My "Racism"— Part Twenty-two. Prayer and Chutzpah.

In the testaments of the Holy Bible, in my seminary studies, in my ministries as a priest/pastoral counselor, chaplain, and spiritual director, my “racism” came into glaring focus. So did my wondering about large categories like race and gender. Is there no category called race or gender that is not now called racISM or sexISM? I mean it is the addition of ISM that suggests that the concept before the ISM wields exclusive, or too much, power—psychologically, spiritually and institutionally. 

Over time I’ve grown to understand my own “racism” as intersectional—layered with many other -isms, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, feminism, socialism, fundamentalism, materialism, intellectualism, consumerism. Such complexity describes my lived experience of my “racism”, making it bearable, forgivable, and, dare I say, manageable. 

Carol Lee, my best preteen friend and the black girl I betrayed because I was racist, no longer haunts my soul or pricks my conscience, thanks to Bible stories, the presence of God within me, and the little bird in PD Eastman’s book, “Are You My Mother?” who at last realizes that all his questions, all his earnest questing for his lost mother, all his heroically strenuous efforts have come to naught. He kneels on his tiny exhausted wee bird legs and becomes a prayer. 

I am my prayer to you, says the psalmist in Psalm 109 (Greenberg translation). 

How does one become one’s own prayer? It is not by working obsessively, seeking answers to your prayer, although such efforts are good for your mental muscles and may even be helpful to other people. It is rather to slow down enough to uncross your eyes so as to see beyond your own desire, to slide off the throne of your ruling desire, your immediate worry, to release your held breath, to open your clenched fists, to let your willing tears flow freely, thereby giving God’s Spirit some stretching space in your soul. 

Scene LXI.  Prayer Rose

I discovered this on many many silent retreats in which prayer was the only bloody thing I did. Well, I cheated, but not much. I became a living, walking, breathing prayer. At night in the chapel at Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut, I knelt alone and gazed at the elongated oil portrait, painted by artist Mary Daly, RSM, of a rose—long stem, thorns, bursting petals against a faintly visible green cross—hanging behind the tabernacle. This to me became the sacred heart of Christ, not bloodied or dead, but beckoning. 

I wanted to walk into this rose. The tabernacle below, containing the sacrament consecrated as Christ’s body and blood, was locked. Locked. I stared. I became a prayer. I climbed the “stalk” of that rose, feeling pricked and torn by thorns, finally to enter the sacred rose-heart of Christ—bruised but breathing. The next day when there was light I drew my own rose and wrote: "I am a rose/You are too/We two rose." 

To make such a climb—powerless, longing, praying—was what it was like to feel called to priesthood in my own religious tradition while trapped in one of those -isms, the sex one, and to be locked out, as I, because of the White-only rules at our beach club, had locked Carol Lee out for her -ism, the race one. Locked out. 

Scene LXII.  Breaking Up the Old Boys’ Club. Women Breach Male Collegiality in the Episcopal Church

In 1974, and again in 1975, groups of Episcopal women deacons organized, inspired by their calling to priesthood. They got political. Some willing bishops broke ranks to ordain these women outside of Church canonical regulations. Prayer, communicating with one another, and their shared desires led them to disobedience—and success. 

These women, on whose shoulders I stood as I pursued my own call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, acted together to break a small but not insignificant sound barrier in patriarchal Episcopal Church politics. It would take a long time for the Church to swallow the whole law whole, to unlock its heart, to disrupt the “order” of things, and admit women as priests—and eventually as bishops. Here are some of the original 1974 group, the Philadelphia Eleven, lifting up the consecrated body of Christ-in-bread. 

Scene LXIII. The Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman

This small ancient story (Mark 7, Matthew 15) is one of my favorite ones in all scripture. Biblical women to me are not without flesh. Their stories count and help shape my soul. The woman in this small story counted as much to me as the actual women who paved the way to ordination for us all. It took me eleven years of knocking on doors and prayer-begging to be ordained priest. It would have been easier if I were a man, easier if I’d not been divorced and single, therefore dangerous, you know what I mean, harder perhaps if I’d been Black, or burdened by any other -isms, and easier if I had not overexercised and flaunted my natural chutzpah. 

