What’s Goin’ On? | Holly Hudley

How we talk about reality has everything to do with how we interact with it. 

There is that famous line from Einstein: “I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.

“For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.

“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning. But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives…God does not play dice with the universe.” 

In other words, we know now - unlike the plagues of the 14th and 17th centuries that this is not God’s wrath or grand poker game. Nor is God stirring the cosmic soup but accidentally left the back door open to let in all the bugs. Nor is God throwing handfuls of COVID19 at those of us who are sinners. It just is. But that isness has something to do with an evolutionary response to this present moment.

It seems like we have a choice here: to opt for fear (which is not the same as caution) and make all our responses about giving into fear; to opt for indifference which is to proceed as if it is business as usual; or to opt for curiosity and understanding...what do we need to hear nature—including human nature— tell us? It’s not useful to stay in the mechanistic world view - human vs. the natural world, or human vs. human. That is unfriendly.  It is useful to see humans as part of nature, to see everyone as such. And even if we can’t yet understand what’s going on, are we able to see any gifts of this moment? In 1971 Marvin Gaye released the song “What’s Goin On” under a very different set of circumstances - the middle of the Vietnam War and free love, the back end of the Civil Rights Movement, the front end of great economic struggle. He sings: 

Mother, mother

There’s too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There’s far too many of you dying

You know we’ve got to find a way

To bring some lovin’ here today.

It might be time for us to choose to participate differently, to be open to this moment in the long arc of time, however scary or unknown. Struggle always presents an opportunity to discern whether we should hold the course or plot a new one. In either case, we need to find our way. If we decide the universe is friendly, that means we opt to be an aspect of that friendliness and bring more lovin’. The opposite is also true.

What say you? Is the universe a friendly place? 

Behind the Scenes | Bill Kerley

Dear Ones -

When you receive the preview for this week you will see that Holly and I are stealing a line from a poem of Hafiz as title for our talk. Our goal/hope is that the talk will contribute to all of us being able to live with less fear and more hope - as well as peace, love and joy.

I love the poetry of Hafiz and a new one found me this week:

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I’d rather see you in better living conditions.”

There are several ways to move into “better living conditions.” Keep a gratitude journal. Write notes to people you are thinking about or whom you know would appreciate such a “personal touch.” Watch the movie “Life Itself” on Amazon. Take canned goods to the EAC (5401 Fannin). Don’t watch more than ten or fifteen minutes of “news” a day. My hunch is that you know some things that would bring you joy even in these upended times.

You could also spend some time thinking about:

Questions you would like for Holly to ask me,
Questions you would me to ask Holly,
Topics you would like to see the two of us address.

You can e-mail these directly from this website using the “contact” menu option. Or you can text directly to me - 713-594-9180 - or directly to Holly - 832-314-0680.

As you likely know, the county in which Houston is located, as well as Fort Bend country, is under a “stay at home” order. We are not supposed to leave our homes except for essential tasks and errands. We pre-recorded the services that will be streamed this Sunday from St. Paul’s. It was decided, given all things to consider, that it made both more sense and was easier for us to live stream Ordinary Life from our usual place at the usual time this week. Your contributions would be helpful.

Live-streaming from an empty space is surreal. We don’t/can’t do it by ourselves. William Budge and Olivia Watson form the team created by Tim Leatherwood that makes it happen. They are our Ordinary Life heroes. Last week John Watson took these photos of us while we were teaching. We wish we could see you personally and that day will come. 

Be well and much love,

Bill Kerley

Being Able To See | Bill Kerley

Dear Ones -

I am posting below the text of the talk that was live-streamed this past Wednesday, March 18, from St. Paul’s. Normally on Wednesdays there is a mid-week Eucharist service. The responsibility for convening this service is shared among the clergy. This was my time and it was the first such service since the decision was made to honor the CDC guidelines and not have any gatherings larger than 10 people. I decided to turn it into more of a “fire-side chat.” I understand that it will be posted as a video on the St. Paul’s website so that you can watch it there. Or, you can download it.

Being Able To See

Welcome to this live-stream version of our mid-week communion service. Because of the Coronavirus and our cooperating with the recommendations of the CDC, gatherings of people for worship services, educational events and offerings such as this mid-week communion service have been replaced by live-streaming. We are also investigating tools to use that will allow us to have small group meetings via internet connections.

Please check the St. Paul’s website regularly to stay up-to-date with any changes or updates in our schedule or plans. Please feel free to contact us through the website or by calling the church to let us know of your prayer requests and personal concerns. We care about you and we want you to experience our care.

