Thursday, March 17, 2022                                         (today’s lectionary)
Put your arms around me like a circle round the sun
After his talk on Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, Fr. Rick Ganz read Mary Oliver’s most famous poem.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
And I wept. I thought of the flagellant society I saw on Google maps in Colorado, and wept for them. I thought of my own doubts about what I am called by God to do, and don’t do. I wondered if the siren call I’ve heard for decades to “give everything away” is a curse from the devil, rather than a blessing from God. You do not have to be “good.”
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
When I read of Joseph and his coat of many colors, I think of Mary Oliver, who treasured the natural world around her.
When Joseph came up to his brothers, they stripped him of the long many-colored coat he wore. Then they took him and threw him into a dry, empty cistern.
Joseph lost his coat and his freedom to his cruel, jealous brothers, but he continued to treasure everything around him. He brought spirit and life and light to everyone everywhere around him, including his Egyptian prison. He had dreams and woke up full, often aching to explain them. Important dreams. Dreams from God.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.Â
In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie’s husband Tea Cake created joy and laughter out of thin air. He paid little attention to propriety and a great deal of attention to the pursuit of happiness, for others and for himself. Speaking of Tea , author Zora Neale Hurston offers us a bit of theology and an idea about how to live well, how to live the Joseph Life:
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
There haven’t been many Josephs, or many Tea Cakes that shone with the spark they were born with. God’s patience knows no bounds, as he watches us suffer and eventually collapse under our “excessive sense of self-sufficiency.”
Can’t y’all just have a good time?
Remember the marvels the Lord has done.
How am I going to answer that invitation from God when I carry the protestant work ethic draped around me like a dead snake? Which is beginning to smell.
But on the other hand, as I write, Notre Dame wins its NCAA tournament game against Rutgers just after midnight this morning, in the game’s second overtime. Coach Mike Brey jumped into the air and shouted to the world, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day, baby!”
I want what he’s having.
(Jeremiah 17, Psalm 1, Luke 8, Luke 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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