Ash Wednesday – Peculiar Faith

Standing at the Crossroads of Healing

Today, Ash Wednesday, Christians begin the annual Lenten journey toward the Cross. While always important to note, this year it seems especially vital and indispensable to say as clearly as possible that this journey does not glorify pain and suffering, nor does it imagine violence as saving.

To say the same thing but differently: crucifixion was a first-century tool of state-sponsored terror—it is quintessentially that from which we must be saved. The image of Jesus on that cross is the image of God in solidarity with us, all of us, on a path toward new life.

I stumbled upon yet one more way to say the same thing in a compelling blog post by Jon Paul Sydnor: crucifixion was a crime, and we must stop seeing this act of performative cruelty as salvific. For Sydnor, “The crucifixion is the wound; the resurrection is the balm.”

Those insights have a long way still to go before they sink fully into my bones and muscles. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian tradition that told me (in both overt and subtle ways) that I’m tainted, depraved, and mostly if not wholly bad—being a burgeoning gay boy didn’t help. The cross of Christ was our only hope at appeasing the wrath of the God who made us. (Don’t try to make sense of that sentence; it doesn’t make any sense at all.)

The struggle to embrace the “way of the cross” as none other than the “way of life and peace” (as the Book of Common Prayer would have us do in the Collect for Monday in Holy Week) is not particularly helped by the Sunday lectionary, which will give us a set of texts this week that can feel like a relapse into a religious addiction: the putative “fall” of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:1-7) and St. Paul’s apparent framing of that story as the origins of “original sin” (Romans 5:12-19).

For these reasons and more, I’m so grateful for the “Crossroads of Healing” initiative here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, our shared effort to host gatherings and events at the intersection of the arts and spirituality. This initiative emerged from our commitment to name and address the wounds of race, gender, class, and sexuality in an ecological frame, and especially for the sake of healing toward thriving.

I’m particularly grateful for this initiative as we begin Lent and reflect on the multi-layered imagery of the Cross. Or, as we might note, Christian communities have especially appreciated the image of a cross at intersectional moments. Rather than just one meaning, the cross of Christ carries many modes of interpretation, including the reassuring hope of divine healing for the wounds of separation, isolation, and the violence of oppression.

This initiative has heightened my own awareness of how Christian faith and culture create various intersections as race and gender (especially in this patriarchal society of white supremacy, which describes the United States from its very founding) intertwine with the Cross, and all for the sake of interlaced liturgical rites and spiritual practices.

But really, what does all of that mean for the first Sunday in Lent and those trigger texts from the lectionary?

We spend nearly as much time on visual art in my parish as we do with Scripture and the Prayer Book. All three have been woven together in ways that prove remarkably insightful and life-giving. Preparing for this year’s Lenten journey, for example, I spent some time with the work of Nigerian artist Olamilekan Abatan; his mixed media piece “Adam and Eve” will certainly accompany me this year on the forty-day journey through Lent.

The complexity of Abatan’s painting echoes and magnifies the complexity of the story itself—for some, this painting could introduce complexity into a biblical story that is usually treated in rather simple (and therefore misleading) ways. The first and most obvious thing to notice, and in rather stark contrast to many visual depictions of Adam and Eve in Western art, these figures are Black, and clothed in ways that might suggest they are African. This makes contextual sense given that Abatan is himself Nigerian, but it also makes scientific sense given that our human species originated on the continent of Africa.

There are other layers to notice here. Adam and Eve are poised on the brink of eating the forbidden fruit. Look closely and you will see something unusual in Eve’s lap—a laptop computer made by Apple. It’s a wonderful double entendre evoking the longstanding cultural assumption that the “forbidden fruit” was an apple even though the kind of fruit is not mentioned in the biblical story.

