2015.03.22 For the Love of a Sloth

While walking in the park on a beautiful sunny day, the air as crisp as blue, I spotted a snail obstructing my path. Seriously? How could such a tiny critter arrest my attention so completely?    I’d never seen a snail, except curled up safely inside its lovely striped shell or on a restaurant plate as a delicacy. Now here was one, opened out and moving, her minuscule body stretched out in front and in back of the shell’s closure, and all her wee feet milli-inching along. I stopped to watch her journey, fascinated by attributes I admire, such as diligence and determination. Undaunted, this critter was on the move. On the move might be an exaggeration.

I called a passerby to look with me. She was amazed. She had never seen a snail on the move before.We exclaimed together while I took some photos of the snail, whom I quickly named Swifty.  I stayed for a while to watch. This was her coming-out party, I figured. I snapped another photo, gave her a little blessing, and wished her well.

Here’s Swifty herself. She is a modest soul, full of gumption and sure to be stepped on by one of the many walkers and players who sport about in the park.

 

Oh, my question: What is slower than a snail? Not a sloth. Well, maybe a sloth but with a different kind of slowness, more like chronic vegging—upside down.  Here is a portion of a poem:

The Three-Toed Sloth by Fleur Adcock

The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know
for its size. It spends its life hanging upside-down
from a branch, its baby nestling on its breast.
It never cleans itself, but lets fungus grow
on its fur. The grin it wears, like an idiot clown,
proclaims the joy of a life which is one long rest.

One cannot but envy such torpor. Its top speed,
when rushing to save its young, is a dramatic
fourteen feet per minute, in a race with fate.
The puzzle is this: how did nature breed
a race so determinedly unenergetic?
What passion ever inspired a sloth to mate?

Recent National Geographic trivia: Sloths rest 20 hours out of 24 in the day. Their metabolism is so slow they climb down to defecate only about once a week. How do they reproduce? How love?

Mark Rosenthal of Animal Magic, an animal rescue program in Michigan, made a smartphone video of two sloths actually breeding while hanging suspended from a branch in their habitat. Haltingly, Rosenthal described the scene: “The male keeps trying...the girl...is receptive... He’s going to try again...Those of you watching, bear with me—they’re sloths...”  (I forgive Rosenthal his use of “male” and “girl”instead of female. Oh Godde!)  The eventual consummation, Rosenthal relates, “was upside down. And it didn’t take very long.” 

Sloths are quick when it comes to love-making. Fall over laughing.

Well, here is a possible answer to my question: the Church is an institution freighted with such an obligation to love, and such a duty to serve, and such a compulsion to be sensitive to everyone’s needs, that reform takes a very long time—a very long time, indeed. Perhaps this is the way with any institution, but religious ones take longer, in part because they are beset with the devilish question: What does God want? It is a question easily deployed to keep us stuck. 

From Swifty, the snail, I learned that slow is also determined. Slow-moving devotion is a gift. Say the word, slow, slowly several times on the exhale, and you can feel yourself slowing down all over. Sometimes I move too fast.

And from the noble inverted sloth, I learned that when love is involved, with a dash of lust and procreative necessity, even the slowest creatures on earth can move very fast. 

The Church of Christ is in danger of not reproducing. It values slow-moving devotion and fast-moving love—planting seeds of compassion wherever there is need, and doing it without fuss and feather. Our balance is off—too much determined devotion and too little fast-moving love for its own sake. If a sloth can quicken love, I guess we Christians can, too.

2015.03.08 Now I Ask You! ? A Lenten Rant.

Now I ask you...... Would anyone think, or in their wildest imaginings draw a mental picture, of  anything womanly or feminine at all, while joining a joyous congregation in lustful song: “O, praise him! Oh, praise him! Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleloooo-ya!”? (Hymn #400, “All creatures of our God and King.”)  ALL creatures! The text was written by none other than St. Francis of Assisi, a saint greatly to be admired and imitated for his capacious spirituality. I love St. Francis, and I love his current namesake, Pope Francis I. I love the Ralph Vaughan Williams music. I would never not want to sing this great hymn. Alleluia means: Shine your praises on God. It's a beautiful bright word.

BUT it’s Lent, and we've banned alleluia until Easter. So I get to reflect on serious things, not just my own sins and flaws but the Church’s. I have given up restraint for Lent.

It’s easy when singing to get caught up in a trance of crowd-sourced praise. It’s the music. I’ve been quite conscious of words we use to define—and confine—God, but with hymns, the music takes over. However, I’ve begun to be aware that hymn texts sink into our hearts, embed themselves into our flesh, just as much as the music does.

