2021.01.31 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Fifteen. Immanence

The arrival of 2021 is freighted and illuminated with grand dreams, even some magical thinking—new executive leadership at the federal level, a vaccine that will immunize the entire global population against a lethal virus and end a death-dealing pandemic, a bipartisan effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth, bipartisan policy and legislation that will save democracy and end racial, class, gender, and economic inequities, and finally, multi-faith cooperation to end the crisis of inequality by promoting an image of Divinity that is both true to scholarship and frees Godde’s image and identity from limitations imposed by patriarchalism’s sexist language.

My hopes and dreams of all the years are at stake. What in my own history will help me weather such a deluge, help me not succumb to white supremacy? Am I too white?  

(To catch readers up in this “racism” series, I write about 1980; I’m in seminary, a commuter, hoping to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and learning some new theological words that assure me that the image of God is not, well, white.)  

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Scene XLI. The Christian Testament, Called “New”

In my second year at Yale Divinity School, I sat in the same huge lecture hall, my pen poised, my mind open. I was ready for the New Testament—“our” testament, the one starring Jesus, the hero of Christianity. I wondered whether anything could top the Old Testament, also why this one was not called “young” instead of “new.”

I was a Christian; I did not know Jesus except through stained glass windows or sermons from mile-high pulpits. The sermons were either sentimental or divinely untouchable. It was obvious Jesus was divine, but not clear how he got that way. I felt guilty about my ignorance—a little.

Nevertheless, I was alert and bewitched just to be where I was.  


Scene XLII. Luke Timothy Johnson and Immanence Theology

This professor was spry, darn near jolly-old-elfish, and laughed a lot.

This man promised something new. We were to begin with the biblically obvious order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The syllabus, however,  indicated that we would begin with Mark whose gospel was chronologically first. Every Sunday School thing I’d ingested was about to be dashed on the rocks of scholarship.

The room fell silent. Into the solemn silence someone sneezed—loudly and explosively. Luke Johnson responded without missing a beat: “God bless you and all vegetative processes.” Everyone laughed—and breathed. Thus was launched the New Testament. Thus began my first inkling that Jesus was human like us, and like his predecessors in the Old Testament.   

I was to benefit from Luke Johnson’s scholarship as well as his style and his pastoral care. He was totally delighted doing what he was doing—lecturing about holy texts to unformed—or ill-formed—students, some even middle-aged! This professor’s spirituality was contagious. I made an appointment to talk with him about my fears and frets about the Episcopal Church and my having been turned down in the Connecticut ordination process. I knew Luke was Roman Catholic, had even been a monastic. He too had been hurt by his church when he tried to get laicized. I was trying to get un-laicized. He wanted out of the ranks and I wanted in.

“I loved the Bible and your course, of course,” I stammered when we met. Luke nodded. “I am trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and the resistance to women priests is, well, stiff.” Luke listened to my feelings with care. He was supportive with no answers. As we wrapped up I stood to leave just as another professor walked by Luke’s open office door. He was a learned professorial type—tall, erect, and fully uniformed in black with the traditional high-rise Anglican clerical collar. He was a nice man, kind and learned, specializing in Patristics (old guys—the Fathers—who articulated early church politics and theological justifications thereof). We students liked him, while also joking that we bet he slept in his collar.

Nodding in his direction, Luke said softly with a smile: “Lyn you don’t fit the model.” He added, “But God knows who you are, so trust God.” That could be good or not such good news.

For now I would dive into my latest God-word: Immanence. Luke used this word a lot and I thought he lived it pretty well. Immanence attracted me. It was close to imminence but with much more— ah!—profundity. Imm-AH-nence had not been on any of the lists of God-defining words I’d heard in Sunday School or from any pulpit.  Now I heard it from an academic podium and soon would read more in an essay about the Jesus of history written by a man named Marcus Borg.

One reason I found Immanence so alluring was that it described the God I’d met under the table as a child— intimate, reachable, and silently conversational. Immanent means “remaining within.” Pulpit Gods were mostly transcendent, almighty, unreachable, and remaining without. Jesus knew all about Immanence.


Scene XLIII. Bill Muehl and Immanent Preaching

As I was rejoicing over Immanence I was simultaneously more and more exposed to people in seminary whose skin was not white like mine. God, I figured, was immanent in them as well as in me and all living things. This I got from the Genesis Creation story, but Immanence was the classy theological word for it—a word that made racist imagery for God impossible.