Still more: might Abatan be inviting us to wonder whether modern technology is a kind of “forbidden fruit”? The biblical storyteller refers to that fruit as coming from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in that sense, do today’s technology devices give us too much access to knowledge? Or perhaps deceitful knowledge is the problem. Or maybe the technology itself—just like the fruit in the original story—is the problem because it creates a distraction from relationship as it pulls apart the intimate couple in this story. This echoes an important way to frame that third chapter in Genesis—as a rupture in intimacy, the breaking of relationship, and the dissolving of trust.

More than only these insights into that ancient story, the artist himself and his approach to the work provide intersectional touchstones—crossroads of healing, as it were—for just such a time as this. Abatan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997 and has emerged as a leading figure in what some have called the “hyperrealist” scene in contemporary African art; he blends Western sensibilities with elements of African visual culture, and he also mixes media (wax fabrics, charcoal and pencil, and acrylic paints, for example).

In addition, Abatan frequently places African figures in classical European poses, using the painting techniques of historical masters like Caravaggio, which tend to evoke Western art but with the “African human” moved to the center of the frame rather than the margins or unseen entirely. He sometimes replicates the style of a religious icon, as in the piece he calls “Black Lives Matter.” The pose, the gesture, and the clothes, not to mention the halo, all suggest an icon of Christ; the use of an African figure as well as the title of the piece can make that assessment a bit disorienting, but the Latin words on the open book held by this African man would seem to confirm the guess: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” One’s own cultural context and history make all the difference in how one reads this image—and what it evokes. Is a Black/African Jesus, for example, the “way to life” in a society trapped in the dynamics of white Christian nationalism?

Even this brief synopsis of Abatan’s life and work makes me wonder about my own reading of history, and the kind of engagement with Scripture I tend to favor, and the way I retrieve theological traditions for pastoral and priestly work: what have I consigned to the margins that might rightly belong at the center? Whom have I overlooked entirely in the texts or visual images of my theological education? More pointedly, how much of my Christian faith relies on having omitted key figures or moments or places (whether intentionally or accidentally)?

Questions like these are not about finding fault or assigning blame for anything; to the contrary, they seem more like assembling the pieces of a treasure map—what kind of riches have we never known in our own traditions because of the restricted views we have lived with for so long?

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

That question alone always makes me glad to observe Black History Month (and all the entanglements and intersectional complexities that go with it); every year I learn something new to intertwine with my own perspectives, not only about Black history but also about my own story; and I appreciate something in fresh ways not only about other traditions, but also how communities of faith can interlace these multiple traditions for a truly rich and “mixed media” witness to a better world—surely these are the “crossroads of healing” toward which we might actually be glad to journey in this Lenten season.

Repairing the Breach and Bridging the Gap

Ash Wednesday is one of those religious days that can prompt even non-religious people to think about religion—probably not for very long (especially when it falls on Valentine’s Day), but at least long enough to notice people with smudgy foreheads attending midweek church services.

More than this, Ash Wednesday also carries with it some language that sounds extremely and uncomfortably religious with words like “sin” and “repentance.” The liturgy in The Book of Common Prayer even uses some old-fashioned words like “wickedness” and “wretchedness.”

More than a few people find the language and the ritual of a day like Ash Wednesday at least off-putting if not distasteful. This is likely another reason for the profound disconnect in Western society today between the religious language of churches and the hopes and dreams of the wider world.

So there’s some urgency on these explicitly religious days, perhaps especially for whole seasons, like Lent, to pay close attention to the rift so many live with between “inner” and “outer,” or to the lively connections between our interior spiritual lives and our outward actions. This is the vital connection so often missing and lost between our religious communities and the wider world that is so desperate for the insight and transformation that can come with religious practice.

This is not just a profound gap, but also a tragic one. I remain convinced that the world’s religious traditions are needed today more than ever for the crises and challenges we currently face. More than this, for the compelling visions our religious traditions offer of what flourishing life can look like on this precious Earth.

