Why do I tear up when the piccolos toodle “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the cannons boom to the mighty 1812 Overture?
I suppose it’s this thing of aging—a salubrious combination of sentimentality and gradual letting go of fretting over girth or acting goofy-happy.
Last evening we watched a 1985 documentary about the erection (well not really but a fun thought nonetheless!) of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Ms Liberty was a gift from France to celebrate the centennial of American independence. The gift is significant, in part because the French knew how difficult it was to maintain the spirit of liberté egalité, fraternité against the pull of monarchy and other ills of control politics.
I grew up in NYC in the shadow of Lady Liberty, besides the Empire State Building. We used to go on Circle Line cruises and wave to her. What moves me most is that the statue is not a symbol or power, or even success, but rather a symbol of promise. America values independence, and freedom even more. The great statue’s torch, held so high and with such somber-faced dignity, reminds us not to forget our reason to be. Perhaps this is a bit like the sanctuary lamp that burns in churches remembers to us the promise of divine grace.
Boston strong turned into Boston nasty over the refusal to bury one of
the Marathon bomber terrorists. Will Boston turn scared now as we face another mass celebration, ripe for bombs? I doubt it.
We are patriotic, in spite of the Patriot Act.
Boston’s annual July 4th celebration this year will go on in its own spectacular way. The security will be tight,very. Some Bostonians will remember the pain and fear of bombings at another of Boston’s great traditions, the Boston Marathon on Patriots Day. Certain behaviors and items will not be permitted, including styrofoam coolers on wheels, non-transparent drink containers, trash cans, any homegrown fireworks, propane tanks for grills and NO BACKPACKS. That's a lot of lifestyle change. I hope they let the kids have sparklers.
I’m proud to be an American and proud to be a Christian. I weep for the joy and privilege of it.
Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2013. Show all posts
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
2013.04.21 Interfaith Faith
Yes, I watched the interfaith service at Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston last Thursday. And yes, I was moved to tears of both grief and joy. And yes, I was struck again about the energetic resurgence of religious vocabulary in our secularized culture at times of national catastrophe, in this case the holocaust of Marathon Monday in Boston, 2013.
Words like God, prayer, sacrament, blessing and many citations from scriptures abounded, led and modeled, in this situation and others, by our President Barack Obama—and he’s had more than his share of such occasions. Of course it was a religious service, therefore such language was natural, but it was also a civic commemoration, a collective funeral. Our civil “religion”emerged as strong and healthy as our spiritual religion. Is there a difference really?
A few things I loved.........
President Obama should have been a preacher. He took to the podium as if it were a pulpit, which it was. He cited verses from II Timothy 1:7 which are worth repeating here. Paul the apostle was encouraging his student and disciple for his mission to teach and proclaim the gospel of grace: “For God did not given us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” These are inner gifts available to us all.
Is there a call to turn to our faith traditions for solace, strength, and national invigoration? Could it be that God, whom many think of as omnipotent in the way the world understands power, is begging us to consider a new/old theological perception: Godde as love within?
The visual diversity was an astounding image. Many “minorities” in leadership.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley spoke with calm eloquence and offered a biblical insight: Crowd and community are often present but are not the same phenomenon. A crowd is a bunch of individuals grouped together, loosely or tightly, each individual invested in her/his own desires and interests. A community is also a bunch of individuals but these individuals derive their identity, meaning, purpose, and quality of life from being part of a community with a unifying vision. Marathoners and fans have formed community over the years—and a vision, without which the people perish. (Scripture again.)
The cello, played by the inimitably passionate Yoyo Ma, is the one singular instrument able to convey the pathos of such a time—mournful, melancholic, yet as deep and rich as soil and soul ready to receive new seeds of life. In the final phrase the melody grew faint, trailed reluctantly off, leaving and not leaving.
Nasser Wadeddy, Islamic interfaith activist for democracy and an American citizen by only one week, remembered his own terrifying experience with a bomb explosion on a road in Damascus, Syria. (Some will recall St. Paul’s encounter with Christ on a road in Damascus, a time when he began his turn away from violent persecutory ways. )
Closing Hymn: “American the Beautiful” based in beauty and grandeur of landscape, not military victory as was our national anthem.
And didn’t love.............
Extremism in any form, including a bit too much American positivism and can-do pride
The phrase: “This doesn’t happen in Boston!”
That there were many many more men than women up front—still, still
I heard no prayers uttered for the young male criminals
That people who "don't believe in organized religion" flock to God and the offerings of organized religion when something catastrophic and inexplicable happens yet never mention the sacred in other venues or give religion a voice in public conversations. Do people flock to cathedrals for political reasons, or for spiritual reasons?
This week Boston and the nation have traveled the arc from vibrant life through death and despair, into hope and hints of healing, and now the journey arcs forward into a climate of uncertainty, unsteadiness and wondering.
Yes, we will go on. Yes, nothing will be quite the same. The best way I know to assimilate the “new normal” is to find a community that is not a crowd.
