It was a great day for bicycling today. Early this morning I got out for about 18 miles on the road bike, and I'm up over 1,000 miles for the year. I'm right where I want to be. I like to average 200 miles a month on the road bike. Then, with the miles on the commuter bike, I get close to 3,000 for the year.

Then, commuting today, the breeze was behind me on the way home! Perfect!

I also was very pleased with my new Specialized messenger bag for the commute. It's the same size and quality as the medium bag made by Timbuk2, but much cheaper. I've been making do with various kinds of bags -- but the right equipment makes such a difference! The only problem is that the only shop that sells Specialized equipment is Conte's, which I've always thought of as the evil empire. (We had enough shops in town before Conte's opened, and we like the owners of the other shops, and we don't want the market to be so dilluted that our friends go out of business.) To Barry at Bikes Unlimited: I promise, I won't buy anything else at Conte's.

Here's Barry's eclectic shop
http://www.bikewilliamsburg.com/home

This Memorial Day

From this morning's New York Times, a beautifully-written editorial about Memorial Day.

Memorial Day often seems like a holiday that anticipates summer. But this year in the Northeast at least, it feels like exactly what it is — a spring holiday. If this had been a scorcher of a spring, rather than unseasonably rainy and cool, perhaps this Memorial Day wouldn’t feel quite so premature. As it is, the lilacs upriver from New York are just beginning to fade — after a tumultuous lilac year, blossoms dense as thunderheads — and the poppies are just threatening to open.

There is also a springlike, life-affirming mood to this day. There are grand, public memorials — as there should be. But in some ways the most meaningful are the intimate ones, the private ones, where we both mourn and celebrate the men and women who have died in this country’s service.

What transforms this nation’s cemeteries today isn’t merely fresh flowers or small American flags or carefully tended gravestones. It’s the presence of quiet people — gathered in small groups or standing alone — paying homage to a grave that marks a life that was sacrificed. Some of these people are still racked by their loss, which is as recent as yesterday. In others the loss has become a very old wound, the pain still lingering in memory even though the scar has faded.

We drive or walk past the cemetery and its poplars, feeling the tug of the season ahead, the resistance of the season behind. At first we may not feel a visceral connection to those somber gravesides or the people standing there. But their loss is ours, and always will be. That is the meaning of Memorial Day.

My most-recent favorite bumper sticker is this:

"Subvert the Dominant Paradigm"

Actually, I'm not sure we need to expend any energy to do that. It's been happening, and is continuing to happen, in just about every arena you can think of.

For instance --

The dominant paradigm used to be: We are safe from foreign attack on our soil.

The dominant paradigm used to be: If you go to college, you'll get a good job.

The dominant paradigm used to be: If you get a good job with a good company, and do a good job, you have a job for life and a pension for your retirement.

The dominant paradigm used to be: The "Big Three" (GM, Chrysler and Ford) are the world leaders in automobile production.

The dominant paradigm used to be: People go to church on Sunday mornings.

The list could go on and on, right?

Here are a couple of faith questions. In all of this, what is the Spirit up to? What is the future God is leading us into?

The big news today is that William and Mary students broke the all-time record of the greatest number of people simultaneously doing the dance to Michael Jackson's song, "Thriller."

To see this momentous event, go to www.youtube.com and type into the search box: William and Mary Thriller.

It's great!

I didn't even know William and Mary students could dance!

A death, and all the emotions that make up grief. People gather for a memorial service. A reception afterwards: time for conversation, a hug.

What does the grieving person hear, over and over? "If you need anything, call me."

Does that ever happen? Does the grieving person ever call? Rarely.

Why is that?

I've said for years that it's because we've been formed by our culture that so much values self-sufficiency and privacy.

As for self-sufficiency: We are formed to think it is a weakness to reach out for help. (One purpose of Christian community is to form us in a value counter to the culture: that we are interdependent; that we need to let others carry us when we are weak, in the same way that we carry others when they are weak.)

As for privacy: Susanna Owens, a member of our congregation and a therapist at the Counseling Center at the College of William and Mary recently told me that she's not sure that is the problem. She thinks it's more a matter of trust. I think she's on to something important. Since we are formed in a culture of competition, we are formed to distrust others. (Another purpose of Christian community is to create a safe place to be vulnerable.)

In any event, it is not enough to say to a grieving person, "If you need anything, call me."

Instead, make the call yourself. There are no magic words to say. A good starter question is, "How are you doing?" And then listen. When a grieving person knows you are a good listener, s/he is encouraged to trust you. If that trust builds, and when you have called every week or so for a lot of weeks, and have then checked in for a lot of months after that, you might find that you've been a part of the grieving person's healing.

