"We have very little control over what happens in our lives, but we have a lot of control over how we integrate and remember what happens. It is precisely these spiritual choices that determine whether we live our lives with dignity." --Henri Nouwen
My nose is running from a bad cold, my hands are freezing from the January weather, and now my loins are stirring from ogling the cute thirty-something lad next to me. We are both looking at Anselm Kiefer's "Book with Wings" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Just the right thing to do at a moment like this.
This book of ancient tales and secrets is anchored to earth. Made of lead from the roof of the Cologne Cathedral, it is ashen and slightly rumpled, the survivor of devastations.
But just look at those wings, so powerful and magnificent: 13 feet wide, strong and athletic, ready to ascend effortlessly, gracefully!
This book is like me--with my running nose, cold hands, and hard on; with my own tales and secrets, devastations and dreams--a border creature, made for both earth and sky.
We have many names and identities: parent, child; architect, teacher, businesswoman; stud or dud; budding Nobel prize winner or total moron--the list goes on and on. Most of our names we get from the world around us, from those who love us and those who don't. And these names shape who we become. Some of them bring a lightness to our step, make us strong and loving, wise and beautiful; others diminish us.
But one name trumps them all. That name is "Beloved". It is given to you by God, and no one--not your parents or your boss or your friends or co-workers, not the religious right with all their righteous ferocity, not even you on your worst day--can take it from you.
This priest's collar's a little scratchy today. I ask: What the hell am I doing in this humongous stone cathedral with its stained glass, polished wood pews, and dazzling candelbras; with these strangers murmuring about hair do's, a theologian I've never heard of, the latest four-buck coffee drink, the recent non-sequitur of George W. Bush, and, of course, who will be the new bishop. I'm here, but I don't get it.
After the horrific sex abuse scandals, a deafening silence about this devastating war, and centuries of homophobia and misogyny, you'd think I'd have found a way by now to get out of my skin, rewire myself with a new nervous system, take on a snappy new religion-free persona. But, no-o-o-o. Here I am thumbing through the convention booklet, eagerly preparing my vote for the next bishop of California. As if I belong here. As if there's really something to all this sound and fury. As if maybe, beneath all my doubts and confusion, lies an even more profound hope.
