Here at Trinity we are exploring the interaction between Religion and Violence.

Here is a blurb from the conference: “While people of faith raise prayers for peace, stories of religiously fueled violence fill the news. Critics question whether the world can afford to tolerate a force as destructive as religion. Is violence an inescapable result of religious commitment, or is it a distortion, a human projection on a God in whom there is no violence? Is it the sole province of extremists, or do the roots of conflict touch all persons of faith?”

I love the fact that I am a part of an institution that is able to provide a forum to ask these questions. Glad that Trinity has now put itself at odds with the US government by daring to give a voice to a Muslim professor whom the US will not grant a visa. And I am glad that for the next three days Jews, Christians and Muslims will face up to the fact that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Many followers of these three religions continue to promote, practice and preach violence. But, thanks be to God, these three religions have also provided examples of people who have resisted violence and evil and have pointed to the God of peace and unconditional love.

We celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Recent events in America show an increase in hate crimes, racial profiling, racial harassment, and xenophobia – not to mention religious intolerance.

Do you know the most organized enemies of Dr. King were religious people? Do you know that when Dr. King spoke out against the war and racial injustice people thought he was unpatriotic and unchristian?

We honor this great man, because he not only rose above racial divisions, but sought to break down the religious divide in America. He gave his life to free religion and society from violence. His words still invite us to “pursue a path of non-violence and to follow the moral conscience,” because we belong to “an inescapable network of mutuality.”

Listen to these prophetic words of his about religion and the church:

“I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen…[but] I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?””

Who are we? And who is our God?

Here is an excerpt from Carolyn Forche called, The Angel of Death

“For if Hiroshima in the morning, after the bomb has fallen,
is like a dream, one must ask whose dream it is. {1}
Must understand how not to speak would carry it with us.
With bones put into rice bowls.
While the baby crawled over its dead mother seeking milk.
Muga-muchu {2}: without self, without center. Thrown up in the sky by a wind.
The way back is lost, the one obsession.
The worst is over.
The worst is yet to come.”

Part of what we are doing at this Conference is to hope that the best of all religions is yet to come. Amen.

I read these lines from a poem by John Fox and knew immediately that I had to share it with you. It is called When Someone Deeply Listens to You.

When somebody deeply listens to you
It is like holding out a dented cup
You’ve had since childhood
And watching it fill up with
Cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
You are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
You are loved.

We live in a world where everybody is listening and nobody is listening. Everybody has an ipod; by the way, I don’t have one. It seems that music is now a way so that people do not have to listen to each other. How would the world change if we were as attentive about listening to each other as we listen to our music? Jesus said love your neighbor and love your enemy; I say to you, listen to your neighbor and listen to your enemy.

See you next time. Let me know what you think. Jah Guide.

Family: The holidays bring family together and at some times there is the unpleasant reality that family is work. Yes, family requires a lot of work, work that begins with the letter L. A friend of mine used to say that you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your family. I say that since you can’t pick them you might as well try to love them. Here is some food for thought, and it is not just pop psychology: the things you find annoying in your family members or the things you hate reside in you. Another way of saying that is that what you don’t like is the unresolved stuff in you.

These days my thoughts center on the Holy Family. I don’t think there is any other family story in which the father says absolutely nothing. In the story of the Holy Family, we meet Joseph who says nothing. A lot happens to him, he says nothing. And then to add insult to injury, he just fades off the scene.

For me, Joseph is the most undervalued character in the Christmas and Christian story. What a man.

Take a look at Mary Oliver's poem "A Visitor." The poem comes from her wonderful book, Dream Work. Maybe this poem says something of the role of fathers in children's lives?

Let me know what you think:

A Visitor

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

See you next time. Let me know what you think. Jah Guide.

