The Promise of God in the Wilderness

Last Sunday, while you were on your Thanksgiving break, the season of Advent began, and the first candle on our Advent wreath was lit.  Now there are two lights, the second Sunday.  Advent is a special season of watching and waiting; of looking for the subtle and surprising signs of God’s presence in the world.  I love Advent because it has a spiritual subtlety that is very necessary in the commercialized excess of the holiday season.  It reminds me that I could miss the presence of God if I’m not looking carefully for it.  Advent is about cleaning your lens and looking at the world in a new way.  And today we have a baptism for baby Charlotte to remind us of the beginning of life, and the journey of faith chosen by her parents.

Look around this morning.  Take a good look.  If you hadn’t noticed, this is the best time of year at Kent.  The best.  We should have signs put up, so you remember.  Instead, our Advent wreath hangs in the chancel, as a gentle reminder.  We’re half way through Advent, as we prepare for Christmas.  You may remember keeping an Advent calendar as a child.  Those were good times--a time of wonder, but the anticipation and beauty of the season are still here, reaching you in new ways if you stop to look around.  A strange thing happened to me earlier this week—something just felt wrong.  I was out of sorts.  And then I realized what I was missing.  I was here at Kent, but I wasn’t stressed out.  These two weeks are quite a few notches less stressful than any other time of the year.  It is a time to just be, or as close as we come to mindful relaxation.  And this time together doesn’t end with final exams, or the goodbyes of spring, but rather a chapel service, one that is different from the others.  People really sing the Christmas carols.  Vacation will hang in the air with the Lessons and Carols service, before we go our separate ways and rejoin our families for the holidays.      

One of the great figures of the Advent season is John the Baptist.  You heard him calling for repentance in the gospel reading from Matthew.  John the Baptist was a prophet, one of the most significant in our tradition.  He left society and lived in solitude, in the wilderness.  People had to leave society to find him.  John went off the grid to find God.  In solitude, he sought God with all of his heart, and society eventually followed him, seeking some small portion of what he had, that peace of mind that passes understanding.  He had many followers, including Jesus himself. 

The theme of the wilderness is a rich one in the gospels.  Like John, Jesus too sought God in the wilderness for forty days.  What would a modern-day John the Baptist look like?  What would it mean to leave society for the wilderness, even for a short amount of time?

As I pondered the questions, I thought of the writer Robert Sullivan.  Robert Sullivan is an explorer and writer, but not the usual kind.  His specialty is the Meadowlands.  Yes, that’s right, the Meadowlands in New Jersey: a former glacial lake that has been receding for the last 10,000 years, becoming the swampland you know now--and at one time the largest garbage dump in the world.  You’ve driven past it on the way to somewhere more important: Newark Airport possibly, maybe a discount mall, or you went there for a Giants or Jets game.  Robert Sullivan is obsessed with the Meadowlands.  Like Henry David Thoreau, he wanted to get back to nature, but he chose the most unlikely spot in the United States, maybe the world.  The comparison with Thoreau, however ironic in talking about an EPA waste site, became absolutely just when Sullivan found that the Meadowlands did, in fact, have a Walden Pond.  It’s just that no one ever went there; no one even looks at the map of the expansive swampland.  So Sullivan decided to go on his own Thoreau wilderness adventure, exploring the Meadowlands for weeks at a time in a small canoe.

Here is Sullivan’s adventure and vision in his own words in his book The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City.

“Sometimes, I sit on the top of Snake Hill until dusk, and I spread out my maps and marvel.  I marvel that I am in the middle of a thirty-two-square-mile wilderness, part natural, part industrial, that is five miles from the Empire State Building and a little bit bigger than Manhattan.

I marvel that the land before me was called ‘a swampy, mosquito-infested jungle…where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and cattails merge in an unholy, stinking union,’ by authors of a 1978 federal report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.

I marvel that on the edges of the Meadowlands there are places that are stuffed with people (some blocks in Union City have the highest population density in the United States) but that in the middle of the Meadowlands there are acres and acres of land where there aren’t people at all…

On the top of Snake Hill, I am on mysterious ground that is not guidebooked and that reads like a dead language…I am in the middle of a place that forces of progress have perennially targeted but have never managed to completely control, a place that people rush past on their way to the rest of America, a place they spit at with their exhaust pipes.  There, with the sun burning through smog and lighting up the reeds, with eight lanes of traffic providing backup, I sing the Meadowlands.  I am the dot on the Meadowlands’ exclamation point.”    

To go out in a search for peace and enlightenment in the Meadowlands of New Jersey is absurd—it’s completely crazy (which is exactly what Sullivan’s wife thought by the way).  But that’s what Robert Sullivan did, and that’s what he found.  All of the madness of our culture and world was right on the edge of a wilderness, almost totally unexplored.  That boggled Sullivan’s mind.  He found peace, renewal, and the unbelievable power of nature still pulsing in the Meadowlands, even as man’s so-called ingenuity is destroying our natural environment.  Mother Nature is still a very powerful lady.  Sullivan is a wise man of our time, finding renewal, inspiration, and peace in the last place anyone would look

The wilderness is spiritually lively, for both the ancient and modern seeker.  In his book Thoughts on Solitude, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer, wrote this about the wilderness in considering the Desert Fathers, the early Christians who left society to live in the wilderness in search of God.

