Longing for Healing

Jeremiah’s description in Chapter 8 of his field of dead bodies in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem is grim.  It’s very real and his anguish is raw.  Even God is weeping over the carnage.  It’s not just the loss of family, friends, acquaintances.  It’s the death of a city, a culture, a religious system, even some say, the death of God.  Back then gods were territorial, and my God is bigger than your God was seen as a very practical thing.  If one country destroyed another, it was because one God had killed another.  So Jeremiah, even in the midst of his pain is learning something new.  His God is not dead, but grieving.  That in itself is startling, shocking, and a baby step towards hope.

I have never seen a field of dead bodies in real life, unlike folks in New York or Canadian soldiers who have served in Afghanistan.  When I think of fields full of bodies in spring time, I think of baseball.  Spring camp.  Take me out to the ball game, kind of things. 

My dad loved baseball.  When spring came to Alberta, he would have a bag or two of bats, balls, gloves, and catcher’s gear sitting right outside the Chemistry Room’s emergency evacuation door.  If we were ahead on our work, that door would be opened and we’d go flying to the nearest diamond.  Kids would breathlessly ask, can we go play?

I hated baseball.  All the things I learned about in baseball were about me.  Four eyes, easy out, poor looser, sucker up to bat, fumble fingers, slow poke.  You name it, they said it, and I hated my time at bat, I hated when they picked sides and I was last, and I hated being out in field, usually so far out that a ball would never come my way, and even if it did, I couldn’t throw to hit the side of a barn.

By the time I was in high school, my classmates didn’t have to say any of those things because I would say them to myself over and over.  I knew I was a terrible baseball player. Those negative thoughts buzzed in my head like a bunch of noisy mosquitos.

Funny thing about mosquitos.  There is a story of a group of teachers, nuns, actually, coming to Alberta to start a school out in the wilderness.  They travelled by Red River Cart, and along the way, their horse foaled.  It was strong enough that they were able to get back on the trail in short order and everything was going fine until the sisters encountered a swamp filled with mosquitos.  They were so strong and numerous that they killed that colt, despite the ladies best efforts.

Mosquitos in the brain can be just as dangerous.  They suck our courage, our serenity and our hope right out of us.  They leave us feeling weak and disheartened.  They drain our dreams and happiness until all that’s left is grumpy anger that spurts out at innocent folks who don’t even know what’s hit them.  They leave us depressed and sometimes we don’t even know we are depressed.

Baseball depressed me.  Or more accurately, my thinking about myself playing baseball made me feel frustrated, hopeless, klutzy, stupid and a liability.  Except when I was with my dad.  Here’s the thing I didn’t really know about him until I was an adult.  He had been the school’s softball coach for several years.  Right beside his two curling prizes and his statue of the Columbia Space Shuttle he bought when he went to NASA, were two softballs covered with girl’s signatures from games they had won.  If there was a baseball tournament within a few days drive, we were there, returning balls for the 5 cents, eating crackerjack.  He took us kids out for playing catch and practising hitting flies as often as he could.

But that didn’t seem to translate to me.  Klutz that I was, I didn’t get it.  And it didn’t help that a song came out when I was sixteen by Janis Ian about baseball which put my experience to music and fed those mosquitos even more.

One day, however, I knew that I was going to watch the ball and hit it.  All I needed to do was watch the ball.  Nothing else.  No mosquitos bussed in my head, just the words, ‘keep your eye on the ball’.

I think that it is good to go back to those old childhood experiences and revisit them.  The story, “Shoeless Joe” written by W. P. Kinsella, did just that.  It went back to the day that a baseball team lost its vision and chose Money over the game.  It found a way through to healing that loss of baseball innocence.  It was so powerful that it became the movie, Field of Dreams staring Kevin Costner.  It wasn’t just about redeeming ourselves and remembering the good old days of baseball, it became a metaphor for healing our childhood wounds, reconciling ourselves.  In the end, Costner’s character was able to reconcile his childhood memories about his relationship with his dad.

