August 25, 2013
We will be here forever....
We will be here because we are part of a much larger story of our own weaving,
a story foretold by our ancestors and lived by all those who travel on the good road.
These words from Ojibway teacher Thomas Peacock jumped off the page into my heart as I read them in a book lying on the table of the visitor center. Cheryl and I were on our annual summer pilgrimage to Pukaskwa, a wilderness park on the Canadian coast of Lake Superior -- what they call "the wild shore of an inland sea." As things have evolved in the park since it opened in 1983, the Obijway people who have lived there for centuries have become a major part of the park management. So it was no surprise to find in the visitor center this book entitled, We Look in All Directions, which was filled with old Ojibway stories and history collected for their wisdom with a view to crafting a new story for this new time.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that we are living in a time when all around us old stories are dying and new stories are struggling to be born. Can anyone else here this morning relate to that? By the way, I'm using the word, "story" today to refer to the underlying narrative of our lives, the lives of our communities and our culture, and the life of our planet. It is by story, used in this way, that we understand who we are, how we came to be, and what we are about.
I've been thinking a lot about story these past few months since agreeing to co-lead a retreat at Rolling Ridge at the end of September on Restorying - cultivating personal, cultural and planetary stories for a new era. As sometimes happens in these circumstances, I have found myself immersed in a sea change of story, personally, at Dayspring. So I am not only musing about old story and new story, I find myself living day by day in a time of restorying.
Today I want to say a little bit about the need for new story, about how new story emerges, about how it may clash with the existing old story, and about the essence of Jesus' new story as a love story, and a little bit about how that has helped me in this challenging time at Dayspring. All of this is well illustrated by today's Gospel lesson about the Sabbath morning in the synagogue when Jesus responded to the woman's cry for healing in violation of Sabbath law.
We Need a New Story
Thomas Berry, a true elder and close mentor of those of us involved in Earth ministry at Dayspring over the years, wrote an essay in 1978 entitled, The New Story, which was published as the initial booklet of the Teilhard Studies Series. He began that essay with these words:
Tell me a story. A child's Request. How often we have said that as children. Tell me a story. Story illuminated the worldfor us in childhood. Today we might also make the request: tell me a story. Tell me the story of rivers and valleys and streams and woodlands and wetlands and shellfish andfinfish. Tell me a story. A story of where we are and how we got here and the characters and the roles that we play. Tell me a story, a story that will be my story, as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings together the human community with every living being, a story that brings us together under the arch of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night. A story that will drench us in the rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to each other that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites on its downwardjourney, the story that the mountain images forth in its awesome grandeur; the story.
It is all a question of story. We are in troublejust now because we do not have a good one. The Old Story, of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is not holding our attention.... that story is dysfunctional and out of date.
Father Thomas was talking about a big story, a very big story -- the Universe Story. But from that big story, that metanarrative, derive all the smaller stories from the planetary and cultural level to the level of our organizations, our groups, and our very selves. We all live by story. It is how we see the world, how we understand the world. Berry concludes that we are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story; we need a new story.
How New Story Emerges
New story emerges in many ways -- as we let go of old story and as we attend to ancient wisdom, to essence, to Sabbath rest, to dream, to song, to ceremony. Mostly it emerges as we try to live it out in the midst of the old story still around us, a process often filled with risk and conflict.
In the book I mentioned finding on the table at the visitor center at Pukaskwa was a forward written by Winona Laduke a well known Native American speaker and writer, who is also Ojibway. She begins the forward with these words:
There is a word in Anishinabemo:ji-misawaabandoaming. That word describes the process as a sort of positive windowshopping for yourfuture. That is what we Anishinabeg need to be about. And, in order to do that, we need to recover our knowledge and recover our selves; that is what this book is about. The story told here is an amazing set of stories told by those who dearly love their histories andpeoples - a great gift to us all; the scattered and dispersed leaves of our stories brought together with this generation's faces and living word.
It's a wonderful thing to think about story as a container for ancient knowledge and for self understanding, really as a container for essence. It reminds me of what Oren Lyons, faith keeper of the Onandaga nation said to Bill Moyers years ago when Bill asked him how native people managed to survive all the hardships and repression enforced upon them. Oren Lyons said this: "As long as there is one to speak and one to listen, one to dance and one to sing, life will go on." So that's it - stories, songs and ceremony. Containers for essence.
I want to share a couple more quotes from this book with you. Winona Laduke actually began her forward with this quote from Jim Durant of the Fish Clan of the Shawanga First Nation:
Our ways are still here, our way of life. Here we are in the dying moments of the twentieth century... almost into the twenty-first century, and we say that the reality we live within is totally different from anything we have ever known. It is just different, a different context. Not a very good one, not a very harmonious or balanced one, not a very healthy one, but this is the environment we live in today. The lifeway that spoke to our people before, that gave our people life in all generations before, is still the way of life that will give us life today; how it will manifest itself andfind expression in this new time [perhaps by"windowshoppingfor a new story"] comes as a part of the responsibility of how we go about revival and renewal.
