Shattered Lenses
“Sometimes it’s about adjusting the tuning, kiddo. Singing the same song in a different key.”
These words are spoken by David Steeler, an Episcopal priest inThe Wisdom of the Olive Tree, the novel I’ve just launched into the world, to his niece, Beth, who is grappling with losses so profound that she no longer recognizes her own life. As David urges her to embrace her newfound — if unintended and unplanned — freedom and focus on moving forward, Beth quotes Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee: “The only reason I’m free is because freedom’s another word for nothing left to lose….and I’ve lost everything that mattered to me.”
David’s advice suggests that, oftentimes, our ability to see a path forward is limited by habit. We see and hear and think about things in the same way we always have, viewing ourselves and the events of our lives through the scratched and cloudy lens we’ve always used. But what if we shattered that lens and tried a new one?
Years ago, I was a member of a church that was going through a painful period of transition. Our wonderful rector and associate rector had each accepted calls to other parishes, and our beloved deacon — a true character and one of my favorite people on the planet — had died, all within a few short months. An interim rector was holding the congregation together, but we were, as a group, in mourning.
Now, if you went to an Episcopal school, as I did, and grew up in the church, you’ve heard the liturgy a thousand times, and in the event of a clerical emergency, could easily whip off your choir robe and step in at a moment’s notice. And while we have different variations on the liturgy (in Rites I and II), the words don’t change if you attend the same service every Sunday. So, as the priest lifts the communion wafer in the air and prepares for the Eucharist, the words you expect to hear at 10:30 am are, “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.” (Book of Common Prayer)
But that’s not what this interim rector said. Instead, he lifted the wafer, looked out into the congregation, paused, and then said, “These are the gifts of God, and you are the people of God” ….and then returned to the script.
Not a big difference, right? A bit of emphasis and slightly different wording. But to me, grieving and shell-shocked, this subtle variation was a powerful reminder that I was not alone. We were in a bit of turmoil, yes, but we were still a community bound by a common tradition, still receiving the gifts of faith, still experiencing the presence of God. Something about that subtle change to those familiar words opened me up to the possibility that while the loss of our clergy was painful, there was a path ahead for us as a congregation, and it was ripe with possibility.
I was reminded of that experience recently when I read *Nadia Bolz-Weber’s blog post about the biblical story of Zecheriah, an elderly priest whose equally old wife, Elizabeth, becomes pregnant. Zecheriah receives this news from the angel Gabriel in the 1st chapter of Luke: “God has heard your prayer,” Gabriel tells him. “Your wife Elizabeth will have a son, and you will name him John. He will be your pride and joy, and many people will be glad that he was born.”
Zecheriah — a priest who would surely understand Gabriel’s message as God-sent and true and the fulfillment of his lifelong dream to be a father — is ecstatic, right? Well….not so much. He is immediately skeptical and demands proof. I imagine him as Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men, but with the rocks-tumbling-in-the-dryer voice of Leonard Cohen: “Pregnant? Like hell she is! Be gone, and don’t let the door hit your wings on the way out.”
But Elizabeth is pregnant, and their son will be John the Baptist.
“Look. You made me drop my thurible. How about you take your good news nonsense somewhere else?”
Bolz-Weber wonders whether Zecheriah refuses to believe Gabriel’s news “because he thought he already knew his own story.” Was Zecheriah, she suggests, “so comfortable with the story he told himself … about what his life looks like and what it will always look like” that he simply “couldn’t believe another story was even possible”?
Her question made me think: What stories are we telling ourselves about our own lives — what our lives can be, and what they can’t be — and about who we are? What possibilities are we dismissing because we think our life stories have already been written in stone and published for life to chip away at?
The challenge I’ve issued myself for 2023 is to throw away the old lens and allow myself to see new possibilities. To sing the familiar songs in a new key, as David suggests Beth should do, and to remember, as Leonard Cohen growls in Anthem, that “there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.”
David writes Beth in a later chapter, “You are not alone in this world, and nothing that has occurred in your life is without meaning. However, it is up to you to decide what that meaning will be.”
What meaning will we make of our lives in the coming year?
As we ponder, here’s Leonard Cohen singing Anthem.
Check out Nadia Bolz-Weber’s work here.