2018.04.08 The Depressed King and the Deformed Musician

What do you do when you feel insane, trapped in the endless circle of your own mind? Sing, of course.

Here’s a story for you. It was part of a sermon delivered by the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates on Holy Tuesday, 2018. The bishop was speaking to the clergy of his diocese, many of whom were feeling exhausted, preoccupied, and some defeated, by the weight of their vocation at this most important time of the Christian year.

King Felipe V of Spain ruled in the early 1700s. He suffered from mental illness that caused him to howl into the night, become incontinent, play obsessively with clocks, and often go mute for weeks. Against all reason he was not deposed.

Carlo Farinelli was an Italian-born singer who was castrated at the age of ten in order to preserve his beautiful voice. Men like Farinelli were called castrati. Although cruel measures were used, the sound of castrati singing had depth and power and a pure, genderless, ethereal sound.

By one of those coincidences I like to call God-incidences, Farinelli the castrato and King Felipe the insane found something unique together. Farinelli was persuaded by Queen Isabella to come to Spain to sing for the tormented king. The king received Farinelli because he sensed a certain bond in circumstance—that inner sense we often dismiss but that sometimes turns out to be a nudge from the Holy Spirit, the Great Connector.  (She does know how to do Her healing work!)

The two men conversed:
    King: “We were both made [who we are] against our will. It is no more natural for me to be a king than it is for you to be what you are.  Both of us have been ‘robbed of normality.’”  Both men, concludes the King, have unreasonable, impossible expectations heaped upon them – by their families, by the public, even by God. “You have a world of subjects – as I do.  Mine were given to me by God, though.  I wish I were a pagan.”
    Farinelli:  “Why?”
    King:  “Many gods are fun; one is a nightmare. … He keeps us on a tight rein.”

The relationship that began in mutual brokenness evolved as healing. When Farinelli sang, the music penetrated the king’s madness. It gradually drew him out of his isolation and dark despondency—re-centered, restored, reconciled him to the world around him, even to the impossibility of his vocation. The king called it “the music of the spheres.”  As for Farinelli, he sang the king to his senses, himself to pride of purpose.

There is a young girl in the neighborhood who stands alone waiting for the school bus to arrive. While she waits she sings—to herself, to the world, to no one, to God—rain or shine, she sings. It’s not the quality of her voice, tonality or atonality, that makes her song beautiful. It’s that her music, for its own sake, evokes truth, love, soul, and beauty. Such odd holiness, eh?

P.S.  It was the patriarchal politics and religion of the King’s day that kept him on a tight leash —not Godde.

2014.03.13 The Palms Have It

Palm trees in Israel gather and wave their own praises.

Christians call this Sunday, Palm Sunday, because we wave palms around, sing Hosannas, and expect our spiritual hero, Jesus Christ, to liberate us all from whatever keeps us in bondage—outside oppressor(s), addiction, mental illness, disability, religion, politics, gender, your neighbor. Our palms symbolize hope. They wave gracefully, especially when attached to trees. They also have sharply pointed tips, and kids are tempted to use them as swords.

To me this day has always seemed like a Jackson Pollack canvas—huge, diverse, disordered, every color imaginable spattered and splattered and slapped ruthlessly onto white space, filling it with bright horror. There’s no order in this startling beauty-in-chaos, yet.....yet what? Everything is represented.  Pollack titles one of his most famous paintings, "Convergence." See how everything is there? See that it is holy?

 
Every emotion, experience, desire and need you’ve ever known is packed into this day of Palms, this convergence of all of life at once. If you come to church for serenity and calm, or joy, stay away on Palm Sunday. 

Palm Sunday begins what for Christians is the most important week of the year, and also the most big fat unmanageable week. We tell the story of the entire week on this one Sunday.

This is the week in which Jesus of Nazareth and his followers entered Jerusalem where Jesus spoke truth to power, lost his life in the process, and died an ugly, ignominious death-by-suffocation in crucifixion—as his offended loyalists fled in terror, betrayal, desertion.

This week is just as dazzlingly diverse as the putative seven-day week of Creation, but this week centers on human flesh, not just created by but inhabited by Divinity. The crashing crushing climax of this week is less securely glorious than Creation. It leaves us with no evidence—only faith, hope, and love, the strength that flows from hope.

It wasn’t God who abandoned Jesus, it was humanity. Except of course for some few women who stayed with him at every step and cared for his dead body after his torturers had left, their dirty duty done. These women are the embodiment of faith, hope and love. In them we see the whole direction and the point of what would become Christianity. They are the gospel. Follow them, and their kind, with your “palms” and your Alleluias.

