Holy Cross Monastery,
West Park, NY
Brother Randy Greve, n/OHC
BCP - Proper 21 B - Sunday 29 October 2006
Isaiah 59:(1-4)9-19
Hebrews 5:12-6:1,9-12
Mark 10:46-52
The main fall ritual in Texas for my family when I was growing up was a trip to the Renaissance Festival in Magnolia. I would eat a roasted turkey leg while browsing the shops, taking in the shows (especially jousting), and generally people-watching. Part of the atmosphere of the Renaissance Festival is a roaming band of actors in character who take the whole Renaissance theme maybe a little too far and interact with the patrons as a variety of colorful period personalities. Beggars were to be avoided because they would revel in humiliating some poor, unsuspecting soul and then pepper them with Renaissance-themed insults if they didn’t get a dollar or two - all in good-natured fun of course. One beggar I remember hearing from a distance had bandages over his eyes and was calling out in a loud British accent: “I’m blind. I’m blind! I’m so blind I cannot see that I cannot see.” That’s pretty blind.
Because I find this story so challenging and inspiring, I’d like to touch very briefly on several truths that come out at me rather than focus on just one.
The blind were, like the very young and very sick, among the social cast-offs of the New Testament culture. Poor Bartimaeus was perceived to have no value, no place, nothing to add to the social system. Many would have believed that he was a sinner and is in his sorry state paying for some evil deed by being made blind by God. He is told to be quiet by the crowds because he, an unimportant person, is bothering the Lord, an important person. And so he is doing the only thing he can do and survive - sit and beg for a few coins to eek out a subsistence life. What appears on the surface to be a simple healing story is, on a deeper level, full of mystery and symbolism. Again Mark presents us with the ironic contrast between this blind man who perceives Jesus as Messiah by calling him Son of David, and the disciples who can often be inwardly, spiritually blind. It is the blind man, the one perceived to be worthless and excluded who rightly addresses Jesus, eagerly runs to him in his blindness, and has faith to be healed and become a follower on the way. Jesus does not go to Bartimaeus, Jesus calls him to himself. Bartimaeus must, in his physical blindness, come out of his cloak and make his way groping through the crowd to our Lord’s presence. Jesus invites him to trust him that he’ll be there, he’ll wait for him. During moments in my life when I seemed to be groping in darkness, I believed the only way to move was with the light of purpose and confidence. Bartimaeus tells us that we can cast off what hinders us and make our way to Jesus before we see fully or at all. It is first and foremost our readiness and confidence that guide us toward our opened eyes.
This story immediately follows the request of James and John to have the places of highest honor next to Jesus in his glory. Contrasted with the desire for prestige and power among some of the disciples is this startling encounter with a poor blind beggar. Though blind, he sees more than the disciples. Though a beggar, he is rich in faith. Though a social outcast, he takes his place along the way with the wealthy and educated. Indeed the kingdom is breaking in if the disciples would just see it.
Bartimaeus teaches us who often believe we see all we need to see just what passionate longing for sight is all about. Surely there were other blind folks in Jesus’ path. Bartimaeus was unsatisfied with his state. He wanted something more. He wanted to find meaning and community and let in the beauty and ugliness the pleasure and pain of life. He wanted to see so much that he yells at the Son of God even when people are telling him to be quiet. He shouts at the incarnate deity in such a way that Jesus stops what he’s doing and pays attention to him. This story reminds us that while we may be blessed with physical sight, we may still be blind to the whole truth of our world and our own life and the needs of those around us. We can become like the Renaissance Festival beggar so blind that we cannot see that we cannot see. In the spiritual life, to gain sight I have to confess that I’m blind in some way. And then I have to want to see. Bartimaeus’ physical blindness and healing becomes a model for us in how to give ourselves fully to asking for help with our need to be illumined and enlightened to the gift of truth. The lectionary picks up the theme of sight in that both the Isaiah reading we heard earlier and the Psalm appointed for today use sight as a symbol for a clearer relationship with God which is lived out in community. Isaiah illustrates the effects of sin and injustice on the people when he says “We grope like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead.” Psalm 13, a cry of lament, says in the third verse “Look upon me and answer me, O LORD my God; give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death.”
