UNLOOKED FOR

God, I am panic stricken today with all I have to do. I am overwhelmed and completely unable to focus on writing this letter. There are distractions in this building today that pop up every two minutes and there is just not enough time today to get this done. Maureen is practically hovering outside my door, waiting for my long overdo letter so that she can put the newsletter to bed. And in times like this, with the pressure on and a deadline to meet and all the other thing I have to do today, I can’t find the inspiration, and I am just not in the mood.

But, of course, I am not alone. So many of our lives are filled with a million things to do. At least that is how it often feels, especially as the Christmas season approaches. A million things. There is the job, of course, and there are presents to buy and decorating to do and meals to cook and the cleaning and the laundry and the tree and the leaves to rake and the dwindling bank account and the problem with the furnace and the dripping faucet and the leak in the basement and the kids and the aging parents and the winter coming too fast and on and on and on goes the list. All of our lists are different but they are also the same in that they are long and they make this season hectic and harried. And what happens when we feel busy and distracted and stressed with a million things to do? Eventually we tend to see nothing else. Life becomes jobs to do and things to cope with and whatever we see turns into a thing. The sparrow lying in the dust in the driveway—just a thing to be kicked out of the way, not the mystery of death. The yelling of children outside your window—just a distraction, an irrelevance, not life, not the most wonderful miracle of them all. A call from a half-forgotten seldom heard from friend—just something that takes up too much time, not an unlooked for gift. That whispering in the air that comes sudden and soft from nowhere—just the wind, just the wind, and not the voice of angels.

The million things that we have to do can overwhelm the spirit inside of us. They can make this magical season into a dreadful drudgery. But this is the kind of life, the kind of world, the kind of reality that the miracle always comes into. The birth of God’s grace always comes when we’re not looking for it, when we’re tending to other things, when we’ve left no room in our heads or our hearts. That is why this season is a miracle indeed.

God’s infant is born where no one expects it, where there is no room to be had, where the weather is all wrong, where no one is in the right mood, where life is hectic and harried and distracted and shallow, where no one is looking or listening or ready at all. That always seems to be the way it happens.

So as this holiday season comes, too soon, with too many demands, with too much left for us to do—trust it. Trust the miracle. Trust the grace of God. Trust it to find a way—a way to surprise you, to take you unawares, to bring you up short, to invade the business of your days and nights with wonder and warmth and grace unlooked for. It will happen.

God comes. The birth happens. Love is incarnate anew among us. The glow, the warmth, the beauty, will find us and touch us and transform our stressed-out routines with light and life and love. You will hear them sometime during this season of hope—the angel voices, high and wild in the night or deep and soft in the soul. You’ll hear them, for this is the season of the miracle of God and that miracle will come. Expect it.

Gathered Fragments

The reading that I wrote for Thanksgiving Eve follows:

GATHERED FRAGMENTS

A REFLECTIVE READING OF JOHN 6:1-14

Reader: (John 6:1-5)

After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. And a multitude followed him because they saw the signs which he did on those who were diseased. Jesus went up into the hills and there sat down with his disciples. Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews was at hand. Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a multitude was coming to him, Jesus said to Philip, “How are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?”

Response: Jesus takes his disciples to the middle of nowhere, outside of Galilee, to a foreign place, and then, uninvited, unasked for, unbidden, the multitudes come. The miscellaneous crowd of outcasts and misfits comes. It is the Passover holiday, a day for feasting and thanksgiving, a day for family and friends, a day for synagogue or temple. But this crowd is trekking into some foreign field leaving behind family and friends, home and hearth, traditions and observances. They must be a desperate lot indeed to be following some street-corner holy man into this distant empty place on the biggest feast day of the year. What longing must be in their hearts? What emptiness of spirit must drive them? What passionate dreams must they be following? But the multitude comes.

