Happy Birthday, Frederick Buechner

Today, July 11, is the birthday of the great novelist and essayist Frederick Buechner. I have been known to devour his writings, from his "doubter's dictionary" Whistling in the Dark to his heartbreaking novelization of the patriarchs, Son of Laughter. He turns eighty-seven today, and we should all blow him a nice kiss.

Buechner's midsummer birthday is as good an occasion for me to repost the following, my reflection on yardwork commingled with his reflection on one of the seven deadly sins. This was originally posted to my now-retired blog Strangely Dim in 2005. I hope you enjoy it, and if this is your first taste of Freddy Buechner's writing, well then, you're welcome.

***

Chez Lounge

The other night I was driving home and saw a neighbor doing something that I absolutely hate doing, and yet I was jealous of him. He was sitting comfortably on a chair on his sidewalk spraying his lawn. He had achieved serenity, shalom, nirvana, whatever you want to call it. Even his labor was leisure.

Let me clarify: I don't hate sitting comfortably, I hate spraying my lawn. It smacks of waste and futility--waste because I'm doing what God meant for rain to do, futility because grass withers in my presence. Right now I'm watering twice a day everyday because our wildflower garden, which supplanted our above-ground pool, has been supplanted by what we hope will one day soon be grass. It's a faint hope, though, since I killed the pool and wrecked the wildflower garden.

As a result, most of my thoughts while watering are occupied not with hope but with grumblings of how I might otherwise spend my time. I could be writing or serving the poor, although more likely I'd be quoting the Lemonheads: "What if something's on TV and it's never on again?" On the surface of things, to be condemned to sit in a chair watering my lawn for the rest of eternity would be, for me, like an eternity of wailing and grinding teeth. I looked at that guy in his khaki shorts and his long black socks and his fishing cap and Hawaiian shirt, and I thought, That dude is lazy. But then I thought, That dude is lucky.

I'm reminded of Frederick Buechner, whose definition of sloth is hanging on the wall of my office, just high enough that I don't have to see it every day:

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A lazy man, a man who sits around and watches the grass grow, may be a man of peace. His sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting. A slothful man, on the other hand, may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something's wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.

So if that guy's lazy, then I'm a ten-toed sloth.

Farewell to a Beloved Pet

Yesterday my wife and I said goodbye to our dear cat Lacey. She's been with us for fifteen years; when I first met her she fit in my palm. Since then she's endeared herself to us with her impossibly long meows, and she's habitually sat in our laps long past the point of convenience. She's always been funny in an awkward sort of way, hiding herself from our friends and family but being her whole self unreservedly with us.

We discovered a couple of months ago that Lacey had cancer, and while she'd been bearing up well since then, she'd lost a lot of weight and had a little less life in her eyes every day. Yesterday morning I called the vet; that afternoon we took her to the clinic and returned home without her.

I've never said goodbye to a pet, mainly because I didn't really have pets till after I was married. We had fish in my house when I was growing up, but fish occupy their own universe; we observe fish, moreso than abiding with them. Lacey and I, by contrast, occupied the same space. We've grown older together; we've moved together from one home to another; we've endured sickness and health and trouble and trial together. My wife and I will miss her; I find it a little hard, quite honestly, to imagine my mornings without her.

Nearly fifteen years ago I first came across a prayer by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, included in his brief book Prayers Plainly Spoken, that he wrote in remembrance of his cat Tuck. I've offered it to friends over the years as they've said goodbye to their pets. I adapt it here for my own benefit, my way of saying goodbye.

Passionate Lord,

By becoming one of us, you revealed your unrelenting desire to have us love you. As we were created for such love, you have made us to love your creation and through such love, such desire, learn to love you. We believe every love we have you have given us.

Lacey's love of us, and our love of her, is a beacon, a participation, in your love of all your creation. We thank you, we sing your praise, for the wonderful life of this cat. Her generosity, her enthusiasm, her naivete, her timidity, her patience, her presence--these qualities and others made us better, made our love for one another better, made us better love you.

We will miss her. Help us not fear remembering her, confident that the sadness such memory brings is bounded by the joy that Lacey existed and, with us, is part of your glorious creation, a harbinger of your peaceable kingdom.