Do we really want to see? Our first reflex would be to answer “of course. I’m blind and I want to see.” But to be given sight carries the responsibility of responding to what we see within us and around us. When healed we don’t have the luxury of an excuse or the convenience of turning away - we’re called to really look at reality. I’ve known people and I suspect you have too who would rather stay in their known and comfortable blindness than undergo the stretching of asking for and being given sight. To open ourselves to the healing of those attitudes, habits, or thought patterns that block our growth in relationship with God and each other is rarely easy. Often we would rather do anything than name the reality of our blindnesses. Do I really want to see?
Bartimaeus is an example of spiritual passion, hunger, and focus in seeking out Jesus despite the barriers. When in our prayers we ask for mercy as Bartimaeus did, we are not imploring God for something we must earn by our goodness or that God is slow to give, but reminding ourselves of the attitude of Bartimaeus who was bold and humble, persistent and needy. Mercy is God’s favor even though we deserve punishment. While God would be justified in treating us as our sins deserve, God would rather offer forgiveness and favor and the embrace of relationship. Mercy describes God’s desire to restore us which is often blocked only by our unwillingness to ask and then be open to receiving. May the cry “Lord, have mercy” be our deep and sincere cry which stops our Lord in his tracks as he hears us. When we are blind and cannot see that we cannot see, may God’s light shine through to us and awaken us to our value and place. May our desire for mercy be a reminder to us of the gift of asking for and then accepting with gratitude new sight to live in holiness and justice and to see the way we are called to walk.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
BCP - Proper 10 B - 16 Jul 2006
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park
Brother Randy Greve, n/OHC
BCP - Proper 10 - Sunday 16 July 2006
Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:1-14
Mark 6: 7-13
Imagine that you are one of the Twelve disciples. At the call of Jesus you have left your family, your livelihood, your familiar and safe world to follow a man who somehow captured your imagination and who performs miracles and preaches and teaches with authority about the Kingdom of God. Clearly God is with him but who or what is he? Could this be the Messiah? You’re not entirely sure. He has told you that this talk of the kingdom is no mere show that begins and ends with Him - this is the beginning of the end of the old era of sin and evil and the ushering in of a world reigned by God. Not only that but he says you will share in his works and participate with him in bringing new life. This eclectic mix of men and women - who would surely not be hanging around each other except for Jesus - suddenly finds itself entrusted and empowered with the authority of the kingdom. Jesus has begun to transform you and give you a vision of what life with God can be like. After time observing and beginning to understand what Jesus is talking about and what his actions mean, you’re sent out to preach repentance, cast out demons, and cure the sick. You’re partner is Philip or Andrew or Peter or Judas… Where do you go? What do you do? What would this power in action look like? You immediately encounter a world of danger, opposition, and mystery. Not everyone is warm and welcoming. Yet as much to your surprise as to the amazement of those you encounter - Diseases are cured, demons cast out, and new life is embraced. And despite being chased away from an unfriendly house or village, some trust you and listen, some are open to the possibility of hope and a future.
Bringing us back into the present, I would like to stop on the idea of unclean spirits; how the disciples might have engaged such spirits and how we might know and respond to them ourselves. To the ancient, pre-scientific understanding of things, the world was a battlefield where good and evil forces and influences were locked in combat within and between peoples, cultures, religions, and beliefs. Suffering, disease, and other demonically-inspired pain was the outward evidence of what was unseen but no less real. The ancient world understandably attributed spiritual origins to what they did not have the knowledge to explain by any other means. Diseases like depression and epilepsy, for example, which have biological origins, were assumed in their world to be the relentless attack of these unseen forces. So does the technology to diagnose and treat mental and physical illness solve the problem of unclean spirits? Because we can scientifically explain a condition previously attributed to unclean spirits, does that totally negate their existence? Not completely, because uncleanness and evil are still spiritual realities.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, writing in the Spiritual Exercises, sheds some helpful light on a more modern way of understanding the inner nature of what is going on here. For St Ignatius a spirit may be called an inclination, an attraction, a motivation which is either God-centered or self-centered. God-centered inclinations can lead us to our best, most authentic self in the love of God and neighbor which is new life in the kingdom. Self-centered inclinations, if followed, can lead to the bottomless pit of self-protection and self-gratification, making us numb to our real self and unable to love God and others fully. St. Ignatius then asks us first to examine our own inclinations in the light of our best self, moving us toward the God of love. To recognize evil means paying attention to what is going on inside us and around us with great sensitivity and care. We recognize the evil or unclean spirit by listening for the lie or truth in the words and actions, the inclination toward reality or unreality. In the face of evil within us or around us, we ask how the kingdom of God break into this moment, change my closed heart to one of openness, my hardness to receptivity to light and truth. As Brian McLaren says in The Secret Message of Jesus “Jesus must draw out, expose, name, reject, and banish this systemic, transpersonal evil…”
Discernment, which is the process of examining where our inclinations are coming from and where they intend to take us, is only possible by living a holy life. Discernment is not the acquiring of skills to detect good from evil spirits; it is living in Gospel humility, faith, purity, obedience, and patience so that we will see with clarity the nature of the inclinations within us and around us.
