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Paradise Lost

Erich Fried translated by Stuart Hood
 
When I had lost
my first country
and when in my second country
and in my place of refuge
and in my third country
and in my second place of refuge
I had lost everything
then I set out
 
to look for a land
that was not poisoned
by any memories
of irreplaceable losses
 
So I came to Paradise
there I found peace
Everything was whole and good
I lacked for nothing
 
Then a sentry
with a flaming sword
said: Pray: Get away
Here you have lost nothing’

Pray: Deliver Me

From the cowardice
that dare not face new truth,
 
From the laziness
that is contented with half truth,
 
From the arrogance
that thinks it knows all truth.
 
Good Lord,
deliver me!

Simply Trust

Issa
 
Simply trust.
Do not the leaves flutter down,
just like that?

Pray: Jonah 2 (from inside the Great Fish)

I called out to You,
out of my deep distress,
and You answered me.
 
From the grave,
from deep darkness,
I cried, and You heard my voice.
 
You threw me into the deep,
You cast me into
the heart of the sea,
where the torrent surrounded me,
where Your surf,
Your waves,
crashed over me.
 
Then, I said, “I am lost,
out of even the sight
and presence of God.
I am truly alone.”
 
The waters closed in over me.
The deep encompassed me.
Weeds wrapped around my head.
At the base of the mountains,
I fell into the deep where the darkness closed upon me.
I surrendered. Gone forever.
 
Yet, You pulled me
up from the Pit.
My Lord! My God!
As my life faded, vanished,
I remembered You!
My prayer came to You!
My voice entered into
Your holy presence,
where You heard me!
 
Salvation and deliverance
I am Yours.
This day, this moment, this instant
are all Yours.
 
Amen. 

(The inspiration for this version of Jonah’s prayer is from Going Nuts! Click cover below to learn more…)

Luke 6: ²⁷ But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. ²⁹ If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

Praise those who curse you.
If someone tries to steal your coat, give it to him gladly.
If someone classifies you as “enemy”, reject their label.
If someone hates you, love them.
When you give to someone, give freely,
and do not keep a ledger expecting something in return.
Why? Because you can. That’s the power of The Way.

If someone strikes you, you do not have to strike back,
you can always choose.
If someone wrongs you,
you do not have to wrong them in return,
you can always choose.
No matter what evil someone does to you,
you do not have to repay evil for evil, violence for violence,
wrongdoing with an even greater wrongdoing.
No one ever forces your response,
you can always choose.
Why? Because you can. That’s the power of The Way.

War never brings peace.
Hate never produces love.
Only liberated people who choose
can dream the world into a new reality.
That has always been The Way.

   Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school.
   “Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked.
   “Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick.
   “You all have very strong stomachs,” she said. “But your powers of observation need some work.”
   “What do you mean?” they asked. “We did just what you did.”
   “There is one difference,” she replied. “The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked.”

Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now. Epictetus

Children came to the scholars to learn The Way.
The teachers sent them away saying, “This is not for you.
This is far too important and difficult for you to learn.”
The teachers continued to talk, write,
and lecture about The Way,
but The Way
was nowhere
to be found.
The Way
was out
climbing
trees with
the children.

Coming in December…

Of God’s love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement. William Sloane Coffin

   As “Music City,” Nashville draws musicians from all over the country. There are so many talented musicians in Nashville that when asked if I play the guitar, I always say, “No.” Playing a guitar means something different in Nashville than in my home state of South Carolina.
   I’ve been fortunate to watch Bob Britt play the guitar in many venues on many occasions for the almost fifteen years of our friendship. When I saw Bob play with John Fogerty at The Ryman, I watched Tom Spaulding, his guitar tech, bring him guitar, after guitar, after guitar. Tom brought so many instruments out for the different songs I commented to Carrie there was nothing left for Tom to bring other than a chair to see if Bob could play it. Tom would later say of Bob in contrast to other premier guitar players, “Bob has a way of seeing the whole and finding his place on stage making room for himself and making the music better at the same time.”
Having watched Bob for so many years, from a distance and up close, I finally figured out what amazes me most about him. There are many great guitar players who have created their own particularly distinct and recognizable sounds like B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, or Eddie Van Halen. Bob does something even more miraculous. At one particular Moment Service, Bob took out his guitar for the night, a Stella he had purchased for fifteen dollars at a Good Will. With a slide and pic, he brought out not Bob’s sound from the guitar, but the guitar’s sound. The Stella sounded cheap and tinny when I touched it resonated with life at Bob’s touch. In his hands, the Stella reached its full potential. Watching Bob, I remembered this poem by Myra Brooks Welch, The Touch of the Master’s Hand,

