Edward Hays ~ Author, Artist & Storyteller
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Westward Ho?

3/26/2014

 

Westward Ho?

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Dear old and new friends,


    Covered wagon trains of pioneers rolling across the barren prairies are classic images in American history that can be a new Lenten symbol in our revolution of heart. Those early pioneers were not tourists but homesteaders seeking a better life than the one they left behind back home. Their covered wagon trains were led by men they trusted because they had some knowledge of the territory and a vision of the new land of promise. 

    In the second century a letter was sent to Jewish Christians that today is entitled The Letter to the Hebrews and in which those early disciples of the Risen One were urged to be faithful to him as leader of their salvation (2:10). In the letter’s original Greek, “archegos” is translated as leader or pioneer. Archegos gives us a powerful new image of Christ as the Trailblazer who continues to lead us migrant-immigrants to a new land and a new way of living. 

   Trailblazer Christ calls out “Follow me—westward ho” as he blazes a new trail in loving by leading us across the frontiers of love beyond family, clan or church assembly. We are to love the alien, enemy and stranger, and his greatest challenge is to love him and others as he loved us. In this New Frontier he called “the Kingdom” (translation: “God’s Land”) as pioneers we are to become a new and strange kind of people who live in peaceful coexistence instead of armed to the teeth in defensive belligerence. We generously share out bread and wealth with one another and with the poor. We lay aside prejudice to love and live comfortably with those who are sexually or racially different than us. In his New Frontier workers receive not of a minimum wage, but a living wage adequate to support a family with dignity instead the shame of welfare. Now as in the Old West some who began the journey grew weary and disenchanted by what they encountered and departed from the other migrants.

    It was at this point the Archegos Christ saw some of the covered wagons of his caravan pull out and circled back to them. Arriving where they had camped he found them angrily distressed by the bizarre strangeness of life on his New Frontier. They complained that the poor given assistance had been caught cheating! The Trailblazer briefly listened and then said, “True, some given welfare did cheat. Theirs however is only minor defrauding compared to gorilla graft of giant corporations who receive billions of dollars in government contracts. Cheating is wrong, all who cheat, poor or rich, need correction.”

    Lent is our annual check-up to see if today you and I are homebound, comfortable with the conditions of justice and equality in our society. Or are we faithful migrant pioneers striving to honestly follow the Holy Trailblazer across outlandishly odd, yet holy frontiers?

Is a Merry Lent...Heresy?

3/19/2014

 

Is a Merry Lent...Heresy?

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Dear old and new friends,       

    If having a merry Lent is heresy, it’s a finger-licking Hershey heresy! Enjoying not only this week’s playful Saint Patrick celebrations and parades but each of these forty days is simply putting divine merriment into old dreary Lent. In that old Christmas classic—“God rest ye merry, gentlemen”— the word “merry” in Old English meant blessed, peaceful or pleasant. The comma after “merry” shows the word isn’t a descriptive adjective of the gentlemen.

    In our innovative new Lent we blend together the old English merry as “blessed and peaceful” with our contemporary merry as “cheerful and jolly” to create a new Blessed Merry Lent. However, don’t go to your local church expecting to experience any merriment because it’s forbidden! “If any cleric or monk speaks jocular words such as provoke laughter, let him be anathema!” This prohibition was decreed at the Council of Constance in 1418, with anathema being the most severe of excommunications.

    That old law that banned merriment still lingers in our churches like the scent of incense today when grim-faced clergy encourage penance, not mirth or laughter. But I’ll take that risk, and as my old monk confessor would say to me, “Edward, whatever you do, do it with full malice.” And so I will with the following story.

    An old friend, Leslie Evans, shared with me this story about an aged Oklahoma
grandfather who told his young granddaughter the secret of a long life: just sprinkle a little gunpowder on your breakfast cereal each day. She did that religiously all her life and lived to be 103. She left behind 8 children, 30 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, 15
great-great-grandchildren…and a forty foot hole in the ground where once had been a crematorium.                   

    If that story didn’t cause you to laugh or grin, I’ve another—a true story. In September of 1862 President Lincoln called a special session of his closest advisers. When they arrived they found Lincoln laughing heartily as he read a humorous book. He began the meeting by sharing with his advisers what he had just been reading, robustly laughing as he did. His advisers sat grim faced in disapproval of the President’s frivolity. He rebuked them, “Why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that’s upon me, if I didn’t laugh I should die. You need this medicine of laughter as much as I do.” Then he told them that he had been privately preparing “a little paper of much significance” and asked their opinion of his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation!

    Blessed Merry Lent’s painful dying to self, the indispensable work of not 40 Lenten days but of 365 days, is far too rigorous without some hilarity. If we are to be seriously engaged in the often painful reforming our lives, behaviors and values, then we will need frequent doses of Lincoln’s medicinal laughter.

