A Prophetic Witness to Intimate Partner Violence

(Image credit)

by Tiffany Curtis, the Chaplaincy's Micah Fellow 

This month we began a new practice of selecting a monthly theme towards which to specially direct our prayer and offering. This has taken shape by adding a line to our weekly prayers of intercession about this month's issue of concern, and by giving our collection from the weekly Eucharist service to a specific organization that works to address said concern. 

In October, we focused on the theme of domestic violence (October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month), and will be contributing to Safe Havens, "an interfaith partnership against domestic violence" founded in 1991 "in response to all the families and youth who reach out to their faith leaders for help."

This organization works in faith communities to help train lay and clergy leaders around the particular needs of people who experience family, relationship, intimate, and sexual violence, including children, men, women, the elderly, couples and families, believing that "it is critical that faith community leaders engage in prevention, earlier intervention, accountability, and social change."

Too often abuse and violence have been wittingly or unwittingly perpetuated in faith communities. Clergy abuse people in their communities or fail to adequately support those who find themselves in abusive relationships. Intimate violence in churches, homes, schools, and workplaces affects everyone, regardless of gender, socioeconomic background, income, race, ability, age or sexual expression. As people of faith we are called to stand with those who are made vulnerable by their circumstances. Those people who are most vulnerable and hurting are sometimes ourselves or our dearest companions, family, and friends. The type of relationality that is modeled by the traditions of Christianity is a mutual, life-giving love, not one of violence, cohersion, dehumanization, or power. 

These are the words we have been lifting up together this month, and we invite you into this prayer with us: 

Comfort and strengthen especially those who find themselves in relationships that are unsafe, lack respect, or are marked by abuse of any kind; surround them with your loving care, and protect them from every danger.

A New Anglican Reads Old Things: "The smallest details of this world"

The first story in Susan Cooper's series

Emily Garcia was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy. In this column she will take a piece of “old” (or older) literature as a starting point for an informal reflection on the religious life.

“Whoever possesses strongly this sense [of the divine] comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order.”

 -William James, from The Varieties of Religions Experience, in Lectures XIV and XV: “The Value of Saintliness." 

            Last year on Halloween, I was bundled up in the warm and welcoming Guiliano house for a party, chatting with Zack (our previous Kellogg Fellow) about Susan Cooper’s series, The Dark is Rising. Since I work with kids in kindergarten through twelfth grade, I have an excuse to bury myself in drama, comedy, and everything in between: talking animals, cooties, notes in the hallway, thieves, and curses.

But even without that excuse, I would very happily find time to read my favorite type of children’s novel: the adventure story. Even saying the word “adventure” gives me goose-bumps. My first experience of adventure was surely the tale of Pooh and Piglet hunting a heffalump—I hid under the covers as Mom read it to me. Later, I skipped my homework to see what Cimorene would do in Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest, or what trouble Terence and Sir Gawain would get into in The Squire’s Tale.

These stories held my attention and imagination, but once I read The Chronicles of Narnia, everything changed. This was a different sort of story—the stakes were higher, the circumstances more strange, the emotions and tension at a different pitch. Later, I read The Hobbit, and far later, The Ring Trilogy. And in junior high, I found Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and its companions. Just last year, one of my fifth-grade students was reading Over Sea, Under Stone, the first of Susan Cooper’s series. I was captivated, and found my mind returning to Will and the children at all points of the day.

            So at that Halloween party last year, I was so happy to find that Zack (a fellow book nerd and a serious academic) was also a fan of adventure. Both of us had felt their impact on our early lives and on our current imaginative lives, and through this, they had certainly impacted our lives as Christians. Zack said something then which has stuck with me: that these stories are especially exciting and valuable for kids, because they stage the drama of the Christian life. Every small choice the protagonist makes could be part of the action on a grand scale.