Twas battered and scarred and the auctioneer
Thought it scarcely worth his while
To waste much time on the old violin,
But he held it up with a smile.

“Three dollars once, three dollars twice,
Going for three” … but no!
From the room far back a gray-haired man
Came forward and picked up the bow.

   The author of this poem, Myra Brooks Welch, was born into a family of musicians, though she loved music and playing the organ, she was limited by debilitating arthritis and a condition which confined her to a wheelchair. Unable to play music, she put her creative energy into writing poetry. Her friends called her, “The poet with the singing soul.” She typed her poetry with two pencils, one grasped in each hand, using the erasers to hit the keys.
Many in Nashville rate a guitarist by the expensive nature of the instrument they play, some with even a model named after them. For those who look close enough, we can see the true masters of the art who can bring life from whatever instrument they touch. So, too, with human life, God is the master who can bring out our potential making us priceless.
   When your mind is still, when you are in the present moment free from past valuations or devaluations, be with God, seek out the touch of the master’s hand in your life. Pray this practice opening yourself to the touch of God using Frances Ridley Havergal’s hymn, Take My Life.

Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee.
Take my moments and my days let them flow in ceaseless praise.
Take myself and I will be ever only all for Thee.

(For more on Bob Britt, check out the following videos…)

As college football kicks off this weekend, I am reminded of my wisest counsel to young couples about to get married, “You marriage will be like football.” 

(Adapted from Jesus Zens You.)

   “Do you, Roger, take this woman to be your wife?”
   “I do.”
   “And do you, Rebecca, take this man to be your husband?”
   “I do.”
   “By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife. Let the games begin.”

   I try and prepare them, those innocent young who come to the church to be married. I try to give them some picture that they have not only chosen each other, they have been chosen by their families, chosen as missionaries, as agents, as representatives. I try to show them how, in their lives up to this point, their families have been preparing them, educating them, training them in the ‘right’ way to live their family way, their long traditioned, heavily patterned, family way, sending them forth into marriage, to procreate a new family, one with the same values, behaviors, traditions, patterns of the family from whence they came.
   I try to prepare individuals who come to me for premarital counseling for the upcoming mêlée. I ask them, “What do you think your marriage will be like?”
   I listen to their responses, then I add, “I like to think of marriage as one really long…football game.”
   Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work as only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion.
   In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten.
   Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage.

Where will the family patterns collide?
   In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low.
   In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end?
   The skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays.
   Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all?
   Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers?
   Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own!
   At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. The unanswered question is, “If the two shall become one, which one?” Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, but which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

The White Trash Café was one of the most colorful restaurants in Nashville. I went because someone invited me. A pastor from a church not far from there, but not too near either, invited me along with the rest of our minister’s group. The inside was almost as flamboyant as the out as the wallpaper was a mishmash of old album covers ranging from Andre Crouch to the Rolling Stones. Our server looked like he’d just come from living off the street and so did the owner.

We must have given ourselves away as a group of ministers. It was either our professional attire, our praying before the meal, or our over use of profanity during it that signaled we were clergy. You get a group of ministers together, confident that none of our congregants are around, and we can throw around more bad language than late-night HBO special just to prove that we can.

“How was your food?” the owner of the restaurant asked us.

“Good,” we all agreed. It was, though secretly I was hoping I would be able to say the same again in a couple of hours. It was the greasy food I love to have but that often has me for the rest of the day.

