2020.03.15 Quarantine

There’s a virus called COVID-19 whipping its toxicity around the globe. We are to practice “social distancing”—the term coined to suit the daily habits of anti-social grumps, but now a term signifying the principal life-saving behavior to avoid contacting the virus that spreads by human contact. Staying away from each other in order to stay well. How paradoxical:the farther away you stay from other people, even loved ones, the healthier you will be.

The other life-saving behavior is more obvious: wash your hands—again and again and then once more.  Thirdly, avoid being in large crowds of people, and of course don’t travel. Such life-saving advice may just kill sports-crazy Bostonians and/or families whose kids are players in some sport and hoping for a college scholarship based on their performance—or their parents who are praying for same.

If you’re a overzealous extrovert you could go into withdrawal. OR you could stay healthy.  If you’re already a clean-freak, you’ll be ecstatically squeaky-clean. Disappointment is not life-threatening. Choose life—yours.

Equally attractive stay-well guarantees include Lysol-spraying or wiping the surfaces in your home. They don’t say exactly how many times a day, but for persons with OCD inclinations this would mean, well, the obvious overdo. Absolutely the most perfected police detection methods will never discover any fingerprints anywhere in your house, except your own on the Lysol spray can or the Lysol wipes container. This precaution will be particularly difficult if you have small children about, because they use every surface as if it were a personal touchscreen—evidence of their omnipresence. Do NOT wipe their faces with the disinfectant. This will cause a tantrum at the very least. Soapy water is old-fashionedly enough for most of this, by the way.

Those at highest risk to contract the virus, and possibly die from it or contract a secondary infection that proves resistant to the latest antibiotic, are persons over sixty, persons whose immune systems are already compromised, persons with lung or heart disease, and compulsive “huggers” who tent you with Christian affection.  

As to our executive leadership, the President at first minimized the little “bug,” then declared himself an expert by “intuition”and “hunch” on such medical decisions, then finally, as the only official authorized to make such a declaration, declared this virus a “national emergency.”  Okay so NOW we can start taking this virus seriously—but not really, because it is, according to the President, a foreign virus, brought into this pristine country from outside—probably without a proper passport or visa. But that should not be a problem with our wondrous immigration policies, unless the virus makes its case as a tourist. If so, all it has to do is cut short its visit and go on “home.” 

Quarantine, including closed schools and colleges, events, and churches, is the only appropriate and effective answer, and it is global. Personally, I feel for young happy-proud college graduates who are staging “fauxmencement”ceremonies to avoid drawing a huge crowd. No fans. Morally, I feel pained, because obviously people who work in food stores, restaurants, construction and many other kinds of workers cannot afford to lose an ounce of income. The virus exposes our racist classist society. Medically, there is also the danger of over-stressing the hospitals and other healthcare facilities if the virus spread too rapidly to manage critical cases.
 
Personally, I can tell you it’s a bit lonely if not boring. What helps?
    Online efforts. I attended online Eucharist at our cathedral this morning.
    Phoning my adult children a few more times than is necessary, yet the sound of each voice on the answering machine lifts me from quarantine gloom.
    This is one of the few times in my life when I’ve been totally obedient—compliant to a fault. Nice to know it’s in me.
    I can write. Words heal. I can pester my husband with baloney, read, watch television, and pray—a powerful energy force through which I know I am not alone and by which I trust God’s faithful Spiritual presence, like a masseuse, de-kinking.
    Keeping a robust sense of humor. Not possible to frown while laughing.
    Poetry is the best salve. Here is a poem that frames quarantine and pandemic in a creative religio-spiritual way. To see more of Lynn’s fine poetry visit her website  lynnungar.com.

Pandemic by Lynn Ungar

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

 --Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

And one more thing: tears. Tears cleanse, refresh, and release. I am mourning the death on March 13th of a beloved bishop, the Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris, the first woman bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion after being elected, proudly, by the Diocese of Massachusetts where she has served as Suffragan since 1989. Barbara was a force for justice, a friend who supported my writing, a woman of piquant humor, no matter what was happening, and a vibrant presence we all will greatly miss.

Our present diocesan bishop of Massachusetts, the Rt. Rev. Alan M.Gates, sent an eloquent pastoral message to the clergy and people of the Diocese of Massachusetts. His words caught up my soul:

A few hours later I found myself at the bedside of one beloved to us all who had just slipped peacefully from this world to the next. In the sure and certain hope which we claim, I gave voice to the Church’s prayers of commendation: Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world . . . into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

A solitary moment, yet embodying the fullest companionship imaginable.  

