I wanted to share with you an extended quote from Michael Bess' excellent book, 'Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of WW II.' His description of the moral character of the villagers of Le Chambon in France during WW II gives a vision of what we can aspire to if we are faithful and deliberate. Le Chambon was one of the very few communities in Europe that, when faced with the Holocaust, did the right thing. At great risk to themselves, they sheltered Jews from the Nazis throughout the war.
The quote:
The villagers of Le Chambon had been quietly but very deliberately preparing themselves, over years and years, for precisely the kind of moral challenge that the war ultimately presented. Partly through their own initiative, and partly through the leadership of their pastors, they had gradually shaped themselves as moral actors: cultivating the critical skills with which to question external authority; honing their sense of right and wrong through reflection; practicing the translation of abstract ideals into concrete action; experiencing their own power to make choices and to see those choices bear fruit; building the tools of moral judgment, and applying those tools time and again to the scrutiny of their own behavior.
They carried out this process through the pursuit of their religion, but it was a highly distinctive religious practice that they undertook: the apparent simplicity of their adherence to the Gospel should not mislead us. Like athletes for a race to be run at some indeterminate point in the future, they incorporated into the course of their daily lives a systematic effort of ethical and spiritual self-fashioning: unobtrusively, without fuss or fanfare, they built up and exceptionally strong constitution of independent thinking and moral fiber.
Perhaps equally important, they did so not merely as individuals, but acting together, in twos and threes, in Bible Study Groups, in running the local school and the affairs of the town. Over time, the community that emerged proved as tough and resilient as the single filaments of each villager's character- perhaps even more so, since the example that they posed for one another, and the encouragement they gave one another, undoubtedly strengthened their resolve still furhter. The rescue operation that took place in Le Chambon between 1940 and 1944 did not 'just happen' by accident: it grew rather out of a decades-long process of patient work and preparation.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Thank You
With this post I draw to a close this season of St. Paul's Source. Thank you to each of you who have read this blog over its year and a half of life. It has been a deep pleasure to work out ideas and feeling about our common life in this blog. Even greater has been the pleasure of talking with you from time to time about the thoughts expressed here. I hope to continue the conversations in other forms here at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael.
Blessings and Godspeed.
Christopher
Blessings and Godspeed.
Christopher
Pool Seven: Discipleship Groups
Being a Christian is not a solo operation. Jesus came not just to save individual souls but to create community. He craved and created friends. When he sent the Disciples out in Mission he sent them out two by two. Because of this emphasis on community in the Christian life, the seventh and last pool of wisdom is the wisdom found in groups.
Discipleship Groups are one way to enact Jesus' command to be in community. They are small groups of generally four to eight people who generally meet every other week for an hour. They are structured in such a way that they hold us accountable, in love, to the teachings of Jesus and to our own deepest spiritual hungers. When they are working, they love us into becoming who God created us to be.
Discipleship Groups involve risk and trust. They ask us to make commitments that are difficult for all of us. They ask us to be generous, faithful and prayerful. They ask us to consider that God may have a special call on our lives, one that only we ourselves can accomplish, and to have the courage to follow that call. They ask us, over time, to trust others with the true stories of who we really are. They ask us, over time, to reveal and even celebrate our weird selves.
The Christian life is not easy. Jesus teaches that it is a narrow road. He teaches us that we each must pick up our own cross in order to follow him. He teaches that we must die to our old selves so that we might be born anew. I know from experience that we all flinch from this task that Jesus gives us. When we read the stories of how clueless the Disciples were throughout Jesus' life, we are invited to recognize ourselves.
The Disciples were not alone in their hard work of becoming true Disciples and we don't need to be either. Discipleship Groups are like the small band of friends that God places us in for a season of our lives. This band can help us become what we could never become by ourselves. They help us realize that we too are God's beloved child with special gifts and a unique call. Their wisdom, in ways known and unknown, holds us through a kind of death so that we may, in Jesus, embrace new life.
Discipleship Groups are one way to enact Jesus' command to be in community. They are small groups of generally four to eight people who generally meet every other week for an hour. They are structured in such a way that they hold us accountable, in love, to the teachings of Jesus and to our own deepest spiritual hungers. When they are working, they love us into becoming who God created us to be.
Discipleship Groups involve risk and trust. They ask us to make commitments that are difficult for all of us. They ask us to be generous, faithful and prayerful. They ask us to consider that God may have a special call on our lives, one that only we ourselves can accomplish, and to have the courage to follow that call. They ask us, over time, to trust others with the true stories of who we really are. They ask us, over time, to reveal and even celebrate our weird selves.
