+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

Deuteronomy 4:9-14; 2 Corinthians 1:1-11; Luke 14:25-35

Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?
Luke 14:31

It would be easy to turn this verse into a Memorial Day political commentary on the current illegal wars in Iraq and elsewhere.

But I won’t go there.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’
Luke 14:28-30

Right up front, here’s a parable we never tell ourselves. I never finished anything until I was 37 - less than 3 weeks, in fact, from being 38. I dropped out of college in 1987 and never went back. My motto had been, “never leave a company unless you can leave ‘em in the lurch.” Even though I stayed at the Episcopal Church Centre in NYC for nearly 10 years, I felt I was treading water. When I suddenly moved to SF it was because I’d quite my job in NYC. In SF I learned how to cut strings effectively and move forward quickly: I could ditch anyone or anything faster than you could say “I need…” In a lot of my life I felt like the rules of engagement had been described in a musical from the 80s called Chess. The song is “Nobody’s Side.”

Everybody’s playing the game

But nobody’s rules are the same

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Better learn to go it alone

Recognize you’re out on your own

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never make a promise or plan

Take a little love where you can

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never stay too long in your bed

Never lose your heart, use your head

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never take a stranger’s advice

Never let a friend fool you twice

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Everybody’s playing the game

But nobody’s rules are the same

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never leave a moment too soon

Never waste a hot afternoon

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never stay a minute too long

Don’t forget the best will go wrong

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never be the first to believe

Never be the last to deceive

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never make a promise or plan

Take a little love when you can

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Kinda crappy, huh? You know, along the way I think I sublimated those ideas… (it was one of my favourite musicals, I’ve owned several recordings. My friends and I would go to piano bars and sing it.) My perceptions…

My spiritual journey was part of this - sort - from a nice evangelical childhood to ECUSA, to Wicca to Gnosticism and what’s called “High Magick”, to ECUSA, to Orthodoxy. (and now to what? I don’t know.) It’s possible to see all this as phases started and never completed. Being a convert to Orthodoxy feeds into this, btw. My priest encouraged me to make a break so firm with my past as to not even talk to people from “back there”. Three years of journals are shreded. Since he knew I wanted to be a priest, I was told that a priest (or monk) could never refer to his pre-ordination past. In a sense he encouraged me to go there early. But this wasn’t Orthodoxy, really. It was just a way that priest had of control. It fit in with my “cut and run” ideas, but it wasn’t the real faith: In fact Bishop Seraphim (a retired Bp in the OCA) wrote to me once not to belittle my past: “there is Grace before and behind” he said. We must learn to see that. It took a long while to hear him…

My relationships - sexual ones, that is - are pretty much the same. On top of the usual casual dalliances that are common to all of my friends, gay and straight, there are several attempts at long-term. In the story I used to tell myself, I was treated pretty badly. But no, in handsight: I can convince myself it was about 50/50 but really, in the longer-term ones I was the ass.

And what have I to show for 35+ years? Not much, really - some stuff, some pictures and a lot of people who love me and wonder what the heck was wrong. I’ve lived in a lot of places. I’ve had a lot of jobs. And most days, I wake up and feel like i have to start all over again with no sense of continuity.

At least that’s the way I looked at it.

I finished my BA in August of 2002. I finished something. It worked. It earned me other jobs. I cut and ran one more time - from San Francisco to Asheville. And suddenly (well, ok, it took nearly 4 years) a life happened: not a brand new life, mind you. This is the life I’ve been leading for 40 years.

I was emailing back and forth with my friend, Donald, about scripture and about the writings of St Paul. We’re discussing what it means to wrestle with the Biblical texts. How can we take the Bible as a cultural document, but also as a spiritual one, speaking to us where we are but at the same time honestly speaking to us from where the writers were - all of us on a journey together; a journey that is as individual as each of us and as common as birth and sunrise.

The example he brings up is Genesis. It’s not that we modern folk know more about things than the author of Genesis 1 or the author of Genesis 2, or even the redactor who combined them. Rather, he or she may have been at the same point on their spiritual journey as any of us - or more or less mature in the faith. How do we hear that author speaking? What do we learn? (This is my paraphrase of his post, what I read and remember now.)

That was an interesting point… and I wondered how to look at Saint Paul who is at turns radically inclusive and radically exclusive. There is a progression, sure, from New Convert to Grumpy Old Man. But how do we need to hear it?

And the reply came back, very gently (and perhaps unintentionally) pointing me to my own online ouvre: developmental, yes, yet all online. How might a reader take “I was in Hell” coupled with news of my journeys to Canada to see Brodie? How might any of that be read in conjunction with my first-ever entry of a web-based journal (6 October 1998) or even more, the original, email journal/zine - which goes back to 23 January 1995! How, indeed, would a reader encompass all that? Worse, how do *I* encompass it? I’ve shredded the print form of the first three years out of horror (as even John Donne, my namesake, did to some of his early work). The online form, however, is with us forever. I can be embarrassed and saddened when someone happens on that past, or…

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

So it suddenly dawns on me that this parable (for whatever reason it was recorded) has a tendency to think about life in blocks. We can, you know: individual relationships, domestic locations, jobs, five year blocks, three month blocks, fiscal years all make sense as a way to cut our lives into discreet scenes and then judge them as successes or failures. We then get a “majority opinion” on our life, a sort of Supreme Court Judgement. We can know at any moment in time if we’re winning or losing.

But Jesus refocuses all of this by inviting us to take up the cross… and the Greek is written in such a way as to invite us to do that over and over, daily. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s an over-and-over thing. The question is not how many times we tried and failed (or tried and gave up) but rather how many times we kept trying. To take a page from the Twelve Steps - specifically steps 8 and 9 - “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” And having made those confessions and amends, they become learnings, rungs on the ladder. I would not be able to love now were it not for those failures.

Back to St Paul’s conflicting comments. St Paul’s letters stretch, in time, from the 40s - 60s, of the Common Era - leaving out, for a moment, those letters generally agreed not to be authentically Pauline, (First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, Ephesians) - we can see, in Paul’s 15-20 year journey as a Christian, development of doctrine. And Grace in all areas or, as my writer says, “But it has the intriguing virtue of suggesting to you and me (to name two people) that we might look at and listen to our younger selves not only with compassion and forgiveness, but remembering that our younger self - despite all the foibles and failings we each can see in those selves - was up to something authentic, holy, essential and blessed and there’s graceful learning for us in it too.”

St Paul as blogger. And an image of God’s salvation for our own timelines.

No man lays a foundation and doesn’t build the tower? Yes, actually we do it rather often. As Jesus points out elsewhere, as St Paul does as well, we don’t know the future. We make plans but can not keep them: Life happens. The point is not the plans or the failures, but the Life. There is Grace, always. Before and behind. We choose to live in that Grace, taking up our cross and moving forward, God-ward or Love-ward (they are the same thing), following in the way of Jesus.