week Soulwork series this August on the book and the four exemplary figures it explores. Click here for an excerpt from the book. Money quote:

Dorothy Day wrote: “Today the Commonweal came with a chapter from Thomas Merton’s book in it about his entrance into the Trappist monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky. He mentions the need we have in our religious life for a formal observance of prayer, the need for ritual.” She was keeping a journal of the year 1948 and planned to publish it…

The excerpt from “The Seven Storey Mountain” spoke to her main concern that year: the struggle to cultivate the interior life amid the life of poverty…

The “Profound Contradictoriness” of Christianity

In honor of the blessing of the marriage between two men (members of our parish) which took place a couple weeks ago here at St. Bede’s, check out this plea to the State Supreme Court of California:

And the check out this article in the current issue of The Atlantic about Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and his effort to hold the Anglican Communion together despite strong disagreements about the proper place of gay people in our Christian Communities.

(In short, the US Episcopal Church–and especially the Diocese of California–believe gay men and women should be full and complete participants in our communion, by serving openly as deacons, priests and bishops as well as having their marital unions blessed in our churches, while certain parts of the Anglican Communion in other parts of the world… not so much.)

Sometimes, Williams has frustrated supporters of the inclusion of gay people in the church by his attempts to bring everyone together and forge compromise. But this article illustrates the importance of that inclusive struggle as well as the fortitude Williams has brought to it:

The Anglican Communion is a dramatic testing ground, because it—alone among the churches—has sought to have it both ways: at once affirming traditional Christian notions of marriage and family, love and fidelity, and adapting them to the experiences of gay believers.

It is not a church, strictly speaking…

Blessed Cecilia

This Saturday, Feb. 28, 7:30 pm, in the nave of the church, the St. Bede’s Choir will perform a collection of Lenten hymns, including Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to Saint Cecilia and Chorale After An Old French Carol, as well as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ piece, To Music, for vocal soloists and piano. Admission is $15 ($10 for seniors and students).

Come and soak up this beautiful music, and take the time to reflect and notice  God during this season of turning (penance) from Winter to Spring, from sorrow to joy, from death to life.

Here’s a taste of the Britten:

St. Cecilia, a third-century martyr, is known as the patron saint of musicians because tradition holds that she sang as she died at the hands of her imperial Roman tormentors.

The Wisdom and Faith of Children

Bede’s Blog has gotten into this before (here, here and here). But the last three Sunday School sessions are prompting me to get into it again. It bears repeating: Children get it–the big stuff, the hard stuff–better than adults.

The past three Sundays, we’ve discussed with the kids three crucial teachings of Jesus: love your enemies; be a peacemaker; and don’t judge others, judge yourself. Adults have such trouble discussing these fundamental tenets of Jesus’ teaching and, indeed, the Christian faith. Bring up these ideas with adults and most of the discussion will be taken up with all the various instances in which such injunctions cannot or should not apply. Adults do all they can to wriggle away from these fairly simple and crucial Christian teachings. (I’m reminded of two bumper stickers; one: When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he meant, ‘Don’t Kill Them; and another: an image of a B-1 Bomber with the words, Peace The Old Fashioned Way).

Kids wrestle with these questions all the time, moment to moment, day in and day out, and much less cynically than do adults. They know not to judge their fellows, but rather to worry about their own behavior. If someone hits them, they know to use words in response and/or to walk away, though they admit they don’t always do so–and they know that failing is their responsibility, not their attacker’s.

They know not to write off others as “bad” simply because they do something wrong or harmful or mean to them, but to give them another chance and find a way to sympathize with them, recognizing their own penchant to do the wrong thing. They sometimes get into fights with others but still return to play with those others, always imagining they can be friends, even if they sometimes fight. They know to encourage those in a fight not just to stop fighting but to “play nice,” that is: to love those they might otherwise call an enemy.

They are believers in the power of love, peacemaking and resisting judgment. And, possibly most important, they accept the messiness of life–with its unanswerable questions coupled with the need to keep asking them. “Why?” they ask. And even though they rarely get an acceptable answer, they keep asking. Why do we put people in prison? Why do we bomb other countries? Why do we have so much more than them?

I was reminded of all this today when I read this blog post by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here’s my favorite passage:

The most fearsome damage wreaked upon my parents by their concept of “adulthood”, was the idea that being “adult” meant that you were finished – that “maturity” marked the place where you declared yourself done, needing to go no further.

This was displayed most clearly in the matter of religion, where I would try to talk about a question I had, and my parents would smile and say:  “Only children ask questions like that; when you’re adult, you know that it’s pointless to argue about it.”  They actually said that outright!

The New Atheism, contd: Secularism vs. Atheism

Bruce Ledewitz, a self-described “non-believer” but defiantly not one of the “New Atheists” (which Bede’s Blog has discussed previously here and here), discusses his upcoming book, Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief and Practice here.

