Go to the Mirror

... he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror. He sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like.

James 1:23-24

Go to the mirror. See who I want you to be.

Linger here a while. Look with new eyes. Look with my eyes.

Do not stare. Do not glare. Do not pore, and do not adore. Go to the mirror.

Look not with your pride. Look there with my pride.

Look with me. Take a look at yourself. Take a good look at yourself.

Do you see what I see?

I see what is mine. You have never seen yourself as anything but yours.

You are not your own. You belong. Have you ever looked at yourself as if you belonged?

Until you do, you are not really you.

Until this moment, you have looked at what you are. Now look at who you are.

See who I want you to be.

You will be who you will be because I am who am.

Remember who you see. For you must love the one you see. You do not have to like; to like is far too cheap a sentiment. But you must love.

Go to the mirror. Look at yourself with love. Look at yourself as if you believed you were loved.

Look at yourself and believe that I believe.

Go to the mirror. Linger a moment there.

You see yourself, and you will see me there.


I will proclaim the decree of the LORD, who said to me, "You are my son; today I am your father."

Psalms 2:7

Near and Far

In the end, did I draw them to me?

When you gave me brothers and sisters, did I adopt them?

The thing I feel in my solitude, is it your warm breath under my skin, or is it the sedative of some devil?

So near, so far: The distance between you and God is no greater than the distance between the averted eyes of you and the person next to you.

I go to your many houses, those of stone and glass and those with no walls. To cross over -- to enter the holy: that is the beginning of worship. To go back -- to bear the holy, being holy: that is the end of worship.

Today, I am at the threshold of the sanctuary, the membrane of the living circle. I sense you are there, in the light, and I want to touch you. I want you to touch me.

There, at the threshold, I remain. I am slumbering almost below the ground in the cool darkness. I almost want not to be disturbed, ever again.

Except, someone says: Sursum corda!

If I do not enter the sanctuary, how can I go into the street?

Without accepting the dare of worship, there can be no risk in the witness.

When will I dare again?

You did not command us to make your house a hermitage. Keep us from liking our loneliness.

Teach us to love what we see.

After all, love really does come at first sight. But for many, first sight comes after ages of unseeing with opaque eyes or downturned eyes. For many more, there is never a sighting.

So near, so far: The distance between you and God is no greater than the distance between the averted eyes of you and the person next to you.

Be thou my vision, Lord, that I may say before I die that I loved somebody.

A Counter-Reading

From Psalm 55:

If this had been done by an enemy
I could bear his taunts.
If a rival had risen against me,
I could hide from him.

But it is you, my own companion, my intimate friend!
How close was the friendship between us.
We walked together in harmony in the house of God.

I am well aware that the accepted reading of this psalm is that of a prayer for justice. Someone has been wronged by a companion, a comrade, a fellow brother or sister. One has been betrayed by the other.

But while reading this psalm I have had a Nathan-meets-David moment. Suppose it is I who is the false friend?

Sin is the distance between who we are and what we are. I can read this psalm as an unwitting prayer of lament for my estrangement from God and from my true self, the person I was created to be.

O God, listen to my prayer, do not hide from my pleading, attend to me and reply; with my cares, I cannot rest....

O that I had wings like a dove to fly away and be at rest.
So I would escape far away and take refuge in the desert.

Sometimes God hides. Most of the time we are the ones who do the hiding.

I tremble at the shouts of the foe, at the cries of the wicked; for they bring down evil upon me.
They assail me with fury.

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sin hardens our heart and casts a veil on all that we perceive. A rose shows us only its thorns. A soothing word only clangs in our ears. The good and true and beautiful appears meaningless and ugly. All the world is ours, but when we are caught and crushed in the vise-grip of fractured relationships, we are stuck in a crumbling nutshell.

I would hasten to find a shelter from the raging wind, from the destructive storm, O Lord, and from their plotting tongues.

Sin corrupts one of our most precious gifts from God: the power of imagination and its corollary in our senses, the power of perception. Indeed, there are winds and storms, and they blow where they will, for purposes unknown to us. Shall we judge them to be raging and destructive, on the evidence of our perceptions?

For I can see nothing but violence and strife in the city.
Night and day they patrol high on the city walls.

It is full of wickedness and evil; it is full of sin.
Its streets are never free from tyranny and deceit.

Of course, there really is violence and strife in the city of man. These are the visible marks of sin, for which we are responsible collectively but usually not culpable individually. Make no mistake: we are sinned against. But which is greater, the transgression or the source of the transgression? Understand this: our own thrown-ness, our common ownership of sin, becomes so heavy and loathsome that we project it falsely onto others, blaming our friends and loved ones individually for every fear and anxiety that assails us. Our lying perceptions are the precursors to our violent interfaces with the world. And our wayward perceptions tragically become the reality from which we cannot flee.

Adam and Eve committed a transgression in the garden, but God did not banish them for it. They were expelled for denying their responsibility. This is the sin that leads to all transgressions.

