FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

A Sabbath Poem (Kelley)

          CHOOSE LIFE
          ~ by Sister Helen Kelley

          Choose Life
          only that and always,
          and at whatever risk.
          To let life leak out, to let it wear away by
          the mere passage of time, to withold
          giving it and spreading it
          is to choose
          nothing.

(from Turning to One Another, by Margaret J. Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002)

The Most Festive Friendships

~ by Joanne Sturt who is a student of Anthropology – a malleable thinker emerging from a shy voice, asking big questions, seeking bigger answers only to continue being on a path of 100% learning. She currently resides in Riverside, CA.

Recently, it just hit me that I’ve been incredibly blessed to have lived in three vastly contrasting countries of the world.  I was born in India, spent time in Kuwait and the UAE, and now live the west coast of the United States. Those experiences are priceless!

Surrounded by different faiths, identities, and customs as a citizen of each country has taught me invaluable lessons about embracing community and expressing identity without feeling lost or alienated.  Whether visiting my Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Arab, Indian, Christian, or American friends, in the end we are just friends.  We share our dreams together, our beliefs, our family customs, and our food, and dances.

What impresses me about being part of the communities in which I have lived is the richness of discovering other people’s lives. I have become not just an honored guest in a faraway land, but a family member in a Muslim home during the holy month of Ramadan, a sister of a Sikh bride on her traditional wedding day doing Mehendi artwork on her hands, and as children of God we have offered prayers together to our Creator as we gathered before a feast of food.  This has been far more than simply exploring unfamiliar territory, I have found fun being in someone else’s space!  It is a blessing to immerse ourselves in the communities where we live.

Is this Utopia talk?  Not really.  Many of us have caught on to this idea.  Any of us can grasp this Utopia and learn to be ourselves, rooted in what we believe whole-heartedly, and still find genuine friendships with people quite different from ourselves, not just toleration of differences.  I have found my most authentic friendships are with the people with whom I can disagree and agree on ideas, we can argue, laugh, share, and still find ourselves inseparable.  Those are my best, my most festive friendships!

So I’m thrilled to learn about Faith House.  It will be the kind of place where this mixing and sharing happens all the time.  My guess is that God is having fun watching us mingle together this way.  Let the festivities begin!

A Sabbath Poem (Moreau)

          RECAST THE EARTH
          ~ by Robert F. Moreau

          Do you have any wild hopes,
          Or tame ones for that matter?

          The possibility of acorns becoming towering oaks,
          Or caterpillars blossoming into butterflies,
          Or that dawn will cast away midnight fears?

          Wild hopes!

          That all creation will learn the dance of joy,
          And all humanity might taste the wine of peace,
          And that our loving God will become transparent
          Through our love.

          “Recast the earth, O Lord,
          And move our hearts with wild hopes!”

(thank you Jess for sending us this poem)

Book Review: Falling Man

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

It seems Don DeLillo was always going to write a novel around the September 11 terrorist attacks. The elements of terrorism, faith, New York City and humanity at the extremes have been recurring themes through his 14 novels and 35-plus years as one of America’s most profound novelists. His new novel, Falling Man, is the book that brings them together.

The events of September 11, 2001, are so much a part of our collective consciousness that DeLillo does not need to spend much time on the big picture. Instead, he focuses on just three people: Keith, an office worker in the World Trade Centre; Lianne, his estranged wife with whom he reunites in the aftermath of the tragedy; and Hammad, one of the 9-11 hijackers whose three brief but haunting appearances punctuate the novel.

Of course, it is in the lives of individual such as these—individuals such as us—that the real issues of terror and faith, tragedy and hope, sorrow and love are played out. Any or all of us who have lost sleep wrestling with the realities of fear and death, the possibilities and impossibilities of God, the question of hope amid the despair of the world knows the human experience DeLillo invokes. And this is the real drama of DeLillo’s story.

Even DeLillo’s sketch of Hammad the hijacker is not as certain as such an outrageous act suggests. Hammad never quite expects the hijacking will take place, always expecting the plot will be foiled before it can be put into action. And as the hijacked plane hurtles toward the New York skyline, he buckles his seatbelt, even as he repeats to himself the assurances of his faith.

By contrast, three years after escaping the collapsing towers, Keith gambles away his days on the poker tournament circuit, perhaps prisoner to the seemingly random “luck” that saw him escape the towers while colleagues and friends did not get such a chance.

But it is Lianne who is the fraught soul of DeLillo’s novel. “There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? . . . She was free to think and believe and doubt simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.”

But Lianne find this impossible to do. In the last act of DeLillo’s novel, set three years after the attacks, she retains her resistance of paradox: “God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That’s why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be.”

While people around her are reading the Koran, Lianne finds herself a regular attender at a nearby church—not a participant, but an atendder—who begins to feel a connectedness with the other regulars. “Isn’t it the world that brings you to God?” she reflects while sitting in the near-empty church. “Beauty, grief terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas. Others bring you closer, church brings you closer, the stained glass windows of a church, the pigments inherent in the glass, the metallic oxides fused into the glass, God in clay and stone, or was she babbling to herself to pass the time?”

Whatever else it might be, Falling Man offers a portrait of contemporary faith, lived in a world of mass media, terrorism, urban lifestyle and private worlds. It is a psychological novel in which the questions of faith do not resolve neatly. We are caught between the fear that there might not be a God and the equal fear that there might be a God, either is terrifying and world-shaking. It takes faith to acknowledge and live in the tension between faith and doubt, when so much of life simultaneously urges us to God and repeatedly questions God’s existence and benevolence.

