Sacramental Living

I used to be enamored with mystics like the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), and with people like St. Francis of Assisi and St. John of the Cross, and John Bunyan. I’m still kind of fascinated by them, to tell the truth. There’s something appealing about the thought of a lone figure in the wilderness, removed from the clatter and clutter of everyday human discourse and discord, maybe living in a cave or a tree. They were doing two things at once: facing down temptation and being ushered into the presence of God. Visions and visitations, ecstasies and epiphanies, moving from glory to glory – that caught me. Even their darkness appealed to me. Even when they were lamenting their sin or God’s absence, they seemed so real. They lost and found and lost God over and again in their (usually) short lives. Mystics, it seemed, lived on a higher plane of existence. Their self discipline and connection to the supernatural realm was what I wanted for myself. Maybe it’s because I so lack discipline, or maybe it’s because I’ve always been drawn to extreme people and activities (without ever being extreme myself. I’d rather read about your extreme experience from the safety of my sofa). Maybe I’m the stereotypical hopeless romantic. Who knows. Whatever it was, that small band of super Christians sparks my imagination.

But more and more I’m interested in everyday mysticism, ordinary living wrapped in the extraordinary Life of God. It doesn’t have the same edge of the cliff, burning desert excitement, but it’s just as real. Not to discount the Desert Sage Experience, which I’m sure it’s a great thing, but daily mysticism has great potential because it is so hidden.

It’s also more true to the incarnation. If (and this is, I realize, a big “if”) Jesus is the Son of God and if (another big “if”) he became a human being, then the whole material world is changed. Jesus touched everything, setting everything free to be his and to be itself. If that’s so, then common, ordinary experiences become mystical. They have sacramental potential. That is, they might become a sacrament.

A sacrament is a physical action that brings a person into the presence of God (some people add that it should be commanded by Jesus). One of the distinctions between Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox Christians and Protestant Christians is the number of sacraments they celebrate. Catholics and Orthodox identify seven; Protestants who recognize sacraments at all see two, baptism and communion. If, however, a sacrament is a physical action (commanded by Jesus) that leads one into the presence of God, and if God-ness is permeating the very fabric of the cosmos because of the incarnation, then every action has sacramental potential, from the most mundane to the most exalted.

Jesus very clearly told his followers to serve the poor. He set it up in a very sacramental fashion, too: “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me in. I was sick and in prison and you came to me. What you’ve done for the very least, you’ve done for me.” He is saying, In these actions, in these people, you will meet me.

He didn’t bother (of course) to clearly spell out what he meant by that. He didn’t bother to say, The hungry person is like me, or, Tending the sick is a way of serving me, or, I am present in everyone. I’ve known a lot of people who have done a lot of theologizing and careful mind exercises trying to figure out what Jesus meant by that. I don’t know that I could ever properly sort out what Jesus meant us to believe about his words.

All I can tell is that he wasn’t presenting a metaphysical puzzle for his followers to sort through; he was serious about what he meant we should do. We should act as though his kingdom is real, as though he is the savior of the world. When people live in that way (or Way) everyday encounters are sacramental.

A problem with what I just laid out is in the impossibility of ritualizing everyday actions. Religion is like science: actions and words (like experiments) need to be repeatable and predictable, otherwise they don’t count. But the unexpected, or at least, the unpredictable, is closer to the norm for sacramental living. It’s pretty tough to find a hungry man and drag him into a church building and give all the members a chance to feed him. There are no special words for visiting a woman in prison. Sacramental living takes each piece as it comes, and finds God in it.

No doubt, Jesus is in the desert, and on the tops of mountains. I can believe that ten years of silence will help a person find God, or that meditation on a single word (like Abba, Jesus’ name for his Father-God) will open unseen doors into the spiritual realm. But the presence of God is also in the tedium of ordinary life, and if we cannot find it there, we won’t find it anywhere.

St Francis of Assisi, one of my mystic heroes, realized early on that he was not to do his work alone. A group of men, almost as eccentric as he himself, were attracted to his joyful abandon to God. That was something new in the midst of religious austerity of the Middle Ages. So he formed a Rule of Life for the small band of “Little Brothers” (friars minor) who gathered around him. Then his friend Claire found herself surrounded by women looking for the same kind of experience. So he helped them write their own Order of Little Sisters.

So far, this is pretty standard monk and nun stuff. But then, as they traveled through towns and villages, working with peasants in fields and begging food for the sick, other people -- married people, ordinary people with families and responsibilities – started to become interested in this life. They asked Francis to help them. After much thought and prayer, he organized what he called the Third Order for those who couldn’t abandon everything to live as a monk or nun, but who nevertheless wanted this new way of life.

The new way of life is not for the super spirituals. It’s for dock workers and parents and children (yes, little kids) and single people and the strong and the weak and deputies and cooks and the lonely and people who can sing and people who can only sign and quadriplegics and prisoners and runners and nurses and the brave and the fearful and even you.