Even if the characters are unaware of it, the young reader knows that there is a larger mechanism—magnificent and terrifying—operating behind the most banal moments. Bilbo Baggins picks something up in a cave; Will Stanton can’t decide whether or not to put on his belt; Terence chooses a cup to drink out of; Lyra sneaks into a cupboard instead of sneaking out of the room—each of these little turning points holds the weight of the whole story. This is what set those novels apart from my earlier books: a sense of urgency, real and serious.

I was happy to see that William James knows what this is like! The quote above is from his analysis of “the saintly type of character,” a sensitive and attentive person who come “naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order.” 

For many of us, this is easy to forget. We forget that there is an urgency to every decision, because the magnificent presence behind every banal moment is God himself. God cares how we speak to people, how we spend our time, which relationships we pursue, and what we want to do with our lives. Our smallest decisions are part of the grand order, and the Christian life is, in fact, a grand adventure.

Disability and Grace: The Prophetic Witness of the Vulnerable

“. . . as one from whom others hide their faces, he was despised,
and we held him of no account.” Isaiah 53:3

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Christ Church Cambridge
October 21, 2012 – Pentecost XXI

In August, just before the academic term started up again, my brother and his family traveled north from their home in Frederick, Maryland, to stay with Pat and me for a short vacation. One of the highlights of that visit was that we were able to celebrate the birthday of my nephew, Quinn, who turned twelve that week. Quinn is a lovely little boy who was born with a complex of disabilities – some genetic, some the result of trauma during birth. Quinn has impaired cognitive skills and a limited command of language; he struggles in regulating his behavior, his attention, and his emotional life; and he can be prone to obsess over things that might seem inconsequential to those around him. Quinn can also brighten up a room with his laugh, or make you feel instantly loved by unexpectedly planting a kiss on your cheek, or reveal a truth by blurting out in his own special language an insight that everyone else is too polite or too afraid to speak.

Every time I am around my brother and his family I marvel at the ways in which they have adjusted their lives to make room for Quinn and to accommodate the quirks of his way of being. They practice a patience and gentleness with him that is extraordinary, and Quinn, in turn, often opens their eyes to a wonder in the world that they otherwise might miss. From watching my brother and his wife raise Quinn, I have learned that what he and other disabled children deserve is not pity, so much as an open-hearted willingness to set aside our able-bodied and able-minded norms to see and feel the world as they do. I do not for a minute want to minimize the heartache and pain that parents of disabled children experience as they cope with the differences that such children present, but I also would not want to overlook the grace and beauty and strength that so often is revealed in human disability. Indeed, I am convinced that living open-heartedly with disabled persons can teach profound lessons about the relationship between human vulnerability and God’s love, while at the same time challenging our most basic assumptions about what it means to be able-bodied or able-minded in the eyes of God.

Today’s text from Isaiah 53, which is part of the famous ‘song of the suffering servant,’ helps us to make some of these connections. The song, which actually begins at the end of chapter 52, is a darkly mysterious portrayal of a messianic figure who, Isaiah tells us, God will ultimately “exalt and lift up” (52:13), but who for now is “marred” in his appearance “beyond human semblance” (52:14), and who has a “form beyond that of mortals” such that he “shall startle many nations.”  (52:14-15). This new messiah, Isaiah prophesies, will not be a reprise of the Davidic warrior-king. There will be nothing “majestic” about him; nor will there be anything “in his appearance that we should desire him.” (53:2).  Rather, he will be a man of suffering, “acquainted with infirmity” (53:3), who will be “despised” and “rejected” “as one from whom others hide their faces.” (53:3). He will bear “our infirmities” and carry “our diseases.”  (53:4). And yet, “out of his anguish” this suffering servant “will see light” (53:11), and “through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.” (53:10).

No doubt many of us recognize this text from Handel’s Messiah or remember it as one of the cornerstones of our Good Friday liturgy in the Prayer Book. As these uses show, the dominant interpretation of the song is to read it as a prophetic prediction of the Passion, and to understand Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s suffering servant vision. Even though the author of Isaiah wrote the song several hundred years before Jesus’ birth during Israel’s exile in Babylon, as Christians we read it as an inspired foreshadowing of God’s decision centuries later to become human in Jesus, to dwell among us in the flesh of a humble servant, and to suffer and die on our behalf. When we interpret Isaiah 53 this way, reading it through the lens of Christ’s life, we naturally tend to understand this suffering servant to be an able-bodied person (like Jesus was) who for our sake endures torture, pain, suffering and ultimately death inflicted upon him by others.

