2021.02.28 A Spirituality of Pandemic

Spirituality: The Spirit weaves its way deeply in and through the fabric of life processes making astonishingly foolish paradoxical life-bearing connections where none seem possible. Notice.

The poet says it best: “The point of life is not to succeed
                                     The point of life is to die trying.”  Millay                                      

Give a damn, I say
I don’t care how you do it, just give a damn

Sleep til noon
Rise before dawn

Worship Satan
Worship God
Both will respond

Try silent listening
A crow may caw

Despise and detest
Adore and believe

Jesus told Peter to go to hell
He did   He became Pope

Stop  Sit down Shut up
Multiple times a day
Recipe for prayer
If you give a damn  
 
Introverts: Pipe up
Extroverts: Shut up

True Story: Visit to the infusion center for allergy/asthma injection
Enter at one of a million entrances. Follow signs.
    1. Register here after already having registered twice digitally
    2. Waved on
    3. Forward march—two more corners
    4. Meet Nazi Nurse, brandishing her weapon of choice
        her stance erect, her face stern
    5. HALT!
    6. Will she fire her “pistol”? Will I live or die?
    7. No, she sweeps my forehead
    7. I’m cool.
    8. She fires anyway, questions like bullets. Fever? Exposure? Travel? No/No/No. Then a brand new one: bruises on your toes? Wha? I bend down to remove my boots and nearly fall over. She says. NO, no, no need. (Liability rules!)
    9. Final exam question: Have you been depressed lately?
        “Haven’t you?” I say
        She grimaces, and at last grins.
She gives a damn. I pass muster. Wait here. Fully trained, scanned, and cleared, I obey.

A young blonde nurse emerges to escort me into the lab. Why are you here? Doesn’t she have mountains of paper work on  me? Oh, and I guess you’re not old enough for vaccinations yet? I tell her I’ve had both. “How come?”  “I’m old,” I say.  She readies my syringe, holds it down at her side and just beyond my vision as if I didn’t know it was there and ready to job me. Why don’t they just blindfold people, like a firing squad? We notice and gaze together at an enormous nest high in a tree. Bird? Squirrel?   

One pandemic
Two pandemic
Three pandemic
Four

Global disease
Global warming
Global murder
Global mindlessness

Watch “An Inconvenient Truth”
Rewatch it   Rewatch it

Take a course in Emotional Intelligence.
We are collectively unintelligent—
Toddlers to seniors

Don’t fight
Do not battle
Do not start wars on anything
Just give a damn and work hard

Wage peace
Wars require one winner
and one loser—always.
Wars sow seed for more wars.

American Dream is a nightmare
Dream your own dream

Try Humility
It will feel too big
You can grow into it

Families are landmines—
death-dealing and life-saving
Tread with caution and humble ear
You give a damn. Don’t lie.

True Story: an old man with dementia lies in a hospital bed at home. He is dying. He knows it. So do his family. They bed him down with great care and affection. They leave. He is alone in dark, sleeplessness. He has one last trip to make. He struggles off his bed, crawls first then staggers, then crawls through a hallway and up a few steps. He’s almost there. He lifts his whole body, just enough to hurl himself forward. He made it. He’s on his bed—bed of marriage, bed of conceptions, bed of sweet sleep, bed of love. His wife of years comes to bed and sees him sprawled there. His presence seems abnormal and normal. She is so tired. There’s no room for her in the bed. She angrily tells him to shove over: “Can’t you at least make room for me after all these years?” He is fast asleep and unmovable. She tries kissing and other persuasions before she realizes that he is dead. He gave a damn.

History: Christendom was a word coined in ancient times (800CE) to translate the concept of universal Christianity into Anglo Saxon language. It offered optimism and hope in the face of Viking brutality and invasion. Missionaries would convert the Norsemen to an all-inclusive religion of compassion divine, based on the generous caring ways of God-in-Christ.
    BUT, over centuries, and coming to a new nadir in this 21st century, religions have consistently been perverted by practices of exclusion and persecution in the putative name of the Father whose Sons aspire to carry out His ways. Will we, sadly through revolution and violence, return to consider the universal nature of salvation for all living things—as it was in the beginning?

I wanna be loose and raucous
I wanna be cool and holy
I kill myself with my bipolarity
I grasp at life and let go of life—at once.

Tell your story
Or keep silent
Shout it out
Or shut it up

Take a risk
Make it brisk
Trust yourself
Trust your God
Tell a friend
Take an M&M

Grief
not peace
Is the global unifier

Just give a damn!    

For the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony: The prayer of the psalmist who gave a damn, prayed a damn. (Translation, Pamela Greenberg, portion of Psalm 19)  

The sky unfolds story of your presence;
the firmament tells of the work of your hands.

There is no word or phrase
in which the voice of your creation is not heard.