And Jesus does not want to disappoint them. They come for spiritual sustenance but he also worries about what they are to eat. He feels responsible. He even thinks that maybe his little group of impoverished disciples should be buying some food. It’s a feast day and Jesus thinks the people should feast. Like the host of any holiday gathering, Jesus frets over the menu and wonders if the guests will have a good time and will there be enough and where will they all sit. He is the host and he means to give them a Passover to remember. They have needs and he has compassion.

Reader: (John 6:6-10)

This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place; so the men sat down, in number about five thousand.

Response: And so they discuss the problem. They consider their options. They don’t have enough money and the food available to them is as nothing in the face of the need. Like so many times in all our lives their resources are not up to the task at hand. How do five thousand people have a feast with just a scattering of loaves and fish? The resources in life never seem to be enough. How do I pay my bills, or send the kids to college, or pay off this mortgage, on what little I earn? How do I get through a night of grief when my strength is all used up? How do I confront the bully when I am so small? How do I get everything done when there is so little time? And for our whole communities; how do we change the world when we are so few? How do we fight for justice or advocate for the poor or stand up to bigotry when we just don’t have the strength, the numbers, the clout, the power? The resources never seem to be enough. The need is great, the hunger is deep and the food is scarce and the feast seems impossible. Such is life.

But Jesus just tells the people to sit down. There are no chairs. There is no table. There is almost no food. They have none of the things necessary for feasting. And yet, Jesus proclaims the feast. The host says sit down. Use the grass. Use the rocks. Use whatever you’ve got. But sit down, for the feast time is here.

Reader: (John 6:11)

Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.

Response: And then he gives thanks. They have almost nothing, but he gives thanks for what they have. They are a group of nobodies gathering in the middle of nowhere, but he gives thanks for who they are. He is a man on the hard road to Calvary and death, but he gives thanks for the journey. Their world is full of cruelty, hypocrisy and hatred, but he gives thanks for it all. This kind of gratitude doesn’t grow out of their abundance or their good fortune or their easy life or their good health or their great prospects; they have none of those. This gratitude grows out of their faith and their hope.

God’s promise is abundant life and they believe the promise and so life seems abundant. God’s promise is for a future of grace and so they find that grace breaking forth in their lives in out-of-the-way places. God’s promise is for a messiah and so here, now, on some desolate hillside, sitting in the grass, they have discovered a messiah. Jesus gives thanks because abundance is in the heart not on the plate, because God’s gifts are in the spirit not in the bank account. He gives thanks because when he looks into the eyes of that multitude at his feet, he sees faith and hopes and powerful dreams and deep longings and an overflowing expectation for the miracle of God’s grace ready to break forth in his impromptu feast on the grass.

Reader: (John 6:12)

And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.”

Response: He says, gather up the fragments. And we are the fragments. Every one of our lives is broken into pieces. We are stressed and stretched by the scattering of our attention into the thousand little and large things that we have to attend to. Our lives are so often hectic and harried, broken into the pieces of family and job and church and a dozen other commitments. And our communities are fragmented by the polarization of our positions and our politics. And we sit in our houses, often with members of our families in separate rooms, in front of computers or television screens or whatever we use to entertain ourselves in our separateness. And our world is broken into the pieces of nations and races and political parties and warring tribes. Yes, we are the fragments.

But isn’t this what Jesus’ life was really all about—gathering up the fragments? He collects the people who are the fragments broken off by our hard-hearted society. He gathers the fragments of our broken lives when we are unable to put them together again. He gathers the fragments of our hearts when they are broken by the losses of those we love. He collects the fragments of our hopes when they are scattered by the trials of life. The baskets of his love can contain all of the fragments of our mistakes and our disappointments and our sins and our shames. He gathers up all the fragments that nothing may be lost.

Reader: (John 6:13-14)

So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the twelve barley loaves, left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!”

