Dear believing, doubting and non-believing friends,

     Hearts, hearts and more hearts are everywhere you look these days, so if you got ashes today don’t let them float down and blind your eyes to Valentine’s Day, only days away. Valentine’s Feast of Lovers and Friends is an ideal companion to Ash Wednesday’s annual launching of Lent’s season of reform. But why do I need to be reformed? “I go to church every Sunday, leaving an offering of 10% of my income; I pray before meals and twice daily, read scripture every morning and am a volunteer at the soup kitchen—and I keep all the commandments!

     Really, you keep “all” the commandments? For Jews and for Jesus, the Great Commandment isn’t one of the famous Ten, rather “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength.” (Deut: 6, 5; Matt. 22:37) To test if we keep that commandment you and I need the Italian Dr. Santorio’s 1602 invention of the thermoscope, what we call a thermometer. We each need a heart-thermometer to give us the degree of our love’s fervor for our Beloved Creator and to measure the degree of the heat of our love for those dearest to us. If your thermometer numbers feel off a degree or two, you’re fortunate that the annual season of reform that begins today provides you with 40 days to rekindle and stoke up the fires of your love.

     After recovering from falling in love we all tend to love moderately within limits, not with great passion. We do so logically to insure our beloved’s death will not drive us mad. Marriage with its routine and sameness also lessens the once explosive fires of love and causes a lack of frequent gratitude and loving gestures and expressions. Marriage vows are necessary since we physically quickly change, and our once passionate love over time cools down until it is as lukewarm as today’s ashes. In the case of seniors, their once fascinating youthful love over the decades matures into an infallible ironclad companionship. Older lovers of God, after years of intimacy, experience that same confident calm love of companionship with their Beloved Lord.

     Unfortunately, believers deceive themselves that fidelity to the laws of God and the church, along with Sunday worship, suffices for love. Non-believers and halfhearted ones don’t hate God but experience the opposite of love which isn’t hate, but apathy. When it comes to Divine matters they are indifferent, uninterested and, when forced to attend church, are bored. The temperature of their relationship with God is lukewarm. Also in failing marriages and love affairs any love left is likewise lukewarm.
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     If fifty percent of American marriages end up dead in divorce, one wonders what percentage of God-human love relationships end up the same way? The Good News is if your heart thermometer measures your love of God as tepid, even if you are a doubter it can be re-enkindled. Surprisingly, enkindled love is conducive to enkindling belief, which is really Good News since it is healthy to deny the existence of some Gods we were taught existed.

     One answer to how God looks upon the degree of your love is found in the book of Revelation 3: 15: “I know that you are neither cold nor hot…So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Those are the acidic hateful words of a god of whom you should be an atheist! It is healthy and holy to be a non-believer of that Revelation spokesperson, like several other false gods who are found in the “Good Book”…but who don’t really exist!

     For half-hearted or devout believers, here are some suggestions. Begin to say aloud frequently throughout the day, “I love you, God.” When you experience a love gift from the Divine One like escaping some accident or finding some forgotten hidden money, say, “Thank you. I love you, God.” As you drift off to sleep as a final prayer of the day, “I love you, God…or Lord…or my Beloved.” Review your life and your talents, personal gifts you’ve been given, or a marriage partner or children, and see them all as individual love gifts to you from your Beloved God.

     Regardless what you may hear from the pulpit or read in the Bible, God believes in you, even if you don’t believe in him/her. God’s love for you is always unconditional, more passionate than any human love; no matter if your love is nonexistent or only lukewarm.

                   Happy romancing your Valentine lover and your Divine Beloved!

Dear old and new friends,

     Today’s marriage vows have remained unchanged for centuries except from the relatively recent historic deletion of the bride’s vow to “obey.” However, those vows need to evolve. Some readers may stop here saying, “I’m not married, so this reflection doesn’t apply to me.” But please read on because marriage is only the introduction to this reflection which is about your tomorrow. The conventional marriage vows today conclude with “…in sickness and health until death do us part” or “…all the days of my life.”

     Love before marriage wasn’t even considered a reality until the 18th century. Today’s acceptance of marriage as a sexually exclusive, romantic union between one man and one woman is a rather recent historic development. Today half of all American marriages end not by death but by divorce…and there are those who fall in love and live as life partners without ever being married. Realistically that pledge of “until death do us part” is the desired ideal and could be compared to the rings on a tree that grow yearly. A happy loveship (more intimate than friendship) lived with loving fidelity, affection and care grows daily into much more than “until death do us part.”

     That “much more” is expressed in a possible new four-word ending to our marriage vows promising love “…in sickness, health and death for all eternity.” The theologian Diarmuid O’ Murchu recalls author Michael Talbot’s words, “We are, as the aborigines say, just learning how to survive in infinity.” In addition, he says, “At this stage of our human evolution the human mind can scarcely grasp the notion of the infinite.” He then challenges us by saying the most controversial principle of quantum theology is, “The concepts of beginning and end, along with the theological notions of resurrection and reincarnation are invoked as dominate myths to help us humans make sense of our infinite destiny in an infinite universe.”

