Spiritual Cross-rhythms

If you play a keyboard instrument and have studied any nineteenth century keyboard works, especially those of Johannes Brahms, you will know that you need to master the concept of two against three. This means one hand plays a series of eighth notes—or duplets—while the other hand plays triplets. Duple against triple or in some complicated instances, triple against quadruple.

Execution of these cross-rhythms is rather like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. But in all my experience as a pianist and organist, I discovered that the most effective way to master cross rhythms was to not let my left hand know what my right hand was doing, or vice versa. This requires focusing intently on the rhythm of one hand, which might be performing triplets, and letting your other hand effortlessly fall into eighth notes.

Trying to hear the contrasting rhythms all at the same time is liable to result in a collapse of the music. The goal, of course, is to settle into the composite rhythm, that sum-total effect of the duple and triple rhythms working together, where the right and left hands are indistinguishable one from the other.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus suggests that the spiritual practice of almsgiving has its own composite rhythm, in which the right and left hands are not consumed with the tasks of one another. I think Jesus’s point is that when the right hand is busy engaging in acts of charity, the left hand should be doing its own thing so as not to belabor the act of charity itself. Because if the mind and heart become too fixated on the acts of charity themselves, there is a danger of losing a sense of humility, and therefore undermining the very point of good works.

This principle, which we might dub the two against three principle, can apply to other actions that Jesus names. These include prayer and fasting, and we might add, for that matter, any acts of piety. The danger, we know, is when practices that are good and righteous in and of themselves become actions that instead draw attention to themselves.

Jesus always goes after the heart of the matter. God, he suggests, knows the intentions of your heart, so don’t worry about what other people perceive in your actions. The prayer, almsgiving, and fasting come with a shadow side that can draw more attention to the person performing the actions than to the individual’s relationship with God.

But this all seems a bit like a Catch-22 situation. If we follow the two against three principle in order to execute this cross-rhythmic way of the spiritual life, then, in some sense, we have to focus on either God or the acts that are intended to bring us closer to God. On the one hand, if we fixate only on our personal relationship with God, we potentially forsake opportunities to help those in need, or we forego practices of piety that shape us into more faithful Christians. On the other hand, if we become so obsessed with such practices and with our good works, then we turn in on ourselves and make it about us, rather than about God.

On this holy day, in which we engage in a vivid corporate action of repentance, we are especially reminded of the tensions between our actions and their intentions. Is there any more obviously ironic sign than putting ashes on our foreheads after hearing a Gospel reading that tells of the dangers of such a practice?

Today, of all days, we remind ourselves that to put ourselves in right relationship with God, we must focus, to a certain extent, on our own lives: on our sins of commission or omission, because otherwise, we find ourselves wandering far from God in a strange land. And yet, if we obsessively focus on our weaknesses and mortal nature, we neglect the image of God latent within us, and we shun God’s merciful arms that are always outstretched to embrace us. Yet again, if we only focus on God’s eternal mercy, we forget that we are sinners in need of redeeming, and we subscribe to cheap grace.

Is there a way out of this conundrum of the spiritual cross-rhythms? Will there only ever be the tension of two against three or three against two? Is there a way towards a more cohesive and seamless composite rhythm?

It might be that Ash Wednesday is the day on which we admit that this cross-rhythmic tension is always present, that indeed it is never possible to avoid the slight friction between tending to our spiritual practices and letting God absorb all of that work into his unspeakable grace.

And so, we will find ourselves, invariably, being more mindful at one time of our right hand, as it engages in almsgiving, fasting, or prayer, and then realizing that the triplets of our left hand, reminding us of God, who grounds all that we do, are being neglected. And we will, in turn, shift our attention to the left hand. And so on.

But if we are to settle into the composite rhythm of the spiritual life, we will need more and more practice. And with more practice, it will get easier, and that composite rhythm will get just a bit closer to where we want to be with God.