At any rate, no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey you are welcome here at St. Paul’s. When this electronic phase of our gatherings is over, which it will be at some point, you are certainly welcome to join us here in person. St. Paul’s provides rich liturgical worship experiences enhanced by our world-renown choir and we provide a wealth of educational and missional opportunities for spiritual growth and the practice of love, compassion and justice not only here in our community but also around the world. You are welcome here.

I want to begin this brief reflection today with a prayer I have adapted for my own daily use. It has been part of my own daily spiritual practice for years. It is sometimes referred to as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer.” If you put that phrase into the search engine on your computer you can find a beautiful rendition of this set to music on YouTube. It is this -

Jesus with me, Jesus within me,
Jesus behind me, Jesus before me,
Jesus beside me, Jesus to win me,
Jesus to comfort and restore me.

Jesus beneath me, Jesus above me,
Jesus in quiet, Jesus in danger,
Jesus in hearts of all who love me,
Jesus in mouth of friend and stranger.

Amen.

St. Paul’s is a lectionary church. That means that our worship is shaped by a lectionary that is shared by many of the mainline churches in the Protestant denomination. Ever since I was in the seminary I have been grateful for the lectionary. My first experience of it was found in the Book of Common Prayer that is used by most Episcopal churches.

The use of a lectionary, a set of readings designed to provide education for worshippers, can be found in some form all the way back to Jewish worship long before the time of Jesus. When the Jews would gather for worship, selections would be read from “the law and the prophets” and these readings followed a cycle of “holy days” in the Jewish calendar. When the followers of Jesus separated themselves from synagogue worship somewhere around the year 80, they took a lot of the Jewish practices with them. After all, they were Jewish.

Over the centuries various lectionaries were created by worshipping Christians. There were no printed books in the first many centuries and then, when there were, the books were few and most people could not read. Lectionaries, or appointed readings, made sense as a tool for educating and guiding those who gathered to worship and share a meal together.

The Scripture passages for today not only fit together so beautifully but also they are so apt for this time when we are anxious about and hurting over the restrictions placed on our normal way of living because of the Coronavirus. Rather than read the passages to you, I simply want to tell you about them and then show one way they are applicable to our lives.

The first reading is from the book in the Hebrew Scriptures called First Samuel.

This passage contains a story that is likely familiar to you.

Samuel has been selected by God to go to the house of Jesse of Bethlehem to select from his soking for Israel. Samuel is very apprehensive about going because he fears the reception he might get from Jesse. But, God advises Samuel that if he invites Jesse and the other town fathers to join him in a worship service, things will be fine - which, indeed, they turn out to be.

Jesse shows up with all of his sons and Samuel knows he is to pick one of Jesse’s sons to be the new king of the children of Israel. Immediately he sees Eliab and thinks, “This is the one!”

But, God says to Samuel, “Looks aren’t everything. Don’t be impressed with his looks and stature. I’ve already eliminated him.” The text reads, “God judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; God looks into the heart.”

This process of elimination goes on and on, one son after another until Jesse has presented seven sons to Samuel and Samuel determines that none of them is the person God is looking for. So, he says to Jesse, “Is this it? Is this all you’ve got for me? Are there no more sons?”

Jesse says, “Well, there is one more. The runt of the bunch (this is what the text says). He’s out tending the sheep.”

Samuel says, “Go get him. We’re not moving from this spot until her he is here.”

So Jesse sends for him and when he arrives, the very picture of health, God says to Samuel, “Get up and anoint him! This is the one.”

This is the story of how David is selected as King of Israel.

The story of David becomes a complicated one and First Samuel is somewhat disjointed. However, you will remember from readings we have during the Advent season that Jesus is described as coming from the house and lineage of David.

Now to the passage from the Gospel that the lectionary directs us to for this day.

When I first got this assignment for today I thought, “Good grief! There is no way we can even read this selection during the relatively brief time we have for this service. It is the entire ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. That’s forty-one verses.”

Again, it is a story you know.

The disciples and Jesus are walking along the way and they encounter a man who, as the scripture has it, was blind from the day of his birth. The disciples to raise a question that fit perfectly with their inherited Jewish theology. Who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind? It makes no sense, of course, to say that he could have sinned since he had been blind from birth.

When it comes to God and human suffering, some people can easily and quickly get thrown off the path.