Response: As they all ate their fill from the five little loaves did nobody notice the miracle? As the two little fish passed from hand to hand with each of the five thousand breaking off a piece did no one notice the absurdity or the wonder of it? No, it seems that it was only at the end when the massive baskets of broken pieces were gathered up that they saw what had happened. But isn’t that always the way. The gifts of God so often go unnoticed or unacknowledged or unseen until we gather up the wholeness of our lives. When we think only of the pieces, we see so clearly what we lack, we see and worry over the lack of resources; we note and tally every little piece of bad fortune, every little incident when we were ill-used or ill-treated, every single time that things did not turn out the way we wanted them to or thought they should. But the countless gifts, small and large so often escape our notice until we add up all of those fragments; until we look back at how we grew or grew deeper even in the hard times; until we see the whole arc of the story and how it was shaped by the gifts of a thousand lives and loves that touched us; until we reflect back on the richness of the whole tapestry of our days and the beauties that blessed them. When we gather up all of the pieces of our living, we each have twelve baskets full of blessings to give thanks for and to praise God for and to rejoice over. Twelve baskets of blessings, gather them up and you too will notice the miracle.

Now, the miracle may have been something that defied the laws of nature. Maybe the loaves just kept growing larger in some magical way as the pieces were broken off. But perhaps it is more profound if we see here a better and simpler miracle. No doubt some, if not all, of those poor people leaving their homes on a holiday weekend and heading out into the wilderness, thought of the issue of food for the journey. They were all hungry for Jesus’ gifts of the spirit, but they no doubt remembered to provide for their more ordinary hunger in their own ways. So when the loaves and fishes came around to them, most people, rather than taking what was offered, added the gift of some of what they had brought. People shared. They gave twelve baskets more than what they took.

It was still a miracle. But it was a miracle of sharing; a miracle of love that happened that holy day. They all feasted on the gifts of each other. They feasted on the generosity of strangers and the largess of friends and the giving of people who had little to give. They found abundance together as a gathered community because each opened their larders as they opened their hearts. They gave their hard-earned food to each other as they also gave their hard-earned trust and faith and hope to this gracious miracle worker who hosted such a glorious feast. It was the greatest miracle of all—he touched their hearts and moved them with the power of love. They had abundance because they shared. And that made a thanksgiving feast indeed.

Reader: And they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

Response: Thanks be to God.

9-11

I marked the anniversary of 9-11 last week by making a contribution to the Cordoba Initiative. In case you don’t know what that is because of the very sloppy media coverage of the last month, the Cordoba Initiative is what has been called the “Mosque at ground zero.” Of course it is not really a mosque (it is a community center with a planned prayer room for Muslims as well as ones for Christians and Jews) and it isn’t at ground zero (it is in a very mixed neighborhood a couple of blocks from the edges of the World Trade Center site), but I won’t get into that here.

I wanted to express my support for the project because I strongly believe in what Imam Feisal Rauf is trying to do. He wants to create a center that can promote a vision of Islam as a faith tradition that works for peace, love and understanding. And he wants this center to be a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can come together to learn from each other, support one another and celebrate their common ground and common heritage. The Cordoba project has at its heart the commandment common to all of our scriptures to “love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”

This kind of leadership in the Muslim community in the area of interfaith understanding and cooperation is just what all Christians and Jews should be hoping for and praying for. Here are Muslims extending their hands to us and I, for one, will eagerly and thankfully grasp those hands.

In each of our separate faith traditions, we are trying, with God’s help, to find truth and wisdom and a meaning for our lives that embodies God’s love and grace. Each of our traditions are limited and flawed. Each of us have histories with ugly chapters that should rightfully embarrass us. Each of our faiths have some radical and fundamentalist followers that espouse our faith in ways that cause division and violence and promote hatred. Each of our precious scriptures have stories or ideas that run counter to the whole and strain our abilities to interpret them in ways that honor the beauty of the central ideas of our traditions. Each of our faiths are incredibly diverse and no one can take any responsibility for their thousands of parts. All three are considered “revealed” religions depending upon the ways in which we have experienced God’s reaching out to us and our forbearers. But all three faiths have grown a myriad of different ways in which we interpret and reinterpret those revelations in our limited, self-centered, and flawed human ways.