Yet, in an important book published last year by Oxford University Press,[1] biblical scholar Jeremy Schipper argues that there is another plausible way to interpret Isaiah 53 – namely, that the “marred,” “diseased,” and “afflicted” servant who suffers in this song is in fact a disabled person. Through a close examination of the images used in the Hebrew text, Schipper (who himself lives with cerebral palsy) argues that the language of infirmity that is used to describe the suffering servant of Isaiah is imagery typically associated with disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. Schipper argues that we tend to assume that the suffering of the servant must be an able-bodied person’s suffering because that is the cultural norm, even though the actual language of the text is more consistent with the suffering of a person with disabilities.

Whether you agree with Schipper’s reading of Isaiah 53 or not, I submit that his larger theological point is worth listening to:  that our tradition has too often adopted a hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible, that has foreclosed interpretations such as his from the start. Disabled people should not be so readily written out of a biblical text simply because the experience of the dominant culture is an able-bodied experience. Such a one-sided appropriation of profoundly important texts like Isaiah 53 leaves little room for disabled people to claim this suffering servant as one of their own. Just as Hollywood and Madison Avenue have historically excluded disabled persons from the array of characters who populate our mainstream media because we’d rather not recognize disability as an acceptable way of being human, so too has the history of biblical interpretation tended to elide disabled characters from its narrative.

So, why, you might ask, does all this matter? Among other reasons, it matters because at the heart of the gospel is Jesus’ claim that we are too often imprisoned by false conceptions of who is clean and who is unclean, who is righteous and who is unrighteous, who is healthy and who is sick, who is powerful and who is weak, who is able-bodied and who is disabled. We think we know who is in and who is out, but more often than not, we don’t.

Take today’s gospel lesson. Like the other disciples, James and John have been following Jesus around Galilee for some time now, and have heard Jesus explain on three separate occasions that his messianic fate is to be arrested, to suffer at the hands of the Romans, and to be killed. And yet, each time, the disciples don’t get it. Ignoring Jesus’ repeated predictions about his future, James and John are convinced that surely Jesus is destined for great things and they want their share (more than their share, actually) of the fame. Like petulant children, they demand: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask. . . . Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  With perhaps a touch of exasperation in his voice, Jesus tries to tell them that they know not what they are asking.

Seemingly able-bodied and able-minded disciples, James and John are in fact spiritually deaf to what Jesus is telling them, spiritually blind to the reality of the Kingdom Jesus is inaugurating, and spiritually lame as so-called followers of Jesus. They think they are on the inside, and yet in their obtuseness, they remain on the outside. By contrast, the people who typically ‘get’ Jesus in the gospels – who see him as messiah, who hear and heed his words, and who welcome his presence – are those who are in some socially relevant way ‘dis-abled,’ whether they be lepers, paralytics, persons possessed by demons, or ritually unclean women.

Indeed, we will see this inside/outside logic of the Kingdom come to a crashing crescendo next week in the text that immediately follows today’s lesson in Mark – the story of the blind beggar, Bartimaeus. In contrast to the Twelve, Bartimaeus will instantly recognize Jesus as the messiah, will throw down everything he has to reach out to him in faith, and will follow Jesus toward the Cross. At the end of Mark’s gospel, the perfect disciple ends up being not James, not John, not even Peter; but rather, a visually disabled beggar, sitting by the roadside, yelling his head off for Jesus.

Which brings me back to my nephew, Quinn. Quinn is fortunate to live in a suburban county in Maryland that has the resources to provide high-quality special needs education, and where nearby there are intentional communities of disabled persons that can provide resources and support for him. He has a future that is hopeful, if not free of its own real challenges and difficulties. It wasn’t always so, of course.  Throughout most of history, disabled persons like Quinn were shunned, forgotten, pushed outside the boundaries of community, or worse, even by the most ‘advanced’ of civilizations.

