2013.06.09 Books We Hear

You can tell a lot about yourself by noticing what your favorite book was as a young child. Often there’s one favorite, one that stands out, one that touched your imagination in provocative ways. It would be the one you requested and loved to skim when no one was available to read it to you. It would be the one your mother or father got sick of. It would be the one whose plot somehow mysteriously told you who you are and where you wanted to go, if life afforded the opportunities and you had enough health and chutzpah to follow them.

I remember the Dick and Jane readers, full of boring repetitions: Run. Run Run. See Dick run—going nowhere fast! Baby Sally and Puff the kitten had promise, but the rest of those plodders killed any possibility of plot or excitement. If that was the spice of reading it was not for me.  Bad writing did, however, motivate me to learn to read so I could move on from these primers.  They weren’t spiritual. They didn’t enliven me.

Thanks God for Dr. Seuss who came along and, by writing a good read, made learning to read enticing.  

My favorite pre-reading book engaged me in a life, an image, and a story fraught with meaning I would come to love and remember. It was called The Little Book About God, published just four years before I was born. It’s small and not full of colorful illustrations to attract a young child. My mother must have picked it out for me at one of our annual book-buying trips to Macys in NYC.  The book spree was almost more exciting to me as the clothes-buying jaunt, also at Macys.

Why my mother thought I’d love this book is uncertain. Perhaps it had something to do with her own yearnings and the fact that she thought I was a gift from God born after several miscarriages and lots of anguish. And maybe I told her I’d met God under the table. I don’t know but God was an early mental preoccupation for me—a Mystery I still ponder and have come to love beyond love.

My younger sister’s favorite book was The Little House. She grew up to live in a little house and be a champion of justice for little people, who, like the book’s little house, got overpowered by big city growth and other oppressions.

 

My children's books of choice told me a lot about them, their souls: wild things, things that moved fast like planes, trains and automobiles, little houses and family love, searching and finding the right mother.

My husband’s favorite, one of them at least, was The Little Engine That Could.  No wonder. He still is one. 

What was yours?  

2013.06.05 Women and Violence—Again and Forever?

I’ve just read The Anglican Journal’s small report on a meeting held on March 1-3, 2013, sponsored by Anglican Women’s Empowerment (AWE, nice acronym!). The meeting was held in Manhattan, New York and was attended by eleven women who traveled from Africa and America to have conversations.

Conversations took place in small groups with the goal of breaking the silence about violence against women.  The groups had the topic and the structure and, as the Indaba model encourages, each group established its own focus and process.

Indaba is a South African term that basically means meeting. The just retired Archbishop of Canterbury appropriated the term for the Lambeth Conference of Anglican clergy in 2008. The idea is that medium-sized groups (not plenaries) come together to converse about large, even global, issues and problems. Call it a family meeting.

Here’s an eye-opener that shot my eyes nearly out of my head.

A youngest woman participant  at the AWE gathering, Faith Meitiaki from Kenya, expressed surprise that women in the developed world struggle with life challenges and sexual abuse and domestic violence in the same way women in less privileged circumstances do.

She said: “For me it was an eye-opener: that, as long as you are a woman, you will always face violence. That was the common denominator between the women from Africa and America.”

As long as you are a woman. So why have I and so many other women continued to write, work and preach against violence against women?  Are we hopeless cases because of our gender? Is there safety for women without a man to protect her? 

I have no good answers but I will think and pray about this “eye-opener.”  The only one thing I am completely sure of is that this painful common denominator, which I suspect is no different for women in general than it was for those women at the AWE meeting, is not God’s will, God’s desire, God’s dream, or whatever else you want to attribute to a power greater than human power, a power more loving than human power—even if you don’t believe in God.

We earthlings with our free will and the best of our good will just aren’t doing very well with justice, compassion, truth and love.  Simply so.

But is it because we are godless or humanless?  Or both?

2013.06.02 Hooking a Soul

I’ve always thought that the arts offer a special perspective, somehow able to transcend in-your-face reality without discounting or prettying it. All great arts transmit faith, hope and love, these three—and the greatest of these is hope, light as a feather and just as profound.   

But shouldn't the greatest be love as St. Paul said in I Corinthians 13?  Only if that love is God's.

Poet Frank Bidart, according to a Poets and Writers (May/June, 2013) interview, admits to a potent distrust of love, as if it would win out in the end. A quote from his 2013 book Metaphysical Dog, describes his disillusion, and has been true of his own life:

    “As a boy you despised the world for replacing
    God with another addiction, love.”

Bidart is “skeptical” that romantic love can validate one’s life but admits that all love is saying yes to something.  He says yes to art.  “It’s the closest thing to God I have found. Art is the way I have survived.”