At the end of the day, we must remember that God always sees the composite rhythm of our spiritual lives. As we in our imperfection live uneasily in the tension between doing and being, the music still plays on. And God forgives the slight distortion in the left hand’s duplets, as we focus on the right hand’s triplets. This is God’s bountiful grace at work.

Let the ashes that you will receive this day be the right hand’s emphasis on the duplets as we tangibly remind ourselves of our own mortality. And then trust, that God is hearing our left hand’s triplets, which are reveling in the presence of a triune God carrying on with his boundless compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. And this is God’s composite rhythm of love.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Down the Mountain

The next time you are walking down Walnut Street in the 1600 block, on the north side of the street, have a look inside the Apple store. It’s especially effective at nighttime. If you were a time traveling visitor from the nineteenth century and didn’t know what was really going on in that store, you might draw your own conclusion from the scene before you: people hunched before rectangular pieces of metal, faces lit up, and eyes fixated on some thing or person or vision, as if in a trance. You might think they were having a mystical or religious experience.

The posture of those who had flocked to that place, their faces seemingly transfigured by a mysterious, if artificial light, and the unflinching devotion of their gaze, all might lead an objective, anachronistic observer, to surmise that the Apple store was some place of transcendent experience, perhaps even a sacred gathering place.

That is hardly the case, as we know. While I own a Mac, I’d much rather be outside the frenzy of the Apple store than in it. I’m fine with my iPhone 6, thank you very much. But it’s hard to escape the reality of the way in which time can stand still when we’re sitting before the computer screen. It’s hard to deny the power that technology has over our lives.

We might end up with a headache after several hours of screen-gazing, but we do it anyway. You start by reading a Wikipedia article on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an hour later you are reading about the surprising regeneration capacity of axolotls.

The entrancing capacity of computer screens or iPhone screens is driven by some kind of insatiable hunger. It could be a hunger for knowledge. Or it could be a hunger to purchase that much-needed piece of furniture for your home office. Or it’s that hunger to check up on all your Facebook friends. Whatever it is, there’s an inner need that must be met, and we often might not know where it comes from. Trying to satisfy this need doesn’t even require communicating with other people. It’s worked out between you and the radiant light of the computer screen, shining on your face, and numbing your sensory perception.

It almost seems blasphemous to juxtapose an image of the glowing faces of hungry consumers in an Apple store with the glowing faces of Peter, James, and John on a mountaintop, as they basked in the light of the transfigured Christ. But if we indulge ourselves for just a minute and do compare these two scenes, maybe this uneasy juxtaposition will be revelatory for us, if not disturbing. Is the Apple store some kind of metaphor for modern, secular worship, a quest for pseudo-sacred meaning in a vacant age?

Think now, for a minute, about that scene on the mountaintop with Jesus in all his transfigured glory. The disciples’ faces would surely have been aglow, too, reflecting the brilliant light radiating from Jesus’s face. There would also have been the ambient light from the cloud that overshadowed them.

At first, the sudden appearance of bright light must have caused Peter, James, and John to blink or avert their gaze, but then surely they were curious and entranced by the vision before them. I picture them with eyes riveted, as if on a computer screen, but instead on the vision of Christ’s future glory in all its transcendence, mystery, and awe. And then with the unfathomable voice from the cloud, they were overcome with fear and fell to the ground on their faces. This gesture was not just a cowering in fear. It was a response of reverential worship. They could do nothing except fall to the ground in holy fear and adoration.

Now, recall the single-minded power in our own experiences, whether sacred or profane, when we are so overcome with emotion, interest, or yearning. We find ourselves unable to move; we are lifted out of ourselves. We are so caught up in the moment that we want to do nothing other than stay right where we are. We want to hit Command + S on our computers and save the moment in time. We don’t want to leave. We yearn to revel in the glory of what we are experiencing and stay there forever.

It’s no secret that people all around us are seeking such encounters. There is astounding loneliness in the modern world, fed by all kinds of things. And as if to counteract this vast emptiness, people are hungry, very hungry. They have voracious appetites that need to be fed, and people are seeking all kinds of ways to feed those appetites.

