email: whitpresby@charterinternet.com
Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
May 2004
|
William Blake’s “Poison Tree” |
|
|
Jacobson on Urban design |
|
|
Native American Grandfather wisdom |
|
|
Artress on Imagination |
|
|
Geoff’s war movie dream |
|
|
Geoff’s war movie dream, part 2 |
|
|
Protest is learned in prayer |
|
|
Fra Giovanni’s letter |
I bought a compilation CD last year called “A Woman’s Heart – A Decade On,” Dara Records, TORTV 1148 CD. One of the songs that caught my attention was the setting of a poem by William Blake. The singer is Mary Black and the words of Blake were set to music by Marcia Howard. Here’s the poem, titled “Poison Tree.”
I was angry with my friend,
I told him so, and my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe
told him not and my wrath did grow
and I watered it in fears
night and morning with my tears,
and I sunned it with smiles
and with soft deceitful wiles.
and it grew both day and night
till it bore an apple bright
and my foe beheld it shine,
and he knew it was mine
and into my garden stole
when the night had veiled the pole
in the morning glad I see,
my foe outstretched beneath that tree
was a poison tree
beware of a poison tree
growing inside of me.
what happened to you and me
I was reminded of the words of Jesus concerning anger in Matthew 5:21-26. We are reminded that although anger is a natural human emotion, it can get in the way of our spiritual lives. Anger presents a strong challenge to faithfulness, but there are helps available, beginning with prayer. Anger management programs can be found in many communities. How do you handle your anger?
May you find from God the strength and help you need this day.
Grace & peace
Geoff
For several years this church and I were involved in our local Urban Ministry Planning Group, working at what it means for a church to be active in an urban setting. There is much thinking going on these days, under the rubric of ‘new urbanism,’ about how cities should be structured and how they can better promote communal living. The latest edition of the Mars Hill Audio Journal spends some time on this nature of urban life and the concept of community, particularly as Christian tradition bears on it. We can recall that the book of Revelation imagines the culmination of creation as a new city, where community reaches its highest potential.
The Rev. Eric O. Jacobson, Associate Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Missoula, Montana, who has published a book, “Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith,” Brazos Press, 2003 (www.brazospress.com) is interviewed on the Mars Hill tape and here are some edited excerpts from the interview.
“Some evangelical Christians have started to address the issue of sports utility vehicles, “what would Jesus drive?” I’m interested in that because evangelicals are getting on board environmental issues, but even the way they have construed a solution, questioning our individual consumer choices (emphasizes our individualism). I could drive an SUV and consume less gas than someone driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle but who drives miles and miles to work each day. Its not a matter of what kind of car I purchase, but why are we building environments where you have to drive so frequently and so far just accomplish the tasks necessary for everyday living. We can’t seem to conceive of solutions that aren’t just individual actions. The great challenge is for us to tackle problems that can only be solved as a community, rather than as individuals.”
The next time you have to run to the store for milk or bread, need to rent a video, or do some other day-to-day function, ask yourself how much healthier you might be if you could walk or ride a bike to run that errand. Imagine a city laid out for the purposes of health and community. Where is God calling to us in the midst of all this?
May you find a deeper sense of community in your life today.
Grace &peace
Geoff
I ran across something I received over the Internet some time ago and pass it on to you.
“A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about the tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001. He said, “I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, angry, and violent. The other one is loving and compassionate.”
The grandson asked, “Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?”
The grandfather answered, “The one I feed.””
Wisdom and insight that, though not specifically Biblical, carries the spirit of Christ. Which interior beasts in your soul do you feed? May you find the wisdom and courage to know the beasts and feed the ones that lead to God.
Grace & peace
Geoff
What role does imagination play in our spiritual lives? In preparation for having the labyrinth at our church for a week in July, I’ve been reading through the book “Walking a Sacred Path; Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool” by Lauren Artress, Riverhead Books, 1995. I ran across this observation there.
We have place the imagination in exile. We have banished it because we do not understand or trust it. Nor do we grasp the imagination’s connection to the Divine within. As we stand on the brink of the next Century looking aback into the mirror of the fourteenth century, we face an odd paradox. During the fourteenth century, the human faculty of the imagination was not empowered by sufficient rationality. Today, the reverse is true. Now rationality is not empowered sufficiently by the imagination. It is almost as if an hourglass has been turned upside down and the sand is flowing the opposite way.; William Blake understood this when he said that “the enemy of whole vision is reasoning power’s divorce from the imagination.” The divorce between the reasoning mind and the imaginative mind places us I peril. The relationship between reasoning and imagination, thought and image, remains divided even in our modern world. The labyrinth can repair this split. The labyrinth can bring the imagination out of exile.
A balanced spiritual life is of great importance to me and this reading points us in the direction of that kind of balance. I’m looking forward to having the labyrinth at our church again and am planning an overnight retreat around its use. It would be open to anyone and will take place July 16 and 17. It would be great to have any of you join us. I’ll keep information posted through these emails.
