BOB & CAROL & TED & THECLA

“I think of life as a cosmic joke, which keeps getting bigger all the time. But I've learned tolerance and maybe affection for the Chasidim. They are real people, who can see light in the darkest things.”

Paul Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014)

 When I think about the earliest Christians I’m inspired by their joy. They were joyful in ways that did not depend on events and circumstances. They were joyful in trials and tribulations. They wrote things like: We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. In John’s Gospel Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” In his first Epistle St. John declares, “We write these things unto you so that our joy may be complete.” St. Paul called his brothers and sisters in Philippi to be joyful, using the words ‘joy’ and ‘rejoice’ repeatedly, and famously proclaiming “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice.”

The joy of the earliest Christians was not caused by self-satisfaction over accomplishments but was simply the way that they were learning to be in Christ. They believed that they had died. They also believed that they had been born again and that the life they now lived was utterly identified with Christ. Sometimes they took on a new name as a new creature in Christ. Moreover they saw themselves as one body in Christ so much so that they held their goods in common. They saw their oneness not as some flimsy, ethereal, longed-for-yet-never-realized condition but as the fundamental reality of creation. Your early-church Bob, Carol, Ted, and Thecla understood that they were married to Christ and in Christ were one body. In chaste virginity, a Thecla, for example, was not seeking isolation but deeper fellowship. Even when she went to live in a cave she knew she was never truly alone but always moving into closer communion in the Body of Christ.

The unity consciousness of the earliest Christians was no regression to a childlike, pre-personal, oceanic feeling of oneness. They were not blurring distinctions and ignoring real contrasts in favor of a hazy, lazy, vague unwillingness to engage the world. That’s just self-protective avoidance, and avoidance is merely a veiled form of aggression which is why it turns hateful so quickly.

Attempts to manufacture such a sense of unity often are destructive of nature and tend to reduce human beings to concepts and abstractions. Only love can truly celebrate unity while not obliterating diversity. Love bears witness to unity while celebrating its own nature within all the glorious, scandalous particularity of life. We do not make unity, but simply let go of the obstacles keeping us from realizing it. Unity, like love, is the very nature of things. If we do not realize and ‘see’ the unity of life it is only because we are turned away from it to an image of our self and this makes us afraid of love because real love is self-emptying. It is joyful, though, and eternal, and it leads us to see light even in the darkest things.

DOWN MAIN STREET

Two enduring influences in my life have been Main Street in Moncton, New Brunswick, and the Petitcodiac River which runs alongside it. I am blessed to have grown up in a place where we could shop, visit City Hall, conduct business, go to the movies, enjoy a good meal, get a drink, have a haircut, be measured for a suit, do our banking, and watch the Santa Claus Parade without ever having to leave Main Street. Today the people of Moncton work diligently at maintaining a Main Street that is vibrant and alive. Because of their efforts much of what was said above is still true. In fact, it is now even a better place to go out for an evening of music and entertainment than it was in the old days. I remember a time when things did not look so promising but Monctonians decided to work purposefully at keeping Main Street as the vital heart of the city.

The fact that the residents of Moncton attend to Main Street as a center of activity speaks to their recognition of the importance of community. After all, one of the city’s oldest buildings is the Free Meeting House constructed in 1821 so that people of all faiths would have a place to pray. Moncton is a city where the Mayor and Members of Council, the Police Chief, the Fire Chief, Members of the Judiciary, and assorted other dignitaries joined residents from all walks of life to pack a large Catholic church for the funeral of a homeless man who had severe psychological disorders and crippling addictions, and who used to spend most of his winters incarcerated. I remember him from when I was a child. He was a fixture; part of the landscape; a character in a city full of them. He was written about in the newspaper by a friendly and compassionate reporter. Readers felt like they knew him. When I heard about his impressive funeral mass it surprised me for a moment, but then I thought that this was somehow typical of Moncton.

Sometimes it takes unspeakable tragedy to bring people together. Folks will remark on the uniqueness of such times and how out of character it all seems. To my mind, though, Moncton has demonstrated time and again the resolve to foster a strong sense of community that does not depend on circumstances and events, tragic or otherwise; a sense of belonging together as the tides of life come and go, both giving and taking away. It is a city shaped by a tidal river which even at its lowest never fails in its promise to rise again.