There’s nothing new or modern about this challenge, by the way. Many Christians who ventured into church yesterday heard from the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah, who was excoriating his community precisely for this failure to connect “inner” and “outer”: look how you engage in your religious fasting, he says, and yet oppress all your workers; you fast, yes, but then only quarrel and fight with each other!

You think groveling in ashes will suffice to get God’s attention, Isaiah says, yet this is the fast God prefers: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free, to feed the hungry, and house the homeless, and clothe the naked (Isaiah 58:1-12).

The temptation of course is to suppose that we can choose either the inner or the outer dimension of our lives, or that one is somehow better than the other. Whatever “breach” Isaiah imagined covenant faithfulness would repair (58:12), surely the common gap between our religious practice and social action qualifies as part of it. Black History Month might actually present some reminders about why such repair really does matter.

“Becoming Beloved Community,” Michell Halley

In a world of racial bias, some argue for a color-blind society, as it’s sometimes called, a society where we pay attention to the inner workings of the heart rather than the outer appearance of the body. Some will quote Martin Luther King, Jr., on this who famously noted in his 1963 March on Washington speech that he longed for the day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Yes, and that great day will not arrive by pretending to ignore skin color, as if that’s even possible. To the contrary, we create Beloved Community—as King himself often noted—not in spite of our many racial, or sexual, or gendered differences but because of them. Diversity is not, after all, a problem to be managed but a divine gift to be embraced, a gift God’s own creativity without which our lives would be greatly impoverished.

To do that challenging work of inclusion outwardly demands that we do significant work inwardly—and that’s exactly the purpose of religious practices and spiritual disciplines.

Even so, I freely admit how much I still struggle with the concept of repentance: it’s hard for me to hear the word “repent” and not think of a scolding parent or a biting rebuke or an encounter framed with anger. (Images from childhood, especially “religious” ones, are never just shrugged off casually.)

But here’s what I try to remember nearly every single day, especially during Lent: the image of a scolding parent has nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ or the good news of the Christian Gospel.

The God who is the very Source of life, the God whose Word brings forth the astonishing diversity of creation and the abundance of Earth, that Word becoming flesh and dwelling in loving companionship among us—this is not the God who comes to us in anger but with kindness and compassion, the God who wants above all to see every creature thrive and flourish—every single one, no exceptions.

Of course the stubborn fact remains that our lives do not always align with that gracious will of Creator God. And so we pause on occasion, as many Christians do on days like Ash Wednesday, so that we can notice that misalignment and to change course and to ask God to help us travel the good road toward abundant life—and that’s a much better meaning for repentance itself.

There’s just one other bit to notice carefully: we do all this remembering that we are in fact mortal, that we will one day die, and actually much sooner than any of us expect (or would prefer).

I suspect that’s why Ash Wednesday liturgies often include the portion many heard yesterday from Matthew’s account of the Gospel (6:1-6, 16-20). There Jesus urges us not to store up for ourselves “treasures on earth”—we just don’t have time for that. Besides, moth and rust will not only consume those treasures but that thief called “Death” will steal them away soon enough.

“Heavenly treasures” are the ones that make a true and lasting difference here on Earth—the ones Isaiah insisted would break the bonds of injustice and let the oppressed go free.

Those are the treasures truly worthy of our time.

“My Name Means Freedom”

Human experience rarely remains neatly contained in tidy boxes. Our emotions blur and bleed into each other, sometimes defying our ability to define them with any precision. I am often struck, for example, by the poignancy of beauty, as well as the luminous edges of pain. While tempted to separate and distinguish such things, I try to pay careful attention when beauty and pain seem inextricably bound together.

Emotional complexity punctuated nearly every moment on my recent trip to southern Africa, where I visited five countries over two weeks as I hoped to gain some fresh insights into the work of racial justice and ecological healing, especially how to integrate these modes of engagement more effectively. I could not have asked for a better encounter to begin that adventure than the one that capped the very first day.

After visiting the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, I was relaxing with a glass of wine at the hotel bar. The bartender was young, maybe in his late twenties, and his skin was a deep, beautiful black color, like midnight—actually, more like the deepest, darkest blue of Lake Michigan on a moonless night.