When we go back in time to those original memories with the help of a coach or a mentor like Shoeless Joe or a spiritual director or a psychologist like Glenda, we can kill our mental mosquitos.  Not by swatting them, but by remembering Jesus’ call to set our priorities straight.  You cannot serve God and mosquitos.  You have to choose.  And when we choose to do so, there is a simple prayer that drowns out their noisy buzz.  Just like hitting a baseball, it takes practise, but it will eventually drown out the loudest mosquito.  Guaranteed.  It may take a hundred repetitions or a million, but it works.  It is the balm that God wants us to have.  And it’s simple to remember.  God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Amen.

 

Lost and found

I have a guilty secret! I love movies, and not just any movies, but kids’ movies, especially Disney movies.  These folks seem to have big hearts for the human condition, and they are brazen in their exploration of tough issues.  Want your 8-year-old to learn how to manage their feelings and talk about what bugs them, try Inside Out. Want them to be educated on techniques to combat racism? Sit them down to watch Zootopia.  All kinds of topics that we adults might hesitate to discuss because we’re feeling discomfort, they have worked on.  They even have worked on environmental commentary.  I was fascinated by the latest Pixar Disney movie, Finding Dory.  It tackles several topics, dealing with everything from physical disabilities, like Nemo’s fin to mental challenges, like Dory’s lack of short term memory, which causes her and her friends no end of problems.  Dory says, “nothing in my noggin” to explain her disability, which is quite untrue of course.  There is more than meets the eye in Dory, and more than meets the eye in the movie of a quest for family through the wide ocean from the Great Barrier Reef to the California coastline. 

This movie shows three fish on their adventure through the ocean stumbling repeatedly through a sea floor littered with cars, garbage, plastic and so on.  It’s subtly done, and the fish characters never make a big deal of it except when Dory gets tangled up in plastic and has to be rescued by a marine biologist.  It’s sad that we have known about the giant island of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for years and no one has done anything about it.  It’s sad that Victoria still dumps raw sewage into the ocean, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia online.  CBC reported last year that Montreal dumps untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence, and that roughly 185-million litres of raw sewage have been dumped into Winnipeg's rivers since 2004. 

That’s about 74 Olympic sized swimming pools.  I don’t know how that compares to our town pool here across the street, but that’s a lot of water.  And when Toronto has a big storm or Halifax’s aging pipes break down, well, let’s just say that it’s not pretty.

Water is a part of us, and a part of our world.  It is changing faster than we realize, and it shouldn’t take a cruise ship sailing the North West Passage to get our attention, and to encourage us to encourage the politicians to do something.

We’ve lost our way.  We’ve forgotten that we are what we drink and that if we completely mess up our water systems, it’s going to make Jeremiah’s description of desolation come true.  The devastation of the fruitful earth is a desecration and a reversal of Genesis 1 when God’s breathe, Ruach, blew over the world and God saw that it was good.  Jeremiah reports God seeing what foolish humans have done, and it is definitely not good.   Is this what God wants for creation? Is this what we call good stewardship?

Jesus talked about going after and rescuing the insignificant, the least and the littlest.  Making an effort to hunt for that tiny coin, abandoning the herd of sheep to go looking for a lost lamb, the 1 percent.  The tiny insignificant things do matter.  When we monitor the quality of water in the Athabasca River, when we invest in a low-flow shower head or a dual flush toilet, when we change the way we brush our teeth to conserve the water more carefully, when we drink water straight from the tap to remind ourselves that water should be clean and potable and not controlled by multinational corporations, when we keep asking our politicians, when will first nations children in Canada all be guaranteed clean drinking water, when we remember to not take for granted what we pump up from our wells, when we remember to be careful when we clean up after an oil change or a painting project, it does make a difference.  It may be a drop in the bucket, but it matters, folks!  Those little actions, those attitudes and questions will add up over time.  A drop of water, millions of times over, can carve out the Drumheller river valley, or even the Grand Canyon.