May you find some of the balance you need in your life today.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Last week’s news events of the situation in Iraq were quite disturbing and they left me in a kind of shock. I did not know how to respond. Then Sunday night or Monday morning, May 16 or 17, I had the following dream:
I’m watching a war movie with my wife, a movie I’d seen before. But this is a new version of it. It is a very graphic and bloody scene with body parts scattered all around. The sound track seems enhanced with the sounds of the scene. I am repulsed by it and I close my ears, so as not to hear the sound track. I continue to react to the scene and shortly afterwards I turn my head behind my wife’s back, so that I can’t see the screen either.
This dream told me in part that the way the events are being covered was too much for me to take in. Is that a fairly common reaction? As a veteran of the previous “national discernment” about the Vietnam War, I could easily relate to the déjà vu of this dream. The images, the specters, the deep things that are symbolized in these events occasionally leave me in despair. My continuing prayer is that we will find a cultural level of intolerance for such graphic coverage, that in turn will help us find a renewed motivation to general cultural decency. With the Psalmist, we ask “How long O Lord?” How long with evil color and effect our lives? Until that day when there will be no more pain or suffering, let us continue in faith and prayer. May you find the strength to go on this day, and to cope with the events in your life.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Tuesday’s email generated more response than usual, including some confusion about what I was saying. I always try to be clear but know that sometimes deadlines push me to get careless. Dream interpretations lend themselves to being vague too. Thanks to you all who responded, particularly you Marvin.
My concern is how our faith shapes our attitude toward war and our responses to such things as prisoner abuse and torture, done on our behalf, or under our flag. I have been wrestling with this all week and my sermon Sunday will address it too (see below for text & title). As disturbing as the events and all the coverage is, I sense there remains enough decency in our society to stir outrage (and maybe even reform) above and beyond the partisan wrangling that prompts so much of the coverage. Maybe we will be forced to think twice about being so ready to solve our problems by shooting it out. I respect the way Europe has, for the most part, been much slower to draw their guns, continental Europe anyway. Could it be that they have seen, within memory of many still living, all the horrors that come when we “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.” (Shakespeare, Henry V. Go here http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0%2C11710%2C929892%2C00.html for an interesting discussion of this quote and its ramifications).
One of the best talk shows in the LA area, “To the Point” (http://www.kcrw.org/show/tp) had a discussion of this issue the other day, which pointed out that after Sept. 11, 2001, the current presidential administration decided that the threat from terrorism was so serious that international rules, like the Geneva (and other) conventions having to do with treatment of POWs etc. were able to be abrogated. My question is, at what point does the USA stop feeling superior to all others, including international law? If the rest of the world is likewise threatened by terrorism, as it is, what makes us so special that we alone feel we can abrogate international conventions? Where do these conventions come from? In part they come from the Judeo-Christian heritage that the Western world shares. That is one of the faith connections that we have with these current events.
My dream of last week tells me we have indeed been here before, but we seem to have learned so little. I turn away, not only in revulsion, but in frustration and disappointment.
Well, so much for my ranting. I hope we can all recall that no matter how bad or difficult or painful things get, our faith, and its resources like the Psalms, is there to help us. I’ll be off my soapbox next week.
May you all find the faith resources you need to cope with this world.
Grace & peace
Geoff
My sermon last Sunday touched upon the importance of lament in our lives of faith. I found this great paragraph in Kathleen M. O’Connor’s commentary on the book of Lamentations, in the New Interpreter’s Bible series, vol. VI, Abingdon Press, 2001.
“The practice of lament in public worship is a political act. Expressing anger, disclosing discontent with the world, protesting injustice to God has political ramifications. Walter Brueggemann asserts that if we cannot challenge the governance of this world, then we cannot challenge the governors of the world. The churches’ unwillingness or incapacity to bring radical discontent, protest, and anger before God silences and denies reality. It teaches sheepishness, lying, and cowardice. Protest of injustice and oppression is learned in prayer.”
I have long been a fan of Brueggemann’s pointing out the importance, indeed healthiness, of lament, a form of expression nearly extinct in our culture. O’Connor’s phrase “Protest of injustice and oppression is learned in prayer” is a great summary of my life for the last 30 years.
Are you dissatisfied with the world you live in? Do you pray that way?
Grace & peace
Geoff
I visited one of our church members who is confined to a nursing home recently and she showed me this letter that struck me as worth passing on to you all. It is a letter by Fra. Giovanni Giocondo written to a friend in 1513. Giocondo was a priest, scholar, architect and a teacher. Here’s the letter.
I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got, but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see - and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly, or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.
Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty - beneath its covering - that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.
Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.
Friendship has played an important role in the history of Christianity. We all know the value of having good friends, those who support and care for us with love. Indeed, Jesus Christ can be seen as a friend to all, as the old hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” sings.
May you find the warmth of friendship in your life today.
Grace & peace
Geoff