His name, he said, is Nkululeku, a Zulu word that means “freedom.” When he told me that—when he said “My name means freedom”—his face lit up, nearly shining, truly transfigured.

Perhaps you’ve seen this happen to a human face when someone speaks a clear and riveting truth, or because of the tender contours of the occasion, or perhaps the depth and richness of character in the encounter itself; a face can shine.

There I stood, a white man of European descent, whose ancestors had stolen so much of the freedom of that Black man’s ancestors, and not so terribly long ago.

My name means freedom, he said.

Just then, not only his face but the space between us and the air around us became radiant with what I can only call “divine glory.” I can’t possibly know whether any of this occurred to him, but I want to trust that for both of us that moment offered at least a glimpse, just a little taste of what it means to launch along a road toward healing and reconciliation after a long, traumatic history of injustice and violence.

“My name means freedom,” he said. And I nearly burst into tears.

Yesterday was the last Sunday after the Epiphany, which sits on the edge of Lent, and most churches always hear from one of the Gospel accounts of what’s called the “transfiguration” of Jesus. This is a pivot point in the gospel narratives, literally a “mountaintop experience” when Jesus radiates divine glory—the “appearance of his face changed,” Luke says (9:29), his face “shone like the sun,” Matthew says (17:2), and as many of us heard from Mark yesterday, his garments became radiant (9:3).

“The Transfiguration,” Augustin Kolawole Olayinka

This story is a pivot point for each of these gospel writers as each of them frames this moment with what Jesus will soon face in Jerusalem—betrayal, suffering, and death. Beauty and pain are bound together in this story, just as they are in the iconic story from the Hebrew Bible the lectionary also gave us yesterday—grief and glory intermingle as the prophet Elijah is caught up in a heavenly chariot of fire leaving behind his dear friend and protégé Elisha.

It’s a pivot point on the liturgical calendar as well. The story of transfiguration ushers us into the week with Ash Wednesday in it, and we recall this mountaintop glory at the beginning of the very same week when ashes will appear on our foreheads, reminding us that we will one day die.

Both biblically and liturgically the last Sunday after the Epiphany presents a peculiar confluence of beauty and pain—which is itself an epiphany. The intermingling of glory and suffering resides at the very heart of Christian faith, and the Gospel writers won’t let us avoid it, at least not for long. I don’t mean that we just happen to hear about the beauty of transfiguration and the pain of crucifixion on the same day, as if this were an accidental coincidence. More pointedly and more severely, the Christian Gospel presents these as inseparably linked.

Like many others, I have struggled for many years with the prominence of sacrifice and suffering in Christian faith, perhaps especially when these are framed with glory. And yet, for at least one, brief shining moment of encounter with Nkululeku—a young South African Black man whose name means freedom—I suddenly and rather surprisingly realized how deeply I longed for racial healing and then still more, how much I would gladly sacrifice for the sake of justice.

If this can be true for us, if mortal, finite human beings can long for new life, and be willing to give much, maybe even all, for the sake of abundant life, then surely this is true for the infinite mystery of Love we call God—the God of Jesus who would give anything and everything for healing and wholeness and flourishing life, and this is indeed glorious to ponder!

Poised as we now are on the brink of Lent once again, I feel some urgency to consider carefully how to spend my time, my energy, and my resources in this season. The world is desperate for more than just my usual half-hearted attempts to give up chocolate. To be clear, spiritual disciplines of relinquishment do offer great value, but not for the sake of sacrifice alone, as if sacrifice itself were a good thing. Surely spiritual disciplines matter most when they guide us toward that abundant life God intends for the whole creation.

Nkululeku inspired me to imagine what a Lenten season might look like if it were devoted to freedom—our own and for others. This would retrieve a compelling practice from the earliest Christian traditions that used “freedom” and “salvation” interchangeably, and it seems high time to resurrect that powerful practice (pun intended).