Hearing black students preach properly and firmly confirmed for me the absurdity of racism. I heard them in the regular chapel worship and in the preaching class required of us all. Students prepared written sermons of course, but the moment of truth came when we had to deliver them—out loud from a pulpit in front of the class and the professor, William (Bill) Muehl. 

 

Meuhl had a sharp, wry wit, was a lawyer by training, and famous for his book All The Damned Angels (1972) deploring all sorts of rigid moralisms and gooey piety about the Cross and its bold dominance in Christian parlance. He once said that a miracle could be performed by accident, and in his book he landed square on the dirty business of Immanence, God’s life in the flesh: “I have had to be content with damned angels and the facts of life.”

I was already suspicious of too much unfleshly transcendence, and really did not adore the cross, although having to preach to Bill Muehl might feel a bit like that. I took courage from the black students who did not seem scared and let it rip with vigor, energy, and an intimacy I loved but knew I didn’t have in me. I was too white.

None of this helped me feel less fearful about Muehl’s critique. I’d heard of it but hadn’t yet experienced it. Good thing because it might have caused me to die before I ever got to the pulpit for my turn.

I remember the text he assigned the day I was to be the preacher in class. It was one of St. Paul’s semicolon-loaded passages in Romans 5— all about justification by faith through grace via Christ, and then actually bragging about your sufferings. I was already suffering. But all would be well, St.Paul assured us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Why? Because God’s love had been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No problem. As far as I could tell, this passage was supposed to include the answer to all of life’s problems—just not mine right now.

Crucifixion suffering was overkill, and resurrection felt like avoidance of suffering altogeher. So, I focused on “poured” and imagined a huge pitcher full of Divinity, somehow liquified or magically de-solidified, pouring into me for the better. I’d never heard of water-boarding, thank heavens, so water seemed safer to me than Christ’s blood. This was a kind of suffering I figured, because I tried to convey the joyful horror of drowning in God. I passed the class.

Muehl would bemoan the fact that he never understood how students did well in his preaching classes and then got out there and preached “pap” in their parishes. Was I a future pap-preacher? I’d already developed a severe case of pulpit-paralysis in a small class.

Listening to the black students preach helped. These students had to be just as scared as I was, but when they got in that pulpit their words sang with Immanence,  jumped for joy.  It was so intimate that listeners talked back: Preach it sister! Say it! Amen! Yes. I felt exhilarated and daunted all at once.

But I was white.

White preaching was emotionally reserved, distant, bleached—transcendent. Was God even in it?  Was I? Muehl advised against imitation and told me to be myself. “You’ll get used to it,” he told me, adding something like, “but of course you’ll get flack about your female voice, so pitch low." I told him I was an alto.

Nevertheless I promised myself that I would experiment with preaching from the center aisle not the pulpit, maybe without a script, aka “cheat sheet.” Pulpit and written manuscript provided distance and a shield of protection from Immanence. 

My promise would prove impossible to honor—but not completely so.

2021.01.24 'Dom Ring

Today, the third Sunday of Epiphany for Christians, the New Testament Gospel tells the story of Jesus’s choosing his disciples, those he would train for a renewed way of being with God, self and neighbors. It was a Kairos time for his ministry on earth. It is now a Kairos time for us earthlings as we choose new leaders and plot new courses.
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The Greek language give us two words for time: chronos for clock-measurable time and Kairos for time that, for a variety of reasons, many unforeseeable, is simply opportune or favorable. Kairos time is neither measurable nor predictable, yet it is discernible— a time made special by a sense of one’s presence to oneself, all creation, and to the creator. Kairos is God’s time. It knows no bounds, has no measure, and is available to all Creation.

Most days are run by chronos. We are chased by, or chasing, time’s passage, racing against its inevitability as if it were in our control. Some of us run too fast and some too slowly. To accurately asses time and make room to notice Kairos occasions, we have to let go of the dominance of chronos, get conscious of what our own insides and our senses reveal.

What time is it now?
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When I was a child I begged my mother with annoying persistence: “Sing ‘Dom Ring’. Sing it again, Mommy.”  My mother, not particularly gifted with a singing voice, took a while to figure our what ‘Dom Ring’ meant, and not much longer to say: “Ask Daddy.”

Daddy did have a good voice. I knew this, because I saw pictures of him in lines of singing men dressed in fancy suits called tuxedos. They were called a glee club and named after a famous musician, Mendelssohn. Daddy was famous.   

