Holy Cross Day is a red letter day on the liturgical calendar, meaning it is a major feast day with its own Collect and set of biblical readings. It’s a day set aside to remember, exaltation the calendar says, the Holy Cross.
When we were in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher we saw what purports to be the site of the crucifixion, outside the city walls as was fitting for lowlife blasphemers like Jesus, not yet the Christ. The site, excavated from the ruins of ancient buildings (335 CE) was erected to venerate the cross of Christ. It was holy because it was the site of resurrection in the Emperor Constantine’s time. But it was also the site of crucifixion! The site was unimpressive—cave-like, claustrophobic, poignant, disillusioning—also appropriate.
I’d expected grandeur, Godde knows why. I’d wanted to faint in wonder. Instead I felt stifled, longing even for tears.
Our teacher, the Rev. Dr. Kamal Farah, said the holy cross represented a new beginning: “The resurrection of Jesus is the promise of God’s mercy.” I believed that with all my heart, and all I wanted to do was run away.
Do most Episcopal parishes keep this feast on a Sunday when people will actually be at worship? Or is it shuttled off to a weekday when no one is in church, or simply ignored? I suspect that very HIGH Anglo-Catholic liturgical parishes keep the day. It wasn’t even mentioned in our local parish.
The day, if it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, can be moved to the nearest Sunday so that the Sunday parish Eucharist will be celebrated to honor the Cross of Christ, the same as if the cross were a named saint or other.
What’s with the cross? Darned if I know. I grew up Protestant and the only crosses I saw were empty, nice shiny gold usually, but pretty meaningless—bland. The first time I saw a cross/crucifix was in a Catholic church. It grabbed my attention so strongly that I felt ashamed. After all it was pretty graphic-ugly. Was I the type who would gawk at executions or casually knit while heads rolled like Dickens’s Madame Defarge?
But one ought always to pay attention to something that fascinates even if one’s feelings are ambivalent. So I did. Eventually, to my anti-Catholic mother’s horror, I bought a small crucifix and stared at it. I prayed for some wise insight. All I got was my own tears and one thought: God cares.
I wouldn’t get what I’d call deep soul wisdom from this horrific alluring Christian symbol till I hit the skids of my own helpless suffering, nothing like crucifixion but enough to wipe me out—a pile-up of losses (deaths, divorce, rejections). I suppose it was then that I knew for sure that God did not prevent or eliminate suffering or evil. Not much consolation really, but honestly if God would intervene in such a way would Godde not have done so for Jesus of all people? Or Moses or Buddha, Mohammed, or me. Oh damn!
I prayed to my cheap little crucifix as if God were a spiritual EMT, even when I knew better. Mysteriously I felt better, so maybe Godde was about as powerless as any dearly beloved who hangs in way beyond hope. This was very bad theology, but I didn’t really care.
Give me a cross that is both empty and full at the same time, I prayed. And here’s what I got, in time.
My first patient at the alcohol/drug rehab center where I was a chaplain I’ll call Noelle, although almost thirty years later I still remember her name. I went to see her in the detoxification unit and greeted her with a bright smile. She greeted me with a blast: “Get the fuck out of here, you fucking religious freak.” Horrified, I obeyed. My staff community reminded me that Noelle would be calmer “dried out.”
Nevertheless, I felt nervous to see her again. She entered my office and confronted me right away and truthfully: “It was that tiny cross around your neck. It looked huge to me,” she said. “My mother used to throw God and church at me all day, then beat me up at night.”
I took off my cross and gave it to her to inspect.
“Kinda pretty,” she said. “Small too. But it’s different. It has a hole in it. That’s where the dead body’s supposed to hang isn’t it?”
“Yes, usually. What do you think?”
She fingered the cross and held it up.
“Want to try it on?”
“Nope. It’s yours.” She handed it back. “What does the body-shaped hole mean?”
“That God can take us off our crosses and help us heal.”
“Just like that?”
