Perhaps the Elevation Enabled us to Hear More Clearly

The church I last served had an actual “upper room.”  It was a simple, open space on the topmost floor of the building just beneath the chime tower and the cross, where youth of a different era had once roller skated.  With a simple linoleum floor, portal windows and a sloped, painted wood ceiling it exuded the feel of an attic, far away from the sidewalks and trafficked streets five floors below.  It was the perfect location for Maundy Thursday services through years.  

 

In the Christian calendar, “Maundy Thursday” is the Thursday of Holy Week – the last week of Jesus’ life. Thursday, the evening of the “last supper,” after which Jesus was arrested by his friend’s betrayal, the effluence of which was Good Friday and its crucifixion.  “Maundy,” from the Latin for “mandate” or, more commonly, “commandment.”  

 

Neither Matthew nor John among the New Testament writers ascribes elevation to the setting for Jesus’ last evening with his disciples, simply referencing a borrowed “room” in which they gathered.  But Christian imagination through the years has been sparked by the notation in both Mark and Luke of “a large room upstairs.”  Since we, in our situation, had the architectural assets to take those writers literally, we eschewed the sanctuary on those annual occasions in favor of that humble space at the top of our building.

 

As the appointed hour approached, the smallish crowd would travel up the elevator, find our seats among the folding chairs arranged in a square, facing inward around a simply set table set with a filled chalice and a stark loaf of bread, flanked elsewhere in the open clearing by a couple of stools and basins of water.  The format of those experiences varied, but always the tone – established as much by the room as by the liturgy – was intimate, almost hushed.   There would be simple songs – unaccompanied, or supported by a guitar or accordion; there would be spoken words, responses and prayers.  Eventually the bread would be broken and the cup would be shared.  And then bare feet, stripped of their shoes and socks and all pretensions of sophistication, would be entrusted into hands that would tenderly bathe and dry them in awkward quietness, until the silence was broken with the familiar words of Jesus:

“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you…I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

I loved those services, and I’ll confess, miss them.  I loved that room and the Spirit it could invite.  Sure, more glorious music could easily be found, and more poetic liturgies could be shared.  But there was, for me, something profoundly inspiring about those simple and austere gatherings on the 5^th floor.  

 

Something both provocative and evocative.  

Something grounding; centering.

Something awe-filling.

Something…holy.

 

There was something about the unadorned, artless, stripped-down elementariness of the moments that enabled us – enabled me – to plainly hear and receive afresh the routinely choked-out but elemental definition of discipleship; that to which the motions and the words, the loaf and cup, the basin and towel all point:  love.  “Love one another.”  This, according to Jesus, is how people will know who you are – not by your creeds or your piety or your confessions or your sacraments; not by your buildings or your pronouncements; not by your liturgies, your blandishments of scripture, nor your songs. 

 

By your love.  By the way that you love like Jesus loved.  

 

Bare feet, received by unoffended hands, and tended as if they were one’s own.

 

Because in every way that ought to matter, they are.

 

The service would end, and that upper room would empty.  But something had changed among us.  There never was much chatter in the elevators on the trip back down to ground level.  We were “cleaner”, I suppose, in more ways than one; “clearer”, at least, about who we were and what lay ahead of us, and chitchat didn’t seem to fit.  We had, as it were, work to do.  

 

The work of discipleship.

 

The work of stripping down and leaning over.

 

The work of this “new commandment.”

 

The plain, ordinary, unglamorous, foot-washing sort of work, in a word, of love.

 

Falling in Love With Lent

 “Always fall in love with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against; with.”

         —Robert Frost

 

No one needs to point out one more time that it hasn’t been an easy year, or enumerate the experiences and ones we’ve lost in the course of it.  I’ve heard many spiritually devout mutter, upon washing the ashes off their foreheads, that they didn’t feel like giving anything up for Lent this time around – such a discipline being redundant amidst enduring quarantine precautions. We’ve been “giving things up” for the last 12 months.

 

It’s true, of course.  Lent took hold a year ago and never let go.  We may have taken a few determined moments to hum a hallelujah when the calendar announced that it was Easter, but it was a forced refrain.  It didn’t feel like any stone had been rolled away, and so we settled back into our Wednesday ashes.  Here we are now, twelve months later, still in the throes of Lent.  Sure, one after another silly politician tells us that the sun is shining and the water’s warm and we should jump right in.  But as a friend of mine recently observed, once you’ve grabbed a live wire, it’s hard to approach, let alone put your hand again on, an electric fence regardless of who might be assuring us that it is turned off. 

 

The season of Lent continues…

 

…which is a richer, more generative observation than it sounds.  Though Lent has largely been reduced, in our understanding, to an onerous and obligatory season of sacrifice, its real purpose is examination, clarification, and realignment with the core of who we are and are called to be.  Jesus was driven into the wilderness – the biblical story that informs the season of Lent – not to subject himself to deprivation “because it would be good for him,” but to distill and clarify the values by which he would live out his life.  The prophet Jeremiah would say that Jesus was setting a personal plumb line. 