Throughout all the earth, rope
of your hopefulness goes forth,

and their words reach the end
of the world’s long stretch of land.

2021.02.21 Ashes Change Hearts

    “Most loving God [sic], whose will it is to give thanks for all
    things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our
    care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless fear
    and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may
    hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and, which
    you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord;
    who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
    one God, now and forever.” AMEN.

We rarely get to pray together this Collect for the Eighth Sunday after Epiphany (BCP, p. 216), because Easter is a moveable feast and we seldom get eight Epiphany Sundays. Somehow this prayer feels to me like standing shivering at the end of the high diving board looking down, feeling small and anxious at eleven. Do I have the nerve to jump? How cold will the water be? Can I do this or not?  Then I inhale deeply, grab my small nose, and jump wildly into the air. The water does catch me. I do surface triumphant. Now all I have to do is refrain from boasting.  

This Collect takes my soul on a dive toward humility—being right-sized, not too big and not too small. It is a difficult spiritual balance to strike. This prayer helps me prepare for a season of reflection, and retreat, and deep personal honesty—diving into myself, praying that the smudge of ashes I just received has mysteriously prepared me.
 

ASH WEDNESDAY, 2021    

I think ashes are powerful symbols through which the Church alerts us to our mortality, how profoundly vulnerable and fragile our sweet lives are—and how valuable.

The ritual reminds me of the nursery rhyme: “Ring-a-round-a Rosie.”  We children joined hands in a circle, then skipped around singing as if we all had a pocket of posies. Then we sang:  “Ashes, Ashes we all fall down.” We’d collapse to the ground on our bums, laughing with glee before we hopped up to repeat our dance.  

Of course we had no idea about the grim implications of this rhyme, understood by some to refer to the rosy rash one got during the 1665 Black Plague in London, herbal posies carried to ward off the smell of the disease.  We kindergarteners just loved it for fun and games. Faster. Faster. We whirled around. Falling down was the best part. We didn’t give death a thought.  BUT……. once one of the girls circling fell down and did not, could not, despite urging, get up. (As I recall she had a heart event, needed immediate treatment, and returned to school in time.)  

What I remember most, about this trauma was how instantly and firmly, our collective terror  gripped us. This ashes event lives on vividly in my mind, even as I dip my thumb into a bowl of blessed ashes and press it firmly onto the forehead of an upturned recipient, saying “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  I don’t feel negative. I do feel solemn. How desperately I want to add something Easterish, but I don’t. I just do not. Silence matters. Solemnity matters.

Then I just jump into Lent. After all, the Bible has said that it’s time to change my heart and turn about and wonder what in hell I am doing now, and what I have done in my little life, and whether I need to notice something new, or repent of something bad.

I can’t think of a single thing, so I think I’ll just follow my gut that tells me to strip down and streak the halls of the retirement residence where I live. I resist that temptation, mostly because of vanity. My aging body is a thing not to behold. Still, the thought itself has lifted my mood.

Mark's Gospel tells us that Jesus, properly awakened, heads not to church, not safely home, not for the road to proclaim and preach, but into the wilderness where he will figure out his own jumping in— his own right-sizedness—as the dry desert winds buffet and buffer his body and soul. 

Will he be a Messiah?  Or will he simply be Beloved?

Mark’s gospel account is honest and brusk:
    All we know is that Jesus’s adult baptism jolted him with his spiritual identity and calling, that he was sorely tempted, and that his discernment took a very long time—forty days a metaphor suggesting some time.
    All we know is that Jesus faithfully used his one mind, and his one heart to make his one plan: I will tell people about the God I know best, the God I believe in and who I believe believes in me.

This same God believes in all living things—including you and me, and the black squirrel who just sprinted and skimmed across the snow-laden chain link fence, pleased I bet with his or her athleticism. 

TO LOVE OR TO FIGHT? That Is the Question.

Today is Valentines Day, a day on which we deeply honor the eternal value of LOVE, a word as difficult to define as Divinity, and as essential to the well-being of every living thing as food and water.

I am completely persuaded,  as I have been for years, that language matters. The words we use advertise what we value most, who we are, and how we see ourselves and others. Words tell the truth about whatever dominates the mind and heart of an individual, a culture, a society, a nation, a country, a world. 

 Today, and for centuries, the word-of-choice to indicate our highest values, has been FIGHT.  (Fight has Germanic origin and relates loosely to fencing, a sport that is lethal, potentially death-dealing, yet requires great skill with movements that look like a graceful dance.)

We FIGHT. It’s the behavior of choice. We FIGHT for and against. Wars are the preferred solutions to sin, cruelty, discrimination, and injustice. FIGHT is the strategy and the ironic path to peace.

We FIGHT cancer and depression or mental illness, and if we lose such “fights” we die, which means we’ve LOST the FIGHT.   