2013.03.24 Empathy Week

Most Christians call the week we are entering, Holy Week. I call it Empathy week. It’s a week we re-enact the skein of tragically inevitable events in the life of Jesus Christ, events that led him to trial and then to execution on the cross, events human history never forgot and divine grace forgave. 

Christians are not re-enactors, like the groups that re-enact Civil War battles and the like. Our liturgies are not pageantry for its own sake, or to memorialize for history’s sake. Christians, if we allow ourselves to be real, if we dare to feel what Jesus might have felt, ought to be heartbroken.

Do we dare to be empathic with the sorrow, the cruelty, the betrayal, the treasonous politics, and rigged proceedings? It takes courage to feel empathy. Can we put our hearts where our mouths are?  All those bloated hosannas ring hollow without heart-truth.   

I’m reading Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir, My Beloved World.  Her life discoveries are interwoven into her story in a seamless way.  Here is one such insight: “I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view.” 

At the time when Sotomayor, was “on trial” herself to prove herself worthy of being a Supreme Court Justice. She said that one of the values she thought important for a good justice to hold was empathy.  Many people jumped all over that word and mocked it as absurd, not part of justice at all in fact.  Do you remember the hullabaloo? 

At the time I thought all the flap had something to do with Sotomayor’s being a Latina and a woman. Probably it did.  However, at a deeper level, the reaction had to do with an incomplete and narrow understanding about what true justice is.  

“I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view.”

Without empathy, things (like love, justice, peace, truth, faith) break down. Simply so.

Sonia Sotomayor has served as Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court since 2009.

Jesus Christ, as far as I know, is still feeding hungry souls.


 

2011.04.20 Holy Week Wisdom

Be wise. Speak wisely. Act wisely. Practice Wisdom.

Wisdom in biblical parlance is a holy figure, a powerful symbolic figure, usually portrayed in feminine form and voice, who basically guides the whole enchilada of developing faith between Divinity and Humanity. Big job!

For Jews Wisdom (Hochmah) is found instructing the people of YHWH in the Torah to bind the law of love for God into their hearts as a constant guide for all they do.(Deut 6:6-8, Psalm 19)

For Christians Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of God’s Spirit (Sophia) in human flesh, quite like binding divinity to your heart. (John 1:1-18)

To be wise the thoughts of your heart must be congruent with the words of your mouth and the actions of your body.

Wisdom is not knowledge alone. Wisdom is the integration of knowledge from without with experience from within.

Quakers are all over this one.

Wisdom guides the integration process. She is Who gets us through the worst and best of times. Holy Week for Christians is both. Wisdom hold it all together, keeps us whole and holy. (She actually is spiritual velcro.)

Pray. Ask. Follow.

Holy Week Holiness

Christian are immersed in a week we call holy, Holy Week in fact. It is our most important week of the church year. Why? Historically, as near as we can figure, this week before Easter is the time, near Jewish Passover (yesterday,) when Jesus entered Jerusalem to confront the powers with the gospel of new life and love. The biblical story details the process which ends tragically with the execution by the state (Rome) of an innocent man. Speaking truth to power is risky.

The Passion story is a powerful one. It may or may not have happened exactly as it is told but something happened, something important to be still telling the story. And there is evidence in extra-biblical sources of the man from Galilee who stirred up the poor and the restless and was crucified.

We call the whole week holy, not just Easter day. Why again? Because all our days, all our ups and down, all our births and deaths, all our joys and sorrow are in God, the God in whom we live, move and have being. All days and weeks are holy, infused with divine grace and easter new life whether we notice and celebrate it or not.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, says the Christian community is meant to be a “mutual hope society.” Hope in the Holy keeps us going.

Holy is a funny word, a word reserved for things religious, monks and nuns, clergy, holy places like sanctuaries, temples consecrated by God for divine purposes. But the word is derived from Dutch/German roots, heilig meaning whole. A little more generic, democratized.

Everyone has natural potential to be whole. To feel whole to me means that what I think, say, feel and do are one. They flow; they’re congruent with each other. For example: I think you are a fool and I say to you, you’re such a fine person, then feel disgust for you ( and myself) and follow that by doing something extra nice for you that you haven’t requested and I don’t have time for............

You get the picture. By the end of the day, who is the fool? I’m twisted up like a corkscrew and mad as a hatter, probably blaming you, the innocent recipient of my lack of integration, wholeness. The Holy in me is dimmed by such patterns of unholiness, and only the Holy breaks through them. Follow the expeerience.

