2020.04.26 Up, Down, and All Around

As a child, my eyes were trained upward, peering through the jagged line of city skyscrapers, trying to get a glimpse of God on high. I saw many clouds and sun and rain. As an adult, I look downward for glimpses of God in my own heart, in the faces and actions of people on earth. I see smiles, and kindness, and tears—signs of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, the dear truth of a holy society envisioned here on earth.

For centuries many have prayed:  “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Do we expect that all this will happen without our help?

According to Vida D. Scudder in her book, Social Teachings of the Christian Year. Lectures Delivered at the Cambridge Conference, 1918, republished in 2015, the appointed Scriptures in Eastertide “keep us strictly to earth, at her homeliest and most difficult. The Risen Lord with the marks of His Passion on Him, moves among His own in old scenes, in the familiar ways. As they tread dusty roads, as they eat their suppers, as they ply their trades; in rooms where they were wont to gather, or by the lake whose waters have known the tread of His holy Feet, suddenly He is with them.”

Suddenly, someone verifiably dead appears—not in a dream but in a vision, earthbound in a sensory way and often with a life-changing message. Some of us have had such visionary experiences of someone to whom we’ve been very close. These are mostly personal and private. We are afraid we’re crazy, so we don’t tell anyone. But a child will always tell. A child I knew once announced: “Daddy called today.” Daddy was dead. Mommy argued truth, but the most she could get from the child was an agreement that she would not to tell anyone else. Such things just do not fit into rational boxes. Jesus’s followers were just as blown away as we are.

Still, let’s remember that the very first person to “tell” about such a strong vision had never seen Jesus alive, but only after he was dead in a vision with a message to TELL the world. That person was Paul, persecutor-in-chief of Christians. He was so radically converted by this vision that, once he digested what had happened to him, he never shut up. So we ought never dare dismiss such an experience as “just a vision.”  The child knew the sound of Daddy’s voice and heard it through the phone—so strong was the sensory memory backed up by the truth of Daddy’s love still in her heart. This was true for the gospel writers—and for us as well.

What’s odd is that these extraordinary spiritual experiences happened in mundane ways and were nothing new. As Scudder puts it, Jesus was “still bent on training his followers to create the Beloved Community.”

This Lord/Christ—alive, dead, resurrected—was/is consistent and insistent. With few exceptions, this Jesus addressed them when they were gathered in a group.

Today we are the group. Some have interpreted these appearance visions to include instructions to organize the Church to be the Kingdom. Scudder warns, with wry humor that “there is scant evidence of this in the Bible and the idea of the Kingdom is belittled when confined to the partial and imperfect expression in the Church visible here below. The Church is doubtless the natural, the appointed instrument of the Kingdom, but it would take an inveterate optimism to identify the two.”  

This vision, this message, this God, was to be proclaimed up and down and all around, all at once, and not restricted to any one religion, including Christianity. 

I find this limitless spirituality helpful today when we are all of us together yet trapped in solitary confinement because of a lethal virus sweeping the globe. We are caught in a paradox we cannot, and are not supposed to unravel: the more alone we are the more together we become.

Can anything good come out of this crisis?  I believe that a cultural shift of massive proportions will occur to move us from global selfie-ism to a god’s-eye-view perspective—up and down and  all around— in every major institution: arts, business and commerce, religion, politics, science, medicine, education, social organization.

Why so? Because we have lived with solitary confinement; we have lived surrounded by death; we have lived in the throes of collective angst and hope, death-in-life. And we will grieve and live to begin anew in a catastrophically changed and strengthened world. Oh yes, we will live with the cruel bruises of this pandemic on our souls and bodies, and we will write new bibles, work to love and heal our Earth, tell old and new stories, sing new songs, never forget.

                                 All changed, changed utterly
                                    A terrible beauty is born.
                                                                 -W. B. Yeats

2020.04.19 Cupcake

I first met Cupcake fifteen years ago in a memoir writing class. Her first read-aloud memoir piece had us all laughing out loud. She wrote about walking along some street in Boston when construction workers called out to her, “Hey Cupcake!” This classic wolf whistle put a spring in her step. With superbly sarcastic wit, Cupcake riffed on the many possible meanings of that appellation. I’ve called her “Cupcake” ever since.

One of the early class assignments was to design a cover for our memoir-to-be. Cupcakes’s cover, as I recall, showed an empty chair, such as one that would be placed at a dining room table. The chair was an image that evoked her feelings of isolation and exclusion in her family of origin.  Cupcake had hoped and prayed that her mother would, one day, set a place for her at the family table at which there was a place set for everyone but her. The mystery of why such cruelty happened is not mine to know, but I do know that Cupcake today would make sure that everyone, even a stranger, would have a place at her table and in her heart. 

I once told Cupcake that there was always a place for her at the Holy Communion altar-table of God. Like clockwork, every March 25th on the anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest, Cupcake sends me a card to honor my anniversary. That would be lovely enough, but she also always includes a check! Usually it’s for $35, but this year it was for $50—possibly a raise for my advanced age.

A retired Boston school teacher who lives alone with two small dogs who don’t talk back or bite, Cupcake has a robust sense of humor and a gigantic heart—not extroverted but authentically truth-bound, a quality of soul ironically common in people who have survived profound early wounding. A lover of detail, Cupcake will often mention the orange dress with the flared skirt I wore on my ordination day underneath my liturgical vestments—myself a flirtatious potential “cupcake” at heart.