It was less than a century ago that the Supreme Court of the United States in Buck v. Bell upheld compulsory sterilization for the so-called feeble-minded, a decision that technically is still on the books even though its reasoning has been roundly criticized. Writing for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the greatest minds ever produced by the law school across the Commons, explained the Court’s reasoning thus: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

I try to imagine what it must be like to be a disabled person listening to these words, listening to the highest Court in the land essentially say: we would prefer that you were not alive. Fortunately for Quinn, fortunately for all of us, we have moved past this Holmesian view of a eugenically engineered society.

If we are looking for an authentic vision of the Kingdom, I suggest that Justice Holmes is a far less reliable guide than Angela, a profoundly deaf woman I recently encountered, who, when asked about her spiritual experiences, described a dream she once had about meeting Jesus in heaven.[2] She and Jesus were alone, and talked for some time. Angela reported that she had never before experienced such peace and joy.  “Jesus was everything I had hoped he would be,” she exclaimed. “And his signing was amazing!”

For Angela, the Kingdom is not a place where her deafness is eliminated. Rather, it is a place where the social, relational and communication barriers that restrict her life in the present no longer exist. In her dream, what had been a ‘disability’ now became the norm; that which had led to exclusion, anxiety, separation and loss of opportunity became the precise mode in which Jesus addresses her. What Angela’s dream teaches us about Kingdom is precisely what Isaiah 53 and the gospels teach us:  It turns out that the world of human disability is the very world that God in His love freely chooses to inhabit.

Amen.

ENDNOTES

1.  Jeremy Schipper, Disability and Isaiah's Suffering Servant, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2. Taken from John Swinton’s “Introduction” to Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2008), pp. 12-14.

"Remember those who are in prison"

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

Hebrews 13:3 

Hi Everyone!

I wanted to share with you all about an exciting new project that I am launching with the Chaplaincy!

Here is the concept:
Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE)
a faith-based service coalition

Our mission:
Harvard Interfaith Prison Education (HIPE) is an interfaith coalition of Harvard chaplaincy graduate and undergraduate students committed to mentoring incarcerated women and men who are working towards their bachelor degrees through Partakers and Boston University's "College Behind Bars" program.

How to become involved:

• Pray for our new ministry!
• Come to the orientation required for all new team members, Nov. 7, 7-8:30 pm at Beren Hall at Harvard Hillel (52 Mt. Auburn Street). The orientation will be presented by Arthur Bembury, the Director of Partakers, and snacks will be provided! (You are also welcome to dine on delicious Kosher eats beforehand at Hillel's dining hall, included in your Harvard meal plan, or $5 for graduate students) 

Background & Contact:  

A collaborative effort of Harvard Hillel and the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. 

Contact the Episcopal Chaplaincy's Micah Fellow, Tiffany Curtis at tcurtis@mail.harvard.edu, or Hillel Coordinator of Graduate Student Programs Hilly Haber at hhaber@mail.harvard.edu. 

Tiffany and Hilly worked together on Harvard Divinity School's Harvard Prison Education Project team, mentoring men incarcerated at Norfolk during their time at the Divinity School. They will be coordinating the HIPE team and providing theological reflection and support for team-members.

There will be 1 or more teams of 6-8 students from across the University chaplaincies, and students will commit to 1-2 visits to the prison per semester.  HIPE will structure interfaith teams and help coordinate rotations for visits, as well as reimburse students for Zipcar rentals to visit the prison, provide structure and opportunity for intentional theological reflection across faith traditions, and host a gathering each semester of all team members for fun and fellowship.

 "...I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Matthew 25:36 

What Waitressing Taught me about the Church

This past Saturday, Emily Garcia (our Kellogg Fellow) gave the homily at Harvard's service of Morning Prayers, held every Monday-Saturday at 8:45 a.m. in Memorial Church. 