Because none of us can claim that our limited minds and hearts can comprehend the whole of the mystery that we call God; because none of our interpretations of our faith traditions are without error and prejudice; we need each other. We need the wisdom, beauty and truth embodied in the other great religions to help us to better understand our own. We need the breadth of God’s grace breaking forth in other cultures, in other languages, in other times, in other lives and minds, to even begin to give us a sense of the wholeness and grandeur that is the God we worship. We each have a central revelation of God that informs and shapes the way we understand the world, but the universal spirit that we worship has been revealed in other ways, in other places, in other lives. Shouldn’t we want to hear those stories? Shouldn’t we want to learn from those other moments of God’s grace? Shouldn’t we celebrate the way in which God has spoken among us even when God wasn’t just speaking to our culture?

Our religions all have God’s love and grace at their hearts. Nothing based on that love and grace should ever become a divider between peoples. It should never create hatred or misunderstanding. It should never spawn violence. We should be able to celebrate each other’s ways. Our faiths are not in competition with each other, they are part of one another. They compliment each other. They complete each other.

What happened on 9-11 was a tragedy that grew out of the hatred that sprouted in the cracks of misunderstanding and distrust in one tiny segment of one of our faiths. That kind of violence has, at times, also found expression among followers of each of our traditions. To allow distrust of Muslims among us, to foster more misunderstanding, to sow more seeds of chauvinistic hatred between us, is simply to promote more 9-11's. If we want to honor those who died, if we want to fight the enemy that created that tragedy, then let us take up the weapons of the heart against hatred. Let us wield the power of love that God has taught us. Let us banish the sources of misunderstanding and ignorance that separate us from brothers and sisters who worship the same God of love. That is what, I believe, the Cordoba initiative is all about. I will join hands with them because there is no better monument that can spring up near ground zero or anywhere than this.

Hard Times

“To preach the good news when times are not good at all.” That is the way my old friend, now deceased, William Sloan Coffin, once described the church’s vocation. And this fall, as we begin to start up a new church year, as we go back to the committee work and the stewardship drive and the Sunday school and the choir and the fundraisers and the mission work, we have to start by recognizing that these times “are not good at all.”

I won’t go into all of the things that make for our “hard times,” but just on the economic side of our lives, things have certainly gotten more difficult. Here in Maine one in every twelve people is unemployed (that’s just the official statistic that doesn’t count those who have stopped actively looking for work). Estimates are that one in four of the people who have jobs are underemployed (meaning all those people who are working part-time that need to be working full-time as well as those people with masters degrees who are employed pouring lattes in coffee shops). Housing foreclosures are the highest that they’ve been since the 1930’s. Small businesses are closing in record numbers. Our state is forced to make budget cuts that leave some of the people hardest hit by these problems more vulnerable. And things don’t appear to be getting much better. Those of us that have not been personally affected by the hard times are still feeling insecure and we all share great anxieties about the future.

I know this is a depressing way to begin a letter about a new church year. But it is in times like these that a church like ours really matters. The difficulties in our economy, the growing polarization of our public lives, the stress and anxiety that is now a part of the national fabric; all these things make what we can do here and offer here more crucial and more urgent than ever. These are times when the message of hope and faith needs to be shouted from the rooftops. These are times when people need a community that makes them feel embraced and cared for. These are times when our children need the support of people beyond just our immediate families and when they need a safe and secure place to be and belong. These are times for us to preach the good news—that no matter how difficult things are on the outside, it is the inside that matters; that no matter what our material circumstances may be, it is the spiritual heart of life that is the meaning and the center of who we are; that even when things are going badly, the gifts of God abound and can still be savored and celebrated.

In short, hard times are what we are here for. Our church community may have more money or more members or be more fun when times are good and safe and secure, but it is in the hard times that we need to be reminded that this church has, down through dozens of generations, helped to give people the strength, the courage, the support, the faith and the hope that has gotten them through. It is in hard times that we can rediscover the urgency and the importance of what we are here for. There is no more vital role to be played by any community or institution or group of people than the mission to which we are together called—to speak a word of love when hatred holds sway; to speak a word of comfort when lives are dislocated; to speak a word of hope when people are cast down; and to speak a word faith when lives feel empty. And then to find the ways to live out that love and comfort and hope and grace in who we are to each other and our neighbors.

