Two Sparrows

Please meet my friends Chirp and Tweet. In Spring 2009, when we still lived in upstate, this couple of House Finches resolved to built their nest right on our porch. They took particular interest in an unused lantern in front of our kitchen window. They started to bring all sorts of old grass and green twigs from a nearby white cedar. No matter how hard we tried to discourage them, their resolve was clearly stronger then ours. Soon, behind our lamp there was a substantial nest in the final stages of construction. It was obvious that our porch was taken and occupied. We did not mind much since Chirp and Tweet were also true to their names, every morning and evening they rewarded us with their lovely songs - House Finches are known musicians.
    Just as we were getting used to the idea that our porch would be taken out of our use through the end of Summer, right before the nest was ready, late one morning, there was a sudden noisy brawl on our porch. A larger dark bird visited their nest looking around; it could hardly fit between the nest and porch ceiling. It was a cowbird - an infamous cuckoo-like nest-parasite. The finches, half of its size, repelled it quickly. Nevertheless, they abandoned their almost-finished nest; it would have been too risky for their future brood. One visit of a cowbird did, what four noisy humans could not do. The House Finches left our porch and moved over to a nearby thick bush. There they brought up their family, singing and warbling around our house while we listened from our porch for the rest of that summer.
    Now, this Sunday, in the Gospel reading (Matthew 10:29) it looks like Jesus stuck a price tag of one penny on two sparrows. Is it possible that he behaved like that, wielding a price-sticker gun and labeling everything around? My own experience with Chirp and Tweet screams NO, I would not have sold them even for millions! And the Greek rhetorical grammar as well as broader gospel context makes it clear. Jesus was not any crazy capitalist monetizing everything left and right! God does not measure value by money like so many in our world do! Come this Sunday to celebrate the priceless value of two sparrows. Come to celebrate the priceless value of so much more in God’s sight!

Divine Guitar

Divine Guitar? Yes indeed, and literally so!
There were times in the Ancient Near East when Guitar really was a god.
You can find him on the list of deities on clay cuneiform tablets from the city of Ugarit (KTU 1.47;1.118 and RS 20.24)
True, he is not named precisely Guitar, but Kinnaru - but that is just phonetics. Both of these names share the same linguistic root together with, say, kithara or zither.
And if there was any doubt about Guitar’s pre-biblical divine nature, a liturgical text (KTU 1.148) prescribes for him a sacrifice: “A ram for Guitar/Kinnaru” - just imagine that feast! And the offering might be substantially richer, but the text is unfortunately broken.
In ancient times this personification and even deification of a musical instrument was the way to acknowledge and celebrate the spiritual power of music. In the Hebrew Bible itself there are still some weak echoes of a deified guitar in Psalm 57. And to this day we use word “music” which is indeed derived from Muses, Greek goddesses of divine inspiration. This is again a subliminal reminder of the spiritual importance of inspired music.
This Sunday we will not sacrifice a ram to the divine Guitar (god Kinnaru) nor will we offer any libations to the Muses, but on this last Sunday with our choir before summer we will celebrate the gifts our choir shares with us and we can share with them - divine gift of inspired and inspiring spiritual music making. Come and join us.

Overcoming Technology Fetishism

The other day I overheard my wife’s Skype conversation with her mother. They were paging together through our internet-based photo-album from our recent mountain climbing holidays. At one point the software did not work as expected and my frustrated mother-in-law started to argue with it. I realized that the Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg is right.
    He claims that we really never became modern Cartesian people who reserve subjectivity to persons. For instance we give names to our automobiles, or we talk even to such fuzzy man-made realities as cloud-based software... in a word we personify inanimate objects. Let us be honest, we all do it, I know I do. And so while pre-modern people were animists who personified plants and animals, and perhaps rivers, springs and forests, modern people became fetishists (in a nonsexual, anthropological sense) who eagerly personify our own mechanical toys and electronic gadgets.
    We cannot help it, it is in our genes, and driven by our innate need to relate. Over several centuries we became alienated from nature and more and more we are becoming alienated even from one another. We hand ourselves over to our own devices (metaphorically but, sadly, also literally). We deny spirit to nature and project it to our own machines.
    On this Pentecost Sunday we will look for help in ancient scriptures; perhaps the liberating breeze of the divine spirit can reorient our wounded relating from machines to the living again.
    I do not know about you, but I am tired of all our modern alienating technological fetishism, I would rather be a postmodern Christian animist re-learning to relate to God, other people and wide nature through Spirit.

Leina - The Place of Leaping

Ka-Lae, also known as South Point in Hawaii, is a special place. Some people travel there to visit the green beach with sand almost entirely composed of the little crystals of semiprecious olivine. Other people go there to visit the southernmost place of the entire United States. Anthropologists arrive to study the oldest human settlement of the Hawaiian archipelago. Locals, just like those ancient people, come to fish. Naturalists search in the flooded brackish caves for the yet undiscovered shrimp. 

        And young people are irresistibly attracted by the cliff from which they dive down to the aquamarine ocean 40 feet beneath. Little do they know that they reenact an ancient archetype. In the oldest traditions this was one of the places from which departing souls jumped beyond this world. Clearly departing souls share something together with daring and raucous youngsters - at least the thrill of jumping. The first group dives into the ocean beneath and the other into the dramatic sunset beyond. 

     This Sunday is called Ascension Sunday. The Biblical text for this holiday is from the book of Acts. It tells a similarly strange and captivating story about Jesus departing heavenwards. Come to dive from everydayness into the thrills and challenges of this rich religious metaphor.
       And if you want to share your summer spiritual experiences, join our Summer Log.

More than clockwork, more than prejudice!