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God because it was no value to men.  The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted because it offered them nothing.  There was nothing to attract them.  There was nothing to exploit.  The desert was the region in which the Chosen people had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone.  They could have reached the promised land in a few months if they traveled directly to it.  God’s plan was that they should learn to love him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

The wilderness comes in many forms.  Our founder Father Sill left his monastery on the Hudson River to go out into the wilderness to found a school, one that would be different from the other Eastern prep schools.  It would be a school for young men of modest means.  His initial fundraising efforts yielded a mere $300, but he kept going forward.  I can’t even imagine the number of times this school might have failed.  But Father Sill persisted, and I have no doubt that he believed he was guided by God.  All of the little details of running a school were put in the light of God’s guidance, including the construction of this beautiful chapel where students might learn about the ways in which we are always part of God’s plan.  Where an alumna’s child could be baptized today.  What a wonderful journey this school has had, and all of us get to play a part in a school that is now thriving.  We keep the fire burning.  It is humbling to be in this space together with the past in mind.  We should always look back to the wilderness of our origins as an idyllic time.  The wilderness is now a land of promise for all of us. 

Expect the unexpected during this Advent season, the best time of the year at Kent.  Where is the wilderness in your life right now?  Where is the neglected place that is alive with new interest?  What have you overlooked about yourself?  The promise of Advent is the promise of God’s love and presence among us.  It’s happening now.  May God bless us during this holy Advent season, that we might awaken to the voice of God calling us his beloved, and calling us home.       

Hazards and Fairways: The Sometime Grace of the Recovery Shot

This morning I will be shedding one of my most tightly guarded secrets.  In twenty-four years of preaching--giving sermons and chapel talks, I have never preached on this subject.  Never, not once.  Even people who know me well have never heard me speak of this personal obsession.  It’s my little secret.  Here it is:  I am fascinated by the game of golf.  Ok, I spoke of it once before in 2013, then went back into hiding like an FBI witness.  Where this passion began exactly, I don’t know; but it has been coming on strong since the late 1990s.  Maybe it was when the novelist John Updike, one of my favorite authors, said that sports writing got better the smaller the ball.  The smaller the ball, the better the writing.  I was intrigued, instantly.  Baseball sports writing is good, but golf writing is even better, I’ve discovered.  The game appeals to my perfectionist side, but then it explodes this way of thinking, almost completely.  If you are swinging a golf club, you cannot be a perfectionist...without going crazy.  The golf swing has so many moving parts—it’s like trying to keep trying to keep fifty ping pong balls underwater all at once.  It’s so simple, and impossible, at the same time.   

When people ask me if I play, I always say no.  No, I don’t.  I’m just a friend of the game—a fan, a golf intellectual perhaps.  I look at the game from the perspective of a writer, like Updike; with detachment, appreciation, and a nose for irony.  But the truth is I secretly play.  My swing is awful, but it is mine.  I am a hazard to myself.  It is a little like becoming really interested in someone because they don’t like you, or they have rejected you.  That’s golf for me, a fickle and capricious lady who tortures me, and turns the screws.  For what it’s worth, I follow the men in the PGA tournaments, but I prefer the Ladies Tour.  I actually watch women’s golf more than football, basketball, and baseball seasons combined.  Yes, I’ll say it, their clothes are fabulous, and they can really play.  The outfits often match the caddy (always a man) with the lady in charge. 

So what do I like about golf?  I already mentioned that I like the clothes, and this is true for both the men and women.  For me, it’s the way in which perfectionism and realism, the ideal and the real, collide in the most beautiful of settings.  A well made golf course is a work of art, and yet the artist is still nature herself.  But the real collision of the ideal and the real is in the mind of the golfer just before the swing.  The mental game is everything in golf.  I don’t have it, but I know its ring of truth.   

I took my daughter Beatrice, who was eleven years old at the time, to her first tournament several years ago, just before school started.  We went to the Barclays Tournament played at Liberty National Golf Course, a course along the New York Harbor, and just under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.  Beatrice loved the Barclays Tournament, in particular the choice to go wherever you want to go, and to watch whatever you want to watch.  There is so much to see: from people watching—lots of fashion choices to study--to the animals on the course in a peaceable kingdom.  Turtles, herons, hawks.  Like many children, she was mesmerized by the errant shots. These are shots that go wildly off course, and often into the crowd.  This is also one of my favorite parts of the experience as well, the collision of perfectionism and realism, the moment when everything goes wrong.  Within ten minutes of arriving at the Barclays, a golfer hit a ball at least a hundred yards off course.  The ball landed in the food court, next to a pretzel stand and a line for the beer concession.  I didn’t have to worry about my daughter being bored; she was hooked by the crazy physics of it all.

A professional golfer hitting a shot wildly out of bounds is schadenfreude for the crowd.  I used a word there: schadenfreude.  There is no direct English translation of the German, but the word means something like “pleasure (or glee) in response to the misfortune of others.”  One of the most disturbing human tendencies is the real pleasure we get from the mistakes of other people.  As the writer Gore Vidal once said: “It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.”  But in golf, schadenfreude goes in surprising directions; it changes shape, becomes something very different. 

Let’s go back to the errant shot that can give the crowd so much pleasure.  Let’s find where the little white ball actually landed. 

The crowd knows more about the shot than the player, as caddie and pro make their way to the gathering spectacle, the new station of life after the disastrous tee shot. The children are ecstatic, so happy—it’s like an Easter egg hunt, except you can’t touch the magical egg.  You’ll be stupefied if you touch it (Harry Potter reference there).  In many cases, the spectators help the golfer locate the ball if it’s in the woods or tall grass.  Is it pleasure the crowd is feeling?  Sure, you can see its gleeful ripples, but there is something else as well.  People deeply identify with the golfer.  There is humor, but there is also a swelling compassion.  Everyone knows all about mistakes; and here comes the so-called celebrity, reduced to the common man, having to join the peanut gallery.  No other sport has the player enter the crowd like the sport of golf, to play an actual shot.  Caddie, golfer, and marshals give stage direction to create a pocket for the shot, opening outward, towards the new target for the golfer.  The caddie, who is much like the medieval squire, dutifully marches off the new, unusual yardage in nobody's book. That is, he takes a walk to the flag, if that’s where the golfer is aiming, and he then walks back, carefully counting his steps.  It all takes time; it is not over fast.  Though the crowd loves the reduction, the humbling moment--the humiliation, they are all pulling for the amazing recovery.  The recovery shot is right after the shot out of bounds.  Sometimes the golfer ends up in better position than he or she would have been had nothing gone wrong.  Everyone is rooting for the golfer because everyone identifies with the mistake.  I saw Phil Mickelson early in the same summer, at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, hit a ball straight off a tree trunk, after already being out of bounds. The crowd, the golfer, and I all had to scatter together to avoid the ricochet.  And we got to do it all over again, in nearly the same spot.  It made the crowd love Phil even more.  That guy hits some crazy shots.  And he is also crazy good.      