Amen

Every Good Thing Begins in a Garden

I stumbled across a recipe yesterday that calls for, among other very trendy things like sea salt, "seven organic, free range eggs." My wife is thinking of making this recipe, which will result in some truffley, moussey, heart-unhealthy bowl of deliciousness for me, I am sure. But for now, it's just the latest instance of a recipe being, for me, a source of humor.

There is no benefit to eggs whatsoever from being "free range." Eggs are immobile; set them down in a free range and they will sit there, slowly spoiling, until you return them to the refrigerator.

I know, I know. "Free range eggs" are the output of free range chickens, which do benefit from the open space both in terms of health and dignity (for the chickens and for those who raise them). But you can't put a misplaced modifier in front of an editor and expect him not to poke fun at it.

But seriously, folks. What really stood out to me about the organic, free range eggs wasn't the modifier so much as the signifier: this recipe is telling me which particular eggs to buy. Not those eggs--they're not organic, and the farming cosmoporation that brought them to market subjected the chickens that bore them to terrible, terrible living conditions. No, buy these eggs--these eggs that hearken back to simpler times, when human hands tilled the earth and fetched eggs out of the nests of loving hens. If your eggs aren't organic, aren't free range, then you're buying the wrong eggs. Your recipe is steeped in the blood and byproduct of factory farming.

Even that isn't my point. My point is, if you're going to give such specific instructions about the eggs, why not go all the way? "Take seven eggs from your hen. Crack into a bowl. Separate the yolks. Whip the whites until stiff peaks form." Something like that.

I'm trying to grow vegetables in my garden. I'm not very good at it--partly because I'm lazy, but mostly because really, what's the point? Why grow a tomato when they're, like, forty cents at the grocery store, and I'm going there anyway to buy some deodorant? Or, for that matter, why do I need a tomato in the first place? They come pre-diced in a can in aisle seven. And even then, if I have such a taste for tomatoes, why don't I just buy a Lean Cuisine in the frozen section, pop it in the microwave and get on with my life? Or, for that matter, why don't I just run by the Arby's and get myself an Ultimate BLT(tm)?

Gardening is so far removed from my normal routine--slow instead of fast, dirty instead of clean, active instead of passive--that it takes a regular act of the will just to walk the twenty feet or so from my TV to my garden plot to see what's happening. And yet I keep trying, year after year. And eventually I get something to eat out of it.

I think it helps me--and I say that I think this because it only occurred to me this morning--to think of a garden as part of a recipe. No one cooks today because they must; it's too easy to get food without cooking. People cook because the experience of cooking has reward to it: health rewards, for sure, but also emotional rewards of accomplishment, physiological rewards from slow and focused activity, and sensual rewards from the scents and sensations along the way. When you take the long view of gardening, you see the essential steps of gardening not so much as labor but as a process akin to cooking, complete with its own rewards. When I spend an evening weeding, I'm not tending to the garden; I'm accomplishing something while indulging in a multisensory experience. I'm not weeding; I'm making soup.

I think this will help me. I won't be sure till several days from now, several days' worth of positive self talk while crawling around pulling weeds and scaring off rabbits. "I'm making soup. I'm making soup. I'm making soup." My neighbors will probably think I'm crazy; if you want soup so bad, just make a run to Panera.

I'm reminded of something cosmologist Carl Sagan once said: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. That's what a garden is, in a way: a universe from which everything we need emerges, the point of origin for every good thing. In gardening we reconnect ourselves to the fundamentally creative nature of the universe we find ourselves in. We watch goodness come to life, and we ourselves have a hand in bringing those good things forth.

Too bad I'm not very good at it. Maybe next year I'll be better.

Waking Up with Wendell Berry: This Is How You Make a Joke

Whenever I run out of things to write, I freely admit, I write about things I read. Such is the case today, and this week, and this past month. Maybe I'll get original again soon, but for now I'm resigned (and contented, oddly enough) to write about a novel I'm reading by Wendell Berry.

