Choosing Love

After a much too “interesting” spring we were happy to settle into a normal-ish summer and a downright gorgeous fall. We have been thrilled at the color of the fall leaves, which despite the February exploding tree ice storm and the June heat dome managed to be brilliant. It helped I suppose that it began raining in mid-September and hasn’t really let up yet.

One part of a return to normal-ish-ity has been working on the house. We had spent last winter updating appliances and so I wanted to next update the lighting in the kitchen. I managed to find some excellent and not too expensive fixtures, which I acquired awhile back. But I was having trouble getting an electrician. Our regular electrician apparently was suddenly overwhelmed. Mercifully, that situation has now been resolved. But along the way I found an ad for an electrician-ish person and placed a call to see whether we might make that work. After a couple of days of texting back and forth he finally arrived to “look over the job.” I showed him the pile of fixtures in their boxes, I showed him where access to the attic was, I showed which fixtures would replace which and he seemed to be making mental notes about the job. He told me he could start in a couple of days, and we discussed scheduling and then he asked something about my “wife.” When I told him I had a husband he suddenly needed to be somewhere else. Shortly after he left I received a text saying he declined the job because of scheduling difficulties. Sure, he did.

This sort of thing happens all the time to LGBTQ people. It always is a surprise and it always hurts. During the time we lived in Wisconsin it took three years to get a deck and a fence built in the backyard—every contractor who came over would poke around and then I’d get an estimate for ten times what the cost should be. It was only after we miraculously found a gay contractor that we got it all built quickly for a suitable price.

I also have the experience that when I tell my straight friends about it they don’t believe me. “Maybe he was just busy” they’ll say. Right …

Miraculously that day (there’s that word again) I had to go pick up my husband, and en route on the radio I encountered the Oregon Public Broadcasting show “Think Out Loud,” which was running an interview about “Oregon Bias Response Hotline Expands with new Funding” (https://www.opb.org/article/2021/10/27/oregon-bias-response-hotline-expands-with-new-funding/ ). What struck me during the interview was a comment to the effect that nobody is expecting to encounter bias, usually you’re going along having a nice day and then “boom” it hits.

Well, after recounting this story a couple of times to gay friends I decided to contact the response line and submit a formal complaint. At least it will get us counted.

God’s greatest gift to creation is the power to love. It is the universal power of creation. If we love we win, if we do not love, we can create chaos. We cannot control events, but we can control how we love.

When we are having a nice day and “boom” hits us, it is a critical moment—if we choose to be angry, if we choose to feel vengeful, that is natural, but it is not helpful. The way out is to choose to love. Not to choose to love the circumstances, but rather, to choose to love whatever is loving in life and creation. My husband rescued the afternoon by loving the red and yellow and orange leaves on our way home. My heart was filled with love for him and for his ability to appreciate beauty.

In Margaret Guenther’s book Holy Listening (Cowley, 1992) the starkest moment for me was when she mentioned all of the thousands of mothers comforting children in box cars en route to Auschwitz by patting shoulders and rocking and saying “it’s all ok, all will be well, I love you.” That was choosing love.

Scripture this week gives us the story of Ruth and Orpah and great love which is not only chosen but built—love builds up (Ruth 1:16-17): “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die–there will I be buried.  May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!.” God is love and love is God and the psalmist reminds us that love sets us free and opens our eyes. Love lifts us up. Love sustains (Psalm 146: 7-8).

So, those mothers in those box cars were lifted up and sustained, even though their reality was falling apart.

In Mark 12:28-34, when Jesus is challenged about commandments he replies with the only truth: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” When the scribe who had challenged Jesus turns to love, Jesus says (34): “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

As I have written many times, as Jesus reminds us, God’s kingdom is already here in that dimension we cannot always quite seem to enter. But when we can love the door is opened, and we can walk through into the dimension of reality where love is all there is.

Proper 26 Year B 2021 RCL (Ruth 1:1-18; Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Faithful Radiant Love

Faith is a tricky business … because having faith means loving love. Having faith means being truly in love with love.

What do we have faith in?

In the other half of my life I’m a scientist (yeah, go figure). I have faith in scientific method and I have faith in the probability theory that underlies much of scientific methods. I have that faith because I have life experience of the model never failing.

I’m also a pretty serious cook. I have faith that what I cook will come out the way I intend and be good to eat. I have that faith because I have cooked a lot, and because I have messed it up a lot, so I know not only that it always works when I get it right but also I have that faith because I have seen precise causes of muckups.