For the disciples to have had the insight and wisdom to distinguish good spirits from evil, they had to have been willing to listen and test at a deep level. Jesus himself is the model discerner who is described in the Gospel of John especially as knowing the thoughts and inner inclination or spirit of those around him. Jesus often responds to what he sees of the inner, real self rather than only to outer words and actions. He recognizes great faith in those who display simple trust, humility, readiness, and receptivity and is able to strike at the heart of the hypocrisy of religious leaders who claim to be models of faithfulness but inside are smug, arrogant, hard, and dead.
Nowhere in the New Testament do we find the “how-to’s” of discernment, but it does tell us the conditions for discernment to happen. Living in the truth and obedience of the whole Gospel, especially where that truth is not popular, easy, or pleasant, is the starting place. As we are sent out into the world, into our lives - how will we use the authority given to us? Are we attentive and awake enough to expose and reject the evil that opposes God’s best? Every day we are sent out to confront the reality of evil and suffering and, using the authority we have, to bring healing, goodness, and wholeness. We may not be sent out far. Perhaps the person most in need of our empathy and kindness is in our own house, our own family or church. The sending out is more about our breaking out of the inclinations of self-protection and self-gratification than a physical distance. The longest mission trip is often from one heart to another.
To accept the offer of healing given by another is also important. I am grateful for those times when I have been the one with the unclean spirit and been met by friends who exposed and banished the uncleanness that lurked in me. As the disciples came face to face with the fallen, broken nature of the world, I can’t help but imagine it turned them inward. Perhaps it was in their reflection on the reality of the coming Kingdom that Peter learned lessons about grace and forgiveness that Judas did not.
The authority given to the Twelve was not just a weapon used to zap demons and cure illness; it was the gift of seeing the world as Christ saw it beginning with their own transformation. To be given the authority of Christ is to share in the interests, attitudes, and affections of Christ himself, to be motivated in everything by his loving compassion. We are invited to live in such a way that we become more aware and awake to the uncleanness that besets us and to name, expose, and repel it. We are invited to embrace the deepest good for the building of God’s reign by offering hope and healing to those who need it - which is all of us.
I close with this reflection by St. Theresa of Avila:
Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours
Brother Randy Greve, n/OHC
BCP - Proper 10 - Sunday 16 July 2006
Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:1-14
Mark 6: 7-13
Imagine that you are one of the Twelve disciples. At the call of Jesus you have left your family, your livelihood, your familiar and safe world to follow a man who somehow captured your imagination and who performs miracles and preaches and teaches with authority about the Kingdom of God. Clearly God is with him but who or what is he? Could this be the Messiah? You’re not entirely sure. He has told you that this talk of the kingdom is no mere show that begins and ends with Him - this is the beginning of the end of the old era of sin and evil and the ushering in of a world reigned by God. Not only that but he says you will share in his works and participate with him in bringing new life. This eclectic mix of men and women - who would surely not be hanging around each other except for Jesus - suddenly finds itself entrusted and empowered with the authority of the kingdom. Jesus has begun to transform you and give you a vision of what life with God can be like. After time observing and beginning to understand what Jesus is talking about and what his actions mean, you’re sent out to preach repentance, cast out demons, and cure the sick. You’re partner is Philip or Andrew or Peter or Judas… Where do you go? What do you do? What would this power in action look like? You immediately encounter a world of danger, opposition, and mystery. Not everyone is warm and welcoming. Yet as much to your surprise as to the amazement of those you encounter - Diseases are cured, demons cast out, and new life is embraced. And despite being chased away from an unfriendly house or village, some trust you and listen, some are open to the possibility of hope and a future.