Jayber Crow, I've come to learn, is one of several books in the Port William Membership family--novels by Berry that occupy the same geographical space and chronological time. It's not the first, but so far as I can tell the sequence isn't that important. I've reached the point in this novel where Jonah Crow (who through a series of events came to be known as Jayber) has resettled himself in the town of his childhood, becoming the local barber. Small town folk don't take quickly to newcomers, and so now in the story Jonah is doing the slow work of making friends. The following scene is critical to that process, but it also strikes me as funny.

It strikes me as funny because it's supposed to. Burley Coulter, Jonah's first adult acquaintance, is trying to make Jonah and others laugh. But he's mainly trying to make himself laugh, which amuses Wendell Berry and is meant to amuse us. And it works.

This is, after all, the essential foundation of humor: You say out loud (or in print, which is roughly the same thing) what you find amusing. Sometimes it's observational; sometimes it's absurdist. Sometimes it's crass or profane or mean or insensitive. Sometimes it's a combination of some or all of the above. But you say it, or you write it, or you otherwise demonstrate it, and people discover by way of your demonstration, and by way of some shared experience with you, that it is, in fact, funny.

Humor is a curative process. The making of a joke is sometimes quick and sometimes slow, but it is always methodical and never accidental. The humor we think is accidental has been curated after the fact, actually; we are ourselves the curators, making our own observations and judgments. Kids who say the darnedest things, for example, aren't trying to be funny; it takes the rest of us to identify and call out the humor in their innocence.

Whatever it is, even at its most uncharitable, humor is conscientious, a bid to connect. Jokes are made; comedy is presented; laughs are shared. Here's how Wendell Berry does it in one scene from Jayber Crow:

One of the early signs of my acceptance into at least a part of Port William society was the following letter, folded once and stuck under the shop door in the dead of night:

"Come to a little worter dranking party Sat night at the Grandstand. Whatever you want to delute your worter with will be fine."

I did not then recognize the handwriting as that of my friend Burley Coulter. Had I done so, I might also have recognized at least one of the misspellings as the work of Burley's conscientious sense of humor. "Worter," as I would know later, was quoted from a famous letter-to-the-teacher written by Oma Wages on behalf of her daughter, who during her three years in the eighth grade had come to be known by the boys as "Topheavy":

"Please let Bobra Sue be excuse when she akses. She cant hole her worter."

That Burley wrote anonymously, making no attempt to disguise either his hand or his manner, was a joke on anonymity and on himself, his way of laying by a little something to laugh about at a later time.

Waking Up with Wendell Berry

I'm very newly into the novel Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It begins with a notice to the reader that I am trying hard to take seriously:

Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

I'm trying, really I am, not to be the dreaded explainer. That is my bent, I'm afraid, but the author has asked in good faith and good humor, and so I'm trying hard to indulge him and honor his request.

To resist explanation, it turns out, is to invite emotional resonance. I'm forty pages into Jayber Crow's 363 pages and already hopelessly in awe of the title character, telling his story in retrospect. By reading his memories of childhood I'm recalling my own memories; by way of his reflections on the impact of time and the wheels of progress I'm noticing how much the places I've lived have changed over the years, and how much I've changed myself in relation to them. I'm observing him observe these other people and recalling my own observations of the people whose paths I have crossed. It's not necessarily comfortable terrain for one such as I, so predisposed to deconstruction, but it's not a bad way to wake up in the morning.

This morning I awoke to Crow, late in life, recounting his time at The Good Shepherd orphanage, where as some odd institutional protocol his name was truncated from Jonah to J., only to be recast at some later date as Jay and familiarized as Jayber. What follows is how my day today begins, and I expect it will shape how my day today unfolds.

For a while after they had come to The Good Shepherd, the newcomers were known as "newboys" and "newgirls." This status of newness we sooner or later simply wore our way out of. . . . I remember a little girl, the E. Lawler I mentioned before, who came to The Good Shepherd when she was about seven years old. She was a slight, brown-haired, sad-looking, lonesome-looking girl whose clothes did not fit. She looked accidental or unexpected, and seemed to be without expectation, and resigned, and so quiet that even in my selfishness I wished I knew of a way to help her.