DOWN MAIN STREET

The first time that we met was down on Main Street

You said, “You got here fresh from the U. S., eh?”
You laughed at my stupid joke about your accent
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

We ate at the first place we found open for coffee
You laughed when I tried to describe a poutine râpée
You told me all your dreams for the future
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

Now surfers ride the tidal bore of the river
Where they built so many ships back in the day
Schooners and steamers would come to deliver molasses
Then ride out of town before the tide took the river away

 

Let’s do the dishes then take a walk down Main Street
To the spot where we met thirty years ago today
We’ll toast the past and smile toward the future
And watch the tide take the river away

 

© 2013 Dale Petley (Moncton)

DAD

It seems I have inherited my father’s sense of humor. My mother enjoyed a good joke, both telling one and hearing one, but she found my father’s idea of what was funny annoying. His humor was based a good deal on whimsy. I called him one day while I was watching coverage of a Papal Election on TV. I asked how he was doing:

“I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I’m answering the phone all the time.”
“Who keeps calling you?”
"The Vatican; they want me to run for Pope but I told them I won’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Not enough money in it.”

I laughed and he said, “When I told that to your mother she got mad at me.”

After New Brunswick’s Provincial Liberal Party destroyed the Conservatives by winning every single seat on election night Dad called me bright and early the next morning doing his best Connie Francis imitation as he sung: “Who’s Tory now, who’s Tory now?” I noticed a similar sense of humor in Dad’s older brother, Tom. I well recall driving around the village where he lived while he pointed out various odd looking characters old enough to be Civil War veterans and told me that they were the ‘Mayor’, the ‘Fire Chief’, and ‘Members of the Town Council’. When we returned from that drive to his home where Aunt Jackie was preparing supper he announced out of the blue that he had decided to buy a mule. He cracked me up, and I’m sure that I was laughing, smiling, or eating any time I visited Uncle Tom and Aunt Jackie.

A good example of what made Dad laugh is a story he told about his younger brother, Ern.  One day Dad and Ern were driving on New Brunswick’s Route 126 from Moncton to Harcourt. Ern was behind the wheel. Somewhere near Coal Branch he suddenly pulled the car off to the side of the road, put it in reverse, and backed up until coming to a stop where he sat looking past my father through the passenger side window. Dad turned to see what Ern was looking at and saw a man standing perfectly still in the middle of a field of hay, all alone, his hands down by his side, staring off into the distance. Ern sat there for a moment then put the car in park, got out and walked around to the front, took a deep breath and yelled: “What are you looking at?!” The man, startled, simply stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away. Ern, his mission accomplished, got back in the car and drove on. Dad laughed while he told me about this all those years later. He still found it funny.

Fathers try to do the right things for their children and say the right things to them but we children tend to remember other things. We remember that they were there for us more than what they said to us. We recall their advice and their aphorisms but we recall their voices with greater clarity. We cherish the memories of their foibles and fumbles, their humanity, and their humor, and it’s all because we love them. Happy Father’s Day!

THINKING ABOUT ETERNITY

“God don’t never change. Always will be God.” (Blind Willie Johnson.)

“No object has ever done the experience of being touched.” (Michel Henry.)

“And I’m thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me.” (Bruce Cockburn.)

The glory of the Incarnation is not that it somehow constitutes an ontological change in God but that it doesn’t. “God don’t never change.” God is Spirit and Spirit is not part of any duality. God isn’t half of anything. God is not an object of any kind and neither are we. If I have to define myself I am going to do so with reference to what is true about me eternally. Anything less, pre-ascension, seems like idolatry – trying to make eternal that which is by definition transitory. Anyway, about eternity …

1: Heaven isn’t in your future or mine. Heaven doesn’t begin at some point in time because it is not in time, although time might be included in it. This means that folks in the past, like Moses and them, were no further away from Heaven than are we, or closer. Why do I find this important? It reminds me that those I love but see no longer are as close to me as Heaven, and God.

2: If we are to inherit it then what is true of Heaven must be true of us. What is true of Heaven? When we recite the Creed we affirm our belief that Heaven means eternal life in the Communion of Saints. And so, if our ultimate destiny is eternal loving union and communion it must mean that every issue, controversy, and disagreement is transcended and overcome. Our divisions are merely temporary; hardly the sorts of things worth killing each other over. What is more, if Heaven is limitless then so are we. Jesus told us that the Kingdom of God is within us. It’s what Rumi meant when he wrote: “In this house is a treasure which the universe is too small to hold.” We feel intimations of our eternal vastness in our desire not only to survive but to keep growing. Unfortunately the materialistic mindset of our time expresses this as a sad, Cyclopean pursuit of expansion. We want more – more land, more money, and more power. In the world just now there seems to be no such concept as ‘big enough’. The problem is that we do not understand our spiritual nature. If we could remember who and what we truly are and live with a sense of boundlessness even here in the midst of the restraining confines of daily life knowing the peace and joy that belongs to eternal Spirit we would bring a wonderful and mysterious quality to this world. We would be a light to enlighten the people. We would manifest timelessness in time. We would be truly and profoundly free. We used to call this sort of thing salvation.

