A YouTube version follows the text.
“Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.”
An excerpt from “Messenger” by Mary Oliver
Now most people
would hear that and ask,
”What kind of work is that?”
”Loving the world,” she answers.
Her work, she said,
was loving the world
and that is a pretty good summation
of our work, too.
Loving the world.
Mary Oliver loved the world
with her poems —
so standing still
and learning to be astonished
was the methodology
of her work.
What is our work — yours
and mine?
How are you, we, loving the world?
I have a nagging curiosity
about how something is going to turn out.
It is the kind of thing
I may never get to know
but I keep wondering about it.
It has to do with God,
which is a subject I am endlessly curious about
and for which I almost never
get any kind of good information.
But here it is.
From the beginning
to the very end,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam —
the three sister or brother religions
depending upon your gender frame of reference —
are “revelation religions.”
What I mean by that,
is that these three religions
claim that the only things we can know
about God
are what God wants us to know.
The word itself, revelation,
literally means to “unveil” or “lay bare” —
to make naked
we could even say.
So what we can know about God
is only what God
has unveiled.
Think literally of a veil —
a thin, silk veil
that God lifts
to reveal some small part
of Godself.
Or on other occasions,
a shear gauzy material
that blows gently between us
and the holy —
never quite clear and open
but tantalizingly almost.
But it is a one-sided deal:
God gets to decide what we know
or do not know
and we can do nothing —
nothing whatsoever —
to gain knowledge or perspective
that God doesn’t want us to have.
Christian theologians
would say that Psalm 23
and John’s metaphor about Jesus
as the Good Shepherd,
are revelations
that tell us something
about God.
As such, whatever it is
that they tell us
is trustworthy.
Biblical literalists
and fundamentalists
would say they are examples
of a direct revelation,
and in fact,
the Bible is the only source
of divine revelation.
Our tradition
says that the Bible is only one source
of revelation,
and that, in fact,
on its own
it doesn’t reveal God.
Rather, that what we read
in the Bible must be mediated —
mixed and blended
to use a food metaphor —
with our historic experiences
and with our ability to learn and reason.
So what our tradition says
is that, yes, God must unveil Godself
for us to know anything,
but the history of those revelations
must be viewed from the lens
of our current experiences
and our ability to reason,
in order to parse the wheat from the chaff.
AND, it is always done
in community.
It isn’t an individual sport.
If someone claims to have
a direct revelation,
it must be shared
and explored
and filtered
and confirmed
through the community.
We do not trust
individuals
to deliver direct revelations —
say a Joseph Smith of Louis Farrakhan.
We do not trust
individual human voices
that claim to know the truth
to unveil God for us.
Revelation is always mediated
and confirmed through community —
which means it always
requires time and patience
to bless
and grow it.
So that is what our smaller tradition
within the greater historic religion says.
But today
fewer and fewer people trust our religion
or our community
within the religion,
to have dependable information
about God.
At least in the United States and Europe
where Christianity
has held sway for so long.
We just do not have any credibility
and so I wonder
how God will choose
to unveil Godself
as we go forward.
The whole idea
that wisdom
is a community event,
and one that requires time
and patience
to bless
and grow it,
is anathema to our culture.
Waiting?
Time?
Patience?
Not directly accessible to me,
on my own?
What kind of product is that?
Perhaps that is one reason
for the growing popularity
of “unrevealed” religions, like Buddhism.
To Americans
enlightenment looks like something
an individual should be able to achieve —
get the right technique
and the right wisdom
and the right teacher
and bang, it’s just a matter of time
before I get it. Right?
Wrong. Not even.
It feels to me
like the Tower of Babel —
everyone shouting to one another
in different languages
but no one understanding
what the others are saying.
Throw in a history of institutional
abuse of power
and misuse of resources,
not to mention clergy sexual abuse,
and there is massive mistrust
as well as a cacophony
of strange languages.
“And the sheep listen to the voice of the shepherd. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…and they follow him because they know his voice…” (from John 10:1-10)
”Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
I fear no harm,
for You are with me.” (from Psalm 23)
I think about my life
and why I am here in this place today,
with you, my community,
and I know
it is only because of my experience
in the community
and my willingness
to stick it out over time,
that I know God’s voice —
or more accurately,
that I have ever heard
God’s small whisper.
On my own,
with only the mediation of my own ego
and my limited experience,
what I have heard and known
would be so much different —
scary and self-serving without a doubt.
So I am curious
how and where and to whom
God will unveil Godself
going forward.
And then where is the community
that will mediate and confirm
what gets heard?
But like I said,
I may never get to know.
”Not your worry, Miller”
God might say.
So whatever may happen
in the days and years and decades ahead,
we are stuck
with the old technology —
historic revelation
mediated through community.
So then the question is,
how can we increase our trustworthiness —
how can we improve our credibility?
The answer, it seems to me,
is given to us by Mary Oliver
among others:
Our work is loving the world.
Now that will likely not be through poetry
so what do we have
with which to love the world?
That is both an individual challenge
and a community one.
You have to do
your own inventory
for the personal question: What
do you have
with which to love the world?
But we can ask that together
as a communal challenge: What
do we have
with which to love the world?
We have money.
We have a space.
We have hospitality.
We have an open table.
We have a loving gathering.
We have shared wisdom.
We have shared values forming the community.
We have a vision.
We have a mission.
We have experience of change and being changed.
We have opportunity.
We have all of that
and even more
with which to love the world
together.
That is our work.
If we can trust what we
have learned so far
about God
from our historic community,
it is that God will be made known
whenever and wherever
we love the world.
We can trust that,
we can trust loving the world
as our shepherd.
I think the Good Shepherd would approve.
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