USNS Comfort

The USNS Comfort sailed into New York Harbor on yesterdayin the best grand entrance since Willy Wonka. The Navy's hospital ship, home to 1,000 beds and 1,200 medical staff, will be used to relieve some of the COVID-19 strain on the city's healthcare system. It will be treating patients today.

-- New York Times

De-sensitized

I've noticed...that it is rare for me to be de-sensitized to just one thing.

Reach The Divine

It is not in perfection that we reach the divine, but through the gateway of our mistakes and our suffering.

-- Mirabai Starr

Forgive Us Our Sins (And Theirs, Too)

As much as we’d like to believe that Jesus is the author of our Right Christian and Wrong Christian distinctions, we can’t because it is simply untrue. By pursuing us with great tenacity in spite of our differences with him, he shows us that he doesn’t have need for those distinctions.

-- Christena Cleveland


It’s never been easy for followers of Jesus to embrace that we’re all part of the same big family. And today, Christians who strike us as exhibiting un-Christlike behavior have a constant public platform on social media and elsewhere online. The power of their voices in shaping society’s understanding of the church makes us want to distance ourselves and scream that WE are not THEM.

What do we do when we know we’re called to unity but feel justifiably outraged by our brothers and sisters? How can we keep the peace and our integrity at the same time? And how do we hold the tension of addressing the shortcomings of others while at the same time remembering our own?

Entire movements and countless church plants trace their origins to a moment when insurmountable differences seemed to call for breaking fellowship. Today, we are at another cultural flashpoint, where divisions within the faith are particularly severe. And God-fearing people of all persuasions are certain they hold the moral high ground.

...

You do not have to read very much of the text to recognize the prayer as a confession. Daniel finds just about every way imaginable to ask for forgiveness. And he fully identifies himself with his people: We have sinned. We have rebelled. We have not listened. We have done wrong. We have been wicked. We have transgressed. We have turned away. We have been unfaithful. We have refused to obey. We have not sought the Lord. We have not turned from our sins. We have not given attention to your truth.  Continue here....

-- Jeff Peabody

COVID-19: Miscellany

...the war between health and the economy is underway.

This is pretty cool!  Tonight is Earth Hour, a global movement that encourages people to switch off their lights from 8:30pm–9:30pm local time in support of the planet.  Would you join me—in participating?


Sunday night's iHeartRadio Living Room Concert for America is pretty legit, featuring Dave Grohl, Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato, and many more—hosted by Sir Elton John.


Because of the coronavirus, we might even start seeing some midshipmen with mullets. The Navy relaxed its hair length grooming standards for sailors “due to COVID-19 force health protection measures maximizing social distancing.”

Breathe

‘Poem for the week' -- "Breathe":

Breathe.

Go on and live your unexpected
life.

Inhale love. Exhale surrender.
Trust: all that’s in between.

“Behold, all things are become new.”

Really?

There is fear,
there is shock,
there is separation and
there is sadness.

On earth, there always have been, 
and always will be—unless, until
a man of sorrows
rides down the dawn on a white horse
with the jukebox turned way up 
blasting an unexpected song,
hopefully Satchmo himself 
in charge of
blowing the horn,
his cheeks bulging,
his eyes wide,
his lungs healthy.

But don’t hold your breath.

Breathe.

Go on and live your unexpected 
life.

Behold, we don’t know what the future
holds.

We never did. We never will. 

How much oxygen is there
in exhaled air?

All the best priests, pastors, rabbis,
and all the best friends
learn to leave elbow room for mystery.
Never trust anyone who is afraid of saying,
As far as I know.

Breathe.

Go on and live your unexpected 
life.

Does your favorite coffee mug still feel good in
your hand? Did the tree swallows return
limpid in the air? They did here.

Are people you love still near?

Breathe deep into your lungs
while you still can. Even in the best of times
the expiration date remains
unknown.

Breathe.

Go on and live your unexpected
life.

Inhale love. Exhale surrender.
Trust: all that’s in between.

-- Linford Detweiler

Tall & Deep

If you plan to build a tall house of virtues, you must first lay deep foundations of humility.

-- Anonymous

Virus & Freedom

Particularly striking, in light of what things looked like just a few weeks ago.

Today is the first day of our Governor's (Indiana) 'Stay-At-Home' order due to the coronavirus pandemic.  After a flurry of activity locally, we as a state now collectively sit in one place (at least that's theory).  This invocation, of course, runs counter to our psyche.  While there is some rush that comes from the change, I'm guessing it wouldn't be long before it feels like something else.

We don't like to be told what to do.

We don't like to have to stop.

We call the absence of such things freedom.

