Tag Archives: Bible

Conversion

February 11, 2021 sigmon-carow 4 Comments

In a pre-Christmas issue of OnBeing’s newsletter, The Pause, Padraig O’Tuama tells a story from his late teens, a period of his life that he describes as “too interested in religion” and “too much zeal.” Working for a church in Dublin, he encountered an elderly woman in chapel nearly every day for five years. And every time, she would say, “I’m praying for you; for your conversion.”

He goes on to say how his initial dismay (“I was already converted”) evolved over time to a deeper understanding of conversion: “It is an embrace of the possibility of change and future. … It calls us again and again throughout a life.”

He might have said, It calls us to life—to a deeper, richer, more genuine life.

In some contexts, conversion is seen in binary terms: yes or no, before or after, saved or not saved, sheep or goat. St. Paul is the prototypical example, to the extent that “Damascus Road experience” is a familiar idiom, even in the secular world.

In others, the pattern is more like that of St. Peter, conversion on conversion on conversion. Even after his uncomfortable post-Resurrection “little chat” over breakfast (“do you love me … feed my sheep”), even after Pentecost, we have the story of his dream on the rooftop in Joppa.

I have been blessed with many conversions over the course of my life. But I say “blessed” only after the fact. Conversion, in my experience, is not a pleasant thing to go through. Most of the time, when we say we are praying for someone, we pray for favorable external circumstances: May you get well, may you get the job, may you win the lottery, may your pain go away. To pray for another’s conversion is to wish pain onto them. Granted, a necessary pain that will lead to that deeper, richer, more genuine life, but pain, nevertheless.

What a startling, presumptuous prayer! And one fraught with pitfalls for the pray-er. If I pray for your conversion, am I ignoring my own need to change? (E.G., May all you folks who voted the “wrong” way in the recent election come to see the light.) If I pray for your conversion, am I assuming that I know what you are in need of? I have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking I knew the particular way my spouse or child needed to change. And yet, more than one of my own conversions came at a wise and loving challenge from Nancy.

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On another front, signs of spring are all around. Shoots of the spring ephemerals are popping up through the leaf litter. The woods are full of birdsong. Nancy spotted a pair of red-shouldered hawks in the big pine tree below us.

As usual, the list of tasks we were going to accomplish over the winter is barely diminished. We did spend two afternoons crawling around under some rhododendron, pulling out the English ivy—a task I am only willing to do when it is too cold for the snakes and other critters to be active. In our observation, the ivy does not climb and cling onto the rhododendron and azaleas. And under the rhodies, the ivy was far less thick than just outside their reach. Too shady? Or does that genus somehow suppress ivy?

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A final aside: Here is a clip entitled “Mona Plays Basketball.”

The View

Prodigality

July 1, 2016 sigmon-carow 1 Comment

Prodigal Summer is one of my favorite Barbara Kingsolver novels. Among its many gifts is redeeming that word, prodigal, from its Sunday School connotation of degeneracy and firmly implanting in my mind the second definition, the more positive notion of nature’s extravagant and lavish abundance.

This is indeed a prodigal summer. The bank along our driveway is a riot of bee balm, cone flower, four o’clock, zinnia, black and blue salvia, butterfly bush, black-eyed Susan, and wild bergamot. Despite a month wasted attacking windows and car mirrors, our bluebirds have managed to reproduce. An Eastern box turtle laid eggs behind the house. The daily show of goldfinch and cardinal and house finch and ruby-throated hummingbird and robin and bluebird continues just outside our dining room.

A few days ago, I glanced at the frog pond and saw the most frantic splashing and flailing about—two frogs in belly-to-belly combat.

The brief video clip here does not do justice to the ferocity I first witnessed; by the time Nancy had arrived and switched the camera to video mode, the pair were nearly exhausted.

A day later, the same pair were engaged in amplexus (frog sex). The female, on bottom, Nancy has named Xena. She’s the brave one who does not dive when humans approach, recognizable by a mark on her left jaw—a distinct blip in the green-black boundary. She’s a fierce woman-on-top in the video. From Nancy’s reading, territorial fights are not rare, but would be expected between two males. Why Xena was fighting her future sex partner is a mystery.