When pressed for what matters most to God, Jesus had an answer at the ready. He cited the Shema, the Israelites’ mantra: “Hear, O Israel, YHWH your God; YHWH is one. You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second,” said Jesus, “is just like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

As we love God and our neighbor, everything becomes sacramental. Prayer and scripture reading (alone or in a group) isn’t easy, but it has great power to focus my attention away from myself and my needs, desires, my petty disappointments and fears. If I let it, it can lead me Godward. Serving the least and the last likewise tears my eyes away from myself and retrains my attention. In the face of the poor, I can find Jesus looking at me.

But, beyond those disciplines becoming ingrained, all of life is one great sacrament. Eating and drinking are windows into God’s provision. Exercise and rest display God’s mercy. Children, partners, friends, and parents are a gateway for God’s love.

I had a professor in college who was a fierce atheist. He told us a story once, though, of a time he was on a Navy ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A hellacious storm pounded the boat, but before it got to there, he watched it coming. He said, “It was the closest I’ve ever come to a ‘religious experience’”.

I was at the Grand Canyon with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. As we stood looking over the edge, trying to take in all of it, she said, “Isn’t God awesome?”

My tendency in both circumstances would be to say, “Look at that big storm,” and “Look at that big hole.” But others, maybe people who are more in tune at specific moments, sense something beyond themselves. My professor had no words, no coordinates, no map, for understanding his experience. My sister-in-law had the rudiments of our God talk: “God” and “awesome”. Each had the opportunity to go further in, further up into the mystery of God’s reality, into the sacrament of God’s world.

Wounded Knee: Summer 2001

This poem appeared in The South Dakota Review and in my book, "Ravens and Other Stories". If you've never been to Wounded Knee, or any other massacre site, you need to go.

Wounded Knee: Summer 2001
A thin sidewalk
marks the dumping ground,
overlooking killing ground.
You lie beneath, suspended
jumble of bones.
In old photographs
we saw corpses frozen,
black against the snow,
caught by death in motion.
That bleak grey paper brought
the air conditioned gallery a different chill.
But here there is only the concrete,
the granite marker and the hills.
And miles stacked on miles of blue, blue sky.
This stark, dusty air makes winter
a bitter dream,
like those photographs seem
here in this peaceful place.
Today tourists, sad for the dead,
wander the dust above your heads,
pitying, leaving,
while the children of your children
stand in the dust
of their receding.

Nate's Love

This was written for a writing contest. I can't remember the rules. I think it won something.


The steer wasn’t going for me, but he got me. He was tied so he couldn’t stand, but his head sure could move. I was pulling my brand, “Lazy H,” from the fire when he turned his horn. The tip ripped through my coveralls, tore a big hole in my thigh.

I’m bleeding bad and need help. I cut the steer loose, but first I brand the sumbich. I stagger to the truck, but with no strength in my left leg, I can hardly shift.

I’m feeling woozy after a mile banging through the fields. The truck lurches dead. Then I see Nate Jackson, the new neighbor. He came out here two years ago, “swept in with Kennedy,” we say at the cafe. He doesn’t know that Deadwood’s no place for blacks.
Nate rides over on his gelding, hat back. Doesn’t say a word, just climbs in. I shove over. He drives and talks.

Says his grandfather, Roy, rode trail with Nat Love, a.k.a. Deadwood Dick. Roy took a distant second to Love’s first in the 1876 Deadwood rodeo. They drifted out of Dakota Territory together, fighting Indians and working cattle. Even got jobs together as Pullman porters, toward the end.

We finally make it to the hospital in Deadwood. I need blood. Nate donates a pint. While they’re pumping it into me, he leans over and says, “Used to be, one in four cowboys had black blood.” “This is two for two,” I wink up at him.

Haiku Series: The Sun Cleans My Hair

The sun cleans my hair,
golden fingers caressing
my scalp like liquid.

The raven calls out,
a beggar looking for bread.
He eats noisily.

Snow falls sweet on trees
like a silky white blanket
covering giants.

Rocks have hard faces
looking out on the soft world
weary from long years.

The mountains are wrapped,
swaddled in billowing mist
like creation’s edge.

We endure like dust:
blown to the edges of time.
Can this be enough?

I imagine God
on the edge of creation,
the black light to him.

The sky tonight

The sky tonight is a cracked vase
shards of purple, orange, and red
shine among dark lines of clouded underbellies.