The reading for the morning was Matthew 25:34-36--
Then the king will say to those at his right hand, "Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you fro the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

I work at a small café-restaurant in Harvard Square. It’s an old two-story building, paneled inside with mirrors and old maps. We serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything else you could want in between. At this restaurant, the waitresses are not just waitresses, but also hostesses, baristas, bartenders, food-runners and bus-boys. We do a little bit of everything.

Now, a childhood and young adulthood spent enamored of libraries and academia might’ve taught me how to read a poem, but it could not teach me how to smile politely even when I wanted to smash a tray over someone’s head. It did not teach me how to stay calm even when I had fifteen tasks to prioritize and complete in the next three minutes.

In learning these things, I find I’ve learned a lot about the rest of my life, too. I’m a waitress, but I’m also the Kellogg Fellow at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard, and a Sunday school teacher over at St. John’s in Charlestown. I’m in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, and I hope to spend the rest of my life working in the church. Waitressing has been an excellent preparation.

A restaurant is fertile ground for learning because it consists of a constant stream of interactions with colleagues and strangers, as well as an ever-changing set of tasks to be accomplished. It’s like setting church life into hyperdrive.

I want to share with you something that first learned in church, but which I have relearned a thousand times since becoming a waitress. And that is: How we look, how we dress, where we went to school, where we work, how much money or influence we have—NONE of these things REALLY matter. What matters is what we have in our hearts, and what comes out of hearts into the ears and eyes of others.

Now, in a restaurant, it’s easy to become a little mercenary. Since we’re paid two dollars an hour and the rest comes from tips, we’re inclined to hope that people will be generous. This—naturally—can lead new waitresses to pin their hopes (and their smiles) to the folks wearing fancy shoes and well-cut suits, hoping for a really good tip.

But soon they learn what everyone in the industry knows—that in a restaurant, the hierarchy is not about how important the world thinks you are. In a restaurant, our favorite customers and colleagues are people who are gracious, and considerate. You get extra points for outrageous generosity, yes, but “gracious” and “considerate” are the highest compliments. For these, we’ll be happy to see you walk in the front door; we might even want to know your name.

My favorite customers are a music teacher named Harvey; a taxi driver named Asim; a retired journalist named Lois, and a grad student whose name I haven’t learned to pronounce yet. These people are gracious even when they are obviously exhausted and grumpy; they think about how their actions affect the waitresses and their fellow customers; they are both respectful and kind, and they are inspirations to me.

Now, being gracious and considerate aren’t just artificial social graces, but in fact in their best forms, they come out of an attentive empathy for every person—even the person who is bringing your glass of water and cleaning up the mess on your table.

There are two particularly Christian ways of talking about this attentive empathy for everyone. One way is to say that we start to see people with God’s eyes. Our mind is limited, but we have been given the mind of Christ; our hearts are narrow, but God’s heart has room for everyone. I am a petty and short-tempered person, but it is Christ in me which allows me to be kind even when my customer has made me angry. When I see a person who was rude and deserves only rudeness in return, Christ’s heart sees a person to be cared for. Christ is, as the hymn says, “My best thought.”

A second way to imagine this attentive empathy is to say that we start to see God in other people. We heard this in our reading today—I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was in prison and you visited me. Most of us don’t take such dramatic steps on a daily basis. So perhaps we might add to that: “When you saw me looking overwhelmed, you held the door open for me. When I was exhausted, you offered me your seat on the train. When I was flustered, you were patient. When I was looking sad, you gave me a real smile and asked me how I was doing.”

These are small things. But in working at the restaurant, I have been confirmed in my certainty that they can be part of God’s work.

I’m worried that I’ve made it sound like I float around my restaurant on six inches of air, smiling beatifically at my customers from beneath a halo. If you come to the restaurant, chances are that I will have my face set in a dour mask of concentration, and I might be a little short with you if I’m in a rush. I am not perfect! But here’s something else I’ve been reminded of, working there: No one is perfect. And God is pleased by our desire to please him, and by the small turns and steps we take in his direction.