As for me, I will cry to God and the Lord will save me.
Evening, morning and at noon I will cry and lament.

Sometimes God says no.

He will deliver my soul in peace in the attack against me: for those who fight me are many, but he hears my voice.

God answers our prayers in ways we can never fully predict, and never according to what we expect. One might imagine that those "many" who fight this tortured soul are not enemies out there or other external forces but rather a part of that soul as the demonic, which is to say destructive, forms of culture we have embodied.

And even in the midst of our demonic condition, there is a voice that cries out loud and true from within our fractured selves. This voice, God will hear.

God will hear and will humble them, the eternal judge: for they will not amend their ways.
They have no fear of God.

We believe God, and yet we reject God. We promise to change, but we cannot change. We tremble before the holy, but we cast off God recklessly. We are confident in karmic vengeance, ever denying that deliverance may require us to be delivered up.

The traitor has turned against his friends; he has broken his word.
His speech is softer than butter, but war is in his heart.
His words are smoother than oil, but they are naked swords.

We never fail to see in others what we fail to see in ourselves.

Entrust your cares to the Lord and he will support you.
He will never allow the just man to stumble.

But you, O God, will bring them down to the pit of death.
Deceitful and bloodthirsty men shall not live half their days.

God will save who we are and do away with what we must not be. God will reunify who we are with what we are. Those demonic forms that we embody falsely, these will be brought down to the pit of death. God will put self-destroying tendencies toward deceit and violence to death. May it be done quickly!

O Lord, I will trust in you.

May it be so.

Today's Prayer

Grant me courage to cover my fears.
Grant me patience to cover my anger.
Grant me strength to cover my weakness.
Grant me these three, for I pledged to obey you and not men.

Be in what I build. Be in what I guard. But let me pray first to be with you, for it is your house, and it is your city.

Let there be bread for all the world. If my work is not leaven for the bread, then curse my work.

Let my name mean nothing and my age mean less as long as the labor is not lost.

Your will with my will, mine with yours, not either my will or yours, for then it will be neither-nor.

The sun dies soon. When rises the moon, stay with me. Bear me toward you so that I can bear the world.

Blessed be your holy memory. Blessed be your holy wisdom. Blessed be your holy will.

The Preceding Post Decoded

It is not a morbid thing to think of death. It makes for preparedness. It surfaces the destructive contradictions and creative tensions in our being, the profundities and trivialities of our existence. It is looking at oneself in a magnifying mirror under a fluorescent light. It is being prodded with a pointed stick.

It is naive for believers in a living God made incarnate to diminish the facticity of death and foolish to be incurious about how everything passes away.

Day slowly bleeds to death
Through the wound made
When the sharp horizon's edge
Ripped through the sky.
Into its now empty veins
Seeps the darkness.
The corpse stiffens,
Embraced by the chill of night.

Over the dead one are lit
Some silent stars.

Dag Hammarskjold, Oct. 12, 1958

Everything must pass away. To live is to let everything go. To die is to complete the giving away. And then God appears. For it is no longer us, but God in us.

Mark this well: nothing that is given away is lost. Jesus died in defiance of those who would have him be sacrificed. But everything we struggle with violence to hold, especially the things we hold most dear, is sunk and eternally abandoned.

Hell is not death. Hell is eternal oblivion.

Anything that prevents the ordinary (and holy) dying, the giving away, the living that leads to the fullness of God, this is the undying Death to be feared. This is the Death that is absolute Loss.

Let us live and die so that nothing we have been given is lost.

Gratitude and readiness. You got all for nothing. Do not hesitate, when it is asked for, to give your all, which, in fact, is nothing, for all.

Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.

Dag Hammarskjold, 1956

Re-reading my thanatological thoughts, I must confess that I have yet to live into the wisdom I brazenly profess.

Thanatological Thoughts

I have never seen a person die.

I am afraid of death by asphyxiation (e.g. drowning, suffocation).

If I die by natural causes, then I believe I will most likely die in the month of February, in the middle of the week, late in the evening.

The earliest memory I have is of being carried on my father's shoulders up the stairs from the basement to the upper stories of our house as it was being built in 1978. The memory is distant like a dream, but as I recall it hazily, I remember sensing that if my father let go of me, I would be badly hurt. Surrounded by strangers and dust and noise and potent odors, my life depended on hanging on to my father.

My most memorable birthday was my eighth, in 1985, when a hurricane devastated the Eastern Seaboard, drowned 16 persons, and left my family powerless for a week. My next most memorable birthday was my 24th, in 2001, because only when it arrived did I begin to stop being afraid after the terror of Sept. 11.

Somewhere in my childhood, around or before the age of ten, I became able to imagine nothingness, the end of my own existence, and eternal unconsciousness. Those imaginings worried me then, and they still do sometimes. This can be a good thing: "There are few things as convincing as death to remind us of the quality with which we live our life" (Robert Fripp).