I identified with this Syrophoenician woman, because she too was an outsider, a noisy threat, a Greek, a Gentile, banging on doors, annoying the Rabbi who was on a mission to secure the promised land for his people, the Jews. She was an interruption and a disruption of ordered canonical processes, like all of us women seeking priesthood were. She was even viewed by Jesus himself as unacceptable by standards we could call NationalISM.  He said: “I came for my people Israel!” Locked out she was. He turned her away three times. She kept on asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus I suppose felt a bit bullied yet heard in her cry, her prayer, the reminder of the depth and breadth and inclusivity of God’s own healing mission—not for Jews alone.

I, like her, and like the other women seeking ordination who were trying to overcome ancient biases, never gave up. Never. 

 

2021.04.25 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Seventeen. Learning Without Studying.

When I started this series on my “racism” I realized that what moved me came from many pressing scenarios, not precisely relevant to racism, or any skin color, but building in me a spirituality of deep appreciation for the sheer brilliance of every living thing. This extravagant enlargement of my perspective has made me know that Love beyond all understanding neither created nor ordained ANY privilege, nor ANY ONE single image of God/Godde, nor ANY race.

Scene LI.  Noah

We read the fable of Noah’s ark to begin Lent. It is part of what is called the primeval history, after Creation, the Eden fiasco, and the listing of many generations of humanity—each one more corrupt than the last. Evil abounds. This biblical pattern continues as generations accumulate, each one more corrupt than the last. God seeks and finds one blameless man who builds an ark, saves animals, and keeps Creation alive through a devastating flood of waters.

Children and adults love the two-by-two animals up the ramp to safety; and we delight in Noah jokes, like how much excrement he’d have to clean up daily, but no, his wife probably did that, right?  We bypass the image of God who, according to ancient spirituality, brought on such a great flood. No one cares much about causality, because we are sure we’ll be on the ark. Floods were common in those times. But…….. do we give equal weight, or more, to what God proclaims about the rainbow, also common after storms?

Exactly what does God say about this rainbow?  “When the bow is in the sky I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Genesis 9:16)

This so called Noachean covenant is the first one mentioned in the Bible. It represents a covenant for life between God and “all living things on earth and in the heavens.” Covenants are mutually binding on all parties. I had heard all this many times. Why now was I suddenly aghast? Why now was I feeling the grace and the burden of it?  Because of “weeny sounds” I’d made at 3, reading the whole darn Bible at 14, in seminary plunging into the intricacies of scripture called holy, a world I thought I knew and didn’t fully. And now I was embedded in a world full of people whose lives I could hardly imagine—or deny.

Noah’s deal was no longer a sweet story. It was mine—hardly rosy and overweeningly peachy keen, yet I felt God’s calling me into the same covenant. I felt scared. Where was this Lord my shepherd?

Scene LII.  Lessons on Dying

From the sick-unto-death I learned to be well.

As I completed seminary my mind felt swollen to the point of explosion, yet equally drained of energy. I was full, as if I’d overeaten. I could not learn one single additional thing. Not one more world of wonder would fit into my soul—even for safekeeping. Not one more prayer could get me ordained. My already wheezing lungs could not inhale one more breath—for the Lord or anyone. And my eyes wept dry tears.

Still, there was one more requirement—one more torturous shredding of my ego. They called it Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short. I would be trained to work in a hospital, to give solace, comfort, and spiritual hope to the sick and the dying. I had nothing to give.

My God, how I wished I could just hop into one of those beds with the crisp white taut sheets, push the button to summon a kindly nurse to wash my feet or offer sweet oblivion with some pain killer drug. Instead I took lessons from the flesh, not from a book. You don’t learn humility, it is given.  

From a child I learned to choose life—anyway.

I was a hospital chaplain, first trained at UConn Health Center by a Roman Catholic nun, then accumulating more chaplaincy hours at Hartford Hospital. I was buying time waiting for the Episcopal Church to ordain me. Limbo.  