 

If Jesus went about that reflective work of his own volition, we have had the wilderness imposed upon us.  One day we were laughing and playing and going about our routines.  The next day the doors were closed and we were working from home.  One day we were healthy and slaying the dragons.  The next, we were constantly taking our temperature, wearing masks and lamenting the loss of those whose death we couldn’t gather to solemnize.  But along the way we have done more than grieve and take precautions and feel afraid.  Like Jesus in the wilderness, we have sorted through our circumstances and selves and separated into piles the “essentials” to keep and the “unnecessary accretions” to set aside.  We’ve baked more bread, made more meals, planted more gardens, and talked with one another about important things.  

 

Not entirely, of course.  Overlaying all this has been a poisonous political season that made a global pandemic seem like a bedtime story.  In the conduct of it we have learned that it will take more than a deadly and paralyzing calamity to break up the sedimented thinking and behaviors that have hardened portions of our hearts and lives and the spaces between us.  

 

Still, in breathtaking ways the Lenten pandemic has sifted us, stripped us, stilled us, worked on us, clarified us; pushed us, of necessity, to reevaluate, reimagine, and innovate.  Not everyone, to be sure.  Some have never ceased to kick and scream and whine.  Countless shops and bars and eateries have closed, the victims of financial starvation.  

 

But there are others who channeled the resilient spirit of Robert Frost – who may not have “fallen in love with” what we’ve been asked to accept, but have accepted it, nonetheless, and worked with it rather than against it.  I think of the restaurants that have found new ways to set virtual tables; businesses that created new pathways to serve their customers; musicians and theatre groups who have created new “stages” on which to perform; churches who have done more than point a jerky camera at a talking head and have created altogether new and beautiful experiences of worship that are more than makeshift, and which evocatively, aesthetically connect with the spiritually hungry far beyond their immediate neighborhood or town.  These, the resilient among us, have leaned into working “with” instead of “against.”  And my guess is – my prayer is – that much of who we have become and much we have trained ourselves to see will endure.

 

We’ve learned some things, in other words, about ourselves and each other, pried away from the present to attend to the possible.

 

Precisely what the season of Lent is supposed to accomplish in and among us.  And if it has taken a year to accomplish it instead of the requisite six weeks, well, the garden was worth planting and the bread was worth baking; the meals were worth preparing and the conversations were worth having.  And who knows what else about all we've been forced to accept we will discover we've come to love.  Surely that warrants a modest pre-Easter "Hallelujah".  

The Greatness of Large Ideas and Noble Ideals

I think now that I was wrong about the slogan.

 

For the past several years we have collectively been regaled with the enjoinder to “Make America Great Again.”  The phrase has energized the populace – thrilling some, while nauseating others.  Count me among the latter.  But I am having second thoughts.  

 

I know this is dangerous.  Such a reconsideration requires a careful, close reading of ourselves and our history – indeed, our collective soul- and Americans aren’t known for subtlety.  Nuance has not been our gift.  We draw with bold strokes – with jumbo crayons on a wide-lined tablet.  We know well the three primary colors, but can’t be bothered with the shades and hues.  So it is that we talk of capitalism and communism, law and order and anarchy, morality and corruption, patriotism and treason, Christianity and atheism, government involvement and personal liberty as if such binaries were the only options.  They aren’t, of course.  There are vast spaces and limitless possibilities between any such polarities, but exploring them, teasing them out and considering their potentialities requires an intellectual patience and labor that, for the most part, we aren’t willing to invest.

 

All that acknowledged, I accept the risk.  Never mind that the progenitor of the phrase in question is someone I experience to be a despicable blight on the American consciousness, I don’t want to turn a blind eye.  We should, indeed, strive to make America great again.  By that I do not mean that we should endeavor to resurrect some mythical moment in our past when all was right with ourselves and the world.  This country never has been “great” in the jingoistic ways that politicians trumpet.  America never has been remotely close to embodying all that it aspired to be.  There surely is no prior period in U.S. history to which women would want to return, or people of color, or indigenous peoples, or those differently abled or sexually oriented or aligned. The past, for all but the narrowest elite and privileged, was defined by constraint, invisibility, or outright repression.  That hardly sounds like “greatness.” There never was such a wondrous and idyllic season in our history that was somehow punctured when voting rights were extended, when marriage equality was recognized, when women gained agency over their bodies, when prayer was supposedly removed from schools and access to affordable health care was expanded.  We did not lose our greatness by liberalizing immigration policies or making room for different religious expressions or reevaluating words in our vocabulary that can exclude and offend.  

 

What once made America great was not our actualization, but our aspiration.  We thought big, we reached high; we had sprawling dreams.

 

Like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. 

 

Like “liberty and justice for all.”

 

Like the pursuit of “a more perfect union.”

 

Among other lofty, aspirational goals.

