Dear old and new friends,

     Americans of means are diligent to eat healthy foods, and grocery store shelves are loaded with all variety of food options displaying large labels that read Natural. Yet to date there are no regulations regarding what can be labeled as natural. So a fine reading of the labels on products is necessary to avoid unhealthy foods with lots of fat, added sweeteners and artificial coloring or additives.

     Would it not be wise to also be seriously concerned about what is in the creed or creeds in which we believe? A remarkable reality is that your daily life reflects what you believe; yes, be you an atheist, agnostic or a believer! Among the variety of today’s creeds are: I believe the goal in life is to get rich…or to be successful…or that being prosperous is a sign of God’s blessings. The creed of the majority of Christian believers is the Apostles Creed which is typically recited robotically without asking if one honestly believes all that is being proclaimed. Catechism doctrines are useful teaching ways to explain countless centuries of accumulated beliefs, but they shouldn’t eclipse an original, natural creed.

     A “natural creed” contains no dogmatic assertions, morality laws or stale old beliefs of former ages. What kind of creed doesn’t contain dogmatic beliefs? Albert Einstein, himself an agnostic, gives us a clue when he said, “The most beautiful emotion is the mysterious. To sense that behind everything we experience there is something that the mind cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly; this is religiousness. Those who cannot wonder and stand in awe are as good as dead.” A natural creed is a primitive response to mystery, to that which is better than us and bigger than anything outside of us, that’s so good we don’t even have a name for it. Experiences of such awesome mysteries would include a star-studded night sky, feeling the mesmerizing power of ocean tides, being in love, and the uniqueness of a human face, even one’s own.

     The religion of a “natural creed” is simply an indestructible living trust in a personal God. Its morality is a personal response to being loved by a gift-giving God applied to all situations. A natural creed’s prayer is not futile SOS attempts to contact God but living aware/awake and responding to the abiding Holy Presence in everything. Its credo is that the Kingdom of God is here, not in heaven. Eternal Life isn’t something to come in the future, it has already begun for us. Surely, such a wonderful natural belief is free of doubts and uncertainties. No, since doubt and faith are two sides of the same human experience.

     This being the mid-point in this Springtime of the Spirit, consider setting aside a sufficient period of time to look honestly at how you live your daily life. Since it mirrors your creed of beliefs you can see what you really, truly believe.

Dear old and new friends,

     This time of the year a bare wooden cross perhaps draped with purple cloth is the central image in Protestant churches, while in Catholic ones it is a cross with the dead Jesus on it—a crucifix. Both of these crosses present us with a crux, a problem. Historically during Christianity’s first thousand years neither one of these crosses was seen! In place of the cross of death, a cross of the victory of life over death, a beautiful artwork in silver or gold, embedded with jewels and precious stones, was venerated.

     The crux of the cross is that art images have enormous influencing power, or they once did. Today our eyes are numbed blind to images, their power diluted because we are daily saturated in a tsunami of images on television, in magazines and newspapers. It has been said that we now see in a day, or even in a few hours, more images than someone in the 12th century saw in their entire lifetime! To see an image of art then required being inside a church, whose walls offered fresco painted images that taught the viewer theology, scripture and the splendor of the resurrection.

     The last decades of the first millennium a new religious image appeared. The earliest surviving crucifix is the Gero Cross of 970 which is a carved oak, full life-size image of the dead Jesus nailed to a cross. Rapidly, such life-size crucifixes spread across Europe becoming increasingly more and more grotesque and bloody. The Emperor Charlemagne then decreed these full-scale crucifixes be placed at the center of all worship places in an effort to unify his kingdom by convincingly converting his Saxon subjects baptized by the sword (Of note: Zealous Charlemagne also decreed that anyone who ate meat in Lent merited the death sentence!)

