Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Perfect Fear Casts Out Love (& Common Sense).

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Jesus assured his followers that, “perfect love casts out fear.” The outcry against Syrian refugees brings to mind, “perfect fear casts out common sense as well as love.”

Living things instinctively view the “different” as potential threat. While, mistrust is in many cases warranted, human beings, at our best, are not merely instinctual, but seek by responding to, as Abraham Lincoln once said, the angels of our better natures form a community worthy of our place in creation.

Such union is always in jeopardy, as anxiety tempts us to regress, operating solely by instinctual, automatic unthinking, response. The challenges of this present time require thoughtful reflection which instinct cannot do. Since 9/11, terror is personal and local. Anxiety is paralyzing and never far from us. There are many things to fear. What we must do is not become our fear!

Syrians refugees now ask for entrance and solace among us. Though we are a nation of immigrants, fear of strangers, motivated by agendas that do us no credit, tempt us again. We are told that the wicked might slip in

painting by Anna Shukeylo

among the refugees. That is likely, however, clear thinking advises us that rejecting these in need arms our enemy more than protects us. These are the very people who have paid the most to these killers. Let us embrace them as the friends they can be. They are not our enemies.

In this Thanksgiving week, let us hold fast the values that raise us above instinct, while employing thoughtful vigilance in guarding all we hold dear. We are better defended by thoughtful response than fearful reactivity.

In hope, in spite of the facts.

©John W. Sewell
Rector, Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee

RELIGION IS HARD-WIRED IN HUMANITY

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Gertrud Mueller Nelson

Gertrud Mueller Nelson

There are practices that appear to cross all religious systems and are near universal means for spiritual formation. Prayer is a human enterprise limited to no one religious tradition. Prayer is universal and even how one prays is widely similar. Now in these days a curious phenomenon has appeared. the secular rationalist and dismissive secular American. has begun to unconsciously fashion faux ancient practices. I got my first cue from Gertrude Muller Nelson in her book, TO DANCE WITH GOD..

SHE WROTE “WHEN THE CHURCH GAVE UP FASTING THE CULTURE TOOK UP DIETING.”

1. What is a diet, but a soulless fast? Now, consider the ancient practices with a corresponding secular invention.

2. What is a vacation but a soulless pilgrimage without purpose or focus. It is small wonder that people return home more exhausted than before. A pilgrimage is a journey to the holy, while a vacation is avoidance of the self.

To Dance with God - Gertrud Muller Nelson3. What the Liturgical Year is the practice of faith, Civil Religion is to the culture. In the eyes of the ignorant they are the same, sharing Christian holy days. Think of it this way. Music in the West uses the same notes for all compositions. The notes sound the same even though as they are played in different keys. The culture rather likes the Baby Jesus (so long as he never grows up enough to meddle) and Easter is there but the focus is on bunnies and Spring rites. July 4th and President’s Day pass for saint’s days, and the flag, that civil totem is equated, even in the minds of some Christians, with the Cross. I love my country and I keep the flag as far from the altar as possible.

4. While constant prayer is a posture of faith, the call to continual communion with the Holy, the culture constructed a continual litter of stimulus important to nobody but forwarded by somebody to everybody with red-flagged emails, all caps, demanding instant access.

5. Tithing, the re-gifting of some of the abundance we have received from God is an act of faithful gratitude. April 15th and taxes are the shadow of the economy of heaven. If tithing were not tax-deductible would it long endure?

6. The Sacred Meal of the Eucharist has as its counterpoint Thanksgiving, that yearly Festival of Civil Religion. It is wonderful in its way, has vague Christian trappings but is firmly civil Religion.

7. Sabbath is a time but more an attitude of getting quiet before God has as its opposite: the weekend. I don’t think I need say more. One is holy and the other runs us ragged.

Only when the church discovers it own ancient practices will we have anything to offer the culture.  Until then the culture will go on making up unreasonable facsimiles of soulful practice. JWS

What did we learn at Thanksgiving that will get us Through Christmas?

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holydays

The Holy Days are coming, those occasions that by the rhythm of once a year but all our lives mark the seasons of living.  We live in a country that has the double whammy of Thanksgiving followed a month later by Christmas. We have double helpings of feasting and double visits from family. One raises our cholesterol and the other our anxiety. 

gI_SFPBookCover3Da.jpg I have learned that while the Holy Days are Holy they are not always happy.  In fact I am convinced, particularly this time of year,  that only orphans think that having a family would solve all their problems, the rest of us know better.  How to survive the Holy Days?  I suggest that you might want to read (or go back and read) Screamfree Parenting. “Ah,” you say, “It’s not my children that are the problem.”  To which I say, “Take out the word parent and put in living.”

