Monthly Archives: January 2012
That’s so God!
If we want to populate society with powerful and responsible citizens, then we need to put more little people on big horses.
The thing about little people riding big horses is the chance it gives everyone to learn something. I saw this when my daughter Rosaling rode in an equestrian therapy for the handicap program. The horses learned to be gentle and take orders from a small being, which is pretty much the life of race, work, show and ordinary coral and barn horses anyway
The little girls and boys had a take-away too — the exquisite opportunity to gain confidence and grow in responsibility which are the very things little people will occasionally need as they go along in the world.
And if we let our little ones ride horses, then they most like will or should get the opportunity to have another shaping experience common to life everywhere — mucking out stalls.
Horses make muck, and someone has to muck it out.
It can be quite successfully argued that we all, children, horses and adults alike, need to grow in confidence and responsibilty and that we all have the chance because we all have stalls to muck. We all have our bathrooms and we have our interior stalls — mental stalls, emotional stalls and spiritual stalls, and that they all need to be mucked out, from time to time. There is no need to drag out studies or statistics or defining narratives to establish such a thesis.
Look inward, and follow your nose — muckish!
I think most of us know we aren’t perfect. If we live or have lived in a family, we know we are not perfect. We have been told, by those who know us best, or worst — repeatedly!
I am charmed by the Biblical story of the fall, although it strikes me that the famous narrative is badly misnamed. The traditional title, “The Fall” works okay I guess to cover one of the actions, but really there are several falls the story, from several angles by which the participants fall, not one. The mythic elements of the tale begin to take on a very present-day and realish character as the stumbling couple falls away from health, falls away from personal responsiblity, falls away from a safe home and falls away from each other. And while leaning dangerously, and eventually heading for a hard bounce off the garden floor, the wayward couple falls behind the trees to a place where they hope even God “can’t” find them.
I am charmed by the story. I am not charmed by the various forms of physical and moral tumbling, but I am charmed by the rightingx, the straightenings, the hand up that occurs after the ignominious and deadly falls.
I am charmed, in this story, by the behavior of God.
Genesis 3:9 states that after the falling out, that the“LORD God called … “Where are you?”
God called.
This is a perfect portrait of God. After failure, God is a caller. God is always the one calling. God called, immediately. He must have had Adam and Eve’s mobile number on speed dial. He called, right away. He texted. And God texted them too, and his text is the book of Genesis
God has always texted.
When we flatten out, God texts, not to blame but to help. They blamed each other, God came to them to stop the blaming.
Why did God call out to Adam and Eve? Because God wanted to begin to muck out their stalls.
Once I backed my SUV into a telephone pole. When I got home and “mentioned” it to my wife, she said, “It’s ok, that’s why we have insurance.”
The grace in that, the lack of judgment, beautiful; God the same. After Adam and Eve’s wreck, God brought out his insurance policy, which was his love. God’s call to them, as they hid behind the trees in the garden, tells us what we need to know about how God reacts to our failure. God didn’t abandon them when they failed. God didn’t reject them and decide not to have a relationship with them.
God loved them. They hid, but God went out and found them, and then began a process, which of course including restorative consequences, to stand them upright again and muck things out.
Theologians refer to this story as the story of “original sin;”it is, but it is also and even primarily the story of original love!
The first family fell. The first family couldn’t muck out the muck that followed the fall.
But God , He put them back in the saddle and led them home to a stall that he had cleaned up. I like the story of the fall. It’s not so much a story of our failure as it is as story about God’s success.
God fixes falls, which means God puts us back on horses again and gives us more opportunities to ride, to be responsible, to gain confidence and to finally, grow up and get back to mucking out stalls again ourselves.
I like it, a mucking-out-the-stall kind of God.
I like it, a standing-back-up-fallen-beings kind of God.
I love it, a responsiblity-restoring kind of God.
Such fetching behavior!
It’s just so God.
Red
I clearly remember the moment I first took responsibility for the earth.
It was the day I found big Red. He was a mangy male on the plus side of the scale, lots of ginger hair with some facial scars that belied his kick-back personality.