And finally the one I began with by Thomas Peacock:
We will be here forever.... We will be here because we are part of a much larger story of our own weaving, a story foretold by our ancestors and lived by all those who travel on the good road.
I don't know how these words strike you in your situation here at Eighth Day, or here at the Potter's House, but I can tell you they continue to haunt me (in a good way) as we at Dayspring struggle to create a viable future for our church and for this sacred land. There are just too many days when I have wondered, will we be here four more years until we run out of cash to pay our bills? Just two more years? And then I read these words, from these First nation peoples who have suffered and endured so much -We will be here forever.... We will be here because we are part of a much larger story of our own weaving, a story foretold by our ancestors and lived by all those who travel on the good road.
Before I leave this brief introduction, I might say that one can examine the stories we are living by and those we might live by in the future at each of several levels: personal, cultural and planetary. And there is much to learn about how to say good-bye to old stories that no longer fit, but which served us, maybe even served us well, in the past. And there are ways in which our smaller stories are embedded in and shaped by the larger stories around us, and ways in which the stories we live by evolve over time. On a personal level our story may evolve from "my life is about me" to "I am about life," (to use some words from Franciscan priest and teacher Richard Rohr) perhaps stopping along the way as we see our lives about more than us -- first as family, then as community, and then finally as "I am about life." Over time in our lives and in the lives of our communities I believe that we are being invited into larger and larger stories. Which is not to imply that the earlier , smaller, stories drop away completely, but that we find our way into larger stories that contain the smaller ones with which we may begin.
The more deeply I study this business of restorying, the more I realize that new story is not just, or maybe even often, something that we arrive at by figuring it all our with our minds. Often, I'm finding it has more to do with what comes to our attention from out yonder (remember Winona Laduke - "windowshopping for new story"), or it has to do with storytelling, or with remembering ancient ways and wisdom (what Thomas Peacock called "the good road"), or with singing and dancing and ceremony, or with nighttime dreams, or maybe even encounters with the sacred in the natural and wild world that we inhabit and that inhabits us.
Jesus Lived a New Story in the Midst of the Old
This morning the lectionary gives us that story of the Sabbath morning in the synagogue when Jesus responded to a woman's cry for healing in violation of Sabbath Law.
We might ask, "What story were the religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, operating out of? What was their story?" We might state their story in this way: "If you obey all the rules that we
have made to insure you are following God's commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, then God will be pleased and you will be in good and righteous standing with God." God makes rules, we follow them, that pleases God. Is that story familiar to anybody?
And then we can ask, "What story is Jesus living out of?" How might you state his story? What Jesus says in a related Sabbath story -- the one about plucking ears of grain on the Sabbath -- is very brief, but points at Jesus' underlying story -- "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." As this story goes, Sabbath is something God does for us -- a gift to us -- not something we do for God. We are invited to enter into rest -- into the "rest of God" as it is put in the letter to the Hebrews and in Elizabeth O'Connor's wonderful chapter on Dayspring in Call to Commitment. Dayspring - a place where we can enter into the rest of God. How shall we respond to this gift? Jesus responds by passing on the gift, by having compassion on the crippled woman and giving her the capability to stand up straight -- "upright" in some translations. God is loving and compassionate in giving us Sabbath, and we are to be loving and compassionate on the Sabbath. A different story from the one that prevailed in his day. A very different story. One that clashed sharply with the existing narrative about Sabbath.
I like the way that in this story that Jesus goes beyond structure to essence. By implication he is working this question -- "What is the essence of Sabbath?" What is the essence of Sabbath? And how do we embody that essence as we "keep the Sabbath holy?" In Jesus' story the essence of Sabbath is about rest, about self-giving love, and about compassion. This little Sabbath story is embedded in a much larger story for Jesus, of course, a very big story about self-giving love.
In the other story about Sabbath -- the one about rules and pleasing God, attention is much more focussed on structure than essence. I'd like to think that when all this structure, this rule-making around Sabbath began it was intended to be helpful to preserving essence. Good structures that carry and preserve essence are important. But sometimes, as in this incident in Jesus' life, structure no longer serves essence, but in fact, obscures it. It may even have been the case that structure -- in this case Sabbath rules -- came to serve another end entirely -- came to serve the purpose of control by those who determine and enforce the structures -- came to serve and preserve not the essence but rather control and power on the part of the religious leaders.