DeLillo describes the closest his character comes to resolution of this tension: “She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice. God is the voice that says, ‘I am not here.’”

And, as such, DeLillo’s novel ends at a sacred starting point.

(Thank you Nathan for this exclusively review.)

A Sabbath Poem (Rilke - 2)

          IF A SADNESS RISES IN FRONT OF YOU
          ~ by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

          You mustn't be frightened
          if a sadness
          rises in front of you,
          larger than any you have ever seen;
          if an anxiety,
          like light and cloud-shadows,
          moves over your hands and over
          everything you do.
          You must realize that something is
          happening to you,
          that life has not forgotten you,
          that it holds you in its hand
          and will not let you fall.

(from Letter to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke,
transl. Stephen Mitchell, New York, Vintage Books, 1986)

Here is New York

~ by Bowie Snodgrass.  Bowie works in midtown Manhattan as the Web Content Editor for EpiscopalChurch.org and lives uptown; she also serves on the steering committee of Christian Churches Together in the USA and is a co-founder of Transmission, a house church in the city.

"A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning." E.B. White, Here is New York, 1949

I found a first edition hardcover of E.B. White's Here is New York in my bookcase this week.  The nameplate says "ex libris T.J. Snodgrass, M.D.," from the library of my great-grandfather (a Wisconsin surgeon whose father and grandfather were Methodist circuit ministers).

White's whole essay is large type on less than fifty small pages.  I read it in two days (it could be read in an hour), shocked at how pertinent it remains, how prophetic, how perfectly written, and how many questions it raises about trying to be Christ in this perilous city . . .

Samir, here are some pulled quotes from White's love letter to New York City, selected for the six of you who are moving out here at the end of June:

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. . . for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail."

"New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant."

"New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation. . ."

"The quality of New York that insulates its inhabitants from life . . . is a rather rare gift, and I believe it has a positive effect on the creative capacities of New Yorkers---for creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions."

"In summer the city contains (except for tourists) only die-hards and authentic characters."

"The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds makes New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.  The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity."

"The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York in the sound of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."

"All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn born fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority.  In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightening, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

New York and I look forward to having you, your family, and Faith House here!   

Blessings!

A Sabbath Poem (Dylan)

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
~ by Bob Dylan, our public prophet, y. 1964

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

You can dowload this poem in a form of a song from iTunes by clicking here.

Evangelicals and Other Religions

~ link to CrossCurrents Magazine, an interview of Tony Campolo by Shane Claiborne

Shane pointed me to this article, entitled On Evangelicals and Interfaith Cooperation.  I think it gives honest, constructive, and Biblically sound reflection about how a fruitful relationship between progressive evangelical Christians and other religions could look like.  True gems, both the article and the magazine.    

Tony Campolo is a friend of Faith House (as one of our endorsers), an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church, and professor emeritus of Sociology at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. Shane Claiborne is a founder of the Simple Way Community in Philadelphia and a prominent Christian activist.  Check out his great book Irresistible Revolution.

Here is an excerpt from the interview, enough to entice you to click through and read the whole thing:

   __________

Shane C: Community seems to form most naturally during times of struggle. Most of the times I have felt deeply connected to people of other faiths were during times where our survival required interdependence. I remember when our peace team was leaving Iraq, in the middle of the bombing. The car I was in had a bad accident, all of us were injured, planes were still flying over. And the first car of Iraqi civilians stopped. Waving a white sheet at the planes overhead, risking their lives, they drove us into the nearest town called Rutba. The doctors and townspeople gathered. One of the doctors was pleading, "Why, why, why is your country doing this?" He said that they could not take us into the hospital, because three days before the bombs hit their hospital, the children's ward. In the same breath he said, "But we will take care of you. Because here, in Rutba, it does not matter if you are American or Iraqi, Christian or Muslim. We take care of you as our friends." And they did, they set up a little shanty clinic outside the bombed out hospital, and they literally saved my friend's life. These are the times when I think cooperation and community are inevitable.

Tony C: Peter Arnett used to be with CNN. I know him and I met him in an airport in Chicago, and I said, "Peter so glad to see you, I'm running out of stories. Tell me a story." He said, "I've got one . . . I'm in the West bank, a bomb goes off and bodies are blown through the air. The Israeli troops seal off the whole area. A man comes running up to me with a bloody little girl in his arms, and says, 'You are press, you can get us out of here. If I don't get her into a hospital then immediately she's going to die. You can get us out of here. You are press'. Peter said, "I put them in the back seat and threw a blanket over them."

And I did get through the lines. As I rushed towards Tel Aviv in the car, I could hear him in the back seat, as he rocked this little girl in his arms whispering, "Go faster, oh God help him to go faster. God help him to go faster. Then he starts moaning, I'm losing her! I'm losing her! Oh God I'm losing her, I'm losing her!" Peter said by the time I got to the hospital I was emotionally drained. They took the little girl into the operating room, and the two of us sat down on a bench in the waiting room, exhausted. We must have sat there a half hour, silent, exhausted from the emotion. The doctor came out and said, "I'm sorry. She's dead." This man dissolved in tears. I put my arm around him and said, I'm not married. I don't have any children. I don't know what it's like to lose a daughter. The man snapped his head back and said, "My daughter? That little girl is not my child. I'm an Israeli settler, she's a Muslim girl. But maybe the time has come for us to recognize every child as our child."

What can we learn about that kind of spirituality that can help us find common ground? No theological statements were made, no compromising beliefs, no attempts to come to a common denominator. And yet, a kind of spiritual oneness.

   __________

To read the entire interview, click here.