We’re Going to Easter’s Party of Joy

SOUPLESS SCRIPTURE, ST. LUKE’S CHURCH, APRIL 1, 2020

Something Big and New is

Being Born in Us Right Now

“Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,” 1943 by Dali

“Geography changes its skin in historic germination.“ Emblematic of the emergence of a new order after the war, stands in direct opposition to the desperate imagery of Dali's earlier painting Spider of the Evening, countering the more pessimistic sentiments of 1940. A scene of global rebirth.

Hope is the main impulse of life

Why do we awake to a new day anticipating that things will improve? What accounts for the hope which lies within us? Teilhard de Chardin noticed that there is something else going on in the universe. He thought deeply about these questions and came to some of his greatest insights in the trenches of World War I. Serving as a stretcher bearer, surrounding by wounded and dying soldiers, Teilhard realized that the destruction of war signaled something breaking through in the world, something not yet realized but coming to birth. This was not naïve optimism but a realization that war is destructive but not final. The violence of war is horrific but out of the rubble life finds ways to rise up again.

“THE WORLD IS GETTING BETTER,” TUTUTHE “MORAL UNIVERSE” QUESTION

“Yes, we do have setbacks, but you must keep everything in perspective. The world is getting better. Think about the rights of women or how slavery was considered morally justified a few hundred years ago. It takes time. We are growing and leaning how to be compassionate, how to be caring, how to be human.” Tutu, 117

DESPAIR THREATENS HOPE

How can you possibly live with joy in a world so filled with sorrow and suffering.?

Tutu: “You show your humanity, by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others. G0d created us and said, Go now, my child. You are freedom. And God has such an incredible reverence for that freedom that God would much rather we went freely hell than compel us to come to heaven.

We have a fantastic capacity for goodness. …you see those doctors and nurses from other parts of the world who go into those situations I mean, they could stay in their homes and have a wonderful practice. But they don’t They go off to some of the most poverty-stricken places. “ 116

Lent Understood as Learning How to be a Walking PartyLenten Disciplines and Journey as

Being Grounded in Grace and

Removing YOUR Unique Obstacles to YOUR Becoming a Walking Party

Resume virtues and Eulogy Virtues

About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

There are two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

THE CALL TO DO SOMETHING UNPRECEDENTED (TO INTERVENE)Rebecca Solnit distinguishes between optimis (to intervene) (to intervene) m and hope by whether people are passive or active in a time of catastrophe. She notes, “Hopefulness… for me, is not optimism, that everything’s going to be fine and we can just sit back… That’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck, and we can just sit back. Hope, for me,” she continues,” just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene. And that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen. We live in a very surprising world.” So, my friends, my first point about Who or What Do We Trust is that we are called to be Hopeful as distinct from passive with the understanding that hope is not about a certainty of knowing what is going to happen. Hope is not certainty. Hope is understanding that there is room for us to intervene – and just not sit back. We are called to do something. To intervene. https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/#audioHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Lent as Preparing to BecomeEven More an Easter Party by Addressing the Obstacles to Joy1. Fear, Stress, Anxiety

2. Frustration and Anger

3. Sadness and Grief

4. Despair

5. Loneliness

6. Envy

7. Suffering and Adversity

8. Illness and Fear of Death

REBECCA SOLNIT, HOPE MEANS THERE IS ROOM FOR US TO INTERVENE.

“You’ve seen it with Ebola. People go into a hugely dangerous situation….They are just showing us what we are all capable of being. And by proxy we link ourselves to those and try as much as we can to enter into who we are: people of compassion.