There is a Japanese term
-wabi sabi-
which means delight in imperfection,
like the asymmetry of every face,
like the splintered sky and vase.

my mind rolls
to my mother and my father.
They who, in a moment I know not,
-in passion, need, fear, love, or spite-
in a moment I know not,
cast me as a fish without sight
into a shrinking sea,
who bound me over
to the living world,
whose love shines wabi sabi
across my sky.

wonderment: thoughts on advent

"Only wonder understands. Concepts create idols." Gregory of Nyssa

When i was an intern pastor my supervisor said, “Advent’s coming. What should we do?” I said, “It seems like people are so accustomed to Christmas that its strangeness doesn’t impact them anymore.” “Right,” he said, “Let’s do something about that.”

So, we had a woman in the church paint an ordinary clay flower pot gold, decorate it with lots of baubles, and put it on a set of steps in the chancel. Each week we moved the pot with great ceremony down the steps. The drama culminated in the Christmas Eve destruction of the pot, crushed in a bag on the communion table. It was strong, that’s for sure.

The beauty of it was in the unexplained parts of it. I’m sure the sermons worked another, more intellectual angle, but the sight of that pot moving inexorably to its demise, its beauty obscured by a bag and then beaten to pieces with a hammer was a wonder-filled thing.

Gregory of Nyssa caught a truth that the Church (or, a large part of it) has lost sight of. In fact, many arms of the Church ran straight into the idolatry he was warning against. Once, when i was teaching an adult Sunday School class, a man said, “We know that the Bible is a book of principles . . .” I was flabbergasted, flummoxed, even. I honestly thought that only straw men set up by liberals and post-evangelicals said such things. I’m sure i didn’t answer very well, which is unfortunate, because he was beyond wrong. He was treading the ground of idolatry.

For some people i meet, to even hint that wonder is the best way to understanding is a heresy. Maybe it is. It transgresses against the religion of reason, it questions the worth of logic and linear thinking, it suggests that maybe we cannot know perfectly, but only through a dirty window at best. Wonderstanding (so, it’s a word now) is not the opposite of intellectual understanding. It’s not emotionalism. God knows American pop piety is full to overflowing with meaningless sentimentalism. Wonder is a different way, one that might move us past some of the roadblocks thrown up by knowing or feeling.

Advent, the liturgical season preceding Christmas, is an invitation. It’s an invitation to understand the Incarnation through wonder, not concepts, ideas, theologies, or theories. Without building elaborate schemes to explain away or defend the Story, we get to wonder at the hard stuff (like a God who loves all people enough to live and die for them) and the impossible stuff (like a virgin birth). Advent says, “Please, let’s not force this through the micro-filter of a modernist mindset. Please, let’s not approach these texts with preconceived religious ideas. Don’t try to understand through twenty-first century or first century eyes, through science oriented eyes or the eyes of faith.” In the spiritual exercise of Advent, we don’t seek to examine the stories with a microscope or to have an audience with a set of principles. Rather, we want to swim in the texts. Allow the fullness of the Story, which is no mere tale, to flow over you and fill you with wonder.

what about the rest of it?
When you read the Apostles’ Creed, you might not notice that the life of Jesus is summarized by the phrase, “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He rose again from the dead.” You might think, if you did notice it, “What about the rest of it?” If you didn’t know any different, you might think that Jesus popped out, fully formed, and died.

We Western Christians, heirs of the mediaeval Roman Church, focus on the crucifixion, almost exclusively, and we apply that death almost exclusively to our own salvation (Granted, we are also people of the Resurrection, which is very, VERY important. But our obsession with our personal salvation might be keeping us from some bigger implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Implications like the redemption of the entire cosmos.). Among other problems, such a focus allows us to leave behind some of Jesus’ harder words and teachings. In the rush to save Jesus from being added to The List of History’s Great Teachers, we relegate him to the Myths of Dying and Rising Gods pile.

Our sisters and brothers in the Eastern Orthodox cluster of churches see things a little differently. They have a great appreciation for the incarnation of Jesus. They have a word that’s connected to it, kenosis, which is the taking on of flesh, his self-emptying, his humility. When the first cell divided in Mary, something (or, better, Something – Someone!) shifted in the universe. God in the material world – nothing could ever be the same again. Even if Jesus failed in his mission (a very real possibility, one we seldom really contemplate), everything changes.

(((Do you ever contemplate the possibility of Jesus failing in his mission? It appears, from reading the stories, that God gambled everything on this chance to save the cosmos from extinction. His prayer to the Father gives us a little insight into what was at stake there. I’ll confess, i’m more than a little afraid of that Love, a Love so deep. You should be, too.)))

at least three (maybe more)
The changes we usually focus on are in the area of sin. We say that by dying, Jesus defeated sin. Sometimes i hear a great slogan, this from my more conservative evangelical friends: by living a sinless life and dying a sinless death, Jesus frees us from sin. I want to say more. With some caution i want to say that in the death of Jesus sin died. I realize the audacity of that, given the obvious odor of sin in my life and the world, but there is no future for sin. It no longer holds the human race like it once did.