Money quotes:

I have been trying to redefine the relationship between secularism and religion from one of opposition and tension to one of fruitful interaction… [Christopher] Hitchens and his supporters [and other 'New Atheists'] want to lead secularists, many of whom know very little about religion, into opposition to religion. Instead, I argue that for secularism to be healthy, it must learn from the wisdom of the religious traditions. Not believing in God, afterlife or miracles does not exhaust what religion can teach… It is possible to believe most of the promises of the Bible without believing in God.

Soulwork: Social Entrepreneur 2 – James Grant

James Grant’s work is detailed in Chapter 19 of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein (Oxford University Press, 2007), which credits him with sparking “The Child Survival Revolution.

Grant has been called “The Children’s Saint” by admirers and “The Mad American” by those critical of his doggedness on behalf of  children’s health. He is known for contending that “morality must march with capacity.” He meant that we, as a world community, have the economic and technical capacity to reduce drastically the incidence of child deaths and greatly improve worldwide children’s health; and therefore we have the moral obligation to get it done.

Bornstein writes:

None of the people-of-the-century lists by U.S. news magazines in 1999 included the name of James P. Grant. This is a telling omission given that Grant orchestrated global health changes that saved the lives of at least 25 million children. From 1980 until his death in 1995, Grant, as head of UNICEF, conceived and led a worldwide campaign to make simple, low-cost health solutions available to children everywhere (248).

Learning How To Die

I just came across The Book of Dead Philosophers, a fun and provocative accounting of the deaths of “190 or So Dead Philosophers,” by Simon Critchley, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School in New York City, who argues that to be a philosopher is “to learn how to die.” As we approach Ash Wednesday this week and the season of Lent, it seems appropriate to wade into the mysterious darkness of death and to explore the ways in which death is a part of life.

In his explication of why he engaged in such a morbid, funny and truly odd project, Critchley writes:

The path to justice, we are told [by Socrates in Plato's Republic], is only to be followed by orienting the soul towards the Good, which is precisely not a matter of knowledge but a work of love. Philosophy begins, then, with the questioning of certainties in the realm of knowledge and the cultivation of a love of wisdom. Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic.

There has never been a more important time to emphasize this distinction between philosophy and sophistry. We are surrounded by countless new sophistries…

Sermon: I Do Choose (to be healed)

Wherefore art thou?

The psalmist is like the infant who thinks the parents have evaporated when they move out of sight. The psalmist wheedles. What good will it do you if I’m ruined? Can I sing songs to you in the grave?

Sound familiar? Given our childhood experience, we’re betting that whining may work. Did it? That’s a good question. Let’s hold onto it. Because the psalmist is healed in some way, and the psalm is his ritual act of thanksgiving in public worship.

Wouldn’t it be excellent if it were incumbent upon each of us to compose a song of praise and to sing it in the midst of the congregation every time we are grateful for God’s grace? If we had that expectation, we’d be much more confident that God’s healing power is everywhere operative, today as of old.

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Scripture for Social Entrepreneurs

Matthew 35:31-40

When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, “Come, O blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

Fat Tuesday, Sugary Tuesday, Doughie Tuesday

We’re looking forward to Shrove Tuesday (otherwise known as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday), the last day before Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent. As good Christians, we traditionally prepare for 40 days of fasting and penitence by partying and eating as much fat, sugar and dough as we can.

It all takes place next Tuesday, Feb. 24 in the Great Hall from 6 – 7:30 pm. The Vestry, as always, will host and provide the pancakes, as well as bacon, eggs and other breakfasty foods.

And there will be lots of decadent pancake toppings provided by Sunday School parents as well as a Lenten trivia game for the adults and a Lenten craft project for the kids. Come and enjoy the fun. There will be plenty of time during Lent to practice restraint.

Working the Watershed

This Saturday, Feb. 21, St. Bede’s kids of all ages, as well as their parents and other interested parishioners, will be teaming up with “Save The Bay” to help rehabilitate a piece of the Baylands in East Palo Alto. We’ll be planting native plants and pulling invasive weeds and otherwise helping to make a small part of our local environment more healthy, as it processes rain-water, filters out waste from our roads, and provides habitat for birds, bugs, mice, and, you know, human beings.

In March (Saturday, March 21 to be exact), we will start work on our own assigned spot of land in the Baylands: Bede’s Bog. Read all about it here.

Social Entrepreneur 1: Dr. Paul Farmer

Check out the book by the great Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, (Random House, 2004).

Farmer, a student of medical anthropology at Duke before attending Harvard medical School, claimed as a hero, German scientist Rudolf Virchow, known as the “Father of Pathology” and the founder of the field known as Social Medicine, which seeks to “understand how social and economic conditions impact health, disease and the practice of medicine,” as well as to “foster conditions in which this understanding can lead to a healthier society.”