I stood with a family at the bedside of their dying child. They had three daughters, all with muscular dystrophy—a wasting disease with no treatment. The oldest had died; the middle daughter lay dying; the youngest, maybe 7 or 8, sat in wheelchair next to her sister’s bed, her face twisted in agony. A machine whooshed, sucked, and sighed as it pumped last-minute breaths into the dying child’s lungs.  

The family had seen this before. The nurses had summoned me, a small plainclothes female chaplain, also a Roman priest, a robust specimen as well done and rounded as a pot roast, and brandishing healing oils. He stood next to the child in the wheelchair and said too many prayers. The rest of us surrounded the bed with powerless presence, keeping watch. I thought I should say something, but nothing occurred to me, so I stood. The Roman priest looked down upon the now sobbing child in the wheelchair and said, “Oh now, don’t cry. Aren’t you happy your sister will soon be with the angels in heaven.”  The child turned her small tear-stained face up and countered him fiercely: “NO. NO. I don’t care about angels. I want my sister!”  

This was the most honest prayer I’d ever heard. I knew God wept with us all as together we watched the machine unplugged, and we listened to the dying girl’s breaths space out slowly—slowly.  
            
From a dying man in his seventies, I learned about God.

We both knew his death was close. We’d talked about it, and he was as ready to die as anyone ever is. I was not ready for him to die. He told me he’d prayed a lot that God would change things, but he seemed also peaceful with the truth, and thought it must be God’s will. I, however, had come to know and care about this man, and uttered the following stunningly unprofessional spontaneous idiocy: “We pray, believing that God saves, heals, and all this, but why would such a great big almighty God bother?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” the man said.  
        

Scene LIII. Lessons From Blacks

I met O.T. in my Hartford Hospital chaplaincy group. He was the most contagiously jolly man I’d ever met.  I don’t know how he did it, but O.T. could laugh—always. It was his greatest pastoral gift and never offered insensitively. From him I learned to laugh—no matter what. He offered what I called kindness laughter. This was essential when one of us hospital trainees felt helpless, or had just uttered something utterly real but clumsy.

Once one of us chaplains stopped to make a pre-surgery visit to a patient who said he was having his lung removed, and before he could explain about transplant, this chaplain, pale with horror, blurted: “The whole thing?” The chaplain (me) was consumed with guilt, and O.T. said “Don’t fret, honey, they remove it in halves.” O.T. was never disrespectful, always listened, and then he brought things round so we all were lost in hilarity. Who finds honest humor in death? He did. From him I learned, again, and more forcefully,  that God was not the ultimate dour potentate we’d been taught to revere and fear, but that God gave us laughter as well as tears. How else does one cope in this ministry?

Dick and I socialized a bit with O.T. When he landed his first job at a big Baptist church in Newark, he invited Dick to deliver the pastoral charge, that is a pep talk to the newly ordained minister about what to do in this first official ministry, chiefly, follow the teachings of Jesus, and try not to get fired before you burn out. Dick accepted O.T.’s invitation with fervor and tremors. O.T said: “Just say it, brother.” Dick hit the pulpit running. Neither of us remembers what he said, but it passed muster. I felt proud of Dick—and something else. A white preacher in a black church receiving enthusiastic talk-back felt like a just-right miracle.
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Chester was another black man I met in the CPE training. He was shy and unassuming, a gentle gay man, partnered with a white man named John. Chester was completely different from O.T. but just as engaging. We also socialized with him and his partner. Their specialty was cooking, and boy did we get treated to good food and good company. Chester’s creative specialty, besides cooking, was making bears with fully jointed limbs. These bears could march!  From Chester I learned modesty and, yes, sweetness. This is Chester when I first met him and one his bears.

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A black woman writer named Alice Walker taught me about prayer and female sass. In her 1982 book, The Color Purple, she wrote in the voice of her main character Celie:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

“...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder.” 

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How odd that so far I would get my anti-racism training from biblical story, academic theology, the dying, black ministers, secular feminism, and my own secret spirituality. I needed some kind of a shepherd for my bloated soul, or at least a structure.