Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Back to School Moon<\/p>\n
A very busy three days with something in the evening each night plus events during the day, too.\u00a0 Glad to get a chance to get back to the bees and the garden.<\/p>\n
Some autumn blooming bulbs came in the mail today, so I’ll get a chance to plant them over the weekend.\u00a0 I need to get outdoors.\u00a0 Fall bulb planting is one of my favorite garden chores.\u00a0 Crisp weather and Folk Alley radio, sometimes the Andover Marching Band can be heard in the background.<\/p>\n
I’m still trying to come to grips with the unsettling experience I had at the seminary tonight.\u00a0 I have no patience for the God talk, less for the elaborate hermeneutical dance that goes on in such settings.\u00a0 I put myself in the room as a favor to Groveland and to Leslie, but I no longer feel like I belong there, a strange feeling after 15 years in the ministry.\u00a0 These used to be my people; it is my seminary; but, I feel more like an outsider now than I did when I began back in 1970 and I was very outside the norm then.<\/p>\n
I hope I’ve not done Leslie a disservice by agreeing to do this.\u00a0 I still respect the faith journey, the attempt to wrest some purpose out of life, to read the palimpsest of history and of nature, scraping away the latest scribbles to look even deeper, to find a way into the world of divinity, a trace of the sacred on the wind.\u00a0 These represent the sweetest and the best of human endeavor, those moments when the human vessel becomes a vehicle for discernment.<\/p>\n
The institutional expressions of religion, the rationalization of charisma as Max Weber said, do little or nothing, indeed often obfuscate the journey with the insistent demands of institutional maintenance:\u00a0 credentialing of clergy, fund raising, dogma protecting, seeking new members, building buildings, routinized worship.\u00a0 Where is the ecstatic?\u00a0 The mystic?\u00a0 The awe-some?\u00a0 Where is the deep calling unto deep?\u00a0 Where is the fearless acceptance of the human condition?\u00a0 Dangerous, lovely, cloying, sensual, heady, brutal, wild and untamed, even in the most civilized.\u00a0 The Methodists and the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ and the Baptists and even, for no God’s sake, the UU’s have fashioned clay towers with bright windows but no doors and no way outside.<\/p>\n
The journey happens at night as sleep comes, when a dream grabs you by the throat and won’t let go.\u00a0 The journey proceeds as you walk to work, hold hands with a lover, dance in the rain, smile at the gorilla and the lion fish.\u00a0 It goes forward along the ancientrails of art, literature, dance, music, theater.\u00a0 Meditation?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Quiet moments with fellow travelers?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Finance committee meetings?\u00a0 Don’t think so. Evangelism?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 The journey deepens when we become vulnerable to ourselves, to the world around us and I’m sorry, but I don’t see the support for that in the pews of any church I’ve ever attended.\u00a0 Perhaps the monastery holds an echo of it.\u00a0 The solitary parishioner at prayer.\u00a0 The Jews at the wailing wall.\u00a0 Muslims at the Kabah.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
But the weak tea I experienced tonight? Unlikely.\u00a0 And I feel bad about that, sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Back to School Moon A very busy three days with something in the evening each night plus events during the day, too.\u00a0 Glad to get a chance to get back to the bees and the garden. Some autumn blooming bulbs came in the mail today, so I’ll get a chance to plant them … Continue reading How Do We Open Ourselves to Mystery?<\/span>