The Gift of Air

The Gift of Air

 

Air.  

Basic, indeed; essential, but hardly a constant awareness.  Like blinks and heartbeats, air is the “given” we take for granted…

 

…until it is absent.

 

“I can’t breathe,” moaned George Floyd with a knee on his throat.

“I can’t breathe,” gasp COVID-19 sufferers.

“I can’t breathe,” choke whole communities in the pacific northwest as wildfires rage.

 

Suddenly air is something we cannot take for granted.

 

“I can’t breathe,” Adam and Eve might have said – if they could have spoken at all – until God breathed into them the very breath of life.

 

Which is to say that it never really was something we could take for granted.  And we try not to.  Living, as we do, in the country, strolling through the wooded trails or amidst the native prairie, we bask in it.  In this season we relish the briskness as well as the clarity of it.  

Breathe in; breathe out.  Such is the antiphon of life.  Air is one on a very short list of items we can’t live without.  Air, food, and – well, one other thing:

 

“All I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you,” sang the Hollies a few decades ago.  

Yes, to both of those. 

 

It is a topic on my mind because our wedding anniversary has rolled around again – September 20 being the official day of celebration – and according to one source the suggested gift for the 23^rd anniversary is “Air.”  Huh?  I’ll admit that my first reaction upon reading that note was deflation – air, after all, being hard to slide on a finger or hang by a chain around a neck, or hook on a wall like conventional gifts.  You can’t wrap it, wear it, or display it.  Not even Amazon sells or delivers it, with or without a Prime membership.  The marital website I consulted gamely tried to make the best of it.  Suggested applications were “balloons” (hardly very inspiring), a “hot air balloon ride” (definitely not on Lori’s wish list), or “airplane tickets” (enticing, but not during a pandemic).

 

The more I live with the idea, however, the more and more I’m drawn to it – perhaps because you can’t buy it, only receive and protect it.  Air, that ubiquitous but perilously fragile element we cannot afford to ignore, choke off, or pollute, precisely like the love for which it is a token.  

 

At least in year 23.

 

As far as I’m concerned, it can stand in for all the gift suggestions for every anniversary to come, if for no other reason than to remind me.  

 

Breathe in; breathe out.

Love in; love out.

Kiss; kissed.

A tender whisper.

A delighted gasp.

A contented sigh.

A playful breath in the ear.

 

Air.

Invisible, but demonstrably manifest.

Everywhere, until it is scarce.  

With the rhythm of my lungs to remind me of what I cannot live without.

 

All I need is the air that I breathe…

…and to love you.

 

Happy anniversary, my love, my breath.  

Toward a New Alteration and Enlargement

“It isn't knowledge

It's humility we lack”

—-Don Henley, “Praying for Rain”

It isn’t entirely true, of course.  There is always more to learn. For starters, there is the knowledge about each other that seems to be sorely absent among us just now. That, along with the still largely unexplored landscape of ourselves.  We have much to hear; much to learn; much to understand.  

The sobering reality, however, is that it won’t ultimately be enough.  That was the naive and ultimately tragic flaw in the Age of Enlightenment:  the fiction that we could educate our way into a whole human community - the embodied Beloved Community that our faith traditions have taught us to seek.  We are more educated and knowledgable than any generation preceding us, buried as we are beneath data and facts and the 24-hour news cycle.  There is ample data, widely accessible and scientifically validated, about climate change and yet we still ignore it.  All ambiguity has evaporated under the scrutiny of credible research about agricultural runoff into the Mississippi that travels downstream to feed the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, but still we spray chemicals in excess of what any crop might need.  Despite decades of clear information about the importance of exercise and what we eat, we are increasingly sedentary, consuming ever bigger mountains of junk beverages and food, and spending more and more on health care.   We know volumes about racism and the generational implications of trauma, abuse, dehumanization and implicit segregation, but all the information at our fingertips has had little impact.  We still act in a historical vacuum and react with prejudicial suspicion and fear.  