It is time to get back to the work of being the church together, with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose. It is also time to discover again the joy, fellowship, fun and grace that we find together in that task. You are part of a great and important enterprise here at First Parish and we need all of you to gather round now and be the church when it is urgently needed. Welcome back if you’ve been away, and welcome home to all of you.

Sacred Space

On the day after my fifty-ninth birthday, I did something stupid. I went backpacking. It didn’t need to be stupid, but the feeling of getting older with more creaking joints, more physical limitations, more feelings of being on the downward slide in life, probably pushed me to do it in a stupid way. I set out to defy my old age. There was a time when I backpacked a lot; climbing many, many four thousand foot mountains here in the northeast and covering much of the Appalachian Trail, but that time was a long time ago.

I borrowed some equipment from my daughter Molly. I studied the maps of the White Mountains that she gave me for my birthday. And I decided to set out on a little three day trip. Molly had suggested a short loop of trails that she and her husband had walked recently; a relatively flat hike to a lovely lake. But I thought, “what’s the use of hiking in the mountains if you’re not going to climb a mountain.” So I picked out a slightly more challenging route. The guidebook, in fact, called it “strenuous.” It seemed perfect for a fifty-nine year old man trying to prove to himself that he was still young and vigorous. Of course, I’m not just an older man, I’m also overweight and out of shape and still breaking in a new hip. I walk most days, sometimes four or five miles, but that didn’t begin to prepare me for this trek.

Maureen thought I probably shouldn’t do it. My daughter thought that I probably shouldn’t do it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my own better judgment was saying that I probably shouldn’t do it. But some other need prevailed and I arrived at the trailhead on a hot summer day just before noon, hoisted my thirty-five pound pack onto my back and set out alone into the mountains.

The trail started out uphill and continued uphill every step for five miles. Sometimes the trail was so steep that it was hand over hand climbing. I was out of breath in two minutes. I was covered in sweat in five minutes. I was in despair in ten minutes.

While taking my overweight and out of shape body up the mountains of Connemara a few years ago, I discovered something: you can always walk another twenty feet. My modus operandi there, when I thought the climb was too much, was to go as far as I could, stop, rest, catch my breath, wait for my legs to stop aching, and then go another twenty feet. In such fits and starts one can climb a hill that seems too big to climb (not a bad lesson, by the way, for life in general when one takes on any enormous and daunting task: don’t worry about the whole job, just do the next thing—take it one day at a time or one minute at a time). And so that’s what I did. I got exhausted, didn’t think I could go on, thought over and over about turning back, but just willed myself to go another twenty feet up the trail. I didn’t set any speed records, but low and behold, I did that all afternoon until I got to the top of that mountain.

The view, of course, was wonderful. Mount Washington and the rest of the Presidential range were just to the west. To the south stretched mountains and lakes as far as I could see. But I had hoped to feel some real exhilaration being up there. Instead, I was just too spent to really enjoy it as much as I should. And I still had the task of hauling my aching body down to the tree line and finding a place to camp for the night. So after fifteen lovely minutes on the summit, I headed down. Two hours later, I pitched my little tent in an alpine blueberry patch, a couple hundred feet off the trail, just below the tree line. After getting things set up, I started to get cramps in my legs. There was little else I could do but to lie down flat in the tent and try to rest them enough to stop the cramping. I don’t know how I managed it, lying in the most particularly uncomfortable spot in the entire mountain range, but somehow I fell asleep.