Both of my grandfathers died in December, one in 1991 and the other in 1994.

Seeing my grandmother choke on a sandwich on the day after Thanksgiving in 1998, with none of us able to give her aid, waiting powerlessly for the paramedics, was one of the most frightening moments in my life.

I still worry about whether I was exposed to asbestos fibers when I was working ten years ago in an office building in midtown Manhattan.

When Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11, 2001, I cried, and on that day I stopped believing in the death penalty. "For everything that lives is holy" (William Blake).

One birthday I was given a dwarf cactus. I tended it poorly, and it died from overwatering. I felt great remorse over this.

The first wedding I ever attended was my sister's on July 29, 2006. She asked me to read Scripture and offer some homiletic reflections. She objected to my quotation of the Scripture that says love is stronger than death.

The last funeral I attended was for Fr. Ed Boyle, founder of the Massachusetts Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, in November 2007. The last wake I attended was for Norman McReynolds, a member of Common Cathedral, last spring. The last memorial I attended was for the Rev. Dr. James Nash, a former faculty member of Boston University School of Theology, in December.

Unlike some Catholics, I felt no distress upon hearing that when the plot of Cardinal John Henry Newman was excavated last October, no body was found in the grave, the only things recovered being the cloth of his biretta, and a brass coffin plate.

Walking through graveyards leaves me feeling strangely fatigued.

I wonder if I have it in me to be a martyr, to be like those of whom it is written that love for life did not deter them from death.

You must hear Led Zeppelin's take on "In My Time of Dying," a blues traditional pushed into postmodern times.

To my ears, hackneyed phrases like "to die for" and "I could just die" are not only indecent but also blasphemous. The same for cheap curses like "drop dead."

For me, the most colorful personification of Death is not the Grim Reaper but a much lesser known figure called the Supernatural Anaesthetist.

If given the opportunity to have a simulated near-death experience, whether induced chemically or by suggestion, I would decline.

I am not so much saddened by a loved one's death as saddened by the grief others show. It is a sympathy sadness.

I am going to find it very difficult to respect my mother's wish to be cremated.

My only monument will be dust and ashes, and it will commemorate the resurrection.

I do not know who will bury me. I know who will raise me.

"Not even death can end the process of our becoming" (Robert Fripp).

On the Turning Away

The phrase presented itself to me, and I could have swept my mind for an age and not know where it came from or how it got there. The words felt older than lifetimes and as new as today. They seemed to tell an epic history, hint at deep loss, and foreshadow a restoration: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained. Or Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

"... on the turning away ..."

We live half-asleep, half-aware, half-full. Insensitive, inert. Full of holes, full of dirt, like cavities. Yet Someone, Something, is putting something there all the time. Mostly things seep out of us like waterdrops from a poorly tightened faucet. Sometimes something stays, bonding in the awful empty spaces.

" ... on the turning away ..."

I could not account for their presence, but they belonged there, firmly. It felt right for them to be there. My intuition told me they were an admonition. Reaching for the edge of my consciousness, I searched for the phrase. (God bless the Internet for externalizing our collective consciousness.)

This is what I found:

On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others suffering
Or you'll find that youre joining in
The turning away

It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud

I found a song. No, the song found me. It has a haunting melody with well-matched words. It could have been sung four hundred years ago, born under gray skies in the distant green hills. I can hear it being sung today and many tomorrows from now, stirring streets and soaring in sanctuaries. With this song, I can pray.

On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerized as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?

David Gilmour and Anthony Moore

***

Scholars whom I trust say Paul was not "converted" but "called" to life in Christ. That's true enough; Paul had always believed in the one God of Israel. And through his experience of Jesus, Paul believed only that he had come more fully and more perfectly to live in the light of the Lord. But he did not always believe in others, in the "nations" or Gentiles. Before Paul experienced Jesus, the people beyond his own people were to be turned away if they could not be made to believe and live like his own people.

After Jesus, for Paul there was no more turning away. Only a radical turning toward.

So there is fundamentally a call, but the call is heard through a million little whispers, soft breezes that collect and turn your direction while you walk. The call is heard through numerous little conversions, increments of turning toward. It is not a negative motion; it is always a positive movement.

Conversion comes through the call. Turning away from sin, turning toward God and humanity. Paul was called to God's life in Christ. But he was converted, too: away from alienation, toward all peoples.

" ... on the turning away ..."

I was half-awake, half-thinking of conversion, when this phrase surfaced. Now I ponder with wider eyes. To what, to whom must I turn my face? Who have I turned away? To what, to whom does God bid me turn?

Can I do it, God? Will I do it? Can you make me feel the breezes? Will I go where you will? Even now, despite my desire to know you and serve all, have I turned very far away from you and all your loved ones?

I will turn again to you. Show me the pale and downtrodden, the weak and the weary. Show me the ones I will love. Show me just one, if one is all I can love.

Thank you, God, for calling me.