The Economist says of the campaigning leading up to the recent Brexit vote, “Knowledge has been scorned … (b)asic facts have fallen by the wayside …,” and that the campaigning has exacerbated “the growing void between cosmopolitan and nativist parts of the country, the diminishing faith in politics, the rise of populism, the inadequacy of the left-right partisan spectrum in an age when open-closed is a more salient divide.” Sound familiar?

A lone gunman kills or wounds more than 100 people in a gay nightclub. Gun sales rise, as do the share prices of gun makers, and both sides in the gun control debate claim the carnage bolsters their arguments. Sound familiar?

The father forgives his wayward younger son and throws a party to celebrate his safe return. Steady, obedient older brother resents the welcome given his sibling. Sound familiar?

Despair comes easily in today’s world. We are beset on all sides by intolerance and tribalism and fear that “the other” is a threat to our livelihoods if not our very existence. Where can we find our antidote to despair? I turn to words: My weekly dose of Parker Palmer and the rest of the On Being crew, local writer Stephanie Piper, and others.

I also try to wrap my scarcity-oriented economist’s brain around the notion of abundance, to meditate on bee balm and bluebirds and the eggs of frogs and turtles, to shake off my older brother righteous indignation and trust the prodigal father’s lavish abundance.

The View

So Proud

April 6, 2016 sigmon-carow 2 Comments

My home state of Tennessee is on the verge of naming the Bible as the State Book. That is great! Didn’t Jesus advocate a wall around Samaria, to keep the infidels out? Didn’t he tell the Syrophoenician woman to go back to Syrophoenicia and take her brood with her? Didn’t he chide the disciples for not being armed, leaving all the fighting to Peter at the Battle of Gethsemane? From the cross, didn’t he order his disciples to rough up the hecklers? Centuries before Jesus, didn’t the Bible tell the believers to send “the aliens in your midst” back out of your midst; to deny healthcare to the poor and the widows and the orphans; to discriminate against the outsider?

Now that our finest politicians are adopting these sound policies, it is time they acknowledged their debt to Biblical teachings. My state, Tennessee, is in the vanguard. I am so proud!

The Arts

7 Words

February 11, 2016 sigmon-carow Leave a comment

There is a new page showing on our top level menu, entitled “Meditations on 7 Words.” While we are still six weeks away from Good Friday, I have taken yesterday’s beginning of Lent as an occasion to collect the Good Friday meditations I have written over the years and publish them there. I invite you to read them.

And if you are interested in a series of meditations for each day of Lent, you might check out this booklet, a collaborative effort both in its writing and its illustration. Nancy has taken a collaborative art project that she helped design for a retreat last summer and reconfigured and repurposed it to illustrate these meditations written by fellow parishioners.

The View

Snow Day Redux

January 20, 2016 sigmon-carow Leave a comment

It’s a snowy day, the first of the season. I was up early, doing my morning pages and watching the snow and wondering if I’d venture out for my usual Wednesday morning men’s group session. And then I remembered another snowy day, almost 18 years ago. I dug out what I’d written that day. So much changes over two decades, but then again, not much.

Snow Day

At 5 am, the rain is laced with sleet. On a normal day, I treasure the stillness and solitude of 5 am. I’ve been known to choke the pendulum on the Regulator clock into silence and pull the plug on our tabletop fountain, their tick, tock, drip, and splash too garish in the early morning calm; I’ve strained to hear tranquil rain above the hum of refrigerator in the next room and jetliner six miles up. Today, with the weather on the fence, curiosity outweighs my need for solitude, and I admit muted TV weather watchers into my journaling and prayer time. I watch the growing list of school closings and let Doppler images compete with Nehemiah, fasting in captivity, mourning his beloved Jerusalem. I contemplate how I will spend the day, if the weather breaks my way.