They are not just bowing down at the altars of technology in the Apple stores or Verizon stores across the world. They are constructing altars of devotion on mountains and hills all over the place: in gyms, in community centers, in the marketplace, in dog parks, in concert halls, in stadiums, in movie theaters, in book clubs. These are not necessarily idols, but they are places that have become, in some sense, sacred mountaintops in a moment in time when mountaintops of meaning are less obviously churches and seem to have very little to do with God. These alternative mountaintops are places where people flock, with great devotion, to fill the gaping holes of emptiness in their lives.

Observing people in such environments, you can actually see the glow on their faces, as if they have been transfigured. They are the red-hued faces on the treadmill, illuminated by the endorphins coursing through their veins. They are the sparkling faces of two dog owners in rapt conversation while their dogs frolic in the park. They are the radiant faces of people who have landed a great purchase in a clothing store.

In other more sinister forms, people’s faces are changed by the pills they have swallowed or the drugs they have ingested. The camps of people craving opioids in this very city are tragic evidence of a desire to escape the ubiquity of contemporary hollowness.

And so we must ask ourselves how we have gotten to this point, to such a desperate seeking of meaning in life. Perhaps the more central question is less about why loneliness and emptiness exist and more about why God is often not the ultimate source of meaning or why God is frequently replaced by other loci of meaning.  

And so, you might ask, what is so wrong about finding meaning in such places? If people are finding community and fulfillment there, and if they are being personally transformed, what’s the harm? One can be enriched by the gym and by worshiping God. These places of personal enrichment are often good, and they need not compete with God.

But there is still a distinct difference between a mountaintop experience of Christ’s glory and other experiences that strive to provide significance for people’s lives and which seem to be gaining greater and greater devotion. The computer screen constantly lures us back to prostrate ourselves before it, because there’s always more information to gain. There’s always another email to answer. There’s always the latest app to download.

Likewise, the power of the gym is enticing. Can one ever be too fit? The ritual of sports practice, even on Sundays, gives structure to a life in the midst of chaos. And so all these places that provide a certain degree of personal fulfillment or happiness can also provide a certain degree of isolation from the surrounding world. They can become escapist adventures that offer respite from a chaotic and vapid environment.

And the faces of the worshipers who leave these pseudo-mountaintop experiences become dull after leaving their sacred valhallas, because a return to the outside world is a return to the emptiness and loneliness that is always still there, that indeed has been there from the beginning of time. The glow from the computer screen doesn’t stay on your faces once you leave the Apple store.

But a true mountaintop encounter with the living Christ, whose unique glory shines on our faces, does not just satisfy empty longings. It is a true metamorphosis of our souls. As the face of Christ was transfigured before the eyes of his rapt disciples, and as his unearthly glow reflected off their faces, they were changed. They fell to the ground as they were swept up in a moment of holy reverence.

And then, Jesus touched them. And in this profound gesture, Jesus revealed to future ages why a sacred encounter with him surpasses any other mountaintop experience that we try our best to engineer. With his holy touch, Jesus called the disciples back to themselves, healed them of their fear, and sent them back down the mountain with faces shining from their experience.

Surely the disciples also had a yearning for change in their own lives when they followed Jesus up the mountain, even though they did not know what they would experience there. But Jesus, with his powerful touch, made it clear that they could not stay on that mountain forever. Indeed, the mountain was not itself the end goal but a means of real transformation, not just for themselves but for the whole world. The disciples need to go back down and become a part of human suffering, emptiness, loneliness, and dying, and there they were called to radiate light into a hurting world.

In his touch, Jesus shows us, too, that what God gives us in our sacred experiences with him outweighs anything that other pseudo-sacred experiences can offer. While manufactured hill altars constantly attract our attention and gaze, they never provide us with Jesus’s healing touch that calls us back to reality and sends us down the mountain. They only demand more and more devotion. They are hungry gods that can never be glorified enough, and they never feed us enough. And the shining light that glows on our faces fades away as soon as we leave the mountaintop.