Words like God, prayer, sacrament, blessing and many citations from scriptures abounded, led and modeled, in this situation and others, by our President Barack Obama—and he’s had more than his share of such occasions. Of course it was a religious service, therefore such language was natural, but it was also a civic commemoration, a collective funeral. Our civil “religion”emerged as strong and healthy as our spiritual religion. Is there a difference really?
A few things I loved.........
President Obama should have been a preacher. He took to the podium as if it were a pulpit, which it was. He cited verses from II Timothy 1:7 which are worth repeating here. Paul the apostle was encouraging his student and disciple for his mission to teach and proclaim the gospel of grace: “For God did not given us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” These are inner gifts available to us all.
Is there a call to turn to our faith traditions for solace, strength, and national invigoration? Could it be that God, whom many think of as omnipotent in the way the world understands power, is begging us to consider a new/old theological perception: Godde as love within?
The visual diversity was an astounding image. Many “minorities” in leadership.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley spoke with calm eloquence and offered a biblical insight: Crowd and community are often present but are not the same phenomenon. A crowd is a bunch of individuals grouped together, loosely or tightly, each individual invested in her/his own desires and interests. A community is also a bunch of individuals but these individuals derive their identity, meaning, purpose, and quality of life from being part of a community with a unifying vision. Marathoners and fans have formed community over the years—and a vision, without which the people perish. (Scripture again.)
The cello, played by the inimitably passionate Yoyo Ma, is the one singular instrument able to convey the pathos of such a time—mournful, melancholic, yet as deep and rich as soil and soul ready to receive new seeds of life. In the final phrase the melody grew faint, trailed reluctantly off, leaving and not leaving.
Nasser Wadeddy, Islamic interfaith activist for democracy and an American citizen by only one week, remembered his own terrifying experience with a bomb explosion on a road in Damascus, Syria. (Some will recall St. Paul’s encounter with Christ on a road in Damascus, a time when he began his turn away from violent persecutory ways. )
Closing Hymn: “American the Beautiful” based in beauty and grandeur of landscape, not military victory as was our national anthem.
And didn’t love.............
Extremism in any form, including a bit too much American positivism and can-do pride
The phrase: “This doesn’t happen in Boston!”
That there were many many more men than women up front—still, still
I heard no prayers uttered for the young male criminals
That people who "don't believe in organized religion" flock to God and the offerings of organized religion when something catastrophic and inexplicable happens yet never mention the sacred in other venues or give religion a voice in public conversations. Do people flock to cathedrals for political reasons, or for spiritual reasons?
This week Boston and the nation have traveled the arc from vibrant life through death and despair, into hope and hints of healing, and now the journey arcs forward into a climate of uncertainty, unsteadiness and wondering.
Yes, we will go on. Yes, nothing will be quite the same. The best way I know to assimilate the “new normal” is to find a community that is not a crowd.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Ash Up for Ash Wednesday—AND Choose Life
So many avid Christians use Lent as an opportune lead-in to-Easter season to take off pounds, exercise more, get healthy—or at least prepare to fit into the Easter outfit they’d planned to wear for their twice-a-year visit to Jesus.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
I suggest instead: take on new ideas and practices that delight, sort of like the famous Eden “apple.” You won’t die, so grab for life. I swear it’s just what God ordained in the first place.
Here’s a witty and wise message from the late May Sarton—great poet and contemplative thinker. This is in her little 1981 book of meditations The House By the Sea, April 29 entry.
Sarton has taken a “heavenly” train journey down the Hudson to NYC where she heads for Bloomingdales’ to find some summer shorts and jackets . . .
“. . .as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed. ‘But, oh no madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 . . . ‘Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.”
I can’t resist the next entry, which Sarton calls her “other experience in New York.”
“After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales’ I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D’Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington’s Journal of the Sixties. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and it was good not to be waiting anxiously for ‘one person,’ to be free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.”
Whole and holy holiday. Must’ve been Passover or Easter—and both.
I wish I’d known this woman, so compatriot with my own soul.
Please notice that Sarton’s journal is spiritual writing par excellence— high, wide, and deep—looking beyond, all around, and within, all at once.
In order to escape the term spirituality getting lost in a mush of eclectic meaninglessness, we ought to honor it by making Spiritual Writing a genre in its own write, or rite.
* * * *
Oh, and I do love that Pope Benedict, a pontiff with whose every word and pronouncement I have strenuously disagreed, has, with his reasonable recent decision to retire for age and health reasons, defrocked the Roman Catholic Church of its hierarchy-of-being delusions, and clothed it in humility.
As our President said last night, we are all in this together, and if we don’t act in bipartisan ways we will decay. I for one will not again vote for any local or national candidate with extreme partisan politics.
It’s the beginning of a new day. Carpe diem! And as the prophet Hosea says: Walk humbly with your God—yourself and your neighbors.
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