The gift of not knowing

I've been thinking about the value of uncertainty in our lives, especially those transition times when we are beset by not-knowing: not knowing what direction to go in, not knowing what we want or how to obtain/achieve it, being unable to guess what shape our life will take next. This is, to my mind, a deeply spiritual topic, in part because it is at these transition moments that we are most open (vulnerable) to God, spirit, the universe.

Not-knowing is a very hard and sometimes scary place to be, but it is such a gift, because it calls us to rely on the God within -- our true core -- rather than our habits, learned responses and routine patterns of thought. We get to move deeper into who we are and experience the exhilaration of trusting ourselves and whatever higher power we believe in. We get to be surprised -- maybe not always pleasantly, but pleasant or not, surprise wakes us up.

Not knowing humbles us, reminding us that our knowledge and control are finite (and small). It teaches us to beware of self-satisfaction and reminds us that our lives are profoundly connected to all other life. It teaches us to value our friends, and to know who they are.

In shaking up our settled beliefs and routines, not knowing can be exciting, even as it is also scary.

When Jesus tells his followers in Chapter 6 of the Gospel according to Matthew that they shouldn't worry about what they will eat and what they will wear because God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies, he is making a similar point, I think. He is saying, "God knows you have physical needs, but don't let them keep you from taking a risk to become the person God made you to be." Don't worry so much, for example, about being sensible and pragmatic that you can't allow yourself to hear God's call in your heart and follow it.

But also, I think Jesus is advocating a way of living that is open, available to the moment and vulnerable. He's saying it's more important to engage authentically with other people than to make sure you have dinner on time or never miss a night's sleep. I'm nowhere near living in this way, but I wish I could be. In my own way, I try to be as open as I can.

DOMA vs. the divine

I read yesterday in the New York Times that the U.S. Justice Dept. will no longer defend the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act. I'm glad for this (small) step, and hope that it will lead to larger ones, like the federal government's  fully recognizing all legal marriages.

Marriage has been a civil institution for probably longer than it's been a religious institution, because the purposes of marriage as an institution are primarily civil -- keeping the property in the family and knowing who was entitled to inherit it. There is no actual religious purpose (i.e., nothing that makes one a better practitioner of any faith) served by marriage. Of course the church's  (especially the Roman Catholic church's) purpose of making more members is served by having people married in the church, but that's really a secular purpose -- power and self-perpetuation -- not a religious one per se.

For perhaps a couple of centuries in the West the idea of marriage for love has gained widespread currency, though in many cases marriage was more about power and position for the well-to-do and about survival for the poor, especially in rural areas.

It is true that the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament have some things to say about marriage, but they are more prescriptions about how people who enter into the civil contract of marriage should behave than rules for a religious rite. Some people say God established marriage, but anyone who thinks Adam and Eve were married in any but the common-law sense is just a ninny. They were the only two people on earth, for heaven's sake -- of course they got together!

I do see a value in the church's solemnizing the intimate relationships of its members. It helps support those relationships and encourages a sense of commitment between the partners. It also raises up the role of God in such relationships, which I think is important for the long-term health of any partnership.

But we must not confuse the church's role of blessing and celebrating a marriage with the state's role of authorizing and regulating it. Only the state grants a marriage license, and only the state grants benefits to its citizens on the basis of their marital status. These are not prerogatives of the church, nor should they be, any more than the state should tell churches which marriages to recognize.

At heart, I think people who oppose marriage for gays and lesbians are afraid that a group of people they despise will become as good as them in the eyes of society -- one less group to kick around. It's also about taking away the "thou shalt nots" of old fashioned, conservative belief and replacing them with a more reflective, relativistic code based on Jesus' two great commandments: love God with everything in you and love others as yourself. You can't love others and enforce a doctrinaire set of rules.

You can't love others and deny them equal rights.

And you can't love God and demand that God fit into your tiny little pigeonholes.

On falling short of the mark again and again

Today's gospel reading was from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells his followers that it's not enough not to murder, that if they are angry with a brother or sister, or insult someone, they are as guilty as if they had killed that person. He adds that refraining from adultery means not just staying out of beds you don't belong in, but not indulging in lustful thoughts about someone who is not your spouse/partner.

He's telling people they must follow not just the letter of the commandments, but the spirit. After all, if you stop short of killing someone but you still hate them or treat them badly, that is not really acting the way God wants us to act.

Elsewhere, Jesus neatly sums this up when he says the greatest commandment is to "love God with all your strength, all your soul and all your might" and the second-greatest is to "love you neighbor as yourself." If we truly love someone, we will not usually treat them with disrespect or do things to harm them. Sure, we may sometimes say hurtful things to people we love, but later we apologize and make up with them.

But it is so hard to catch ourselves in the heat of the moment and not say the hurtful thing, or not do that which might be gratifying in the moment, but could lead to years of regret. Big things and small, every day, we do and say things that are not loving to others -- that is, not in their best interest.

And it is a fact of the subjective nature of our reality that we really can't help doing and saying some hurtful things -- we can only try to reduce the number of such things and to repair the damage for those we recognize after the fact.

I am comforted by the idea that even my wanting to do right, to act in a loving way, matters. That even if I mess up a lot -- and I do -- the fact that I care about how I affect others, and want to do better makes some difference.

Another comforting thought is that God can use even my mess-ups and mistakes to bring about something good. God is the essence of creativity, and uses all the material to hand -- much of which is human fallibility, evil, misjudgment, etc. to bring creation back to its original state of perfection.

On being a blessing

We never know when we have blessed someone, when we may have been the very person they needed at a given moment. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently, both times when I was driving around my newly re-adopted hometown in Central Massachusetts. Yesterday, I was forced to take a detour on my way home because a house that had collapsed from the weight of snow on it was being demolished and the street was closed off. I wasn't sure how to get home, so I stayed on the street I was on, hoping another place to turn would come along. Eventually I stopped at a gas station to ask directions. The clerk behind the counter gave me one of the blankest looks I've ever had the misfortune to have turned on me. Lucky for me, her customer was able to tell me the way, and it turned out I was very close to home.

Then this morning, I was going to work, making my way through the narrow, snow-clogged streets of a blue-collar neighborhood and traffic in both directions came to a complete halt. I began to feel quite claustrophobic and was filled with panic. I put my car in park, got out and walked over to a vehicle trying to go in the opposite direction.

"Would you just talk to me for a minute, this is kind of a scary situation," I said to the young man behind the wheel. The woman next to him, whom I imagined to be his girlfriend, looked like she thought I was some kind of nut. But he talked to me in a calm and friendly way, saying he had seen a broken-down school bus behind him that was blocking traffic.

His kindness in talking to me for just a couple of minutes made me feel enough better to get back in my car, and soon the frozen traffic began, ever so slowly, to creep along. Just moving made me less panicky, and I was fine for the rest of the trip to work.

These two people turned up at moments when I needed help, and they blessed me with their presence.I am encouraged, thinking about them, to hope that I, too, have blessed others without knowing it.