“How would you like to see Jesus?” he asked.

We didn’t know what to say. I wanted to explain to him that we were ministers, employed by churches, paid by congregations, so there was no way we wanted to actually see Jesus. We had master’s degrees in Christianity, were taught by professors and thought of ourselves as being like professors, tenured. We considered ourselves to be like Jesus’ disciples, though not Peter for he tried to walk on water. We thought of ourselves as similar to the other eleven, who, while Peter tried to walk on water, watched, and then when everyone was safe back in the boat, Peter and Jesus included, those disciples professed how amazing Jesus they was and that he surely must be the Son of God. As Professional Christians, we were more than happy to talk about Jesus, from a distance, but we had studied enough about Jesus to know just how dangerous Jesus could be. We were fine with seeing Jesus, but anytime you saw Jesus, whether in the Bible or 2,000 years since, there is a high likelihood that Jesus might see you. Once Jesus sees you, and says, “Follow me,” then life as you know it, as you worked for it, is probably over. Better to watch from a distance, stay in the boat, and if you can’t work it out, get paid for it. That’s our unspoken contract with our congregations. Keep church to an hour, go over an hour and Jesus might find you. So, get in. Pray. Get out, with a blessing. See Jesus? Sure. Can we get a guarantee he won’t see us?

Neither wanting to be like Peter trying to walk on water or denying him when confronted, we followed our restaurateur guide across the dining toward the restrooms and beyond toward the janitor’s closet. Before our host showed us Jesus, he held up a picture of Christ on the cross and asked us to look at it. We did. Then he slowly pulled it away like a curtain on The Price is Right, revealing what we’d won. There he was, above the mop bucket and mop, in the window. Just like the picture. Jesus on the cross.

http://media2.fdncms.com/nashville/imager/cafe-christ/u/original/1482404/smwhitetrashjesus.jpg

Now, whether or not you see Jesus in that bit of algae between two sheets of Plexiglass is up to you. Going to the restaurant two or three times and looking at a picture of a painting of the crucifixion right before you look at it does seem to aid nonbelievers in seeing the light, or seeing Jesus through the light. Whether or not this is an act of God, consequence of nature, or both, again, I leave up to you. What I have observed in my life is that too often I suffer from not seeing Jesus in the usual places than from seeing him in the unusual ones which leads me to the answer for the most popular question asked by churches and ministers, “How do we grow?” or, said another way, “How do we get people to come?”

The answer is in what I’m calling, The Parable of The White Trash Café. I went to the White Trash Café because someone invited me. Colorful though it was, I would have never gone in unless someone invited me, albeit it, dared me to go. Without that connection, I would have never gone. The second lesson of The Parable of The White Trash Café is this, I saw Jesus in the window because somebody showed him to me. It’s not a very complicated parable or a complicated solution to a painful problem throughout congregations across the country.

As churches, if you want to grow, follow the lesson of The White Trash Café. If you want to grow:

1. Invite others.
2. Show them Jesus.

Will you grow if you invite others to come and show them Jesus? Likely not. Jesus’ way in the Gospels is not magic but miraculous. Jesus’ way in the world also had him living in relative poverty and got him killed. If that’s what happened to Jesus, why do we think showing people Jesus will pay off our personal or congregational mortgages? Inviting others and showing them Jesus may or may not ease our congregational woes or even provide our pastoral pensions, but if we don’t do those two things, then likely we stopped being churches a long time ago. It’s not magical, it may or not be miraculous, and it may even at times be less interesting that algae between two window panes, regardless, it has and will always be, our calling. Invite others. Show them Jesus.

Sad to say, The White Trash Café closed, so, I guess it is up to the churches now. God help us.

As a child, many of us were taught, “Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the door and where are all the people?”