Here’s a poem from Sharon Mollerus I thought you might like:

Doubt never shoved
Anyone out of bed in the morning:
At the least, it must be suspended
To complete the project. That’s its
Best answer – provisional. Meanwhile,
It slithers at the windows, a coating
Of gray fog that fades bright bleeding
Reds and blinding greens to rust brown
And seasick marine.

I have been thinking about the power of “doubt” lately. I know, I know, we live in a culture and we are in a religion that puts a lot of emphasis on believing. Christmas is a time to believe, suspend imagination, suspend facts and believe or is it really a time to face the doubt.

On closer examination of the Christmas stories, we see a lot of doubts, a lot of questions. True, questions and doubts are two different things though they sometimes show up at the same time.

What role does doubt play in your belief system? What role does doubt play in your day to day experience of life?

Here is a challenge for 2008; stay with your doubts. Embrace your doubts and see what happens.

Back to Sharon:

This is no ordinary
Storm we are stuck in, standing in such
An unseaworthy boat; we are about to
Founder and fall out. Wring some last
Hope from your salt-soaked kerchief,
For I won’t be the first to stop bailing
Us out. Doubt is neither pillow nor
Preserves. It doesn’t stock
The pantry or people
One’s bed.

May God meet your doubts somehow.

Here’s a poem from Sharon Mollerus I thought you might like:

Doubt never shoved
Anyone out of bed in the morning:
At the least, it must be suspended
To complete the project. That’s its
Best answer – provisional. Meanwhile,
It slithers at the windows, a coating
Of gray fog that fades bright bleeding
Reds and blinding greens to rust brown
And seasick marine.

I have been thinking about the power of “doubt” lately. I know, I know, we live in a culture and we are in a religion that puts a lot of emphasis on believing. Christmas is a time to believe, suspend imagination, suspend facts and believe or is it really a time to face the doubt.

On closer examination of the Christmas stories, we see a lot of doubts, a lot of questions. True, questions and doubts are two different things though they sometimes show up at the same time.

What role does doubt play in your belief system? What role does doubt play in your day to day experience of life?

Here is a challenge for 2008; stay with your doubts. Embrace your doubts and see what happens.

Back to Sharon:

This is no ordinary
Storm we are stuck in, standing in such
An unseaworthy boat; we are about to
Founder and fall out. Wring some last
Hope from your salt-soaked kerchief,
For I won’t be the first to stop bailing
Us out. Doubt is neither pillow nor
Preserves. It doesn’t stock
The pantry or people
One’s bed.

May God meet your doubts somehow.

The kings will lose your old address.

No star will flare up to impress.

The ear may yield, under duress,

To blizzard’s nagging roar.

The shadow’s falling off your back…

Joseph Brodsky in the poem aptly titled, January 1, 1965, captures the essence of the Christmas season and the New Year. Time passes, sometimes in more subtle and uneventful ways than we would wish. Advent, Christmas, the New Year and the whole of life will have more meaning if we are attentive and grateful.

Most of us are probably digging out from all the wrappings. Many of us feel that the gift we wanted did not come. Put it this way, few of us responded the way our children did – that childlike excitement is no longer there. Or maybe it was.

What is the gift you seek? What present will make your life more meaningful?

Here’s Brodsky, again:

And staring up where no cloud drifts

Because your sock’s devoid of gifts

You’ll understand this thrift: it fits

Your age; its not a slight.

It is too late for some breakthrough,

For miracles, for Santa’s crew.

And suddenly you’ll realize that you

Yourself are a gift outright.

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

These days, everybody is challenging us to be good, our best, and downright excellence. If we listen carefully, we realize that there is a voice within us urging us – arguing with us – to be our best, to be great.

In the midst of all the Advent activities, I give you this iconoclastic poem: You do not have to be good. I think this is truly good news and I am not going to apologize for it. You do not have to be good. Mary Oliver gets this right and I wonder how long it will take all of us human beings to recognize that it is not about our goodness, it is all about the goodness of God.