I awoke at about eight-thirty in the evening. I left the tent in nothing but my boxer shorts and walked to the top of the ridge. There it was like I had stepped into another reality. The sun was setting in absolute splendor over Mount Washington. Every treetop for fifty miles was bathed in golden light. The lakes to the south were glistening in gold. Just over the sunset, Venus had come out as brightly as I have ever seen her. And then, just rising over the mountain I had just climbed to the east, was a full moon, huge in blazing orange. I could see hawks soaring along the mountainside hundreds of feet below me and I was looking down on wispy clouds scuttering along the hills. If there has ever been a lovelier moment of pure beauty in my life, I cannot remember it. My eyes filled with tears. My heart ached with the grandeur of it. It was not just that I was seeing it, but, standing there on that mountainside, I was a part of it. The beauty was not just around me, but in me and of me.

I didn’t have to utter a prayer; every fiber of my being was stretched into a “thank you.” I just stood there for forty minutes or so until it was almost too dark to find my way back to the tent. I didn’t feel tired any more. The aches and pains were gone. I had no worries about the next hard day to come. In fact, in that forty minutes, I had no worries about anything at all. I was alone in the world; alone in the moment; and yet, so full of the presence of everything that I was tingling with it.

This, of course, was a sacred moment for me; a sacred place, a sacred time, and now, a sacred memory. In the late stages of a rather underwhelming sabbatical leave, finally this comes—a charge of spiritual energy and renewal beyond any expectation. So what is it that creates a time like that? What happens? Why does such a scene of grandeur light us up on the inside? What is it in us that responds with such wonder to beauty?

Most of the time, of course, we live in the metaphorical valleys of life. That’s where everyday life happens. We tread our way through the well-worn ruts of habits and routines. We focus on duties and labors and responsibilities. We follow familiar patterns. That’s all necessary. We can’t live everyday on mountaintops. We’d never get anything done. The wind is too strong. But our life in the valleys leaves us hungering and longing for some kind of transcendence. We do need to climb above the tree-line of our days to see and feel the bigger reality. We need to feel connected to something beyond ourselves and the small relationships in our lives. We need to feel significant; like we have some place in the “big picture.”

Of course, I’m not just talking about something “out there,” but far more importantly about what’s inside us. We respond to beauty out there because it echoes inside of us. We too are “intricately and wonderfully made.” We are a part of the grandeur and the beauty. Most of the time we don’t see it or notice it, but it is always there. There is some spirit in us that is of the same substance and the same reality as the grandeur out there that we can feel rising up within us and coming newly alive in those mountaintop moments. This is what feeds our souls (whatever they are). Without the occasional transcendent moment we starve to death on the inside. We become smaller, narrower, sadder.

Spirituality is about finding ways to cross the boundaries between our private worlds to experience the power of our inherent connection to each other and all that is. We need ways pull back the veil that hides our deepest nature from ourselves. We are part of the whole (whether we call it God or the world soul or the collective unconscious or the ground of being). We are not just separate entities living private little lives. We are transcendent. Every once in a while, God beaks through our barriers and reminds us of that and those moments fuel the real depth of our lives.

So look for those moments. Find the sacred spaces in your life that can stimulate them. Open yourself to the world around you in any way you can. Go to extremes if it allows you to cross the boundaries, inside and out, and find your connection to the whole.

I probably could have killed myself going so overboard on my ridiculous little climb. I probably won’t do it again any time soon. But, was it worth it? My God, all the pain, all the effort, all the sweat faded into nothing in that first moment of glory. It was worth any price.

Doubts

What follows is a capsule version of what I preached on for the first Sunday of Lent.  It seemed an important enough message for the season, that I include it here for all of you that were not among us that day.  I can only beg the indulgence of those of you that already struggled through the longer version in church.

This is the first week of Lent.  In the church, we start Lent each year by reading the story of Jesus going out to the wilderness for forty days and nights to fast and be tempted by the devil.  Of course we read this story in a metaphorical sense.  We don't actually believe that there was some guy with horns and a pitchfork out there in the wilderness talking to Jesus.  Jesus may not have even gone to the wilderness except in the metaphorical sense.  The ancients didn't have a way of talking about their internal life (emotions, inner dialogues, the unconscious) except by externalizing in stories.  But what the story is about, of course, is Jesus wrestling with his doubts.  We are told that he didn't choose to go to the wilderness but was "driven" there by the Holy Spirit.  And so before he can do whatever it is he decides to do with his life, first he has to sort out his own inner life of faith.  He confronts his doubts, he tests his faith, he "tries on" a variety of ideas for how to live out his faith.