So we have two stories, very much in conflict - one story about self-giving love and another story about self-serving control. Anyone resonate with that situation? Of course, Jesus came to know his story at a very deep level, and throughout his ministry that story was up against other stories. The tempter in the desert had other stories in mind (feed yourself, test God, be a dominating King), his mother among many others wanted him to just work miracles, to stick around our town, and most wanted him to be the Messiah that would give the Romans the boot and restore the political Kingdom of Israel. Time and again Jesus would restate and enact his authentic story, one that resembled the ancient suffering servant story told by the prophet, Isaiah. I can hardly imagine how frustrating that must have been.
I find that what Jesus did in that moment of conflict between two stories that Sabbath morning in the synagogue very instructive. He could have confronted the existing story, the one about Sabbath rules, and made a case for revising it. He could have talked with the scribes and the Pharisees and tried to get them to change their rules. But he didn't do that, he did something else. He just acted out of the story that was his to live, the one about self-giving love and compassion. What he is doing in this instance reminds me of something that R. Buckminster Fuller once said. Perhaps you know this quote. It goes like this:
You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new reality that makes the existing reality obsolete.
Another take away lesson from this morning's Gospel reading for me is that living new story in the midst of a very powerful old story -- one that serves the interests of an existing domination system -- may involve considerable risk. In another instance of Jesus healing on the Sabbath -the one about the healing of a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath -- at the end of the passage the Pharisees go out and hold counsel with the Herodians about how to destroy him.
So in summary, Jesus is living a story in which the good and Godly life of faith is one which is characterized by self-giving love and compassion. It is in essence a love story. In contrast, the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the time are living a story in which the life of faith is about obeying rules that serve the interests of the leaders and ruling class. A self-giving story versus a self-serving story. It would seem that if we are about the business of following Jesus, we are necessarily about the business of moving from self-serving story to self-giving story -- at the personal level, and also at the faith community level as well. How, as communities of faith, do we shift our story from one where "our life is about us" to one where "we are about life?"
The New Story is a Love Story
Reflecting on the Gospel reading, I keep wondering how much of our own New Story - personal, community, cultural, or planetary is at its root a love story, in the way in which Jesus' story is a love story.
Teilhard De Chardin, the French Jesuit whom Thomas Berry tracked very closely, said this: "The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, the gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire."
How is the new story for Dayspring, the new story for the Potter's House, each of the new stories that are struggling to be born in our lives, how are they going to be love stories, stories rooted in self-giving love?
For myself, in my context of emerging story at Dayspring, what guides it toward being a love story are things like awareness of abundance, coming from gratitude, and entering into the Sabbath rest of God.
One of the things that's been happening out at Dayspring is that we've been working with a friend, a lay Benedictine man who has done wonders to put the monastery over in Berryville into a new and promising future. He has led us in a process to identify four unique features and four unique benefits of Dayspring and put them into a couple of sentences as the basic message (or "elevator speech") that we would always say when anyone asks us what Dayspring is, and that will go on all our written materials and website. The current draft of that message goes like this:
Dayspring is an ecumenical Christian Church set in the beauty of 200+ acres of woodlands, meadows, ponds, and wildlife. We are a small, deeply committed faith community with shared leadership of worship and ministries including a silent retreat center and a creative earth ministry.
Somewhat to my surprise I have found that as I share this basic message with others (incidentally we have identified our key audiences as college students, green groups, contemplatives, and disaffected Roman Catholics and Evangelicals) I find that I get more excited about Dayspring and its possibilities.
This had led me to start meetings of our leadership team (which faces some really hard economic issues as we move toward a sustainable future for Dayspring) with a call to remember our strengths, the abundance which has been given us. It goes something like this:
Remember why we are here. Remember our strengths: our roots in the long experience of the Church of the Saviour and its ongoing expressions; our long experience with shared leadership in worship and ministry; our deep spiritual base in silence and contemplation and in this land; our ministries, including a silent retreat center, a conference center, a creative earth ministry center, a mission group devoted to holding all of Dayspring and its challenges deeply in prayer, a developing permaculture market garden, and a new, children-exploring-Dayspring, mission.
And when we face the operating deficits, the fewer people showing up for worship on Sunday morning, I want to acknowledge that reality, but also I want to immerse myself in a story of abundance, a story that ends well -- a story well might contain these words like those from that Ojibway book (We Look in All Directions) -- words like these
We will be here forever.... We will be here because we are part of a much larger story, a story of abundance and self-giving love, a story foretold by our ancestors and lived by all those who travel on the good road.
Just now, we need a new story, as Thomas Berry has said.
A story of where we are and how we got here and the characters and the roles that we play; a story that will be my story, as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings together the human community with every living being, a story that brings us together under the arch of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night. A story that will drench us in the rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to each other that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites on its downward journey, the story that the mountain images forth in its awesome grandeur;
And I would add (and I'm sure Thomas Berry would agree) -- at it's root -- a story of great love.