The Little Red Blog

Now Be Thankful

“Now Be Thankful”

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

When the fire is grown too fierce to breathe
In burning irons I'll be bound
Fierce as fire weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

(Written by Richard Thompson & Dave Swarbrick; recorded by Fairport Convention)

(10) Now Be Thankful (Stereo Mix) - YouTube

(10) Now Be Thankful - Richard and Linda Thompson (Live 1975) - YouTube

 

 

Now Be Thankful

Fairport Convention, "Now Be Thankful":

 

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

 

When the fire is grown too fierce to breathe
In burning irons I'll be bound
Fierce as fire weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

 

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

 

Original: Now Be Thankful (Stereo Mix) - YouTube

Cover by Richard & Linda Thompson: Now Be Thankful - Richard and Linda Thompson (Live 1975) - YouTube

 

"Gratitude makes the world holy."

"There is so much abundance / in the people I have... / and all in their short lives / give to me repeatedly... / They are my staff. / They comfort me."  (Anne Sexton)

From Richard Beck (Experimental Theology), some thoughts on gratitude, followed by my own comments:

When life is treated as a possession that can be taken from us, damaged or lost our lives become infused with fear causing us to cling, protect, hoard, defend and aggress.

The antidote to this fear is gratitude, viewing life--the whole of life--not as a possession to be defended but as a gift to be shared.

Gratitude sanctifies the world. Gratitude makes the world holy.

Think of everything you possess, everything that is yours in life. How can we live with these things in a way that doesn't entangle us? 

Receive them as gifts. When we handle the things of the world as gifts they become holy, consecrated and sanctified. Gratitude--thankfulness--marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane…

Gratitude accomplishes this because the object in question--which includes not just possessions but also things like your time, attention, status and your very life--is relocated in the mind by thankfulness, making us able to "lose" and "let go" of the object as we live for and share with others. Thankfulness sanctifies the world because thankfulness creates the capacity to use things--by letting them go or sharing them--in holy ways. 

Those of us who have so much for which to be grateful also have so much we need to lose, to let go of, and to share with others.  “Gratitude” ought not to be merely a word or even a state of mind: it ought to be at the core of our lives, enabling us to give ourselves away—our “time, attention, status, and [our] very life”—to each other.

Because the answer to what are people for? turns out to be: each other. It’s that simple, that beautiful, and that difficult.   

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2016/11/thanksgiving-is-liturgy-of-christian.html

Hymns to the Silence

I had the privilege this morning of doing a presentation (along with my friend Zan, on behalf of the National Alliance on Mental Illness) at the Missoula Friends Meeting House.  From the moment we arrived, I felt something almost uncanny about the ambience of the room: restful, comfortable, hushed, holy but not intimidatingly so.  The group of Friends who gathered graciously to hear us was wonderfully attentive--these are people, after all, who know how to be silent and to listen. During occasional pauses in our presentation, I noticed that the brief silences--which can feel awkward under other circumstances--contained no anxiety or restlessness at all.  

And so I came home feeling grateful, feeling calm, and thinking about silence.

Can you put "silence" into a song?  Van Morrison can, and did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiFc5DHvaxo 

"Hymns to the Silence" is from the album of the same name, released in 1991.  

"Can you feel the silence?  Can you feel the silence?"

This morning I could feel the silence, and I carried a bit of it with me when I left--thank you, Missoula Friends.

Susan Neiman on "Reverence"

The philosopher Susan Neiman has written, among other things, EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT and MORAL CLARITY (a book I shamefully, albeit inadvertently, omitted from my list of “best books of 2014”); as those books attest, she is a superb, lucid, and humane thinker and writer.  I’ve just found some articles by Ms. Neiman archived in the “religion” section at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (www.abc.net.au), a site I highly recommend for anyone interested in theology and philosophy (full disclosure: the articles at ABC tend to be longer than is usual for the web—honest to goodness substantive essays, in fact).