There were no women in the group, but I was used to such displays of male importance, and besides my Daddy was the handsomest, even though he was mostly too tired to sing ‘Dom Ring’—to me.  ‘Dom Ring came from the British national anthem sung for their Queen, but America stole it, and I made it my personal favorite. Here is the first stanza.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freeDOM RING!

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Not given to paroxysms of patriotic zeal, episodes of urgent flag-waving or flag-burning, or seizures of praise-cheering in church, I have suddenly just now been twice overtaken by surges of patriotic fervor with echoes of “'Dom ring" flooding my heart. Both brought me to tears.

On the day of Epiphany, January 6, 2021, collective ignorance met collective rage. What appeared in full view was America against itself. The well-planned, presidentially-incited, white supremacist attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. was violent and horrifying. Many of us were asleep to this possibility, entirely unprepared for such an insurrection, operating on chronos time only. There hadn’t been time or will to organize such violence, many thought. Not in America, many said. We’re safe and secure here, politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainline Christians said. Our president wouldn’t allow such a thing, many said. This was unprecedented—and indeed it was. Nevertheless, we did have warning signs—misread, little heeded, and imagined to be isolated. I trembled and wept.

Then on January 20th, the United States inaugurated a new President—not chosen by dissent or the will of a dictator, but by the votes of record turnouts of voters. Many labored together, outside of political preferences, to make sure there was no voter fraud and that all vote counts were accurate. This was a Kairos-driven process—unexpected but crucial. The losing candidate finally left, declaring himself the “real” winner of a “stolen” election. He was deprived of nothing except the dignity of truth with humility. I worried and wept.

Would this inauguration come off free of violence, safely, without foreign or domestic interference, and within the structures of tradition?  For 13 days I’d held my breath and prayed like hell. I still held my breath as I watched Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Kamala Devi Harris, first black and Asian American woman to serve in executive office, swear on huge bibles, using God’s name, promising to uphold the principles of the Constitution as they held its highest office. This was indeed a Kairos within chronos event. This was a ‘Dom Ring moment. I exhaled and wept for joy.
                 
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On that same day things came together in Kairos time for me personally:     

    1) My country chose Democracy over politics, Constitution over party, and leaders with integrity and a chronos-time commitment to American diversity truly represented in our government. 
    

    2) My husband and I received our first vaccine shots against a deadly virus.
    

    3)  One of my nephews, a long-time heroin addict, for whom I’d prayed incessantly, finally got clean and was willingly admitted to a local Suboxone clinic for treatment.
    

    4) President Biden proclaimed and embodied empathy and mutual respect for the dignity of all humankind and the whole created order, promises central to the baptismal covenant of The Episcopal Church in which I am a priest. America would UNITE NOT FIGHT! Biden’s “whole soul” was/is in this effort. Mine too.

    5) Amanda Gorman, age 22 and the youngest national youth poet laureate ever in this country, recited her brilliant inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”. (Not a grueling self-defeating hill like Sisyphus’s, nor a hill like Jack & Jill’s, down which Jill came tumbling after Jack, of course.) Besides her natural beauty and verve, Amanda Gorman, like Biden, has had to overcome a stutter. Now she preached a gospel of “right not fight”—irresistibly.  
    
    If we merge mercy with might, and might with right,
    then love becomes our legacy in change, our children’s birthright.

    With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
    we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

Maybe this nation, long enthralled with its own freedom, progress and self-love, is ready to turn itself inside out for the freedom, progress and self-love of others. Is that enough unity? Will freedom ring for us all?  We shall make it so—kairologically and chronologically—as we plot together the daily wonders of Epiphany.  

‘Dom Ring.
 


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2021.01.17 The Acceptable Year of the Lord?

When I watch all the rioting and attacks on our national leadership, I can almost feel the fright oozing or leaking out from the inanimate television screen. It would be easy to turn it off and go to bed, a favored option. But that would be, what? A cop-out? Being like a head-in-the-sand ostrich? Do they really do that out of cowardice?  I am trembling, not inert or inept, but deserted. I feel caught in the middle of a feud without a leader.

Feud is a funny word, of Germanic origin loosely related to hostility or ill will or foe. Definitionally, it means prolonged mutual hostility.When I say FEUD over and over my lips curl and pout and my teeth roll over onto my lower lip, expectorating if I try hard enough. This little-used word has power, somewhat like another famous F-word made powerful for its verboten status. Feud is not the same as conflict or disagreement or out-and-out war demanding a winner. In a feud there is no winner.