FIGHT is the way small boys on a playground prove their mettle, gain acceptance and popularity.  Young girls also learn to FIGHT—underhandedly. And just look at the video games our young children play, most all are about war and FIGHTS.

Religions FIGHT against each other. They FIGHT for their own God. FIGHT(ing) images projected onto Divinity in sacred texts are more numerous than images of LOVE.

Sports have become FIGHTS. We sing FIGHT songs. We make FIGHTER jets and train FIGHTER  pilots. Politicians FIGHT for votes. We FIGHT for healthcare and the right to freedom and relief from poverty. Why not work for such things? We even FIGHT for peace.

The news throughout the 2021 impeachment trial cited the word FIGHT countless times. It was used to prove the ex-President innocent of charges that his FIGHT language incited acts of domestic terrorism. It was used also to demonstrate that all politicians, even those who leveled FIGHT-charges against the president, use FIGHT.

FIGHT was the word used to convict, and FIGHT the word to assure innocence.

FIGHT is such common parlance in the world of politics, medicine, religion, social discourse, business, entertainment, education, and family life that FIGHT has become benign. That is tragic, if not fatal. That assures that LOVE cannot and does not win. Even when we do fight FOR love, like in wars or duels, it is not very successful, because our goal is to win, not to love.  

                                         *  *  *  * 
And yet there is just one day—today—in the year dedicated to LOVE and to the value of coupling and relationships that enhance goodness in self and other. Rituals that surround LOVE on this one day, which happens to fall on Sunday this year, are costly (flowers, cards, jewelry, pricey chocolates)—icons of LOVE.

Valentine’s Day has many roots from ancient times, yet it is universally dedicated to LOVE, and falls on the same day each year. We will not forget it, even if it can make us sad. That’s because Valentine’s Day is a collective ritual, not unlike the sacraments of worship, always the same day, always in the bleak mid winter, always celebrating the same value, and acted out not just by human couples but by loving families and creatures—even pets or stuffed teddy bear confidants—who know about LOVE, affection, listening, compassion, care, loneliness, and yes, God.  

Why the heart shape? Well, because without a beating heart there IS no life, no pulse. On this day we try very, very hard not to fight. On this day we recognize the invaluable beauty of LOVE. It is only by LOVE that this planet will survive and thrive.  
 
My prayer to God is to LOVE those with whom I passionately disagree and/or of whom I’m afraid aka “enemies,” because I cannot yet. The divine goal and purpose is always LOVE not fight. Choose LOVE—every day just a little bit. Make every day Valentine's Day.

My "Racism"—Anecdotal History. Part Sixteen. Living Into Immanence.

Today is Sunday, and we priest spouses read and prayed and broke bread together. When I read aloud yet without a congregation, I sink into the text. I envision and dramatize it. Today I read the familiar story in II Kings about the Shunammite widow and the prophet Elisha. In short, the wealthy widow who had often offered the wandering prophet hospitality, now all but scoffed at the idea that she might need something to repay her generosity. I’m fine, she said. (How many times do we say that when we know it is not quite true?)

Elisha, however, is compulsive and insists on recompense. She is cheeky, calls Elisha’s prophetic bluff, and boldly tells him not to mess with her In God’s name, Elisha pushes his luck. The women gets pregnant, bears a son, loves him like crazy and of course he dies. (I say "of course" because biblical stories always take treacherous turns.) The mother, in a raging sorrow, chases after Elisha. “Did I ask you for a son, O prophet? Did I not tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?’ ”

You would think Elisha being a bit of an amateur, would give up, but no, he carries it to extremes. He ends up stretching his warm body onto the son’s cold dead body—twice. Like any good miracle it works out against all odds. The story shot me back to a time in my life when I felt like the Shunammite.


Scene XLVIII.  Sinking In

I’d experienced the thrill of pushing life into the world with the force of my uterus—my womb alive/creating. Childbirth had reconnected me with God in my flesh—immanent in a forceful, profoundly painful, fruitful way. I had children to love. The sprawling blossoming lives of my four children kept me alive as I pursued the God I knew as a child, in my children, and now I needed more—for myself.

I entered a decade of death—my youngest sister died in 1979; the parish priest and my chief supporter left; Dad died in 1983; my divorce from my husband of twenty years was finalized in 1983; I had suffered rejection in the ordination process in the Episcopal church in 1978 and 1981.

My chosen vocational course was left in a shambles of doubt, my self-love dwindling, and my soul trembling with fear and rage. I had no idea who I was, where I would go, who I could love. Many people in grief lose their grip on their connection with faith or God or theology, but— paradoxically or ironically or both—mine strengthened. I continued to pursue God’s identity with foolish yet honest greed as if I could contain, possess, ground, or at least secure Divinity.  

How odd that my frantic search for God would be my anti-racism training—or part of it anyway.