How, for example, can we more intentionally promote freedom from the economic hierarchies that turn living beings into commodities, whether as human slaves or poached ivory from elephants?

Where we do we still need freedom from colonial classification schemes that make the color of our skin, or whom we choose to love, or the species into which we just happen to be born the basis of our value?

What can we do to facilitate a deeper freedom from the dynamics of cultural shame that keep so many trapped in unseen prisons of loneliness and a relentless, quiet despair?

Ash Wednesday will remind us that we are made from dust and that we shall return to dust, so perhaps we can help each other likewise remember the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death.

That fear—and all the anxiety that attaches to our own mortality—that fear expresses itself in so many destructive ways, both individually and socially, from an epidemic of opioid addiction to the relentless burning of fossil fuels.

As God’s own beloved, we are held and embraced by God forever. This matters more than I usually imagine or can bear to conceive. I don’t know why just yet, but this conviction of God’s embrace deepened dramatically as I stood on a southern African savannah with elephants and buffalo and zebras and giraffes. As tears streamed down my face as I watched the sun set behind rolling hills and African teak trees, I knew—I just knew with unshakable certainty—that we never have to fear death again, not ever.

Freedom from death’s terror gives us the freedom to live fully, and then to offer even our very lives for the sake of a world of peace with justice.

Every year the story of transfiguration launches us toward Lent. In this story, the Jesus who is about to suffer and die is also the Jesus who shines with divine glory. A voice comes from Heaven in this story and calls this Jesus “the Beloved.”

I understood this story better when a young South African man said to me, “My name means freedom.”

A Lenten Discipline: Don’t Waste Your Time

Imposing ashes on the foreheads of a community slowly emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t seem redundant, exactly, but it certainly felt poignant. Preparing for that moment, I recalled two classic touchstones in Christian faith that seemed suddenly more vibrant and fresh than they had for years.

First, we are sinners. I know that sounds terribly old-fashioned, but it’s also true. We fail regularly to live the kind of abundant life Creator God intends; we too often prevent others from flourishing because of the way we live.

We do not always act justly, we have trouble loving mercy, we forget to walk humbly with God, to quote the prophet Micah’s summary of what God asks of us (Micah 6:8).

A second great theme on Ash Wednesday is of course our mortality. We are finite creatures and we will one day die—each of us, no exceptions, all of us returning to the earth from which we came.

Connecting these two themes seems especially urgent given the state of, well, everything. We could begin with this: as mortal creatures, time is of the essence. We simply don’t have time for small visions, or petty resentments, or the refusals of shared flourishing born from bitterness. In the shortness of time, sin is whatever keeps us from thriving; or more simply, we just don’t have time for bullshit anymore, and likely never did.

The time is now—not next year, not next month, not even tomorrow, but right now is the time to remember or perhaps realize for the very first time that God takes great delight in every single thing God has made.

There is absolutely nothing about God’s creation, not one creature of any kind, not one human being, that God does not love madly and wildly. The opening collect for the Ash Wednesday liturgy makes this clear and it’s one of my favorites in The Book of Common Prayer: “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made…”

For some people, that claim is life-changing; for far too many, it’s life-saving; and for all of us, it’s mission-critical because time is short.

Lent is a time to clear out the toxic clutter, to remove whatever prevents me from seeing myself as a cherished creature of God.

Lent is a time to stop whatever I might be doing that prevents others from seeing themselves as cherished creatures of God.

Lent is a time to understand more deeply that our way of life as modern Western people is damaging and destroying this cherished creation of God called Earth—and time is short.

In my little parish yesterday we heard Matthew’s Jesus (6:1-6, 16-21) being just as plain about this as he could be: don’t waste your time on empty religious gestures; don’t bother being pious for piety’s sake—it’s worthless and pointless.

Pray instead for a change of heart.

Pray instead for a change of life.