The Christian life is not easy. Jesus teaches that it is a narrow road. He teaches us that we each must pick up our own cross in order to follow him. He teaches that we must die to our old selves so that we might be born anew. I know from experience that we all flinch from this task that Jesus gives us. When we read the stories of how clueless the Disciples were throughout Jesus' life, we are invited to recognize ourselves.
The Disciples were not alone in their hard work of becoming true Disciples and we don't need to be either. Discipleship Groups are like the small band of friends that God places us in for a season of our lives. This band can help us become what we could never become by ourselves. They help us realize that we too are God's beloved child with special gifts and a unique call. Their wisdom, in ways known and unknown, holds us through a kind of death so that we may, in Jesus, embrace new life.
Pool Six: The Poor
'Surely as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.'
These famous words of Jesus appear toward the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is teaching on the end of time and he is giving a hard teaching that, in the end, some will get to be with him forever in heaven and others will be cast aside. Those who get to be with Jesus forever are precisely those who in their earthly lives fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited those who are sick or in prison. The blessed are those who did it.
Why might this be? Some reflection on the whole of Matthew's Gospel provides help. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus begins his great Sermon on the Mount by telling us who is specially blessed in this life. They are, it turns out, precisely the least. The blessed are those who mourn, hunger or thirst. They are the persecuted and the poor in Spirit.
Our call, if we wish to know, embrace and be like God, is to seek and be with the poor in our midst. Looking into the eyes or holding the hand of one in need, a person specially beloved of God, is to see Jesus face to face and to hold his hand.
Communities that actively practice service of the poor talk about 'reverse mission.' In some ways, we go out into the world in mission believing that we are bringing the love, blessing and forgiveness of God into the world. Our actual experience is that the poor that we connect with, when we connect without judgement, bring the love and wisdom of God to us.
Paul teaches that God chooses what is despised and rejected in the world to bring life to the world. We ignore the teachings of Jesus and Paul at our peril. Without making a personal connection with those in need, we run the serious risk of one of the great sins of scripture, hardness of heart.
These famous words of Jesus appear toward the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is teaching on the end of time and he is giving a hard teaching that, in the end, some will get to be with him forever in heaven and others will be cast aside. Those who get to be with Jesus forever are precisely those who in their earthly lives fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited those who are sick or in prison. The blessed are those who did it.
Why might this be? Some reflection on the whole of Matthew's Gospel provides help. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus begins his great Sermon on the Mount by telling us who is specially blessed in this life. They are, it turns out, precisely the least. The blessed are those who mourn, hunger or thirst. They are the persecuted and the poor in Spirit.
Our call, if we wish to know, embrace and be like God, is to seek and be with the poor in our midst. Looking into the eyes or holding the hand of one in need, a person specially beloved of God, is to see Jesus face to face and to hold his hand.
Communities that actively practice service of the poor talk about 'reverse mission.' In some ways, we go out into the world in mission believing that we are bringing the love, blessing and forgiveness of God into the world. Our actual experience is that the poor that we connect with, when we connect without judgement, bring the love and wisdom of God to us.
Paul teaches that God chooses what is despised and rejected in the world to bring life to the world. We ignore the teachings of Jesus and Paul at our peril. Without making a personal connection with those in need, we run the serious risk of one of the great sins of scripture, hardness of heart.
Pool Five: Silence
Be still and know that I am God.
In each of the four pools we have considered so far there is a treasured place for silence. The Book of Common Prayer, the Benedictine tradition, Scripture and the writers of our tradition each honor the practice of being still and quiet before God in different ways. Benedict says that even good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence. Why?
Our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, likes to write about the 'peaceful worthwhileness' of each person. Each of us is worthwhile and lovable just because we are God's creatures. God made us and God hates nothing God has made. Yet we tend to continually forget this. One of our many perversities is that we expend great amounts of effort proving our worth. But this effort is unnecessary.
Practicing silence, for example by sitting for twenty minutes a day in Centering Prayer, is a way to slowly work through our layers of illusion and distortion. By being still we eventually let go of false perceptions of ourselves, the world and God, and so gradually rest in loving truth like a child on its mother's breast. It is the practice of being before doing.
I often quote the fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, who wrote that God's first language is silence, the rest is translation. To practice silence is perhaps the pool of wisdom that gives us the most direct access to God. It is always already available to us if we will only step to the side and embrace it.
In each of the four pools we have considered so far there is a treasured place for silence. The Book of Common Prayer, the Benedictine tradition, Scripture and the writers of our tradition each honor the practice of being still and quiet before God in different ways. Benedict says that even good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence. Why?
Our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, likes to write about the 'peaceful worthwhileness' of each person. Each of us is worthwhile and lovable just because we are God's creatures. God made us and God hates nothing God has made. Yet we tend to continually forget this. One of our many perversities is that we expend great amounts of effort proving our worth. But this effort is unnecessary.