Bringing us back into the present, I would like to stop on the idea of unclean spirits; how the disciples might have engaged such spirits and how we might know and respond to them ourselves. To the ancient, pre-scientific understanding of things, the world was a battlefield where good and evil forces and influences were locked in combat within and between peoples, cultures, religions, and beliefs. Suffering, disease, and other demonically-inspired pain was the outward evidence of what was unseen but no less real. The ancient world understandably attributed spiritual origins to what they did not have the knowledge to explain by any other means. Diseases like depression and epilepsy, for example, which have biological origins, were assumed in their world to be the relentless attack of these unseen forces. So does the technology to diagnose and treat mental and physical illness solve the problem of unclean spirits? Because we can scientifically explain a condition previously attributed to unclean spirits, does that totally negate their existence? Not completely, because uncleanness and evil are still spiritual realities.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, writing in the Spiritual Exercises, sheds some helpful light on a more modern way of understanding the inner nature of what is going on here. For St Ignatius a spirit may be called an inclination, an attraction, a motivation which is either God-centered or self-centered. God-centered inclinations can lead us to our best, most authentic self in the love of God and neighbor which is new life in the kingdom. Self-centered inclinations, if followed, can lead to the bottomless pit of self-protection and self-gratification, making us numb to our real self and unable to love God and others fully. St. Ignatius then asks us first to examine our own inclinations in the light of our best self, moving us toward the God of love. To recognize evil means paying attention to what is going on inside us and around us with great sensitivity and care. We recognize the evil or unclean spirit by listening for the lie or truth in the words and actions, the inclination toward reality or unreality. In the face of evil within us or around us, we ask how the kingdom of God break into this moment, change my closed heart to one of openness, my hardness to receptivity to light and truth. As Brian McLaren says in The Secret Message of Jesus “Jesus must draw out, expose, name, reject, and banish this systemic, transpersonal evil…”
Discernment, which is the process of examining where our inclinations are coming from and where they intend to take us, is only possible by living a holy life. Discernment is not the acquiring of skills to detect good from evil spirits; it is living in Gospel humility, faith, purity, obedience, and patience so that we will see with clarity the nature of the inclinations within us and around us.
For the disciples to have had the insight and wisdom to distinguish good spirits from evil, they had to have been willing to listen and test at a deep level. Jesus himself is the model discerner who is described in the Gospel of John especially as knowing the thoughts and inner inclination or spirit of those around him. Jesus often responds to what he sees of the inner, real self rather than only to outer words and actions. He recognizes great faith in those who display simple trust, humility, readiness, and receptivity and is able to strike at the heart of the hypocrisy of religious leaders who claim to be models of faithfulness but inside are smug, arrogant, hard, and dead.
Nowhere in the New Testament do we find the “how-to’s” of discernment, but it does tell us the conditions for discernment to happen. Living in the truth and obedience of the whole Gospel, especially where that truth is not popular, easy, or pleasant, is the starting place. As we are sent out into the world, into our lives - how will we use the authority given to us? Are we attentive and awake enough to expose and reject the evil that opposes God’s best? Every day we are sent out to confront the reality of evil and suffering and, using the authority we have, to bring healing, goodness, and wholeness. We may not be sent out far. Perhaps the person most in need of our empathy and kindness is in our own house, our own family or church. The sending out is more about our breaking out of the inclinations of self-protection and self-gratification than a physical distance. The longest mission trip is often from one heart to another.
To accept the offer of healing given by another is also important. I am grateful for those times when I have been the one with the unclean spirit and been met by friends who exposed and banished the uncleanness that lurked in me. As the disciples came face to face with the fallen, broken nature of the world, I can’t help but imagine it turned them inward. Perhaps it was in their reflection on the reality of the coming Kingdom that Peter learned lessons about grace and forgiveness that Judas did not.
The authority given to the Twelve was not just a weapon used to zap demons and cure illness; it was the gift of seeing the world as Christ saw it beginning with their own transformation. To be given the authority of Christ is to share in the interests, attitudes, and affections of Christ himself, to be motivated in everything by his loving compassion. We are invited to live in such a way that we become more aware and awake to the uncleanness that besets us and to name, expose, and repel it. We are invited to embrace the deepest good for the building of God’s reign by offering hope and healing to those who need it - which is all of us.
I close with this reflection by St. Theresa of Avila:
Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Funeral - Br. Douglas Brown - 10 May 2006
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Sermon preached at the Requiem for Brother Douglas Brown, OHC
Wednesday 10 May 2006
A Resurrection Life
The essential message of the Easter proclamation has always been: Christ has won the victory. Death has been trampled down by death, and Christ now gloriously risen invites us to join Him in faith, and when we do, His victory will be ours as well. And so it will. The victory of Christ on the Cross has opened to all the world the possibility of resurrection, and our hope as committed Christians is that all will come within the reach of that saving embrace. On Easter morn we sing, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia. Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia." His rising makes our day holy.