     These new crucifixes proclaimed a new spirituality of suffering, death and a fear of hell, and asked the logical question, “Who was responsible for this horrendous crime?” Preachers provided the answer using fiery, agonizing images of hell. “You Saxons are guilty! You have murdered the Lord of Life by your sins!” That guilt-laden explanation lingers in today’s sermons and pious devotion, and it haunts with culpability those who looked upon crucifixes. Words from authority figures appear toothless, yet all words are living art images possessing incredible power, especially when repeated over and over and over, which is the secret of propaganda.

     In 1095 Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade, calling European warriors to take up the sword and wear the cross as their symbol to wage a holy war against Islamic forces holding Jerusalem, and against all unbelievers. The pope commissioned Peter the Hermit to preach the Crusade through France and Germany. His preaching on Good Friday in Cologne, Germany called upon the crusaders to force Jews to repent of murdering Christ and accept baptism at the point of the sword. Cologne’s subsequent slaughter of Jewish men, women and children was the first Christian pogrom against Jews. It is estimated that before turning east to the Holy Land the Crusaders killed approximately ten thousand Jews in Germany alone, where previously for centuries Jews and Christians had lived peacefully side by side. Peter’s diatribe of vicious hate speech against the Jewish people spread quickly across Europe, repeated by other preachers who created exaggerated bloody, gruesome accounts of Jesus’ death. The Jews had now replaced Christians and their sins as the new culprits guilty of Christ’s death.

     Instead of the cross as a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, or of him as the scapegoat carrying humanity’s sins away to his death, recall that God is love. As the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert so the Spirit of Love drove him to Calvary’s cross. The cross isn’t about sin or guilt, but about God’s love. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says the first crucifixion took place in the heart of God as a total self-emptying in unconditional love to become one with all humanity and creation. That first crucifixion showed the helplessness and vulnerability of God’s love. The cross is an Icon-image of evolution where suffering and death are essential for the birth of new life. Theologian Ilia Delio says that the cross is about the wildness of Divine Love that’s stronger than death. Sadly, we eclipse its atomic energy by domesticating it when we use it as a decoration and by a lack of prayerful awareness when making the Sign of the Cross on ourselves. An old Russian saying is that you can tell the depth of faith of another by how she or he makes the sign of the cross.

     In this reflection we have also considered the power of words like those used in hate speech towards the Jews. Words are more than just sounds. Words create vibrant living art images in the mind. Words like weapons can kill and injure, so our Teacher taught us derogatory remarks about others are equal to murder and merit the fires of Gehenna. The many centuries of insulting Jews by hate speech and derogatory jokes led ultimately to the deaths of millions in the Nazi Holocaust. Be vigilant of your words. Beware of echoing those whose vivid speech condemns abortion. Wash out your ears after hearing anti-Muslim, anti-police, anti-immigration and anti-racial black or white speech. When tempted to use any negative speech, pause and then obscurely make on your closed lips a small sign of the cross.

                       
                                             And God stepped out on space,
                                             And he looked around and said,
                                             “I’m lonely…
                                             I’ll make me a world.”
                                                         -- God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson
                       
Dear old and new friends,

     Forty days is a long time to be all alone in the desert. Did Nazareth’s stone mason/carpenter after thirty some years of cramped close village life taste there the acidic bitterness of loneliness? Solitary confinement today is considered the harshest punishment, just a notch above capital punishment. So why did God’s Spirit drive him into the desert for forty days when today scientists equate the health effects of loneliness to that of smoking 22 cigarettes a day?

     Modern loneliness doesn’t require retreating to a desert or being estranged from others. Paradoxically it is found in public gatherings, happy social events, Sunday church worship and hectic work sites. You can encounter it in loveless marriages, the staffs and residents of nursing homes and senior care facilities, in the homes of the elderly and infirm who live alone, and surprisingly by those with a microphone standing before large audiences. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang in the Beatles’ song Eleanor Rigby, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

     Loneliness is the new black plague in spite of television’s endless display of us being always happy people, smiling with perfect white teeth, selling this or that—but that isn’t us! America psychologists tell us we are in the midst of widespread psychological depression. This “epidemic,” according to psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, has gone hand in hand with the loss of psychological and spiritual guidance. There is a nostalgic longing for the wise neighbor at whose kitchen table we once could confidently unload our inner feelings. People hunger for someone who will listen to them with no personal benefit except to wish them well. Ironically, flooded with an array of hi-tech message devices, people cannot find anyone willing to genuinely listen with only his or her welfare in mind.