“What can you do to help change that situation? You might nor be able to do a great deal, but start where you are and do what you can where you are. And yes, be appalled. It would be awful if we looked on all of that horrendousness and we said, Ah, it doesn’t really matter. It is so wonderful that we can be distressed. That’s part of the greatness of who we are – that you are distressed about someone who is not family in any conventional way. And yet you feel distressed, equally. It’s incredible just how compassionate and generous people can be.” 116

PANDEMICS OFTEN KILL COMPASSIONThe Spanish flu pandemic that battered America in 1918 produced similar reactions. John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” reports that as conditions worsened, health workers in city after city pleaded for volunteers to care for the sick. Few stepped forward.In Philadelphia, the head of emergency aid pleaded for help in taking care of sick children. Nobody answered.There is one exception to this sad litany: health care workers. In every pandemic there are doctors and nurses who respond with unbelievable heroism and compassion. That’s happening today.Baker recently had a report in The Times about the EvergreenHealth hospital in Kirkland, Wash., where the staff showing the kind of effective compassion that has been evident in all pandemics down the centuries. “We have not had issues with staff not wanting to come in,” an Evergreen executive said. “We’ve had staff calling and say, ‘If you need me, I’m available.”Maybe this time we’ll learn from their example. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to take steps to fight the moral disease that accompanies the physical one.David Brooks, Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too; You may not like who you’re about to become. March 12, 2020

OUR TRUE NATURE IS THAT WE ARE FAMILY“When a disaster such as 9/11 happens, we realize we are family. We are family. Those people in the Twin Towers are our sisters and brothers. And even more startlingly, the people who were piloting those planes, they are our sisters and brothers (#BigLove). You have a tsunami happen, and have you seen the outpouring of love and compassion and caring? I mean, you don’t know the victims from a brass farthing. And people just gave and gave. Because that’s actually who we reallyare.

When miners are trapped in Russia, people don’t say, I can’t speak Russian, or, I don’t even know where that place is on the map. There is compassion that just springs up.” 117

WE’RE ACTUALLY VERY GENEROUS, COMMUNITARIAN, ALTRUISTIC BEINGS

Solnit: And I think of that as kind of this funny way the earthquake shakes you awake, and then that’s sort of the big spiritual question. How do you stay awake? How do you stay in that deeper consciousness of that present-mindedness, that sense of non-separation, and compassion, and engagement, and courage, which is also a big part of it, and generosity. People are not selfish and greedy.

And then the other question is: Why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments? And what happens if we acknowledge, as I think people in the kind of work that neuropsychologists and the Dalai Lama’s research projects and economists are beginning to say, what if everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous, communitarian, altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we’re in but not made happy by it? What if we can actually be better people in a better world?

DESPAIR VS. HOPE IN THE BOOK OF JOY

(CONTINUED)

The tenth of March is the annual commemoration of the 1959 protest of the Tibetan community against the Chinese occupation that ultimately led to the crackdown against the Tibetan Freedom movement and the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile. In 2008 local people had started demonstrations that were bound to lead to more suffering and the death and imprisonment of many Tibetans.“Over the next few days, during my meditation, I actually visualized some of those Chinese local authorities and did one of our practices, called tonglen, literally meaning ‘giving and taking.’ I tried to take on their fear, anger, suspicion, and to give them my love, my forgiveness. Of course, this, would have no physical effect on the ground. It would not change the situation. But you see, mentally it was very, very helpful to keep a calm mind. It was a good opportunity to practice forgiveness and compassion. So I think that every person has this same sort of opportunity, this same capacity.” Dalai Lama, 118

“I DO AT TIMES GET VERY ANGRY AT GOD” DESMOND TUTU

“Some of my friends complain at the Buddha. So same idea,” the Dalai Lama“I usually would go to my chapel….I would lambast God. …Jeremiah is my favorite prophet for precisely the honesty that he had. You can go to God and speak all you have, pouring it out in that fashion…I weep when something has happened where I may not be able to assist…. Chris Hani…was going to succeed Nelson Mandela. But then he was assassinated just before Easter….I broke down, and Leah held me, like I was a baby. I think it helped because later on I had to go and preach at his funeral. I could appeal to those very angry people at the funeral not from a superior position but from a position of one who was with them and who had felt the same anguish and pain. “ Tutu,119- 120

