A Screamo Easter

There are three Sundays in particular that cause me consternation: Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. These celebrations are so meaningful to me and the christian faith, that I struggle to communicate them with creativity and pathos appropriate to their inherent specialness.

Easter is coming in a couple days and my soul wants to scream He Lives. The music for the season communicates powerfully with their words but the tunes are reminiscent of marshmallow peeps.

The best rendition of Christ the Lord Is Risen Today that I could find is this one. It is up beat and modern, but in a smooth jazz/r&b sort of way. To communicate the joy and rapture that ought to be bursting from our hearts, the jazz should be rough and the blues sexy. I feel like if I gave voice to my soul I should scream it out half choking on the emotion - I want to hear P.O.D. or Blindside's rendition!

We cannot celebrate Easter hard enough!  Death, the grave and hell conquered by the unfathomed awful rising of the triumphant King!

Allegorical practical jokers

"Innocent Smith is not a madman - he is a ritualist. He wants to express himself, not with his tongue, but with his arms and legs - with my body I thee worship, as it says in the marriage service. I begin to understand the old plays and pageants. I see why the mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why the mummers were mum. They meant something; and Smith means something too. All other jokes have to be noisy - like little Nosey Gould's jokes, for instance. The only silent jokes are the practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly considered is an allegorical practical joker."

Ritual and liturgy really are the way we incarnate the mysteries of life. Isn't it then the call of all lovers of Christ to be practical jokers in the sense of Smith? Shouldn't all our lives be a charade to act out the love of God?

Saint Francis and saint Trask

Foster himself places St. Francis squarely in the Charismatic stream, citing him as a prime historical example. “I commend Francis of Assisi to you as a model of charismatic jubilee” (106). Jubilee sums up the beautiful sense of joy found in St. Francis. From Le Jongleur de Dieu to whimsical songs to brother Sun and moon, to his own child like wonder and perpetually simple faith, joy filled the Franciscan spirit. It was also jubilee in the sense of the freedom. The emancipation from the dark ages, and the freedom granted in supernatural works. His was a strange mix of celebration and asceticism -- they found their home together in his constant practice of simplicity. Simplicity as Foster notes brings freedom and joy.

From the horrors of war, a year of captivity and a year of convalescence stirred and transformed something deep within Francis. His family and friends may well have seen it as a break with reality, for he through off the imposed reality of this world with the clothes off his back and began a quest to enter fully into the reality of the Kingdom of God. Foster notes his longing for transformation, quoting his poem to the virtues:

Hail, Queen Wisdom! May the Lord preserve you
With your sister holy pure Simplicity!
O lady holy Poverty, may the Lord save you
With your sister holy Humility!
O lady holy Charity, may the Lord save you
With your sister holy Obedience
O al you most holy virtues,
May the Lord save you all,
From Whom you come and proceed (Foster 104).

Francis was gregarious and influenced by the wandering troubadours and jugglers who entertained from town to town. Even as a young man and a soldier, Chesterton notes, “Francis was one of those people who are popular with everybody in any case; and his guileless swagger as a Troubadour and leader of French fashions made him a sort of romantic ringleader around town” (41). That is his transformation wasn’t in his character as much as in whom he served. As he through himself into the service of God with characteristic abandon, he traded French fashions for a hair shirt, but he remained a ringleader, romantic toward God and His creation, and a Jongleur de Dieu.

With beauty Chesterton describes the time and world of Francis. The world was emerging from the dark ages, a time of penance and purging from pagan naturalism. St. Francis emerged into a world that was clean and ready to receive his songs of praise for creation and her Creator. His joyful asceticism was a release from the harsh practices of the previous age. H e renounced the emerging wealth of the renaissance with an adventurous and generous spirit. He fought in the crusades not with an army, but alone with God, hoping to convert the radical Islamists. On his return he found even his own movement too tame, beginning to own property, albeit in common.

Francis is also an example of the incarnational life. He valued the material world and the ways he could see God in the world around him. As my friend Ken notes, Francis saw the wonder and miracle in the world around him. Is it any wonder then that the miraculous followed him? Francis seemed to see the world through spiritual eyes. He could identify the wonders and miracles in the world around, he could see creation as brother and sister. In his simplicity and holy foolishness, he saw the reality of the Kingdom around him. In his mind there may not have been much dividing the natural from the supernatural. His life was the adventure of the true Kingdom invading the world of men, so he had to live according to the values of that Kingdom come what may.

This week we were on our own mendicant adventure with a Franciscan flavor, trusting God for our every need. We went to our District Council without any money to rely on. There in the midst of God’s wonderful provision for us, I found great joy celebrating the lives of saints who had persevered in ministry. Allow me to submit one such saint as a further example of the Charismatic stream, Thomas E. Trask.