     Looking for a personal mission in life requiring no special education? Consider becoming a listener. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. It requires not giving advice (which we all love to do), not judging and simply the ironclad patience of listening. You can minister anywhere. When encountering anyone—stranger or friend— carefully look at her/his eyes for the dullness of loneness’s lack of joy. Then say a few words invested with sincere caring to them with the hope of rescuing them at least for a brief time of being frozen in isolation.
 
                                               A Spirituality of Solitude

     Seriously consider adding to your spiritual practices time in solitude. Turn off all your hi-tech gadgets and phone, and just be alone in silence. Self-imposed isolation is frightening. So let the Spirit “drive” you into it confident that it is a holy place. The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for 40 days, and the same Spirit drove Buddha to a Bo Tree, there to sit alone for an extended period of intense contemplation. For both of them their solitary times ended with enlightenment, and each began to teach and minister to others. What gift is hidden in our dread of silent solitude that we try to fill up with music or worthless entertainment. Is it the same gift that Buddha and Jesus discovered? Neither spoke of what it was, but their lives loudly proclaimed it.

     Perhaps Mark Twain may have given us a hint in his observation, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone….” (And I will add…or to themselves.) Could it be if truly sufficient time spent, not counted in minutes per day but in a true solitude, one is liberated from life’ s distracting three-ring circus of frivolous triviality so that very slowly one’s moon turns its dark side towards us? Once that happens its darkness and all that is secreted in it could be lovingly embraced and converted.

     Or in their long solitude did Buddha and Jesus slowly descended down into their underworld of the Unconscious, symbolized by the dark side of the moon? We each have such a subterranean consciousness which is not some reservoir of animal drives; rather it is the unexamined reside of our earliest training and feelings about ourselves and the world. It is unexamined since as small children we weren’t old enough to make judgments of the behaviors of our parents or the influences of our home environment that were influencing us. Yet in each of us that unconscious contains the deep motives of our adult behavior and the drives that determine our conduct. So we are blessed when we attempt to confront that hidden inner consciousness that can lead to conversion, real growth and the self-assurance to become whom we were destined to be.

Dear old and new friends,

     Agnostics and atheists, non-religious or religious, no one yet has escaped dying! This Haystack reflection is for all to ponder as we anticipate the events of Friday, April 3rd, that remembers the death of Jesus. Believers or doubters, we all need to think about that unavoidable event in life and the reality known to every backyard gardener that the beautiful pictures on the seed packets don’t come alive unless they die. Do garden seeds fear their death as we fear ours?

     More than a primal survival instinct our fear of dying is evident from our daily speech when we politely say, “Mary passed away today”—instead of “she died”! So common is this darkest fear of the inescapable that in the stone business a salesperson never speaks of tombstones, instead refers to them as “memorial stones or monuments.” Regardless what you want to call it, to each of us someday the “unspeakable” will come so we best wisely prepare for it by thinking about it seriously.

     Surprisingly the best preparation for a happy death is to become an expert lover who never tires of more unselfishly loving—more totally and sacrificially loving—regardless if married or not! Single, divorced, widowed or vowed religious, the wandering teacher of Galilee who died crucified on a cross calls everyone to wisely observe his one and only commandment: “Love God and each other.” Every act of love requires death of self; dying to the self’s powerful demands to be always right, first and in control. The need for the self to die is essential according to theologian Ilia Delio, “A self that is full of itself can never receive the love of another nor make a genuine movement towards the other.” Infallible is this ironclad rule of how to love.