The Riches of the Kingdom

“go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, 

and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Mark 10:17-31

A homily from our Chaplain, the Rev. Luther Zeigler

One of the great privileges of the priesthood is that the dying often call upon us to be by their bedside at or near the time of death. I say it is a ‘privilege’ because these moments are often filled with a holy tenderness as family and friends gather round someone near the end of life to provide comfort and to share their truest and deepest feelings – of gratitude, love, fear, hope. In these liminal spaces – as we watch someone we love prepare to move between this life and the next – there is an honesty, authenticity, and raw beauty that frequently eludes us in our day to day living.

Sometimes, though, in that honesty, there is also heartbreaking regret. I have held the hand of dying persons who outwardly have achieved great ‘success’ – building great wealth, acquiring many things, achieving status, power and prestige – but who at the end of their earthly life are overwhelmed with a profound sense that it doesn’t seem to count for much.

Most of us spend the better part of our lives pursuing these false idols, persuaded that we can somehow save ourselves if we only achieve enough status or accumulate enough stuff. And yet, I have never met a dying person who wished he or she had only worked harder, made more money, or had more things. What the dying almost always regret, more than anything else, is that they did not devote enough time and energy to the relationships in their lives that truly matter.

In today’s gospel we encounter an unnamed man in pursuit of his own salvation, convinced that he can achieve eternal life if he only does all the right things. Notice the question he poses to Jesus: “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He tells Jesus that thus far in his life he has done everything that the Law teaches; he has abided by all the Commandments. What else is there for him to achieve, he wants to know?

Jesus tells him, in essence, that there is nothing he can do to inherit eternal life. The problem is not what he must do, but what he must un-do.  Salvation comes not in striving for more, but in letting go of what he has. “You lack one thing,” Jesus says; “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

There is a double movement in Jesus’ words. On the one hand, Jesus’ concern plainly is for the poor, whose plight the young man may not even have noticed. And so, by telling the young man to share what he has, Jesus is certainly saying something profoundly important about the insidious social consequences that accumulating wealth has on those around us. And Jesus is thereby pointing the young man, and us, to a different form of human community, one built upon providing for each other through acts of generosity that establish human connectedness. Jesus wants the young man to start thinking less about what he has and more about what others need.

But there is a second aspect to Jesus’ concern. Jesus cares not just for the poor, but also for the young man. Notice what Jesus does before he tells the young man that he must give everything away:  “Jesus, looking at him, loved him. . . .”  Jesus loved him. This is the one and only time in the gospel of Mark that Jesus explicitly singles out a person to love. Caring deeply for this man, Jesus can see that the one thing that stands between him and God are things. Whether he knows it or not, the young man is crippled by his love for things. The paradox of the good news for this young man is that he can only inherit if he first bequeaths; he can only receive if he first gives; he can only live with God if he first dies to self.

That is all well and good, but maybe wealth is not your problem. Unlike the young man in our gospel story today, perhaps you don’t have many possessions.  Most of you, after all, are students in a university setting with little or no income. And, I suspect, many of you may have liabilities – read student loans – that exceed your assets. Yet, the pursuit of wealth is not the only form of disabling acquisitiveness.  In academic communities such as this one, acquisitiveness is expressed in another currency – the currency of status. While folks in the public marketplace may be preoccupied with money and things, folks in academic communities tend to be preoccupied with status: with degrees and honors and gpa’s and grants and fellowships and all the nuances of academic pedigree. That is how we measure each other. And, we tend to convince ourselves, consciously or not, that our worth and dignity somehow turns on whether we go to the right schools, earn the right degrees, and win the right honors.

The theological problem that underlies both the pursuit of money and the pursuit of status is one and the same:  it is the problem of law and gospel. When, like the young man, we start to believe that we can win God’s favor if we only do more, if only we perform better, it is then that we make the mistake of treating God’s love as if it is something to be won. Again, I submit to you that the critical moment in today’s story is not so much what Jesus says to the man, but what Jesus does in response to his question. Jesus looks at him, gazes at him, in love. With this visual embrace, Jesus is assuring the young man that he is already loved if he would only just let go of his pretense of merit and receive gratefully that which he has already been offered. The freedom of the gospel is the freedom to let go, and to let yourself be loved, without the worry or need of earning it. And, just as miraculously, that freedom then allows us to live for and to love others.