Practicing silence, for example by sitting for twenty minutes a day in Centering Prayer, is a way to slowly work through our layers of illusion and distortion. By being still we eventually let go of false perceptions of ourselves, the world and God, and so gradually rest in loving truth like a child on its mother's breast. It is the practice of being before doing.
I often quote the fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, who wrote that God's first language is silence, the rest is translation. To practice silence is perhaps the pool of wisdom that gives us the most direct access to God. It is always already available to us if we will only step to the side and embrace it.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Pool Four: Western Christian All-Stars
Our imaginations are shaped by what we read. Like water over rock, the words we read slowly shape our minds and so determine how we understand and view the world.
There are no words that are more important than the words I wrote about last week, the words of scripture. They are the root of any mature Christian life. But if they are the root, this week I want to write about the trunk. That is, I want to reflect briefly on the people who, through the centuries, applied scripture to new situations in profound and sometimes startling ways. By reading them, we learn how to make scripture and the Christian life relevant and powerful for our own day.
The Christian tradition is both deep and broad. It can be delightful and instructive to read people from other branches of our larger family, like the Eastern Orthodox influenced writings of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But I have found, given the limited time we all have to read, that I am most deeply enriched by returning regularly to our own American and English tradition of Christian reflection, a tradition with direct connections back to the Roman Empire.
Here's an annotated list of seven books, working backwards in time. I conclude with what I believe to be, by far, the single most important book in our tradition.
1. The Chronicles Of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The twentieth century was rich with Christian imaginative literature including Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I chose this one because, beyond this great children's fantasy series, Lewis provides a broad and deep feast of Christian writing.
2. The Four Quartets by TS Eliot. Eliot and Auden were both outstanding poets who, by the middle of their lives, had made strong commitments to Anglicanism. The Four Quartets are a mystical Christian reflection on God and time.
3. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. This is a simple parable of the adventures of a Christian Soul facing allegorical challenges like the Slough of Despond. It was written by a 17th Century puritan from an English jail and for centuries was one of four or five books every English speaking Christian owned. It is still well worth reading.
4. The Temple by George Herbert. Unlike his contemporary John Donne you don't need professional guidance to understand these direct, heartfelt and beautifully crafted poems. Some have made their way into our Hymnal.
5. The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous. There were two high points of English Spiritual literature. One was the the early seventeenth century which gave us Herbert, Donne, Andrewes and the King James Bible. The other was the late fourteenth century which gave us Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and this brief book, which gives us the way of Centering Prayer so many of us practice today.
6. The Divine Comedy by Dante. Not only is this a great piece of literature in its own right, it also gives us a thorough introduction to the broad range of medieval Christian thought and life. Reading it is like exploring Chartres Cathedral.
7. The Confessions by Augustine. If you are going to commit yourself to the project of reading one Christian book in our tradition, make it this one. Augustine set the agenda for Western Christianity. There is no thought we can have about Christianity that Augustine hasn't already had. By entering into deep conversation with Augustine, which is what it feels like when we read the Confessions, we enter into the heart of our way of following Jesus.
There are no words that are more important than the words I wrote about last week, the words of scripture. They are the root of any mature Christian life. But if they are the root, this week I want to write about the trunk. That is, I want to reflect briefly on the people who, through the centuries, applied scripture to new situations in profound and sometimes startling ways. By reading them, we learn how to make scripture and the Christian life relevant and powerful for our own day.
The Christian tradition is both deep and broad. It can be delightful and instructive to read people from other branches of our larger family, like the Eastern Orthodox influenced writings of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But I have found, given the limited time we all have to read, that I am most deeply enriched by returning regularly to our own American and English tradition of Christian reflection, a tradition with direct connections back to the Roman Empire.
Here's an annotated list of seven books, working backwards in time. I conclude with what I believe to be, by far, the single most important book in our tradition.
1. The Chronicles Of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The twentieth century was rich with Christian imaginative literature including Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I chose this one because, beyond this great children's fantasy series, Lewis provides a broad and deep feast of Christian writing.
2. The Four Quartets by TS Eliot. Eliot and Auden were both outstanding poets who, by the middle of their lives, had made strong commitments to Anglicanism. The Four Quartets are a mystical Christian reflection on God and time.
3. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. This is a simple parable of the adventures of a Christian Soul facing allegorical challenges like the Slough of Despond. It was written by a 17th Century puritan from an English jail and for centuries was one of four or five books every English speaking Christian owned. It is still well worth reading.
4. The Temple by George Herbert. Unlike his contemporary John Donne you don't need professional guidance to understand these direct, heartfelt and beautifully crafted poems. Some have made their way into our Hymnal.