I have faith in my husband’s love. I have a lot of experience of his love—forty-three years now—and we both have lots of experience of muckups and thus I have absolute faith in his love even as I forgive the occasional muckup.

I have faith in God too, although I have to admit even as a priest, that’s much harder. I know science and I know empirical method and I know probability theory and I know cooking (even pie dough) and I know my husband but I have to stop and think hard about how I know God.

Sometimes the way I know God is by knowing what God is not. God is not some old guy pulling strings or making a list and checking it twice. God is really a lot more like making pie dough or probability theory or even my husband in that I know that God is pure love and that means that I only am in the presence of God—in the presence of pure love—when I am able to rid myself of obstacles that keep me from love. I know God best when I am able to love, to feel love, to give love, to love myself.

Having faith means loving love. But the reality of our daily lives is that we mostly are too busy, or not interested, or whatever … to be loving people. And if we do not love, we do not receive love.

That is the whole message of the Gospel: to receive love, you first must love.

We have been following the saga of Job. You know how Job’s life went, pretty much like yours and mine the last couple of years. No matter what you did more [ahem] fell on your head. No matter how hard you worked more [ahem again] fell on your head. No matter how much you cried out to God more and more of that stuff [ahem] fell on your head.

But, why was that? Probably because we forgot to love. This is the really, really, really hard lesson to learn. The one Jesus says is like a camel through a needle, and all those other wonderful metaphors in Jesus’ stories. It is because to love, to actively give love when you are in a mess and a world of hurt and a world of stress, sometimes it’s just too much.

And yet, it is the only way. You have to love, to be loved. Job gains generations and centuries of life (!) and everything imaginable all by loving.

This morning instead of sitting quietly with my coffee listening to the Oregon rain (ok, it’s one of those “atmospheric river cyclone bomb things, but hey, we need the rain) I had to take my husband someplace (notice, “I had to” there’s that [ahem]. While I was driving around in circles waiting I heard an interview on the NPR show Freakonomics with economist Arthur Brooks (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/arthur-brooks/), who says we could have worked our way quickly out of the pandemic by conquering contempt. He suggests we pretend to have love by pretending to smile. Here’s the kernel of it (interview by Stephen J. Dubner):

DUBNER: So you’ve collaborated with the Dalai Lama, and you asked him once what to do when you feel contempt. And his answer was, “Practice warm-heartedness.” … And then, as you write, he suggests that you think back to a time when you answered contempt with warm-heartedness, remember how that made you feel, and then do it again. Is it really that simple? Because that sounds like even I could do that. 

BROOKS: It’s amazingly good psychology. It’s reversing an automatic process. There’s a famous exercise that I teach to my Harvard students now. I have to teach a class on happiness. And when you’re feeling unhappy, if you want to feel happier, if you put a pencil in your mouth and bite down so it’s sideways in your mouth and you’re biting down on your molars, that will actually strain the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corner of your eyes, giving you a little crow’s feet. And that signals to your brain that you’re doing a Duchenne smile, which is the only smile associated with true happiness, and it runs the causality in the other direction, and you will literally feel happier. So that’s what I’m suggesting. Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s an act. It’s a commitment. It’s not a feeling. And in so doing, you will run the cognitive process in the opposite direction, and you’ll get results. And that’s what the Dalai Lama was telling me. He was just not telling me in those wonky, nerdy terms.

What do you know? We can be more loving, Godly people, just by smiling even with pretend smiles because when we pretend we release happiness hormones that actually make us loving people.

This is why the Psalms are full of paeans of praise for the unashamed radiance of love—because love is easily produced, love is easily reached, love builds up, love is reliable. In this we can have faith.

Mark’s Gospel (10:46-52) is the story of the healing of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, who is healed by his faith. Even blind Bartimaeus knew that Jesus embraced love, unashamed unfailing radiant love. And after regaining his sight he “followed him on the way,” which means a lot more than that he followed the group along the road. It means he followed the way of love, because after all it was his love that healed him.

This sort of thing can be a tough lesson for LGBTQ people because we so often find ourselves in Job-like circumstances. Yet we have the innate capacity for love. Love is what defines our very identity. It is this fullness of love that is both our gift in creation and our call in life. Love is the core of our faith, if we can believe and act, if we can reach love’s dimension.