All of this has prompted me to think a little more fully about doubts.  Perhaps the best place to start is with an analogy between religion and science.  While many people think about science as a body of knowledge, that's not really what it is.  The knowledge gained through the scientific method is the aim, but the "science" is the methodology.  Science is a methodology for objectively discovering how the world works.  The method is fairly simple.  We observe closely a given phenomenon and based on observation we develop a hypothesis about how that phenomenon occurs.  And then we test that hypothesis.  The test, of course, is an experiment designed to prove or disprove the hypothesis.  If the experiment is well designed, it is a success either way.  If the hypothesis is proved, then we know how things work.  If it is disproved, then we have eliminated one of the options for how to understand it.  Either way we gain knowledge.  Once enough understanding is gained we might be able to construct a "theory" that tries to explain something far broader.  But the theory is always provisional because all of the data about a broad issue is never quite in.  The theory gets altered, amended or tweaked to accommodate new bits of knowledge.  A body of knowledge grows out of this kind of experimental exploration but it is the method that is the science.

So too with our religions.  At heart, religions are not a body of doctrines or dogmas that we are called upon to believe.  They are instead spiritual methodologies.  Religions are traditions that have grown up to help us get closer to whatever it is that we call God or to get to a greater spiritual depth in our own lives.  Each religion gives us a collection of methodologies for accomplishing this.  Buddhism teaches that a life of meditation, non-attachment, and discipline gets one to a spiritually deeper place.  Islam prescribes a prayer ritual several times each day, a regime of generosity, a system of sharia law, and a once in a lifetime pilgrimage as part of the methodology for reaching a more realized relationship with God.  In Christianity we believe in regular worship, lived out compassion and the power of a loving community as the methods for reaching a greater spiritual depth.  The doctrine and dogmas of our religions are secondary to the central purpose, which is to get closer to God.  If the doctrines help and abet that purpose, they are good, if they do not then they should be rejected.  Remember that "faith" is the heart of our religion not belief.  Belief is what is going on in our heads, faith is what is happening in our hearts.  Belief is what we think about God, faith is our relationship with God.

All of this long discourse is just a way of getting to the business of our doubts.  Because doubts play the same role in our religions as experimentation plays in science, and doubt is just as important.  Usually, Christians have been taught to fight their doubts-- that doubts are bad and that they undermine and erode our faith.  If we have doubts, we have been so often taught to strap on the helmet of belief a little more tightly to expel or suppress those doubts.  But remember that Jesus is driven into the wilderness of doubt by the Holy Spirit.  His doubts are the very spirit of God working in him.  Doubts are not the enemy of faith, they are the single most important part of the methodology of faith.  Doubts are the spirit of God sending us a message.

Doubt is a cognitive dissonance, whether conscious or unconscious.  We doubt because something is wrong in our heads or hearts.  When what we know from common sense or life experience is at odds with what we've been taught to believe, we have doubts.  Religious authorities might prefer us to tamp down those doubts and in the conflict of belief with reality, let our connection to reality yield.  But this puts our faith on a very shaky and uncertain foundation and it does a disservice to truth, which is part of what God is about.  When we experience the cognitive dissonance of doubt, Jesus' example would seem to be the better one; let those doubts drive us into the metaphorical wilderness to sort things out.  If a doctrine of the church is something that we doubt, then we either do not understand it deeply enough or it is wrong.  Either way, the process of taking our doubts seriously and wrestling to get to the heart of them makes us deeper spiritually and closer to God's truth.  Doubts are God's gift.  Either we get a more profound understanding of one of the doctrines of the church or we discover that that doctrine doesn't work as a methodology of faith and then we reject it.  Like an experiment in science, wrestling with a doubt succeeds either way.