That's our proclamation. But how do we get there? How can we be transformed by the resurrection?
There are so many Easter symbols of new life: The new fire, the flowering cross for the children, the festive food, the Easter eggs and chocolate in baskets, the bunnies and chicks and other soft and fragile offspring which remind us of the newness of spring and the renewal of life. When I was a boy, we used to get new shoes for Easter. The week or so before the great day, the stores would be full of parents and children trying on shoes, which we children would eagerly compare on the great day. The Black Church has an image for heaven: it's the place where all God's children got shoes. All God's children are loved and gifted and privileged. A child's Easter is a festival of sweet and tender newness: The victory of the Resurrection is given as a free gift, from adults to the children, from God to us, new life and love unbounded, uncomplicated, rejoicing love.
But gradually, the complications, the failures, the compromises, the shadows, of adult life gather round and penetrate our souls, till many believe that the Christian proclamation of the Resurrection victory is, in one of St. Paul's favorite words, foolishness: foolishness to Gentiles, to the thinking secular world, and worse, offensive to Jews, to serious religious people. So one righteous man died and was justified, the criticism goes. That gets you off the hook? Absurd. Where's the responsibility for the individual to engage in the struggle? Where's the need to build up social structures, to share with others in human solidarity?
An adult Easter needs to take into account the darkness of our lives. In the words of the great hymn which I heard for the first time on Good Friday, 1976, in St. James' Cathedral in Toronto, so beloved of Douglas, "My song is love unknown, my savior's love to me: Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." We become lovely by being loved, and in turn loving others into loveliness.
The victory may have been won, but appropriating the fruits of victory is no easy task. Douglas Brown was a man who lived into these questions with deep sincerity, and whose life is a paradigm of the answer to the world's criticisms of the Christian faith. He placed himself in the path of the Resurrection, and that path took him to strange and wonderful places. This Chapel, the worship in it and the community which lives its life around it, became Douglas' life, and the strange and wonderful place where he struggled to appropriate the victory of the Resurrection.
Douglas was profoundly liturgical. He loved the ancient liturgies of the Church, the monastic offices, the chanting, the community's times of simple shared prayer, the psalms and canticles and antiphons, the public reading of scripture, the hymns of Anglican worship in all its glorious variety, the shared physical movement of the community in the daily dance of praise, the Peace at the Eucharist which he would share in a great bearlike embrace, the bread and the wine and the fellowship around the Table of the Lord. He found here his heart's center, and in the stability of the forms of monastic prayer I believe he found the strength to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Because the cross is the answer to the criticism of cheap grace: We are offered the Resurrection victory won by Jesus Christ if - "if" - we follow his life and death and make it ours.
Douglas embraced his cross. He allowed himself to die to parts of his life that could not give him life: shyness, insecurity, drinking. His life was a work in progress on all these fronts. I believe that the great gifts he shared with us were made possible by the Resurrection victories won on the crosses of his struggles.
When our Founder, Father Huntington, wrote about the houses of our Order, his first thought was about the spiritual struggle they make possible: "The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven." Jacob's ladder is the ancient Jewish and Christian symbol of mystical contemplation, and at a deep level, the union with God symbolized by that ladder is the goal of every monk. I think the genius of the image is not so much in the ladder, however, as in the picture of the angels ascending and descending. Up and down, up and down, an interplay of the interior life, which is never simple, always dynamic.
This ladder has an ancient pedigree in monastic tradition. St. Benedict gives it 12 steps, and each one of them is an act of humility. The fear of God; leaving behind your own desires; submission to a human superior; obedience under difficult circumstances; the vulnerability to share your inner life with those who have power over you; contentment with whatever comes your way, especially abuse and deprivation; willingness to live by the community's norms; keeping silence when what you want to do is chatter; restraining the laughter of hysteria and self-preoccupation; when you do speak, speaking modestly, gently and briefly; and finally, realizing that we speak not only with our words, but in our actions. They too must be characterized by humility.