Screamfree is a way of thinking that focuses on our own functioning rather than the functioning of others.  To prepare for the Holy Days, we might ask ourselves some of the following questions. On Thanksgiving and Christmas when families gather:

 Who will experience the most anxiety and who the least?

  • What amount of “space” is between me and the family? Am I stuck or cut-off?
  • How much energy is spent on the  “issues” of being together?
  • How do you stay “loose” in the family so that you can risk being an adult?
  • How can I plan ahead so that I know what I will do/be when the family member begins doing what he/she “always does.”
  • How can I define myself, sometimes by keeping my mouth shut?
  • How can I focus on the reasons that I love my family even while being with them?
  • Can I go into “research mode” and seek to learn from my family, resisting the temptation to give advice and fix them?

The country is anxious, states, cities, neighborhoods are anxious. How to do non-anxious-presencedeal with this anxiety during the most anxious time of the year?  As my teacher, Ed Friedman, used to say that, “consistency is only possible when we Focus on our own functioning.  Breathing in and breathing out is a good focus when anxiety rises. Getting more oxygen aids thinking and breathing may be the only thing that we can control. Stick to the facts not what we think they meant by the words they spoke. If things get more than we can take find an excuse to take a walk or visit a sick friend and then come back later. If you are out of town, hotel rooms are neutral.

Now I will see if I can take my own advice.  In addition to the national and religious holy days we also have the annual parish meeting on this coming Sunday, December 8th.  Please come and join us as we take council in this annual gathering of the parish. 

Let’s focus on the things that matter so that we are not distracted and miss them.

Peace, John+

It’s Grace + Nothing!

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Robert Farrar Capon 1925 – September 5, 2013

Anyone who knows me at all knows how much I am indebted to Robert Farrar Capon. He is the one of my spiritual heroes who taught me more about grace than anyone. Robert was RUTHLESS about grace which got him in trouble regularly, especially with good church people.   I know because I saw it happen in front of my eyes.  It was a Sunday night in Madison, Mississippi, deep behind the Magnolia Curtain. At the Chapel of the Cross, the parish I served there, we had a Lecture in Easter-tide.  Whoever was invited was  simply asked to speak to us about grace.  I learned that Father Capon was leading a retreat at the nearby Diocesan Conference Center. I called him immediately and asked if he would care to do our lecture on either end of his other engagement. He graciously agreed and now back at the ranch it was Sunday night and he was lecturing in the parish hall to at least a couple of hundred people.

He launched into a vintage set-piece, a “tirade” about grace, and said that it was “grace plus nothing!” A man in the back of the room raised his hand (I’m standing in the back of the room watching this) and right then and there asked, “Why be good?”  This fellow came to Eucharist most every Sunday but was not a member.  He and his family were from a very fundamentalist sectarian form of Christianity and though he was very attracted to what was going on in our service, afterward he beat a retreat home to accompany his wife and children to their congregation.  He was by training a lawyer and by temperament a Pharisee.  He asked his question with an edge.  Robert totally unaware (or so he let on) of the implied hostility replied, “Because it’s more fun!”  Well that sat a match to the cotton bale.  “So, you’re saying it doesn’t matter how we live,” said the trial lawyer by day and Pharisee all day and night!  “I didn’t say that,” said Capon.  “Of course it matters how you live, it just doesn’t earn you anything; Its grace plus nothing!”  That was when it happened.

Chapel of the Cross – Madison, Mississippi

The room divided about 60/40, with 60% offended beyond measure and 40% thrilled out of their minds.  I thought this is how it was when Jesus taught. If I had been beside the lake it would have been just this way.   Well, the 60% were not seen the next night at the second lecture, but the fascinating thing was that the 40% were back dragging with them whoever had been injured or offended by the righteous and for whatever reason didn’t accept or buy the Gospel.  The net effect was that the attendance was about a third to a half larger than the night before.  And this crowd heard Robert gladly.  I’m here to tell you that that weekend I saw with my own eyes how deeply offended good people can be by the preaching of the Good News, the very ones who should have glad. The other folk, on the other hand, heard clearly what they would have hoped for if they had any notion of how good the genuine Good News really was!

The gravestone of Henry Grey Vick in the churc...

The gravestone of Henry Grey Vick in the churchyard. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Robert, I know that God chuckled when he saw you coming yesterday afternoon and said, “Son, put on that apron and let’s go cook a batch of grace to use at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb. I know I made the recipe up originally but I have always enjoyed the sauce you made to go with it. Nobody could whip up a batch of grace like you.

Robert, please save me a place at the bar so I can tell the one about the time you preached behind the Magnolia Curtain.

And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!”  May light perpetual shine upon him.  JWS