Suppose you walk across a heath and there, on the path, you find a pocket watch. What would be your first thought? “Poor fellow!” You might think and, “Is there a way it might be returned?” These thoughts clearly do not come naturally to some religious types. An Anglican clergyman William Paley wanted us to believe that the first thoughts would turn to the identity of a watchmaker. In 1802 he wrote an entire book about it.
    Paley argued, and after him many fundamentalists up until today, that just as a found pocked watch presupposes a watchmaker, so thus the order in nature proves the existence of God. Firstly, this whole argument, as we have seen, is built upon an unnatural, stilted story. But beyond this funny premise, the whole analogy is false and seriously flawed because it compares living nature to a nonliving machine. Such an analogy is not only logically flawed, it is also arrogant and seriously dangerous. Thinking along these lines (nature is just like some man-made machine) has brought our civilization to the brink of ecological disaster.
    But Paley’s argument betrays also his pitiably insecure faith. Arguing the existence of God from the miracles of nature is unfair to nature and unfair to God. Living faith does not need any proof of divine existence and even less arguments from our ignorance. The beauty and complexity of nature are far more than just crutches for insecure religion.
    When you find a lost pocket watch on a heath, please, forget about watchmakers and bring it to the lost and found. And when you are awestruck by the intricate beauty of nature, please, forget dim-witted arguments about divine existence and instead pause for a moment and allow your heart to be filled with divine songs of insight and joy.

Alien theology

“Would we baptise Martians?” asked Pope Francis this Tuesday in his homily, instantly grabbing the attention of the media. "If - for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them... And one says, 'But I want to be baptised!' What would happen?" But this was certainly more than a publicity stunt! It was a radical prophetic gesture of inclusion. 

When my family and I came to America, we were officially labeled “Resident Aliens” (that is really official terminology!) and we are not even green! Frankly it was and still is quite unsettling when you consider how aliens are often portrayed and treated in American films. 

Every true, spiritual, prophetic religion asks questions, opens our minds and the circles of our inclusion. This Sunday our youth are preparing and leading our worship. For the homily they picked the marvelously challenging parable of The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Structural and rhetorical analysis of this parable makes it quite clear - while the main focus is on the younger “prodigal” son, the open end of this narrative parable forces the audience (us!), to identify with the older, the responsible, and the angry son. That is the only role open for us, the church people and well-pampered New Yorkers. The open end of the story leaves us with a burning and challenging question: How broad a circle of divine grace are we willing to draw? How alien could our aliens be? Resident aliens? Nonresident aliens? Undocumented aliens? Aren’t we alienating ourselves from divine grace, if we attempt to limit and curtail the divine grace? 

Yours sincerely, Resident Alien

Thomas and Margarita

Any time we read about Doubting Thomas, we celebrate the diversity of our faith which reaches as far as we can see - certainly as far as the oldest Christian writings. 

     The Bible itself represents some of that diversity, as it includes four different gospels together with the writings of the apostle Paul and his disciples, as well as writings associated with the name of John and some other apostles. But the diversity of the early church was even broader; many alternative streams of Christianity were never represented in the official Bible. 

     One such distinct alternative stream of the early Christianity was associated with the name of the apostle Thomas. It was possible, some biblical scholars hypothesized, that the story of Doubting Thomas was actually a narrative theological explanation and polemic against this alternative early Christian tradition. This story acknowledged and yet it undermined the Thomasine tradition by maligning its legendary spiritual founder. 

     But the religious writings of this early group survived (sometimes almost miraculously) and today we can read the Gospel of Thomas, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender. The oldest writing of these, the Gospel of Thomas, is as old as other biblical writings.

    These Thomas writings are different from what would become the orthodox tradition. But that is their real value. They show us the original broadness and diversity among early Christians. 

     In the Gospel of Matthew (13:45f) we hear a parable in which the Kingdom of Heaven (God) is compared to a precious pearl. The Gospel of Thomas (logion 76) contains a seemingly identical parable, but the meaning of the pearl has slightly shifted - it is said to be an image of the Kingdom, but becomes ever more an image for the human soul. And in the Acts of Thomas the author quotes the ancient Hymn of the Pearl - a fully developed allegory of the pearl as a human soul which is to be liberated and rescued from the ugly material world.

    It is most likely that the pearl as an image of the soul is the oldest form of this metaphor. But the early orthodox Christians did not like the dualistic theology which it implied (ugly material world, beautiful spiritual world) and even less did they like the concept of salvation as a deserved escape from the material world. 

     Orthodox Christians suppressed the Thomasine version of the parable. But times are changing as is also our understanding of the world. Almost two thousand years later, and with our modern biology (conchology - study of shelled molluscs) we can perhaps re-coin this ancient allegory. Now we know that pearls do not grow on their own. Molluscs grow pearls in self defense. Pearls grow around irritating grains of sand, some other particles and foreign objects or parasites.

    Beautiful pearls, just like beautiful souls often grow in response to adversity or pain. One can spend an entire lifetime as happy as a clam (as the saying goes) and remain just a slimy blob of a mollusc, or encounter adversity and start forming character like a beautiful precious pearl. This image is in harmony with the Christian understanding of sacrificial (understand - meaningful) suffering. I also find this allegory deeply meaningful to true life and my personal experience. The nicest souls I have met all overcame some major adversities.

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A Gothic painting of the apostle Thomas by  Master Theodoric of Prague overlaid with the first page of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (NH II.2).

And for those who are still looking for the Margarita of our title - margarita is the Latin name for a pearl. It is a lone word from Greek language - ο μαργαριτης (HO MARGARITES) and most likely further adopted from ancient Sanskrit's majari. This brings us full circle back to India to the original home of the narrator of The Hymn of the Pearl. And the legendary mission field of the apostle Thomas.