When you look at your life what about it is “meant to be?” And what isn’t? What’s a mistake? A sin? A…well…a do-over? What in your life are you grateful for – and what would you like to see redeemed? And can those things be brought together?
When my aunt said to me one evening while watching television, “Well, you know your grandfather was gay, right?” it shook my core to realize that, yes!—I am, too. It was all the more reason then, that coupled with my self-inflicted rigid beliefs and my own sexual epiphany, I was utterly wounded the morning in Sunday school when my teacher lectured on the sin of homosexuality.
It is not a problem to understand that all of our struggles and achievements as a Church draw us near to the Gospel. The problem lies when we question why the “uncool fundamentalists” (among others) claim to sit at Christ’s table. I have to admit that, not rarely, I have acted as the pharisees who criticize Jesus for having a meal with tax collectors.
Dark Matter is something which dominates the mass of the universe, cannot be seen, and is only detectable because of one thing: it has weight. Yes, the dark stuff of the cosmos has weight – and as the cosmologists tell us, it’s quite literally pulling on everything. It can’t be seen, but it’s heavy anyway.
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.
What was it that allowed me to hold this antipathy all these years? Then I hit upon it: All three of these people had, at one time, made me feel very small and unworthy. God has made us so vulnerable, particularly when we are young. An unkind word, a public humiliation, a thoughtless putdown can stay with us over the course of our lives.
Now, a week later, after a wonderful whirlwind weekend of teaching, barely recovered from jet lag, I look back on that time on the patio as a quiet example of what the Transfiguration story gives us: a lamp shining in the darkness, the letter of Peter calls it; a moment on the summer patio, sipping tea, resting in the quiet of a Sabbath morning on the harbor, reflecting on what it means to be invited into the presence of the living Christ and seeing, just for a moment, that it’s all true.
When I was around seven-years-old, I began praying every night for a baby sister whom I promised God would be named Hope Ann McDonnell with initials that would give her the nickname of HAM. Although I have no idea where I got that name and she never arrived, I realized as an adult that I stayed stuck in hope with no actualization.
Whatever trouble we face, however beaten down we are by the world or our fellow human beings, Jesus has been there before us. In the words of the great spiritual: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.” If we but call on him, he will come and show us the way.
Making my rounds as Chaplain Ann in the VA nursing home I came to the door of a man whose first words were – “I don’t need a chaplain unless you brought me a gun!” – a startling introduction to my summer of Clinical Pastoral Education.