2017.11.19 The Music of Noble Grief Untold

Here's a small inside story, lean but robust. It’s about a saxophone player, the father of a little six year old girl named Ana. It’s about another father who has two daughters—and very long arms. The saxophonist is Jimmy Green. The man with long arms is President Barack Obama.

The public facts to this story most Americans know and remember with varying degrees of shiver and sorrow. On December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, twenty small children and six staff were murdered —mercilessly, without warning, and arbitrarily— mowed down by a gunman with a rifle.

When I heard about this massacre my first reaction was similar to my reaction when I first heard about the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York: “Come on!” I laughed, as if such things happened regularly—and never. I could access neither fact nor feeling—for days. After the Newtown tragedy, President Obama addressed the nation—with tears and grace— at a memorial gathering. Only then could I cry and, oddly, relax.

President Obama flew right away that same day to Newtown, to the school. This is the duty of a president, the letter of the law one could say. The spirit of that “law” revealed a man’s heart. President Obama is a man who is able to govern and to weep, to take authority and to let his heart break visibly, to wage war and to make peace. On occasion politicians can be heroes.

Joshua Dubois (b.1982) head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 2009 to 2013, wrote about that day in “The President’s Devotional: ‘What Obama Did In Secret In Newtown.”  The staff coordinated details, but the president did the difficult pastoral work. The families gathered in classrooms. The president, briefed on names, moved unhurriedly from room to room. He gave each person a hug and asked “Tell me about your son, or daughter.” He looked at and held photos of every dead child. He listened to descriptions of favorite foods, television shows, the sound of the child’s laughter. Younger siblings were tossed in the air, laughing, and then received a box of White House M&Ms. Who knew there was such a thing?

“In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break,” Dubois wrote. Some small measure of love was given to every single bereaved family member: “The same hugs. The same looks, directly in their eyes. The same sincere offer of support and prayer.”  Over and over, for hours.

How can one sustain such authentic tenderness over an extended time—knowing that no amount of comfort or prayer, even from a president, even from God, could be adequate consolation?

According to Dubois, President Obama never spoke about these meetings. “He was nearly silent on Air Force One as we rode back to Washington, and has said very little about his time with these families since. It must have been one of the defining moments of his presidency, quiet hours in solemn classrooms, extending as much healing as was in his power to extend. But he kept it to himself—never seeking to teach a lesson based on those mournful conversations, or opening them up to public view.”

What is not so public is that Obama went to Newtown a second time, just months after the tragedy, to visit the families in their own homes. I am privileged to know some of one of those visits: the one made to Jimmy Green the professional saxophonist and his wife. 

Think of a saxophone and its sound. Is it not the most lugubrious? Although usually associated with jazz, the saxophone can wail out the mourning night—a long sound, the sound of grieving parents, the eternal sound of God’s grief.

Jimmy Green was in Rockport, Massachusetts last summer as a visiting artist for the Rockport Music Association’s Jazz Camp, an educational jazz program for children.

                                     (Green with his saxophone.) 
A good friend of mine hosted Green and asked him, naturally, about his children. She was taken aback first  to hear that he was the father of a six year old girl named Ana who was murdered in Newtown. Ana, he said, loved music and dance, and she loved to love. Here she dances with her daddy.

About Obama, Green said,  “I knew the guy was tall, but I didn’t realize he had such long arms. He just sat with us (Green and his wife) on the couch and held us both together.”

Grief requires a long reach, a reach only heroes can summon. Heroes are people who do good anytime anyhow.  It is particularly hard for very public people—people who have to be constantly conscious of themselves…like being on camera 24/7— to be heroes of this kind. That takes courage, not just feelings, and not simply military action. Heroes touch the heart of God. Heroes keep us alive and wanting to live.

2017.01.08 Wish Upon A Star—Always

We in the northeast are in the middle of our first big snow storm. It’s no time to venture out—unless you’re a Magus in search of something more.

I stare at this beautiful and whimsically visionary image created by my sister and her late husband  many years ago.

The image is symbolic. It honors the three Magi of biblical story. They are out at night on a dangerous mission. All three together sit astride a single camel, with three humps, one for each of them.  All three wear crowns. The flirtatious camel winks. The image stands for hope in a new kind of world in which all people and their leaders are on the same page (or camel) truly committed to equality, justice, and compassion for all living things. 

It’s hard to see the three faces in this photo, but one is black, one oriental, and the third, riding high in the middle, is obviously a woman. It’s comical. It’s prophetic, and it’s a work of art that articulates a powerful biblical message of universal wholeness fueled by Hope—against hope. Here's a close-up.

These three storied Magi in the New Testament set out in the deep darkness of night on three camels to follow a star and a promise they sense is of God—the impossible possibility of a new kind of "king" for the world as symbolized by a newborn child lying in the hay in an improbable stable in Bethlehem.

As the story goes, they went at night for fear of the Judaean acting king (37-4 BCE) King Herod's  jealous rage. They returned home by a different route to deceive Herod who had uttered a sycophant-ish request about the whereabouts of this infant—that he too might go there to worship this new monarch. The Magi were political figures of some wealth. They wanted change and had followed a star that looked exceptionally bright to them. There are such stars of course, especially when your heart is expanded by hope beyond hope and things appear brighter than they are. That’s the power of mystical inspiration— sight and insight. It is what empowers us to keep on keeping on—no matter what. It’s why we keep telling the same story. It’s why we call such impulses spiritual—godly.

Hope has been the driving vision of the Obama administration (2008-2016) in the United States. President Barack Obama wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope. We have seen what many thought was an impossible hope: a black president and the hope of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual diversity with safety and freedom he and his family represent.  (It isn’t about policy or party politics, it’s image.)

In her recent farewell speech to a group of school counselors, First Lady Michelle Obama articulated this “star”:  “The infusion of new ideas, and cultures and talents is what makes this country great. . . . Our glorious diversity is not a threat to who we are, it makes us who we are.” She invited all young people to take this star into the future, to get a good education, to think critically and creatively, to believe in the power of hope, and then work for the vision. I wept.

Will we follow? Will we be like those Magi, risking deep desert darkness and hostile powers, filled with hope, spiritual and political, bringing their wealth to invest in something new. Godde knows we all have followed the wrong star from time to time and invested in empty errant causes. But we don't lose hope or stop trusting God. Nor do we stop envisioning new possibilities—always wishing upon a star. 

Three courageous outlaws pushed on through the cold desert night. Their apparent insanity, it turned out, was remembered and recorded in the Christian gospel of Matthew as well as other Roman writers, all proclaiming a new message to the ancient first-century world darkened by oppression, inequality, and desperate fear. This is why some Christians celebrate Christmas on January 6, el Día de los Tres Reyes, Three Kings day. It is why Christians honor a whole season called Epiphany, the season of light, a season to follow stars that look bright with hope. 

The Magi were wise adults, and their pilgrimage of hope inspires us forward as powerfully as that babe in the manger. As Michael Hudson writes in his Meditation on the Journey of the Magi:

God gave the child to love the world
that noticed neither child not light;
but love grew up, a brighter star,
to guide a pilgrim through the night.

May we follow their Hope and make it our own.

2016.11.27 Remember and Do LIkewise...........

The Gettysburg Address has a familiar ring. President Abraham Lincoln, November 19,1863 delivered it in a matter of minutes. Nice brief homily! Lincoln was a Republican. This beautiful speech was delivered to a divided nation at war with itself. It inspired hope and remembrance of who we are as a nation. Does it still?



Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. We, 1,153 years later, are also in the midst of civil strife in which much blood has been spilled, most of it senseless.

Many Christians believe that Jesus Christ shed blood to save us. I believe that Jesus’s death was a crime of epic proportions that occurred in a system in which all parts contributed to its happening, including those who loved him. But they did not forget what he stood for. They kept talking and remembering this brilliant life and this useless death—over and over until they derived hope in resurrection. Today, Christians remember this founding event regularly in order to call us back to God who created us equal—all of us—and whose desire it is that no more blood be spilled for Christ’s sake, or anyone else’s either. 

As we enter this liturgical season of Advent, we soon will say goodbye to Barack Obama, our president of eight years, and to his family, most handsome and bright. He is the president who ran on a platform of Hope. He is our first brown-skinned president. He is the president who entered office with dark brown hair and leaves with gray hair. He is part of what makes American great.

I hope we will remember all that he has stood for and all that he has accomplished on our behalf.

I hope we will encourage our new government to stop shedding invisible blood and take time to evaluate Obama’s reforms with care as changes are made.

I hope all of us Americans, citizens and  citizens-in-waiting, will make extra efforts to get to know each other's stories.

I hope we will be able to see each other beyond our politics, our skin colors, our genders, our religions, our physical or financial status, whether we were born here or not. I hope we will have respectful conversations, listen and talk with open hearts, rather than looking to convert anyone to one single point of view—our own. 

I hope we will honestly try to be true to our founding vision, the one we still dare to call these United States, a country in which ALL people who live here may dream and work and, yes, enjoy equal access without fear to all the many resources available—economic, social, educational, spiritual, agricultural, legal, cultural, natural—from sea to shining sea.    

We the people do not know who we are, nor who our neighbors are, so steeped are we in our own positions, fears, values, and judgments. We are not the land of the free until we can share that freedom—and help each other hope. 

I hope that if there is another speaker as eloquent as Lincoln that person will recall us to our founding values. 

The apostle Paul in his famous love letter to Love in the Bible (I Corinthians 13) declared the three top spiritual gifts to be faith, hope, and love. But alas, he then rank-ordered them to say that the greatest of these is love. In my experience, the three are of equal value, inseparable, and ceaselessly interacting. 

Hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

May the God of hope bless us, keep us, and shine upon and from within us, that we may abound in Hope, Faith and Love—this day and always.

2016.02.21 Why I Support Hillary Rodham Clinton To Be the Democratic Nominee for President of These United States

I’m no policy wonk; nor am I more than an averagely-informed political activist, so I will try to keep this at least clear-hearted, if not especially bright-minded or serene. You can read more measured professional opinions and statistical data elsewhere. 

The woman I hope will be our next president is Hillary Rodham Clinton. I will refer to her as Hillary, not out of disrespect or any attachment to informality, but frankly because alternatives are, well   . . .  funny:
        -HRC? The other major contender is BS.
        -Clinton? Fails to honor the fight Hillary put up to retain “Rodham” in her married name.
        -Mrs. Clinton? Ok and respectful, but incomplete.
So Hillary it is, and how progressively wonderful that most journalists and others refer to the two front running Democrats in  the 2016 presidential campaign as Hillary and Bernie. 

My writing points for Hillary:
    -I read her memoir Living History. In it I met a woman of intelligence with a passionate and authentic story to tell. When she ran for president in 2008, critics evaluated memoirs by all the candidates, including Barack Obama’s, and found hers the most authentic.
    -I’ve been a feminist for years, a Christian feminist who believes that maleness and femaleness are created in the image of divinity. I’m no biblical literalist; nor do I discount that some biblical wisdom is inspired by God, so counter does it run to traditional human practices. This imago dei idea from Genesis makes my soul sing.
    -Hillary Rodham Clinton is a born politician in the best sense of that word. We need leaders like Hillary, and we need the perspectives women bring to leadership. The gift of gender is one formative factor in a  person’s profile. When women are on board, a discernment/decision process tends to be more collaborative, more inclusive of diverse points of view, and, dare I say, more affectionate without loss of strength. Also a little wild.
    -There is gender as gift and gender as handicap in a society organized around rank-ordering and -isms. Hillary knows in her flesh that women have not achieved the dignity and respect commensurate with their qualifications—simply because of their gender. If she knows that about women she knows that about other disinherited groups.
    -Hillary has stayed true to her desire to make democracy work for the common good. She has made many egregious errors of judgment. I believe she has learned to be more cautious, focused, and still to retain her vision. I don’t trust political rigidity. I don’t trust religious rigidity either. 
    -Hillary’s transitions and transformations over her long career have been painful. An early example was her movement away from the party of her family of origin to a party that better articulated her progressive vision for social justice. I know how much that can sting. I did it myself.
     -It is time for American’s “greatness” to include a recognition of the dishonesty and injustice of sexism and elect a woman as president—not at all costs and not any woman, but for the sake of who we say we are—and for the Statue of Liberty, herself. Economic injustice is not the only injustice.
   
    -I know what it is like to be consistently behind the patriarchal eight-ball, to keep trying, and to get up and try again because you believe in yourself and because you have a voice and a vision that matters enough to never say die. Hillary is ambitious, sometimes too much for her own good—quite unpopular in a woman. I used to be ashamed of my ambitions—until I met Jesus and then I blamed God for us both.
    -Hillary has survived public ridicule and humiliation in her marriage. Living through the trauma of personal betrayal is humiliating enough, but going through it in the public eye and holding onto personal dignity through the impeachment threat and other scandals, takes courage—not just to grin and bear it, but to stay the course. I chose divorce and she chose to stay. Either choice is very difficult, and neither is right or wrong.  Either way it’s messy. The eye of the Church softened its gaze toward me. Maybe the nation will do the same for her.  I care about good credentials in a leader. More important to me is a sturdy well-smelted soul to go with them. Hillary has not become enslaved by her wounds.
     -Hillary isn’t popular. Fine with me. People say she isn't warm. Boo hoo. I don’t know how anyone can be warm under such pressure. Nevertheless personal caution is not necessarily a sign of weakness but of modesty, a lost value in today’s world. That’s not a bad boundary for a public authority figure to maintain.
    -People don’t crow and moan about aggressive men in politics or other fields of endeavor. Aggressive women? Well, they are still considered a threat to the system. They are.
   
    -Hillary is too establishment, they say. When I was a young teen I was thrilled to discover that the longest word in the English language was antidisestablishmentarianism. 11 syllables! Eventually, I learned that it meant opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Would I want to disestablish the institutional Anglican Church I’d fought so hard to get established IN via the Episcopal Church? Just because the established institution of power needs to change and evolve doesn’t mean it is rotten to its core. Women are still trying to break the Episcopal stained glass ceiling. I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t care so deeply about the health and wholeness of that for which I fight.
    -I learned that I myself, can really mess up, defy many establishment norms, be forgiven by an established institution, and continue to lobby for reforms. Maybe the same process can be true for Hillary in the institutional halls of government and with American citizens.

    -Hillary has a spiritual life of prayer and goes to church not just for public appearance's sake. How politicly incorrect! 
    -Metaphorically, Hillary could be a stealth Robin Hood in female garb since she has already begun robbing the rich through collecting their outrageous fees for her talks. It’s ironic, but so was Robin Hood.
    -Is there temptation to elect a woman just because she will be a first? Yup. There is equal temptation NOT to elect a first for its own sake. Take your pick.
    -Bernie Sanders would be the first Jew. We don’t hear much about that, now do we? God forbid. But are we more scared to be anti-semitic than we are to be sexist?  Or is there just resistance to a woman in high office? The way it looks now, and it is early I know, we shall have a first woman president, a first Jewish president or, let’s say, a first unashamed and authentic public bully president.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wounded woman who has the potential to become a wounded healer. Such a gift, if realized, has much to offer public office. But then I am a person who believes that security/safety is NOT the highest value. Humility is.

Do I pray about all this? No, actually, not exactly— only that God will make sure the best woman will win.

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.

2013.01.23 A New President

I should be writing about Barack Obama of whom I feel proud, and his drop dead gorgeous wife Michelle, but right now I’m captured by the new President of Smith College, my alma mater. When I was at Smith there had never been a woman president of this all-women’s college with the woman founder.  What’s with that?

But Smith came through in 1975, fifteen years after I left, and has stayed with women presidents ever since. 

I heard the new President-elect, Kathleen McCartney, speak briefly on a YouTube video sent from the college. She is mild-mannered and soft-spoken. She said she “absolutely loved fund-raising,” which told me a lot and gave me hope for the future— didn’t turn me on much.  She said that Smith would be “bold” going into the future, which did turn me on.

McCartney used a quote from Smith’s founder Sophia Smith. Sophia, Lady Wisdom as her name suggests, said that “Smith College will be “a perennial blessing to the world.”  It was to me, even though I nearly killed myself with my drive to excel—compulsively so. But I did, and now I’m proud.

Then President-elect McCartney said this about her vision for herself as Smith’s next president: “I will be a servant leader.”

I felt an unexpected rush of joy-tears. That is what Jesus is remembered as saying to his followers: “I am among you as one who serves.” 

I don’t imagine Kathleen will be washing any feet as a demo of servant leadership as Jesus did, but I do hope she will be a leader of compassion, vision, and vitality as she serves one of the places that served me as I grew.

(I quipped to a friend that the next US president would probably be a gay man, and the next a Latino man, and the next???  Could we have a woman, please?)  

2012.10.24 Who Is a Leader?

I did not watch Monday’s presidential debate.  We turned it on and immediately the thrust and parry began, the fencing match that political leadership has become.  Each flick of the saber knicked my soul.

Each candidate had something offensive or defensive to say—right away. It’s not that you couldn’t pick out a few points or identify an issue, but the energy of warrior prevailed.

Instead we turned it off and shed some tears remembering the recent death of a great statesman George McGovern, a man of warmth, intellectual clarity, and dignity. 

Frankly, I don’t want America to be the strongest nation in the world. Honestly, I don’t care if we are second or third or last.  I’d rather see us begin to pay it forward, to give more than we expect to get, to appreciate more than we want to be appreciated, to give applause not expect it, to be less rather than more exceptional, and to give more thanks than we get—way more.  And I wouldn’t mind some spoken reverence for a power greater than human, more compassionate than human, and with better bigger, broader eyes! 

Images of JFK confronting the Russian superpower about setting up lethal missiles in our back yard (Cuba) came to mind. We watched an excellent PBS video on the details of that terrifying time.  Our president went against all his advisors and made a deal with Kruschev which they both held between them and which worked for both men and both nations to save peace and more importantly to keep the world alive!

When you can actually imagine, envision up close the end of the world, not on a sandwich board shouldered by a delusional prophet, then true fear can drive you into sanity, a greater power than the power of might or winning.  That is what happened to both world leaders. Fear drove them sane not mad— and it drove them together.

Fifty years ago I was riveted watching President Kennedy on national TV, simply stating a boundary and saying no to the hostile plan of encroachment and threat and yes to the vision of peace for all together.  He was a leader who served humanity as a DOVE! When someone speaks like that you listen, and you feel respected, too.

When my dad called me “Lynda” (my given name) I listened. It didn’t just happen when I was caught sneaking out to meet my teenage boyfriend whom I later married. It happened when I told him I wanted to be a priest and started to blather about why as if I had to justify my vocation. He  said, “I get it Lynda.” 

Who of these two presidential contenders in 2012 would I want to stand firm on my behalf, on my country’s behalf,  about anything, not just missiles? 

I would want Barack Obama because I think he has the gravitas and the language skills necessary to restore true statesmanship—oratory not single-issue rhetoric—to the office. He is a leader who can compromise to serve peace. He also can wait.

Romney is competent, skilled, and impatient. I’d be afraid he’d smirk.