And yet, despite our misgivings, there is something baked into this that we intuitively know IS about our freedom.  In other words, we can't have complete freedom personally if we can't have it collectively.  My choices affect your freedom, as yours do mine.  So, when the circumstances converge in such a unique way as this (at least for us—many around the world suffer lack of freedoms all the time), we basically all have to agree that we will set aside some of our personal freedoms for the sake of our collective freedom (even if that still is mostly self-serving...so we can get back to having our own freedom again).

How will we use this twist on our sense of freedom?  What will it teach us?  Personally?  More importantly, collectively?

The Range Of Our Knowing:

Until recently, the range of our knowing has been limited by our experience, with the relatively small group of people that, for whatever reason, has been around us.

But no more—the range of our knowing going forward isn’t limited (at least in the same way), because the range of our access to the experience of others is now virtually unlimited.

Knowing

Ever noticed...that it is one thing to know about something and quite another kind of knowing to experience it?

Homily: Life Coming to a Focus

As we grow in the spiritual life, our life will become increasingly centered. Only a few things will really matter. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, I see a lot of people right now thinking this way. There’s a sense that we’re all in this together—every continent, country, class, religion, race, age, or gender. We’re all subject to this crisis. Suffering has an ability to pull you into oneness. 

Maybe you’ve seen such oneness emerge in your family. I went to Kansas last month for my sister’s funeral, and all of my family was there. We don’t have any big resentments or conflicts, but the suffering—and acceptance of that suffering in her death—brought us together in the most beautiful way. It was such an honor to have the funeral with my own family and for my own sister. 

We see an increasing centering take place with Jesus and the disciples in the gospel text from this past Sunday [Matthew 17:1-9]. Jesus is leading the disciples towards the Transfiguration experience. He is preparing them for the cross, and saying, “It’s going to come! Be ready. It’s probably the only thing that will transfigure you.”

As I said in yesterday’s reflection, there are only two major paths by which the human soul comes to God: the path of great love, and the one of great suffering. Both finally come down to great suffering—because if we love anything greatly, we will eventually suffer for it. When we’re young, God hides this from us. We think it won’t have to be true for us. But to love anything in depth and over the long term, we eventually must suffer. 

The disciples first respond to the Transfigured Christ with fear. In our global time of crisis, this is where many of us are today. The disciples mirror the itinerary of the spiritual journey: we start out with many concerns, fears, and worries. Our minds and hearts are all over the place. But Jesus comes, touches them, and says, “Get up and do not be afraid.” When the three disciples raise their eyes, they see nothing but one image: Jesus. Their lives have become fully focused and simplified on the one thing that is good, the one thing they desire, and the one thing that is necessary. What a moment of grace and encouragement!

But then Jesus leads them down the mountain, back into the ordinary world to continue his labor of love, healing and nonviolent protest against Empire. We can’t stay on the mountaintop forever. And then Jesus ends with a line that to me was always a disappointment: don’t tell anybody about what just happened. He might be saying, “Don’t tell this story to someone else, because they’ll think they understand it just by hearing about it.” Religious experience has to be experienced firsthand. We can’t believe it because someone else talked about it. Sooner or later, we have to go to our own mountaintop. We have to have our own transfiguration, and we have to walk down the mountaintop into the ordinary world, on the path of suffering, and the path of love—which are, in the end, the same. As we experience a suffering world together, I pray that this community will be drawn to center itself on the cross and bring Jesus’ teaching to life. 

-- Richard Rohr

On the Lighter Side: Probability Distribution, In Real Life

On the Lighter Side:

Witnessing the Birth of the Coronavirus Economy

New York was still making money a week ago. A few people wearing masks, some closings, but generally business as usual. And then we tumbled down a cliff. By Friday, commuters arriving at Grand Central Terminal paused as they entered the main concourse — stunned by its emptiness, the usual din quieted by stay-at-home orders from companies and the government. For the first time, the vast, star-covered ceiling seemed appropriate.

Earlier this month, I started to travel the city to document the onset of one type of economic activity — the anxious purchase of emergency supplies — and the collapse of many, many others.  More compelling photos here....

-- Ashley Gilbertson


What we are experiencing with Covid-19 is what most of the world experiences every day. Malaria, typhoid, meningitis and water-borne illnesses that endanger your loved ones. Except they have no power to resist it: scarce resources, no clean water, not to mention Purell or soap, to even fight against it. No way to cure, only to endure it.

May God grow compassion in our hearts as the enemy sows seeds of fear and scarcity, and may we give more, love more, and risk more to others in this troubled time. As you feel vulnerable, pray for and give to the most vulnerable. As you feel anxiety, praise God for what you have. As you are tempted to hoard, be generous and give away. There is freedom in this path of generosity and greater pain in the path of scarcity and fear. Even a small light is blinding in great darkness.

-- Matt Hangen, water for good

Outcast

Is this what it feels like without community & friendships?

‘Poem for the week' -- "Outcast":

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.

