My Final Entry

No, I'm not dying. When I arrived at Bucknell University, I inherited a tradition of sending out a weekly meditation through email. It has been a challenge to write both that, and another for the blog. Sometimes, I just copied and pasted the meditation to the blog. But I am going to let the blog lie fallow for a while. If you would like to receive the weekly meditations, send me an email at jpc026@bucknell.edu and I will add you to the list!

Honor and Shame...We Know Them Both!

In this week's Gospel lesson from the fourteenth chapter of Luke, Jesus throws a wrench into the honor-shame culture in which he lived and preached. In that culture, those who were the have's made sure others knew it, and those who were the have-not's did their best to stay out of the limelight. Jesus instructs dinner hosts to invite to their feasts not the well-heeled of the community, nor others who could pay the host back. Instead, he suggests that they invite people to their banquets that they know beyond a doubt cannot ever pay back the debt of hospitality offered. Wow, what's the wisdom in that advice? If we cannot strut our positions and achievements in public, what's the use of striving for excellence? I have watched, with a mixture of amusement and dismay, the proliferation of sashes and cords and medals with which graduates are festooned at commencement ceremonies. Whereas commencement should be a celebration of all graduates having made the grade, so to speak, we have managed to make it another competitive exhibition. Is it not enough we honor academic achievement by listing, and sometimes announcing, Latin honors as the graduates pass? What if everyone wore a plain, black academic gown with no adornments? I write this as one who did not receive his undergraduate degree with honors. But I did receive several graduate degrees with an academic average high enough for top honors, except that the schools involved felt that we ought not acknowledge grade point averages at the graduate level, because it fostered an unhealthy level of competitiveness. "Curses, foiled again!" as Snoopy would say. I remember my first on-going experience of honor-shame. When I was in the third grade, we moved into a new elementary school that housed a cafeteria, something the old school did not have. Up until that time, all of us brought our lunches from home. But my folks insisted that I continue to carry my lunch. That does not sound unreasonable, but for the fact that my school segregated all of the "brown-baggers" from those who bought the hot lunch. We were exiled to a table by the wall, away from the kids who bought their lunches. The worst was Thanksgiving, when even the die-hard brown-bag crowd gave in and bought the feast. But not me. I sat with just a couple of other folks, feeling sheepish and hoping the other kids did not look down on us, while feeling certain that they were doing just that. Our junior high school did not have a cafeteria, and so we all brought our lunches from home for the next three years. When I entered high school, I bought lunch in the cafeteria every day and never carried a brown-bag to school again. Writing this has caused me to remember that little honor-shame saga so clearly, and it is not a pleasant memory, even though it seems so insignificant now. How large a burden, then, must be carried by those whose income level or social status causes them to be marginalized or made to feel different every day, with no end in sight? Jesus sought to end class distinctions forever, and yet they remain, in abundance. Why do we resist his command so vigorously?

Religious Memories, and Memory

Early September always puts me in the mind of my early memories of going to school. When I was in kindergarten, I had to ride the bus for about two miles to get to the school, and that is the longest distance I ever had to ride the bus to arrive at school. I remember the smell of the diesel fumes on a crisp fall morning as the bus driver stopped to pick up students along the way. To this day, the smell of diesel fuel burning transports me back to those bus trips so long ago. September also reminds me of the first parish that I served after graduating from divinity school. For the first time in my life, I was not attending school in the fall, and everything seemed a bit strange and new to me as I went about my daily tasks while others attended classes somewhere. For some, September reminds them of "Rally Day," when the Sunday school classes were promoted to the next grade and the program year began in the church. A family picnic at a location that resembles a grove where picnics were taken when the youth group went on an outing can make our senses come alive. The sound of a beloved hymn, or the smell of candles burning or sunlight illuminating stained glass can all have dramatic effects on our memories. Religious memory can be a very good thing, as it can take us back to times in our lives when we may have made important decisions about our faith, or times that God just seemed a bit closer. Memory can also convict us, sometimes, because we may believe that we were more active, spiritually, when we were younger than now. However, such memories can serve to idealize a time that may not have been as much a time of spiritual growth and certainty as we remember. When recently I stood in the chapel at my Alma Mater and celebrated Holy Communion, for the first time ever in that space, I was overtaken by a sense of awe, of then, and now. I was moved by the memories of the time that I spent there as a student, and as I looked around the room, I was touched by the faces of former classmates and former professors who had gathered that day. But I would not return to those student days for anything, because I had so much to learn, and so much growing to accomplish. Though I was a very devout young man back then, I was so clueless as to the fullness of faith's meaning. Though I must still work to "go on to perfection" in Wesley's words, I know that I have a greater sense of God's love and compassion now that I have lived these years as an adult. I hope that you also have memories that warm your heart, coupled with the perception to help you to know how far you have come on your spiritual journeys since those days. Who we are and what we believe is built always on the soil of where we have been.