Here is one of Bidart's poems that exemplifies the saving power of the art of poetry and acting: (Ennis Del Mar is the main character in Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and Heath Ledger is the actor who so superbly played Del Mar in the movie.)

“Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger”

Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to
centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his

mouth, he mastered to mutilate

you: the Joker’s voice so unlike
the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar.

Once I have the voice

that’s the line

and at

the end
of the line

is a hook

and attached
to that

is the soul.

2013.05.30 Fuck Off ?!

Well, I guess if the inimitable and great British artist Helen Mirren can tell a bunch of gay drummers on parade in London to “fuck off” then the lid’s off, no?

Mirren, earlier this month, was playing Her Majesty the Queen in a delicate play called The Audience.

Her F-outburst had merit, considering that London theaters are right on the street and the furious enthusiasm of a parade of drummers was interfering with both the actors’ concentration and the theater-goers’ ability to hear their lines. So Mirren swept out into the street at Intermission and in full regalia told the blighters,“Shut the fuck up. People have paid fucking a hundred pounds for their theater tickets.”

How politically incorrect can it get? But it was a parade-stopper. Mirren said she felt badly. AND:  “Something had to be done.”  Good on! commented a gay friend and Mirren fan.

Helen Mirren, according to my beloved spouse, somewhat of an amateur actor himself, is sort of a “fishwife”—not a woman who sells fish. But is there such a characterization for a man who might tell his female wife, his female nurse, his female secretary, et al. to fuck off several times a day?  Who’s ever heard of a fishhusband?

The humorous twist in the F-story is that she did this while in costume and make-up for the role she was engaged in as QEII.

The gracious twist to Mirren’s fishwifery is that Helen Mirren, not on stage but in real life, recently stood in for the Queen to answer the dying wish of a 10 year old Downs Syndrome boy beset with spine cancer. He wanted to go to Buckingham Palace and have tea with the Queen. Mirren took the boy and his family to the Gielgud Theater, a fine substitute for the palace, and afterwards took them back stage for tea and cakes and a visit with the corgis (see below) who had played their parts in the play.The boy was transported. Mirren played both herself and her royal role with grace.  Even the family admitted it was hard to tell the difference between Mirren and Her Majesty; the boy never knew—and, to that family, it did not matter. How fucking royal of Mirren!

What is most real is most spiritually correct, if not politically so.   

To tell you the truth, I love the explosive expressiveness of the F word and use it myself. I’ve never used it from the pulpit but there are times I’ve thought it might fit, even, or especially, from the lips of Jesus or Moses.

Some times political correctness or the rules of civil decorum, especially around the parameters of being a “lady,” might be chucked—or fucked.

HOWEVER, Helen Mirren isn't Dame Helen Mirren for naught. She attended a concert of the drummers a few days after she'd insulted them on the streets. She went to support them and their performance and to make amends  for her own "performance."

 

2013.05.26 What Is the Trinity?

I don’t know what exactly the Trinity is, but yesterday was Trinity Sunday so it’s on my mind.

Oh okay, it’s a Christian doctrine that tells us that the nature of Divinity is relational: three self-expressions in one being: Father, Son & Holy Spirit. or Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. Not very revolutionary unless you need God to be absolutely singular in nature—a monolith. 

Here’s the idea: Creator/Mother/Father ignites life energy; Christ is Jesus, who catches the energy and lives it so well he could be related, as a Son; the Holy Spirit is the Great Connector, She plants seeds of love and healing all over the cosmos. The three dance together as one ball of divine energy, and I am invited to join in just as I am, vulnerable, human, and resurrectable,  as Jesus was.

The Trinity evolved out of the faith of the early Jesus followers who experienced Jesus of Nazareth as the most divinized human being ever alive.  

Who really cares? I do. Why? Because the Trinitarian idea of God is more feminine—relatable and intimate by nature, not just because feminists change the spelling of the divine name or give the Holy Spirit a feminine gender.  The Trinity is re-creating every second, like a book you can read, re-read, and read again and it's always new.  

So here is my imperfect analogy—derived in part from my own efforts as a religio- spiritual writer.

God Creator is like the author who has a fabulous bright idea in mind.
Christ is like the book (first in a series) the Creator writes to give form to the idea.
Holy Spirit is like readers who read the book.

The original bright idea is the unifier, present in author, book, and readers. It’s my favorite book.