It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.

Despite our occasional but fleeting flashes of ingenuity and magnanimity; despite an effervescence here and there of grandeur or moral, communal stature, we largely remain a species of juvenile delinquents - delinquents who have been to the moon, to be sure, and smashed the atom and mapped the human genome and eradicated countless diseases, but juvenile nonetheless, roaming the streets of our common life metaphorically and literally stealing trinkets and breaking windows - with a soul deep within that is aching to grow up.

It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.

Not long ago, Lori and I visited the grave of Carlo Carretto, the 20th century Italian activist and mystic, in the charming little Umbrian village of Spello across the hillside from Assisi where he had spent the latter years of his ministry.  In the months since our visit, I’ve been reading Carretto’s books.  In one of them, In Search of the Beyond, he makes the dismal observation that, “I have too often been wounded by ‘intelligent’ people, disconcerted by unloving champions of orthodoxy or by self-advertising revolutionaries who are incapable of an act of humility.”

We know those people he is describing.  Wincingly often, we are those people he is describing.

It isn’t knowledge

It’s humility we lack.

We know too much about that which we simply don’t care…

…because it is simply inconvenient; 

…or it’s not my problem;

…or it’s someone else’s fault.  

It won’t, of course, turn out well on those terms.  As the sage behind the biblical book of Proverbs puts it, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”  (Proverbs 11:2)

I’ll keep learning - it’s just the kind of thing I do, and there are whole worlds, after all, about which I know little or nothing.  But I - we - had better start changing as well; bending out of the inert certitude of our intellection, and into the wonderment of humility in which all that is not me is no longer mere object, but holy subject...

...that not only educates me, adding to my knowledge, but alters me and enlarges us all.

Plenty of Room for Light

I mowed this morning in silence - as much silence as can be with 30 horses of power throbbing in the tractor beneath you.  Eschewing my usual headphones with their podcasts or playlists, I just couldn’t stand any more sound.  The roar within was all I could manage.

This was the week it happened for me.  Some will likely wonder what took so long.  Others will be surprised that this week seemed any different from the ones preceding.  I can’t honestly account for it.  Something just…snapped.  

Yes, there are the increasingly heavy ramifications of the pandemic - the escalating infections, the mounting death toll, the prolonged isolation.  The flagrant refusal by many to acknowledge the risk.  But that’s all getting to be routine.  

This week was somehow different.  It all began with the surprising news of the unexpected, unexplained death of a brother-in-law - a kind and winsome soul three years my junior who laughed and listened and generously loved.  The thunderous silence of his absence is part of the noise.  Following that death, the week proceeded inexorably downhill.  There was the raucous protest in Kentucky on Sunday, in the space between the Capitol and the Governor’s mansion, during which the Governor was burned in effigy while the militants chanted the words of Lincoln’s assassin.  All this, with complicit elected officials looking on, presumably because the protesters do not agree with the Governor’s policies.  I say, “presumably,” because I do not have access to their minds - granting them the courtesy of that stressed presumption.  If they have a mind, any evidence of it was obliterated by their heinous actions the likes of which surely should be behind us.  Then there was the murder by suffocation of a black man in Minneapolis by an on-duty police officer while his fellow-officers looked away.  A knee on the throat of a handcuffed man, gasping for breath.  This, in the name of — what?  Justice?  Order?  And by such means as matter-of-factly deemed appropriate by who, outside of ISIS or the Taliban?  I had come to think of Minnesota as the last place such an egregious act might occur, but then I recall that whole “Governor Ventura” episode several years back, confirming that nowhere is apparently free of lapses.  

This killing, then, followed predictably by street protests of escalating violence, about which the President mused that the protesters should be shot - a reaction that made me gasp, but then considered the prospect that death by gunshot might be pleasanter than the cruel asphyxiation that had precipitated it all.  This, the same President who is berating social media outlets for fact-checking his falsehoods, and who has been busily firing government watchdogs - five as of this counting - allegedly because we no longer need them.  Proof, of course, that we do.  