In his book The Idea of the Holy Rudolph Otto defines the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a huge near-terrifying and also fascinating mystery.) One of my seminary professors gave an example: “It’s like you’re on your way upstairs with an armload full of clean laundry and suddenly with no warning there’s a teenager draped across the third step as if from nowhere with a crucial question you must answer now! You nearly drop all the laundry and are tempted to run screaming into the night, dreading the encounter, and at the same time you’re fascinated at how this youthful presence, this body of energy suddenly appeared unable to be ignored.” Fits for me. I was a teen once and had some myself.

I had an experience of the Holy like that when I was trying to write a seminary paper about the Holy and felt stumped. An experience darted into my mind, one long buried and forgotten, an experience of having been sexually molested by an old man stranger in a New York City movie theater when I was eight. The old man had a long white beard and looked just as I thought God looked. The experience left me scared of the God I had loved so I’d stored it all away.

I grew up. I went to seminary, headed for priesthood and still was incomplete with God and myself. Up popped the old man memory thirty years later frightening me and drawing me to follow it.

So I wrote about what had happened and felt whole, holy. My missing piece was now on paper, no longer requiring any of my life energy just to keep the secret. What happened as I mulled over the paper was the Holy in action.

Holy Week is a time when many Christians want more than ever to skip over the reenactments of Jesus’ last three days, especially condemnation, scourging, torture and nails AND the commandment to love one another anyway. It’s just too much!

To meditate on crucifixion is terrifying. What if we could hear Jesus scream? What if all our own losses make us cry? Eeeuw and ow!

To meditate on God’s resurrecting Love can be equally terrifying. Many interested but dutiful or distant followers appear in church on Easter Sunday only to disappear again till next year. What if it’s not true? Is it for me too? Hocus-pocus! To be loved totally is to surrender all pretense. True for non-believers as well as putative believers. It is unbelievable.

But to skip over any part, life, death or resurrection, is like my leaving the old man buried for so long.

The Holy compels us to face truth and to enter— fears, hopes and all— into Mystery.

Memoir Musings Part Three: Staying the Course

It’s Holy Week, an important one for Christians. We remember the events leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection and we honor all our own grief and pain and place our trust once again in the hope that we have a God who reaches into our worst darkness, even death, and raises us up body and soul together, wounds and all. In these days we all have our own memories of death and resurrection.

I had experienced myself and life in a sacramental way by instinct from childhood. My movement towards priesthood seemed obvious. All I had to do was turn myself inside out. I thought the Church would be, well, nice.

It took a record-setting eleven years for me to get ordained, the usual time being four or five years. I stayed alive in the wilderness by thinking that if only I got ordained . . . what? My father would love me as I am? My mother would acknowledge my authority as an adult? I’d be happily married? All my life my way of establishing myself in the world had been by achieving, one glittering triumph after another. Now I was stopped cold.

All one can achieve in a wilderness is survival.

God as well as my self, my direction, my values, my vocational track, came under scrutiny and into question in my wilderness.

Going to seminary whether the Church liked it or not felt deliciously defiant—also dangerous. Sometimes in a wilderness you just have to find a building, a temporary shelter, a tent even— and of course a library! Falling in love with the bible and its motley cast of characters raised my spirits. In the bible, a best seller I’d never understood, I found vocabulary for some of my own spiritual experience.

For example, when, at three under the dining room table, I’d sit and chat to my imaginary friends who never listened and to God who did listen, I felt that I mattered. I received the gift of the authority of my selfhood without any judgment or abandonment. The psalmist calls it feeling yourself to be “the apple of God’s eye.”

Personal authority and belonging came together for me under that table. This “marriage” is rare if at all in a world full of fear, but perhaps it’s a gift only God can give, a gift of love not conferred as reward or power except the power of one’s being. I feel it in my body of flesh when my spiritual body takes residence in every bone, muscle, sinew. I feel alive even when I’m tired of trying. It’s what helped me stay the course.

Recently a woman in my yoga class asked me what I did. I told her I was an Episcopal priest to which she replied “Oh, I’m done with all that religion. I was raised in the Catholic church. My mother believes every word.” I told her I had many doubts myself. She said something like “We’re all just light, Just light. None of this matters.” She patted her body. I resisted for once a little sermonette on incarnational theology, simply saying. “You are a beautiful, graceful athlete. Your body is Light, sacred all by itself.” She looked stunned.

Our conversation ended and I don’t know what she thought. But that’s the way we connect isn’t it, by sharing what matters most to us with each other? I know I’m thinking of what I call the “light of Christ” in a more expansive way because of her Light.