 

But somewhere along the way we gave all that up.  We reduced our tools to nailing down rather than prying open; to whittling away rather than building on.  We fell in love with “no” instead of “why not?”  Our large and noble ideals were reduced to puny ideological prejudices.  Our statecraft became obstructionism.  Victory became more compelling than wisdom; maneuvering became more practiced than persuading; coercing more than inviting.  Any potential greatness we may have known has given way to a runty petulance that ought to embarrass us all – liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or any of the other silly jerseys we have come to wear.  We have become miserably small not because we have grown weak, or because we lost manufacturing jobs or signed treaties, or because of any terrorizing or threatening or morally corroding “them”.  We have shrunk politically, morally, economically, and globally because our interest in big ideas has atrophied, our sense of the whole has narrowed to the individual, and our inquisitive patience with wonder has fossilized.  Content with what we think we know, we haven’t the time or the tolerance for what we might yet learn or comprehend or apprehend.  

 

And it is a smaller and smaller place to be.  

 

We used to be grander than that.  We used to be greater than that.  And I miss that.

 

So let us abandon this village of Lilliputian petulance and thought, and indeed make America great again – not the America that ever actually existed, but the America we once-upon-a-time aspired, together, to be.  

Somewhere Along the Way, Iowa Got Lost

I still remember the characterization.

 

Living out of state at the time, I had been contacted about considering a vocational opportunity in Des Moines.  I knew nothing about Iowa, and even had to consult a map to situate it in my cosmos.  A friend who had until recently lived in Iowa called to check in on my consideration, and to counter any apprehensions I might have about living here.  

 

“Yes, they are all driving tractors,” she reported, “but they are listening to NPR inside the cab.”

 

Of course, even then it was hyperbole.  Iowa’s farmer-driven identity has steadily given way to inexorable urbanization – a transformation already well underway by the time the movers unpacked our boxes in the winter of 1993.  But if there were fewer tractors than my friend had led me to believe, she was right about NPR.  Iowans, I would soon discover, were sharp, intelligent and actively aware citizens who eschewed easy labels.  Slightly right of the political center, Iowa had nonetheless a reputation for independent thought.  

 

Before the rest of the country deigned to recognize indigenous peoples as “human,” the Iowa Legislature bucked the prevailing federal statutes and sold – with title – land back to the Meskwaki tribe – implicitly if not officially acknowledging personhood.  It wouldn’t be the last time Iowa would lead the way with imagination.  In 1873 the University of Iowa Law School became the first in the nation to graduate a woman.  Iowans may not have invented the community college system, which was trialed in Illinois in 1901, but we quickly recognized the merits of the idea, establishing the first of our campuses in 1918.  Decades later, Republican Robert Ray was conspicuously alone among his gubernatorial peers in the country in responding to President Carter’s plea to states to receive refugees, welcoming desperate refugees from Southeast Asia and establishing a state office of Immigration.   Decades later, Iowa broke new ground again by dismantling the legal obstacles to same-sex marriages.  When I moved to town, and for years to come, we were a pragmatically “purple” body politic, with a U.S. Senator from each major party, a divided statehouse, and Governors both Republican and Democrat.  

 

Public education was a high value statewide, with a passionately defended preference for local control; insisting that the best decisions for our kids are made by those closest to them.

 

And then we began to change.  I’m not enough of a social scientist to pinpoint a date or a cause – perhaps we simply succumbed to the same debilitating infection of ideological certitude that has swept so much of the country.  All I know is that my beloved adopted home – thoughtful, independent, common-sensible Iowa – has become sedimented into a dry, crusted and lifeless ideological aridity.  Suddenly the “state knows best”, wrenching local control away from communities and school districts.  At a time when our leaders are fecklessly flailing with managing a localized global pandemic, the State Legislature is meanwhile debating a “bathroom bill”, reverting public consciousness to a fixation on genitalia at the expense of human beings; proposing a return to the non-efficacious barbarism of capital punishment, stripping professors at state universities of tenure, enshrining gun rights in the state constitution, and strangling women’s right to an abortion.  

 

Meanwhile, when the nation’s Capital was invaded in January with insurrectionists destroying and defacing “the People’s House” and threatening assassination – a crisis I would like to think superseded bathroom talk - what did we hear from our leaders? 

 

Crickets.

 

Nothing.

 

I wrote our two U.S. Senators at the time to solicit their views, and eventually received nothing more than boilerplate drivel by way of response.  

 

In the end, it wasn’t complete silence.  In response to a New York Times reporter’s question about the Impeachment Trial of the ex-President that grew out of the Capital invasion, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst described it as “a total shit show”.

 

Oh my.  We seem stuck in the bathroom.

 

I don’t know what has happened.  We Iowans used to be so reasonable, intelligent, and articulate.  In place of all those our intelligence, our morality, our compassion and our acute perceptiveness have, in recent years, fossilized into ideological stone.  And it isn’t pretty.

 

What will loosen the sedimentation?  I can’t help but believe that it will start by talking less and listening more; preaching less and discussing more; honoring the voices of each other.  There will necessarily be required an excavation of the kind of humility that begins with the presumption that we have more to learn, more to understand than we have heretofore comprehended.  Change occurs best, it will be good to remember, in the midst of genuine community where minds are moved by the winsomeness of our arguments, not constrained by the forcefulness of our office.  

 

And failing all that, perhaps it means climbing up for a long tractor ride and tuning the radio dial back to NPR.