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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| Cleaning out his closet, Starla found three chess pieces; queen, rook, and knight, all carved of black marble. "Why a rook and not a castle? Makes me think of birds." Carefully, she put the pieces on the bureau, beside her mother’s wooden lamp with a pale pink nineteen fifties shade. Over the years, she faithfully dusted the trio, sometimes wondering why. One Christmas, she received a candle from a friend. Lighting the candle to honor this event or that hope, she arranged the pieces around the candle: "A pleasant arrangement." As time passed and the candle burned away the chess pieces seemed more and more like sentinels. With age came losses, friends, family, health. Her doctor referred her to the nursing home. She knew she would never go home. The chess pieces went with her. Sometimes, an aide would ask about them. She would say “They have been with me a long time,” moving them closer to her. When, finally, the end came, her caregivers found the chess pieces; the queen in Starla’s right hand; rook and knight in her left. No one came for her. The nursing home people, the doctor, and the funeral director decided to leave the pieces in her hands on her way to the crematorium. They gave specific instructions. When her remains returned, the marble chess pieces, lay intact on top of her soft, grey ashes. After the nursing home manager did as Starla had asked with her ashes, she placed the chess pieces on her shelf and dusted them faithfully, sometimes wondering why. |
| Malachi 4: 1-2a. *See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. After my initial reading, I wrote my first thoughts. I imagined how it would sound to a child of 10 or 12: In the night, a flash kindles a fire, a burning bed fueled by dread of being found out. Ruthie dreamed she awakened to charred stumps for legs and a future of torment. After all, isn’t that what the Bible said? “The arrogant and evildoers will be stubble..." She was still a child and already, she was doomed. She had been arrogant. She had demanded that her friends follow her rules. She told them she knew rules they weren’t following. They told her they didn’t like those rules and if she didn’t stop, they wouldn’t play. She stood her ground, and they all left her alone. Each of her friends had gone a different way and had not stayed together after the argument. They each remembered the incident too. For some reason, it left them feeling confused and uncomfortable. They had abandoned their friend. They had ended what had been a very good day playing together and had ended it in anger. The next day in Sunday School, Ruthie brought it up and they discussed the problem with their teacher. Ruthie shared about her problem with the passage from Malachi. They read the passage together and the teacher advised the students to look up some of the words in the passage. Definitions: Arrogance – overbearing pride; exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner 2: showing an offensive attitude of superiority Righteousness – acting in accord with divine or moral law: free from guilt or sin 2a: morally right or justifiable b: arising from an outraged sense of justice or morality Revere – to show devoted deferential honor to or regard as worthy of great honor Let us leave the class discussion as we take a look at the context in which the book of Malachi was written. The first thing I noticed was its location in the Bible. It is the last book of the Old Testament. It is the last of the collection called “the minor prophets.” I quote Ingrid E. Lilly who writes in the Women’s Bible Commentary, “With Malachi, we enter a world of relational dynamics where love, hate, honor and shame operate to distinguish insiders from outsiders.” The book comes from Jerusalem, a small struggling city, after return from exile and the temple has been rebuilt and Jerusalem serves as the administrative center to the vast Persian Empire. The exile has disrupted traditions, rituals, and devotion to the covenant of Moses. The Malachi prophecy seeks to rejuvenate confidence and challenges the priesthood to reform. Consequently, it includes a lot of social criticism followed by a presentation of hope of God’s return to the temple. I think we can identify with the situation the people of Jerusalem faced. As the impact of globalization bringing us all into contact with people of other cultures, and as we try to include more people who were previously seen as unacceptable and redefine them as deserving the same respect as everyone else, we find ourselves in conflict. In other words, we are struggling with who is us and who is other. It seems that the responsibility to administer the Persian Empire is a bit like trying to create a sense of one from millions of immigrants from various cultures all over the globe. And then there are the rest of the eight billion people we interact with in trade and travel. We humans are pretty good at forming small, cohesive groups, but the bigger the group, the more problems appear that require attention for the enterprise to succeed. I take you back to the problem my imaginary character, Ruthie, and her friends. I feel confident that we all have experienced what Ruthie and her friends are feeling. We have all been there in one way or another and probably several times. The more important the relationships, the more painful the experience of unresolved conflict. Malachi describes the experience vividly: burning like an oven, left as stubble. Ruthie pictured it clearly in her dream. I remember a time I was in conflict with a family member that felt like that. It was so bad, I thought healing would be impossible. My father said to me “I remember that happening with my sisters.” I found that very helpful because I knew them to love each other. Malachi creates the painful