But God’s glory shines on us and in us, illumines our hearts, and sends us among the desperate and hurting, to radiate that light into the world around us. If God came down from his throne of glory to be a part of such a world, then we must be there, too.

When I walk by the Apple store or the numerous gyms with their avid spin cyclists, I admit that I wish more of those people were bowing down with holy fear in the temples of God. Maybe some of them are, I don’t know. But I long for every person I meet to have a true experience with the living God, rather than seeking what only God can provide in other places.

But you are here, and I’m preaching to the choir. Maybe what’s important is our ability to show our own transformed selves, radiating with the glow of Christ’s glory, in a world that needs to see more faces shining with the truth of God.

Only the touch of Christ can heal us of our fear of loneliness and of the emptiness in our world. Only his touch can heal the divisions and anger within humanity. Only his touch can cause our own hearts to be transformed and our faces to sparkle with the hope that God is always making things new.

And so at the end of this Mass, we will need to leave this sacred mountaintop, where we receive Christ’s glory in Bread and Wine. And we will need to wake from our blissful reverie with Christ’s holy touch, telling us to go. Go out those doors and let his glory shine, and do not fear. Because as glorious as it is, we can’t stay on this mountain forever, and God doesn’t want us to stay here either.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
23 February 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A Senator, a Song, & a Sermon

A Senator, a Song, & a Sermon

Father Mullen

Fairly late in the last century, when I was a young man just out of college, I went to Washington to work for a United States senator.  I’d have had a hard time locating my own politics too precisely at the time, but the senator I worked for was a Republican, and that was just fine with me.  I was a staff assistant on the senator’s staff, which is as low as you can go on the organizational chart.  I spent time in the mail room, I also helped constituents navigate the federal government, and I spent a lot of time as an aide to the senator, driving him around Washington and in the Virginia countryside.

In the black Lincoln Town Car that was standard issue for members of Congress in those days, there was an early version of a mobile phone, hard-wired to the antennae on the back windshield, and there was a CD player.  I can only remember ever listening to one CD with the senator in that car, but my memories of it are very clear.  The CD we listened to many times over was a recording of Willie Nelson singing Gospel tunes.

The senator was not a regular church-goer, but he is a believer, and he’d be comfortable, I think, with the label “God-fearing.”  I could guess at a number of the songs we listened to Willie sing, but the one I remember clearly - because the senator insisted that we sing along on the refrain - was “In the Garden,” a tune that was hitherto unknown to this former boy chorister.  The senator always rode up in the front seat, beside me, and he was vigorous in in his encouragement when the chorus came around:

And he walks with me,
And he talks with me,
And he tells me that I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

The senator was well aware that at the time I was one of the gentlemen of the choir of men and boys at Washington Cathedral.  And I imagine that he knew this old Gospel hymn was not in my repertoire.  I am quite sure that he was only partly teasing me by prodding me to sing along with Willie Nelson.  Partly, he thought it would be good for me.  I’m sure he was right.

These two musical spheres - one on Capitol Hill, the other on Mount Saint Alban, where the cathedral stands - might have provided an early signal to me that many situations and conditions that we think of as dichotomous, either/or situations actually exist on a spectrum.  You don’t actually have to choose between Willie Nelson and William Byrd, you can move back and forth along the spectrum.  And it’s perfectly alright if you live closer to one end of that spectrum than the other.

It’s characteristic of our thinking in this century that we tend to see things as falling on spectra, without, perhaps, being fixed at a single point thereon.  We think of gender, sexual orientation, emotional intelligence, even ethnicity (to some degree), and a host of other things in this way.  Call it non-binary thinking; it’s not uncommon.  

Religion, however, is seldom an area of thought where people expect to encounter non-binary thinking.  To the contrary, people mostly expect religious folk and religious organizations (like churches) to specialize in binary, dichotomous, either/or thinking.  Righteous or unrighteousness.  Saint or sinner.  Saved or damned.  Sheep or goats.  Heaven or hell.  Religious language often lines up easily along binary lines.  Deuteronomy proves my point this morning.  Listen to Moses, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life....”. You see what I mean.