I wrote something like, “Sin died with Jesus,” in my ordination paper. That did not sit well with the review committee. As i looked for metaphors to explain myself, the image of a snake whose back has been broken slid into my mind. When a snake (and a lot of other creatures) is mortally crippled it flails around. Its frenetic activity isn’t the sign of health, but of impending death. Is sin like that?

Jesus’ life was also an affront to the reign of death over all people. Isaiah called it a shroud that covers the nations. Living is always a movement toward death. And that can be frightening. Somewhere (I think it was in Greece) the Church picked up an idea like a venereal disease: the idea that we humans have an immortal soul. If we do, someone forgot to tell the writers of the Scriptures about it. Does that surprise you, or even sound grating in your ears? We have bought a package of wishful thinking that there’s something in us destined for eternity, by its very nature. We, brothers and sisters, are mortal. That means we’re not immortal in our natural selves. We imagine that some little part of ourselves will survive the sloughing off of this skin like a snake. When we die, we die (The one consistent objection i get from people when I spring that phrase on them that is, “Well, what about hell?” To bring hell into this discussion is a little like trying to soak up the ocean with a cup of sawdust, it’s that insignificant. To worry that someone might not burn in the lake of fire for eternity because they might not live that long seems to have little to do with the good news of Jesus, who came to liberate us from hellishness, including wishing everlasting damnation on others).
Everything Jesus did, from the moment of his conception, was a challenge to death. He was Life itself, walking around in a world of death.

Almost as importantly, that Life is given to us. You, the holistic reality that is You, will live eternally, not because you were created with an immortal soul, but because the death denying life of Jesus is given to you. Again, the Orthodox give us language to carry these deep realities. They have another great word, deification, which hints at our union with God, the Life of God being lived in us, and we living the Life of God.

Finally, Jesus came to undo what St. Paul in Ephesians calls “the principalities and powers.” Some of us mistakenly think that term means only personal demons, tempters like alcoholism, lust, pride. Others of us believe it to mean only the structures of injustice that oppress human beings like capitalism, communism, and corporations. The Apostle seems to have meant both and probably more. Whatever else it means, Jesus came to undo those powers and to establish an alternative kingdom.

the alternative
The kingdom of God is not heaven. It’s not pie-in-the-sky; it’s pie-on-earth. At least, it’s a slice of the pie. The kingdom of God is about restored relationships. First, as the carol says, “God and sinner [are] reconciled”. Second, there is in the kingdom reconciliation among people and peoples, which has enormous implications for ecological stewardship and war and economic justice and racism and domestic violence (and a slew of other issues that sometimes make people uncomfortable because they sound political).

Our Orthodox friends remind us that by his very incarnation, Jesus sanctified all things. He became matter, sanctifying matter. The very substance of the universe is now united with God is a way it wasn’t before. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was wrong: here indeed is a new thing under the sun, but it’s not the same sun that rose yesterday. It, too, has been changed by divinity sliding into the world in a new way. The human experience is sanctified because Jesus passed this way before: as a zygote, as an infant, as a youth, as an adult. Everything is different.

a people en route/a saviour en route
So, her we are, approaching Advent, a season the Church marks out for her children. The word advent means something like what we mean by en route. During the season of en route we read the Scriptures of the ancient Hebrews because, somewhere between the Jordan River and Babylon, they began to think about and get a glimpse of and imagine in their deepest longing a Deliverer who would come and rescue them from their enemies. Their prophets point to a kingdom in which justice is truly done, where everyone has enough, where there is no want. We read the nativity narratives of the New Testament because those writers were beginning to realize that Jesus came as that Deliverer, but to save us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the principalities and powers of personal demons and power structures.

But the season of Advent has another meaning. St. Patrick’s Breastplate, a sixth century poem/prayer calls on the strength of Christ’s “return for the judgment of doom.” That’s why so many of the texts for this season focus on prophecies of the fullness of the kingdom, not only what it can, should, and sometimes does look like now, but the fullness of “God’s dwelling among mortals”.

But don’t be fooled by the theology or theologies you’ve heard about the return of Jesus. There is much flotsam and jetsam today that looks like solid ground when it comes to the return of Jesus, but turns out to be only rotted wood, illusions, and dangerous ones at that, because they claim to be the sole truth and probably are nothing like it. Many trees have been felled to promote silly unbiblical theories and speculations and plot lines of the so-called end times. They’re not only unbiblical in their competing diagrams, but in their encouragement of sloppy living now. Here, i think, the Apostles’ Creed does indeed summarize clearly what scripture has to say: “he will come to judge the living and the dead.” Dwell on that, and in that, for this time, not on weak speculation and textual gymnastics that try to answer questions the Scriptures never pose.

I hope you’ll dive into Advent. Puzzle it. Wrestle with it. Let it throw your intellect, your emotions and your spirit to the floor and tell you its mysteries. Let the wonderment it teach you understanding.