This is a big order. It is a sixth century 12 step program of formidable challenges. Ascending this dynamic ladder of humility requires more than one act of faith. It requires first of all that we are willing to give ourselves to God unreservedly, not looking to our own strengths and gifts but allowing God to use us as we are. "Just as I am, without one plea" says the old hymn, and that is the monk's daily song as we struggle up a rung or two of the great ladder. This first act of faith requires us to trust that we, our own essential being, and not what we can say or do or produce on our own, is worth God's trouble. A tall order for a shy, insecure alcoholic. But Douglas took it on.
A second act of faith climbing this ladder requires is that the community will be a faithful partner in the struggle. Submission, obedience, vulnerability, joining in the no doubt flawed life of people no better than you are; all this presupposes a community and leadership whose first focus is on the Cross and its victory, and not on its own power and gain. This is a struggle for all of us in monastic community. But what joy when we all honestly share its tasks: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity." It is like the fine oil anointing Aaron, running down in seeming waste all the way from head to foot, signifying not the usefulness of the oil but the overflowing abundance of God's Spirit, not the daily tasks of earning a living and running things and being productive, but the hope of a superabundant overflow of generous, mutual love. A tall order for a man who could so easily analyze the realities of personal dynamics in himself and others, and whose call to leadership was complicated by his understanding of the inner dynamics of the exercise of power. But Douglas took it on.
A third act of faith that climbing the ladder of humility requires is that you only reach the top when you have hit the bottom. St. Benedict famously does not recommend humor to his monks, and if there were one thing I would like to change in the Rule, that's it. I think a joyful approach to life is always welcome, but then, we don't live in the sixth century, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire a living memory, with the collapse of the successor state of the great and wise Theodoric the Ostrogoth on the horizon and chaos drawing closer and closer, surrounding them like the darkness of an enveloping night. But there is a delicious irony in the thought of a ladder of humility. If the Cross is a paradox, so is the ladder. Imagine: climbing higher and higher to become more and more humble. When you reach the top you are really at the bottom, so to speak. I cannot help but think that this is a parable about leadership as well as a profound observation of the course of a truly redeemed life. Perhaps that could be the monastic message to our leadership shortly to assemble in Columbus (editor's note: the triennal General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA). Here is where I think Douglas found his Resurrection victory. He hit bottom. He embraced another 12 step program, one I think not unrelated to Benedict's. He understood that when you reach the top of that program, you're still no better than the day you started. I think he made this his life's work: To see in himself and in others the daily work of grace, grace that picks you up after you've been thrown down, and keeps picking you up, day after day after day. Not an easy way to live your life, but Douglas took it on.
I loved Douglas' ways of being humble. The schlumpfy clothes, the sandals (didn't the man have a single pair of shoes?), the only-occasionally trimmed hair and beard, the muffled voice, which you had to strain to understand sometimes, low like an organ pipe. He didn't much like spending money. I would try to take him out to a nice restaurant near the seminary in Chelsea, and more often than not we would end up in a Chinese place just north of 23rd Street where it was a challenge to bring the bill above $20.00 a person. He loved being a monk, even perhaps playing a little in his ironic way with the outward symbols of humility.
Douglas was a holy person. Not a saint, I think, but holy. He let himself be transformed by grace and the Spirit. When his life hit bottom, he saw it as Christ's cross for himself. He saw the ladder of humility planted firmly in the midst of the monastery and embraced it. He trusted the Lord and he trusted the community, not without struggle, but with an admirable constancy.
And as a result, his life became a blessing. He was a rock of integrity to us in the monastic life. His preaching and retreats were beacons of reason and generosity and insight to thousands. His spiritual direction reached deep into the souls of hundreds and hundreds of earnest Christians. His wide sympathies, born of his own sufferings, opened channels of grace which are still flowing with the waters of life. His love of justice and compassion in public life led him to become a voice in the struggles of our day.
In my church we sing a song after the sermon, a song born in the Black Church:
Thank you Lord, for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord, for making me whole.
Thank you Lord, for giving to me
Thy great salvation so rich and free.
.
Thank you, Lord, for saving Douglas. Thank you for making him whole. Thank you for giving to him your great salvation so rich and free. Thank you, Lord, for giving Douglas to us all, for the great gifts his salvation has brought us. Thank you for the Easter life, for the free gifts of childhood, for the Ladder of the humility of the Cross, for the humility which lifts us up, and brings us, finally, to You.
Amen.