            So, back at the Barclays, Beatrice will never forget the shot a golfer named Jason Kokrak hit a hundred yards off course.  It was her introduction to the sport.  From the pretzel and beer stands with hundreds of new friends around him, Kokrak then hit a recovery shot to within ten feet of the hole.  I had never heard of Jason Kokrak, and I watch golf every weekend.  I looked him up on the leaderboard after the hole.  Was he about to lose his tour card?  Was he on the edge of a nervous breakdown?  Was it time to find a new career, maybe selling real estate or life insurance?  Maybe go to divinity school?  Jason Kokrak was in the top twenty of the Barclays Playoff.  He was having a good day at the office.    

All of us are going to hit shots out of bounds.  I do it every day.  We make mistakes, sometimes big ones.  If you are not used to failing at something, you haven’t tried anything very hard.  But the disastrous shot doesn’t have to define you.  It doesn’t define your worth, or your abilities, or your future.  It’s actually when you join the human race.  But the very next moment—the recovery shot--may very well define your character forever.  How you respond to ordinary adversity is when your character is forged.    

            So what does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to say about recovery shots?  Here’s what Jesus has to say about the wayward sinner, and the mistakes we all make:

“’Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?’  ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’

‘Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully and find it?  When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’  ‘Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.’”

It is clear from Jesus that God loves recovery shots.  To repent is literally to turn around; to choose a new target of wisdom and morality, to go for the right flag.  God cares for us most deeply when we are out of bounds, when we have run off the map of how we think our lives are supposed to go.  Anybody can handle success.  How you handle a big mistake or a major personal failure are the moments when you discover your faith, and the size of your heart.  Courage is fear turned inside out, and the recovery shot may be the most remarkable shot you have ever hit.  You will find, in some cases, that you are in a better position than you would have been had you never made a mistake.  This is the moment of grace; and we get a chance to participate with God’s grace and become stronger at the most painful or embarrassing moments on the course of life.  Jesus says there is greatest joy in heaven when one person does this.  This is because the recovery shots are the moments when we develop compassion for other people.  We get out of our own heads and really learn to love each other.  It is the moment when we reverse the schadenfreude of Gore Vidal’s quotation.

“It is not enough that I succeed.  Others must succeed too.” 

            This is Kent after six weeks of school in our river valley.  People are hitting shots out of bounds every day.  Tee shots sail into the river, or off the chapel facing.  They land behind dormitories, or roll past the mail room into the student center.  Oops, that one’s going in Macedonia Creek.  It’s in the hazard.  You’re going to have to take a drop.  The disaster does not define you, the gospel tells us.  But the recovery shot, the one that God is watching closely, can change your life; and it can land right by the hole, making you richer for the wayward journey.  It can be a great show here at Kent, watching other people make mistakes.  Or: your own recovery shot can change how you see yourself and everyone around you, and their fundamental worth as children of God.  It is not enough anymore that I must succeed.  Others must succeed too.  Have a great seventh week.  I’ll see you on the fairway. 

Reversals in Ripe Season

The gospel reading from Luke is about radical reversals.  It contrasts a rich man and a poor man who live in the economic extremes during their lifetimes.  One experiences the luxury of great wealth and the lavish lifestyle that comes with it.  The other lives in the streets in abject poverty and misery, with dogs licking his sores.  It is interesting that the poor man gets a name in the story told by Jesus, but the rich man remains anonymous.  The poor man named Lazarus has more definition.  With their divergent lifestyles, both men eventually die.     

The story moves on to the afterlife where their roles are completely reversed.  Lazarus is in heaven with Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, while the rich man suffers in agony in Hades, or Hell.  The rich man petitions Abraham: “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.”  Abraham explains that the two worlds are separated by a great chasm; heaven and Hades are forever cleaved from each other.  The rich man then petitions for Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his family.  Abraham rebuffs this request, saying that Moses and the prophets have provided adequate warning for the Jewish people to achieve salvation.

I have experienced radical reversals in my lifetime, both up and down.  Let’s start with the upward reversal, with a personal story that took place during the Christmas season twelve years ago.  Just after the holiday, I took my mother to a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.  We were sitting up in the mezzanine level, the cheap seats, in the very top row. The game between the Knicks and the Charlotte Bobcats was about to begin.  As the players were finishing their warm-ups, with music blaring through the arena, I noticed a man dressed in black was staring at me, a little too intensely. 

He slowly made his way over and sat down right next to me.  He sat there silently, looking at me and my mother.  In his approach, I noticed the New York Knicks employee identification card.  His official status with the Knicks organization made me relax just a little, but my first reaction was that I must have done something wrong.  After a swift moral examination, I could find no fault with my behavior—I hadn’t done anything wrong.  I hadn’t even yelled at an official or an opposing player-not yet anyway.  Not that anyone would hear me, up in the rafters.

            The strange man in black explained that we had been chosen as the Poland Spring upgrade of the game.  If we would follow him, we would be given courtside seats.  Our upgrade would include waitress service at our seats, video monitors, and statistics for the game by quarter, and also a group photo with myself and the New York Knick cheerleaders.  The cheerleaders were very nice, a most comely group of Christmas elves.  I only wish I had my clerical collar on in the picture.  Or perhaps my Christmas vestments—that would have been simply fabulous.  But who was I to complain?

