Laurel Massé

All shall be well: Julian of Norwich

And in this vision, God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, 'What can this be?' And the answer came to me, 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, 'It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in this same way everything exists through the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it.  Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Julian was the first woman to publish a book in English (in what we now call "Middle English"). In it she tells of the visions she had in 1373. In it she describes Christ as a mother. In it she assures us that "sin is necessary, but all shall be well. All shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well."

Today the Episcopal Church celebrates dear Julian's feast day. Eat something wondrously good, with gratitude. She would like that. Remember that C.S. Lewis said her book was dangerous. I think she would like that, too. Stories about her suggest she had a cat. I like that.

There is more information about Julian here , and here is the podcast of a talk (the transcript's there, too) given by Rev. Mimi Dixon, Presbyterian pastor, about her experiences of Julian.

This extraordinary icon was written by Mihai Cucu. This, and his other exquisite icons, can be seen here.

It was Madeleine L'Engle who introduced me to the writings of Julian; for that, and for so much more, I am always grateful.

To the Christians in the House

I once had a manager who thought he was John Galt. Or at least a John Galt. Even though I adored him, I knew he wasn't. And when he went on to embezzle a substantial sum, it bore out my literary instinct.

I knew, though, who he was talking about because I had read Atlas Shrugged as a younger girl. So much younger, in fact, that my mother had taken the book away from me, saying, "You don't need to read that. You're selfish enough already." But I eventually read through to the end.

So when Ayn Rand's writings came back into public notice with the advent of and media attention to the Tea Party and the Libertarians and Paul Ryan's Randian Catholicism (an oxymoron), I did not have to run out to buy the book to understand that there would be trouble ahead for women, immigrants, and the poor from anyone who followed her precepts. Which are horribly, horribly selfish precepts, and idolatrous, and about as far as one can get from the teachings of Jesus.

A group of Christian faith leaders (Faithful Filibuster) gathers every day Congress is in session across the street from the Capitol  building to read scripture out loud, especially the 2000 verses that tell us how to care for the poor. This is both a protest, and a public education service. Obviously there are a few folks in the government who have clean forgotten that the Bible has any use other than as a weapon with which to bludgeon people.

Those same forgetful folks have also forgotten their Ayn Rand. For it is not, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroic capitalists alone who bring down the government, and with it, the entire culture. It is the giddy, greedy, cruel Wesley Mouches, out for themselves.

You have changed the rules in the House so as to prevent any change in direction. You bark about the Constitution. You would edit out the uncomfortable bits of Jesus' words. Show me how you are not a Mouch.

Listen up, House. You dance yourselves into a tunnel of an ever-shrinking width. It is not the narrow path to heaven. It is a death trap. You will soon lose the ability to turn around. You are worshipping power, and money, and individualism. You are throwing other people's children into the fires of Moloch, in the belief that wealth and particular interests will take care of you if you legislate the sacrifice of others. They will not take care of you. They will use you, and devour you, and fail you, and forget you. They are false idols.

Relent. Repent. Come back into the daylight. Help save our country by saving its people. The Lord, which you claim to proclaim, said to love God, and love our neighbor, to heal the sick, and raise the dead. 

It's time to take Him seriously. It is time to turn around. Come back to your senses. We need you. Come back to us.

 

Follow the leader, or rename the game

Anyone who grows up in the church has heard the stories. Jesus says "Be well!", and behold, someone is well. Jesus mixes up a poultice from some dirt and spit and applies it. He touches someone and says, "Your sins are forgiven,"  and they are forgiven. And that person is made well. Can see. Can speak. Can hear. Stops bleeding. Stops mutilating himself. Walks. Runs. Is not dead anymore, but living, and whole.

Only once are we told of a "stolen" healing. A woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, works her way through a crowd of people around him, and touches his robe, hoping that will be enough. And it is. She is healed. When he feels it happening, and asks, "Who touched me?", she comes forward in fear, and identifies herself. But he simply says "Your faith has healed you." It is nowhere recorded that he ever said, "You were not authorized."

Or, "No. Sorry. You've had enough relief from your sins, your pain, your grief. That's all you get this quarter."

Today, a dear dear friend, who suffers from chronic debilitating back pain needs to have a prescription fior pain meds refilled. She has injured her fragile back, and is in terrible pain. It should be simple. But it's not. She is told by a receptionist at the medical practice where she is a patient that, because of insurance and state rules, she can't get a refill without seeing the doctor, and the first available time is at the end of the month.