PEOPLE WERE MADE GOOD, AND THEY REALLY WANT TO BE GOODAnything that swerves from the basic goodness of human beings is an aberration. People are remarkably, remarkably, remarkably good, incredible in their generosity. …We’ve got to be recognizing that despite the aberrations, the fundamental thing about humanity, about humankind, about people, is that they are good, they were made good, and they really want to be good….the media do not report on the very many things that are fantastic about our world because they are not seen as news.” Tutu, 120

I have never been interested in or impressed by evil itself, but I have been confounded by how attractive it is to others. Evil grabs the intellectual platform and its energy; it demands careful examinations of its consequences, its techniques, its motives, its successes however short-lived or temporary. …It hogs the stage. Goodness sits in the audience and watches… Allowing goodness its own speech does not annihilate evil, but it does allow me to signify my own understanding of goodness: the acquisition of self-knowledge. A satisfactory or good ending for me is when the protagonist learns something vital and morally insightful that she or he did not know at the beginning…. he acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge on display in the language of moral clarity — of goodness. Toni Morrison, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-goodness-altruism-literary-imagination.html

WE MUST KEEP THE MORE HOLISTIC VIEW.

There are millions and millions of children who are loved by their parents every day;. Then in school their teachers care for them. Okay, maybe there are some bad teachers, but most of them are really kind and caring. Then in the hospital, every day, millions of people receive immense caring. But this is so common that none of it becomes news. We take it for granted.

No doubt, there are very negative things, but at the same time there are many more positive things happening in our world. We must have a sense of proportion and a wider perspective. Then we will not feel despair when we see these sad things.” Dalai Lama , 121

HOPE IS NOT THE SAME AS OPTIMISM; THERE IS NO SITUATION THAT IS HOPELESSOptimism is more superficial and liable to become pessimism when the circumstances change. Hope is much deeper. .. If when Chris Hani was assassinated, if you had been an optimist you would have said, “Well, the assassination of Hani is the end of everything. What made people want to go on going on – holding on by the skin of their teeth – was not optimism but hope – dogged inextinguishable hope.

I am not an optimist because that depends on feelings more than the actual reality. Hope is different in that it is based not on the ephemerality of feelings but on the first ground of conviction. I believe with a steadfast faith that there can never be a situation that is utterly, totally hopeless. Hope is deeper and very, very close to unshakeable. It’s in the pit of your tummy. It's not in your head. It’s all here,” he said, pointing to his abdomen. Tutu, 121-123

HOPE IN THE FACE OF DESPAIR. – OUR JOB.JIM WALLIS, SOJOURNERS

" Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change."Hope is not just feeling, but a decision. Hope is our vocation and our identity as the people of God. Let’s put it this way — when we confront the depth of things we address we must also understand our role. I am convinced now that hope is our job as people of faith.Hope is our job.Jim Wallis, https://sojo.net/articles/way-hope

A COMMUNITY OF HOPE STEPPING INTO THE STORM THAT WILL PASSResignation and cynicism are easier, more self-soothing postures that do not require the raw vulnerability and tragic risk of hope. To choose hope is to step firmly forward into the howling wind, baring one’s chest to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass.” Hope is also nurtured by relationship, by community, whether that community is literally one or one fashioned from the long memory of human striving whose membership includes Gandhi, King, Mandela, and countless others. Despair turns us inward. Hope sends us into the arms of others. Tutu, 121-123

Everything is forming; Everything is open to completion

Teilhard’s religion of the earth is a radicalization of the core tenets of Christianity. In an unfinished universe where spacetime continues to unfold, nothing is complete or fully formed; everything is forming. Everything is open to completion, including the Church. This open process of ongoing life is symbolized by the Christ event. Life, death and resurrection are three dimensions of life’s openness to completion in God, and God’s future fullness in the whole of life. Everything must die so that everything may live in a new integral wholeness. Ilia Delio