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Sermon preached at the Requiem for Brother Douglas Brown, OHC
Wednesday 10 May 2006
A Resurrection Life
The essential message of the Easter proclamation has always been: Christ has won the victory. Death has been trampled down by death, and Christ now gloriously risen invites us to join Him in faith, and when we do, His victory will be ours as well. And so it will. The victory of Christ on the Cross has opened to all the world the possibility of resurrection, and our hope as committed Christians is that all will come within the reach of that saving embrace. On Easter morn we sing, "Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia. Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia." His rising makes our day holy.
That's our proclamation. But how do we get there? How can we be transformed by the resurrection?
There are so many Easter symbols of new life: The new fire, the flowering cross for the children, the festive food, the Easter eggs and chocolate in baskets, the bunnies and chicks and other soft and fragile offspring which remind us of the newness of spring and the renewal of life. When I was a boy, we used to get new shoes for Easter. The week or so before the great day, the stores would be full of parents and children trying on shoes, which we children would eagerly compare on the great day. The Black Church has an image for heaven: it's the place where all God's children got shoes. All God's children are loved and gifted and privileged. A child's Easter is a festival of sweet and tender newness: The victory of the Resurrection is given as a free gift, from adults to the children, from God to us, new life and love unbounded, uncomplicated, rejoicing love.
But gradually, the complications, the failures, the compromises, the shadows, of adult life gather round and penetrate our souls, till many believe that the Christian proclamation of the Resurrection victory is, in one of St. Paul's favorite words, foolishness: foolishness to Gentiles, to the thinking secular world, and worse, offensive to Jews, to serious religious people. So one righteous man died and was justified, the criticism goes. That gets you off the hook? Absurd. Where's the responsibility for the individual to engage in the struggle? Where's the need to build up social structures, to share with others in human solidarity?
An adult Easter needs to take into account the darkness of our lives. In the words of the great hymn which I heard for the first time on Good Friday, 1976, in St. James' Cathedral in Toronto, so beloved of Douglas, "My song is love unknown, my savior's love to me: Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." We become lovely by being loved, and in turn loving others into loveliness.
The victory may have been won, but appropriating the fruits of victory is no easy task. Douglas Brown was a man who lived into these questions with deep sincerity, and whose life is a paradigm of the answer to the world's criticisms of the Christian faith. He placed himself in the path of the Resurrection, and that path took him to strange and wonderful places. This Chapel, the worship in it and the community which lives its life around it, became Douglas' life, and the strange and wonderful place where he struggled to appropriate the victory of the Resurrection.
Douglas was profoundly liturgical. He loved the ancient liturgies of the Church, the monastic offices, the chanting, the community's times of simple shared prayer, the psalms and canticles and antiphons, the public reading of scripture, the hymns of Anglican worship in all its glorious variety, the shared physical movement of the community in the daily dance of praise, the Peace at the Eucharist which he would share in a great bearlike embrace, the bread and the wine and the fellowship around the Table of the Lord. He found here his heart's center, and in the stability of the forms of monastic prayer I believe he found the strength to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Because the cross is the answer to the criticism of cheap grace: We are offered the Resurrection victory won by Jesus Christ if - "if" - we follow his life and death and make it ours.
Douglas embraced his cross. He allowed himself to die to parts of his life that could not give him life: shyness, insecurity, drinking. His life was a work in progress on all these fronts. I believe that the great gifts he shared with us were made possible by the Resurrection victories won on the crosses of his struggles.
When our Founder, Father Huntington, wrote about the houses of our Order, his first thought was about the spiritual struggle they make possible: "The ladder of the cross is planted firmly within the walls of a religious house and angels pass up and down that stairway. Our house is a house of God; let us strive to make it for ourselves the gate of heaven." Jacob's ladder is the ancient Jewish and Christian symbol of mystical contemplation, and at a deep level, the union with God symbolized by that ladder is the goal of every monk. I think the genius of the image is not so much in the ladder, however, as in the picture of the angels ascending and descending. Up and down, up and down, an interplay of the interior life, which is never simple, always dynamic.
This ladder has an ancient pedigree in monastic tradition. St. Benedict gives it 12 steps, and each one of them is an act of humility. The fear of God; leaving behind your own desires; submission to a human superior; obedience under difficult circumstances; the vulnerability to share your inner life with those who have power over you; contentment with whatever comes your way, especially abuse and deprivation; willingness to live by the community's norms; keeping silence when what you want to do is chatter; restraining the laughter of hysteria and self-preoccupation; when you do speak, speaking modestly, gently and briefly; and finally, realizing that we speak not only with our words, but in our actions. They too must be characterized by humility.