     We have been taught God is eternal, without a beginning or end, and it seems heretical to conceive of ourselves in the same way, but the new quantum physics dares us to do so. We proclaim that the Christian God is love, and so that love surely shares in the Divine’s infinity. To daily attempt to live with the conviction that you will live forever radically transforms how you view today’s daily little hangnail irritations. Marvelously, you don’t have to create some great masterpiece to become immortal.

     As we struggle with this new conception of personal infinity may we find support in Woody Allen, the American film actor, director and writer. He has been acclaimed a genius by the French and praised by Americans as one of the greatest film directors of modern times. Allen himself is more lighthearted: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying!”

Dear old and new friends,

     “Eat, drink and be merry” would be a great motto for these December days. December 7th begins Hanukah’s eight-day festival, followed by the celebration of Christmas, and then New Year’s. The coming days call for good food and good wine…speaking of which reminds me of a true story.

     Bishop Johann Fugger set off in the year 1110 from Germany to participate in Emperor Henry V’s coronation in Rome. He sent his majordomo ahead to sample the wines served in taverns along the road leading to Rome, instructing him to write “Est” (It is) over the doors of taverns serving good wine. About a hundred miles north of Rome in the small Italian town of Montefiascone he wrote over the door of the inn, “Est! Est! Est!” Bishop Fugger agreed and drank only the Montefiascone vintage for the rest of his life. He even was buried in that Italian town, and his will directed on the yearly anniversary of his death that a barrel of Montefiascone was poured over his grave! Now there’s a great wine.

     The Teacher of Galilee’s words not to put new wine into old wine skins, as the old skins would break and you would lose both the skins and the new wine, seems like just folk wisdom. Yet the Gospel writer Luke tells us it is a parable! Its lesson seems to warn of not putting new radical ideas into old weary structures, which sadly happened with his teachings when the Church embraced the Gospel. In his life, Galilee’s wandering teacher went about offering the new, very potent wine of love and freedom. Any who dared to drink this new wine quickly developed bizarre behaviors, acting as if the world had been turned upside down. They drunkenly loved their enemies along with everyone else; feeling liberated they ignored those who tried to hold power over them. The inebriated followers also were guilty of WWI: Worshiping While under the Influence by not observing official prayer or temple worship.

     Secular and religious authorities denounced this dangerous new wine, so the teacher wisely instructed his disciples to imitate him and be bootleggers, and like him to carry hidden this new wine in skins in his high boots. They were to offer it only to those tired of the drabness of being sober and wanted to get merrily drunk. If you desire to drink this wondrous new wine, don’t look to the Church to provide it; her wine cellar holds only the old vintage, some so old it has turned to sour vinegar. So you must become a bootlegger and create your “new” wine in your own bathtub winery.
 
     Such new, tasty intoxicating spirits are especially needed since the over-civilized mechanization of life has caused us to lose our human capacity to both deeply love and to be alluringly lovely. Here’s a “new” wine recipe: Absorb as much as possible of the vital life energy of love by loving those in the center of your life more deeply and more passionately each day than you did the day before. But be cautious…don’t love only with your head (cerebral=non-alcoholic wine) but passionately with all your body, and extend your love boundaries by physically embracing more, including unlovable persons.
 
     Finally, be a bootlegger. As the Teacher taught, keep your forbidden booze hidden until you offer some to some sober sad soul who asks how you can be so cheerful and happy in such terrible times? By making your own Galilean new wine and sharing it with the truly thirsty, you’ll find these holidays days to be “Est! Est! Est!” merry.

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.

Forever is a holy word
     I've stolen from God's vocabulary
     that I dare to utter
     when speaking of my love for you.

From the ten thousand names of God,
     with lips trembling in fear,
     I have chosen Forever
     to sing of my love for you.

Idolatry — to make human love divine
     and put it on par with God.
No, not idolatry, but identity,
     for love and God are one
     when love longs to be Forever.

O You who never created love,
     but are Love, and Love-Forever,
     gift me with Your sacred heart
                                                            to love You, and my beloved,
                                                                     Forever, Forever.
                        
                                                          
     From the beginning, God wedded human love and God-love together as one and the same — even when human loving falls short of forever. Gratefully, human love is awakened to its Godhood whenever such love struggles to be forever.

     The tree of love can withstand all storms, droughts and disasters when its roots are entwined around the God-Stone at the center of the Earth. Love's zero gravity is made stable by being thus grounded in Ground Zero. Each time "Forever" is whispered in the darkness, it sends the roots of love racing to encircle more tightly the Sacred Stone.

