Christianity/Spirituality

Ashes to Ashes

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

A few years ago on the morning of an Ash Wednesday I came out of Hope Mission’s shelter for men and saw a man urinating on the sidewalk beside one of the concrete garbage containers. Relieved that his back was to me I walked by, keeping my eyes on the corner ahead which would take me back to my office just a block away.

I was a few paces past him, pretty sure he hadn’t noticed me, pretty sure he wouldn’t care even if he had, when I heard my name. “Steve”, the voice called, “Steve, don’t be ashamed of me, wait.” I stopped and turned around. Tom came lurching toward me, one hand holding up his pants the other hand pulling on his zipper. The smell of Listerine reached me before he did. He was drunk from it. His face was wet from watering eyes, a running nose and drool. His shoes and pants were splashed and wet with urine.

“Steve, I’m going crazy, I can’t stop, I can’t help it.” He poured himself out in front of me. “Steve, you know me, I’m your my friend.” I’ve known you for a long time, you’re one of my only friends.” These are the words he said, but they came out slurred and sideways.

I’ve known Tom from the first days I came to work in the inner city. I’ve learned of his wounded background. The last time I had seen him, a month or so before this, he was sober. We had a conversation beside my car. I was leaving work and he waved me down as I crossed the street. I took my glove off and offered my hand. Tom said he didn’t want to shake my hand because he just finished crapping in the alley and hadn’t found much paper. I told him how thankful I was for his consideration. We both laughed.

He then told me he was doing okay, that he was thinking about getting away from downtown. This is something he always says. He knows I’ll say that it’s a good idea, and I think he hopes by saying it, it will help him do it and keep him sober longer, and at times, I think it does. When he’s sober, which usually lasts a couple weeks or even a couple months, he sometimes stays away from the inner city but usually he stays at the Mission. He can be a good guest, polite, helpful, responsive. Then gradually he finds the days too long and the burden of carrying the weight of his own success too much to bear. Often the slide starts by his pointing out the failures of other guys on the street. He becomes independently righteous and scornful of other addicts. When this happens it’s only a matter of days until he finds something to ingest; and then he becomes the thing he just scorned.

Today Tom was in front of me weaving back and forth, repeating how he was going crazy and hitting his head with the heel of his hand. As he was carrying on a young man in his twenties came towards us from across the street. He was loaded down with a large back pack and had work boots tied by the laces to one side of the pack and a heavy parka lashed to the other side. He must have heard Tom and he called out when he was half way across the street, “Tell me about it man. I know what you’re saying.” When he got close the young man smelled Tom and said, “C’mon partner your drinking shit, things can’t be that bad.”

Tom looked blank and pointed to the half finished cigarette in the young man’s hand. The man gave it to him, saying, “Here you go friend.”

In the mean time I was planning my exit, thankful for this diversion. But just when I was about to go the young man turns to me and says, “Just tell me one thing…that things are going to be alright.” I blink and then I say, “Things are going to be alright,” and then I add something I’ve heard myself say too many times to too many street guys: “Where there’s breath, there’s hope.” The young man nodded and said, “That’s right,” and walked on.

I looked at Tom beside me, he was breathing, but I didn’t see much hope. I walked him back to a bench at the front of the shelter.

Two hours later the bishop at St. Joe’s marked a cross on my forehead with ashes and said, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It was appropriate enough. I felt as powerless as dust. But perhaps that’s the point of Ash Wednesday and the lesson of Lent. While I believe with my heart that where there is life there is hope, too often it’s been my security systems, my insurance policies, my protective barriers, that have supported and sustained this faith. A healthy understanding of dependence doesn’t come easy–for Tom, caught in the extremes–or for any of us. But to recall that we are all marked with ash, ultimately dependent on the giver of breath, is also to recall the mystery of hope and life and salvation.

Technorati Tags: ,

Beauty

April Anticipated

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Three or four cells in me were hanging on to a memory of spring and this morning they were joined by a whole humming collection. I could feel the florescence.

The temperature had turned overnight and stepping out into the slush this morning I could actually smell a breeze from early April. Wether it came from the past of future I don’t know. What matters is that it came with a wisp of promise.

I forget how much my body is tied to the earth. Where have you gone Walt Whitman, John Muir, Henry Thoreau, Rachel Carson? (Please send more light.)

lantern in snow

Technorati Tags:

Beauty/Spirituality

On Worry and Prayer

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

One thing about being flat-in-bed sick for four days is that, after you’ve grown weary of reading and television, it gives you time for something like a mind search. The imposed silence and solitude of my sick-bed cloister gave time, outside of episodes of feverish unconsciousness that is, for picking through my soul’s innards. And what I found as I began to trudge along through all those coils were cysts and pustules of worry. Larger and more lethal than I had realized.