(You know all of this, don't you, from your own journeys through grief?)

This is the remarkable second editorial in today's Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Religion seems much on America's mind. What else is new? A Newsweek cover story, "The End of Christian America," provoked debate and consternation. Critics who likened the article to an attack on Christianity either misread the piece or read it without clarity and, for that matter, without charity. The author, Jon Meacham, identifies himself as a Christian, albeit a "poor" one, which places him among the multitudes, including the writer of these words. Then there is the controversy regarding Notre Dame, Barack Obama, and an honorary degree. Accusations have been traded regarding another movie based on another comic novel by Dan "Da Vinci Code" Brown. Editors of Britain's Economist have published a book about religion's resiliency. God Is Back proclaims the title, a prospect a reviewer in The New York Times evidently considers appalling.

Two new books have kept us occupied. In Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart discusses "The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies." An Orthodox theologian, Hart writes with elegance. Even his invective has style. Try this: "The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great, a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method." Hart examines the so-called new atheists, and finds them wanting. How could they be otherwise? The culture cannot even produce what Hart calls "profound unbelief." Belief can be banal as well, yes it can.

Atheist Delusions is not simply a broadside or a witty counterpunch but also something of an apologetic. Hart sings beautifully of the mysteries and of what happens when communion reunites. His focus falls not on religion generally or on a vague spirituality but on Christianity, whose central claim he calls the "most subversive" in the whole of human history. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" and was crucified and is risen indeed.

William Murchison's Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity disappoints. Murchison, a retired senior columnist with the Dallas Morning News who earned national admiration for his editorial stewardship, addresses the well-documented decline in mainline Protestantism, with specific attention paid to his home, the Episcopal Church. He cites various trends in the denomination itself, as well as trends in the church's relations to the secular world, that have driven distressed congregants from the pews. Subjects include alterations in the Prayer Book (not only in grammar but in content), reparations to African-Americans, homosexuality, and the late Bishop Jim Pike. The ordination of women, in Murchison's indictment, may be the original folly from which much mischief flows. Our editor disagrees. Many are they who, sitting on the knees, with great gladness take bread and wine consecrated by merciful women of the cloth, whose souls magnify their Lord.

Sourness undermines Murchison's plea. The tone wearies. The Eucharist receives scant treatment, and, as a noun, even suffers a sneer. Oh dear. Children, the candle burns; the light glows. At the rail division disappears. Despite all the changes, favored or ill, affecting the church, for many believers communion is now, and forever will stay, "the most loved and solemn act of Christian worship." Theology comes in tomes and in tracts; yet as vital as scholarly exercises might be, in the end, or, more precisely, in the beginning, Christian theology boils down to two words: Imitate Christ. Which is to say, remember. Be.

Not only do I drive a red Miata with the license plate "B-tine", but I've put on the bumper stickers below:



The car is awfully recognizable in this little town. So, as my Dad used to say, I "gotta stay out of bars and pool halls." (At least, I can't park the car in front of a bar or a pool hall. Maybe down the street a few blocks ...)

This past Saturday I completed my fifth century ride since recoving from my illness, and the first since I put the "100" bumper sticker on the car. This century even featured bonus miles: the odometer read 103.97 miles at the end.

It was very windy on Saturday. But at least it was real hot and humid. I averaged about 15 miles per hour over the century. There were an awful lot of macho, Lance Armstrong wanna-bes who blew past me early in the day. I took special pleasure, later on, riding past several who were stopped on the side of the road, nursing leg muscle cramps, because they hadn't stopped often enough to drink liquids. (Who finishes first: the tortoise or the hare?)

Yesterday I finished Brad Gooch's captivating biography of Flannery O'Connor, who died at age 38, of lupus. Tomorrow I officiate at two memorial services, for two people who died too young. Since I have been grieving for them, Gooch's stark description of Flannery's final illness and death hit with special force -- even though I knew how the story would end.

As Garrison Keilor said years ago, our griefs accumulate.

Awake much earlier than I needed to be this morning, feeling overwhelmed with all I need to do. So I made the coffee and spent an hour reading through Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Dorothy Day lived one of the most chaotically active lives of Christian discipleship in history, and her diary entries reflect that. But she also writes about her constant effort to re-center in God's presence and love and in an awareness of the daily blessings that come to us, so that a chaotically busy Christian disciple can remember exactly why s/he's got so much to do!