     So anchored in Love, our loves can withstand the dry desert winds of routine, the twisting tornadoes of emotional differences, infidelity and workaday chaos.

     Forever — let us say it slowly, say it full of meaning, say it as one of the holy names of God.

Dear old and new friends,

     Today’s Christmas is domesticated and tamed…but the first one was wild, lacking kindly toy-making elves and flying reindeer. It was also frightening as Bethlehem’s silent night was shattered with loud agonizing cries of pain, the same ones heard at every birth! No heavenly chorus of singing angels soothed that birthing anguish we celebrate on this Christmas—so don’t expect them at yours!

     Birthing? What are you talking about? It’s impossible; I’m too old to be born again. Besides once is enough! Yet vast are the spiritual depths for our Christmas meditation in the First Letter of John, 4:7-8: “Everyone who loves is born of God…for God is love.”

     To unravel this mystical puzzle, let’s begin by reviewing our loves. First, we learned how to love as infants by being loved by our parents, then this love evolved into a wider love of members of our immediate family and relatives. Outside our family, our first real love perhaps was a sexual, erotic one that began a new relationship with another that was intended to evolve into the beautifully, supportive love of companionship. Of falling in love, the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Once you get over falling in love, you can really begin to love.” Yes, after those high octane mind-blowing experiences you must learn to love with such great strength so as to withstand infidelity of all types, along with your physical aging and that of your lover, so your love can evolve into a greater, divine love.

     God is all of these kinds of human loves, yet God’s love is different. That author of John’s first letter said, “God is love,” yet left unspoken what that loves is! Divine love is radically different in that it is not attracted by physical beauty or charm and loves effortlessly the disfigured and ugly. God’s love is free. It can’t be purchased or manipulated, and it never requires any thanks, not even the natural response of being loved in returned.

     To love as does God requires a dedication to the evolution of all of our previous ways of loving, and so naturally must include the birthing pains of evolution. Your spirit will scream out in pain when this new loving calls you to lift a soiled, stinking, perhaps diseased person out of the gutter. Inwardly your soul will wail in agony as you continue to love one who returned your years of loving kindness with hostility and stony silence. Your spirit will howl with a birthing burst of anguished pain when you respond with loving kindness to those who dislike you, who speak lies and spread malicious gossip about you.

     Love like this day after day and you will be born of God, just as Jesus, born of Mary, was born of God to become Living Mystical Love among us. When you love as God does, all of Heaven rejoices and sends out the joyous announcements of your new birth!

Dear old and new friends, 

     It’s Thanksgiving, and merchants in a hurry for the beginning of the lucrative holiday season are flooding television and newspapers with advertisements for Christmas gifts. This holiday impatience is contagious. Countless are infected and can’t wait for the Thanksgiving dinner to end so to race off to join crowds of shoppers in city streets and businesses already decked out for Christmastide, while everywhere one hears the music of ancient carols. These all conspire to make it difficult to realize we’re celebrating Thanksgiving.

     Paradoxically, I propose adding yet another holiday to Thanksgiving—Valentine’s Day! By blending Thanksgiving’s turkeys with snowy Christmas trees and toy-making elves along with giant red hearts, pink cupids and bouquets of red roses of the Feast of Lovers we can add to our gratitude. That’s ridiculous, you say…it will only distract people! Really? More than competitive TV football games or hectic Christmas shopping now divert us from visiting and enjoying our family on this ancient feast of autumn gratitude?

     We Americans already easily forget we are so gifted; don’t let a premature Christmas eclipse or thrilling football games sidetrack us from being truly thankful! Be aware of that Grand Canyon of disparity in wealth between us and the impoverished, unemployed and homeless, and our need to alleviate their suffering by giving thanks in tangible acts.

     To the many dishes on Thanksgiving tables that are from treasured old recipes I add:            
                                                       Recipe for
                                        A Holy Feast of Giving Thanks

     1.) Begin by recalling the Haystack reflection of two weeks ago about the African American Father Divine and his conception of tangibilitating…giving in concrete, tangible ways.

     2.) Write a short list of those things for which you are most grateful. Keep it short so you are able to express your gratitude not simply in words but in tangible ways.

     Remember, we've added Valentine’s Day to our Thanksgiving. Love is divine; a gift you          can’t buy, trade, barter for or win. Love is a free gift that is ever-evolving.

     3.) Now return to your gratitude list. At the top might be those who taught you how to love by their loving of you—your parents. Next, teachers and mentors whose love helped shape you. Now place with them the person who presently loves you most, and whom is your greatest love. Then on Thanksgiving express your appreciation and gratitude for her or him in a tangible way by giving them a lover’s gift of affectionate gratefulness. It can be simple or elegant. Regardless, it will be a treasure because it is filled with love.

                                                 Happy Thanksgiving!