For me the spiritual life and Christmas is about God being good to us – unless, God does not have to be good either. Let me close with the last lines of “Wild Geese”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,

the meadowlarks, the sky, the world’s whole dream

remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,

helpless, both of them part of me:

'Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.'(from the poem Vocation)

William Stafford, you the Man!

What is your job? Do you like your job? What would be your dream job? How does your job contribute to what the world is trying to be?

[Please, take some time to answer the question.]

In this poem called Vocation, Stafford points to a greater truth about the call of each individual; it is connected to the dream of the world. You see, I believe most of us seek to live our own dreams. We want to be all that we can be for us. In a line from Being a Person, Stafford writes: “Suddenly this dream you are having matches/ everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.”

What is the world trying to be? Imagine that: the world has desires, the world has hope and the world has a calling? What is the Middle East trying to be? What is the continent of Africa trying to be? What is America trying to be?

As some of you know, I am married and we have a five year old son. Once I read this poem, I suddenly realized that I have gotten it all wrong, all wrong. Everything changes when I ask myself what is my wife trying to be and what is my son trying to be? All this I ask in the context of the world…

So there you have it: a vocation is always about the world. Check in with the world before you wreck the world. Jah Rastafari. Next time: Mary Oliver.

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke

the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.

Let any season that wants to come here make its own

call. After that sound goes away wait.

These are the words of the poet William Stafford in a poem entitled “Being a Person.”

If you were to ask me what is the hardest thing to do in life I would say it is to be a person. To be a person, without a doubt, stands as the most difficult thing in life. Be a black person. Be a white person. Be an Asian. Be a Native American. Be a Latino. Be a foreigner. Be a gay person. Be a Republican. Be a Democrat. Be a Christian. Be a Jew. Be a Muslim.

Being a person is the hardest thing in the world. If you doubt that, then I invite you to be a person. Try it for a day.

There is an African American saying: Be who you is; because if you is who you ain’t, you ain’t who you is.

I suspect that all God and life require of us is that we be the person we were created to be: not to get distracted, not to get attached to things or the wrong people, but just to be the person we were created to be.

Stanford ends the poem with these two lines:

How you stand here is important. How you

listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

Too often I find that I take a stance forgetting that it is more important “how” I stand than where or with what I stand. Tammy Wynette’s words come to mind: Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. I say, it is true, because it is the hardest thing to be a person.

I don’t think I can offer you any easy answer. I could try, but I will refrain.

In the fullness of time being a person comes from breathing right now. Selah. Next blog: More on William Stafford

"Rise up this morning
Smiled with the rising sun
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singing sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true
Saying
'Don't worry about a thing
Cause every little thing’s gonna be all right...''"

It gives me the greatest and highest pleasure to open my blog with these eternal and priceless words of the psalmist and prophet the Honorable Robert Nesta Marley, Bob Marley to most of the world.

In another one of his songs, Bob Marley wailed: So much trouble in the world… We do live in troubled times, but I am convinced that what we need to hear more than ever is that still small voice that reminds us that "every little thing’s gonna be all right."

These poetic words are a drumbeat refrain to the book of Genesis: and God saw that it was good.

To believe and know that it is all good is the greatest good. For me, it is this belief and this hope that has kept humanity alive and will for years and years to come.
I invite you to sit with another melodious rendition coming from the 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich:

All shall be well
And all shall be well
And all manner of things shall be well

And if as if to prove the importance of these words listen to T.S. Eliot (whom I believe is a 20th century mystic):

We shall not cease from exploration
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Here is where things get complicated: we are called as roses to trust the fire. Only when we roses trust the fire, only then will all be well and everything all right.

Behold the economy, the war, the crime, the struggle, the divisions, the hurt, the misunderstanding, the sin, the brokenness and the hurt…Behold the promise, behold the prophecy: every thing will be all right.

In the fullness of time all shall know that everything, every little thing is gonna be all right. Selah. Next blog: the poetry of William Stafford.