Musings

Greetings,

The fourth Sunday of Lent is coming up, and the film we will be exploring this week is “Milk”. Remember that it will be shown in the Salons (1016 Nelson) on Friday at 7 pm.  Dianna Waggoner, a writer for People Magazine, was in San Francisco in Harvey Milk’s era, and covered the story of his assassination. She will be speaking on Friday evening… “background and colour.”
The article on the Oscar Sermon Series in last Monday’s Vancouver Sun, has sparked further media interest, and Global TV is planning to be present on Sunday morning to film a bit of the worship service, and to offer a two minute clip on the evening news about what we are doing.  So don’t be surprised if you see a TV camera … we’ve asked them to be discrete and not disrupt worship.

We will be joined this Sunday by a guest musician, Stefan Hintersteininger, a Cellist.
And remember that after worship, everyone is invited to the Annual General Meeting (child care offered), where we will “do the business” over a light lunch.

GLEANINGS
Ted Loder is a fine writer of prayers.  They’re long, and so often don’t make it into worship services.  But here’s one on freedom, that in some ways touches upon themes from the film “Milk.”  It comes from Loder’s book, My Heart in My Mouth: Prayers for Our Lives (Philadelphia: Innisfree Press, 2000)  It’s long… but worth reading to the end.

Is This What It Means to Be Free?

Elusive yet attending God,
here we are, as if you didn’t know,
bold to bother you again,
since from the beginning you made us this way
and insisted on bothering us ever since.

Why do you bother us with all these questions,
those counter claims, contingencies, and confusion,
with the mystery in everything obvious
and the hiddenness in everything plain?

Why all these whys, these ifs, hows, and whethers,
all these half answers that multiply
into more mind-wrinkling questions,
all these nagging moral dilemmas
instead of definite right and wrong solutions?

Why isn’t the purpose of the universe evident, not obscured,
by theories of relativity,
principles of uncertainty
and probability structures,
by chaos dynamics,
hints of a strange attractor,
by antics of electrons in atoms
and light that behaves like particles or waves,
depending on who’s watching?

Why is the marvel of a molecule of DNA its capacity
to blunder into something new
when we would have made it perfect,
according to our Eden complex;
except the molecules blundered
their way into us first –
or was that your “sort of” plan all the time,
the blundering being a nudge
toward an intentional choosing
through the whole twisting way?

Why does the interaction of things and creatures
constantly change things and creatures,
which somehow makes us key players
in your process of creating this corner
of the universe, doesn’t it?
Or maybe of the whole thing?

Why is our compelling impulse to love
so confusing and sometimes painful?
What makes our nagging need
to do what’s right and just
so difficult and complicated?
Why is beauty so haunting and inviting,
words so powerful and compelling,
feelings the bridge to neighbours and to stars,
thought so deep and yet confounding,
music a universal language
no one can quite explain or silence,
unless the universe itself ceases to hum?

Why do you bother us in so many ways
with so many mysteries?
Why suffering, why accidents and birth defects,
why violence and hate, why disease and cruelty?
Why did you do it this way?

Why throw us out of Eden for one mistake?
Or are we in exile because we keep making it?
Is this what it means to be free?
Is freedom the foremost of your lover’s gifts
to this whole megillah, from galaxies to microbes,
to human hearts and minds and wills?

Quite honestly, it is a  bothersome gift, God,
a burden equal to its blessing,
in spite of our passionate desire for it,
for from the Garden on, we seem hell bent
on misunderstanding and misusing it,
shirking its responsibilities,
as well as its just possibilities,
wanting more order and security,
more privilege, comfort and control
than freedom allows,
or love can give, or even faith can grasp,
if the mysteries of this living universe
reveal any of truth at all,
or human history does.

So, Lord, we pray we’re worth your bother
and that you continue to be up to it.
and we up to it as well,
to what the gifts of love and freedom are about.
Bother us, then into the wisdom
of accepted limitation,
of knowing that all we do not know
is not a matter of “not yet,”
but of what we will never know,
are not meant to know,
the not of not being you –
putting all our pretense
at least momentarily aside.

Bother us out of pride
into the humility of wisdom
and into gentleness with each other
and ourselves, and with you.

Bother us out of fear
into the courage to take
the leap of faith we’ve feared to take,
falling not being our primal inclination,
except, perhaps (where else at last)
into your arms.

Lord, we know not why
you bother us with freedom and with grace,
with beauty and with awe,
with children’s trusting
past our little answers,
with their bothering us to follow them
into the unknown, unknowable lands
of their insistent curiosity
and on to kingdoms of dreams
and ever after.

Bothered as we are, we do not pray
to be delivered from any save the fear of it.
but rather to be bothered on and on
by our freedom, and by yours,
into even deeper water,
so we will keep bothering you as well.

Our truest hope is that, in that interaction
and the faith that it requires,
things will change,
we will change,
the world will change,
and there will be more cures,
more symphonies and laughter,
more peace and community,
more honesty and trust,
more justice, more mercy,
more reconciliation and rejoicing
more reveling in the mystery
of your unaccountable grace,
more of gratitude,
of life,
of you.
Amen.

Blessings,
Rev. Gary Paterson

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 10:38 PM and is filed under Gleanings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.