By 6:30, rain and sleet give way to snow, and white accumulates on lawn and street. Local schools are closed, and I intercept my teenage son on his way to the shower. I go back to bed. Snow is a gift, not least for the chance of extra sleep.

At 8, I wake again. The world is white—every trunk and branch and twig. My youngest is awake. He turns four today and already has two unplanned presents: a snow day, and a big brother to share it with. If he were older and self-entertaining, my love and I might stay in bed till noon. I fantasize, but not for long.

How will I spend this snow day? I could brave the slippery streets and clump around the office in hiking boots and jeans and bulky sweater, one of the male majority who consider ourselves essential to the economy and our driving skills well above average. I could stay home and chafe at the inconvenience, trapped in childcare and domesticity. I’ve done both.

Or I can accept this day as a gift, six-pointed grace. I call the office and say I’m staying home. “Call if you need me.” They won’t, and I won’t mind.

In all honesty, I should confess that I’m underemployed right now and would have had to take a day or so off anyway. But I’d stay home even if it were a busy week.

The snow took out a pine tree, laid it neatly on the path that switchbacks down to the kids’ fort. Most of the pines in my oak woods lean and droop on a good day, and this giant’s snow heavy top got the better of its roots. An oak, itself an affront to gravity leaning 40 degrees off plumb, snagged the top 15 feet off the pine on its way down. That lethal widowmaker hangs 30 feet in the air, its 8” diameter butt-end a jagged warning flag of yellow against black bark, green needles, and gray sky. Come spring, we’ll have to build a new stretch of trail through the poison ivy, briars, and deadfall. Come spring, we’ll have muddy shoes and pants to clean as the four-year-old climbs the newly formed mountain of roots and explores the crater they once occupied.

The snow makes disappointing sledding. We tromp through the woods to explore the downed tree, bombarded by soggy tufts of slush from the canopy. Wet cold hands soon bring us inside. We make cake and cookies for the birthday celebration. I do a workout, some writing, some housework, enjoying the slow pace of a snow day.

I’ve had a lot of snow days in the past two years, though few with real snow. Leave without pay. Not enough work. Days when I stayed home and played with my son or took him to the zoo. Days when I painted the house. Days when I wrote. A long Gulf Coast vacation.

Those days are joy; I relish the re-creating freedom and opportunity. Loss of income is a serious downside, to be sure. But the nights of waking in dry-mouthed, heart-pounding fear of unemployment have been rare. I more often feel on the threshold of something exciting.

Chronologically, I’m on the threshold of Modern Maturity, which will be arriving in my mailbox any day now. But my snow days are not about withdrawal and winding down. They are days of discovery—that I have creative gifts, healing gifts, spiritual gifts to be nurtured and used.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis says of his fellow bus travelers, “They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities, but of impossibilities.” That is the face I see in the mirror that scares and haunts me. Gaunt, tight, sunken cheeked, steeled against the world, seeing only today and an endless string of todays.

More than most, I’ve resisted change and run from risk. Once I wore a mustache for 21 years; having grown it to spite my father, I forgot what I looked like underneath and couldn’t make the leap to rediscover myself or him. I count my life as two decades of childhood, two of stagnation, and one of belated climbing out of ruts. Snow days are for climbing out of ruts.

And what of my next decade? Where will it take me? Patching up my dis-integrated life is a priority. I am tired of this piecemeal life in which the way I earn a living interferes with the way I find fulfillment. With Frost, “My goal in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation…” To write, to serve and heal hurt children, to love, to worship and pray—that is the description of my dream vocation. Snow days are experiments and practice for my next career, whose outlines I barely discern and whose details I have not yet imagined.

The next day, streets are clear, schools open, and life back to routine. In separate casual conversations, two people I barely know ask if I made it in to work the day before. The first seems shocked and dismayed when I say I could have, but didn’t; with the precision of a practiced commuter, she details for me her route, the road conditions, and just how many extra minutes her trip had taken. The other, like me, had voluntarily stayed home and enjoyed every minute. Her face is all smile as she recounts telling her husband she might just quit work and stay home for good. Yeah!