I watched her all the time. When her class went out to play, she did not take part but only stood back and watched the other girls. She always wore a dress that sagged and brown cotton stockings that were always wrinkled. She was waiting. I did not understand that she was waiting, but she was. And then one day as her classmates were joining hands to play some sort of game, one of the girls broke the circle. She held out her hand to the newcomer to beckon her in. And E. Lawler ran into the circle and joined hands with the others.

I wrote E. Lawler in my tablet so that I would not forget her.

Local Food and Sustainable Religion

I'm not what you might call "self-motivated." I often need external prompts to keep me going on my more mundane projects. One of those projects is gardening.

So every year now (for the second year in a row!) I'm reading a book that relates in some way to the growing of food. Last year was Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a gift from one of my hippie author friends, who noticed that I had read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (a gift from another of my hippie author friends) and assumed that I must be a hippie foodie. I'm not, but the book was great.

This year's entry is Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, by Craig L. Goodwin. I met Craig at the Inhabit Conference last year, an event sponsored by the Parish Collective, a network of mostly urban and suburban hippies who want their religious life to be homegrown, organic and slow. It's a great event, if you're into that sort of thing.

Craig's family spent a year living locally, and facing up to all the implications of that. They went in fairly ignorant (less ignorant, I suspect, than he likes to suggest in the book, but by no means were they stealth hippies engaging in fraudulent life experiments), and dealt with the surprises as they came. I'm now at the point where the family is running out of staples, like flour, and running in search of homegrown replacements.

The family visits any number of processing plants with very little luck, until one food industry representative directs them to a "recovering conventional farmer." Fred proves to be a good match for Craig's "recovering conventional consumer"; I suspect I'll hear more from Fred as I continue to read. Anyway, Fred turns Craig on not only to local sources of flour but to the ecological logic of what has become, after a century or two of industrial progress, unconventional farming. Show concern for the sustainability of topsoil, Fred suggests, and your land will not dry up. I found this interesting: "The richness of the tropical rainforest is in the way it recycles the nutrients"--the interdependency of the soil and the plants growing in it. "Once the native vegetation disappears, so does the productive capacity of the soil." Deforestation in the Amazon, for example, won't result in more land for agricultural use; it'll result in more useless land and a starker, less stable environment.

The kicker of chapter five, for me, was the surprise twist at the end, in which Craig steps way back from his search for flour and sugar and cheese, and reflects on the parallels between environmental responsibility and congregational life. He's a pastor, so he thinks that way, but I found his insight to be quite compelling, and fertile ground for the church's ongoing reformation. Here's what he wrote:

I am learning that what farmers like Fred are doing agriculturally, I need to do theologically and pastorally in the church. Like farmers, our lives have become disintegrated and fragmented by rapid cultural and technological change. Maybe we've imagined the whole world as little more than a medium for growing souls, pushing and pushing until we erode the fertile topsoil that's essential to our faith--justice, goodness, mercy, compassion. Imagine what might change if we thought of the earth and everything in it as part of God's redemptive plan, as an integrated process of life breaking out "on earth as it is in heaven." Maybe even our stop at the dairy aisle and our choice of flour could be fertile ground for faithfulness.

An Anchor of Time: The Letter from Birmingham Jail, 50 Years Later

Everybody wants to be on Martin Luther King's side, but no one wants to cross the street.

Back in college one of my professors suggested that, while it was appropriate to date time from the birth of Christ, given the historical and cultural significance of that moment, the time had come to mark time differently. He proposed August 6, 1945, the day on which the U.S. government dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and ushered in the nuclear age. That day changed history, he argued, and he was right.

But the interesting thing to me about how we mark time now--according to the birth of Christ--is how unremarkable that day was to the people who were living it. It's only through the lens of history that we came to recognize its significance, only in retrospect that we know how profoundly that day changed history.

So, if my professor is right and the time has come to re-mark time, I think we ought to look for something more subtle than a nuclear explosion. I might propose April 16, 1963.

