Special Grass

Grass near Pu'u 'Ula'ula of Mauna Loa

At least once a year my wife and I love to spend several days hiking in the Hawaiian snow. Yes, there is regular frost and snow in Hawaii. At 13,000 ft (4,000m) the air is thin, the head is spinning and the going is tough. All around is a volcanic wilderness with spectacular lava formations but completely devoid of anything alive except a few spiders persisting on insects blown up there by the wind. Even other hikers are a rarity - the highest number we had ever encountered were five in one full day. After the year-round crowds of Manhattan - this is our mountainous hermitage. Hiking cleans our heads and sharpens our senses. And then, after a few days spent in almost complete solitude without any telephone, electricity or running water we are ready and happy to return to civilization, but first we need to descend from this frozen high altitude desert. Coming down at the altitude of 10,000 ft we come across our first grass. Just a few small bunches of tenacious, hardy grass, but grass nevertheless. After days spent among just black, brown, gray and red rocks, the grass is so green and alive. Grass is so underrated! Every single blade is like a harbinger of life.
    Yes, I know that the Hebrew Bible grass has a reputation of ephemerality and impermanence. It is undeserved reputation and rightly corrected by the Synoptical Jesus who lifts the humble grass of the field above the beauty of the legendary monarch.

Come and join us this Sunday celebrating the beauty and diversity of grass, any life including the humankind.

Video version of this blog (with few more pictures and videoclips) is here on YouTube.

In Praise of Silence

This Sunday, the third in lent, will be about the gift of silence. My granddaughter reminded me recently what a great gift it really is! We were playing with rattles and learning how to crawl and then it was about the time to take a nap. After such a flurry of activity that was not easy. I carried her on my arms, sang her Czech and Hawaiians lullabies, even one which I made up myself years ago for my children. Her eyes were getting narrower and narrower, with few inevitable reverses of course. At last, the narrowest chinks closed and her eyelashes merged and locked followed with a little twitch in her legs. My grand-baby was finally  asleep, breathing deeply. Time to put her in her day crib. Here she is surrounded with some of her toys - a crescent and stars. Shhhh. Silence is indeed a great divine gift!

Recounting Divine Glory

This Sunday is the first in the season of Lent. This year we will follow our Presbyterian devotional called “Awaking to God’s Beauty” and the Book of Psalms will be our guide.

At first, people worshiped under the open skies, in some nice or special places; in a holy grove, by a brook, at a spring, or on a special hill or a mountain.
     Soon after, people erected a stela or created a stone circle, built an altar. Those were the beginnings of the first shrines which later grew into temples.
     Those ancient temple complexes were still built and decorated and organized as sacred models of the world, informed by the local mythological cosmology.
     In the center was the holy of holies, a divine habitation, surrounded with a place restricted only for priests, then a space for the local devotees and finally for anyone else. Basins and pools represented oceans, large pillars were mountains upon which the sky rested and columns stood for tall and splendid trees (especially their capitals preserved that notion). Some of this architectural cosmology is present in cathedrals till this day.
     Over time the divine became more and more confounded into the walls of temples, cathedrals and churches or even worse hidden in a transcendent distance. On this first Sunday in Lent the 19^th Psalm will encourage us again to return back to nature and to open our eyes and all our senses to the divine beauty all around us. Come and join us in the worship.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Last summer I went to Alabama to visit the National Lynching Memorial. I thought I knew enough about American lynching history so I just wanted to see and experience that powerful art. I can confirm it is indeed powerful art and it did to me what true art, and only true art can do. It transformed me from within, it grabbed me by throat and showed me the difference between intellectual and visceral knowledge.
      American history of slavery, lynching and racism are different permutations of the American society’s original sin. And such deep historical sin, just like any other deep trauma, cannot be forgotten no matter what you do. Silence will not help and pretensions will do no good. Unconfessed, hidden sin just like personal or family trauma will always find its way to come up and haunt us.
     Theology and psychology are strangely unanimous – the only way forward is confession, repentance and forgiveness. That is when I speak theologically. Psychology has different lingo but follows the same course - bringing the trauma to the surface, owning the wrongs, dealing with them openly and honestly, changing our ways and seeking forgiveness from those harmed. That is the way to be liberated from the dark past.
       The National Lynching Memorial is in fact like a helping hand offered to all of us by our black brothers and sisters to finally deal honestly with our history and to get freed from those brutal daemons of our collective past. I think this generous and kind offer is a marvelous theme for our celebration of Black History Month. So come and join us in this deeply meaningful celebration.

Jesus' healing today

A year and half ago there was a mass shooting in one of the Bronx hospitals. I learned about it almost instantly as friends started to call me all concerned about my wife who is also a doctor in the Bronx, but thankfully in a different hospital.

          Shortly afterwards while returning from vacation I had an opportunity to visit that hospital as I went for a hospital call virtually from the airport.

          It was the most bizarre of my hospital visits thus far. I did not know that place and I ended up entering the hospital through the emergency room. In that emergency room there were more police officers and security guards than there were doctors and nurses combined and it was not because of that earlier shooting. Cops were there accompanying victims or suspects of stabbings, shootings and brawls. It goes without saying that hospital is in one of the roughest parts of our city

          But in this hospital I personally encountered a true miraculous healing. I was visiting a person who fell from the fifth floor onto the concrete pavement below and was completely broken. In a few weeks after a great number of surgeries she was released to home care and is fine now. We still keep in occasional contact.

          Doctors and nurses in this hospital saved her life. It is a hospital clearly supported by charities and the city budget, a hospital with rusted hospital beds and shaky elevators. However, for my victim it was a better place than any of the posh hospitals in Manhattan. In this Bronx hospital the trauma medicine is their daily bread. Day in and day out they deal with the demons of poverty, violence, alienation and provide perhaps not fancy, nevertheless, top medical care especially for trauma victims. And that is the true healing miracle - in medicine just like in the rest of life wealth is not everything.

          My visits to this specific hospital and the stories which I hear from my wife from her Bronx hospital made me wonder - how would or how do Jesus’ miraculous healings look today in our world? Join us this Sunday, our worship will be right about this.