Oh, and we also got a year’s supply of Poland Spring water.  The fun part of the situation was my mother could hear none of the conversation; between myself and the mysterious man in black.

I said, seriously, to her.

“Follow me.”

“What is it?” she asked, a little concerned.

“I think we’re in trouble,” I told her.  “Big trouble.” 

She didn’t ask any more questions.  She has known roughly since my birth that she can’t always get a straight answer out of me.  As we made our way down through the levels of the Garden on the employee elevator, I whispered to her.

“I think it’s a new security procedure.  We’ve been profiled.  Dangerous white people…”

As we exited the elevator, we were each given a bag full of New York Knick paraphernalia, hats, shirts, the works.  I don’t even like the Knicks, but who cares?  It was free stuff.  We entered the Garden at floor level through the players’ entrance.  We were given Poland Spring hats and shirts that we were told to put on.

At this point, my mother was coming to the giddy Christmas conclusion that we were not in trouble—though maybe I should be.  Another Knick employee told her that we were going to be on the scoreboard, so we should be ready for the TV timeout; when we would be announced as the Poland Spring upgrade of the game.

I prepared myself, contemplating a dance move, or two, to celebrate the big moment: on the big board at Madison Square Garden.  I think they call it a Jumbotron.  But then the moment came.  There we were in front of 20,000 people.  I stared at myself in the ridiculous Poland Spring hat and shirt, and all I could manage was a shy little wave.  We looked like complete idiots.  We appeared huge with the extra large shirts over our winter sweaters, and I had just a moment of disdain for our great benefactor Poland Spring water.  I was their poster boy for a day.  Me and my Mama.  During our painfully long moment on the scoreboard, when not one of my mighty dance moves came to the surface, I was struck with a terrifying thought: what if a Kent student is here? 

Hey, isn’t that?  Yes, it is.  Man, he looks bigger on the screen, he looks huge.  He must really eat during the Christmas holidays.  I still don’t know why it was terrifying, as a thought, that one of you might be there.  It must have been the big shirts and silly hats; and the dizzying turn of events when our afternoon was turned upside down in front of 20,000 people in New York City.

As soon as the camera was off, I ditched the Poland Spring stuff and settled in for some NBA basketball on the day after Christmas.  My mother was instantly on her cell phone, telling everyone her new upgrade story.  Even when I went to the concession stands, I was spotted.

“Hey, it’s the upgrade guy.”

I just gave everyone the thumbs up. There are worse things to be.  My own Christmas story is a story of reversal; of what it means to be surprised; of what it means to be given a gift when you least expect it.  But I couldn’t help but wonder who in the world deserves an upgrade more than me—and more than any of us.  I thought of what the world could be like if we dedicated ourselves to giving upgrades to those who deserve it most.

Radical reversals are part of the gospels.  In Matthew, Jesus says that the poor will receive the kingdom of heaven and that the meek will inherit the earth.  These are mighty promises for the future.  Mighty reversals will come if you watch things go full circle.  Is there any evidence for this?  Maybe not. 

Yet Jesus maintains there will be justice in the afterlife.

In Greek literature and history, radical reversals are a major theme.  This gospel reminded me of the story of King Croesus and Solon in the history written by Herodotus.  Croesus is the king of Lydia in the sixth century B.C. who ruled for fourteen years; he was fabulously wealthy.  He met a wise man named Solon and asked him: Who is the happiest man in the world?  Croesus believes he knows the answer: himself.  Or Donald Trump.  Solon sees the situation differently.  Instead he speaks of a man who died fighting for his country and two brothers who got their mother to a religious festival before they both died suddenly.  The last thing they did was a good deed.  Croesus can’t be the happiest man in the world because he’s not dead yet.  The king is stunned by the wisdom of Solon.  He is baffled. 

Reversals can still happen.  Fate and fortune are fickle and mercurial.  Here at Kent, you can go up, go down, and sideways all in one day.  What happened to Croesus after meeting with Solon?  His son died suddenly, his wife committed suicide, and the Persians destroyed his kingdom in 546 B.C.  He became a prisoner and wise man to the Persians led by the great King Cyrus, and he does grow spiritually.  He learns wisdom at the bottom of reversals, and he shares it.

The bottom is where faith becomes a very interesting question.  Though I have been to the pinnacle in Madison Square Garden, my most important work has come at the bottom of life’s reversals.  What you overcome is more important than what you achieve.  I believe that.

Forty-one years later, my story is still hard to tell.  When I was nine years old, I was diagnosed with cancer.  My childhood was shattered; it was a forlorn tour of duty.  It all started with a broken leg and a tumor on the back of my head.  The broken leg happened during a soccer game, and the tumor was initially thought to be a harmless cyst.  When my local doctor tried to remove it, he sewed me up and sent me to Stanford Children’s Hospital.  There were other potential tumors in my body.  I was to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment for two years.  I had cancer.  I hated that word with every fiber of my being.  My life had a radical reversal.  I was down, on the bottom of life.  I was like the poor man Lazarus, yet God came through loud and clear.  God came through people.  My people.  God was a spirit of help, and God came through my mother who attended every chemotherapy appointment but one.  My father did not go to any.  God came through my Asian doctor who calmed and comforted me with her skill and compassion.  I did not survive by a miracle, though I do believe in them.  It was pure science, and yet it was still deeply spiritual.  I began to understand a suffering God.  One who was deeply beautiful and present at all times.    

I identified with Jesus, deeply, in my suffering.  Jesus got nails in his wrists on the cross; I got chemotherapy shots in the same place, where a bruise would emerge after a treatment.  Jesus wore a crown of thorns.  I got to wear a large rubber band around my head, so that I would keep my hair as long as possible.  It didn’t work.  Jesus was speared in the side by a Roman soldier.  I got a large needle inserted into my side, directly into the hip bone, to extract bone marrow for chemical study.  The first time this happened, I tried to scream but no sound came out.  I related to Jesus, and he related to me.  He came to me, in strange and diverse forms.  When you have been to the wall yourself, your attitude changes towards those who suffer.  You want to bring them hope because hard times come to everyone.  You want to give them upgrades.  I went into remission at the age of eleven; remission is a word I will always love.