We in the United Church like to preach about a God who loves us, and I do believe in that God.  But there were times when my children were small that I got exasperated with them.  Sometimes they wandered off in the store when I was trying to shop for something.  A few seconds later, I would be searching for them frantically until I would hear ‘would the mother of the little child please come to the jewelry counter’.  I would feel frustrated that they hadn’t listened, that I hadn’t watched closely enough over them, that it took only a moment for them to move so fast.  If God is the creator of this beautiful blue planet, surely there is a need to honor that creation by whatever little steps we can take to cherish it.  Because from all accounts, there isn’t a lot of water nearby and even if we harvested clean water on Mars and brought it back here, I’m not sure we could get it here fast enough to help the fish and the whales and other creatures in the ocean and rivers.  They don’t have a voice, unlike Dory and Nemo and Marlin, and we do.  May we do our best to keep doing our best to speak up for this beautiful world before it is lost into the vision Jeremiah painted so bleakly many centuries ago.  God help us find the vision, the words and the backbone to speak for the lost ones, confront the foolish ones and challenge the complacent ones, especially when we are the lost, foolish and complacent ones.  God have mercy on us all.  Amen.

Hospitality and entitlement and pokemon

With all the excitement in the news of Pokémon Go this summer, I was looking forward to coming back from holidays and interacting with kids in search of their elusive Pocket monster characters.  It has become quite the talking point; young folks are getting off the sofa, going outside and meeting people, especially the generation that has been seen as living lives similar to mushrooms, down in the dark basement playing endless video games.  Yes there have been some silly things associated with it, and some sad and tragic things from people who forgot their common sense, to kids getting lured into a trap and robbed at gunpoint!

I was hoping to provide hospitality to teens and young adults looking for their charmanders, pikachus and bulbasaurs here.   Unfortunately, or fortunately, we are not a Pokestop, but the old brick schoolhouse up the road from us is.  So I went up the road to the library to offer hospitality.  Pokémon were the number one requested by kids getting their faces painted at the summer library program at Alice B Donahue this week.  The motto, ‘gotta get them all’ is very familiar to them.  They appreciated the hospitality of meeting them where they were and respecting what they were interested in. 

Hospitality is one of the calling cards of Christian practise.  It’s a spiritual practise that was shocking when it first was taught by Jesus and Paul, and it still is shocking today.  Think about it a bit.  When was the last time you threw a dinner party and invited everyone to it regardless of whether they could give a dinner party back to you? Or fed people who would never have the ability or resources to bring a potluck dish to a gathering?  In Jesus’ time, banquets were business deals.  You knew how important you were in the community by where you sat at the table, and it was an opportunity to remind people of your power and wealth.  Unlike the free pancake breakfast at the Agricom yesterday, a dinner party was designed to show strength and curry favor.  Jesus suggesting that we have a dinner without political wheeling and dealing would today be more like the bank opening its doors to the vault and saying, “help yourself to whatever you find in here”.

Christian hospitality is a difficult ideal.  How do we manage it? I still struggle – is it safe to have this homeless person in my house for a night? Is that couple okay?  How do I know? When is it hospitality and when is it entitlement?  That’s the flip side of the banquet parable.  There are times we think we are entitled to the best customer service or the best deals at our favorite store.  We deserve to have a break today.  We deserve to know that we are saved and that we don’t need to do anything more to keep our souls as healthy as our bank accounts.  We download the app that says, “I have decided to accept Jesus as my savior” and we are done.  Nothing more needs to be said.

Jesus and Paul would have nothing to do with that kind of entitlement.  Much like Pokémon Go, it’s not enough to have the app on our phones, or the catch phrase on our lips, we are to get out into the big scary world and meet folks.  Talk to them, encounter them.  The game players who search for their characters know that it takes time, effort and training to become a competent Pokémon trainer.  Paul and Jesus too, want us to become not just people who made a commitment one day and figure that was all that was needed.  No, they want us to be people of the way, followers who see themselves as disciples, ever learning, ever experimenting with what it means to be a Christian.  Our church is a training gym for us to learn the skills and practises of being Christ followers.  Our sacraments of communion and baptism are visible signs of how we work together to provide hospitality as part of our Christian faith.  Baptism is a sign that we are choosing to be disciples and that we recognize it is a life-long path that goes best when it goes in community. 

Communion is that banquet where all are welcomed as part of Christ’s family to join together in joy and celebration that we are part of God’s beautiful world.  Both remind us that whether we are first timers, long timers, irregulars or still seekers, we are all welcome here.