At no time are we alone. Here, there. Now, then. At few moments in our memory have we more needed to remember this, to assure one another of this and to show forth that conviction to others as Christians.”

And I wept.

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.
                                               *  *  *  *
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.

2013.12.01 Wait-and-See Advent

Outside the church we are already commercially and spiritually focused on Christmas and its trappings. In this age of instant everything many of us are conditioned NOT to wait.  I get cross with my computer if it doesn’t pop into action at my touch. I can’t wait.

The comic strip, “Heart of the City,” features a kicky little girl who protests to a local store owner about Christmas paraphernalia on display even before Thanksgiving arrives. Heart carries placards, bravely pickets the store, and argues with its owner. She loses the battle to commerce, but wins the war. Few miss the point:

In our haste to get to the “good part” are we not missing the “best part?”

I remember my anticipation as a child. The baited breath suspense of Advent was as full of new life as Nativity. Waiting built up the Spirit, made Santa Claus, also Jesus,  all the more wondrous, and gifts all the more delightful when they came, even if they weren’t exactly what we wanted. 

Advent was the best part simply because as its days grew shorter and darker the world around lit up. Both darkness and light happened simultaneously. At the same time!  It made my eyes pop with awe.  I awaited the dark with as much eagerness as I did the light.

I feel it as an adult too. I don’t complain when days get dark early, unless it’s just to join the chorus of grumbling I hear all around me. But deep inside me I feel oddly comforted when we pull shades before 5 pm and turn on lights, maybe slide the thermostat up a tiny bit.  It’s cozy; it’s hearth; it’s holing in for the evening.

Advent is the interior season, the safe-and-warm-inside season— prayer, softness, dim glow, the color purple-blue, quiet womb, wait 'n see.

Yet in Advent I always think more about homeless people in this season. I don’t wait for Christmas to see Jesus in church pageants.  I see christs on the streets slumped against buildings, huddled in blankets, asleep on benches, sometimes mumbling thank you.  I can’t make them cozy or warm.

As a young child in the city I’d beg my mother for a nickel to throw in a cup or the bucket of a bell ringer.  Clink!  I’d ask: Why are they sleeping? It’s too cold to sleep outside. Don’t they have beds?  My questions were childish—or were they?  I couldn’t make them cozy and warm.

The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has an active street ministry and employs a street priest to celebrate Sunday Eucharist outside on Boston Common and organize pastoral care. This church is called Common Cathedral. Some of my church “taxes”go to the diocese to support this ministry. 

I’ve visited this outside cathedral  and once gave my scarf to a man who looked cold. I admit I felt awkward, guilty, not wanting to be perceived as Lady Bountiful—but also a little scared. I wish I could be brave and easy like street priests, lay and ordained, but I’m not. I wish I could be more externalized, more of an activist, but I’m an indoor priest. I wait, watch and hope with every “advent” bone in my body, through prayer and Christ’s Eucharist meal, that others with more vocational will and guts will take such generosity outside with them. 

There is hope. I just read (Boston Globe 11/29/13) about blanket ministry, administered in part by our Cathedral Church of St. Paul but the brainchild of Boston’s homeless community.  Some foolish christ asked them what they needed. Blankets, they said!! The blankets are folded to the size of a deck of playing cards in a small pouch. They are silver Mylar space blankets—extremely lightweight and very warm, the kind worn by astronauts and marathoners after a race. Inexpensive too!

You need something warm while you wait outside for a home inside.

The precious blankets are not distributed from shelters or agencies but by volunteers who have been homeless on and off themselves. Over 8000 blankets have been purchased and sent to St. Paul’s. The homeless christ-priests recognize their own on the streets, pull a small blanket pouch out of their backpack, and hand it out—sort of like Eucharist, a tiny wafer on the tongue or in the hand, blessed, as are the blanket pouches, and distributed. Neither solves life’s many problems nor fills an empty belly, but each helps. Oh, each helps as we wait.

To me the whole city world begins, metaphorically, to look eucharistic, open-hearted giving and receiving —wafers inside, blankets outside—as we wait together, but not precisely for Christ for christ is here in the heart of the city.