As Farmer puts it in the book, “ Virchow had a comprehensive vision: pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology.” (61)

For years Dr. Farmer has commuted between Harvard and Haiti, where he founded Partners in Health (PIH), forging connections between Haiti and resources in the US. Known as Dokte Paul throughout Haiti, he has improved rural health by teaching basic health practices as the best preventive medicine.

With this public health model, Farmer and his colleague, Jim Kim, have influenced changes in epidemiological protocol for global infectious diseases, in the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Red Cross (IRC), as well as in the pharmaceutical industry.

Farmer was raised Roman Catholic. He has tenuous ties to organized religion, taking guidance from the example of Jesus. He has found an affinity with liberation theology, a movement arising out of Latin America in the 20th century. Farmer abbreviates the basics:

The “O for the P” is the preferential option for the poor in scripture, in the life of Jesus, in the witness of saints, e.g. monastics working among the Latin American poor (174).

The “H of G” is a hermeneutics of generosity, the discipline of giving others the benefit of the doubt, based on the imago dei, humanity created in God’s image. (215).

Soulwork: Social Entrepreneurship Series

There’s only one more Social Entrepreneurship Soulwork session left–this coming Sunday, Feb. 22, 9 – 10 am. But you can read about each of the case studies our rector has presented over the past two months right here on Bede’s Blog. All this week, I’ll be posting Kitty’s notes and thoughts, along with relevant quotes and links, regarding each of the social entrepreneurs Kitty helped introduce to us.

Why do an adult ed program at a church about social entrepreneurs? Well, these are folks doing the work of Christ, whether they call themselves Christians or not. They are finding creative and sustainable solutions to big social problems and setting up systems that now help and will continue to help this planet to live into Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven. These social entrepreneurs instruct and inspire regarding the biggest and most pressing issues of our time. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Stay tuned…

Seekers, Calling 2.0, March 12

Last Thursday’s Seekers Dinner on the subject of vocation and calling (What sorts of work has God called us to do? How do we know? What are the issues that arise for us as we seek to discern God’s call and ultimately follow God’s call? How does Gods’ call change over time?) was so meaty and fruitful and only barely scratched the surface.

So we’re going to stick with this topic at our next Seekers Dinner on Thursday, March 12, 7:30 – 9:30 pm. So if you missed it, please come to the next one–we’d love to hear about everyone’s struggles to figure out what sort of work/jobs you have felt called to pursue and how you’ve pursued it.

Pennies and Peacemakers

The last couple of weeks, the Sunday School has been discussing some of Jesus’ most important and most difficult teachings: to love our enemies and to be peacemakers. This has coincided with our effort to begin collecting pennies for the Pennies For Peace program, a fundraiser whereby kids help pay for schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as run by the Central Asia Institute.

What’s amazing is how easily the kids understand the kind of work Jesus calls us to do. They have no trouble going with the idea that we can and should love those who might have harmed us in the past or who seek to harm us in the present and future. From what we’ve experienced these last two Sundays, it seems that it’s not as hard for kids (compared to adults) to believe that offering love will work, will produce peace. They unquestioningly believe in the capacity of people to recognize the good and turn toward it.

You can call them naive, I suppose. Or you could call them Christians.

What did you do for Evolution Weekend?

Stanford’s Center for Religious Life dubbed this past weekend, “Evolution Weekend,” and made a point of celebrating Darwin and all that his science has wrought upon our thinking and feeling and praying. In honor of all that, here is a sermon by Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann given during Stanford’s interfaith service the previous Sunday, February 8, entitled, “Twin Mysteries.” (Thanks to The Rev. Joane Saunders, Stanford’s Associate Dean for Religious Life for passing this along.)

Nine-year old Joey came home from Sunday School and his mother asked him what he had learned. “Well, Mom, our teacher told us how God sent Moses behind enemy lines on a rescue mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. When he got to the Red Sea, he had his engineers build a pontoon bridge and all the people walked across safely. Then he used his walkie-talkie to radio headquarters for reinforcements. They sent bombers to blow up the bridge and all the Israelites were saved.”

“Now, Joey, is that really what your teacher taught you?” his mother asked.

“Well, no, Mom. But if I told it the way the teacher did, you’d never believe me!”

What does Joey understand, even at the ripe old age of nine?  That the miracles of the Bible call for a leap of faith, just as the Israelites had to first leap into the sea and only then did it recede.  Veterans of experiments with the sun, magnifying glasses and bugs, or of messages in bottles thrown into the ocean and swept back on the beach by the tides, nine-year olds already sense that faith often shares an uneasy truce with the scientific process. Joey fears that transmitting, let alone believing, the miraculous story he heard in Sunday School would diminish his own credibility and intelligence.