The word feud evokes for me the image of a pot of boiling water arrested in a simmer.

Famous feuds include families such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Montagues and the Capulets as portrayed in Romeo and Juliet, or more modernly, the Puerto Ricans and the New York elite in NYC as portrayed in West Side Story. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a feud culture—many tribes vying for territory, investing, or wasting, energy in futile feudal feuds over which tribe was God’s favorite. Jesus was murdered/executed for his efforts at feud- reconciliation. Only fools try to resolve feuds, because feuds are by nature insoluble, emotionally transmissible like a virus, and deeply, unconsciously rooted from generation to generation.   

All feuds have tragic consequences. The original dispute festers, buried deep in the flesh and blood of feuders, generation to generation. Even when the original dispute is forgotten and irrelevant, feuds live on. When my parents, afraid of those Puerto Ricans invading their safe white space, fled the city, my dearly beloved hometown, for the suburbs, I was twelve. I felt like a teenage tragedy all by myself and caught in a feuding culture not of my own making—as impotent as Juliet, María or Jesus or a hapless Pharisee or Hebrew, caught in a feud response not of my making. What I needed were friends to walk with. I found love and knowledge in books, good words, also experiences of loss, humiliation, and deep sorrow.

What a feud need is leaders. Leaders whose power is one of mutual and prolonged self-respect and other-respect—both. This kind of leader comes out of tragedy, grief, faith in God, and that mysterious quality of interior life we call Soul. This kind of leader has qualities that can reassure followers who are attracted out of their need to follow and their ability to intuit spiritual intellectual, emotional, and mental dignity within and without, in self and in others. Such leaders do not feud or succumb to its lies.

MLK Jr. was such a leader. There is much written about him and we all know it or can look it up. He, like all victims of feuding, in this case north/south, died for his efforts, but is never forgotten. It was his birthday on January 15 and his national holy day Jan 18. I offer you his preaching, based on the prayer of the psalmist who in Psalm 90  recognizes that God’s time is now and yesterday and tomorrow, every day newly acceptable. May we make it so. MLK the preacher still lives on. 

Excerpted and paraphrased sermon, delivered  by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 5 June 1966. “Guidelines for a Constructive Church”


The acceptable year of the Lord is any year (Amen) when we decide to do right.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is any year when we will stop lying and cheating. (Amen, Make it plain)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is any year is when we will stop throwing away the precious lives that God has given us. (Make it plain)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when people the world over will elect governance that will act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when we will keep our theology abreast with our technology, our morality abreast with our mentality.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when we will keep the ends for which we live abreast with the means by which we live. (Yes)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is that year (Yes) when all of the leaders of the world will sit down at the conference table (Make it plain) and realize that unless humankind puts an end to war, war will put an end to humankind. (Yes)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is when we discover that out of one blood Creator God made all people who dwell on the face of the earth.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is God’s year.

2021.01.10 Blue Jays I See

Blue flashes on grey skies
blackboard mist
   
swoop
   swing
      swish
         slash
    
Swatches of blue
    now streak the sky
             now flash among trees

My eyes pursue

  dart
     dash
        dip
           dive

Just like my eye doctor instructs:
  look up for me
     look up right
         up left
           down right
              down left
All the way up. All the way down.
   So I follow until her light
     stops
       settles
         sets
            sits
See

Two blue flashes at rest
    large and small
        squat and tall

Having blue fun
    Father and Son. 

 

                                         

 

 

 

 

 

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This Sunday is the first Sunday of Epiphany in Christian churches. According to ancient story and biblical tradition, the Messiah has been born and recognized as the anointed One. It’s a very exciting day, often honored as Holy Family Sunday, a time to celebrate the big three—Jesus, Mary and Joseph—lovingly, or in a cuss phrase after you’ve mistakenly, bashed your finger with the hammer and called out: JMJ.  Often we have Baptisms on this Sunday to celebrate in solidarity with the Baptism of Jesus in the Temple. On this day he will begin his spiritual life as a human being.

None of this of course is literal history, but all of it has profound meaning in terms of the Christian understanding of values like family, children, parents, and the sacrament of Baptism by which, with water and the Spirit and promises made in their name, little ones become Christians. They join the fold, the flock, the following. Dramatically, each usually-howling, infant is “sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” with blessed oils. The whole congregation says AMEN. Often there’s applause as the priest holds the infant up, sometimes, depending on the volume of protest the infant exerts, even walking up and down the aisle with her or him. Hey kid, you’re one of us now. We try to follow the ways of Jesus the Christ who walked, talked, and loved as Jesus of Galilee did.  