What are our words communicating— over and over? To our children, girls and boys, to our own souls, to the world? I want us to remember all creatures, not just male ones. I want us to remember God as Creator/Author, not just King. A creator/author makes something beautiful and then lets it go,  in hopes of course that it will please and be appreciated, not trashed.

When I sing this hymn’s refrain, I sing, “O praise God. Alleluia.”  I do the same with the Doxology. It’s easy to let God be known by name, rather than by a masculine pronoun.
            Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
            Praise God all creatures here below.
            Praise God above ye heavenly hosts.

I know I’m in my personal porti-pulpit, and some will say I have spiritual OCD. So I stop my rants for a while, until something hooks me.

Recently we sang, “The Church’s One Foundation”— a great old Christian chestnut. I was singing along with nary a thought until I hit the word “consummation,” and, I’m sorry, but all I could think of was the sexual meaning of that word. The female Church was awaiting her consummation with the male God. I laughed it off.  UNTIL a woman came up to me after the service, agitated, and said, “Did you hear what that hymn was saying about women? Awaiting consummation? Being bought?” We laughed together—half-heartedly.

We had just sung a hymn in which a female Church was “oppressed,” “scorned by men,” “rent asunder,” “distressed,” and crying out, “How Long?” Sounded like a theme song for female domestic violence victims, waiting for their divine male rescuer to change their “night of weeping into a morn of song.”

OK, it’s mystical, visionary, allegorical, metaphorical, intensely Christian, and written long ago. It’s only words. It means Christ. It's not real-world. AND, still,words matter. Pronouns are small and mighty. They alert us that the one done unto is identified as female, and the one to save her is male. Ah, Cinderella! I’m being overreactive, silly. Why all this spleen? (I really should have that organ removed!) I calmed down until two things appeared before my wondering eyes.

First, a  FaceBook posting of a friend and colleague, Elizabeth Kaeton, one-time president of the Episcopal Women’s Caucus, about the historic consecration of Bishop Libby Lane in the Church of England, a first. Kaeton reported the “dust up over whether or not the bishops who consecrated her have 'tainted' their hands and therefore must show 'gracious restraint' when next consecrating Philip North to the episcopacy because he - and three remaining consecrating bishops - do not believe women have 'sufficient ontological matter to be an efficacious bearer of sacerdotal presence.'" What? 

Does this mean we women don't have, well, proper sacerdotal anatomy, lodged between our legs? Yes, I know the carefully chosen word, “ontological” means dealing with the nature of being itself, not just the flesh. Now I ask you: how do you separate the two? God apparently did not when Godde became human and the Spirit inhabited all flesh, not just human flesh, and not just Christ’s.

I scolded myself, called myself cranky and too literal. 

Then.........  (Boston Globe, Op Ed, 1.26.15) . . .   Tennis U.K. wonderboy, Andy Murray, has a new logo, aka brand name, that will appear on a full line of clothing and accessories—everything   but tennis balls, or any balls—though who knows? What’s wrong with that? Laying aside any issues about the accumulation of wealth in the hands of too few, I had a fit of pique about the logo itself: “77 AM”. What’s wrong with that? Seven is my favorite number, and a lucky one at that, and AM are his initials. Doesn’t he deserve this kudos as a sign that he is the first British man to win the Wimbledon singles title in 77 years?

“In reporting Murray’s victory, numerous commentators and media outlets stated that he was the ‘first Brit’ to win Wimbledon in 77 years. As I noted at the time, that statement is true—unless you think women are people.” (Chloe S. Angyal, a senior columnist at Feministing.com. Italics mine.)                        
AM was not the “first Brit to win, only the first male Brit. Four female Brits won the equivalent title (Venus Rosewater Dish) at Wimbledon in women’s singles within that 77-year frame. But then don’t we all know that “winning Wimbledon” is shorthand for winning the men’s singles title? It is still assumed, without much thought, that what counts is what men do. To me, such ongoing assumptions discount women’s achievements and take away their worth. Some women let this happen easily, and some don’t, but we all feel it. 

Many hymn texts in the 1982 Hymnal, and most liturgical language, remains patriarchal, discounting  women as people who hold up half of the divine image. Carl Daw and Brian Wren, gifted hymn text writers, are notable exceptions. Thank you, gentlemen.  

I forgive myself this snark, but do not regret it. It is time to change. If indeed the Church is female, she has the resources to change, and ought to consider her own cry, “How long?”

Allow me to share a verse from Psalm 103 (translation of Pamela Greenberg) which gives me a personal blast of hope, and perhaps can inspire Mother Church as well. We are used to reciting or singing this psalm line: “Bless the Lord, my soul . . .”  Here is Greenberg’s rendering:

“Be wild, my soul, for the Source of wonder; let all my insides praise the Holy Name.”  

 

She will return, yes? 

