Benedictine/Spirituality

Remembering Father James Gray

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

A couple weeks ago, the last time we had tea with James, he dropped his cup–the lip broke on the floor and tea splashed over the tile. The three of us, Deb and I, and Fr. James in his habit, got down on our knees and cleaned everything up with Kleenex. He joked that he’d better leave before he wrecked the place. We talked some more and then he left, but not before giving us one of his vice-grip hugs.

FrJamesandDebbie(sm)

A few days ago, while visiting him in the hospital he began to wonder about the stuff of his life. Knowing I wouldn’t see him again, I failingly tried to express my gratitude for his friendship. He said he hoped that his life made a difference. I told him that it made a difference to me. I told him that just having tea with him made a difference. He said he supposed everything we did was ministry. After this, he began slipping in and out. Then, Easter Monday, he died.

I felt uniquely special in his life, but I also know that others felt the same way. That was part of his gift.

Souls contact and change the motion and direction of other souls. It’s biological-billiards. Father James was one soul who changed my trajectory.
Souls also mingle and change each others structures. Father James was someone who mixed with and influenced people the way lime influences acidic soil, or the way loam effects gumbo. He mixed with people and improved their tilth.

Any death is hard to bear. We try to stand up under its weight. The weight is there, but it helps to know that Fr. James already saw his death as release. He was ready for it and although he wouldn’t say he welcomed it, there was, in him, no resentment or fear of death at all.

Even before the trouble with his aorta, we often talked about death. It’s a Benedictine thing. In fact as a monk he would have been used to contemplating death daily. The Rule of St. Benedict counsels it. Whether that is really possible, who knows. To our sensibilities, considering death appears morbid. But recalling our mortality, for Benedictines, is a way of cultivating compassion for life. In this, there is nothing of the evasive busyness, the infatuation with youthfulness, the false security, we moderns comfort ourselves with. Making room for death is basic balanced reality.

father james greyLife is delicate, remembering our mortality helps us treat life gently. Recalling that we mortals are all in this together will help us treat each other with kindness. And in some way, when we treat each other with tenderness, we are already living as though death is behind us.

Fr. James’ life came rising and shining into this world–and when it set, at least one corner of the world was found a better place.

 

Atonement/Christianity/Religion/Spirituality

Easter is about a wrath-free God

Posted on by stephen t berg / 7 Comments

May you have a blessed and bloom filled Easter!

Just realized it’s been exactly three years (and 500 plus posts) since Grow Mercy hit the blogosphere with an underwhelming whump. But a whump nevertheless. And I’m still, mostly, going on about the same things…well, things like Mercy.

Anyway, here’s an article published in today’s Religion (Edmonton Journal). Something new, something old…like the scribes:) Hope you find it interesting.

Easter article April 11, 2009

Peace/Politics

Passion week and peace

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

It’s like we’re at the Longbranch in an episode of Gunsmoke and Jesus is at the bar and we’re at a poker table where the inevitable showdown is simmering and he turns to us and says, "Yeah you, I’m talkin’ to you."  Or like the gospel of Luke has it, If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!

The double-take is for me, for all of us. Why don’t we recognize the things that make for peace? It’s not because we don’t want peace; although what we mean by peace needs scrutiny. It’s not as though peace has not been fought for. After all, we kill in the name of peace–which is a beguiling irony.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was supposed to contain within it all the things that make for peace. And its implementation, through progressively effective social engineering was to make global peace a reality. And yet nothing remotely close has come about. Mary Robinson, the former U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, lamented,

Count up the results of 50 years of human rights mechanisms, 30 years of multi- billion dollar development programs and endless high-level rhetoric and the general impact is quite underwhelming . . . this is a failure of implementation on a scale that shames us all.

The things that make for peace remain hidden from us–we don’t see them, because we are formed in envious rivalry. And this grasping desire is hidden from ourselves through our unique ability to always find the problem in another. Ephphatha_cross_(winter)sm This is our original "sin." The sin in our cells.

Recall for example your grade-school years. Recall the class dweeb, the misfit, the one teased to within an inch of his or her sanity. Think about how your own fear of being cast as the misfit compelled you to side with the oppressing group. Or think about the group that teased you, part of their identity was having you as a scapegoat.

The ostracism and expulsion of the grade school victim is simply a less sophisticated microcosm of what goes on in all cultures, socially and politically. Think about our own country’s expulsion of an entire culture in the name of an enlightened (Christian) civilization.

Even our peaceful institutions like our churches, our universities…are often maintained through the subterfuge of acquisitive desire. The marketplace subsumes all, sometimes even the best intentioned grass-roots activist organizations. We secure ourselves through the smoke of expulsion and victimization. And it is a heavy smoke we can’t seem to penetrate.

And yet, there is the presence of a persistent hope that humanity is not made for this kind of life-together, let alone its extinction. We are somehow structured for transcendence. But how then are we saved from ourselves? As deep as our unconscious current of rivalrous desire is, it is not deeper than the passion of Jesus.–who takes up freely the role of the victim so as to expose once and for all, our war-like ways, our bondage to violence. This exposure, this act of love and mercy, is why I remain a Christian, and why I continue to be passionate about passion week.

Spirituality

Passion week and tanks and missiles

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Passion week is upon us (for those of you who follow the Christian liturgical calendar).

At the same time on the front page of our city’s principal newspaper this morning was a picture of a tank–apparently not just any tank. It’s Canada’s new Leopard tanks. In the Journal’s online edition you can take a virtual tour of the new medium force weapon. The captain in the video says the Leopard 1 C2 tank "will strike fear in the hearts of the enemy."Nuclear_Tests_Photo_3

A bigger gun "story" with a greater alarm quotient is North Korea’s provocative  long-range missile test, coming as it did a couple hours before Obama’s speech in Prague yesterday, where he announced to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons. But Kim Jong-il’s missile test is also evocative of the possibility of planetary destruction.

Obama:

Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black markets trade in nuclear secrets and materials. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered in a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point when the center cannot hold.

The center not holding is another way of saying that in the event of a rogue nuclear attach, the contagion of violence set off, could just as likely go global.

The cold war, narrowly defined, may be over, but the surreptitious one rages on (as do all the hot ones).

But here I want to give Obama credit for the way he ended his speech:

There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it not by splitting apart, but by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.

Are we at that place yet, where we either denounce war entirely or face annihilation?

Violence as the path to peace, is still the most intransigent of political and societal doctrines. And it is the foundational lie uncovered by Christ’s passion–and not Mel Gibson’s version of Christ’s passion.