Serendipity As part of my duties as a hospital chaplain, I say prayers with the pre-surgery patients who request it. One day, I was on the prep unit, visiting someone, when I saw another man being prepped. There was nothing special about him, but somehow I felt he would want a prayer. Still, he hadn’t asked for one, so I returned to my office. It wasn’t long before his name appeared in my inbasket for a visit. Returning to his bedside, I introduced myself. He was friendly, enough, but he didn’t seem to know why I was there. “Did you ask for a chaplain?” I asked him. He said he…
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One Who Loves Me
Someone for Whom I Am Life He was young to have a stroke, but that didn’t make it any less debilitating. No one knew how much of his old self he’d recover. When I met him, his right arm was cramped, his fingers unwieldy. Speaking was not easy. He needed help with simple tasks. His nurse said he often refused to try to feed himself or brush his teeth. He seemed to have lost the will to live. Call him Jacob. It seems he’d wrestled with angels, though his wound was more severe than his namesake’s, and he felt anything but blessed. Since we rarely recognize godsends when they come…
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Knowing God’s Love
The God of Job About a year ago, while working on a column about the Book of Job, I came across the passage below. Job has demanded that God be put on trial, that he answer his questions about fairness and justice, yet God answers nothing. Instead, God grills him. He asks Job: Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope?Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? [1] Job…
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Life Stages and Spiritual Growth
Learning Right from Wrong Living with my two- and four-year-old grandchildren reminds me that, not only is childhood about discovering the shapes and movements and idiosyncrasies of the world, but also about learning to manage one’s inner experience and behavior. In the best of all possible worlds, we receive help labeling those strange sensations in our chest, the rumblings in our belly. Maybe they’re fear, sadness, rage, embarrassment, frustration. Once we give them a name, we can figure out what to do with them, how to express them in word or picture, in play and movement. Then there’s morality. We have to learn what our culture deems proper, what our…
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Shame, Shamelessness, and the Parson
Shame, Shamelessness, and Narcissism Shame sometimes looks like its opposite. When our shame becomes unbearable, it twists into an intractable shamelessness. Then we can hurt others without remorse. Unless something stokes our pride or satisfies our lust, it means nothing to us. When we are shameless, no consequence society can enforce will affect us. No matter how ferocious or ingenious, punishments cannot squeeze remorse from an indifferent heart. Catcalls, beatings, imprisonment, banishment might sting, but only those who entertain the possibility that they have done wrong will be moved to change. The shameless feel offended by chastisement. They see themselves as victims. Thus, they defend themselves from condemnation by condemning…
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Animal Intelligence
Animals as Sacred For the Creek Indians, animal intelligence is a given. Indeed, not only do they, and many indigenous people, consider animals to be smart, but they see them as superior to humans. They were here first, after all. As Creek stories explain, animals created the world and then made us. We are related to them, but they are spiritually advanced, and we owe them respect. [1] The native people of the Arctic believe reindeer and caribou can understand and respond to human thought. [2] Australian aborigines recognize that animals are sentient. [3] David Aftandilian suspects that native peoples came to understand the wisdom and spiritual maturity of animals…
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Shattering Images of God
The First Cause It may be an illusion, this world we inhabit: a virtual reality machine, a dream, a joke. But if so, who’s running it all? If it’s all smoke and mirrors, surely something is tending the fire, polishing the glass? Perhaps the Big Bang is truth, and a singularity randomly popped into existence, just as quanta wink in and out, without someone or something controlling it. Alternately, quantum fluctuations may have created a series of Big Bounces, resulting in one multiple universes. Some people imagine there was no beginning, that space always existed. When conditions were right, time manifested, and the universe-building began. No god required. It’s hard…
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Coming Home to Ourselves
We Can’t Go Home To be a hero, at least in myth and fairy tale, we must leave home. Maybe we set off to right a wrong, vanquish a monster, save a loved one from a witch’s spell, find our fortune. In the stories, no adventure or peril is too great for us. The deed will be done. On the way, as we spar with giants, beat at windmills, turn the river from its course, melt the witch, we change. Hopefully, by the time we end up back home, we are wiser, more true to ourselves. Yet we are not who we once were. That’s one reason, of course, that…
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Texts of Terror and Love
Death in Numbers 25 The Hebrew Bible is the story of a love affair between Yahweh and his chosen bride, Israel. In return for God’s blessings, the people promise fidelity, yet over and over, they rebel, complain, and bow down to other gods. Sometimes Yahweh is patient. At other times, he punishes them harshly. One such harsh punishment occurred at the end of the Israelite’s wilderness journey. They were camped along the Jordan River across from Canaan. In between Balaam’s prophecy that Israel would be victorious in battle against the neighboring tribes and the taking a census of the Israeli people, lies the tale of the murder of Zimri and…
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Nonjudgment and Moral Discrimination
The Trickster Elegba Elegba, also called Èshù, is a Yoruban trickster deity. He mediates between the heaven and earth, has dominion over the crossroads, and, though he creates mischief, he does so in the service of harmony. Elegba teaches us that there are two sides to every question. [1] In their book of stories, Nina Jaffe and Steve Zeitlin retell a story about Elegba. Once upon a time, there lived two farmers, Olufemi and Olushegun. They lived next to one another and were great friends. Every day they talked, and they always agreed. If they were deciding how to harvest their crops or how to discipline their children, they agreed.…