But the week was just getting started.  News reports emerged today from Pennsylvania - the home of the "City of Brotherly Love" - that legislators of one political party who had tested positive for Covid-19 alerted members of their own caucus, but neglected to share the warning with those across the political aisle.  As if we had any doubt that politics is a blood sport.

Beyond all this, I’ll just gloss over the other political atrocities, corruptions, duplicities and chicaneries that by now are almost commonplace in this "land of the free and home of the brave."

All this, on the week headed by a collective commemoration and remembrance of those who died in service to their country - who fell in the line of duty.  

I can’t believe that this is what they fell for.

There is a scene in the classic movie, “Ghostbusters,” when a public official steps in and demands that power to the containment grid be shut off.  It is the grid that holds all the captured paranormals.  Protests ensue, court orders are produced, and eventually the switch is thrown; and all that had held back evil was removed.  In a riotous scene, the liberated specters burst through the roof of the converted fire station and catapult into the sky above and subsequently into and throughout the city.  All hell quite literally breaking loose.  

That’s what it feels like has happened.  The containment grid has been unplugged, the roof has been burst, and the demonic has been unleashed.  This, from a guy who doesn’t believe in demons.

There are those who will say I am getting “too political”; to whom I respond,” I haven’t even begun to be political.”  The actions I am decrying, the choices I am condemning have nothing to do with politics but with common decency, moral character, and the guiding principles of civilized society.  Neither “left” nor “right,” Republican or Democrat, these are the foundations I learned as a child from my parents, from my volunteer teachers in Sunday School, in public school, and the writings of our nation’s founders.  We have come to be so fixated on the Constitution - defending it, arguing over it, splitting the hairs of it, but a guiding creed that does not live in the hearts and lives of its citizens but only in its ink isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written, and has ceased to matter at all.  The wind has left the flag.

I pondered all this while mowing in silence, circling and circling, back and then forth; the lawn and the trails, the paths and even the culverts.  Mowing, motor throbbing, until I ran out of fuel.  

An apt metaphor, it seems to me. 

I’m ordinarily a fairly positive guy.  I can usually find a patch of blue in most stormy skies.  “Silver linings” and such.  

But I hit a low this week.  Something snapped.  And now here I am with a soul full of all this mess, and nothing left to mow.

I am left, as I often am, to lean on the wisdom of poets - 

—like Leonard Cohen who observed,

“There is a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.”

—like David Wilcox who notes that, like healed bones, we are…

“stronger than ever now in the broken places.”

I hope to God they are right.  We’ve got plenty of room for light to get in, and in the dubious event that we do actually find some healing amidst all this brokenness, endless locations for new strength.

A Few Quiet Pandemic Reflections

These are challenging times.  In ways that we are sick of talking about, our usual touchstones routinely, even silently, counted on to keep us oriented and grounded have been moved - or removed, altogether.  Yes, faith communities continue to call the faithful to worship, but on a screen, rather than in a room.  Restaurants send their culinary arts out the door in bags rather than into the dining room on trays.  Parks are closed.  Theaters are closed.  Coffee shops are closed.  We remain apart.  To the extent that we move among each other at all it is behind masks out of an abundance of caution and concern for one another.  

It’s changing, I know.  Restrictions are gradually being lifted.  Businesses are reopening.  Orders are expiring.  Beaches are crowding.  The pretense is filtering out that “life is getting back to normal.”  

And yet the "normalcy" is more aspirational than actual.  Fear persists.  Caution lingers.  Disorientation is the new orientation.  We’ve long since given up on knowing who to trust.  Trust, itself, has become politicized.  Those we counted on to have our collective best interests in the foreground have demonstrated a bias toward lesser, more calculated concerns.  At the very time we need each other, we feel increasingly alone.  

And from the highest office to which we have looked over the decades, in times of war and tragedy, terrorism and natural disaster, for leadership and bearing and a call to our best cultural self we get nothing but nonsensical, self-interested dissembling, perfidy and prevarication.  