I can think of worse gangs to join. 

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Back to the swooshing Jays. They are passerine birds, which means they are distinguished by feet adapted for perching. They know how to grasp onto a branch quickly and sturdily. They are also noisy, preachy, excitable birds, songbirds intent on making their mark on wintry skies in the northeast where I live. 

The biblical meaning of seeing the Blue Jay is that the birder will communicate well, be persistent, and plan for the future. I try to do that—without being too annoying or preachy as some Christians can be. The male Jay has a reputation for being aggressive and downright disagreeable as he asserts himself perch to perch. Still, the Jay symbolizes protection and fearlessness, also monogamy. Blue Jays often chase off large red Cardinals, rivals at feeders. Politically telling in 2021, eh?

I have a bright blue shirt on today.

I could be an aging, failed monogamist, still perching like the Blue Jay, full of vision and blue passion for the lost—also for those newly found or found out.  

Some of this of course is human projection, yet I do think that it could be true as I listen and watch the little masculine duo dart about taking possession of the territory. 

The females, less flashy, contrary to human females, are I presume at home in nests resting and brooding and pondering about avian life in general just as Mary might have: Whose son will my baby boy be? Some say Father God’s. Some say Father Joseph’s. I say mine.

 

2021.01.03 A STORY. AN IMAGE. A SONG.

The Christmas season lasts for a mere twelve days, but that’s silly really, because Christmas is whenever, however, wherever there is awe, splendor and wonder.

A STORY
    Once a man told me a Christmas story I never forget. His father had told him and he told me. It was Christmas Eve and my friend’s father was a boy of about eight in bed very sick with chronic bronchitis. The doctor had been giving him Sulpha. It was the 1940s and the miracle of Penicillin had not yet hit the market. The doctor told the parents that he didn’t think he could pull the boy through this bout.
    The boy’s parents felt helpless and frantic. Suddenly the boy’s father couldn’t stand sitting idle. He jumped up, put on his heavy overcoat, hat, and a muffler against the winter cold, then left their small New York City apartment, being careful not to slam the door. This father had a plan.      

He trudged along the snow-filled city streets where he knew he’d find what he was looking for a few city blocks off on the corner. Yes, there was the scruffy old Santa Claus, all dressed in red, with the scraggly white beard covered with bits of the soup he’d slurped earlier, liquor on his breath, and a bell in his hand. He stood next to a pot on a tripod with a sign on it reading Salvation Army. Santa rang his little bell and called out, Merry Christmas—over and over. People passed by and popped coins into his pot.
    The father approached this Santa, pulled out a small wad of cash, pressed it into Santa’s mitten, whispered something in his ear, turned and walked off the way he’d come. Santa followed. The dad led Santa back to the apartment and into the bedroom of his sick little son. The parents propped their son up a bit. Santa stood at the foot of the bed, rang his little bell and said Merry Christmas. HO. HO. HO.
    The son got well soon. The parents were jubilant. This Santa Claus belched and rang his bell.

Who knows what Christmas really is? Who knows what salvation really is? Who know what a miracle is?
 

AN IMAGE

    The image above is of the little Christmas array we have outside our apartment door.  Ollie the Otter has hopped down from his usual perch to make room for the manger scene, the creche. If you look closely to the left on the floor you will see a three-humped camel (a dromedary) carrying three “Royals” one on each hump, their crowns askew. It’s been a rough desert journey eastward through many nights with only the light of one bright star, seeming to be close but always elusive. Luckily, these three, one a female, are gifted astrologers.
    They will arrive on January 6 to place luxury gifts at the foot of this newborn babe whom they believe offers hope for a just new kingdom, one free of tyranny and deception, one that promises peace, PEACE.

A SONG.

Everyone everywhere always needs a theme song. Here's mine. The lyrics are by songwriter, author, and comedian, Katie Goodman, daughter of Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a favorite of mine. This song has been and will continue to be my theme song—including that old unexcised "u".  It is very base, maybe a little arch, and not traditionally christmassy. But it’s Christmas!
    I didn’t fuck this up.
    You probably didn’t fuck this up.
    We didn’t fuck this up.
    So let’s all un-fuck this up.

We can together unscramble our world, our politics, our economy, our social compact, our spirituality and more for the sake of our planet and all living things.

Will we?