All Saints, 11.01.2020

Today in the Christian Church we celebrate All Saints Day, which immediately confronts us with the very practical challenging question: Who is a saint? What does a saint do, or not do?  Why?

Most preachers in Christian churches will elaborate about the higher values of the kingdom of heaven of which we are citizens and whose values we live by.  YES, BUT how does this Transcendent Kingdom connect with Earthed Kingdom?  I can only think of one acceptable answer: God doesn’t stay in “Heaven.” Simply so.

I was struck with the ever-so-familiar—even trite Scripture—THE Beatitudes.These are hard blessings. Each divine blessing presumes its polar opposite: poverty of spirit, mercilessness, grief enough to suffocate a soul, persecution, torture, evil, unrequited justice, and the absence of peace. For each and all of these blessings God offers its opposite but not its elimination. In other words, dearly beloved, this kingdom of Saints is neither all good nor all bad. It’s both.  

On my home altar sits a small scallop shell. It was hinged but spread open when I first spotted it years ago on an ocean beach. The shell has traveled with me, in pockets and on altars and through a few geographic moves. Hence, the tiny hinge that held the two halves of shell together, enabling it to yawn open and clamp shut for the sake of the tiny critter within, broke. Now I have just the shell in two halves. They look exactly the same, but notice. The outsides of each half are quite distinct.

BUT when the shell is open the insides of both halves are exactly the same.

 Such is the all-blessed image of the Kingdom of God—all residents different one from another externally and all the same internally.  Beatified.



Today I remember a human saint who embodied these beatitudes of inclusion. I first met the Rev. Roy Parker at Holy Cross Monastery while on retreat. He was my spiritual director for a time. Monthly I drove over to Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, where he listened well to all my palaver. I felt soothed by his presence, until one day I stopped talking and looked over to see Roy sound asleep. I woke him and we laughed, followed by my strict instruction that he see a therapist for possible depression.We laughed—together. He still laughs I believe.

Once some years later —in the mid 80s—Roy was on a meditation trip with a nun as his companion. Dick and I offered them a place to spend the night along their way. We served them a delicious dinner and gave them each one of our three spare bedrooms available at the rectory and laughed about sharing such a delightful evening with a monk and a nun.  Our two travel buddies left with deep gratitude for our hospitality. A lot of funny stuff can happen under the sign of the Cross.

We stayed friends with Roy, and I consider him still an exemplar of true sainthood. He was present at my ordination to the priesthood in 1988. We’ve enjoyed his humor whenever we’ve visited the monastery. Once he sidled up to Dick on the way to lunch and whispered: “You know this aging stuff is not for sissies!” Roy’s work hangs on the monastery walls heading toward the chapel.

 

Roy calligraphed the cover for  my ordination bulletin. The larger version of the wisdom of St. Irenaeus of Lyons also hangs above the bed where we sleep. 

Our favorite image of Roy’s calligraphy is a quote from the work of the late mystic and beatitude type, Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk. He wrote if you can't read it: "Dance in the sun, you tepid idiot. Wake up and dance in the clarity of perfect contradiction." I gave it to Dick because it, well, reminded me of him.  We will never ever reframe this to get rid of the crack in the glass!

Roy Parker died of a paralytic laryngeal disease in 2020. The disease took away his voice entirely and then his life. Just before he went silent, he did this last calligraphy.

 

 

Roy is a saint in good standing in the beatitudinal kingdom of all saints. My heart can’t help but be lifted, my cup filled to the brim, my soul drenched in the generous faithfulness of God when I remember Roy.    

2017.10.22 Battle of the Sexes

Dick and I just saw the film, “The Battle of the Sexes” about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King, 29, played by Emma Stone, and Bobbie Riggs, 55, played by Steve Carell. Besides good tennis, the film captured the essence of male/female issues back then—and sadly unresolved today.  Here are Stone and Carell facing off. These actors look amazingly like King and Riggs.

We sat alone—one woman and one man in the darkened theater munching our popcorn—the only two people breathing except the onscreen actors. I was rapt, thrilled. I loved and played tennis—with enough zeal once to cheat: my racket ticked the net which was illegal, and I didn’t tell, a sin of shame worthy of much confession later, but right then, I was too exhausted not to win that match. 

Watching the film, I relived both my old tennis joy and my excitement about the 1970s feminist explosion. In 1973 I too was dreaming of changing the world, or at least the church. Priests were white, male, and in charge of altars and pulpits. Women were in charge of the kitchen and the sacristy.

When Billie Jean King was twelve she had an epiphany: everything in tennis was white—socks, clothes, balls, and players. For King this meant that if she were good enough at her sport she could help change the world, not just her sport. She did both, playing with all her strength to win against a single opponent—and against sexism, racism, ableism, and heterosexism.

Epiphanies open our eyes and hearts and catapult us beyond our narrow little worlds.

When I was twelve I too had an epiphany: my new suburban public junior high school was overrun with boys who seemed to multiply on demand—loud teasing, testing their testosterone  prowess. I’d come from an all-girls’ school and I suddenly felt pathologically shy, short, dumb, boobless, and female. School had been my “sport,” but I couldn’t get good enough at it to change the world, because school had become a boy’s kingdom. Soon I switched “sports” to play for God’s putative kingdom, the earthly version of which was also a “boy’s” kingdom. I thought, nevertheless, that I had a better chance of changing that kingdom because of its divine imprimatur, not to mention the biblical idea that God created everyone in God’s own image, not just boys. 

My grim epiphany in school and church wasn’t far from what King ran into as an adult. She excelled in her sport and tried to change the tennis world—a kingdom for men. Women played in their own tournaments, but they were not paid as much as men in money or recognition.  So King and other women started a “league of their own” lobbying for equal pay for equal work on the courts. King and her women arranged boycotts, hired a fashion designer to create their own tennis outfits, promoted their cause, and made a public scene. King lost her membership in the professional lawn tennis association, and earned the scorn not only of  her male counterparts— players, managers and commentators—but of a whole patriarchal world. She also gained the respect of many women in waiting. She modeled fierce determination.

The publicity awakened the ego of tennis champion Bobbie Riggs, retired from tennis but not from his ego needs or his gambling addiction. Riggs, filled with delusional grandiosity, taunted King and challenged her to a three set match with outrageously high stakes.

Philip Morris paid big bucks to sponsor a tour for the non-smoking women and their cause—a touch of risky irony.

The emotional drama this film portrays is what happened inside these two flawed and gifted individuals, battered by unjust American societal expectations imposed from without on both sexes—both.

The grace of this movie is that it has the courage to portray the truth in good taste. Both players were transformed—not by winning or losing one match—but by inner courage for King and inner humility for Riggs.

Today, King, now in her early 70s, in an interview in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine, 9/17/17, said that she believes that a lot of advances have been made in social acceptance of the GLBT community. “We still have a long way to go, and I think we’re starting to go backward a bit, especially with the ban on trans people in the armed forces. We have to keep pushing. We have to have equality in every way. Everyone deserves to belong.”

That is what she did for tennis, for me, and I’d say for the earthly kingdom of God as well—maybe even the heavenly one too.  She still wears her signature glasses. She is a champion of justice for all of us in bright red, pink, or blue glasses.