One of my favorite theologians writing today is Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. Rabbi Sacks is fond of saying that there are 3 kinds of goods in the world: political goods, economic goods, and spiritual goods.

Political goods have to do with power. If I am President, I am given a certain amount of power over people: I can force them to do what I want because I am in charge. The status and prestige we confer upon one another in academic settings is just another form of political power. The thing about power, though, is that when you give it away, you have less of it.  Students of politics know this truth: when kings or queens (or provosts or department heads, for that matter) give up power to others, they inevitably end up with less themselves.

Economic goods, which have to do with the currency of exchange, function in the same way. If I have a 1000 dollars and I give away half of it, I obviously have less when I’m done.

Political goods and economic goods involve what economists call zero-sum games: there is only so much power and money to go around. For this reason, politics and economics both by their very nature invite competition. People compete with each other to see who will win in the game for power or money, and who will lose.

By contrast, spiritual goods are very different. Spiritual goods are things like love or trust or friendship or kindness or mercy. But notice this remarkable quality about spiritual goods: the more you share them the more you have. Spiritual goods are generative. When my first daughter was born, my wife and I loved her more than the entire world. And yet, when our second daughter was born, we loved her more than the entire world as well. Somehow there was more then enough love for both of them. The same thing is true of sharing friendship or trust or kindness. The more we share these things, the more we have of them. This is the simple but profound miracle of spiritual goods.

Another way of capturing Jesus’ teaching in today’s gospel, then, is to say that we draw closer to God the more we organize our lives around spiritual, rather than economic or political goods. This is because spiritual goods generate relationships, and relationship is at the very heart of God. Indeed, when we contemplate the nature of God, and are drawn into the self-giving love that eternally moves between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we see the mysteriously generative power of spiritual goodness in its purest form.

Economic and political goods, on the other hand, tend to be divisive. They separate us because they breed differentiation and competitiveness. Don’t get me wrong:  In the fallen world we inhabit, both economic and political goods are necessary. Our social lives require them.  The point is not whether we need them to get on with our earthly lives; of course we do. The point, rather, is whether we let them dominate our very selves and take over our hearts. That danger, it seems to me, is what so deeply grieves the young man in our gospel story.

Let us pray that we might find the courage to loosen our grip on all those things we feel that we must have, so that instead we might discover that we are already in the grip of a divine love that will never let us go.

Amen.

A New Anglican Reads Old Things: William James and Personalities in the Church

Emily Garcia was raised in the Evangelical Free Church. In her freshman year at Princeton she was baptized at the Easter Vigil, and joined the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion four weeks later when she was confirmed on Good Shepherd Sunday. She is in the discernment process for the Episcopal priesthood, is a published poet, and is this year’s Kellogg Fellow at the Chaplaincy. In this column she will take a piece of “old” (or older) literature as a starting point for an informal reflection on the religious life.

“It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a definition of ‘the ideal horse,’ so long as dragging drays and running races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesman’s packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function.”

-William James, from The Varieties of Religions Experience, in Lectures XIV and XV: “The Value of Saintliness”, page 374

The other day I sat whining at a friend—also religious, but in the Latter-Day Saints tradition—about a new character at one of my workplaces. This person (I complained) stood too close when he talked, used my first name too often, asked too personal of questions, and shook hands too warmly. I did not like his familiarity, his (over)confidence—in fact, I did not like the way he went about relating to people. (I did not like him, Sam I Am.)

Indulging my bad mood, I went on to say that I’m always distrustful of this particular character type—which I think of as “a businessman”**.