When I found Red, wandering, I drug him home with me, his forelegs hanging over both my arms, his stiff ears brushing the underside of my chin, his back legs and tail bumping along on the ground behind.
My mom let me keep him, but he was pretty much confined to outside, where he wanted to be anyway, just in case there was a chance to mix it up with the feline cuties flirting in the neighborhood.
To get a sense of Red, you must understand something: He was so large and prowlish that when he was out and about, mothers pulled their small children back inside the house.
I was very, very proud of Red; his homecoming put me in a God-like category.
Genesis 1:26 states rather underwhelmingly that in the amazing and astonishing beginning of the very beginning of us, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible … “
And then, in perhaps the greatest omission in world literature, the text goes on to say, “for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.” In other words, for Red.
The author, seemingly unawares, blithely glosses over the emotional reaction — an unbelievable ellipses! Upon creation of beings like himself, God must have jumped up and down, waved his arms and hooted! Adam and Eve must have screamed with pure delight. The animals must have jumped into a celebration chorus so raucous and joyful that it forever upstaged any and all imitative, animated, Disney-movie hit tunes!
What? The emotional response to creation was not mentioned? Perhaps, it was shockingly lost in the Hebrew oral tradition, or perhaps Moses thought he couldn’t do it linguistic justice.
But the effect wasn’t lost. According to the record, Adam and Eve jumped right into the forray and started happily naming things. With all the acumen of a Carl Linnaeus they classified the marvelous creatures they were now wonderfully “responsible” for.
Cool! They acted out the DNA of God. They named, they brought home, they cared for — Red!
To care for the creation, to name it, feed it, pet it and bring it home with us– this is the image of God in us. The image of God is reflected in human responsibility for creatures. The sacred text itself says, God made us like him, so we could be responsible.
And in a damaged world and a broken creation, it is certainly the most God-like thing we can do to find lost creatures and to bring them home and care for them.
Want to be God-like?
Feed the dog.
Bring home a lost humanoid too.
Ordering Disorder
Around him sat at least 15 open paint cans, a half-dozen paint trays half-full of paint and a good 20 rollers and brushes with paint hardening at the edges.
He looked up at me from the mess, smiled wryly and said, “It would have been a lot easier to do it myself with a paint gun and one helper.
This was what the end of a church painting project at a campground in Mexico. About 20 people had been recruited, transported, armed with paint “weapons” and turned loose on a couple of now shinning buildings. It worked — kind of.
It’s typical. The end of most attempts to order the earth have a behind-the-scenes disorder to them. It’s called clean-up.
Last week, I got out the ladder, and took down the Christmas lights. There was a pile on the lawn, then a pile in the box, then Christmas was again on the top shelf of the garage.
Life is a lot about the clean up, about ordering the disorder created in our attempts to bring about order.
I talked to someone yesterday who is in need of redoing their taxes, in a better way, a more orderly, honest way. They told me that they have a sense of an era closing. They simply aren’t going to cut corners they used to cut. A new definition of what’s orderly has inspired them and a mess is going to be cleaned up, as best it can be cleaned up.
Paint rollers, taxes, Christmas decorations, the kitchen sink, our minds, our hearts – all need attention, ordering. To leave them as they are is to complicate the future. To order them is to bring about the next thing, to provide an opportunity for something new to happen.
I just cleaned out my clothes closet in my bedroom. Some of the shirts and pants that I had not that long ago bought, placed in my closet, wore, washed and returned to the closet were now tossed in a box to be donated, in order to restore order to my closet. Some of them, I just wasn’t wearing anymore and they were complicating and hiding the clothes I am wearing.
When I finished, I felt ready, for this year and I felt something else. I felt calm.
Isaiah the Jewish prophet, claimed that the effect of being right and doing the right thing is peace.
Order equals calm. I like it, calm, a sense that for the moment things are okay.
What’s next? We decide, what to do with disorder in our lives.
A good plan for any chaos or mess might look like the following:
First an ordering of the disorder, then calm.
The garage.
The closet.
The past.
A broken relationship.
A mental confusion.
The inner-most closet of the heart — think cleanup.