I recently asked Cupcake why she remembered my ordination anniversary in such a consistent way. She wrote this:
Psalm 110 tells us "thou art a priest forever."  Celebrating your anniversary is a small statement of who you are to me - Episcopal priest, counselor, teacher and friend. When I missed a writing group one day, you called to see how I was. My dog had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and I asked you to pray that God would give me the grace to get through the situation. And you did and I did.
When I heard of my ex-husband’s death, you were the only person who asked how I was doing. No one else has ever even hinted of his significance in my life.
I remember your ordination because you are always priestly to me.
I remember your ordination because Maya Angelou exhorted us to "try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud." 
You are my rainbow. 
 

I felt undeserving of all that praise until I remembered the popcorn. I’d once commented on how much I love popcorn. The next thing I knew a large carton full of individual bags of popcorn arrived at my doorstep. Too much! But this is Cupcake, a hopeless gift giver, generous to the point of embarrassment. Her joy in giving quickly erased my discomfort in receiving, along with my shrinking from the gift of praise. Cupcake knows how to keep Easter going, no matter what.

If Cupcakes’s own Roman Catholic tradition permitted the ordination of women priests, she would be one if she so desired. But she needs no pope, or archbishop, or brother priest to formalize what God has already planted in her soul—a priest forever in God’s sight.

Thank you, Cupcake.

2020.04.12 Easter Images

I can only downsize Easter a bit, expand it to include all Creation, take it out of heaven, and lift it very far away from pearly gate jokes or even serious theologies of divine condemnation or hell fire.  So I have photographed some images that have personal meaning to me and also capture the joy and the sorrow and the love of Easter.

Here are three images of a cross moving from black through scarlet into white. The small cross necklace was a gift to me long ago from the man I eventually married. It conveys the steadiness of Christ's love with us— no matter what.

 And here are my very broken glasses. They dropped out of my pocket as I was walking in our neighborhood. They were getting fogged up because of my Corona mask, so I removed them and slipped them safely into my pocket. Not safe! They fell out. After two trips around my route by flashlight, with my husband, and in the sunlight they finally appeared—broken. Note that the lenses are still intact. Easter!

 

And here is a multicolored work of art, a cross created several years ago by my oldest daughter and her then husband, an artist. Its power lies in its creativity. Today it hangs on our front door, a sign that we celebrate the depth and breadth and width of Love itself. Easter.

 

2020.04.05 Palms or No Palms—Hosanna For Both

For Christians, this is the Sunday we remember the procession of Jesus into Jerusalem, surrounded by what Matthew’s gospel account describes as a large and clamoring crowd. (The biblical footnote indicates that “most”—only most—of the crowd followed him.) 

Jesus is astride a donkey. The crowds spread palms and cloaks in his path. They shout: “Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Hosanna echoes psalm 118:26 and translates as “O save!")  Many exclamations points!

Jesus is the hoped-for Messiah who will change the world’s hidebound classist politics, bringing justice and peace. So they hoped. So we hope.

The donkey is a humble touch, resonant of the Nativity donkey, led by Joseph and carrying a very pregnant Mary. The couple seeks shelter for the birth. They’re too scruffy for any self-respecting inn to shelter, so they end up in a humble stable where Jesus is born and laid in a humble manger. No one could miss the exaggeratedly humble theme—altogether counter to traditional patriarchal images of Almighty God, then and now. Humble imagery still eludes us. It’s not dramatic or impressive. But, let’s face it, would a large majestic stallion tolerate the stable scene or the commotion of the palm procession? Stallions were for warriors. Not this king!

Hosanna isn’t the whole story, however. There are shadows underlying the bleached scene of joy. In Jerusalem, people say, basically: “Who the hell is this?” Then follows a violent scene in which Jesus overturns the usurious tables of greed in the temple, claiming the temple to be a house of prayer. Who is this intruder, acclaimed by unruly mobs, tearing down our business practices, and adulterating our holy ground? Jesus insults the status quo. Jesus assaults our assumptions.

In the rock opera,“Jesus Christ Superstar,” one lyric, beside wild Hosannas and hope-crazed longings, stands out:  “Jesus Christ, Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are?” A question many still ponder. 

Palm Sunday in 2020 longs for Hosanna. The world is beset by a dangerous virus, ironically called Corona, spreading easily and rapidly. We are staying safely inside, fearful of human contact that could bring death. Hope of life and fear of death linger together in the air, just as they did in ancient times.

Here is what we hung on our front door this Palm Sunday: old dead palms with new green branchlets. In both, God’s grace emerges.

To be physically isolated one from another with no secure timeline about the dissipation of this virus is crazy-making. Back in the early 1980s, I wrote this poem when I was waiting—and waiting like the biblical Job— for the Episcopal Church to ordain me a priest.

When I have no title
    I make one up—irreverend.
When I have no collar
    I roll my neck round.
When I have no church
    I steeple my fingers.
When I have no altar
    I celebrate my back yard.
When I have no bloody wine
    I shed tears
When I have no bread
    I am a sacrament
When I have no God
    I pray anyway. 

Today, I feel the same suspended timelessness mixed with urgency and desire to be free AND well.

When I have no outdoors
    I clean my windows.
When I have no society
    I fight with my spouse.
When I have no fun
    I, well, never mind.
When I have no friendly faces at hand
    I look through my computer screen at pixelated images.
When I see mask-covered faces walking by
    I strain to see smiling eyes.
When I can’t dine out
    I lose weight and treasure my beloved personal spousal chef.
When I have no church
    I bring church on home.
When I pray to God to lift this curse
    I am not humble.

AMEN and HOSANNA!!