This is a big order. It is a sixth century 12 step program of formidable challenges. Ascending this dynamic ladder of humility requires more than one act of faith. It requires first of all that we are willing to give ourselves to God unreservedly, not looking to our own strengths and gifts but allowing God to use us as we are. "Just as I am, without one plea" says the old hymn, and that is the monk's daily song as we struggle up a rung or two of the great ladder. This first act of faith requires us to trust that we, our own essential being, and not what we can say or do or produce on our own, is worth God's trouble. A tall order for a shy, insecure alcoholic. But Douglas took it on.
A second act of faith climbing this ladder requires is that the community will be a faithful partner in the struggle. Submission, obedience, vulnerability, joining in the no doubt flawed life of people no better than you are; all this presupposes a community and leadership whose first focus is on the Cross and its victory, and not on its own power and gain. This is a struggle for all of us in monastic community. But what joy when we all honestly share its tasks: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity." It is like the fine oil anointing Aaron, running down in seeming waste all the way from head to foot, signifying not the usefulness of the oil but the overflowing abundance of God's Spirit, not the daily tasks of earning a living and running things and being productive, but the hope of a superabundant overflow of generous, mutual love. A tall order for a man who could so easily analyze the realities of personal dynamics in himself and others, and whose call to leadership was complicated by his understanding of the inner dynamics of the exercise of power. But Douglas took it on.
A third act of faith that climbing the ladder of humility requires is that you only reach the top when you have hit the bottom. St. Benedict famously does not recommend humor to his monks, and if there were one thing I would like to change in the Rule, that's it. I think a joyful approach to life is always welcome, but then, we don't live in the sixth century, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire a living memory, with the collapse of the successor state of the great and wise Theodoric the Ostrogoth on the horizon and chaos drawing closer and closer, surrounding them like the darkness of an enveloping night. But there is a delicious irony in the thought of a ladder of humility. If the Cross is a paradox, so is the ladder. Imagine: climbing higher and higher to become more and more humble. When you reach the top you are really at the bottom, so to speak. I cannot help but think that this is a parable about leadership as well as a profound observation of the course of a truly redeemed life. Perhaps that could be the monastic message to our leadership shortly to assemble in Columbus (editor's note: the triennal General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA). Here is where I think Douglas found his Resurrection victory. He hit bottom. He embraced another 12 step program, one I think not unrelated to Benedict's. He understood that when you reach the top of that program, you're still no better than the day you started. I think he made this his life's work: To see in himself and in others the daily work of grace, grace that picks you up after you've been thrown down, and keeps picking you up, day after day after day. Not an easy way to live your life, but Douglas took it on.
I loved Douglas' ways of being humble. The schlumpfy clothes, the sandals (didn't the man have a single pair of shoes?), the only-occasionally trimmed hair and beard, the muffled voice, which you had to strain to understand sometimes, low like an organ pipe. He didn't much like spending money. I would try to take him out to a nice restaurant near the seminary in Chelsea, and more often than not we would end up in a Chinese place just north of 23rd Street where it was a challenge to bring the bill above $20.00 a person. He loved being a monk, even perhaps playing a little in his ironic way with the outward symbols of humility.
Douglas was a holy person. Not a saint, I think, but holy. He let himself be transformed by grace and the Spirit. When his life hit bottom, he saw it as Christ's cross for himself. He saw the ladder of humility planted firmly in the midst of the monastery and embraced it. He trusted the Lord and he trusted the community, not without struggle, but with an admirable constancy.
And as a result, his life became a blessing. He was a rock of integrity to us in the monastic life. His preaching and retreats were beacons of reason and generosity and insight to thousands. His spiritual direction reached deep into the souls of hundreds and hundreds of earnest Christians. His wide sympathies, born of his own sufferings, opened channels of grace which are still flowing with the waters of life. His love of justice and compassion in public life led him to become a voice in the struggles of our day.
In my church we sing a song after the sermon, a song born in the Black Church:
Thank you Lord, for saving my soul.
Thank you Lord, for making me whole.
Thank you Lord, for giving to me
Thy great salvation so rich and free.
.
Thank you, Lord, for saving Douglas. Thank you for making him whole. Thank you for giving to him your great salvation so rich and free. Thank you, Lord, for giving Douglas to us all, for the great gifts his salvation has brought us. Thank you for the Easter life, for the free gifts of childhood, for the Ladder of the humility of the Cross, for the humility which lifts us up, and brings us, finally, to You.
Amen.
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