God is in the ups and downs.  From the gospel and the Greeks, the message is to be humble when things are going well, and to be faithful when they aren’t.  When I was on top at Madison Square Garden, my thoughts went out to the truly poor in the world who really deserve a break.  When I was down, I learned that I can help others just as people were there for me.

Let us help increase the upgrades in our world.  For what we do to help others will eventually come back to help us.  In the full circle of a God who pulls us forward; that we may no longer live for ourselves, but for the love that saves us.  Amen.   

Naked and Afraid: Part Deux

 

  Last year, on the first Thursday of the first week, I stood before you as the chapel speaker and made a confession; it was personal, and deeply embarrassing: I watch a reality show called Naked and Afraid.  The show is ridiculous.  I hate myself a little bit for watching it, but I do it anyway.  Two naked strangers, like Adam and Eve--the first biblical survivalists, have to survive for 21 days without food, water, and clothing.  It is the ultimate setting of personal discomfort.  Who would want to do this?  You would have to be crazy, right?  They say there is no prize money; it’s all about the experience.  When I first discovered the show, I thought it was a new low in television.  Then I settled in to watch.

But something about the show reminded me of how I feel when I begin a new year.  Everyone is a little naked and afraid.  When you’re new here, there can be fear and certainly anxiety, and homesickness.  Maybe that feeling is already gone.  But maybe it’s lingering here tonight, on the fourth day of school.  I actually find my own anxiety level increases during Early Week; maybe others do too.  Just beginning on Monday was much better than waiting for the year to start. 

On Tuesday Dean Kelderman spoke about the importance of being willing to be uncomfortable as she related her experience living on a sailboat.  I’m following the same winds  tonight.  Being a student, being a faculty member, requires you to make peace with discomfort, and to expand your comfort zone little by little each day until the discomfort becomes something like confidence, and even peace of mind. 

The episodes of Naked and Afraid show the peril and difficulty of living off the land.  Here at Kent, we live close to nature in this beautiful setting, this lovely river valley.  Take the time to look around and experience the natural world.  Take a hike.  On a daily basis, you can spot eagles, hawks, herons, turkeys, beavers, bobcats, and yes there are bears.  I have had one bear sighting in my time at Kent.  I was driving north on Route 7 just past the village when I saw something large crossing the road.  My brain couldn’t process what I was seeing.  Why is there a couch crossing the road?  I asked myself.  Someone is magically moving a sofa.  Then my brain knew the word: that is a bear.  Bear.  It moved slowly, loping along with complete confidence, until it disappeared into the woods.  Last year, there was a small white owl who was roosting on the side of the chapel.  It was Mr. McDonough who first spotted the owl, resting in a small, circular opening on the chapel wall on the south peak. The owl was a huge hit on Facebook.  We are close to nature at Kent, whether you think of it or not.  Several years ago, I had a bat living in my chapel office.  It rested on the wall near the door, very much alive.  I let it be.  Live and let live, I say.  It stayed for three days inside my office, and I like to think we became close friends, though I never named it.  One day it was gone, and I was filled with sadness.  But you have to keep moving if you live close to nature.  Nature has no place for sentiment and nostalgia; it’s all about survival.  And if you love someone, set them free.  Fly away little, brown bat.  Live long and prosper.

So this chapel talk is “Naked and Afraid: Part Deux.”  Subtitled “The Epic Controversy.”  What in the world has caused me to speak of this ridiculous show a second time?  Here in St. Joseph’s Chapel.  To go to this sad, small well one more time.  It’s all because the show is…fake.  It’s fake.  Phony, like Holden used to say.  It’s all over the Internet, so it must be true.  This accusation hit me like a ton of bricks.

Reality shows are supposed to be, well, real.  Is it possible that Naked and Afraid is fake?  Ok, let’s be clear.  The animals really die on the show; that’s the most important thing, in my opinion. This part is undeniably real.  That naked man with a machete really is killing an electric eel, and chopping it into pieces for a BBQ on cable TV as electricity shakes his arms in the struggle.  No faking there.  Sometimes the camera turns shyly away when there is a blow to the head of an animal.  When women kill on the show, it is always memorable; I love those scenes the most, reversing hunter gatherer associations from our genetic past.  The women sometimes have cleverly crafted traps for shrimp and fish.  Women can kill animals if they get hungry enough.  And they will often take the lead in cooking the animals.  All of this gives me great faith and comfort.

So what’s fake about the show?  The process of editing 21 days to forty-five minutes requires a certain storyline that may not fit the experience of the contestants.  This is not raw footage that stands on its own, but rather a narrative that follows something like a script.  Some contestants have complained that the show distorts their experience.  In particular, the show likes to have villains or bad guys whom the audience is rooting against.  The actual experience is much more complicated.  Are there really heroes and villains at Kent School?  I don’t think life works that way.  I am reminded of the character actor James Cagney from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  He was famous for playing bad guys in the movies.  When asked how he played the villain so well, Cagney responded simply: “I never played a bad guy.”  Everyone can be explained, and we are always justifying ourselves…to ourselves. 

As my investigation continued, I found the evidence against the show to be slim and anecdotal.  The only hard evidence was the treatment of a female contestant named Kim.  After eating the liver of a turtle, Kim suffered from food poisoning.  She was fed with bread, rice, and baby food for several days.  She also had two IV drips.  None of this was in the actual show.  There was another female contestant who regularly stole food from the camera crew, but none of her behavior was presented.   And then there was Shane, one of the more annoying contestants.  He limped around for the whole show, whining about everything under the sun.  But the episode never revealed that he had three broken toes at the time. 