Tom Trask celebrated his fiftieth year as an ordained minister this week. Until last summer he served as General Superintendent for the Assemblies of God in the United States. He is a consummate preacher, though not using the method of expository preaching I value most. His preaching relies entirely on the anointing of the Spirit. Prayer and a spiritual reading of the text is important to him as he prepares.

He lived the adventure of ministry that my family is enjoying now. He planted a church in Northern Minnesota in 1956. He made no money as the church’s pastor, so he had to work. His father, also a minister in Minnesota, told him to get a job that was simple enough that he could do while still focussing on God - on his call.

He began to work for a Jewish businessman, W.R. Feldman. After struggling through months of slim income, Fledman approached Trask. “I’ll pay for your management training, if you come back to work for me,” he said, offering a large salary.

Trask said he would pray about it. Fledman was incredulous, “Pray about what? I know what they’re paying you!”
Trask responded, “The church is not my boss, God is my boss.” After praying Trask felt he had no option but to turn Feldman down, believing that he had been “bought with a price.”

Complete trust in God for his financial security combined with a discipline of giving, giving him experiences like St. Francis. One thanksgiving he had no food for his family. He didn’t have money for groceries, but in desperation he got in to his car to head to the store. As he was pulling out a man in a pickup truck pulled in behind him.
“Are you that pastor, Trask?” He asked. When Trask said yes, he said, “I have something you will need for tomorrow.” He proceeded to take two bags of groceries out of the back of his truck. Trask never saw the man before or since, convinced that angels sometimes dive pickups.

Giving continues to be an important discipline for him. As he rose in the ranks of the church and made more money, he increased his giving, until last year he was able to give away %70 of his income. Though he can also strangely value nice cars and manicured lawns as evidence of God’s provision to those around us.

Early in his ministry an older minister told him, “Tom, ask God to put you on a schedule and keep that schedule.” Rising early to engage in disciplines of prayer and study became important for him through out his life, as did “creating a family altar.” He recalled as a child his parents gathering the family before school and praying, “God keep Tom, keep Roy, Keep Patty.” Such times of prayer and worship with his family were important disciplines for him.

Looking back on his 52 years of ministry, Trask says, “Enjoy the adventure, because it was meant to be enjoyed.”

The faithfulness of Saint Francis and saint Trask in the adventure of the kingdom is a great inspiration to me. Like Francis this week I have been challenged to give and entirely trust in God for my family’s provision. It has been wonderful to see him work in us. Dropping the last of our money in the offering plate and then seeing God replenish that amount or give even more for us to give has been hilarious and wonderful. I can appreciate the joy of Francis as he danced naked through the forest, free from possessions but rich in God.

As Elaine and I were Ordained this year, the example of those who have gone before has been powerful as well. I appreciate Tom Trask’s example of faithfulness and demonstration of how this heroic trust and that we can actually make it through the adventure. After we were ordained, and hands laid on us symbolically passing the anointing, Tom Trask kissed my cheek. I accept from the Spirit Trask’s blessing.

Defining Spirituality

Borrowing some from Rolheiser, I would define Spirituality as what we do to sort out and express the divine madness in our souls. The restless longing of the dreamer, the quixotic refusing to accept the surface reality, the madness given by the gods by which we hunger for more, for meaning, for completion. Spirituality seeks to express these longings and fill them with something Divine.

At the beginning of the television series Heroes, Mohinder Suresh asks what it means to be in the image of God,

"Where does it come from? This quest? This need to solve life's mysteries though the simplest of questions can never be answered. Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream?
Perhaps we'd be better off not looking at all. [But] that's not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here."

It is indeed maddening to seek transformation into the image of our creator. A Holy Madness is appropriate for all who lay themselves down on the operating for this intense surgery. To be conformed into the image of Christ is to be made into the Human of Design, to be the kind of person who looks out for others, the kind of person who is not only holy as his maker is holy, but is also to be the kind of citizen that would make a truly just world possible. It would be making a world the way God had intended it.

This formation into the image of Christ is not an undertaking, but rather an in-working. In John 21 the disciples fished all night and caught nothing, but a word from Jesus and their own effort to cast the net and haul it in was met with the grace of 153 large fish. We can work all night long and get nowhere, but how blest our work can be when we do just those actions Jesus has directed us. We clothe ourselves with him as we hear his voice. We put flesh on the word, we incarnate it, this is the way of spiritual formation.

On the loss of a friend

Here I stand mourning the death of Don Quixote of la Mancha. His madness in committing himself to his profession gave me strength to commit myself to mine. Now I bid farewell to Alonso Quixano the sane. Thank you for the joy and sweetness your delightful madness has brought me. May my own peculiar madness be as sweet to me, and sanity find me praising God!