-- Claude McKay

Community & Friendships

Sparked by some of the impacts of COVID-19, I've been thinking more about the nature of communities and the relationship between the ideas of communities and friendships.  What are some of the distinctives about a community and friendships?  How are our ideas about awareness, love, loneliness involved?

Among other things, it seems to me, friends are those who are actively interested in your life.  In other words, because it is personal, they pursue you.  They come to you (and you to them—you know, "To have a friend, you have to be a friend.").

Communities, on the other hand are more about them, something you join.  Sometimes, that reverses, like in times of crisis when communities come to you.  But, mostly, it seems that a community embodies something that you share a common ideal with, something that you are a part of, something you want to work for collectively.  In other words, something you go to.

If communities are something that you pursue, that you seek out; perhaps, friends are those that seek out you.  They want to know and be a part of what is happening for you.

There are times when these two concepts get co-mingled to the point that you don't really know anymore, which is which.  So, the more revealing moments are, when you and the community are not in sync.  Friends get closer—they want to know, are curious, want to become a part of whatever it is you are going through (succeeding, struggling, how you are growing and changing—rather than only in how those changes affect them), whether it is popular (with the community) to do so or not.  Community, however, tends to withdraw—they look at you skeptically, they grow silent, they distance themselves, they fear the needs of the group itself more than the loss of you.

But, sometimes, communities help create and foster friendships.

We are probably fortunate when we experience either one of these; lucky, when we have both.

Terrible Disease

...the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

More Than Love?

I'm wondering...is there anything that shapes us, or re-makes us, more than love?

Implore You

We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. 

-- 2 Corinthians 5:20, 18-20


...arrangement and emphasis added.

How can this be done without healthy self-understanding?

Being Conscious

Through the lens of the Enneagram we have greater self-knowledge and the ability to let go of what only seems good in order to discover what in us is really good.

As long as we cling to our prejudices and identify with our preconceived views and feelings, genuine community is impossible. We have to get to the point where we can break free from our feelings and thoughts. Otherwise in the end we won’t have emotions or ideas; they will have us.

Sometimes we meet people who are free from themselves. They express what moves them, and then they take a step back. They play an active part in things, but they don’t think they have a corner on the truth market. Without this kind of “inner work,” of simultaneously putting ourselves forward and taking a step back, community is doomed to failure. Learning this is really hard work. I probably can’t expect it from politicians, but I do expect it from people who know God. It’s the work of detachment, self-emptying, and “fasting” from the need to be right—the disciplines taught by all great religions. This is what makes someone “conscious.”

-- Richard Rohr

COVID-19: Healthcare System Capacity

From:  COVID-19 #Coronavirus Data Pack

What seems to be really going on and the fight over it:

Italy’s Health Care System Groans Under Coronavirus — a Warning to the World

Inside the Oval Office, a Fierce Fight Over Trump’s Virus Speech

Shouldn’t leaders, like our President, embody the greatest features of vision for the spirit that make us all human, instead of those that make us more inhumane (fearful)? ...especially at times of crisis?  It's too late to 'show up' at that point and pretend to be decisive.  That's not leadership—that, among other things, is populist pandering....

COVID-19 at Least Partly Contributed to Dramatic Fall in Pollution Over China

Signatures

From Michiana Chronicles:

My daughter spent a lot of her spare time this winter wrapped up against the cold on the streets of downtown Brooklyn asking strangers for the signatures that are needed to get the fellow from her hometown on the presidential primary ballot in New York’s eighth congressional district. That’s Lily. Some of you know her, and I know the thought of her makes you smile. She has a positive spirit. Lily collected signatures from strangers on the streets of Brooklyn after work, after long, tough social worker days telling patients and their families the truth about what’s out there when they leave Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai hospital.  

"There was one lady,” Lily told me, “who said she absolutely would not sign a petition for Pete Buttigieg. She told me she had heard that the town where he was mayor, South Bend, Indiana, is a terrible place, especially for minorities, and he’s a bad guy who has done things to make life bad for people there.

“I told her, ‘I’m from South Bend,’” Lily said, “and I said, ‘I don’t think that’s true.’”

“Then the woman said, ‘Well, I have friends in South Bend, and I say it is.’”  Continue here....

-- Sid Shroyer


When can we move forward from the competition-only framework, that we've ended up with, and toward a collaborative-constructive one?  I think this resonates with those (young and old) who are interested in more than the current simplistic good-guys vs bad-guys win-at-all-costs mentality and actually want to solve problems positively, for the betterment of all.

You Will Have Been All Of These

...how far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

-- George Washington Carver


The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.

-- Madeleine L’Engle

Disappointed

My recent knee surgery had a goal, at least in my mind.  It was pretty straight-forward:  to be able to run again, pain-free.

