LITMIR.BIZ

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does for others. But after all these years I’ve come to not expect much any more.

      So Eastertide begins to drag for me. After that Easter morning let-down, and then six Sundays of preaching about John’s post-resurrection stories I began to run dry and wish for some of the Pentecost season readings from the Hebrew Scriptures, rich, powerful, human stories you can really sink your teeth into. And then this morning we arrived at the story of Stephen, the new deacon who left off deaconing and took up preaching and got himself stoned to death for it. Had a vision as he was dying, and as he shouted out his vision, well, I thought, that’s what happens to mystics; they get stoned, and then someone accommodatingly stones them to death. Happened to the prophets. Happened to Jesus (except execution by suffocation, shock and exposure on a Roman cross instead of rocks). Now it’s happening to Stephen. And others will follow. Mystics are just too off-the-wall, too loose-cannon-ish, too outside the limits, beyond the pale. They can’t be tamed, and so they can’t be tolerated. They can’t be controlled, and they dream weird things, wheels within wheels and hundred-eyed indescribable critters, things that point beyond the texts, beyond the codified experiences, beyond the expectable. And those dreams point toward mysteries not captured (perhaps not even hinted) in the holy writings, mysteries more indescribable than trinities, mysteries more fundamental than even YHWH.

      And I, fool that I am, have a yen for some mystical experiences. I think they might open understandings deeper and richer and more elemental and more extensive and more profound than the tales of Hebrews and their images of the eternal. I would hope for glimpses, mere glimpses mind you, of the chasms and abysses that illuminated and motivated Jesus. Souls are willing to be stoned to death for things like that, and some people are always willing to accommodate them.

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      Feast of Pentecost and Mothers’s Day—May 11, 2008

      Nancy and I took Ed and Marvine to their church this morning, a small, very country church with an average age of about seventy-five. Found myself reflecting on what a different circle of standing stones this was. A country UCC church, farmers and such, just coming off a short, bad pastorate with a gal they should never have called, now being interimed by a senior pastor who’d served here before, but only as long-term Sunday Supply. She fits them well, seems as country and down home as they are. And I reflected (though I’d been here before and reflected on this community before) how different an experience this was from our normal St. Luke’s, Episcopal experience. No formal liturgy here to speak of. But lots and lots of family. What happens in this circle of stones? A reinforcement of this as a chosen extended family. These folks seem to like each other, feel at home around each other (I’ve no hint what ancient animosities and dividing biases separate them; they keep those monsters hidden even from themselves). The first minutes were taken with greetings around the room (time is deliberately or accidently given for this), and the formal service began after this was completed. The pastor began with a folksy litany built around “This is for mothers who . . . .” Folksy, country stuff that said “You’re okay, we’re okay.” Not stiff Anglican liturgical material. A lot of (hidden) stuff was going on (I felt). Not clear how much of it was Christian. The words of the service were built around the Pentecost readings, but I was not clear that the underlying messages were; they seemed to me more American, mid-Western, farming country messages, and I suspect you need to be a seasoned member of this community to comprehend the underlying, subtle, not explicitly voiced messages. But values were being reinforced. And the pastor knows how to talk with them, country-folk. So a kind of matriarchy was going on. At announcement time one mother touted her son’s perfectly pitched baseball game the day before, seventy-five pitches for the whole seven innings. A round of applause felt appropriate, though not given. As a preacher she seemed to me somewhat scatter-shot with Pentecost messages about getting some mission going, and the Interim’s messages about some things that need to be happening here, get with it! Not my kind of tight and obviously erudite piece of scholarship. And no Communion; but that was missed only by my Anglican fixation on Eucharist. But these were folks who were enjoying seeing each other for an hour, and then anxious to get on homeward. This circle is about such different things than my St. Luke’s that it is kind of amusing (though to say that would sound deprecating, which I do not intend). And I can only hunch what things are given voice and enactment within this circle; I’m deaf as a post to their language, unable to hear what is being said in between and underneath the words. This is not my circle of standing stones.

      Perhaps at St. Luke’s we are reaching out to touch the numinous in our very stiff and formalized, ritualistic, liturgical ways; while here they seem reaching for family, farm community, for keeping-it-together kinds of things through a very loose, flexible, transparent kind of liturgy.

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      My Circle of Standing Stones

      So each Sunday I make the pilgrim trek to my particular circle of stones (I pass two other Episcopal ones enroute, one because the pastor is a proudly self-proclaimed red-neck who preaches a funny, backwoods version of Americanism with some gospel stuff occasionally thrown in; and the other because the now-moved-on rector chased Nancy and me away with her incompetent temper tantrums) and wonder, “What am I getting from this community, circle of stones?” and “What is this community, this circle of standing stones needing or wanting of me?” I know I am trying to reach far beyond what this circle can open to me. I can still enjoy and engage in the intellectual musings of this community; they are fun, but in the end insufficient to fund my searching. And I’ve thus far found no one standing in this circle whom I trust to search alongside. So that is not its drawing for me, not a place to deepen and extend my search for the eternal.

      And the liturgy? Well, it’s mine, it’s what I grew up with (despite the superficial changes of the 1979 Prayer Book revision), it’s what I was trained in and practiced professionally for so many years. I am accustomed to and feel most comfortable with it; it is my liturgical home. And it is a limen for me, in its own way, a doorway that opens in a very limited way, to whatever lies beyond, a tiniest, halting baby step toward an Eternal. But I have come to understand that liturgy is a communal thing, it is done to foster the community; it cannot, is not designed or intended to feed the individual’s soul. No one has told me that; I have gradually uncovered that for myself, and I do not know if that is true for anyone else around me, or whether anyone else has ever discovered it. So my soul-feeding must happen elsewhere, through some other limen or imaginal. Liturgy has become comforting, but not illuminating, and is instructive only to a minuscule degree. It is a comforting metaphor, but I am unclear for what.

      And while I like the people who gather in this circle, and enjoy being with some of them, this is a very artificially chosen extended family for me. They are not intimate family or friends for me. But then I am a very alone person who has, or needs very few intimates or compatriots.

      So what is this circle for me? I am no longer sure. It draws me back, and I willingly participate. It yields me some little time, some little place, some little focus to muse, to recall, to re-sort, to review and reframe. It causes me to pay enough attention to ask, “What is happening here? What is this about?” and “What is it pointing toward? For what is it the metaphor?” Probably without this time and place I would not take the time to wonder, much less to ask. It does that much. And perhaps it does much more. Perhaps it reminds me that there is something much more than what is happening here, something to which I, Jack Bowers, need to be paying attention. It invites me. But to what?

      And what is this circle of standing stones needing of me? I’ve so little notion of what I have to give, and even less a clue as to what it is in need of. What do I bring that it wants, or needs?

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      A Saturday—September 20, 2008

      And now I place one foot outside my standing stone circle, and begin to wonder, perhaps to wander. Odds and ends begin to pile up, bits and pieces, and to join up, and to form a vague alternative to this particular circle, a not-yet-viable alternative, an only vague one.

      I’ve been scouring, even teaching Jack Miles’s book, God: a biography. He tracks the YHWH of the Hebrew Scriptures, from Genesis through Chronicles, watching simply what He does and says, and asking “Who is He? What is He?” The portrait

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