Proper 25 Year B 2021 RCL (Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Essential Glory

What does it feel like to be gay?

I have been pondering that for decades. I know it feels like I feel. I am gay and this is how I feel so this must be what it feels like to be gay. I know it feels different in some ways from what it must feel like to be straight. I know there are obvious emotions concerning sexual attraction but I also know that those are not the most of it. I know that when I am in the physical presence of my beloved I don’t perceive gayness.

[I had better make it explicit that although I identify with the LGBTQ community I obviously only have the experience of being gay. I understand what it feels like to be LBTorQ only tangentially from my interactions with the community. On the other hand, of course, much of what all of us experience comes from the reality of being somehow “other.”]

I know that I am most aware of my sexuality in that sense when I am in an exclusively heterosexist environment. I know that decades ago when my closest friends had a baby girl and made jokes about how she was eyeing the baby boys in the nursery I was really angry that there was simply the assumption that everybody had to be heterosexual until proven otherwise. That time I felt gay. That was a sense of oppression.

I know that my first experience of the Gay Games in New York in 1994 was both humorous and joyous. I was only vaguely aware of the impending games when, early one morning, I hopped down to the corner near my Chelsea apartment to grab a newspaper and a bagel and I was shocked that everybody around me seemed to be gay. I laughed out loud (really!) as I had that realization “Oh, this must be what it feels like to be straight most of the time.” A friend promptly called and invited me to go with him to the opening ceremony and as we rode the subway up the west side all I could see anywhere were LGBT people. It was my first experience of feeling like I was in the majority, of feeling like I was not different in some way. It was glorious.

There you have it—glory is that sensation of love that comes from inside. Glory is love incarnated in our daily experience. The surprising red tomatoes in my garden are glory, my husband walking around the neighborhood each afternoon is glory, the rain chasing away the wildfire danger is glory. We make a mistake when we look for glory outside of ourselves instead of in our own hearts.

The love we experience is glory.

What does it feel like to be gay? Well, glorious, of course!

To remain in a state of glory requires that essential action of walking in love. It is too easy to challenge reality, to challenge love, to challenge God by being angry instead of remembering to walk in love. When we dwell in anger, even justified anger, we stop loving and become self-focused (Job 38:1-2). But when we remember to walk in love the anger dissipates and love fills life with joy. All creation shouts for joy when God’s creatures experience the glory of walking in love.

But what are we to do with those feelings that gave rise to anger, what are we to do with that feeling of oppression? This, too, requires essential action, to lovingly seek justice and righteousness. This requires wisdom that comes from a lifetime of walking in love (Psalm 104:25). This requires the wisdom that comes with sharing the cup of Christ (Mark 10:38), which is the baptism of walking in love. We must push through the anger, through the sadness, through even grieving until we reach the other dimension, where we see the glory of love shared.

What, then, does it feel like to be? To be a living member of creation sharing the power of the love that binds everything together is glorious.

Proper 24 Year B 2021 RCL (Job 38:1-7, (34-41); Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b Benedic, anima mea; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45)

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Love is All You Need

Awhile back when we were excited that our family would be all together in mid-September I ordered a bunch of DVDs from a postal DVD service (you know who I mean). For some reason it kept wanting me to order Yellow Submarine (The Beatles 1968) so I did. For years now, when I am without a parish, instead of worrying a sermon and going to bed at 7:30 I make pizza (I make wonderful pizza) and we have movie night. I thought Yellow Submarine would be fun and we would all sing along. Well, it didn’t show up, so we didn’t get to watch it together.

Yesterday, six weeks late, it showed up, so we watched it with the last pizza Margherita of the season. In the first 30 seconds I quickly was transported back to the psychedelic 70s and blurted out “this would be better if we were stoned.” (I do date back to the ancient days of the Age of Aquarius after all, but not to worry we forged ahead with our consciousness unaltered.)