That’s it?  I started to feel better.  I could face this coming school year with confidence, clothed and unafraid..  And then the NY Times, the paper of record, did a piece on the show.  It was an unusual focus, but one that I had often considered myself.  Who are the people who do the editing of the pesky body parts?  Who are these people?  They make it all suitable (more or less) for mainstream America on the Discovery Channel.  These are the people who cloud over the nakedness.  What kind of job is that?  Are they hiring?  Do I need to finish Kent to work there?  Some of these tech guys thought maybe this was a dream job, but experience proved otherwise in the tedium of hiding the human body.  And there can be zero mistakes.  The turnover is very high in this department, and 25 people have left the position since the show began five years ago.  The work is tedious and boring, and the workers are given to depression.  One editor had this to say about the state of his existence working on the show.

“Thankfully we stay pretty hectic around here, so I don’t have a lot of time to sit back and think about the path my life has taken.”

So what makes us different from a silly reality show?  Our common life is real.  Our business together is deeply real and profound.  Not that people can’t be fake here; there’s plenty of that.  Our species, homo sapiens, is twisted and strange and tragic, but still capable of greatness and beauty and compassion.  But to keep it real you need to let yourself be known.   Be genuine.  Seek your authentic self and draw out the best of those around you.  This happens all the time at Kent, and you can be accepted for who you are at the deepest levels of being human.  It will be uncomfortable at times, but keep pushing outward, past your limits.  You may be holding on to pain, keeping you from throwing yourself into this crazy thing called life.  Last year is not this year.  The pain can go somewhere; it can actually do something.  This can be the full power of forgiveness, which makes you eager to live again.  And to love again.

If you really leave your comfort zone, you might encounter the most amazing presence in the natural world: the Spirit of the Living God.  It’s out there, just waiting for you, knocking on your heart.  The naked fear you experience now can become the deepest confidence and calmness in your being. 

All will be well.  I won’t tell you to keep it real this year because I know you’ll do just fine.  You got this. 

"The Holy Spirit All Over the Place"

Pentecost is a major feast of the Church, but it is a distant third compared to Christmas and Easter.  Face the facts.  How come?  What can we do to give Pentecost a chance to catch up with Christmas cheer and Easter joy, as spring unfolds before us each day?  Maybe it’s because Pentecost doesn’t have a secular mascot like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.  Pentecost celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, which Jesus promised would happen in today’s gospel from John.  The Advocate will come.  Like the holiday of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is a distant third in the Holy Trinity.  Today is about underdogs.  Nobody talks about the Holy Spirit, or at least not enough. 

So, what about the divided tongues as of fire in the Acts of the Apostles?  What about the gospel being preached in different languages?  This is powerful stuff going on, why doesn’t Pentecost get more respect?  Is it too hard to imagine in our world today?  An instant Rosetta Stone experience, for the new leaders of the Church. The flames of spiritual presence allowed the disciples to speak in different languages, and thereby spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, which they did.  The disciples, now apostles, are amazing in the absence of Jesus.  The Gift of the Holy Spirit is a breakthrough experience for everyone involved.

In Buddhism, there is an important concept called Moksha, which is relevant to Pentecost, I think.  There is a great buildup of energy in moksha, followed by a breakthrough; an extraordinary liberation from the temporal, differentiated, and mortal world of ordinary experience.  A liberation, from ordinary forms of sensation.  And consequential thought.  There is a breakthrough experience, opening up a deeper spiritual reality that has access to the human mind.  Moksha and the Holy Spirit, both Buddhism and Christianity, have something in common, and much to learn from each other’s tradition.  Prize Day is a kind of moksha, along with the important events coming in the next three weeks. 

Today students from the Buddhist Club, now in its fourth year, will be traveling with me to the Chuan Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York.  The monastery has the largest Buddha in the Western Hemisphere.  It stands at 37 feet and is surrounded by 10,000 miniature Buddha statues.  I counted them during my last visit.  I had to be sure, to check out the hype.  The monastery is not far away, but it’s another world that we will enter.  Today our students will meditate before the greatest Buddha of this hemisphere.  Maybe we’ll experience Moksha, maybe the Holy Spirit.  Who knows?

There is a tremendous buildup of energy at this time of the year; the key thing is to direct it productively.  The guidance of God comes in the new form of the Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Spirit is not really new at all.  You can find the Spirit of God all the way back in the first chapters of Genesis, with the Spirit flowing over the waters of creation.  I have heard countless sermons in my life, but I have never heard a sermon that was just about the Holy Spirit—at least not one I can remember.

How can we move the Holy Spirit and Pentecost upward from their bronze medal status?  How can we find the gold medal stand? 

Let’s start with the decorations in chapel this morning, and the gospel read in different languages.  Ms. Lynch from the Art Department has brought us the wonderful and beautiful ribbons next to Jesus.  They are the tongues of fire, the inspiration for speaking new languages.  And they surround our resurrected Jesus statue, high above us each Sunday; which is exactly true to the holiday; with the Holy Spirit fulfilling the Easter miracle, Jesus and the Holy Spirit together.  There are so many paradoxes today.  The Holy Spirit is ineffable and yet tangible; with a penetrating ability to communicate, and to inspire communication in every known language.  What does it mean for the Spirit to be both accessible and ineffable?

Ahh. This question brings us to baseball, thankfully.    

Baseball can be a road to God; the ineffable and the tangible come together in following the game.  This is typical Holy Spirit sermon behavior, changing the subject when you’re just getting started.