Pray instead—as we heard the prophet Isaiah urge (58:1-12)—pray instead in ways that loosen the bonds of injustice and that let the oppressed go free and that provide bread for the hungry and housing for the poor—that’s true religion.

Pray instead, Isaiah says, so that you yourself become light in another’s darkness, water for another’s desert, a builder of dwellings laid waste and repairers of the breach for many generations—that’s the only religion that really matters.

Yes, we are sinners and time is short. But we can make good from the time we have if we repent of our sins and embrace the Gospel, which is nothing less than the abundant life God intends for all.

Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Tabling the Ashes, and Other Religious Choreographies for an Insightful Pandemic

Are you pausing to learn or just trying to get through as fast you can? How much of what we used to call “normal” is worth trying to retrieve? What’s one big “take-away” insight from living in the midst of this pandemic that you might not have had otherwise?

Could we agree that we all just need to take a huge nap before trying to build a new world together and that it might be useful if we all took that nap at the same time?

I think I’m inching closer to a big take-away insight from all this, and I’ll share it below, but I’m intrigued by the intermediate steps to get there, the coping and fussing and experimenting and adjusting and canceling and scheduling and revising—all the time! (Did I mention a nap would be nice?)

I’m also intrigued, having returned to fulltime parish ministry, to find my capacity for innovation strengthened by turning frequently to my grounding in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Episcopal Church. This is not unlike the old aphorism about jazz piano—learn your scales first. I used to say something similar in the seminary classes I taught on systematic theology—know first how to operate the interlocking gears and gadgets of doctrinal claims before trying to spin off those whirling bits of novel God-talk.

As many clergy have been discovering (while others are actively denying it), there are some things we can no longer do that we once thought we simply must do for effective liturgy, or more severely, for a “valid” sacrament. I continue to be grateful for my formation in what many consider the “rigidities” of liturgical tradition precisely because they shaped my sense of why we do what we do—and therefore how to omit those things responsibly by either replacing them with something else or inviting people to pray through the gap.

I still have a lot of thinking and pondering to do on the implications of liturgical leadership during a pandemic, but I feel the strong need to write these things down, even when they’re not completely formed. I worry that our (understandable) eagerness to “get through” this pandemic will mean rushing past the many lessons to learn and even “gifts” (if we dare use that word just now) of this peculiar time unless we take the time, right now, to record some of it.

As we lurch into Lent (remember a year ago when we were looking forward to being back in church on Easter—I mean, last Easter?) I’m thinking especially about two broad, gestating insights that could inform how I “do liturgy” even when we begin to gather again in person.

First, don’t pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t.

And second, creed and confession are more entangled than I realized; I’m not sure yet what that means, except it has something to do with healing.

So here a few observations about both of these, and then a note or two about that bigger “take-away.” And I would love to hear from others, lay or ordained, about your experiences of church over this last year, either in conversation with these insights or others.

Everything is Not Okay and That’s Okay for Now
When I first arrived to Saugatuck, Michigan after driving across the country from Berkeley, California last summer, I kept wanting to create video productions for worship in my new parish that mimicked as closely as possible “real” church. After a few weeks of that labor-intensive effort, I began to wonder what in the world was “real” about church to begin with. I also started to realize that I was trying to pretend everything was still “normal,” except for being online.

Everything is not, of course, normal; hardly anything is, actually, and I stumbled into a space of liberation and relief by acknowledging that to myself and then saying it out loud to the other clergy and lay leaders in the parish. That freed up my energy to start noticing, prayerfully, just how not-normal things are and what this means for we pray and worship.

This past Ash Wednesday is a case in point. I considered, briefly, some of the clever and ingenious ways I was reading about from other clergy for how safely to impose ashes on foreheads, including sprinkling them on tops of heads instead. But I noticed again the hankering in my pondering for pretending that everything is normal when it isn’t. I also couldn’t imagine how anyone needed a reminder of their own mortality right now.