“With your help. But you gotta follow God off the cross, which for you now is the pain of your alcoholism. Living without alcohol will feel like another cross for a while.”
“I can’t imagine life without alcohol to stop the pain,” she said.
“You won’t be alone. You’ll have AA meetings, lots of buddies who know what it’s all about, and listen to you forever, like the best family you can imagine.”
After Noelle left I fingered my little cross. Sure enough it was full and empty at once. I decided to keep wearing it , fucking religious freak or not.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
2013.09.11 Good Wisdom
The 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s poetry, Leaves of Grass, contained a preface, which was left out of subsequent editions, and in it he wrote:
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
So there you have it. (Why in the name of anything did it get left out after 1855?)
This is perhaps the most charmingly beautiful word picture of—I don’t know what. I dare not project or theologize such naked truth. It’s just too darn beautiful.
Oh, let me be a poem.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
2013.09.08 Pride Reaches and Overreaches
Pride goes before a fall...and you’re riding for a fall. My father used to say these two phrases coupled on occasion. It was a wisdom I knew, actually believed, but heeded less. To me growing up it seemed a boring strategy, even if true.
I reasoned thus, until at six I reached too far and made a discovery. On the top shelf of the medicine cabinet I saw a balled up tissue—out of reach and sight, but not to a precociously curious overreaching child.
I just had to know what was wrapped in this egregious tissue. I reached and stretched to reach some more till, with great pride, I retrieved the tissue. As I was climbing down I missed the edge of the bath tub. I fell and cried and bled from my head as the tissue flew from my grasp, and one tiny tooth fell out of it and into the tub. It was my tooth.
My fall hurt. My grief hurt worse. For that was the day the tooth fairy I’d bet my heart on died.
Who needs a quarter when you can have faith in a small magical fairy who comes at night to take your tooth and leave you a reward just for losing it, for growing up?
I reasoned thus, until at six I reached too far and made a discovery. On the top shelf of the medicine cabinet I saw a balled up tissue—out of reach and sight, but not to a precociously curious overreaching child.
I just had to know what was wrapped in this egregious tissue. I reached and stretched to reach some more till, with great pride, I retrieved the tissue. As I was climbing down I missed the edge of the bath tub. I fell and cried and bled from my head as the tissue flew from my grasp, and one tiny tooth fell out of it and into the tub. It was my tooth.
My fall hurt. My grief hurt worse. For that was the day the tooth fairy I’d bet my heart on died.
Who needs a quarter when you can have faith in a small magical fairy who comes at night to take your tooth and leave you a reward just for losing it, for growing up?
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
2013.09.04 A Gethsemane Moment?—Write About It
Last week I had what I VERY loosely call a “gethsemane moment.”
Naming my blues after the agony of Jesus in the garden is highly pretentious but it came to mind as I prayed and reflected about what had happened to make my mood take a plunge from buoyant to dregs for no reason that I could see. Nor could I imagine why Gethsemane came to mind.
New Testament gospel stories tell us that Jesus went with his disciples and followers into the Gethsemane garden to pray on the night before they entered Jerusalem to confront the powers. Most of us know the enormous anxiety that accompanies even a small confrontation which is conflictual. Dangerous! You want friends around you to encourage and support you. Jesus was no different. He begged his three best friends to stay awake with him in his darkest hour. They fell asleep! Such friends! Such utter and ultimate feelings of aloneness. Such abandonment.
In my "gethsemane moment" I felt alone with thoughts like: no one calls, no one cares, I have no use to anyone, no purpose, belong nowhere, on and on in a morass of dramatic irrationality. I also felt physically exhausted, not tired just spent. I prayed for insight. Nothing. I called friends. Not home. Dick out for the day.
I was tempted to condemn my feelings; instead I focused on Gethsemane. I'd been there just two years ago when we went on pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine.