Dichotomous, binary language, is not unknown to Jesus, and, in fact, he sometimes seems to specialize in it.  When we get to the Sermon on the Mount, which is where we are this morning, Jesus is using a rhetorical technique to contrast his teaching to the commandments his audience had been taught to live by.  In some cases, Jesus presents a binary choice, in others, he seems to be trying to to move his listeners along the spectrum, or to imagine a more expansive view of that spectrum.

When we join Jesus on the Mount this morning, he has recently concluded the Beatitudes.  In much of what follows of the sermon, he is trying to shape the behavior and attitude of his followers.  These are lessons worth stopping to listen to for a moment, in paraphrase:

Don’t let your anger get the best of you: seek forgiveness and offer it.

Don’t be unfaithful to the one you love, for it does more damage than you realize to both of you, and the results are never good.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep; and tell the truth.

Don’t be vengeful or seek retaliation, even if you have been wronged.  Turn the other cheek, and go the extra mile.

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  Yes, love your enemies, even if it’s hard to do.

Don’t brag about your generosity to others, but do be generous.

Don’t be ostentatious in your prayer, but do pray.

Don’t store up wealth that you don’t need, it does you no good, and someone else needs it.  You can’t serve two masters anyway: which is it going to be, money or God?

Don’t be anxious.  Don’t worry; be happy.  God knows what you need, and he will provide it.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Don’t profane that which is holy; don’t throw your pearls before swine.

Ask and it will be given to you.  Seek and ye shall find.  Knock and the door will be opened to you.

Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Don’t just be hearers of these lessons: live by them.

There’s more to the Sermon on the Mount, but these points are many of the highlights.  They sound timely, don’t they?

In his second inaugural address, in 1865, as the final days of the Civil War drew near, Abraham Lincoln referenced the Sermon on the Mount, saying, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”  Perhaps he was a little disingenuous in his resort to scripture, but at least he was trying.  He considered that the war might have amounted to God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, inflicted on both sides of the conflict.  Much of the speech is constructed around biblical texts, which are woven throughout.  And although Lincoln supposed that God “now wills to remove” that sin of slavery, he allowed that “the prayers of both [sides] could not be answered.  The Almighty has his own purposes,” he said, and he assumed those purposes would prevail.

Back in the days when I worked in Washington, someone once quipped that I split my time between two hills in that city, the Capitol stood on one, and the cathedral on the other: one was sacred and the other was profane.  But I have to admit that I never saw it that way, and I wonder now if I was just naive, or if things really were different then.

People sometimes forget that the constitutional prohibition of an established religion in this nation serves to protect religion at least as much as it protects the government, and maybe more so.  And the founders’ wisdom in structuring our nation this way is one of the reasons religions have flourished in this country.

If you ask me, the soul of the nation and of American Christianity (such as it is) have both been marred by hegemony of the marketplace, the wisdom of which is wrongly assumed to be a fact.

This pulpit is seldom a place for politics, and I think that’s mostly as it should be, so I mean to tread carefully here.  The senator I worked for found himself on the wrong side of his own party for positions he took on gun control, women’s rights, and (in the recent wars) on so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques.  And I should know better than to bring up any of those issues from the pulpit.

But on this President’s Day weekend, I hope you will forgive me for being a little nostalgic for the days I spent sitting beside a Republican senator singing along with Willie Nelson’s renditions of songs from an old-time religion.  Singing those hymns together did us both more good than either of us realized.  

And on this weekend, will you bear with me, as I call to mind again Lincoln’s second inaugural address, so shaped by the scriptures.  Lincoln was profoundly  aware of the dichotomies that literally tore this nation apart.  I’d say his concluding words form a perfectly good prayer for our own day and age:  

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Amen.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
16 February 2020
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia