2018.11.22 Thanksgiving—a Short List

Today is Thanksgiving Day. In the face of so much to decry in this world and church, I am grateful for love, prayer, beauty, and children. Such things keep me alive and well. I am also grateful for hate and ugliness, because such things keep me humble.

     For love, because it is as basic to the viability and vigor of my soul as food and water are to my body. When I am not well enough fed I cannot feed others.

     For prayer, because it is what consistently connects me to my inner self and the truth of my  own feelings, desires and needs. This is my baseline. I address my prayers to God, say AMEN, then go on with my life to the best of my ability and grit. Self-knowing and God-knowing are correlative. I don't know what God does, but prayer keeps me alive and alert to signs and wonders all around me.

     For beauty, because it is all around us if we would but expect it, then notice it, then praise it. It's in human faces, tears, laughter, frown, fret, puzzlement, terror, anger, awe, and wonder—also spoof and surprise. It's in Nature—animals and plants, in every form and shape.

     For children, because I grew up with my own four beloved children, now adults, yes, but also because all young children exhibit uncontrollable impulses toward play, toward joining, delightedly and without prejudice, with other children in the romp of play, the best play being the disorganized  spontaneous play for its own sake. They make it happen together—in conversations with stuffed playmates, at tea parties, and on play grounds with lively playmates.

"One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children, The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum.      .  .  .  I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, 'We don't know these folks! Be cool!' I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children I m ashamed."

This passage is from a memoir, Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the form of a letter to his son. Coates has described the terror many black people feel for the precious children they love as much as white people love theirs. These parents love their children with such ferocity that they have to train them into fear rather than confidence, teach them how to protect their black bodies, to be "watchful prudent and shrewd" always, just because their skin is not white. The contrast with what white parents teach their children about how to walk in the world—confidence and boldness according to the respect they expect to get—is tragically stark. 

In this scene above, however, the high value of child's play for the spiritual well-being of a child supersedes racial profiling and all the lessons that go with it. Coates's son, he acknowledges, is naturally extroverted and uninhibited, but play is shaped by its toddler participants according to their personalities—not the color of their skins. When I read the anguish of this father who for a moment dropped his own fears to let his son play freely, my heart broke open.  I believe God's does too.

My God, my God, what have we done?  My God, my God what are we doing?

Scriptures tell us that a little child will lead us. Will we follow?








 

2018.07.29 Thank You Episcopal Church

At the 2018 General Convention of the Episcopal Church (TEC), the legislative houses passed a resolution about prayer book revision. It addresses language about God—my peeve and passion of years.  Here is the wording of the relevant resolutions:

New plan for liturgical and prayer book revision 

Convention adopted a plan for liturgical and prayer book revision that sets the stage for the creation of new liturgical texts to respond to the needs of Episcopalians across the church while continuing to use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

Resolution A068 originally called for the start of a process that would lead to a fully revised prayer book in 2030. The bishops instead adopted a plan for “liturgical and prayer book revision for the future of God’s mission through the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement.”

The bishops’ amended resolution calls for diocesan bishops to engage worshiping communities in experimentation and creation of alternative liturgical texts that they will submit to a new Task Force on Liturgical and Prayer Book Revision to be appointed by the presiding bishop and the president of the House of Deputies.

It also says that liturgical revision will utilize inclusive and expansive language and imagery for humanity and divinity, and will incorporate understanding, appreciation and care of God’s creation.

Meanwhile, General Convention also adopted a resolution that allows all congregations in the Episcopal Church to use optional, expansive-language versions of three Rite II Eucharistic prayers in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

Resolution D078 provides alternative language for Prayer A, Prayer B and Prayer D. The changes are available for trial use until the completion of the next comprehensive revision of the Book of Common Prayer.

This project coordinates well with the mission strategy of the Episcopal  Diocese of Massachusetts: Embracing Brave Change.
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I found TEC over fifty years ago when I was in college, thanks to the college chaplain who discerned my longing for, well, worship with chutzpah, bold enough to invite my whole body to enter in—kneel, pray standing, cross myself, move to the altar, and call out: “And with thy spirit.” TEC (our shield below) was also talking about women being ordained priests—some distant day, but they were at least wondering whether women were also called by God.

Our Book of Common Prayer, the “bible” of our worship, has an astoundingly open-ended Preface for 1789. It authorizes the church to make adjustments, abridgments, and alterations to this book in accordance with its purpose: “the edification of its people,”  and according to the exigencies of the times. There have been many revisions over time. The point is that our common prayer reflects who we are and what we believe about God and about ourselves and the Creation in which we live.

TEC will not publish a whole new prayer book, which is wise considering that paper is slowly losing its dominance in the digital age. Ah, I grieve—and shred! Still, this year’s resolution is revolutionary, because it calls for changes in theological language, that is language about God, or the image of God. Traditionally, God has been clothed in words that portray God as dominantly transcendent, excessively almighty and exclusive masculine. The image of God has been stunted, incomplete, and yup, errant.

My memoir God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Becoming Woman Becoming Priest (2016, Wipf and Stock/Cascade Books) tells the story of my fight with the patriarchal Episcopal Church to be ordained priest and my ongoing conviction that God/divinity has no gender, let alone one gender only. I have lobbied and prayed with audacious chutzpah that the wholeness of the divine image be accurately reflected in our words. (Me and two of my books.)

There’s an expression in the Talmud called chutzpah kelapei Shemaya, calling for boldness. Chutzpah, btw, is not Yiddish but Aramaic and is from the Babylonian Talmud. Jesus knew this spirit well. It’s all over the Bible.

I feel accompanied by influential biblical characters who had such audacity, even confronting God on occasion: Moses scolded God for giving the people too much gold—if You hadn’t done that they wouldn’t have had enough to make the idolatrous calf you got so jealous of!  Wasn’t it Moses too who smashed those sacred tablets to smithereens?  And didn’t Jesus break into the Temple, recalling it to its mission of prayer? Mother Mary’s Magnificat praises God for pulling off some major social class reversals; the woman at the well challenges Jesus’s theology; the Syrophoenician woman challenges his Jewish exceptionalism. These may be symbolic stories but they shine the harsh light of judgment on “the ways we’ve always done it” and pack a wallop, forcing us to think again as we embrace brave change.

Language is our most potent creating symbol. It must live and it must have enough chutzpah to keep us alive and awake. Thank you Episcopal Church.