Finding Freedom in a Concentration Camp

~Fr. Michael

In 1939, just as World War II was beginning to rage throughout Europe, the young German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was in New York, exploring whether he should stay there.  He had offers to be a pastor to the German emigrants fleeing Europe.  He had made himself deeply unpopular with the German regime, making radio broadcasts critical of Hitler and running a secret society for clergy in Germany who could not accept the way that the Nazi state was controlling the Church.

After what he describes as draining struggle, he decided to go back to Germany.  He left knowing that he was returning to a situation of extreme danger.  Six years later, he was dead, executed for treason in a concentration camp.  We know all this because he wrote letters to family and friends from the camp, which have become one of the greatest set of theological reflections of the twentieth century.  He had left behind the chance of freedom as most of us would understand it and re-immersed himself into a complex and risky world, getting involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, living as a double agent, daily facing the prospect of arrest, torture and death.

But freedom was one of the things he most often wrote about.  In a poem he wrote in July 1944, he sketched out what he thought was involved in real freedom – discipline, action, suffering and death.  Not quite what we usually mean when we talk about freedom. These reflections take us into the heart of what it is for someone to be lastingly free.

The freedom he is interested in is the freedom to do what you know you have to do.  The society we live in gives us all sorts of messages about what we should be doing, and our own longings and preferences push us in various directions.  If you have the discipline to test your passions and preferences, and come to an understanding of yourself, it can give you the courage to act.  When you act, you take risks.  You become less free, in our normal understanding of the word, because you are bound by the consequences of you action.  But what is really happening is that you are handing over your freedom to God and saying, ‘I’ve done what I had to; now it’s over to you.’  Freedom, he says, is ‘perfected in glory’ when it’s handed over to God.  And this finds its climax in the moment of death, when we step forward to discover what has been hidden all along – the eternal freedom of God, underlying everything we have thought and done.

At the end of Bonhoeffer’s journey, as he writes about his inevitable execution, is a vision of the joy that can only come when you discover that you are at last in tune with reality, God’s reality.  Everything else, the stories you tell yourself, the pictures of yourself that you enjoy thinking about, the efforts to make yourself acceptable – all this falls short of reality.  ‘The truth will make you free’, says Jesus; and that is what sustains Bonhoeffer in prison, where he learns the true nature of freedom.  It reflects Jesus own promise in the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the poor, those who are hungry for justice, those who make peace’; these are the people who have got in touch with what eternally matters, with God’s reality.  These are the free people, because they have been liberated from all the fictions, great and small, that keep us locked into our anxieties and ambitions.  These are people who are not afraid to die because they have discovered what supremely matters and are willing to hand over everything to God.

Some religious people talk about letting of our minds settle so that it can truly reflect God, like a still pool.  As Bonhoeffer’s life and death make clear, this is not some sort of refusal of the world; it is rather the only way we can ever act in the world so as to change it, because we open the way to God’s action, through us, but not just through us.  Looking quietly at all the clutter that prevents us from seeing ourselves honestly, looking quietly at the ways in which the world we live in muffles the truth and so frustrates the search for justice and love – this isn’t a luxury.  This is how the truth makes us free.  Not free to whatever we want, but free to be real, to be truthful, to abide in the truth, as John's Gospel puts it.  After all, what other sort of freedom is finally worth having?  It may cost us everything we thought we needed to hang on to; but – as the history of Christ’s journey to the cross and the resurrection makes clear – the end of the story is a fulfillment, a homecoming, for which we can never find adequate words.  It’s the freedom to be what we most deeply are.

What is a Sabbatical?

~Fr. Michael

This year, after planning and preparing since my arrival at the Cathedral, the vestry has agreed to allow me to take three months of sabbatical time in 2018, my seventh year with the congregation.  While this is a regular practice in every major denomination, and is encouraged practice throughout the Episcopal Church, it is not something any Dean of Christ Church Cathedral has yet done.  As with any new exercise, some information is useful.

This sabbatical will be a period of time when the congregation and I set aside our normal pastoral relationship for the purpose of education, rest, and renewal toward sustained service of the ministry.  It is not an extended vacation, nor is it a time to look for a new position, but a temporary release from the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual demands of the call for the well-being of the leader.

 The word sabbatical comes from the biblical word Sabbath, which has a long and rich history of interpretation and use within the church and within our culture.  Keeping the Sabbath is both an act of creation (see Genesis 1 and 2) and a commandment (see Exodus 20).  This suggests that God has woven it into the very fabric of our being, and knowing what’s best for us, gives us a large framework for making sure we rest and take care of ourselves.  Jesus himself taught extensively about Sabbath and rest, saying “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.”  And the church has long taken His model of retreat and withdrawal to a quiet place to pray and be renewed.  Throughout His ministry, the steady demand led Jesus to step away on a regular basis.

Richard Bullock and Richard Bruesehoff in Clergy Renewal: The Alban Guide to Sabbatical Planning suggest the following motivations for considering a ministry sabbatical:

Continual spiritual growth facilitated by periods of rest and renewal is vital toward being an effective minister.

• Pastoral responsibilities are not contained within normal office hours and regularly involve long hours on weekends and evenings.
• Rapid change in parish ministry in recent years increases the likelihood of burnout without periods of rest and renewal.  
• Burnout makes ministry and the minister, dull, hollow, and uninteresting.  
• Provides the opportunity for congregations to examine their dependency on the ministry leader and consider expanding the roles of lay leaders.

All of this comes down to the fact that there are natural rhythms in our lives and in the Church.  These rhythms are God-created, and so even in a fallen world, they can be health-giving and spirit-nurturing.  Failure to appreciate and connect to those rhythms is destructive; acknowledging and coming into synchronicity with those rhythms strengthens our resilience and creativity.  One such rhythm is time away.  The motivation is not remedial or even preventative, but simply to be in tune with the health-giving and spirit-nurturing will of God.  Our hope is that everyone will be enriched.

There are still quite a few possibilities for things that I might do this year, and so much of the time has not been firmly scheduled yet.  I have been elected by the Diocese to serve the General Convention which meets this year in Austin, Texas, which is a two-week commitment; I am also scheduled to participate in a new training directive offered by the national church with regard to stewardship; this will take place in April, along with the North American Cathedral Dean’s Conference.  The only things firmly scheduled at this point are my induction into the Society of Ordained Scientists, and my enrollment in a January Term language immersion course.

The Society of Ordained Scientists

~Fr. Michael

This past month, I was admitted into a group which is at the vanguard of one of the most important conversations in the world:  the Society of Ordained Scientists.  The group was founded in the early 1970s in the UK by Professor Arthur Peacocke, a luminary in the nascent field.  This group is an international assembly of clergy with advanced degrees in the sciences, and with a robust history of publications addressing the issues raised by the imposition of the false dichotomy between Science and Theology by our modern culture.  I was beyond honored to join the ranks of John Polkinghorne (my external dissertation examiner), David Wilkinson (the President of my college and my Advisor), John Templeton, Robert Russell, and Alister McGrath, and countless others besides, as a newbie and a hanger-on.  If those names are meaningless to you, I suggest at least a simple Google search if not a more in-depth exploration of the fantastic literature and program that they have produced. 

I call the conversation between Science and Theology ‘most important’ because it is clear that the common view in the world around us, fueled by ignorance and lack of education, is that these two world-views are disparate and opposed to one another.  There have been quite a few popular writings in recent years which suggest that religion is passé and irrelevant in the face of science.  The work of Richard Dawkins suggests that religion is just a behavioral vestige of superstitious tribalism, practiced only by those who lack the mental capacity to form rational ideas.  The same author advocates eugenics, and termination of down syndrome babies and others with congenital birth defects as ‘scientifically ethical’; he proposes that strategic ‘wars of elimination’ should be waged to eliminate the populace which hold ‘superstitious beliefs’ in order to ‘liberate free thinkers’.  That line of conversation is dominating the public field—Dawkins’ spurious books have outsold the aforementioned authors by three times—and is rabidly opposed to the system of ethics proposed by the Gospel.  You can begin to see, I hope, why I regard this as among the most important conversations in the world—this is not just an idle conversation, but rather policies, and ultimately, lives, hang in the balance.   The ideas of Gospel ethics deserve not just my time and attention, but yours as well.

The three-day biannual retreat that I attended at the start of January is the continued effort to establish a new province of this society in North America, primarily an effort to make the Society and its meetings more accessible to supportive clergy and congregations.  It was a genuinely spiritual retreat, with reflections and conversation facilitated by the Bishop of Rhode Island, himself a physicist and teacher.  We gathered in regular prayer and conversation about all available issues, from genetics to cosmology, and encouraged one another in our common ministry.  I have to say, it was one of the most refreshing retreats I have ever attended, I was challenged by the level of thought that was presented, just as I was encouraged by the level of witness.

Perhaps most important of all, I was connected anew to a network of fantastically talented colleagues, each of which is working, in his or her own neighborhood, to use the light of science to shed light on the work of the Church, and also, using the vast storehouse of ecclesiastical resources to inform our scientific endeavors.  

There was a moment at the close of the middle day of the retreat, when I publicly made apology for ‘geeking out’ and talking about the relationship of the relationship of an extremely esoteric field of mathematics (the Lie geometries of the Platonic Solids, if you’re interested) to theology.  Bishop Knisely cut me off, mid-apology, to say, “What on earth are you apologizing for, Michael?  We’re your people!”  I must say, it felt good.

A hundred deep breaths.....

~Fr. Michael

Christmas is nearly here, and Advent is upon us.  Every year we are challenged by the church’s call to keep a time of penitent, joyful expectation, especially as the world around us has no place for waiting or expectation.  Perhaps it feels a little difficult to try to be joyful when so many expectations are bearing down on you.  Sometimes it’s difficult to look forward to such a hectic and draining season, much less try to enjoy waiting for it. 

But what we’re waiting on comes from a God who knows our nature, our selves; and knows of our knack for getting bogged down by expectations; and knows of our impatience and our desire for instant gratification.  From that depth of wisdom, God has built creation in such a way that it benefits from stopping and resting; pausing to reflect and refresh.  Sabbath is built into creation from the very beginning, and God’s people are instructed to keep it as a commandment.  Advent, if observed as a season set aside by God, has the same power to sanctify our waiting as the Sabbath does to sanctify our rest.  And more, both are meant for our refreshment and benefit by someone who we suppose knows something about our well-being.

So, how does one learn to appreciate waiting?  An easy answer is to learn how to stop and say a short prayer.  Prayer opens up the possibility that we can live in and appreciate the moment that we are in, and be better attuned to ourselves, our neighbors, and God.  And while you feel you have a grip on the whole how the whole prayer-at-church thing works, many people find taking moments of mindfulness and enjoyment to be difficult.  So, how do you start to pray?  It doesn’t need to be formal.  You don’t need to wait for it to be right.  And while adjusting your environment to be more suitable to prayer can sometimes help, it isn’t really necessary.  You can do it anywhere, any time. 

It’s as simple as taking a deep breath…

Have you noticed sometimes when you are feeling stressed that stopping and taking a deep breath can have a remarkable effect?  Perhaps it doesn’t cure your stress completely, but it helps to stretch muscles, helps to focus your mind, and it just plain feels good.  And while a deep breath might not qualify in some people’s books as a prayer in and of itself, I would argue that it’s pretty close.  It doesn’t take much more than a nudge to turn a deep breath into a full-fledged prayer.  In fact, the only thing it takes is an intention.  Instead of passively living through something your body goes through several times a day, draw your attention to growing more peaceful, or being more aware of your body or environment, or use your imagination (or will) to generate a charitable thought about another person.  Your breath has just become a prayer, and a moment of conscious waiting has probably done you a world of good.

If you practice this, you can get pretty good at it.  You might even find that doing it a few times in a row can be helpful.  *Please be careful to note:  don’t do anything like this against your physical comfort or health — if you have questions or problems, you should consult your physician*  But, if it helps, of if you enjoy it, you can stretch out the time, and enjoy it more, and enter into a time of mindfulness a little more deeply.  If you’re anything like me, though, you’ll find that your attention wanders off after a while and you can’t keep your mind from tugging at you to get up and do the next thing.  There are a few things that you can do easily to help with this.  Some people find that having a tactile reminder like a rosary or a prayer rope helps to pull them back to the mindful moment, for others sometimes a visual reminder, like a candle or an icon, can help.  While I do like both those methods, sometimes when I’m not around any of those things, simply counting can help maintain some focus.

For myself, I try to set a pace of a hundred a day.  After a while, I lose count, but after even a few days of trying it, you know about how long a hundred breaths takes.  It can be a remarkable experience.  It only takes about 15 minutes or so, but it feels like a much longer time while you’re doing it.  It’s fascinating to see where your mind and heart can take you when you stop to have a moment like that.  I’ve experienced a whole range of prayerful experiences.  Most often, I find a Bible verse pops into my head and repeats itself gently; sometimes I find a deeper awareness of my physical self, sometimes I find that just the act of air passing in and out of my lungs can be a start of a deep prayer.  After a long time of practicing this, I am aware that my body has become accustomed to it, and misses it when I don’t take the time to do it.  But since I’m more used to it, I find that I can do it, even just for a short time, almost anywhere:  A car trip, in a waiting room, when your lunch partner has stepped away, on a walk, and even while exercising (although the breathing patterns change a bit).

As Christmas looms and Advent beckons, try taking a moment to appreciate the now, and the not yet, by just taking a deep breath, or two, or a hundred.