Breathing Exercises

We celebrated the birth of Christ Jesus last night at our meeting with a reading of Mary’s song in Luke (ch 1.39-55 in Greek, with English on-screen), and a participatory candle lighting that slowly illuminated a nativity scene. I resisted the urge to Photoshop the dirty plates and cups out of the above image … because that would make the incarnation less real. To paraphrase: while we were yet unwashed and sloppy, Christ came to live among us.

We shared some art and listened to some of Bruce Cockburn’s beautiful Christmas album. Michael read “thoj” …

kevin asked me to write a poem about humility
which is like asking a speeding freight train
to write a poem about the sound made
by a butterfly’s wings

the oxford american dictionary
defines humilty as
“the quality of having a modest view of one’s importance”
then defines modest as
“viewing one’s abilities or achievments in a humble way”
which means that despite probably having multiple advanced degrees
in english language smartness
they have no clue what humility or modesty means
and hoped that nobody else would notice

discovering this little spinning dance
would normally be all i need
to wind up a good rant about the stupidity
rampant in people who aren’t me
inviting you to join my special club of people
who are above that sort of thing
because we notice it

but i am writing a poem about humility
which pauses the snark express just long enough
for a moment of silence to be heard
it washes over me like a wave,
or am i feeling it echo in my bones
sitting
perfectly still
trying to hold this …. thing … long enough
to tell you about it,
an invitiation that has nothing to do
with rising above

if the current holders of the nobel prize for lexicographic ineptitude
at the smartypants oxford american dictionary writing company
got their act together
and wrote an entire volume on humility

it would still be the beat of an insect’s wing
against the waning stillness of morning air
drowned out by the cosmic freight train of humility
infinity just became finite
eternity just appeared now
the creator of space and time
lying in a manger, trying to find his hand
so he can put it in his mouth

Back in January, I put up a post called Mystery, which encoded a short piece of text in a QR code. A QR code is a two-dimensional black and white image that can encode text (vs bar codes which only encode numbers). I gave no explanation for it, just put it out there, wanting to see how much people would work to understand something that was not immediately obvious. Here’s the code again:

If you scan the full-size version of this with a QR reader (apps are available for smart phones, and decoders are available online), the following text would appear:

“Jesus often left things unexplained, yet invites us to pursue understanding. Why would he conceal truth behind cryptic statements? A better question: ‘how hungry are we for the truth?’“

One of the proverbs says “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,  but the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (25.2). There’s an interesting tension in this text. God, who could be understood to hold answers to the great questions of our lives, somehow includes mystery as an aspect of divine glory. God ‘conceals matters’, and that’s apparently one of the great things about God? That feels like a kind of a bummer … but there is some hope in the second half of the text. Somehow human glory (like the best qualities of the best king) is to not be satisfied with mystery, but to go knocking, asking, seeking. We are meant to go after God. We can see God welcoming this kind of trouble throughout scripture. Consider how the epic troublemaker Jacob was allowed to best God in a wrestling match, while demanding a blessing.

The reason why I hid my text in a code was that I wanted to make the point that if I ever say or do things that are incomprehensible, I would want people to come after me … to try and understand (vs. settling for not understanding). I have spent enough time working with people to know that we generally do not try to understand. For example, if a person does something we don’t like, we write them off as the kind of Person That Does Things We Don’t Like … instead of asking them why they make the choices they do.

I’m for a community contract that says we don’t ever leave a mystery unexplored. Especially when the mystery is a person.

While hanging out with the gang last night, Person To My Left says, “I used to think I was a _____ -ist, but I’ve been reading the writings of _____, and now I think I’m a _____ -ist”, and went on to describe a little of what that meant, all of which was a bit-too-steep of an onramp to an unfamiliar way of thinking, which is why I can’t remember how to fill in the blanks above. But I was interested, so I made sure we would be able to hear a longer-than-2-minute story about what it means to be a _____ -ist. Then, the Person To My Right says, “I’m pretty sure I’m a _____ -ist“, which was different than the first -ism, regarding which you will just have to trust me, because I can’t remember what the second -ism was either. Into all of this I interjected, because I am a humor-ist, “Hey, our first split!”, by which I meant our first sch-ism. Ha. But Person To My Right, rightly, said what I believe anyway, which is, no, it’s got to be allright for us to have different ists and isms if we’re going to be in community. Yes, amen.

Homogeneity is unsustainable except in isolation. If I wanted to hang out only with people who saw the world just like I do, then I’d have to give up my dream of being a part of a functional community that could legitimately claim the name of Jesus Christ, who invites all kinds to come and empowers all kinds for the work. A homogeneous community can only grow by working to eliminate contrary perspectives, or by fracturing repeatedly. Of course there are ways that communities align naturally along certain lines, and a community that gathers around the life and leading of Jesus will necessarily come to be aligned in many ways, and choose certain important boundary lines.

But the way that people gather around Jesus has always been unique in the world: the idea is that we people are like parts of a body … hands, legs, ears, eyes, and we become powerful and functional only when we come together – like the way my hands are so much more useful connected to my eyes and feet, to pick a couple helpful others. Our place in the Body of Christ, is as parts which cannot survive alone and which are not very productive when in isolation. In this spiritual body, Jesus holds the honor of being the head and as such is the source from which we take life and leading. But while we have this relationship to the head in common, it’s good that we all have really different ways of engaging the world and different purposes in the body. This may seem a simple truth, but in fact it’s very difficult in practice. What holds the dipsarate parts together? Further, what gets them to work together? How do we learn to accept that people with whom we live might have an entirely different way of seeing and speaking into the world? Instead of seeing different as complimentary, we see it as a rebuke against what we are, and we fight.

I’m counting on the fact that the head has the key to alignment, and I can be somewhat ignorant of how it all works together. I figure one thing I can do is regard the other people in my community with the honor due to someone who is learning how to be loved and led by God. This is part of my current three-way attentiveness model (which I just realized I have): attentiveness to the head, attentive to others-in-my-community, and attentiveness to the surrounding world. Each of these could describe any healthy part of my physical body, and also my whole self, inasmuch as I am a part of the body of Christ.

In recent years I have come to appreciate (and depend on) the complimentary and sometimes contrasting perspectives of friends. If it weren’t for them I’d be more cozy in my perspective but less functional in the world. I am both wary of and excited about the twin facts that as the number of people in my community grows, there will be more complexity and, along with that, there will be more functionality.