Interestingly, as the movie went on I could see there was one firm message embedded in the movie, in the music. It is this:

Love, love, love …
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
All you need is love …
Love is all you need …

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul Mccartney
All You Need Is Love lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

All you need is love, indeed. It seems it is not news now, even though it seems every day to be news to new generations, that we are surrounded by grace. Grace is God’s gift of love. Grace, therefore, is justice and unity and abiding love. Love is always a possibility, therefore grace precedes and follows us always. But it is up to us to grasp it. It is up to us to make sense of it. It is up to us to nurture grace with love.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
All you need is love …

On the other hand, it is pretty common to have an inverted view of reality such that we see ourselves but not the role we play. Like a forest for the trees idiom we bear down on our own situation without remembering to see how we fit. This is a polite way of saying we make ourselves miserable by forgetting that it isn’t God who has abandoned us rather, it is we who have abandoned God. We “look” for God, but in reality God is always with us in the living out of love. To find God all we have to do is love

God is always present. God always has been present. We always have been in the presence of God. Love always is potential. Love always has been potential. We always have been in the potentiality of love

Loving, living in love, walking in love—loving requires boldness. Boldness in loving is the doorway to grace and mercy. If we hear Christ’s commandment to love one another as ourselves we hold confidence and pride firmly as hope. Hope is our invitation to grace.

You can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
All you need is love

The parable of the rich man (Mark 10: 17-31) places us in the context of grace and hope. Love is always potential and grace is always near. Hope is always justified in confidence. But we must love. To love we must give up those things that bind us. To love we must give up those things that blind us. It is those things that bind and blind us that cut us off from the love we are called to live. Who is last and who is first? Those who give love are always first.

The LGBTQ community of love is first because so often we are last. To be fully the LGBTQ people God created us to be in God’s own image means “giving up” the closet that binds us and blinds us so that we might live boldly the lives of love intended for us. It is love that defines our community. It is living in the boldness of loving that opens the doorway to grace and mercy. We can indeed learn how to be us, all we need is love.

I remember as though it were an old movie how it was when I came out as a gay man. The smiles of my brothers in the gay community were a reflection of the relief in their hearts that I had given up the blinding binder to live in the community of love and loving. The hugs that greeted me were an expression of welcome and joy that I had learned how to be me.

One, two, three, four
Can I have a little more?
Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
I love you …
Look at me
All together now …
All together now
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul McCartney
All Together Now lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

All together now: love is all you need.

Proper 23 Year B 2012 RCL (Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15 Deus, Deus meus; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31)

©2021 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Synergy Glory

It is cool and raining in Oregon, although today is dry and sunny. There has been enough rain now to give us the chance to relax a bit about wildfire danger. We’re even allowed to use our fireplaces again, which is nice now that cool evenings are more commonplace. Relief has always been my favorite form of mercy. Relief—just the knowledge that I can relax a little bit—is a reflection of the synergy of creation, which of course is the synergy of the love that is God. Mercy, after all, is that quality of forgiveness that makes life possible because it allows us to keep going.

Still, life comes and goes. God is not a puppeteer. Rather we are gifted with the opportunity to walk in love in harmony with creation. When we manage that even our mistakes are greeted with mercy. When we fail to walk in love in harmony with creation then we encounter challenging times. In those times it does no good to decry love. Rather, we must love even more in those times. We must always remember that love builds up.

We can build love in simple ways, by singing with joy, by worshipping love by whipping up love. These are the ways we can encounter glory—the sustained abundance of the present manifestation of love. We must always at least try to live a life of love. As long as we try, we are grounded in the presence of God.

We do not see love subjectively. Rather we see love embodied in Jesus who taught us the ways of walking in love, simple ways: washing each other’s feet, eating together, feeding the oppressed, healing the outcast by welcoming them in. These are the ways of building up the love of God in synergy with community and creation. These are the ways of grounding the presence of God. These are the ways of seeking glory, which is the armor of love.

Hardness of heart is imperviousness to love. If you cannot walk in love it is easy enough to give one’s self over to rules: no chocolate, no dessert. Then, it is easy enough to make other rules: no outsiders, no one who is different. Hardness of heart builds up too. No love remains then, only obeisance.

The antidote always is love, always is the realization that these are the “last days” in our hearts. In every moment we have the opportunity to build love to energize the community to synergize creation. All we have to do is start. All we have to do is try.

The echoes of life for LGBTQ people are like trajectories all through this midrash. Relief comes when we can relax into our daily lives, when we can think about dinner and the garden instead of worrying about survival. We have our ups and downs. We have many opportunities to sing and share the joy in our hearts. We are called to share food and drink, to welcome each other, to build community. We are called forth from our love as children created by God in God’s own image of love. We are called forth to shine like a beacon in the synergy of these last days of building up love. We are called to embrace and nurture glory.

Proper 22 Year B 2012 RCL (Job 1:1; 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.