The author of the book Baseball as a Road to God is John Sexton, the fifteenth President of New York University, who used material from his very popular class of the same title to shape the book’s theology.  The course at NYU is geared towards helping undergraduates create an intellectual and personal context for the ineffable.  That’s the goal.  To make friends with Moksha, our new classmate.  As any mystic will tell you, or not tell you if they’re really mystical, the ineffable is hard to talk about.  By definition, the ineffable is too great or powerful or beautiful to be described in mere words.  It cannot be understood by conventional means; you must move outside your comfort zone, and normal realms of knowledge.  As for other fields, besides religion, science isn’t generally helpful with the ineffable (and the religious faith it generates).  Theology is really the best field to talk about the ineffable, and how it can be found in baseball, according to Sexton: “Whatever its particular manifestation, faith is an affirmation of something that cannot be expressed, for it is rooted in another domain of knowledge, one that is unknowable in scientific terms.”

For Sexton, a major baseball motif is a sense of brokenness and a longing for home.  Everything comes back to home in baseball.  Baseball requires, if one is to be successful, a separation from home, by three stations, and a return when the runners—the former hitters—are somehow changed by the journey.  Like you, here at Kent.  The runners score; they return to the fraternity of dugout and clubhouse.  It all comes back to where it started.  But none of this happens safely; there is always peril.  Don’t do anything stupid in the last three weeks of school.  Keep it cool.  Baseball seems to have a knack for breaking one’s heart, while inviting, on a mystical level, a deeper commitment to secrets, mystical coincidences, and zany anomalies.  In the words of Sexton:

“Faith is often the handmaiden of hard work, intellectual and otherwise.  In religion thinkers have often tried to use reason to convince others to join them in the faith.  Much ink has been spilled, for example, on various philosophical arguments designed to ‘prove’ God’s existence.  I find it interesting that the argumentative style and logical structure of some of these arguments have parallels used—with equal force—to suggest that something more than coincidence is involved in some of baseball’s delightful anomalies.”

The hard, personal work of religious faith began with Sexton’s love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and how they embodied the joy and sorrow of his childhood, especially when they left for the West Coast in 1958.  Listening to Dodger games on the radio was a magical experience, a scrolling narrative of imagination in every Brooklyn neighborhood, listening to the Southerner Red Barber call the games.  (At the time of the Dodgers, Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the United States.)  Going to the park, to little Ebbets Field, was heaven itself.  Sacred places and sacred time at the park require partisanship, and this partisanship creates the suffering, and the glory. 

For John Sexton, baseball is a ground of being where one can experience religious faith.  This is how he describes the relationship between the individual and the ineffable:

“There is much that is known today, and even more that is unknown today but will be known (perhaps even hundreds of years from now).  Faith—true faith—deals with neither the known nor the unknown but knowable.  It deals with that which is unknowable in the scientific sense but which the believer knows with all his or her being (the way, in a wonderful marriage, love is known).  This is the domain of faith.  Therein lies the most powerful connection to baseball, its rhythms and patterns, astonishing feats and mystical charm; it is not necessary to elevate baseball to the level of ultimate concern to notice that, for the true fan, there is sometimes a touching of the ineffable that displays the qualities of a religious experience in the profound space of faith.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, ‘All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator I have not seen.’  That thought was echoed by William James: ‘The divine presence is known through experience.  The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness.’”

So the Holy Spirit streams ahead, and pulls us forward, to Prize Day and beyond, bridging the gap between conscious living and the ineffable source of our being.  In an act of consciousness, we meet God again, in our own time with the Spirit.  Enjoy the moment; it is a gift from God.  Be in the moment.  Enjoy your life, but with gratitude that reaches out to others.  The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is experienced by some as a sacred dimension of God that is feminine.  Nearness to the divine comes with surprising discoveries, and you can make them too.  The Holy Spirit is the author of our dreams and visions.  May the Spirit bless all of you in the weeks to come as we finish the year together, as people on fire.  A moksha for goodness.  And love.      

"Resurrection Fields and Country Music"

On this third Sunday of Easter, we continue to celebrate the new life offered to us during this season, with the glory of spring all around us on our campus.  Oh wait, it seems to still be winter, despite the calendar.  It must be some kind of cosmic joke, but the snow did make the campus look pristine for a few days.  There is so much beauty to see when spring comes in earnest, but we get even busier.  There is so much going on, every day on this campus. 

How should we approach the new life that is all around us now?  The Easter season is all about new life, and learning how to live more fully into God’s victory over suffering and death.  In the Easter showings of the Risen Jesus, there is a gap between initial perception and a full recognition of the resurrected Jesus, as you heard in John’s gospel this morning with Peter seeing a stranger on the beach.  Then he sees that the stranger is the risen Jesus.  There is a breakthrough of seeing in all of the resurrection appearances, a beautiful new way of being with the Risen Lord, one that is surprising and deeply personal.  Resurrection makes sense of the past, even the most heartbreaking events, even our worst failures and stupid decisions.  There is still the chance to live anew, with full hearts.  These moments of encounter with Christ transfigure seemingly ordinary events, like the simple scene of fishing with Peter and the other disciples.  Simple events become loaded with joy.  New life can hit us the same way in our daily rounds.

            I know something about the dawning gap between initial perception and then spiritual recognition; of being clueless about what is really going on, and then suddenly getting the big picture.  My story, which will be very scary to some of you, has to do with music.  I’m not talking about rap, indie rock, hip hop, classic rock, house music, classical, jazz, or even Motown.  What’s left?  Uh Oh. 

That’s right.  My scary resurrection story this morning is about… country music.

            Just a show of hands: how many country music fans are in chapel today? 

            When I was young and unwise, I hated country music.  It was hate.  I was a hater.  At best, I thought it was a cultural nuisance.  But, over the many years of my life, something changed.  I changed.  Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, I saw the light.  And I blame Easter for the change, this new life I am living.  I blame resurrection, that wild, unpredictable force that makes all things new, even musical genres once rejected by a teenager.  There is a prayer from the Good Friday liturgy which helped me understand that my world could change drastically, even overnight.  The prayer goes like this: “…let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.”  For me, this is country music. 