I decided to keep the ashes as part of the live-streamed liturgy that evening, but only in a crystal bowl that sat on the altar. They will sit there for the whole season of Lent, not as a reminder of our mortality but as a reminder of the promise God always makes at that Table: to bring new life out of death. We will then sprinkle those ashes around the parish memorial garden on Easter morning.

During the Ash Wednesday liturgy, I blessed the ashes in their little altar-bowl with these words, borrowed and adapted from the Scottish Episcopal Church:

Living God of renewal and hope,
in their life palms draw sustenance from the Earth
and give of their own vitality to the air we breathe,
and to the animals they host and shelter;
in the worship of this community,
they help us mark with joyful anticipation
the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before his death:
Grant, O God, that these palms now reduced to ashes
may remind us of the mortality we share
with your whole creation,
and may also stand as a sign of your love,
which is stronger than death.
May we recognize that love at work in us even now,
replanting our lives in the sure and humble soil
of your grace and generosity.
We pray all this in the name of Jesus
in whom you have become one with us in our mortal flesh,
and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen.

Presiding this morning at our Eucharistic liturgy for the first Sunday in Lent, I was quite moved to see the little bowl of ashes on the Table as I prayed that we might all “prepare with joy for the paschal feast.”

Creedal Confessions for Healing
For reasons I cannot yet fully articulate, this pandemic has heightened my awareness of the intimate relationship between what I believe and my failure to live fully the consequences of those beliefs. This has caused me to reflect in new ways on what I learned many years ago in seminary: not only sins or faults but also beliefs are items we confess, and both types of confession might actually play a significant role in our healing, both individually and corporately. (That’s a dense sentence because I’m not sure yet what I really mean to say.)

Reflecting in this way prompted me to wonder whether connecting belief and failure more closely in our liturgical language might assist us in deepening our shared sense of trust in God’s presence among us, as the Creator, the incarnate Word, and animating Spirit. “Trust,” after all, is probably the best synonym for faith.

I’ve been working on such a “creedal confession” for some time, and I’m considering using the following draft for our midweek service of Evening Prayer:

I place my trust in the creative power of God,
   maker of all things, known and unknown,
   source and sustainer of life;
       and I confess my failure to respect the dignity
       of every creature God has made.
I place my trust in the Word of God incarnate,
   who gathers us as a mother cradles her children,
   as a father who binds up wounds,
   as a lover who mends broken hearts;
       and I confess my share in the patterns of violence
       that fragment, divide, and harm.
I place my trust in the Divine Spirit,
   who animates the whole creation
       with the breath of life,
   drawing together all creatures
       with the assurance of forgiveness,
     the promise of healing,
       and the hope of communion.
Receive my trust, O God of endless compassion,
and strengthen me for your service. Amen.

Those two insights will continue to evolve, no doubt, and they can stand on their own as “keepers.” But we also just concluded a weeknight adult education class here at the parish (via Zoom, of course) on Matthew Fox’s new book, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—and Beyond. I knew that Julian had lived during of bubonic plague in Medieval Europe; I had not realized that her entire life was spent encountering wave after wave of that disease.

And yes, I knew that Julian had a remarkably unswerving confidence in both the love of God and the goodness of creation in the midst of unspeakable bodily horrors. All shall be well—she didn’t merely hope this, she insisted it was true. Jesus told her so.

More than all of that, Julian-via-Fox has done something to my thinking right now that feels, if not “new,” then fresh. It’s this: the imperative to notice and address the links between and among climate change, this current pandemic, racism, sexism, misogyny, matricide, and patriarchy, all in a single “mystic-prophetic” posture.

I do believe the world’s religious traditions were made for just such a time as this—for just such a time, that is, for rooting ourselves sufficiently in those traditions to innovate.

Now, about that nap…

Beloved Dust, Take Heart

Almighty God, you created us out of the dust of the earth…

human_body_dust_1

you hate nothing you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent…

human_body_ludovic_florent_1

create and make in us new and contrite hearts…

human_body_olivier_valsecchi_3

…that we, too, may thoroughly love all that you have made.

human_body_reiko_murakami_2014

***Image 2 was created by Ludovic Florent for his 2014 exhibit, Pousièrres d’étoiles (“stardust“).

***Image 3 is part of Oliver Valsecchi‘s 2009 series “Dust,” that explores the figure of the phoenix rising from the ashes — and in this case, actual ashes from his fireplace.

***Image 4, Reiko Murakami, 2014.

Text taken from or inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, 1979

Ending the War on Women: Lent and Liberation

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6)

We are currently in the midst of a cultural and political war on women and women’s bodies. Perhaps you’ve noticed. If you had any doubts, the recent and truly creepy image of an all-male panel testifying before Congress about contraceptives should convince you. (Just imagine an all-female panel testifying about the virtues of vasectomies.)

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. If Lent can be retrieved as a practice for liberating humanity from the chains of oppression, then ending this war on women must take priority. This will involve attending carefully to the propaganda machine (both secular and religious), mobilizing people to vote when appropriate, repenting where necessary, and recommitting ourselves to the hard work of creating a different world, a world where all can thrive and flourish (if that’s not a suitable goal for a Lenten discipline, I don’t know what is).

I’ll begin with three observations:

First, the current war on women is not new; it is of course many, many centuries old. (I was reminded of this recently by reading a great analysis of the ancient Greek three-cycle play, The Oresteia, and it’s recurrent theme of the fear of powerful women.)

While none of this stuff is new, the current iteration of this power struggle is particularly virulent and insidious in the United States. By “current,” I mean the cultural trajectory that began taking shape more explicitly in the 1970s after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision – a decision that acknowledged what should have been the case long ago, that women have rights over their own bodies. (Yes, abortion is complicated, but my friend and colleague, Susan Russell, recently wrote eloquently on this very topic.)

Second, I believe the current virulence in the war on women is fueled by having an African-American man in the White House. African-American men in American history have quite frequently been the subject of emasculating rhetoric if not also castrating violence; they still are today. Make no mistake about this: white men in power keep their power by subjugating women and treating non-white men like women. If we fail to link sexism and racism we do so at our own, very grave peril.

And third, I am a white man. That means a lot of different things, not least that I enjoy a remarkable amount of privilege in western society. That doesn’t make me bad or evil. It does make me accountable and it should make me responsible. I have, alas, too frequently failed to live up to the responsibility of that privilege for the sake of women’s thriving.

In a recent professional gathering, I was witness to a blatant form of sexism – in both rhetoric and posture – yet I said and did nothing. I hereby repent, and I resolve to do better. As just part of that commitment and for my Lenten discipline this year, I’ll devote regular blog posts to analyzing theologically and culturally the pernicious peril our world faces from the twin threats of sexism and racism.

Notice that I didn’t mention homophobia. I believe the disdain and opposition toward LGBT people is but a symptom of a much deeper and more intractable poison in western culture: the confluence of misogyny and white supremacy. Upon that “wedding” rests most if not all of the truly hideous moments in western society. (Pictured here is Sojourner Truth, from the 19th century. A perfect icon for the incarnation of race and gender.)

One further observation needs to be made here: Religion (including Christianity) has contributed significantly to the subjugation of women and women’s bodies, both historically and today. In that regard, my obligation and responsibility deepen as I am not only a white man, but also a Christian and a priest in the Episcopal Church.

I believe the peculiar character of Christianity, for all its severe faults and foibles, can still help us achieve a better world where all can thrive and flourish. I have some ideas about how to do that but I need help. As I post my own suggestions this Lent, I hope you will add your own. Let’s create a great toolbox for planetary thriving!

At the very least, let us commit ourselves to ensuring that no one ever again has to see a panel of all men making decisions about women’s bodies. That would be a small but nonetheless significant step on the Lenten road toward new life.