It is maddeningly sad.  At the very time we need a cup of cool water we are routinely handed sand.  Or broken glass.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself keeping interesting intellectual company - brooding over the intersection of 3 pieces of spiritual wisdom that have intruded themselves upon my time of pandemic-imposed physical isolation.  One, from Pema Chödrön, Buddhist practitioner, teacher and writer, whose older but suddenly timely book is titled, “When Things Fall Apart”, and whose counsel is that everything does, indeed, fall apart - even that which crumbles the good, inevitably itself falls apart.

Another, from the 14th C. English mystic, Julian of Norwich, to whom was shown the assurance, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And finally, a nagging teaching of the Apostle Paul, from 1 Thessalonians 5.

“Be at peace among yourselves. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”

I sit with them all, open-handed; receiving; arguing.  

Drinking in.  

Chewing. 

The words are still settling into my soul.  I’m not sure what sense to make - or counsel to take - from the intersection of these three:  

An observation;

A confidence;

An instruction.  

But the conversation among them, across centuries and geographies and circumstances and devotions - a conversation into which they have now invited me - continues to be both provocative and, strangely, centering.

The facts, of course, remain.  The virus still encircles and infects us.  Our leaders still disappoint us.  Our lifestyles are still in disarray.  Things do, indeed, fall apart.  It is the nature of things.  Entropy and all that.

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

In the meantime, we have work to do:  

Rejoicing

Praying

And in all circumstances - even these odd and disorienting ones - 

Give thanks.

It's a challenging assignment.  And I'm hardly at my best.  

But I’ll see what I can do.

Aching for Grandeur and Light

It has been raining since before the dawn on this Easter Sunday.  That precipitation merely preceding the snow anticipated for later this afternoon. A lid has descended on the jubilation of this day, keeping it all at a low simmer.  It hardly feels like resurrection.

The pandemic-necessitated isolation doesn't help.  Holiday outfits and trumpeting lilies usually brighten things up, but the sanctuaries are empty and - speaking purely for myself - "dressing up" seemed a little contrived.  There are bulbs blooming, shrubs flowering, and fruit trees blossoming, but with nights in the 20's forecast for much of the week ahead, even those signs of promise strike a fearful, apprehensive and protective note.  The rain, the thunder, the cold and the virus - everything feels a little small and contained.  "Entombed," perhaps, which sounds appropriate for the day.

We fired up the internet and tuned into worship - first here, and then there.  We have been religious omnivores throughout the weeks of this social distance, worshipping with friends and family and colleagues around town and around the country.  More than once I have voiced my gratitude that I have not been faced with the challenge of packaging spiritual nourishment to be technologically delivered...in isolation.  I continue to be grateful to my active peers for experimenting, growing, polishing, and, above all, doing their best to be presently faithful.

What I came to realize, as we worshipped our way around the country, is that what I was needing this Easter Sunday - what I ached for and craved and reached for and sang to - was grandeur.  I wasn't hungry for theology, though that never hurts.  I had no appetite for homiletical acrobatics or liturgical glitz.  The gospel story, after all, has ample lungs to speak for itself.  I hadn't the stomach for chocolate bunnies or plastic eggs stuffed with treats.  I wasn't looking for forced gladness or the silliness that can leak out in awkward times of stress. I hadn't patience for, "we are going to make the best of this, never mind Covid-19."

It was largeness I was looking for; immensity, grandeur and awe.

Living on a farmstead with prairie and woods and wildlife and birds, grandeur is usually in abundant supply.  We walk the trails, we step outside and hear the sounds; we pause and deeply inhale.  We notice the tracks, we pause over buds, we pay our best attention to the particularities of feather and song and color and motion.

But I mentioned the rain, the lightening and thunder, the cold and the small-making isolation.  We weren't likely to spending much time outside.

I needed grandeur - today of all days.
Something larger than myself.
Something larger than our isolation.
Something more immense than our present fear.
Something - not so much an insight or a dogma or a platitude or placation...
Something soul inflating.
What I needed was for us and our giddy contrivances to simply get out of the way and invite the story to do its work, to breath its breath of life, to pierce the dank moment with new and radiant light.

And here and there it happened - in songs both simple and grand; in silences both invited and reverenced; in words spoken with economy and humility; with faith born witness -

- for this day, and those to follow;

In grace proclaimed and received.

It's raining, and cold, and the pandemic still necessitates protective caution.  But the day is somehow larger now that the stone has been rolled away, and the grave clothes, neatly folded, have been set aside.

Larger, with a bit more grandeur...

...and light.

Happy Easter.

Weaving a Stronger Cord

When, in the summer of 1993, incessant rains forced rivers from their banks and flooded the Des Moines Water Works, forcing the utility to shut off the water supply, faucets were left bereft.  All over town.  Toilets didn't flush.  Showers didn't spray.  Drinking cups were left dry.  It was a difficult time.

But miracles spilled where water refused to flow - Anheuser Busch canned water instead of beer and freely gave it away.  Neighbors helped each other.  And the city organized water distribution centers.  Bring your own jugs and wait in line and return home with a few gallons of that which only days before we had universally taken for granted.

One of my favorite memories from those difficult days was standing in the water line at midnight in the grocery store parking lot, alongside the richest and poorest - all of us in the same boat, each of us holding our empty and rinsed milk jugs, waiting; equalized by catastrophe; unbathed and thirsty.

Today has been the first day of spring, though nothing about the presenting circumstances bespeaks new life.  In central Iowa the clouds have hovered, the rains have fallen, the lightening tonight streaks the sky, and tornado cautions are in effect.  All that, and COVID-19.  For the most part we are home.  Hunkered down; closed in; socially distant and hyper-cautious.  Restaurants are closed by gubernatorial decree; employees have been laid off; colleges classes have moved to the internet; grocers are on reduced hours; the stock market is roller-coastering down and then up and then down again; shelves are empty and nerves are taunt.  We panic at the sound of a cough.

Last night we compared this crisis to the tremors of 9/11.  This is worse, we concluded.  When the aircrafts crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, there was a finitude to the crisis.  Within days we knew what was what.  The fallout continued for years, but at least the numbers affected, the crisis itself, the task ahead were known before very long.  It was what it was.

This, on the other hand.  We don't yet have a clue what all this means and where it is taking us.  We have no way of knowing how long it will be unfolding, how far the ripples will extend, and how many will be claimed.  Not limited to a geographic focus, this crisis is seemingly everywhere, enveloping all of us, shoving us onto a fog-drenched road that veils any glimpse of what's around us, let alone what's ahead.

And yet...

...there are candles piercing the opaqueness.  Pastors are broadcasting prayers and inviting us to pray along.  Musicians are performing free concerts online - Susan Werner, Ken Medema, The Indigo Girls, Paul Simon and Willie Nelson just to name the ones so far of whom I have become aware.  Doctors are posting daily updates and offering helpful advice.  Fitness practitioners are leading exercise regimens for whoever logs on.  Neighbors are checking on each other.  Customers are paying it forward - buying gift cards, ordering carry-out, and leaving generous tips.

Yes, we are frightened.  Yes, we are anxious.  Yes, we are stressed because we don't know where this is going and how long this will last.  Yes, we are staying home and getting cabin fever - never mind the coronavirus.

But closed in, we are reaching out.

Doing what we can.

Stacking sandbags against the flood that is this threat.

Lifting each other up.

And claiming larger truths:  that in each other's keeping, the tide will not wash us away; that though alone we are scared to death, together...

...together...

..."Two are better than one...for if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.  Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)

And we are, creatively, impulsively and imaginatively weaving a multi-cord strand.

And together we will not be broken.

It is officially springtime even though circumstances defy the designation. It's bad out there.