April 16, 1963, is the day Martin Luther King Jr. began writing his letter to white clergy, on the occasion of his arrest and imprisonment in Birmingham, Alabama, for "parading without a permit" in an effort to end legal segregation in that city. He wrote in response to an editorial, written by various white clergy, offering general support for the cause of the black person in the American South but urging patience and meekness. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the writing of that letter, and it is as current today as it was then.

Oh, the details of the story may be slightly different, but both in the specifics (the systemic injustices that keep people of different ethnicities separate and unequal) and in the generalities (the long arc of history that still leads to but has yet to arrive at justice), King's letter is profound and prophetic.

You don't know in a moment how significant a piece of writing will be. Even a bestseller can't be judged at the point of sale. Only time tells the real value of a good word. And time has been very good to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. It is eminently quotable but merits thorough reading and reflection. It has been the impetus for any number of short-term and lifelong works of reconciliation and justice. It has shored up the courage of people fighting good fights; it has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

To those who seethe under a general situation of injustice or who crave revenge over specific acts of hate and violence--as I suspect many are feeling today--King's letter points to "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest." For those who think the law is the law is the law, King points out that "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and . . . it was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany." To those who think that the best life is the avoidance of extremism and the preservation of peace at all costs, King replies that "on Calvary's hill three men were crucified . . . for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

"So the question," King asks for all time, "is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be." This question, grounded in history as it is, will haunt us far into the future. It is transcendent, the way all good anchors of time should be. As we return to it, we make inevitable progress on the long arc of history toward justice. As King declares in his letter:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

For the full text of the letter (which I read once a year, every year--a practice I recommend wholeheartedly), click here.

Jesus with Skinny Jeans On

I found this recent episode of The Mindy Project (embedded below) wildly entertaining. Mindy meets a guy on the train and they go out on a date. She finds out that he's a Lutheran minister (he prays for dinner). She goes to his church and he dumps her because she's not selfless enough for him. She goes to prison to prove she's a good person. Hilarity ensues.

The thing that strikes me as most interesting about this episode is how fascinatingly odd Mindy finds it that someone would (a) pray before eating and (b) go to church. Churchgoing is that quickly becoming exotic and unexpected.

The concept of religious faith isn't pilloried by the episode, even though the show makes a mockery of contemporary worship services (Moby as liturgist?!?). Fair game, I say. But the church and the vocation of Mindy's would-be boyfriend (he's a Lutheran, probably mainly for the vestments, but he could have been a pastor in pretty much any church without a celibate clergy) are really just foils for more interesting questions:

[] Why do some people believe some things, and others don't?

[] What motivates our altruism, and are our motivations legitimate?

Anyway, I liked it, and I thought you might like it too. A little harsh on people in prison, and a little blue here and there. But comedy genius. Enjoy it while it's streaming.

The Cloud We Find Ourselves In

Before there was a cloud, there was a great cloud.

We read about it in the letter to the Hebrews. It’s mentioned explicitly in chapter 12, but the heart of it is actually in chapter 11, as a kind of litany declaring what faith looks like. Guess what: It looks like a cloud.

A cloud jam-packed with people, it turns out. “By faith we understand,” the writer tells us, “that the universe was formed at God’s hand.” Faith characterizes the stories we tell each other about Abel, whose sacrifice was better than Cain’s, and who paid the ultimate price for his great faith. Faith describes the experience of Enoch, who was taken from this earth. It describes the experience of Noah, of Abram, of Isaac and Jacob, of Joseph and his sons, of Moses and the people of God in their exodus from Egypt, of Rahab and Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and the prophets. Faith is the great motif of the story of God; it floats through two testaments like a cloud; it lights up the sacred text like a pillar of fire.

And yet the faith of Hebrews 11 was an unfinished story: “none of them received what had been promised”—and this is important—“since God had planned something better for us.” The writer of the letter to the Hebrews goes so far as to make us—you and me—the final object of all that faith: “only together with us would they be made perfect.”

The paean to faith in chapter 11 is the antecedent for the “great cloud” introduced to us at the beginning of chapter 12. Our connection to this historic faith is the rationale for our faith-rooted efforts in the present and the future: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Just as our antecedents await our witness to perfect their faith, we come to understand, we depend on their experience for the perfection of our own. And all of us, taken together, depend on Jesus for perfect and perfecting faith. We are incomplete without each other, and all together we are incomplete without Jesus.