Opening our hands with fingers in to symbolize a full church was the goal while an empty church was a sad church, at least that’s what I was taught. However, through the years, I can’t help but think of the Great Commission in Matthew 28, “Go into all the world…” the end result of the church was intended to be more than a full building.
Here’s a different perspective that might give your church a different view of our core calling…

Jesus said, “Go…”

1 John 3:1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.   

My friend, Etta Britt, tells a wonderful story of how she claimed her worth in a high school world that challenged her value on a regular basis. The story is from her book Backroads and Spotlights,

   We had PE, physical education classes back then as well. We had to “dress out” everyday. It was a lovely outfit. Blue shorts, a gray t-shirt, tall athletic socks, and tennis shoes. I enjoyed it though. We got to climb ropes, jump on trampolines, walk on the balance beams, and do calisthenics.   After class, all the girls would go to our locker room to change. I would start playing the schools fight song on the lockers as if they were a set of drums. The girls would join in and we’d sing at the top of our lungs. There was one group of girls that didn’t care for me though. I don’t know what I did to make them hate me. Maybe it was because I loved to sing and dance and laugh a lot and that got on their nerves. Maybe I was just annoying. One day I got wind that they were plotting to embarrass me. They planned to wait until I was fully dressed, grab me and throw me into the shower. I was very upset about the news and went home and told my mother. The next morning, Mama handed me a bag. She said, “Melissa, here’s what I want you to do. I have put a change of clothes in this bag. After class, put the clothes you are wearing now back on. When you see the girls coming toward you, run into the shower room, stand under the shower and turn it on yourself.” I couldn’t believe my mother was actually telling me to get into the shower with my clothes on, so I asked her why she wanted me to do this. She told me that if I did it myself, the girls would be powerless and would then leave me alone. After class, I went to the locker room and got dressed. I played the fight song on the lockers as usual and carried on my business acting as if nothing was going on. I looked up and saw them coming. Four girls with evil in their eyes. I turned around and started walking toward the shower room. As the pace picked up behind me, I sprinted into the room and jumped under one of the shower heads. I turned on the water and let it drip down my head and onto my clothes. I then looked at the girls with a big smile and waved at them. They were stopped in their tracks and stunned. Just like my mother said, they were powerless. They turned around and left. I got out, got dressed in my fresh clothes, brushed my hair and left the locker room never to be bothered by them again.

(Click on the book cover to read more.)

To help you live this liberation, a Britt theme song of love and grace from God…

I’m so glad we have A.A. meetings in our church. Their presence reminds me of who and how we should be as a church community. Here is a reflection from Frederick Buechner on what makes A.A. a shining model of what churches might become when (and if) we grow up.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS or A.A. is the name of a group of men and women who acknowledge that addiction to alcohol is ruining their lives. Their purpose in coming together is to give it up and help others do the same. They realize they can’t pull this off by themselves. They believe they need each other, and they believe they need God. The ones who aren’t so sure about God speak instead of their Higher Power.
When they first start talking at a meeting, they introduce themselves by saying, “I am John. I am an alcoholic,” “I am Mary. I am an alcoholic,” to which the rest of the group answers each time in unison, “Hi, John,” “Hi, Mary.” They are apt to end with the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. Apart from that they have no ritual. They have no hierarchy. They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no buildings of their own, they meet wherever they can.
Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories with the candor that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong and how day by day they are trying to go right. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes one of them will take special responsibility for another—to be available at any hour of day or night if the need arises. There’s not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made.
You can’t help thinking that something like this is what the Church is meant to be and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous. “I can will what is right but I cannot do it,” is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19).
“I am me. I am a sinner.”
“Hi, you.”
Hi, every Sadie and Sal. Hi, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. It is the forgiveness of sins, of course. It is what the Church is all about.
No matter what far place alcoholics end up in, either in this country or virtually anywhere else, they know that there will be an A.A. meeting nearby to go to and that at that meeting they will find strangers who are not strangers to help and to heal, to listen to the truth and to tell it. That is what the Body of Christ is all about.
Would it ever occur to Christians in a far place to turn to a church nearby in hope of finding the same? Would they find it? If not, you wonder what is so Big about the Church’s Business.

– Originally published in Whistling in the Dark

Additional Resources for Reflection:

12 STEPPING SONGS

PARABLE OF THE BIG BOOK