Scene XLIX. Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit

“The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God . . .”  (I Cor. 2:10b)  This phrase leapt off the thin crinkly page of my overused Bible. It was a phrase from  St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. I engaged with this passage because it was central to a course I was taking,  and because it contained a spirituality that ran deep—as deep as the very soul of God Godself. Paul’s teaching went on and on as Paul does, but my grabby soul latched onto this one phrase as salvation.  

The course was offered by a favorite professor, Luke Johnson. It was  a journal course on experiential theology with no required reading, so students flocked to it. “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit” based its premise on the biblical phrase that had hooked me. I was ready to let the Spirit run wild. I was running wild by then, too. Was I led by the Spirit or was the Spirit leading me? To me these felt different. I never found out—exactly.

We heard lectures on big, fat, unmanageable theological words— grace, holy, faith, sin, idolatry, prayer, possessions, sexuality and gender, anger, freedom, truth—then wrote our own experiences of these ideas.

I had to let go of the tyranny of my intellect. I couldn’t think my way out of this, so I wrote and it hurt.

Scene L. The Organizing Power of the Holy: Life Narrative.

“God is in me from my beginning.” That was my first sentence. I elaborated a bit on  immanence, but then I suddenly wrote: “I am early aware that God in me is hard on me.” What? If this Spirit searched into the depths of God as if by torch and searchlight, then there seemed no escape from this Spirit—even for God. I wanted such intimacy and distrusted my worth. I wanted to know once again that I mattered in the flesh. Where was Holy? Luke said that the Holy had organizing power. Organizing? I needed internal organization. I just hadn’t counted on such a right-brain process.

Without warning I wrote about black Carol Lee and the painful compromise I’d made to exclude her from my birthday party, because I wanted it to be at our racist white beach club. Was that holy? I wrote: “Part of the little-girl-God in me dies. Is God black?”  

Memory: My second daughter Jill had a horrifying sledding accident when she was about eight. I had left the three oldest children with my parents and taken the baby to visit friends in lower Connecticut. Jill and her cousin were thrilled with the snow. Jill slid on an ice patch and ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. Screaming and covered with blood, she ran back to the house for help, her frightened cousin right behind her, calling, “Jill, are you all right?” Jill was not all right. When she got to the house Ether opened the door and sprang into action at the sight. She grabbed Jill up into her strong arms, got towels, yelled for my father who came running. He drove as fast as he dared to the hospital, and Ether sat in the back seat holding Jill . She pressed her head to stanch the bleeding. Jill later told me: “She held my head so hard against her body, like she was holding me together.” At the hospital a brilliant plastic surgeon named Dr. Platt stitched Jill’s face up and saved her eyes.

Ether was black. Dr. Platt was a woman. Is God black and female? Yes.

The memory about Jill’s accident came to me when I was writing my journal chapter on Faith: Obedience and Creative Fidelity. We were supposed to focus on Jesus, but Abraham came to mind. In the story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac in order to prove his faith God stopped Abraham from faithful obedience—just in time. God loved Abraham more than his obedient faith, and Abraham loved God unlimitd by obediential demands.

I wrote: “God is going against himself in this request and call. God has asked Abraham to disobey him, to choose against the promise. But God himself is more important to Abraham than God’s promise. How about that? God is not defined by his promise!”  Professor Luke wrote in the margins: “Yes. Good.”

Was I getting God? Did I have the Holy? My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. My daughter Jill helped me again. She by now was seventeen and expressing angry feelings, telling me she did not feel loved. When I asked what she wanted she said she wanted to go see our family therapist with just me. I felt afraid, but we went and Jill blurted out: “I feel second best. You value your church activities more than me.”  

I made explanations.The therapist invited Jill to keep repeating her feelings. I was locked up inside my own fears and wrote: “She was hurt, and I was getting a bandaid. I couldn’t open myself to her wound without sacrificing my faithful obedience to my own “good mother” illusion.” I had made an idol of my motherhood. The ordination committee had told me that I could not be a good mother and a good priest at once. A “dual vocation” they called it. I wrote: “In fact, what blocked me in that process (ordination) was the same thing that was so painfully blocking me with Jill. I had made an idol of my motherhood. . . . I could not be creatively faithful to what was my real love as a parent to Jill, because I was being destructively faithful to my self as a perfectly caring and loving mother.”  
                                   *  *  *  * 

To be a mother is no more or less holy than to be a priest. All I had to do was choose, I thought. To be black or a woman was no more or less holy than to be white. But I couldn’t choose my sex or the color of my skin. Could God? More tears, more years, my search continued, but for today right now, this.
            
    The grace of God cannot be fixed
    or fastened to a sanctioned spot;
    when we move as the Spirit moves,
    there is no place where God is not.  
                 Michael Hudson, text. Doxology/Eighth Tune