He’s not alone.

Happy Birthday Darwin!

Darwin is deserving of all the praise he’s been receiving on this, his 200th birthday. He did a ton to advance our understanding of life as we know it. I am in awe of his scientific work and his understanding of the many gifts science can and does offer to humanity. As Darwin rightly put it:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

As a theologian however, Darwin inspires in me a more mixed response, although I greatly appreciate all that he’s added to humanity’s collective theological conversation.

On the one hand he believed:

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

And that is, in my opinion, an admirably modest statement that seems to at least partly contradict the previous statement above about the nearly limitless abilities of science to answer our questions.

On the other hand, I take issue with statements such as:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

My abbreviated response: Why not? “My thoughts are not your thoughts nor my ways your ways, says the Lord.”

And then there’s this:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Really? Indifference? Then why is it so hard for me to feel indifference in response to the universe I observe? Why am I moved by my observations of the universe to raptures of joy and wonder?

Finding God in the Economic Crisis

Speaking of God’s “call” to pursue one career path over another…

One silver-lining of the current economic crisis is that many young graduates of elite business schools (and other top-flight training grounds for American captains of industry) will now be more likely to launch careers focused on making the world a better place as opposed to careers meant to amass wealth. (This came up during last Sunday’s Soulwork discussion–we are currently in the midst of a Soulwork series on Sundays, 9 – 10 am, as led by our rector, Kitty Lehman, that is focused on social entrepreneurship.)

There has been much discussion recently about “moral hazard” regarding the bail-out of the American banking industry, but during the boom of the last (nearly) 30 years, graduates of elite universities have faced a different kind of moral hazard. As they made their plans to graduate and enter the work-force, I would argue that many sincerely wanted to embark on careers that might possibly make the world a better place. But at the same time, they faced huge educational debt and the opportunity to make very big money by working for an investment bank or a hedge-fund or some such thing.

Arguably, over the past 30 or so years, much of America’s top analytical, problem-solving minds have been drawn to the wealth they could amass by creating these increasingly complex investment strategies we’ve been reading so much about. Because in so doing, they could make a lot of money. And no matter the purity of one’s intentions, the allure of wealth is awfully powerful.

Now, however, what sorts of job options do graduates of Harvard Business School or the Yale School of Management or the Stanford School of Business  have? Can they jump into a hedge-fund or investment bank and immediately start pulling down salaries in the high six-figures, with the possibility of bonuses in the millions? Of course not! Some of those banks and hedge-funds don’t exist anymore!

Seekers Calling

This Thursday, Feb. 12, 7:30 – 9:30 pm, our next Seekers Dinner will convene in St. Bede’s Great Hall to enjoy good food, good people and to discuss the idea of “calling.”

How are we called to live our lives? What sort of job should we be in? How should we divide our time between our jobs and rest of our lives–our friends, our families, ourselves? Have we made some sort of horrible compromise if we wind up in a job “just for the money”? Is there a job or career path out there that we are particularly well suited for–the work equivalent of a “soul-mate”? And what does God have to do with it?

Also: Should we stop all this navel-gazing and get to work, knowing we’re lucky to earn a living wage, and extremely lucky to be able to choose between different kinds of work in an effort to find just the right vocation that suits our particular selves?

Come weigh in on these questions and more tomorrow night!

From Elsewhere To Here

I just picked up a book by NYU sociologist, Dalton Conley, called Elsewhere, U.S.A. about the craziness of modern white-collar professional family life, in which both mom and dad tend to work nearly incessantly while also tending to their fabulously-scheduled kids.

It’s a helpful attempt to make sense of a peculiar cultural moment. Here’s an excerpt from early in the book:

We all know we are on some new wild ride. We may have all made mental notes to ourselves to slow down, examine our (multiple) lives, and take stock of what has happened–but, of course, we don’t have time to reflect… there is a palpable sense out there that many of us have lost control of our lives. Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere feel like they need to be not just in two places at once but literally everywhere at the same time…

Might I humbly suggest contemplative, liturgy-focused church services–like those at St. Bede’s and throughout the U.S. Episcopal Church–as a potential antidote? as an opportunity for reflection and calm? as a chance to experience wholeness, if not holiness? Regular reflection upon whence we’ve come and where we’re going is needed now more than ever, if we are return from elsewhere to here.

As Conley explains:

Today… Leisure is work and work is leisure. Consumption is investment. A tax-deductible home equity loan is savings. And the salience of social connections does not indicate nepotism but rather social capital and entrepreneurial skill totally consistent with meritocratic ideals. The corporation has widened and flattened, resolving many of the tensions between sociability and hierarchy. Loyalty has been replaced by value: Indeed, you show your value within the organization through calculated displays of disloyalty–that is, by leveraging outside offers from other corporate suitors.

Even our religion has undergone a transformation…