I have learned that the surgeon apparently had to take out about 70% of my meniscus to achieve the goal (the pain-free part, at least).  This leaves me with an inevitability—to run regularly again will only increase my chances of more significant knee problems.  In other words, no more regular running.

Devastation...is over-stating things a bit.  But, I am disappointed.

I've talked about disappointment before; but, this time, it is registering a bit more deeply with me.

You see, I love to run.  I think it has been one of my greatest sources of overall health.  Not just physically; it has also been one of my greatest therapies.

I am now imagining a world where fixing something (like surgery) is not possible—where living with less of something that I really want is perpetual.  I am tempted to think that this is more than simple disappointment.

But, in reality, that appeal to something more dramatic is probably just evidence of my sense of privilege—that most anything that isn't right, can be fixed or solved.  But, what if it can't?  Many people (and whole people groups) live with a lot of things that are way more disappointing than this—and with a perpetual sense that they will never have the something they really want, ever....

I can go a number of directions with this feeling.  But, the main one for me right now is to allow myself to just be disappointed.  To be fully present to it—not to get away from it or to re-position it, to feel victimized by it, etc.

This willingness, I suspect, is able to provide me with the capacity to experience something I otherwise would miss (in my rush to find other remedies).  Perhaps it is a means of knowing something I would not know, an experience of something that others experience that I know too little about, an awareness of something otherwise too long undetected.  And, perhaps it is a means of reconnecting me to something.

I don't like being disappointed.  But, I need to be able to be.

25% More

Employees who exercise regularly are 25% more focused, driven, and efficient than those who don't. 

-- Gary Sorrell

Unsuspected Joy of Slowness

I've noticed...though I too often tend to chafe against it, slowness can have its own kind of joy.

My recent knee surgery has slowed me down.  I've been a little chagrined at my frustration over how long it seems to take to get to the places I need to be.  I didn't think I was that committed to speed.  But, it turns out I am.  At the very least, I don't like to be slowed down.  That is a little sad.

For one thing, slowness can give us a chance to see things, we otherwise might not.  When we slow down or even stop, we can see what else is moving. Because of the surgery, I've had to spend time just sitting. But, being in one spot has enabled me to notice more of what is moving around me—a runner going by, the particularities of a bird winging itself across the sky overhead, leaves flittering in the wind, a man making a sign, and so on.
Life is in motion at so many levels beyond just the one I am on. There is a beauty to it that is independent of my participation, but that also invites it...even if that amounts to no more than just noticing it. I feel an unsuspected joy embedded in this reality—the one I've noticed because of slowness.

Recklessness

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

-- William Sloane Coffin

World's Worst Football Coach

Initiative

The only way to get initiative is to take it. It’s never given.

And some people hesitate to take it, perhaps because they’re worried that we’ll somehow run out.

We’re not going to run out. It’s a self-renewing resource.

From an early age, most of us were taught to avoid it. Do your homework. Take out the trash. Wait to get picked. Wait to get called on. Become popular. Fit in. Maybe stand out, but just a little bit. Failure is far worse than not trying.

The alternative is to take some initiative. On behalf of those you seek to serve.

Go ahead, there’s plenty to go around.

-- Seth Godin, Initiative

Not About the Here and Now

Believing that spirituality is just about transcendence, and not about the here and now, allows us to excuse ourselves from intervening in the ongoing oppression and marginalization of certain bodies.

-- Hillary McBride

Embracing Risk

Many people believe they cannot afford (to risk) change.  And, it seems even more believe it is just too hard to embrace its disruption, even when it comes to them anyway.

But the reality is that life (God?) is always pulling us forward—inviting us to change (to grow) because changing is simply cooperating with what is already happening, everywhere.   Holding on to things, especially beliefs in the way things used to be, is largely a futile effort because things will change anyway, with or without our approval.

Holding on to beliefs is often largely about something else anyway, like a desire for security.  But, in what (or in whom) are we secure?  Certainly not in the fact that things won’t change...because they will—because they do.

Static is a design feature that we might prefer, but it doesn't actually exist—change just IS.

So, the real risk then, it seems to me, is not embracing it.

Who Is Right

Once you have given up knowing who is right...it is easy to see neighbors everywhere you look.

-- Barbara Brown Taylor

Instagram: nakedpastor

Not For Who You Are

Ever noticed...how awful it feels when you recognize the possibility that people like you primarily for your contribution, rather than for who you are?

Truth & People

As my last few posts have intimated, I am increasingly suspicious of organizations of truth that seems to lead more toward the defense of ideas than it does the defense of what has been created—especially, but certainly not limited to, human beings.


My soul is sore when I learn how our people are tortured, when I learn how the rights of those created in the image of God are violated.

-- Óscar Romero


I pledge allegiance to the Flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one Nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for ALL. (emphasis added)

Do we still believe this?  Belief is an active stance, not a passive one.