Gethsemane is a small garden outside Jerusalem. It is tended in very loving, and I might say excessively protective, ways by a group of Christian monastics. Tourists are not allowed into the garden unless they have arranged for special permits and then only in small groups.
We Episcopalians walked around the garden and gazed into it over the iron fences. Olive trees line the road to the garden. In Jesus’ day there were no Christians and no tourists—just olive trees. Five of them are 1880 years old. They evoked worship in me. They are huge, gnarled, majestic, preserved in their ancient beauty, like guardians of Mystery. I wept. AND these old olive trees still yield fruit—very significant because olive oil and its products are the mainstay of the local economy in Israel today. The word gethsemane means olive press.
To soothe my "gethsemane moment" I ate dark chocolate and read the day’s comics. Then I wrote because it's what I do.
Three insights emerged.
1) I was missing my manuscript, my memoir, my story, my life in words, years in the making, but most intensely labored over in the last year almost every single day for several hours. The day before I’d delivered it to an editor. Her skill and work will take over for now. At first I felt an uplift, like a weight dropped from my shoulders. But the next day my mood plummeted. I was grieving.
2) It’s good to exaggerate feelings, blow them out of all proportion. It brings them to light so you know exactly your own state of mind and heart. Such purposeful exaggeration keeps you from judging your feelings as silly because you already know they are overblown. So I let them be.
3) My feelings were nowhere near the depths Jesus must have known. Gethsemane came to mind not so much because Jesus felt similar aloneness, though he did, but for the sake of the olive trees—images of time, memory and aging, and the knotty wisdom of necessary bereavement.
Irrational, yes. Ridiculous, no.
Naming my blues after the agony of Jesus in the garden is highly pretentious but it came to mind as I prayed and reflected about what had happened to make my mood take a plunge from buoyant to dregs for no reason that I could see. Nor could I imagine why Gethsemane came to mind.
New Testament gospel stories tell us that Jesus went with his disciples and followers into the Gethsemane garden to pray on the night before they entered Jerusalem to confront the powers. Most of us know the enormous anxiety that accompanies even a small confrontation which is conflictual. Dangerous! You want friends around you to encourage and support you. Jesus was no different. He begged his three best friends to stay awake with him in his darkest hour. They fell asleep! Such friends! Such utter and ultimate feelings of aloneness. Such abandonment.
In my "gethsemane moment" I felt alone with thoughts like: no one calls, no one cares, I have no use to anyone, no purpose, belong nowhere, on and on in a morass of dramatic irrationality. I also felt physically exhausted, not tired just spent. I prayed for insight. Nothing. I called friends. Not home. Dick out for the day.
I was tempted to condemn my feelings; instead I focused on Gethsemane. I'd been there just two years ago when we went on pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine.
Gethsemane is a small garden outside Jerusalem. It is tended in very loving, and I might say excessively protective, ways by a group of Christian monastics. Tourists are not allowed into the garden unless they have arranged for special permits and then only in small groups.
We Episcopalians walked around the garden and gazed into it over the iron fences. Olive trees line the road to the garden. In Jesus’ day there were no Christians and no tourists—just olive trees. Five of them are 1880 years old. They evoked worship in me. They are huge, gnarled, majestic, preserved in their ancient beauty, like guardians of Mystery. I wept. AND these old olive trees still yield fruit—very significant because olive oil and its products are the mainstay of the local economy in Israel today. The word gethsemane means olive press.
To soothe my "gethsemane moment" I ate dark chocolate and read the day’s comics. Then I wrote because it's what I do.
Three insights emerged.
1) I was missing my manuscript, my memoir, my story, my life in words, years in the making, but most intensely labored over in the last year almost every single day for several hours. The day before I’d delivered it to an editor. Her skill and work will take over for now. At first I felt an uplift, like a weight dropped from my shoulders. But the next day my mood plummeted. I was grieving.
2) It’s good to exaggerate feelings, blow them out of all proportion. It brings them to light so you know exactly your own state of mind and heart. Such purposeful exaggeration keeps you from judging your feelings as silly because you already know they are overblown. So I let them be.