The joke that worry pays because 99 percent of what we worry about never happens exposes a shadowy truth about my mental makeup. I worry as a way to control outcome. Someplace inside I believe that sifting through every unhappy consequence of a given situation steers the outcome away from the cliff-edge. When I examine the logic I see the lie, but worry countenances no logic. Even when it does, I still keep the fret-practice because I believe it will at least prepare me for disappointment…or worse.

I thought I would worry less as I aged. It hasn’t happened. I’ve been conspired against. I lay the blame on layers of responsibility, but in reality the additions have been marginal. What I have is a well cultivated habit. That’s what I found as I went inside.

Hating the fact that I lose so much vital juice on stewing I wanted to (again) curb the thing. I’m not stupid enough to believe I’d ever put a stop to worrying, but reining it in seems doable.

That’s why this line from Psalm 51–that I read sometime while being ill–seemed to hold promise: “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” This spoke to me of a specific kind of displacement.

Two-on-pier Mystics from all traditions say that the “inward being” or the “secret heart,” is where God resides. Christ said the Kingdom of God is within. God, as Wisdom, as truth and beauty and peace and freedom and Love waits within. Most often God is crowded out by a blimp full of ego and anxiety. Crowded out that is, by what’s not altogether real.

It seems to me that worry is a shell game, it puts on a show but it’s a swindle. To worry is to live within an unreality. That’s why, ultimately, it’s so useless. If it was a real thing it would be useful. So to displace the unreal with the real, to replace what’s fraudulent with what’s faithful is Wisdom’s education. Wisdom effaces worry. Sophia/Wisdom is resting in God’s presence.

But how do you find God’s presence within which you can rest, worry free? To long for it always, say the Saints, is enough. Failing that, long for the longing. Longing leads the search and the search shows that because God resides within in profound silence, God’s mystical presence can only found in silence. I suppose my imposed silence and solitude taught me something close to this. At least it rekindled in me the importance of meditation or “centring prayer,” which has been far too sporadic for too long.

A kind of conclusion: The way, then, to worry worry is to meditate.

Atonement/Christianity/Peace/Violence

Letter to a Christian Nation

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

For my kick off to Lent I read Sam Harris’, "Letter to a Christian Nation." It’s the new edition released just last month with an afterword–where he reiterates his disdain for moderate religion and gives some thought to the origin of religion…which he was just coming to at the end of the previous edition.

books And it’s here, on his ruminations on religion and blood sacrifice, that I want to call Sam up and say, please, please, read Rene Girard …and by the way, it’s okay, he’s not a theologian, he’s an historian, ethnologist, and an anthropologist.

Harris says, "Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere." Well, Girard, has done peerless research in this exact area, but he has done so much more. He has taken his discoveries and worked forward, showing how the expulsion of a victim, and the resultant "peace," enforces both the belief of the guilt of the victim and the victim’s paradoxical power to bring peace. Social unity is restored over the divinized surrogate victim and a ritual of remembrance (more sacrifices, prohibitions, myths) is encoded into the culture. This is how religion got every ancient human culture off the ground.

Of course to Harris the purpose of religion has long past. And in this important but incomplete understanding of religion he is exactly right. Now if only he could take this research he seems to agree with and stay with it a little longer…begin to sit with the theory that scapegoating, sacrifice of the one for the sake of the all, is everywhere transcribed in antiquity as myth, and that scripture itself in this sense, is also mythological (justifies violence), but is finally revelatory. Revelatory in that we are confronted with the fact that scapegoating is still indelibly inscribed in us. Here’s James Alison:

Professor Girard had assumed that the Jewish and Christian sacred texts would show exactly the same thing as all other ancient texts and myths – the threat of collapsing social unity leading to violence and the emergence of a new peace around the cadaver of the victim. To his amazement he found that although they did exactly that – they really are structured around sacralised violence – there was a unique and astonishing difference: the Jewish texts, starting with Cain and Abel – gradually dissociate the divinity from participation in the violence until, in the New Testament, God is entirely set free from participation in our violence – the victim is entirely innocent, and hated without cause – and indeed God is revealed not as the one who expels us, but the One whom we expel, and who allowed himself to be expelled so as to make of his expulsion a revelation of what he is really like, and of what we really, typically do to each other, so that we can begin to learn to get beyond this.

The forms of Religion railed against by Harris are indeed in need of deconstruction. And if God is a capricious God of wrath and blood sacrifice, then I am an atheist. But a move to the logical positivistic philosophy of Harris will not get at the root of violence. In my thinking, the key for this is in being confronted with our ways of vicitmizing and the acquisitive desire that spawns it. This is the revelation found in the gospel, through which we can see our way free of hatred, abuse, torture, and all forms of violence.