But strangely, gloriously, it's good.  There is life amidst the death.

Green, piercing the winter detritus.

And somehow, amidst the spontaneous music and prayers and phone calls and mutual concern, we are already bearing fruit.

Hang in there.  We are in this thing together.  And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Clergy Reflections on the Church and Social Distancing

We have been making some changes around our farmstead.  They were not prompted by the stirrings of our imagination, but by changing circumstances that necessitated them.  They were, I'll confess, accompanied by grumblings - after all, they were not what we "wanted".  But something funny happened along the way.  The grumblings mutated into laughter.

And gratitude.

Because the resulting shape of our changed circumstances has, we have had to confessionally admit, been unmitigated improvement.  The present that necessity created is better than the past that we had leisurely fashioned.

I think about that just now amidst the chaos created by an epic pandemic.  Schools are closing, businesses are locking their doors, people are cancelling vacations, and churches are...going online.  It's not a unanimous choice.  Some are defiantly "staying open," channeling the spirit of Mordecai in the Hebrew Scriptures who wondered aloud to his cousin Queen Esther:  "Who knows? Perhaps you were made for just such a time as this.”

"It would be unfaithful," they believe, "to close."
"It is irresponsible to gather together," counter others.

What's the church to do?

Trust me, I am not the guide for such things.  Gratefully, at this stage of my ministry, I am no longer tasked with the institutional responsibility for guiding such choices.  The moment has, however, tugged at me, forcing an internal conversation about what it means to be the church - especially when it comes to worship.

The church is, as Paul so deftly and metaphorically noted, a "body" with interacting and interlocking parts.  We "have to do" with each other.  Our diverse gifts are manifest "for the upbuilding of the whole."  There is more than a single way, of course, to actualize that intention.  Connection, it seems to me, is the core value - a value no more insured by gathering together in a single room, than it is prohibited by physical separation.  There are the diaconal functions of caring for those in need.  There is the importance of shared learning and worship - of "singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs".  Those "table legs," along with fellowship, and holding all things in common.

Once upon an earlier, more naive and narcissistic time in my ministry I assumed that the most important part of congregational life was the formal gathering together for worship, and within that, the presentational elements - the musical offerings, and the sermon.  Indeed, those are the only dimensions of worship effectively conveyed via "livecast."   And while in my professional days I would not have been immune to the need to "earn my salary" by dispensing a sermon via any channel available to me to those paying me to provide one, I've changed my sense of it all since then.  I don't mean to hint that such presentational elements are unimportant - there is a reason why, after all this time, faithful continue to gather in the company of preachers and choirs.  We ache for inspiration and edification; we are drawn to that which is larger than ourselves.  At their best, such musical and homiletical offerings are corporate, but let's be honest enough to admit that congregants in the pews are too often passive recipients rather than active participants; mere consumers of religious goods and services, rather than actors in a choreography of praise.

If the church were actively and routinely accomplishing its mission - making disciples - instead of simply convening attenders, churches would be populated by preachers and pastors and prophets of myriad description, in diverse locations and not simply within the walls of the church building.  There are lots of ways to preach a sermon - with or without words, as St. Francis reminded us.  There are lots of places to read the Bible.  The pews do not own the hymns.  There are countless opportunities to be "in each other's keeping" whether or not we are in each other's presence.

As this pandemic and its implications continue to unfold, we will continue to adapt and respond.  Some will continue to unlock the church house doors and welcome whosoever in.  Others will encourage "social distancing" and offer a word and song online.  We'll do what we are led to do.  Regardless, I'm convinced that key in it all is the intentionality of our interconnection.  I'm less concerned about our meeting together than I am about our shared responsibility for each other - and the "others" we have yet to meet.  Telephone calls to check on a neighbor or the place bound or the lonely, or to glean from the wise, or to simply catch up with a friend do not transmit viruses.

They simply transmit care and nurture connection - the lifeblood of the church.

Who knows?  Maybe that can go viral.


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