3: Contrary to motion pictures and popular misconceptions, Heaven doesn’t wait; it is complete, entire, and perfect. It has always been so. To put it another way, when we declare in Holy Communion that we join our voices “with all the company of Heaven,” we mean it; we’re serious. Let’s give Thomas Traherne the last word: “The contemplation of eternity maketh the soul immortal, whose glory it is, that it can see before and after its existence into endless spaces. Its sight is its presence.” (Centuries: 55.)

DEVOTION

The first time I noticed my mother’s French accent was when she spoke Latin. I heard no such accent when she spoke English. To my ears how she said things in English was simply the way words were supposed to sound.  Other people heard an accent but not me; not until one day when we were talking about the church and she recited parts of the Latin mass. (Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecatta mundi …) She remembered this from childhood. In the early1940’s her father (our pépère) gave her a tiny prayer book, 2 inches by 31/2,  which could be used to follow the services in Latin, French, and English. I still have it.

Mum participated fully in celebrations of the Holy Eucharist. She would sit as near as possible to one of the loudspeakers in hopes of hearing the readers and the officiating priest. Even though she knew the service by heart she would still have her copy of the Sunday Missal open and her reading glasses out of the case, ready to use. She listened attentively to the sermons and used to share with me some snippet of what the preacher had to say, especially if he told a story or a little joke.

Over the last several years I’ve been increasingly drawn to worship. This does not mean I’m especially intrigued by the wonders of the church. I’ve always said that being Anglican suits me because it’s just about as much religion as I can stand. I continue to have little interest in the history of liturgy and have experienced no sudden fascination with ecclesiastical architecture; no swooning over flying buttresses. When I say I’m drawn to worship I’m referring to the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, noonday prayers, and prayers said and sung at sunrise and sunset. I suppose I should say I’ve become more devotional.

When I pray it is not because I feel somehow separated from God; it reminds me that we’re never apart. When my parents were alive and I was living more than twenty-two hundred miles away I felt I was far apart from them, but when they died, so did any sense of distance.  It’s like that when I pray. I’m not attempting to communicate with a remote deity from the great beyond but am in communion with the One in whom I live and move and have my being. I realize that God is transcendent but I am also aware that transcendence doesn’t mean distance.

Believing in God, for me, means trusting God and I suppose that’s why I like the word ‘devotion.’ As well as meaning worship, devotion connotes loyalty and love. Devotion means sticking with someone through thick and thin; never leaving their side. It inspires me to be more faithful, more in tune to the present moment, and more grateful. Devotion establishes a pattern for each day and helps keep me oriented towards what is true and good and beautiful.

Gratefulness and praise are qualities of eternal Spirit and it seems like Mother Nature expresses this every morning when I listen to the birds sing before sunrise. They greet the dawn as if they are joyfully testifying to evidence of things not seen. I do not suggest the birds are praying, as such, but they do seem to have a lot to celebrate. We all do.

Happy Mother’s Day!

PASCHAL PROCLAMATION

Christ is Risen! This is the traditional Paschal Proclamation. My computer thinks it ought to be ‘Christ is raised.’ At least it’s not ‘Christ was risen.’ I’m not questioning ‘historicity.’ I’m thinking about eternity, which is what the resurrection has to do with. Christ Jesus doesn’t merely come back to history in resurrection but transcends time itself and every other created thing. The resurrection does not restore Christ to history, it restores history to Christ.

I don’t much care for Bible movies. A film is a thing I watch passively as a spectator. The word does not allow such passivity. The word requires engagement. The word calls for a dance partner and says follow me. A film seems a step removed from its subject, not closer. On the other hand there is no real distance between the word and the one who receives. A spectator may be acted upon but the word acts within.

If we are going to present the Christian faith as a motion picture then we’re going to need a suitable screen upon which to view it. I suggest mending the Veil of the Temple and projecting our images on it. Be warned, though. This won’t work with the word for the word is a lover and is not content merely to be seen but tears the veil of our soul’s inner sanctum and enters in to share himself with us, planting the seed of eternal life.

Happy Easter!

LOVE

In Plato’s ‘Symposium’ Socrates tells the story of how a priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, taught him about Love. My guess is not everyone learns of it this way.

According to Diotima, Eros/Love was conceived on a Feast of Aphrodite as a result of the coupling of the Spirit of Plenty (Poros) and the Spirit of Poverty (Penae). The Gods do not seek wisdom for they are already wise, but Aphrodite insured that her beloved Son would be a seeker. Edmund Spenser pictured it this way:

Or who alive can perfectly declare
The wondrous cradle of thine infancie,
When thy great mother Venus first thee bare,
Begot of Plenty and of Penurie,
Though elder then thine own nativitie,
And yet a chyld, renewing still thy yeares,
And yet the eldest of the heavenly peares?