The following passages are from Ms. Neiman’s June, 2013 essay¹ “Reason Needs Reverence,” and they need no commentary from me:  

There is very little written on the concept of reverence, and no wonder: reverence itself is virtually ineffable. It's what gives rise to the feeling expressed by Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Reverence is what you feel when you feel overpowered, struck dumb by the realization that some things are beyond human grasp. Why should human language be able to contain it?

The very word ["reverence"] is likely to produce misgivings, like New Age discussions that begin with the word spirituality. Even those of us with high tolerance for what others call kitsch may find the word too sweet or too tinny, something that's devalued the more often it's invoked. Traditional religion did it with poetry, but writing good poetry about particulars is comparatively easy. Once you abandon the guardrails of traditional faith, the force that was behind it veers off, inarticulate.

The wish to maintain a distinction between sacred and profane is not a recognition of mystery but of limit, with the profound understanding that Creation, wherever it comes from, isn't ours to dispose of. Natural religion's image of Creation was much clearer than its image of a Creator. Whatever else you believe about the world, only one thing is crucial: it wasn't you that made it. ²

This points to one difference between reverence and respect. Respect is something you should feel for yourself along with others. Reverence is the feeling you have for something none of us will ever reach. You can have reverence for God or nature, but also for ideals of justice or beauty or truth. To be reverent is to be aware of the contrast between all the things that you aspire to and all that can bring you down: failure and weakness and madness and, should you somehow avoid all the others, death.

Like anything that underscores the inadequacy of language, reverence is easier to approach by saying what it isn't. It has more than one opposite: scorn, disrespect and most important, envy, one of the deadlier sins. Reverence is usually rare, and one of its elements is surprise. Like love, you cannot will it: if you don't feel reverence toward an object, pointing out its admirable qualities will not help - though without those qualities reverence is impossible. Like love, it overwhelms you, and if moments of love and lovemaking can be reverent, it's because you know you're in the grip of something vaster than you are.

If reverence cannot be willed nor persuaded, it certainly cannot be forced. Perhaps most importantly, reverence belongs to things that cannot be bought or sold. Otherwise it becomes idolatry. If reverence contains admiration it also contains gratitude. That's the impulse behind the argument for design, the idea that Creation is so miraculous there must have been a Creator behind it. Kant thought this was the only argument for God's existence that is tempting for both the scholar and the man on the street, even as he argued that it was fallacious.

And the flaws in the argument didn't prevent Voltaire from feeling reverent in the face of an Alpine sunrise. What you feel in such a moment isn't the kind of gratitude you feel for a gift from a loved one, but closer to what you feel for an unexpected act of kindness from a passing stranger. That is gratitude for Being itself, and for the fact that you're alive to experience it. It's an experience not of pleasure, but of silent celebration. These are feelings that enlarge us, and make us better than before.

Reverence, wonder, humility, awe, and gratitude: these are indispensable responses to existence, and our lives are poorer when we fail to cultivate them.  Thanks to Susan Neiman for her eloquent reminder.

__________________________________________________________________

¹ http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/06/26/3789916.htm

² If I were never to read another word of philosophy or theology, Ms. Neiman may have given me, in this single sentence, the only wisdom I will ever need—which is why I added the “bold” emphasis to her statement.  

The Good They Do

There’s nothing wrong with not believing in God or with not belonging to any organized religion: those things describe me, for instance, among many other people.  And there’s nothing wrong with criticizing the excesses and zealotry to which religion sometimes leads.  But anyone who denies that religion is a powerful force for good in this world can only be willfully blind to the facts.

Yesterday I attended a quarterly meeting of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative.  There were thirty-five or so people present, including clergy and laypersons from various local churches of different denominations, as well as representatives from a number of community organizations (I was there representing NAMI Missoula).  For ninety minutes, over hot soup provided by First Presbyterian Church, we discussed a number of programs and initiatives on which these people and their churches are working.  The issues and expressed concerns included: homelessness, hunger (and “food insecurity”), the reintegration of ex-prisoners into the community, provision of low-income housing, trauma in the lives of children, mental illness, suicide prevention, poverty, and what one participant called “profound isolation”—which, he said, comes in all forms.  All in all, the conversations covered the gamut of what are known as "social justice" issues.