Open Palm Loving

3/12/2014

 

Open Palm Loving

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Dear old and new friends,

    Our instruction of this Lenten romantic revolution is to strive to learn how to become more ardent and holy lovers. Its focus isn’t the usual Lenten self-punishing denials but to build a pre-spring sizzling fire in your heart for God and others (since who desires to be loved lukewarmly?). So check your heart thermostat to see at what temperature it is set: Are you a mild or mad lover of the Holy One?

    True, an affectionate relationship with God is a stretch since it requires loving what can’t be embraced or even seen. Two thousand years ago that Galilean wandering troubadour and lover of God went about singing the same song: “Whatever you do to others, including loving, you do unto God.” That’s nonsense to us who are entrenched in the illusion of duality, that Grand Canyon size divide between you and me, friend and enemy, male and female. Yet contrary to the human mind’s convoluted workings we know at the quantum level everything that exists is interconnected in an unbroken seamless web of life. Mutiny against your old mind, and love intensively, confident all love shown to others is simultaneously shown to God.

    Holy loving requires a conversion of our human need to cling onto that which we passionately love. Young first-time lovers are instantly recognized by how they walk together in public affectionately holding hands. Young and old love needs to make tangible the robust energy of love that while beautiful needs some reform, needs to evolve.

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                                                Two easy exercises

    (1) Open your hand palm up visualizing in it whoever you love, and then close your fingers around her or him, clutching this treasure you never want to lose. (A) Yet change is the only constant thing in the cosmos, and someday the one you love will die. So strive today to love passionately and openhandedly. (B) With that desire, unclench your fingers opening wide your palm, allowing life to be whatever life will be. Frequently engage in this practice.

    (2) Repeat the above exercise, only placing God in the palm of your hand and close your fingers together. (A) When deeply loving God we inadvertently clutch tightly what is in our clenched fist as “my” God. Yet God can’t be yours! The Divine One can’t be the possession of any religion or manipulated by any holy voodoo of praying some prayer for nine days.
(B) Open wide your palm releasing God to be God of Muslims, atheists, Christians, doubters, and totem worshiping pagans…all peoples and all creation.

    Revolutionaries of heart, let us strive to love passionately without clinging which requires affectionately caring and yet not caring. This loving madness doesn’t require the balancing skill of a circus acrobat but the grace of God. So trust, and love as outrageously as the village idiot, and that divine gift of energy to accomplish the impossible will be given to you.

Merry Alzheimer's Wednesday

3/5/2014

 

Merry Alzheimer's Wednesday

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Dear old and new friends,

    Today’s Ash Wednesday begins Lent, that annual, marvelous opportunity for spirit/soul growth regardless of your religious affiliation…or lack of it. This Wednesday’s name comes from the ancient practice of tracing a cross of ashes on the forehead of public sinners as they began their Lenten forty days of penance. This reception of ashes was by the eleventh century the norm for all Christians.

    Old time Catholics who prefer the antique Latin Mass also would love a return to Lent’s former strictness. Such a revival of the former harsh Lent would mean 40 days of strict fasting, abstinence of meat, milk products, cheese and eggs, along with the self-punishments of going barefoot, sleeping on the floor and not cutting one’s hair or bathing! Imagine having to work beside (or live with) a devout old Lenten observer who abstained from bathing for 40 days!

    That old grim Lent is still alive and with us today in churches dominated by a large cross draped in a penitential purple cloth. There the clergy admonished the faithful to recall their former sinfulness, go to confession and do penance. Do you think God desires such a forty day guilt trip? Or shouldn’t its purpose be the same as that of life, only intensified: growth in love of God and one another? Kneeing in guilt begging contritely for pardon isn’t the stance of a lover. So open your heart and arms to God and instead of dredging up your old sins—forget them!

    The saintly Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), a Ukrainian Hasidic mystic, taught that “...most people think of forgetting as a defect, but I consider it a great benefit. Unless you forget your past sinfulness it will be utterly impossible to serve God because surfacing memories of your old sins only disturbs your abilities today to love with unbounded affection.” I think we should rename Ash Wednesday as Alzheimer’s Wednesday! I know the very mention of the “A” word causes shivers. Forgetfulness creates regrets and, if you’re middle-aged or older, the dreaded fear of the possible onslaught of that life-stealing disease.

    Yet, to intentionally forget is essential not only to be a better lover of God but also in daily life. Unless you wipe clean your memory of where you parked at the grocery store two days ago, you won’t recall where you parked today. Having holy dementia about the old mishaps of your marriage partner or wrongs done to you in the past by others makes lovingly pardoning them as easy as—Lenten pie.

    Jesus at the Last Supper initiated a New Covenant, and among its conditions the prophet Jeremiah quotes God saying, “I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more!” (Jer.31, 34) When the clergy urge you to scour your soul for past sinfulness and repent, recall the words of your Alzheimer Lord and those of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.  Have a Revolutionary Romantic and Merry Lent.


    Edward Hays


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    Haysian haphazard thoughts on the
    invisible and visible mysteries of life.

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