I’ll wager you it won’t be long, if it hasn’t already happened, that some religious idiot will say that the Coronavirus is the result of someone’s or some group’s sin. It will be the homosexuals or abortionists or immigrants or some group that person targets as an “unworthy” or “sinful” group. I know you know better than that.

Stephen King has a line that is the truth about our lives and living on this planet: “The world has teeth and it can bite you with them anytime it wants.” Indeed. When I was diagnosed with coronary artery disease nearly eleven years ago now, I asked my cardiologist if there was a cure for the condition. He said, “No. As Buddha said, ‘To have a body is to live in a house that is on fire.’”

This chapter in John is so rich. Spend some time with it.

The main point for this conversation today is that Jesus heals a blind man. If you read the entire chapter you will see the wide range of responses this healing had.

At the beginning of his ministry Jesus announced, quoting one of the Jewish prophets, that he had come, among other reasons, to restore sight to the blind. He didn’t mean just physical seeing. This is a metaphor for the kind of seeing the Hebrew passage shows us: a seeing that is not superficial but one that sees the essence of a person.

In this ninth chapter of John Jesus says, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.”

Perhaps one of the biggest problems we have in this world is what might be called “the sin of superficiality.” Father Richard Rohr, someone I know many of you are familiar with, says that one of the shortcomings of the church is that it has taught people what to see and not how to see. Both passages appointed for this week are about how to see, about having our vision corrected so that we can see as Jesus saw, as God desires us to see.

Suppose you have gone to the grocery story. It is after work and you are in a rush to buy what you need to prepare the evening meal and head home. You forgot to bring your own bags and are carrying two paper sacks full of your purchases as you head for your car as fast as possible. As you leave the store and are about to step into the parking lot, you collide with another patron. The handles on your paper bags break and you watch as almost in slow motion your purchases - eggs, milk, pasta sauce, plastic containers of fresh fruit become airborne for a few slow seconds before making a total broken mess in the parking lot.

You are frustrated and furious. It take enormous restraint for you not to yell at the person who caused this, “What?! Are you blind?” You turn to castigate the person only to see that, in fact, he is blind, can’t see a thing.

Immediately your heart does a one eighty. You say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Are you alright. I didn’t see you. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

You do this because you see what is really going on. You see deeper than the surface.

One of the things the lectionary readings for today invite us to do is to see.

I’ll take it a step further. One of the things following Jesus enables us to do, empowers us to do, is to see.

Jesus with me, Jesus within me,
Jesus behind me, Jesus before me,
Jesus beside me, Jesus to win me,
Jesus to comfort and restore me.

Jesus beneath me, Jesus above me,
Jesus in quiet, Jesus in danger,
Jesus in hearts of all who love me,
Jesus in mouth of friend and stranger.

With companionship like that we don’t need to be afraid and we will be empowered to see.

Only Everything | by Holly Hudley

Y’all. 

It has been a minute.

I’ve taken a long (unintentional) hiatus from the blog. It’s probably owing to the fact that I am reading and writing all the time for this PhD, maybe in part that I have 3 kids, as well as the uptick in co-teaching with Bill. Thoughts swirl all the time...I just haven’t put them in blog form lately.

But, here we find ourselves social distancing, and I am thinking of all of you wondering how you are holding up. What is bringing you joy? What about despair? Are you missing connection in ways you were finding it a week ago? I wanted to hug a friend today, but instead we air kissed. I tell you it was so bizarre to teach Ordinary Life to a near empty room. I think Bill and I both felt grateful to have the other, and extremely grateful to Tim, William, John, and Olivia who keep us going. When it is socially permissible to do so, give those 4 a hug—like a really huge hug. And then when it’s socially permissible to do so, also give them a fat kiss on the cheek. 

I imagine hope comes in unique ways for each of us, as does worry. I am a person who loves being home. I love working in my garden, sitting by the pool, hanging with my husband, lounging on my screen porch, and yes, even going nuts with my 3 loud, crazy, funny kids. These things ease my worry. I feel blessed. My heart aches for the kids and families who either rely on hourly/low wages or free and reduced lunch and don’t have access to them right now. All we ever have is what is right here, right in front of us, and that’s exceedingly hard to hold onto when you’re gripped by worry. So what keeps me grounded? Along with the things I listed above, poetry. Sometimes single lines of text that sticks with me. Like the one from William Jame’s Varieties of Religious Experience about us being part of eternity. Today I want to share one of my favorite passages from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. It is about presence, about the sacred, which is also only ever right here. Whatever this moment brings us we have access to being in relationship to it. We are already a singularity, just the space between us must be at least 3 feet at present...which in the context of doing a lot of nothing may just give us more spaciousness to know only everything.