Even our deepest doubt should be taken seriously.  Our deepest doubt, of course, is about the existence of God itself.  All of us have experienced doubts about God's very reality.  These doubts are the most crucial.  As Martin Buber wrote, "Any God that can be killed should be killed."  In other words, if we doubt the existence of God then our God is too small.  God is beyond our comprehension and so all of our images of God and ideas about God are truly provisional (we should learn from science and have no dogmas or doctrines, but only theories), our doubts push us past the petty and shallow ideas that we have about God to deeper ones, bigger ones, truer ones.  If you believe in some magical being who listens to our prayers from up above and decides who gets hit with earthquakes and who gets cured from cancer, then I can only hope that your God given doubts will sweep away that idol and push you to find a deeper faith and a richer understanding not so easily undermined.  

Every now and again, we all belong in that metaphorical wilderness where our small certainties are stripped away and we have to face the wildness of newer, grander, more unsettling ideas.  This is the journey of faith-- it always passes through those wilderness places.  Do you doubt?  Listen to those doubts.  Treasure those doubts.  Let God use those doubts to reach deeper into your life and make you a more sacred vessel of God's love and truth.

IT’S ALL BEYOND US

 

We enter Lent this month.  It begins with ashes and ends with Alleluias.  It is in some ways the very heart of what our faith is all about.  It is a time to think about who we are, where we’ve been, where we are going, and why.

 

In our age it has become a challenge to understand what “time” means: that human life is a hundred thousand years old, that the earth began its spinning trek hundreds of millions of years ago, that the origin of the universe is cast farther back in the mystery of time than we have zeroes to reckon with.  And our moment is but a speck in something beyond comprehension.

 

Space is equally daunting.  Space is the ocean that goes on and on and on.  We falter for language to explain it, except that space is large enough to house galaxies of stars more numerous than the sands and each galaxy is vast beyond what we can grasp.  The light we glimpse from the nearest galaxy started its shining journey towards us before human history began.  Our tiny speck of a planet makes its laps around its little star in the midst of a vastness that makes the mind shudder.

 

Strangely, it seems even more difficult for us to grasp the significance of human history with all that it reveals to us about the rise and fall of civilizations, with all that it teaches us about ourselves but from which we rarely learn.  “Everything changes, everything passes away and is forgotten,” declared an ancient sage.  “The nations are as a drop in the bucket,” cries Isaiah.  Our American moment follows the “golden ages” of a hundred empires whose traces are now just dust and barely discoverable ruins.

 

And finally, we come face-to-face with our own personal histories: our birth, our life, our death.  And of each of us the Psalmist declares:  “Our days are like grass that withers and flies away on the wind… We spend our years as a tale that is told.”  Or as the Bard wrote: “…that struts and frets his hour upon the stage; and then is heard no more, it is a tale; told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

 

How do we contemplate the vastness of all that is and still find some meaning in the place where we stand?  How does the rising and setting of our lives make any difference?  Why do we sweat and toil, fret and care, ache and groan, or do any of the things that we do?  This is the task of our faith, of our spiritual journey; to find our place in the sands of time and the oceans of space; to claim our role in the little cycle that is all life and our life; to forge a relationship with the heart of the vastness.  Most people create a little tiny god, cut down to size to fit their needs and their limitations and close their eyes and minds to all the rest. 

 

This Lenten season, I invite you to embrace the challenge of a God that is beyond your comprehension, beyond your understanding, beyond your wildest dreams, and yet blowing through the backdoors of your heart and mind.  Our little span of time and space may seem trivial and yet our days can be full of sounding joy and delight beyond our understanding.  For our infinite God is in you, and so, likewise are the stars and the galaxies and the long arc of time.  Contemplate the mysteries.  Open your mind to the incomprehensible.  Let the jaw-dropping wonder of it all wash over you.  And in those moments the spirit of the God of all that is will rise up within you.  This is the reason for our faith and the heart of our spiritual task.  Embrace it.