scenario, then offers this: “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” In the next paragraph, he goes back into his imagery of the wicked being stomped on and becoming ashes. This is confusing. Are we supposed to stomp on people who disagree with us so that we can be redeemed? I certainly don’t want that to be the case. I don’t want to stomp on anyone even when we disagree. However, I have been known to fly into a rage, to yell, and to stalk away from someone who doesn’t agree. Then I feel like the lowest piece of rotted plant in the compost heap. I have trouble finding hope of ever feeling okay again. The thing I feel like stomping on is my anger, my rage, my decision to walk away. The thing I want rid of is my own behavior. I am the person who is not faithful. The other person was never my issue. Something that happened between us triggered my internal turmoil and I want it to be theirs so I can leave it behind like the kids who left the game thinking the problem was Ruthie’s behavior. As it has happened so many times in my life, once I see that the problem I need to deal with is inside me, I start to feel some hope that I can heal. I can grab hold of hope and weave it into my thinking and emotions to settle myself and face the problem with resolve. It never happens that the healing of that incident prevents all future incidents. Don’t you agree? Don’t you just wish it would? How nice it would be if I could resolve a disagreement with someone and never disagree with them again. How happy this world would be if… Wait a minute. I am doing it again. I am saying the world is my problem. When Jesus faced crucifixion, he didn’t say the Romans or the Jews were his problem. When he prayed in Gethsemane for God to “take this cup from me,” it seems clear to me that his struggle was internal. And so it is that Malachi says a lack of faith disrupts relationships and faith brings us together. Let us get back to the Sunday school class with Ruthie and her friends. Let us imagine together that after these children tell their story to their Sunday School teacher and she listens carefully, she tells them what she has seen and heard in their story that represent faith. She asks them how they might draw on their faith to solve the problem. What would they do? How would they organize what they want to do? What do you bet that by this time the children are relaxed with each other and ready to talk rather than fighting? I can tell you it really does happen that way, at least with people who want to remain friends. When people are steeped in “self-righteousness” fueled by fear, separations can become so uncomfortable that they seem unresolvable. That is where a third party becomes a resource: a third party with faith, who is invested in growing seeds of faith in others. I think that is what Malachi wants us to do. I think that is what Christ did. I think that is what the Holy Spirit will help us do. All we need is to ask each other to listen as Jesus would listen, without arrogance, but from a place of righteousness and faith. We need to ask ourselves to listen in the same way to ourselves as well as others. So, let us listen to Malachi one more time and think about the whole passage rather than one line without the other. “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.” May this lesson open our hearts to your gifts, oh Lord, and to each other. Amen |
| BOOK Jackson, Richard and Robert Vivian, Traversings, Anchor and Plume, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2016. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to write creatively back and forth with someone for a year or so, not sharing news, but just sending each other poetic ruminations. Richard Jackson and Robert Vivian did just that and turned it into a book. They are quite different from each other. Richard Jackson sees concrete details around him and wonders about the nature of these things. He gives voice to his environment in a way that helps the reader attach to the experience R. Jackson describes. Robert Vivian writes more often from somewhere in the spiritual realm or the realm of imagination. The reader gets to sail in whatever direction R. Vivian has chosen for himself. Despite these differences, the work, which consists of pages alternating between the two writers, has them clearly playing off each other, taking the core idea or image from the previous work of the other. Richard Jackson gives agency to nature: "The early mountain snow creates a fresh canvas where each creature will write its own new story." Later in the same piece, "Our words are probes that will never reach that receding edge of stardust, but we write them anyway, not to escape whatever fearful stories the snow will record, but because, like the mockingbird flinging itself again and again against the glass of this invisible window, we want to believe there's another world beyond the frayed edges of this one." and it is quite true that I want to believe in the world described by these two creative men in their distinct ways. Reading the book makes this possible. Robert Vivian responds to the quote above: "How many ache and never find home but look for it in a string of words, a hum or melody, a moan that would be king or queen in the valley of the little birds." These prose poems celebrate the life of communication, of thriving in words that bring the reader a world that sings, that thrives, and invests in our happiness without even trying. I loved this book and read it slowly, going back over each few pages before moving ahead. I have been a fan of Richard Jackson for some time and always read his work this way. This is my first extended exposure to Robert Vivian. The reading and re-reading approach works equally well with his writing style. I encourage you to read this, or anything by these gifted artists. |
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