5. The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous. There were two high points of English Spiritual literature. One was the the early seventeenth century which gave us Herbert, Donne, Andrewes and the King James Bible. The other was the late fourteenth century which gave us Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and this brief book, which gives us the way of Centering Prayer so many of us practice today.
6. The Divine Comedy by Dante. Not only is this a great piece of literature in its own right, it also gives us a thorough introduction to the broad range of medieval Christian thought and life. Reading it is like exploring Chartres Cathedral.
7. The Confessions by Augustine. If you are going to commit yourself to the project of reading one Christian book in our tradition, make it this one. Augustine set the agenda for Western Christianity. There is no thought we can have about Christianity that Augustine hasn't already had. By entering into deep conversation with Augustine, which is what it feels like when we read the Confessions, we enter into the heart of our way of following Jesus.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Pool Three: Scripture
The Bible is tough. It is probably our greatest pool of wisdom, yet it is often not easy to access.
When I first started reading scripture I was disappointed. In High School I got the habit of reading good books that had a message that inspired me and made think. These books included Siddhartha, Dharma Bums and the Fountainhead. Furthermore, I was inspired by the great story telling of Tolkien and our great American novelists.
By the time I was in college I finally was motivated to give the Bible a try. Like many other intrepid readers before me, I started to read it like a novel, beginning with the first page. Like many before me, I soon dropped out, intimidated by the lists of ancestors, the repetitive stories and the obscure rules. I had expected lessons for life but instead got lost and a little intimidated. It was years before I returned.
I am now fascinated by the very things that initially intimidated me. After years of faithful reading, I finally 'get' the relevance and fascination of what at first seemed so obscure. It is as though my eyes have slowly adjusted to the light. What seemed dark and indistinct now seems lively, distinct and deep.
This change in me has been gradual. I was helped by some guide books like Etienne Charpentier's 'How to Read the Old Testament,' but the greatest help has simply come by faithfully showing up on a weekly and daily basis and reading the scripture itself.
Over time, I have read scripture in a variety of ways. I've read it for daily prayers, for classes I was taking, for classes I was teaching and for preparing sermons. But the way I have found most helpful and enlightening is to gather with others who are open and inquiring, read it aloud, and then ask open questions and give our genuine responses. The difference between, for example, hearing the scripture read in church and reflecting on it in a Bible study is like the difference between just hearing a song like 'Summertime' on the radio and being a part of a jazz combo that's playing 'Summertime' together. As a small group of us wrestles with the text, we come to know and love it in depth. The Spirit seems to reveal what none of us could ever have seen by ourselves.
The Bible is tough but it is also true, good and beautiful. After years of reading, I am fully convinced that there is no end to the depth of the wisdom found in scripture. We discover that wisdom best, I believe, when we explore them with others who share with us an open heart and a desire for God.
When I first started reading scripture I was disappointed. In High School I got the habit of reading good books that had a message that inspired me and made think. These books included Siddhartha, Dharma Bums and the Fountainhead. Furthermore, I was inspired by the great story telling of Tolkien and our great American novelists.
By the time I was in college I finally was motivated to give the Bible a try. Like many other intrepid readers before me, I started to read it like a novel, beginning with the first page. Like many before me, I soon dropped out, intimidated by the lists of ancestors, the repetitive stories and the obscure rules. I had expected lessons for life but instead got lost and a little intimidated. It was years before I returned.
I am now fascinated by the very things that initially intimidated me. After years of faithful reading, I finally 'get' the relevance and fascination of what at first seemed so obscure. It is as though my eyes have slowly adjusted to the light. What seemed dark and indistinct now seems lively, distinct and deep.
This change in me has been gradual. I was helped by some guide books like Etienne Charpentier's 'How to Read the Old Testament,' but the greatest help has simply come by faithfully showing up on a weekly and daily basis and reading the scripture itself.
Over time, I have read scripture in a variety of ways. I've read it for daily prayers, for classes I was taking, for classes I was teaching and for preparing sermons. But the way I have found most helpful and enlightening is to gather with others who are open and inquiring, read it aloud, and then ask open questions and give our genuine responses. The difference between, for example, hearing the scripture read in church and reflecting on it in a Bible study is like the difference between just hearing a song like 'Summertime' on the radio and being a part of a jazz combo that's playing 'Summertime' together. As a small group of us wrestles with the text, we come to know and love it in depth. The Spirit seems to reveal what none of us could ever have seen by ourselves.
The Bible is tough but it is also true, good and beautiful. After years of reading, I am fully convinced that there is no end to the depth of the wisdom found in scripture. We discover that wisdom best, I believe, when we explore them with others who share with us an open heart and a desire for God.
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