2013.05.22 Endangered Values/Endangered Patriarchal Religion

I remember thinking when we—my first husband and three children—lived in Alabama (imagine!) and Jimmy Carter was running for Governor of Georgia in 1969 that he had something different going for him. I didn’t know what it was but I trusted my intuition over my shamelessly northern distrust of those who drawled and said “bless your heart” too much.

We’d moved to Annniston, a “northern”city about midway between Birmingham and Atlanta for a job offer too good to refuse. The job had promise, but the company boss was an all-day alcoholic who drank Pepsi Cola laced with bourbon, which more than once landed him in Birmingham Hospital with unstoppable hiccups. Guess who got a call in the middle of the night to go rescue him? 

Our house was elegant red brick and had a spacious front entryway of large square black and white tiles— fit for Scarlett O’Hara, not for three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, who ran in the red clay soil and tracked it into the house.  I slaved to keep the floor clean with my newly purchased electric floor cleaner. Still, the black tiles bled onto the white ones besmirching them with black flecks. What a ghastly metaphor for racism. I was as angry at the tiles as I was at the segregated uptown Episcopal church I could not, by any twist of conscience,  make my spiritual home

Alabama was a foreign land and I was a bored housewife who missed New England and had not much else to do but clean the freakin floor!—also drink scotch, nurse my depressed rage, write sloppy laments, read crap, correct the kids’ blossoming southern accents,  get pregnant with a fourth child— and watch TV.  

On TV, however,  I became acquainted with Jimmy Carter.  Later, back north, I voted for him for President.  He was a one-term president, some have labeled “weak.” He was hardly the traditional American macho president-of-choice. But neither is Barack Obama, yet both of these men won Pulitzers for peace efforts, Carter’s, uniquely, awarded 20 years after he left the presidency.

I still think Jimmy Carter represents something our American culture needs very much, perhaps a return to our basic values and faith in a power greater than ourselves.  We are a country that needs more than ever to be "under God" not above or without God. “Under” to me means overseen, not as a spy or a tyrant but as Love that is intimately, providentially co-creative. Dare we return to Genesis and the all-inclusive image of deity?

Recently  I read about Jimmy Carter’s “high profile defection” (NY Times’ assessment) from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which he’d been a member for 60 years. Carter could not support the Convention’s selective biblical literalism used to justify the subjugation of women and prohibit them from serving as pastors. At last I knew why I’d thought Jimmy Carter had something different going for him. 

Carter published a book in 2005 called Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.  In it he wrote: “The truth is that male religious leaders have had—and still have—an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.”

He rightly connects patriarchal theology and abuses of power with abuses of women throughout the world—with God as their justification.  Carter knows that such gender discrimination is a “clear violation” of the core teachings of all major religions.

Please note: Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention. He did NOT defect from Christianity, nor the Church, nor the Gospel of Jesus Christ—nor, I add, from his integrity as a human being and a son of the living God.

I don’t regret our southern sojourn in Alabama. There I got gifts: a dear fourth child, second son, born almost immediately after we came “home”; the memory of my friend, a lovely black woman who took care of the neighbors’ children while I took care of mine—we were domestics together; the surety that I would never have a black and white tiled foyer; and pride in an American politician who did have something different  going for him.

2013.05.19 Pentecostal Message

Okay, its time to give the  Holy Spirit, Shekinah, Hokmah, Sophia and other names I do not yet know, her due as the Great Connector.  The nature, Spirit and image of Holiness by any name is far too big for our silly denominationalisms with their accompanying doctrinal theologies. Godde will not fit in boxes and Divinity can not be harnessed—or brokered in any way. 

A friend and professor at Boston College sent the below Rumi poem to his students in the Religion Quest class.  I wrote him back in thanks.

You are a blessing!  And this encouragement for students is so crucial (right word) in the face of Cardinal O'Malley's boycott of the BC commencement because of the speaker,  Irish Prime Minister,  Enda Kenny, whose government agreed to allow abortion to save a woman’s life.

And crucial too in the face of, sadly for now, Pope Francis I's ongoing rigidity about the Vatican party line politik against the openness and gentility Rumi’s poem reflects.  

Who is not all Rumi’s categories in her own one precious soul, so why not live it out, come on out with it?  Well, you know my theory: it's all about the death throes of patriarchy—an organizational system that depends on structured domination.  It’s collapsing. We see many signs, and we see the backlash of fear.

Luckily, doctrine follows practice, so it might just follow practices like the poem advocates. Look East young people, go East for your own soul’s health and grace—and bring the West with you.

 

Whoever you are.

Religious, infidel, heretic or pagan.

Even if you promised a hundred times

And a hundred times broke your promise,

This door is not the door

Of hopelessness and frustration.

This door is open for everybody.

Come, come as you are.

Come again, please come again.