My friend had a good laugh over my flustered outrage, and then very gently eased around the conversation. He pointed out the obvious thing that I had missed: that people with this personality can also “serve God and the kingdom,” that they also “hear and share the simple Gospel of Christ.” He suggested that this, in fact, was part of the parable of the talents: that we should use our personalities for the work of God, rather than hiding them. So instead of expecting my “businessman” to become a soft-spoken artist or a self-deprecating scientist, I should ask God to open my heart, so that I can see how this man can serve and is serving the kingdom of God.

This is a very simple lesson, but I often need to relearn it! In the excerpt above, William James is demonstrating that “all ideals are matters of relation.” He’s particularly concerned with the belief in “an ideal type of human character” and the perpetual “feud” between “the saint’s type” and “the knight’s or gentleman’s type.” After considering these “differentiations of equine function” (above), he goes on to say: “You may take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one particular direction.”

Workplaces and churches are odd mixtures of specialized animals; sometimes I spend too much time wishing that I or another were a particular “ideal type.” Better to spend some time considering what functions each of our talents fill, and what “particular direction” we’re each headed towards.

**Luther, our Chaplain, chuckled when I shared this with him, as it’s a sign of how my view of the world is split into “academia,” “business,” “art,” and “the church.” Both stoic bankers and extroverted salesman are “businessmen,” he pointed out.

This is Love

Tiffany Curtis is the Micah Fellow at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard, through the Life Together program in the Diocese. She was raised in the Disciples of Christ tradition, and received an MDiv from HDS in 2011. In 2011, she was awarded a Sheldon research fellowship and worked in Ecuador to study the intersection of Indigenous spirituality and alternative sustainable development models. Each week she offers us a reflection from her work, past or present.

 I recently attended a lecture at Harvard Divinity School entitled Rethinking 'Mysticism': Toward a Pedagogy of Contemplative Life. The speaker was Thomas Coburn, President Emeritus at Naropa University and Visiting Scholar at Brown University, and the lecture was part of the Center for the Study of World Religions' ongoing series "The Intellectual Worlds of Meditation."

Among Coburn's many wonderful insights, he shared his skepticism concerning Max Weber's distinction between prophetic and mystical religions. According to Coburn, Weber casts the two modes of religiosity as a dichotomous relationship between wanting to change the world "out there" and wanting to close the gap between "is" and "might be" by transforming interior worlds. According to Weber, although these ways of being religious are very different, both approaches are born out of the disparity between what we actually experience in the world and what we want the world to be. While Coburn challenged this Weberian model, noting that many activists are also contemplative practitioners, he also raised the paradox that contemplative traditions hold the primacy of the present moment, but social justice work tends to be future-oriented. 

Given this, what is it that drives practitioners of more now-centered "mystical religion" to engage in the prophetic work of justice? Perhaps it is because inner and outer transformation are so deeply intertwined. In the work of transformation of self, one's focus is drawn outside of oneself, to a feeling of integration with a more expansive reality. The distinctions between self and other, inside and outside, become blurred. Coburn held up Parker Palmer's metaphor of the Moebius strip as a perfect example of this. The Moebius strip is completely one-sided and yet multi-dimensional. As Coburn said, like a single line drawn across a Moebius strip, we can seamlessly look at our experience in its totality, without need to divide into inner and outer. We can live in a continuous now, a series of presents, in which we actualize change, however slight.

A friend forwards me daily reflections from Franciscan Richard Rohr, and this week one of these emails concerned precisely this tension between mysticism and prophecy. Fr. Rohr notes that although these ways of being religious are often seen as disparate, if we look to the biblical prophets we see that they use intimate language about God, an indication of close divine relationships, mystical relationships that seemingly led to their radical voices about social change. 

The truth is that suffering is at the heart of mystical and prophetic approaches to spiritual practice, and both ways of being seek a love that embraces and transcends the aching heart. It is  in an intimate engagement with the realities of suffering and the expansiveness and immediacy of divine presence that allows us to be open. Open to our own longing, open to the longing of the world around us, allowing the distinctions between self and other to melt away.

I am reminded of the wise words of the Muslim mystical poet Rumi:
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.