No Spanish Inquisition. No witch trials in Europe or Salem. No Catholic-Protestant struggle in Northern Ireland. But no Bach Cantatas or Mozart’s Requiem. No Gandhi. No Peace Prize for Desmond Tutu, and no Truth and Reconciliation Commission. No St. Francis. Readers – what would break your heart if we had no religion?
Haiti is not a clean place … we have dirt, we have dust, we have all the pollution from cars and trucks. It’s hot, and I sweat a lot. All that combines to make my clothes pretty dirty, sometimes after just one wearing. As I pour out the now-dirty water and watch it swirl down the drain, I think of how washing the dirt from my clothes is rather like washing the dirt from my spiritual life.
I was in my canoe with another kid in the scariest thunder storm ever, with giant waves, and literally miles to go, and I thought I was done. The boy supposedly steering our canoe had pretty much become catatonic from fear behind me, and there I was just paddling for dear life trying to drag us both to the other side of the shore. I recall looking overboard and contemplating jumping in.
Seeing the picture of myself as a rather nervous young man sporting his first moustache, I remembered my feelings of terror as I passed through customs in Leningrad with 20 copies of the New Testament in Russian concealed in my luggage, and my relief at getting away with my smuggling.
The return trip—rounding the point and heading back to the harbor—was rough. The wind came up and the current near the point worked to push them back. As the waves grew so did the uneasiness of his guests. That’s when the skipper asked one of his guests to reach into his cooler and get him a peanut butter sandwich.
Prayer without action is passivity; Action without prayer can wind up being about more narrowly political and social agendas – it can lead us to miss the dream of God in the work we are called to do. Genuine prayer will lead us to action. But it is folly to dismiss either of these as “simply poetry.”
In our consumerist culture, and especially in the present financial crisis it won’t be easy to renew the crucial strands of our life line. But who is trying? For a single sermon commending pleasure or desire, we’ve probably heard twenty urging us to give or share because we ‘should be grateful.’ We’re in the grip of fearful Christian thinking from those bitter centuries that came to mistrust pleasure and desire.
Jesus talked about money more than anything else – the love of money, the desire for money, the lack of money, the abundance of money. Money, he knew, challenges and changes us like nothing else. Money is powerful – so powerful that something that is supposed to be useful too often just leaves us feeling used.
It is easy to be thankful when everything is going well. But how to be thankful when things are not going so well? The company is on shaky ground and the job may disappear; the kids are going through a really rough time; the economy appears as unstable as it has been in many years; people we love are seriously ill or have died; the future is uncertain. What can I say to those suffering, to you, about these things in your lives?
Just as I told my children about the Civil Rights Movement, my parents told me about the Great Depression. I heard about the grandfather who lost a farm because he co-signed a note for a less provident brother, the grandfather who kept a farm because a New Deal program enabled him to pay a mortgage note just in the nick of time and a once prosperous great-grandfather who managed to pay off all his depositors in his small town bank before dying a broken man.