The people at this meeting would be the first to tell you that they are neither saints nor heroes, but simply plain, ordinary human beings.¹ Their concern for (and their willingness to help) the least among us is not just an outgrowth of their faith; it also reflects their innate human decency and kindness.  But there is no question that, for these people, faith—especially faith shared in and nurtured by community—strengthens their resolve and reinforces their commitment.  Faith leads them to go above and beyond and to give of themselves in remarkable ways, sustaining each other in the process: in the face of which, even an atheist ought to be impressed.²

The Missoula Interfaith Collaborative is not an isolated phenomenon; similar groups exist in cities, towns, and villages around the nation.  The common mission of such groups is to bring people of faith together to attend to the wounds of the city, to minister to neighbors and to strangers in our midst, and to embrace the outcast and the marginalized.  Churches and church members reach out in myriad ways on a regular basis, compelled by their faith, their compassion, and their love. I was once, years ago, a member of such a congregation--at Trinity Episcopal Church in Buffalo NY, where I saw for myself how religious conviction inspires people to live out their faith in the world by helping others.  The doctrines of these churches may differ, sometimes quite dramatically; but they all agree on the fundamental precept of “Love thy neighbor,” and they all take it seriously.

Whatever you think of the efficacy of government programs intended to alleviate social problems, know this: the “welfare state” has not displaced and will not displace private efforts to do the same—because so long as there are faith communities, there will be charity and generosity above and beyond what our taxes pay for; there will be love in action.  Missoula is fortunate to have so many people of faith and so many active churches, and to have the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative to bring them together.  You don’t have to consider yourself “religious” to appreciate the work these people do; you just have to have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart open enough to respond with gratitude.

So on behalf of this community: thank you to all the good people of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative.     

____________________________________________________________________________

¹ I think they’re better than that, actually.

² Obviously, this atheist was.

"A Heart Replete With Thankfulness"

The text for today is from 1Corinthians (4:7):

What do you have that you did not receive?  And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

The commentary is from Barnes’ Notes on the Bible:

This is not designed to discourage human exertion; but to discourage a spirit of vain-glory and boasting. A man who makes the most painful and faithful effort to obtain anything good, will, if successful, trace his success to God. He will still feel that it is God who gave him the disposition, the time, the strength, the success. And he will be grateful that he was enabled to make the effort; not vain, or proud, or boastful, because that he was successful. This passage states a general doctrine, that the reason why one man differs from another is to be traced to God; and that this fact should repress all boasting and glorying, and produce true humility in the minds of Christians. It may be observed, however, that it is as true of intellectual rank, of health, of wealth, of food, of raiment, of liberty, of peace, as it is of religion, that all come from God…

Everything I have and everything I am is gift, pure and simple. I look at my life and I realize: I didn’t build that, and today is the day to acknowledge that fact.

 

Free At Last

Oh joy: February is over!

Here’s what I’ve been able to enjoy already this morning, now that I’ve released myself from the confines of the Fox News bubble:

• Steve Kornacki (MSNBC) discussing the just-vetoed Arizona “religious freedom” law with Barney Frank, Joan Walsh, and others;
• An article by Damon Linker (at The Week) on “Is Secularism Inevitable?” (he says No);
• Ben Domenech (at The Federalist) defending the Arizona “religious freedom” law in an article titled “Religious Liberty after Arizona,” in which he argues that “legitimate bigotry will be punished by the marketplace.”  I assume that “legitimate bigotry” is similar to “legitimate rape” and is distinguishable in Mr. Domenech’s mind from “illegitimate bigotry,” i.e. bigotry that Mr. Domenech thinks is perfectly acceptable; 
• Ross Douthat (New York Times) writing about “Religious Experience and the Modern Self”;
• A positive review—at Huffington Post, and penned by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League—of the new movie “Son of God”;
• Finally, an article (from Patheos) about loneliness—“Loneliness and our Social Brain”—which quotes “social neuroscientist” John Cacioppo:

“Like any number of other characteristics, the genetic propensity for desiring social connection    and the propensity for feeling social pain in its absence are transmitted though bits of genetic    information in our cells, coded as instructions for making proteins. The expression of those    genes is dependent on environmental circumstances, whether real or merely perceived.  Some of    the proteins take the form of the hormones that carry messages in the blood. These messages    serve to integrate different organ systems and to coordinate behavioral responses. One of the    hormones is epinephrine, which can flood us with the cluster of sensations we know as arousal.    Another small protein—the hormone oxytocin—promotes breastfeeding, soothing calm, and    close connection.  Other genetically orchestrated proteins give rise to neurotransmitters such as    serotonin, which can elevate our mood or send us into despair, depending on the concentration    in the brain. The genes provide the chemical carrots and sticks that guide behavior, but they    depend on the sensory systems to actually interact with the environment. Signals that the senses receive from the environment trigger changes in the concentration and flow of these hormones and neurotransmitters. These chemicals serve as internal messages to prompt specific behavior—and this is when the genetic instructions at long last appear as individual differences in levels of anxiety, or agreeableness, or sensitivity to feelings of social isolation.”   [Erractic spacing the fault of Typepad formatting]

That quotation is from Mr. Cacioppo’s book LONELINESS: Human Nature and the Need   for Social Connection, and on the basis of the one passage alone, I’m going to skip reading the book and just take Cacioppo’s word for it.  I’m all for neuroscience, but life is too short for me to spend much time reading in any great detail about “chemical carrots and sticks”.

I hope it's clear that I am enjoying life outside the Fox bubble, and that my brain (no doubt as a result of chemical carrots and sticks) is feeling liberated--opposing viewpoints!  Rational discussion!  Nuanced thought!  And for those who think I’ve simply exchanged one bubble for another, allow me to note that Damon Linker, Ross Douthat, and Ben Domenech are all conservative authors; Huffington Post is unabashedly liberal, but The Federalist is staunchly conservative; and loneliness has no ideological affiliation.  Slogans aside, “fair and balanced” isn’t something you’ll ever get from  exclusively watching (or refusing to watch) any one TV network or from exclusively reading any one newspaper or any one magazine; you actually have to go seek it out for yourself.  It’s called “intellectual curiosity,” and believe it or not, it’s fun.

Thank You, Friends

“There is so much abundance / in the people I have…” –Anne Sexton

On the off-chance that the Original Sin was actually ingratitude, I want to make it clear how grateful I am for the people in my life.  To quote the late Lou Gehrig, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth—and I honestly mean that. 

I’m grateful not just for the abundance of the people in my life—friends, family, random strangers—but also for the abundance I have received from a number of people who are no longer with us: Kara, Mark, John S., Joyce, Cheri—and of course Donna.  If friends are the robes we wear when we stand before God, then all of these absent friends (and more) will someday stand with me and I with them.  In the meantime, I’m grateful to have known them and to have been the recipient of their friendship.

And for those friends who are still here, and who do not need to be named because they know who they are: thank you.  The late Alex Chilton (why can't these people be on time?) put it better than I can, and set it to music:

Thank you, friends
Wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you
I'm so grateful
For all the things you helped me do

All the ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Thank you, friends
I rejoice to the skies
Dear ones like you do the best I do
As far as can see my eyes

All the ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Without my friends I got chaos
I'm often a bead of light
Without my friends
I'd be swept up high by the wind

All the ladies and gentlemen
All the ladies and gentlemen
I said, all the ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Here’s a link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5bUSYQ9c2Y

Alex Chilton also wrote a song called “You Get What You Deserve,” to which my response has always been, I hope not.  It’s my good fortune to have gotten far more, and far better, than I have ever deserved.  When the accounts are eventually settled, I owe an awful lot of people, big time.  Be patient with me, friends; the check is in the mail.