2015.03.01 Astrolatry

We managed to sneak a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert in between blizzards in this snow-blasted New England winter of 2015. To go or not to go was a discernment: our age, fear of falling, snowy, icy, uncleared walkways, transportation iffy, and very cold weather for lungs and  limbs. We had sane and sensible priorities which showed that risks clearly outweighed graces. Grace won out. We braved the weather, walked to the T, and went to the concert.
The payoff was magnificent.!

We heard a new piece, not a premier, by a composer we’d not heard of named Avner Dorman. A young man of 40, Dorman is Israeli born and now on the music faculty at Gettysburg College.

Astrolatry means worship of the stars, a practice that served the ancient world well, not only to orientate but to inspire devotion. Deities were associated with celestial bodies. Think Mars, Jupiter, Venus, etc. No star or planet named God so far. Good thing.

At first I wondered whether astrolatry was a form of idolatry, making false gods. But I decided it wasn’t. Idolatry leaves the soul and body empty; its fruit is the agony of craving, a hyper-anxious condition of constant unslakable hunger and thirst—the most stifling feelings imaginable.  Astrolatry, on the contrary, leaves souls full of the brightest awe, alive and completely content to be part of a cosmic whole in which your own place is both proper —and guaranteed forever.

I find myself seeking out the stars and moon on clear nights, and love our summer vacations in Nantucket when we can actually see the heavenly array.  It’s harder in cities, though not impossible.
Dorman writes: “While writing Astrolatry, I spent more time outside of large cities than ever before in my life. More than anything else, I found myself in awe of nature in a way I never felt before. Lightning, rain, winds, and the night sky were so much larger and more impressive than they are in the city; and for the first time in my life, I could truly understand why ancient people worshipped the stars.”

The music expresses the fall of night: from total darkness moving into the arrival of stars from the first shy individual twinklings, to groups, adding rhythm, to more and more activity and conflict, building to a cosmic panoply of such diversity and beauty you have to gasp. I’ve watched this display with my eyes, and now I have heard it with my ears. I hear the stars. And how many pieces of music give such play to the dainty introverted piccolo?  The risk we took was worth it.

These days the world is bloated with an oversupply of people, too often acting in vile ways toward one another. Terrorism and violence frighten us all, and military solutions are clearly impotent. Star gazing provides divine reassurance in ways that all our poor words, liturgies and prayers do not. And music is the handmaid of astrolatry.

I understand the attraction to the stars when they reveal their fullness. I do worship. I do thank Creator. I do adore. I do not, however, bow down. Looking up/opening up is prayer as reverent as any I can imagine.

Wonderstruck!
                                                                   *  *  *  *
Four weeks and two storms later, we made a similar discernment, and again grace won out. We went to the symphony. Walkways were still icy and uncleared, but Boston was mobile again and the snow had left, leaving only a polar vortex strong enough to freeze an ocean wave in mid-course!
This time the house was packed; all the pieces celebrated spring; the audience went nuts. So ready are we for spring!

My favorite was Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in E flat for chamber orchestra. I know I was supposed to go nuts over the Brahms and the virtuoso violinist, but........The hall was jumping with energy thanks to Stravinsky’s amazing rhythms and beats, at once diverse and consistent. Stravinsky, it seems to me, didn’t do melody, but used rhythm and sound structures to make a picture and a dynamism. Love it!  His music reminds me of my favorite Spanish painter Joan Miró—whimsy in motion.

Stravinsky, I read, had been “deracinated,” forced to live and work in a culture not his own, three times: from his homeland Russia by war and revolution, to France, to America. I figured this word meant somehow yanked away from the very roots. It is a tribute to his adaptability that his Russian soul adapted and his music reflects that flexibility. Bravo!

Debussy also created pictures with music. We heard his “Images,” for Orchestra. Never saw so many players on the stage at once, and all had a part—even Tubby the Tuba.

In 1908 Debussy wrote to his publisher. He commented, with French snark, on a new piece on which he was working, called réalities—”what imbeciles call ‘impressionism,’ a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art.”
 
Yes, but................in fairness to art critics: consider that mystery is elusive, almost illusory, enough that one is able only to get and give a visual or auditory impression, or intuition, of it before it vanishes. True artists capture the fleeting power of mystery—only an impression. I suppose this is one way to describe spirituality.

2015.02.22 Anita

“You gotta see this great new movie we just saw last night. It’s 'Anita,' a terrific docudrama about her story up to today, narrated by her voice.”

“Mom, you’re obsessed with Anita Hill!” 

 “You’re right. But she’s one of my heroes.” 

Obsession might be too strong a word, but close. I suppose my daughter remembered when her mother sat glued to the TV in 1991 listening to Hill tell her truth to the “hill.” And her mother is still talking about it. Then it was a brave new thing for a woman to do. It still is.