So here’s my sad story, my small-change Easter miracle.  I grew up in a small, agricultural town called Turlock, California.  Actually, compared to Kent, Turlock is huge, but so is almost anywhere.  The subject matter of country music songs always seemed dangerously close to my life growing up in Turlock.  At my high school, your social status could go sky high by driving to school in a pickup truck…or having a new tractor on your farm.  You may have heard the tractor lyrics from that Kenny Chesney song.   

            “She thinks my tractor’s sexy…”  You’ve heard this one? 

            “She thinks my tractor’s sexy

She’s always starin’ at me

as I’m chuggin’ along.”

That was my hometown.  I didn’t have a pickup truck or a tractor: I was the outsider, the persecuted intellectual.  I actually rode a bicycle to school.   

            What scared me most about country music was the twang.  You know exactly what I mean.  It seemed to emanate from an agrarian madness, undoubtedly classifiable as a type of mental illness.  And yes, I feared the fever because it was Southern.  Forgive me, Lord, I knew not what I did.  This madness might run in my family if I weren’t very, very careful.  There was a lot of pesticide used in the Central Valley of California.  I grew up in the age of crop dusters.  Who knows about the long-term effects?

            But back to the twang.  Its dangerous alchemy has finally gotten the best of me; my inner redneck has fully surfaced.  The twang for me is a kind of lunacy, a bemused and crazy peace of mind, which carries us forward more or less gracefully, even when the past wasn’t graceful or pleasant.  The twang carries with it the wounds of the past, but somehow the burden is different, transformed, even lifted.  There is a new order: our lows become highs, we have indeed rolled with the many punches that life has to offer.  I am starting to sound like a country singer myself. 

The pesticide is no doubt kicking in. 

            As an English teacher, I also couldn’t help but notice that many country songs are ballads.  They are stories about the human experience, our common ground.  Some of the funniest lyrics can also be found in country songs, and today you will hear some of them.  The weird lyrics, the wacky expression, the absolutely preposterous rhyme can wake you up—like a Zen koan—snapping you into a new reality. 

Here’s a sample of country music lyrics for you, as we continue in this Easter season.

“I bought a car from a guy who stole my girl, but it don’t run so we’re even.”

That one often hits you later.  It will sneak up on you, probably at brunch.

“If the phone doesn’t ring, that’ll be me.”

That one is also a little sneaky.

            “I’d lie to you for your love, and that’s the truth.”

            “There’s dirt roads and white lines and all kinds of stop signs, I’ll stay right where I’m at, ‘cause I wear my own kind of hat.”

            And another.

            “Easy is getting harder every day.”  Perfect for April, when we think we’re on the home stretch. 

            Here’s a good one for surviving at Kent School.

            “I know I’m crazy, but it keeps me from going insane.”

            Country singers are also obsessed with geography lessons, mostly around the Southern region of this nation. 

            “How I wish Dallas was in Tennessee.  If I could move Texas east, she’d be here with me.”

            “You walked across my heart like it was Texas and taught me how to say I just don’t care.”

            “All my x’s live in Texas, therefore I reside in Tennessee.”

            As you can see, the Texas-Tennessee dynamic is frequently referenced.

            Here’s one that manages to cross the border.

            “I’m stuck here in Mexico living on refried dreams.”           

            And no discussion of country music would be complete without the wonderful, sometimes tragic, often comic, relations between men and women.  Unfortunately, this section had to be heavily edited for chapel, especially all the honky tonk references.

            “I gotta girl who’s got her own money.  Somebody slap me, I can’t be this happy.”

            That one has a kind of feminist ring to it.  I think.  Then again, I’m not so sure.

            “You don’t have to call me darling, darling, ‘cause you never even call me by my name.”

“You can’t have your Kate and Edith too.”

“I got you on my conscience, but at least you’re off my back.”

Country music is also unafraid when it comes to religious faith and God.  The best lyrics in this category, in my opinion, come from Iris DeMent:

“Some say once gone, you’re gone forever

And some say you’re gonna come back

Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior

If in sinful ways you lack

Some say you’re gonna come back in a garden

Bunch of carrots and sweet little peas

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.”

Here’s another classic in the religion section.

“I’ve been roped and throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost corral.”

Here’s one that subtly combines religion and romance.

“I fell in the water that you walked on.”  I really like that one.

And this last famous line brings together religion and football, which are virtually indistinguishable in the South anyway.

            “Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life.

            End over end, neither left nor right

            Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights

Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life.”

            Though football no longer uses the drop kick, that song will live forever.  (Actually Doug Flutie did a drop kick with the New England Patriots.  It is still legal.).  But the twang of country is a double-edged sword.  For all of its mighty humor, country music is at its best in the expression of sadness and sorrow.

            “Dreams don’t make any noise when they die.”

            This next lyric comes from “Star of Bethlehem” by Neil Young.

            “Ain’t it hard when you wake up in the morning

            and you find out that those other days are gone.

            All you have is memories of happiness,

            Lingerin’ on.”

            And the very best of them all, from Patsy Cline.

            “I sing just like I hurt inside.”

There is a kind of moral wisdom here in all of these lyrics that steadies people through hard times.  In the language of country music, the music makes better people out of worse people.  The song allows you to get from where you are now to the person and place you’re supposed to be, even when life is at its worst.  Hard times are democratic.  They come to everyone. 

            In country music, the broken heart is never the last word.  Like the season of Easter, there is no quit in country.  It goes the distance, and so can you.  We can all grow strong at the broken places, letting our sorrow mix with the Easter joy that comes from God.  May God bless all of us--in our remaining time together this year. 

I’ll close this morning with the sweet words from a song by Tom T. Hall.

“I love honest open smiles

Kisses from a child,

Tomatoes on a vine,

And onions.

I love winners when they cry,

Losers when they try

Music when it’s good,

And Life.         

And I love you too.”