“—What, then, does one experience of the You?

—Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. 

—What, then, does one know of the You?

—Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.” 

See you next week on Livestream! I am grateful for the ways we can connect. That truly is miraculous.

Love Better | by Brooke Summers-Perry

Love Better, an erasure (blackout) poem

intellectual culture
imperfect knowledge

unless our civilization itself may be
as beautiful almost as the morning itself;

when we have the learning and appreciate
those less known

heaven at last

astronomically a high sense
nothing to be wasted

love better

all the world to come together
among the constellations.

Through Mystery | by Brooke Summers-Perry

While meditating on “truth,” I used pages 20 and 21 from Frederick Buechner’s book, The Sacred Journey to create a blackout poem.

Central hearth
lit the morning
brave enough
through mystery
I found it
beyond looking
to grow
we understand

Grace in, peace out,
Brooke

Stay cool | by Brooke Summers-Perry

The world
tunneling change
hopes thrown off
The silence
shrinking
the truth gathered
waiting
the weight whispering
in my head
stay cool everyone

I decided to renew my commitment to Ordinay Life blog contribution through blackout poetry. For me, creating this type of poetry is much like centering prayer or other forms of meditation. This practice is a physical, mental, and spiritual practice of distillation, of discernment. Like thoughts in our head that come with our without our beckoning, the words on the page can be noise that silences as we choose to attend to those that speak truth in the moment. I hope that by sharing these distilled pages with you, we find our truth woven together in the stories of our ordinary lives.

Love to all,
Brooke

A Collage for Advent | by Holly Hudley

The Power that governs all dwelt in a small womb.

While dwelling there, He was holding the reins of the universe.

~St. Ephrem of Syria

Gratitude | by Holly Hudley

The color blue. All shades. Paired with olive green. 

My fingers threaded through big soft curls.

Resting my chin on the top of my oldest son’s head. (He’s that tall now.)

Being underwater where it feels both like being held and flying.

The sun on my face with my eyes closed.

A chrysalis threaded with gold. 

Fractals.

Gratitude is the simplest way to restore our sight. To notice, to pause, to choose...a better way to live. 

This week, above all else, above turkeys and pumpkin pies, above grandma’s cornbread stuffing updated with craisins, above avoiding topics at family dinners, above mythologized relations between Native Americans and colonists, is a chance to practice thankfulness. 

A wise man I know once said a gratitude journal, the simple art of writing 5 things a day you are grateful for, can transform your life. I’m leaving the comments open on this blog post in hopes that you will add your own to this list.

So much love. To all of you.

God is a Verb | by Holly Hudley

Dr. Cleve Tinsley is wicked smart. 

I’m taking his class on liberation theology and wishing I could have 3 more hours of dialogue with him every week. Last week we read Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father in which she dismantles patriarchal white guy God, in fact depersonifies God all together. 

As we were reading I had tiny glimpses and chill bumps imagining God as what we might call nothingness but what I imagine to be more like a force field, possibly gravity. My favorite analogy is dark matter - that which keeps things from flying apart. 

Mary Daly says God is a verb. 

Take that in. 

God. Is. A. Verb. 

Not a thing. Not a man, not a father, not even a clear lake of meaning from which everything emerges. God is a process. A process of evolving and becoming. “A verb is a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, such as hear, become, happen.”

Check out the examples used! “Such as hear, become, happen.”

God hears, becomes, happens. 

Bill and I had a conversation the other day, somewhat about God as process and I loved what he said. Something along the lines of paleontologists constructed an entire dinosaur out of a fossil the size of a thigh bone. There was a lot of guesswork and intuition as well as a general  understanding of how bones fit together. There’s probably a million ways the T-Rex could’ve turned out. Putting him together was probably akin to throwing a 5000 piece puzzle in the air  and figuring out where they go. It’s a process. 

In that same vein, as God is process, then so it is for everything. Some of it is about un-becoming. It involves looking at the things we inherited, at the puzzle pieces that landed in our field of existence and choosing where the pieces go or if we even want to use them. 

To fully become, we have to un-become. 

To happen with God, we have to allow the notions we have of the God we grew up with to fall apart and imagine something new.  We have to enter the process that is most definitely not static.

God is a verb. A process. A way of being. Not a thing. We are inhabited by this process as much as we inhabit it. There is reciprocity at every turn. I like this idea - that God the process is figuring itself out through evolution, through consciousness, through general becoming. 

Through You and Me.