Right. Jesus is important. But I’m mainly interested for the moment in the fact that we’re incomplete without each other. Communality is so hot right now—we crowdsource and kickstart and otherwise participate in a broader communal life in virtual and occasionally real physical space. Some code writer somewhere probably thinks she invented the cloud, where all our best selves commingle and cultivate something greater than the sum of our particular parts. But then we flip to Hebrews 12 and we see it’s always been there, supporting us and making demands on us.

What does it mean to participate in the great cloud? It means, among other things, that we owe it not only to our ancestors but to ourselves to get to know them. We search the Scriptures not just for fortune-cookie axioms to organize our days around but to know who we are, as parts of a whole but also as a whole with so many constituent parts.

It means, among other things, that we read beyond the Scriptures, to familiarize ourselves with those who came after Hebrews 11 but before Century 21. They too occupy the cloud with us, with them; they too help perfect us, and they too are perfected in us.

It means, among other things, that we engage one another fully, encouraging one another where encouragement is needed and challenging one another where challenge is needed. It means we play fair and fight nice, since we’re all in this cloud together, and we’re all interdependent for our mutual and collective perfection.

Someone will complain that I’m writing so much about perfection. (Not my uncle; he'll complain about the whole post. He hates when I write stuff like this.) Nobody’s perfect, someone will remind me, and the pursuit of perfection in the aftermath of humanity’s fall from grace is an idolatrous waste of time. To them I say, chillax. I don’t expect to become perfect; I don’t think I or anyone else is perfect. I do believe in a great mystery, however—that he who has begun a great work in us will see it to completion. Not in my lifetime, surely, any more than he completed it in the lifetime of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob, or Peter or Paul or Mary. In the meantime, we owe it to ourselves and to one another to make the most of this cloud we find ourselves in.

What Kind of Extremists Will We Be? Haunted by MLK

On this forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. . . .

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously constructed dams that block the flow of social progress. . . .

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . .

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? . . .

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as being the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists. . . . So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are. . . . Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned to outright disgust. . . .

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . Let us all hope that . . . in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

A Prayer About Time, 3.0

Every few years I repost the following prayer written by Robert Banks, a missiologist from Australia, and published in his book The Tyranny of Time. Today seems like as good a day as any to repost it yet again. A blessing on your head.

***

God our Father,
you are the Maker of everything that exists,
the Author of the world of nature
and of all living things,
the Creator of both space and time.

Without you there would be no past,
present or future;
no summer or winter,
spring or autumn,
seedtime or harvest;
no morning or evening,
months or years.

Because you give us the gift of time
we have the opportunity
to think and to act,
to plan and to pray,
to give and to receive,
to create and to relate,
to work and to rest,
to strive and to play,
to love and to worship.

Too often we forget . . .
and fail to appreciate your generosity:
we take time for granted
and fail to thank you for it,
we view it as a commodity
and ruthlessly exploit it,
we cram it too full or waste it,
learn too little from the past
or mortgage it off in advance,
we refuse to give priority
to those people and things
which should have chief claim upon our time.

Help us to view time more as you view it,
and to use it more as you intend:
to distinguish between what is central
and what is peripheral,
between what is merely pressing
and what is really important,
between what is our responsibility
and what can be left to others,
between what is appropriate now
and what will be more relevant later.

Guard us against attempting too much
because of a false sense of our indispensability,
a false sense of ambition,
a false sense of rivalry,
a false sense of guilt,
or a false sense of inferiority:
yet do not let us mistake our responsibilities,
underestimate ourselves,
fail to be stimulated by others,
overlook our weaknesses, or know our proper limits.

Enable us also to realise that
important though this life is, it is not all,
that we should view what we do
in the light of eternity,
not just our limited horizons,
that we ourselves have eternal life now.

God our Father, you are
not so much timeless as timeful,
you do not live above time
so much as hold "all times . . . in your hand",
you have prepared for us a time
when we will have leisure
to enjoy each other and you to the full,
and we thank you, appreciate you
and applaud you for it.

Amen