It’s sweetly ironic that three of my most valued heroes are black women:
    -Rosa Parks (1913-2005), the quiet woman/civil rights activist, who, in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, refused the bus driver’s order to give up her seat in the black section of the bus to a white passenger, and catapulted a movement, already in the wings, onto the national stage. There are no rights without duties, and Parks didn’t do her “duty” and was arrested.

     - the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, first Anglican woman bishop in the world, consecrated in 1989 as Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts, who, though urged to do so, refused to wear a bulletproof vest and jumped-started the institutional church into its next right move toward gender equality. A comment, about a contraption like the vest doing nothing for a woman’s physique, has been attributed to Harris. If she didn’t say it, she probably thought it.

      -Anita Hill, attorney and retired professor at Brandeis Law School, who, when summoned in 1991, agreed to testify before the Senate confirmation hearings to approve Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice. Hill told the truth about being harassed by her one-time boss, and gave rise to the issue we now call sexual harassment.

 

 Thomas was voted in by a narrow margin, but many women took up the cry for justice with vigor and humor. Pat Schroeder ( House Representative from Colorado, 1973-1997) captured the question and the quest: “How can you be a congresswoman and a mother? I have a uterus and a brain. I use both.”)

 Damn, I wish I’d said that to the church when I was questioned about being a mother and a priest!

I don’t know why my three chief women heroes are African American. I certainly admire any and all women feminist pioneers in the movement for gender equality, an issue which, to me, supplants and overrides all the particularized divisions we fight over (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.)

It may be that these stories, such a stretch for my well-honed white Anglo-Saxon privilege, made me weep, touched my heart so deeply that I knew that this was the stuff of everlasting heroism, something to follow. I call such heroics, spirituality: when something taps into my core, where I believe God dwells, and makes me explode. Pow!  Then I shout or write or turn activist in my way.

I am grateful when I get depth charges, like this. The deeper issue Hill also identifies is gender equality. It was not Anita’s testimony that helped us move forward; it was the public voice that took up the message and kept it alive. “I just made a scene. You all made it a movement.”

True heroism is when the message inside a personal moment of truth bears truth beyond the one who experiences the moment. It’s a pay it forward phenomenon. You can see it in the Hebrew prophets and the gospel messages in the Christian testament. 

Hill speaks about her decision to “leave home” to write her book, Speaking Truth to Power. She had been so traumatized by the harassment (my word) she received from the all-male squirmy panel of senators when she told the truth about experiencing her own sexual harassment from Thomas, that she couldn’t wait to get home.

Home meant the bosom of her large supportive family in which she thrived as the “baby sister,” youngest of thirteen. Home also meant her state: Oklahoma where, she said, white and black culture coexisted in a way that honored the past while simultaneously living into a new kind of future. Home meant she would be cradled, both privately and publicly. Home meant being affirmed, even cheered— and a place to heal.

But home, as necessary as it was to Anita in 1991, couldn’t last. She discovered that it was sheltering, and also limiting—too protective a climate in which to launch a book, advance her academic career in law, social policy and women’s studies up north at Brandeis, and continue to fuel what she had started. (She has written a book on this topic, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. “I found my voice in 1991, and I won’t lose it,” she said.

In one scene, Hill was asked by a tearful member of an audience, “How do you deal with fear, I mean through it?” 

“What caused me to be fearful, my testimony, was the right thing to do,” she answered.

 

How does one know what the right thing to do is? You don’t. There is only conviction with passion—and doubt. It helps if your one voice in the crowd is echoed by other voices from the crowd, even if they are few, and even if they are faint.

One such voice was that of the twelve-year-old daughter of Charles Ogletree, Professor of Law at Harvard. Ogletree was present at the testimony. He supported Hill and had his doubts, too. One evening his daughter called him to say: “Daddy, I’m home watching Anita Hill on TV.”  “You shouldn’t be watching that,” said Daddy.“I know but I am. I just wanted you to know I believe Anita.”

I believed Anita, too. I still believe Anita. It’s hard to watch and listen to her and not believe her. It was harder then to listen to Thomas pulling the racial discrimination card to defend himself as if he were the real victim here. The issue was not race, it was gender! 

I believe in my daughter, who tolerates my obsession, and who is a gifted lobbyist for legislative justice for labor. I sense her conviction about justice is more than a job.

I call the film, 'Anita'  a miracle unfolding. The late Anglican theologian, the Rev. John Macquarrie defined a miracle as something unstoppable that happens for which we feel surprised and grateful.  Or . . .I wonder?  Could a miracle also be something God is doing all along but of which we suddenly become aware—and appreciative.

We know a lot more about gender equality than we did in 1991, Hill said. “We are on the verge of something monumental. Now I can retire.”