     The legend that Adam, by sinning against God, ushered death into this world was the way the ancients tried to explain the existence of this dark horrifying fate of all life. Science has shown us that death and life appear together after evolution’s Big Bang as dying stars exploded outward in space all the raw ingredients of life. These star deaths were repeated over and over in the billions of years of evolution as galaxies appeared, and then our daystar, the sun, was born out of the clouds of various gasses and atomic hydrogen. The other planets in our solar system along with our planet Earth were gradually created from cosmic clouds in like fashion until, most amazingly, we humans became living Easters of long dead stars.

           Good Friday is the Great Valentine’s Day! Believers and unbelievers need to see the cross with all its suffering, pain and death not as a sacrifice-payment to redeem humanity from the punishment of its sins but rather as a cosmically gigantic act of love. The cross symbolizes the deeply profound cost of authentic loving and the sign of a willingness to go to extreme limits of genuine true affection and faithfulness. Even if it appeared God had abandoned him in his agonizing death, Jesus never once curses, asks why, or abandons God. The cross then is the ultimate sign of a love that knows no end. There is an old Russian expression that says you can tell the depth of belief of a woman or man by the way they make the sign of the cross.

Dear old and new friends,

    The original April fools were those who celebrated New Year’s on the First of April instead of the new date of the First of January in the revised calendar of Pope Gregory XIII. In March of 1852 he corrected the outdated old calendar of Julius Caesar that no longer coincided with the seasons by removing ten days and changing the day of the New Year. Many just couldn’t, or refused, to change their thinking. Since they continued observing New Year’s on April 1st they were called “April Fools!” Don’t rush to judge them as we as well find it difficult to change our thinking.

    This Feast of Fools comes with perfect timing around halfway through Lent. After four weeks of penitential grind many are weary of it. Some finding theirs has been a lackluster Lent blame being constantly distracted by making a living and family obligations and begin to secretly nurse “if only” wishes. I could have made progress in my meditating “if only” I could have spent Lent in some monastery or Zen retreat. “If only” I could have spent these forty days in the solitude of a Benedictine abbey or convent where tolling bells mark the hours I could have escaped the noisy secular world and experienced God and move closer to being a saint! If you ever felt this way, reflect on this story.

    Once, a wandering mendicant monk made a pilgrimage to the Holy River where he had a       religious experience. He decided to actually live and pray beside the Holy River and on its       bank built a simple bamboo lean-two shelter. At first he supported himself by begging.          Then he began selling bottles of Holy River Water to the hundreds of pious pilgrims coming      to pray and even bathe in the Holy River whose waters it was believed healed both body        and soul.

    When it came time for the pilgrims to return home they inwardly envied the monk who           was able to daily live beside the Holy River, but their jobs and family duties made that an       impossible dream. So they did the next best thing and took home with them a bottle of          Holy River water they purchased from the monk busily dispensing them.

    One departing pilgrim, as he was purchasing his bottle of Holy River Water, gave voice to        his longing saying to the monk, “Isn’t the Holy River magnificent this morning? My soul            takes flight like a bird just seeing the sun beautifully glistening like precious jewels off its        rippling waters.” Handing him his bottle of river water the monk asked, “What river?”

    “If only” thinking isn’t limited simply to Lent. Those serious about their spiritual quest frequently desire to retire to some serene Zen or Trappist monastery to deepen their prayer life so to grow in holiness. While such retreats from daily life can be beneficial, this kind of thinking is a cousin-thought to “Happy April 1st New Year.” Galilee’s Spiritual Master proclaimed the Joyful News that God is present wherever we are! That Presence abiding within and around us makes having to escape from the busy congestion of life to experience God and become holy unnecessary! Touching that Mystical Presence requires faith that at this moment you are enveloped in it; wipe your mind spotless of every image you have seen of God, especially Biblical ones.

    Then go and love your Divine Beloved in doing the family laundry or dishes, in the marriage bed, in soiled diapers, in cooking supper spiced with love, in your raucous workplace, in unpleasant neighbors, even inside your parish church!

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?

 
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.

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.

                                                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.