It was raining (again!) when I first got up. So I listened for the rain to let up, and then went out to get the newspapers. Each morning I am amazed at how consistent is the performance of our New York Times delivery person. Every morning, I find the Times in the ditch, less than three feet from the edge of the driveway. In other words, the delivery person nearly, almost gets the paper on the driveway surface, every morning!

Oh well. At least I know exactly where in the ditch I'll find the paper when I go out to get it.

Yesterday morning the youth of the congregation led worship. That is always a moving experience for me: listening to high school seniors tell how they have seen that the Spirit has been active in their maturation, and sharing ideas about the work that God might be calling them to do as adults. This service becomes more moving to me, the longer I am here -- because I remember when these youth were entirely unable to think in such terms. I remember when they were young children.

Yesterday, both Katie and Matthew thanked the congregation for the role we had played over the years!

That is how the faith is formed: in community, through the practices of the faith.

Our foundational practice is worship. And, yesterday, I watched how it happens. The high school youth were leading the service. But, during the Hymn of Praise, a young mother was singing the words into the ear of her three-year old daughter she was holding, so that the child would learn the hymn. A few pews away, a nine-year old was singing the words to the hymn herself.

How had the nine-year old come to know the Hymn of Praise by heart? How had the high school youth come to see the movement of the Spirit? It's because their parents bring them to worship, to the commuity's foundational formation event. The result of that foundation, and of follow-up conversation in classes and youth events, is that the teenagers are making the transition from what they thought about God in childhood. They are coming to understand the stories in the Bible in a more sophisticated way. They are understanding the necessary role of mentors in the faith community who support them and provoke them in their growth. In other words, the Spirit is leading them on the journey to conceive of who the God of compassion is, revealed in the compassion of Jesus; a faith that can serve them well in the joys and tragedies of adulthood.

How else can human beings come to be formed in love and compassion, in forgiveness and the joy that comes from that, in the hunger for justice, without the formation that takes place in the community of faith? Certainly, these are values counter to the culture we live in.

Certainly, the Spirit is much more able to form people in faith when parents and sponsors and congregation members do what they say they will do at the baptismal font. The most important of those promises is to see that children grow into teenagers and then into adults, in the context of the weekly formative experience of worship.

“What if everybody just took a timeout?”

That’s the first line of a recent Kathleen Parker column in the newspaper.

She writes that we’re “a TMI-addled nation. It isn’t only Too Much Information, but the pitch and tenor of delivery that have us in a persistent state of psychic frenzy. From cable news to micro-blogs to the latest 'Fox Nation,' life’s background music has become one prolonged car alarm.”

Parker asserts that we’re so overwhelmed with data that we “can’t tell what’s important and eventually become incapable of responding to what is. Our brains simply aren’t wired to receive and process so much information in such a compressed period.

“In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is one quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that’s three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

“The massive explosion of information has made us all a little batty. Just ask the congressional assistants who field frantic phone calls from constituents.

“’Everybody’s come unhinged,’ one told me recently. ‘They think we’re going to hell in a handbasket. And maybe we are.’

“Who knows?” Parker asks, wryly.

And then, this paragraph: “In fact, brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we’re not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime.”

There’s a name for what is needed here. It’s an ancient practice of the faith, in both the Jewish and Christian faith traditions. It is, perhaps, more critically needed now than it ever has been before.

It’s called sabbath time.

Sabbath time is “time out” with a particular orientation towards the daily gifts that come to us from God. Sabbath time itself is a gift from God (a gift that, sadly, many of us do not receive).

Sabbath time is for freedom! It is an opportunity, for instance, to be free from the compulsion to pay attention to the overload of information that comes to us minute-by minute. (Here’s the sabbath mindset, in the words of a monk I know: “The thing is not to read widely, but to read deeply.”) In sabbath time, God offers freedom to taking stock, to process and regain perspective, to think, to pray.

Sabbath time is for enjoyment! Enjoy worship and prayer that reminds us that all is gift from God. Enjoy activities that refresh and renew – with the consciousness that these activities are gifts from God: time for enjoying loved ones God has given you, for taking walks, eating together, playing. Patiently overhauling a bicycle wheel hub, and enjoying a ride on the bike path. Getting dirt under your fingernails in the garden. Working in the wood shop in the garage. Fishing. Sabbath freedom from cell phones and computers. For one day a week, trusting that we have enough and not shopping.

Sabbath time is freedom from the need to produce, to be “constructive.”

It is time to waste.

What joy!

Sabbath time – a day a week, an hour a day – is simply necessary for spiritual and emotional and physical health. It’s an essential practice of the faith, if the Holy Spirit is to produce faith that is rich and vibrant, growing and joyful.