3) My feelings were nowhere near the depths Jesus must have known. Gethsemane came to mind not so much because Jesus felt similar aloneness, though he did, but for the sake of the olive trees—images of time, memory and aging, and the knotty wisdom of necessary bereavement.
Irrational, yes. Ridiculous, no.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
2013.09.01 Tribute To a Poet and Poetry
Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate poet, Irishman, Dublin resident who also taught at Harvard, devoted dad of three and husband of one wife, ebullient raconteur, imbiber, lover of the land, user of plain-talk words that make sense of life and don’t rhyme but have rhythm, just died at 74— my age.
The purpose of poetry, as I see it, being a priest, is to consecrate what is,—simple things like bread and wine, small children, your own fruitless malaise, or the latest obit. You can do it with hand gestures, a smile for no reason, humor, deep listening, a kiss, a poem, like this one by Heaney:
DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
The purpose of poetry, as I see it, being a priest, is to consecrate what is,—simple things like bread and wine, small children, your own fruitless malaise, or the latest obit. You can do it with hand gestures, a smile for no reason, humor, deep listening, a kiss, a poem, like this one by Heaney:
DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
2013.08.28 Proustian Spirituality
Recently some good old women friends and I were wondering as we do about those funny little lifts of soul we don’t quite know how to name or explain. Happification? Perhaps just being alone without noise is enough to help focus attention and actually see or hear what the world has to offer our senses.
This is an excellent practice for writers. Just observe and drink in, then write. OR the reverse. Either way it makes for a good piece of writing, prose or poetry. You just never know what the details will reveal, and I don't think it's the devil, who has mistakenly reported to be in the details.
One of my seminary professors back in the 80s said there were only three simple rules of prayer: STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. Same rules for a writer.
Marcel Proust had such a famously arresting moment, a moment when details suddenly exploded to reveal, let's just say, a world beyond the world. The concentration of memoir writing can be a little like that. Proust wrote about it in Remembrance of Things Past (1871) All it took was a pause.
Marcel tasted some cake with tea, which released a flood of memory and more, the kind of experience I call Godde:
"I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?"
This is an excellent practice for writers. Just observe and drink in, then write. OR the reverse. Either way it makes for a good piece of writing, prose or poetry. You just never know what the details will reveal, and I don't think it's the devil, who has mistakenly reported to be in the details.
One of my seminary professors back in the 80s said there were only three simple rules of prayer: STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. Same rules for a writer.
Marcel Proust had such a famously arresting moment, a moment when details suddenly exploded to reveal, let's just say, a world beyond the world. The concentration of memoir writing can be a little like that. Proust wrote about it in Remembrance of Things Past (1871) All it took was a pause.
Marcel tasted some cake with tea, which released a flood of memory and more, the kind of experience I call Godde:
"I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?"
Sunday, August 25, 2013
2013.08.25 Life Wisdom—Mundanely Called Coping, Spiritually Called Hoping
Love fiercely with all your might;
have faith in your love even when it is clumsy or grows faint;
hope when there is no reason to hope—no matter what. . .for
hope is neither wistful nor wishful, but is
clear-hearted and mindful
partaking of the Divine.
I write this in gratitude for the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who is still dreaming hope into souls black and white,
male and female,
child and adult,
parent and child,
able and disabled,
employed and unemployed
young and old,
gay and straight,
rich and poor—for better for worse.
AMEN
have faith in your love even when it is clumsy or grows faint;
hope when there is no reason to hope—no matter what. . .for
hope is neither wistful nor wishful, but is
clear-hearted and mindful
partaking of the Divine.
I write this in gratitude for the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who is still dreaming hope into souls black and white,
male and female,
child and adult,
parent and child,
able and disabled,
employed and unemployed
young and old,
gay and straight,
rich and poor—for better for worse.
AMEN
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