The month of August.

She asks to speak to her physician. "Doctor X is too busy to come to the phone." I am looking at her. She can hardly stand up straight. Pain is carving her face like granite.

I know this woman well, and you know what? She is a warrior. She pushes herself. She keeps going. She endures. She does not complain, or exaggerate, and she is not looking for a high. In fact, she doesn't particularly like how the drugs make her feel, except... they make the pain recede just enough.

She has health insurance, for which she pays a lot. The insurance company will cover a major and costly surgical procedure that has already been shown to be ineffective and sometimes dangerous in cases like hers, with a long recover time including physical therapy the insurance will not fully cover. My friend does not want this surgery. She just wants enough relief for the pain to be manageable.  This is why one sees a pain management doctor in the first place, yes? But her medications are rationed by cost analysis, as are her allowable office visits. There is no thought given to her actual condition, to which I am witness. Nothing I experience in the lasting effects of my car accident comes close to what she deals with almost every day.

So. I think about this week's House vote (the 33rd such vote) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I think about all the proposed cuts to or elimination of WIC, the Food Stamp program, Medicaid/Medicare. And about the man whom so many of our elected officials on both sides of the aisle claim to follow.

If we are so all-fired Christian, how do we dare to draw lines he never drew? I know things can be complicated, and that I am not aware of every problematic issue involved. But really. Once you develop the habit of calling yourself by his name, don't you also have to be going about the business of doing what he said to do?

Or are we just wearing lapel pins, and calling it a day?

 

Enough 2

When my mom grew weary of her two litle girls quarreling over whose slice of pie or bowl of ice cream was biggest, she instituted this practice: one of us did the dividing, and the other got the first pick. This instantly and almost magically evened out the size of the pies.

Wanting some-more-most is seated deep in the human psyche, as are good-better-best, for example, and new-newer-beta. They're all just variations on I-me-mine (in some traditions that's called original sin). Our capitalist economy depends on this. How will corporations get all their capital if we don't spend all of ours buying their stuff?

So? What's wrong with that? For the corporation, nothing. The system works. But for us? We for whom the gaping maw waits all wide and toothy?

Here's what Rob Bell says, in his book Love Wins:

There is nothing wrong with possessions; it's just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They're nouns that mean something only in conjunction with a verb. That's why wealth is so dangerous: if you're not careful, you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.

"Garage full of nouns". Ha! I don't even have a garage! O most virtuous me!

But might I have a closet full of nouns? You bet. If I moved to a smaller place and put some of my things in storage, I'd have a storeroom full of nouns. Nouns plus one heart, because Jesus said "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also", and I have yet to see empirical proof to the contrary.

Letting go is difficult. We trust what we hold in our hands. We find it hard to even identify that which holds us.

 

( Here's George Harrison's haunting I Me Mine. Embedding was disabled. Perfect, yes?)

 

Target practice

There is a word heard more often in churches in the season of Lent than in the rest of the year: sin. It's in the prayers, it's in the sermons, it's in the hymns, and it's an uncomfortable, squirm-in-your-seat word. It makes me think of the scene in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Brideshead Revisited, when Julia (Catholic, and married), says to Charles, with whom she is having an affair:

Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night.... 'Poor Julia,' they say, 'she can't go out. She's got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,' they say, 'but it's so strong.'

It's like picking at a wound, like holding on to a viper. It hurts, but still one can't let go. "Oh Lord," prayed Augustine, "make me chaste, but not yet."

Your spiritual tradition may use different language, but we all have some term that means "messing up in a big way". The Greeks had a word for it: hamartia (ἁμαρτία),which is borrowed, I have been told, from archery. It means "missing the mark". That is the term Paul used when he wrote, in his letter to the Christians in Rome, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God".

When I take my eye off the ball, I miss it. When my mind wanders from the bullseye, so does my shot. Oh boy, do I know it! Time after time, I pick up my bow, aim at the target, and then, between my intention and my action, or as T.S. Eliot wrote, between the idea and the reality / Between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow... or the bright distracting thing. My mind says "ooh, sparkly!". My arrow of desire wobbles and goes off-course. I hit neither target nor distraction; even worse, that arrow may injure some innocent thing that was in the way of my careening.

I want to learn how to draw the bow, and be still in my mind and, keeping my eyes on the target, hit the mark. "Purity of mind," said Kierkegaard, "is to will one thing". There is work to do here; sometimes the best I can do is to will one thing at a time.

And that's my Lent so far.