(An Hymne In Honour Of Love)

As Diotima describes him, Eros/Love is not “delicate and lovely, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, in doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of heaven.” He always partakes of his Mother’s poverty and yet is also his Father’s son, the son of Resource/Plenty. “He is a mighty hunter and a master of device and artifice – at once desirous and full of wisdom, a lifelong seeker after truth.” Love, says Diotima, is “neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he will be now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and now dying, to be born again by virtue of his Father’s nature, while what he gains will always ebb away as fast. So, Love is never altogether in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between wisdom and ignorance.”

When I read Diotima’s description of Love as a tough, barefoot, lifelong seeker after truth, at once desirous and full of wisdom, I did not think of Socrates, even though he matches the description. I didn’t make the connection until later, when Alcibiades showed up and spoke of his exploits with Socrates during wartime in the field of battle. Not only did Socrates acquit himself with honor and valor, his bravery made enemy soldiers leery of him. This fact helped him save the life of Alcibiades when the latter was injured. Socrates not only enabled Alcibiades to escape with his life but also retrieved his armor. We’re told that during the winter months of the military campaign Socrates continued to dress in the same simple cloak he always wore (and apparently slept in), and continued to go barefoot as he always did without the slightest complaint. When rations were scarce and they went hungry, no one put a cheerier face on things than Socrates. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for food, for when there was something to eat he enjoyed it right along with the rest of the soldiers, but it just seemed that whatever life sent his way he accepted with remarkable equanimity, so much so, he became a source of amazement to those around him. I suppose they wondered why he was so happy.

Diotima says, “Love is a lover of wisdom, and, being such, he is placed between wisdom and ignorance – for which his parentage also is responsible, in that his Father is full of wisdom and resource, while his Mother is devoid of either.” Philosophy is for lovers, and for Plato no one embodies this more than Socrates. He loves wisdom, and in wisdom he knows that he does not know. He does not think he knows the truth when he does not. And so, Socrates is at once rich and poor, always midway between wisdom and ignorance.

The word ‘pharmakos’ is a loaded term for the Greeks. In Ancient Greece it referred to a cleansing sacrifice made on the 1^st Day of Thargelia, a festival of Apollo observed each year in Athens. The pharmakos was similar to a scapegoat. A condemned prisoner was led outside the city and beaten to death. All the misdeeds, mistakes, sins, and grievances of the previous year were symbolically removed from the city with the pharmakos. The 2^nd Day of Thargelia was a joyful occasion, a time of freshness to celebrate the newness of life as games were played, songs were sung, and children recited the poetry they had learned.

‘Pharmakos’ (pharmakon) also referred to a recipe for a medicine in which a small amount of what is harming us is used to make us well. Jews, Christians, and Muslims might think of Moses holding up the bronze image of a serpent in the wilderness so that those bitten by serpents could be healed by looking at what hurt them. Socrates was a kind of pharmakon in that he used the arts of the sophists against them to demonstrate the inherent weakness and fault of their position. He skillfully used an exact amount of what was making Athens sick to cure her, or more precisely, to allow the body/politic to heal herself. It was nothing if not a labor of love.

Philosophy is not the acquisition of wisdom but the love of wisdom. Plato had such a deep and profound understanding of this he chose to write in dialogue form. Approaching wisdom through dialogue the way Socrates and his interlocutors did is to be involved with each other intimately. Most of us find it less threatening to toss opinions back and forth, but coming together as one in order to move through (dia) the words (logos) of an argument in order to arrive at a mutual understanding requires a level of unity appropriate to lovers. To begin again from a place of not knowing is to be naked and exposed in one’s ignorance, open to the exploring questions of our fellow lovers of wisdom. All of this takes a good deal of trust, and gentleness. It is the stuff of deep spiritual communion.

Love is why Socrates was utterly content as well as a tireless seeker (one might even say a mighty hunter) after wisdom. Love is always full and always emptying itself for its beloved. I’m reminded of the Invocation of the Isha Upanishad: “Fullness comes from fullness. When fullness is taken from fullness, Fullness still remains.” Eros loves not because he is in want; he wants because he loves. Eros loves because it is his nature to love. He is always full and always emptying himself, spending himself into poverty for his beloved only to be raised again according to his Father’s nature.

It was love which allowed Socrates to accept fate as he did. Trying heroically to accept God’s will in a sort of ‘Amor fati’ without self-emptying love is likely to end in suicidal despair. We need the kind of love with which we can see through our selves. It is why Socrates said that Philosophy – the love of wisdom – is about learning to die.

According to Diogenes, citing Apollodorus, Socrates was born on the 1^st Day of Thargelia, the day of cleansing when the sacrificial victim was taken from the city. Plato was born on the 2^nd Day of the Festival, the time for celebration and renewal. These philosophers were true lovers of wisdom, and in love they were led to seek a vision of “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, and which neither flowers nor fades away.”