2021.02.28 A Spirituality of Pandemic

Spirituality: The Spirit weaves its way deeply in and through the fabric of life processes making astonishingly foolish paradoxical life-bearing connections where none seem possible. Notice.

The poet says it best: “The point of life is not to succeed
                                     The point of life is to die trying.”  Millay                                      

Give a damn, I say
I don’t care how you do it, just give a damn

Sleep til noon
Rise before dawn

Worship Satan
Worship God
Both will respond

Try silent listening
A crow may caw

Despise and detest
Adore and believe

Jesus told Peter to go to hell
He did   He became Pope

Stop  Sit down Shut up
Multiple times a day
Recipe for prayer
If you give a damn  
 
Introverts: Pipe up
Extroverts: Shut up

True Story: Visit to the infusion center for allergy/asthma injection
Enter at one of a million entrances. Follow signs.
    1. Register here after already having registered twice digitally
    2. Waved on
    3. Forward march—two more corners
    4. Meet Nazi Nurse, brandishing her weapon of choice
        her stance erect, her face stern
    5. HALT!
    6. Will she fire her “pistol”? Will I live or die?
    7. No, she sweeps my forehead
    7. I’m cool.
    8. She fires anyway, questions like bullets. Fever? Exposure? Travel? No/No/No. Then a brand new one: bruises on your toes? Wha? I bend down to remove my boots and nearly fall over. She says. NO, no, no need. (Liability rules!)
    9. Final exam question: Have you been depressed lately?
        “Haven’t you?” I say
        She grimaces, and at last grins.
She gives a damn. I pass muster. Wait here. Fully trained, scanned, and cleared, I obey.

A young blonde nurse emerges to escort me into the lab. Why are you here? Doesn’t she have mountains of paper work on  me? Oh, and I guess you’re not old enough for vaccinations yet? I tell her I’ve had both. “How come?”  “I’m old,” I say.  She readies my syringe, holds it down at her side and just beyond my vision as if I didn’t know it was there and ready to job me. Why don’t they just blindfold people, like a firing squad? We notice and gaze together at an enormous nest high in a tree. Bird? Squirrel?   

One pandemic
Two pandemic
Three pandemic
Four

Global disease
Global warming
Global murder
Global mindlessness

Watch “An Inconvenient Truth”
Rewatch it   Rewatch it

Take a course in Emotional Intelligence.
We are collectively unintelligent—
Toddlers to seniors

Don’t fight
Do not battle
Do not start wars on anything
Just give a damn and work hard

Wage peace
Wars require one winner
and one loser—always.
Wars sow seed for more wars.

American Dream is a nightmare
Dream your own dream

Try Humility
It will feel too big
You can grow into it

Families are landmines—
death-dealing and life-saving
Tread with caution and humble ear
You give a damn. Don’t lie.

True Story: an old man with dementia lies in a hospital bed at home. He is dying. He knows it. So do his family. They bed him down with great care and affection. They leave. He is alone in dark, sleeplessness. He has one last trip to make. He struggles off his bed, crawls first then staggers, then crawls through a hallway and up a few steps. He’s almost there. He lifts his whole body, just enough to hurl himself forward. He made it. He’s on his bed—bed of marriage, bed of conceptions, bed of sweet sleep, bed of love. His wife of years comes to bed and sees him sprawled there. His presence seems abnormal and normal. She is so tired. There’s no room for her in the bed. She angrily tells him to shove over: “Can’t you at least make room for me after all these years?” He is fast asleep and unmovable. She tries kissing and other persuasions before she realizes that he is dead. He gave a damn.

History: Christendom was a word coined in ancient times (800CE) to translate the concept of universal Christianity into Anglo Saxon language. It offered optimism and hope in the face of Viking brutality and invasion. Missionaries would convert the Norsemen to an all-inclusive religion of compassion divine, based on the generous caring ways of God-in-Christ.
    BUT, over centuries, and coming to a new nadir in this 21st century, religions have consistently been perverted by practices of exclusion and persecution in the putative name of the Father whose Sons aspire to carry out His ways. Will we, sadly through revolution and violence, return to consider the universal nature of salvation for all living things—as it was in the beginning?

I wanna be loose and raucous
I wanna be cool and holy
I kill myself with my bipolarity
I grasp at life and let go of life—at once.

Tell your story
Or keep silent
Shout it out
Or shut it up

Take a risk
Make it brisk
Trust yourself
Trust your God
Tell a friend
Take an M&M

Grief
not peace
Is the global unifier

Just give a damn!    

For the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony: The prayer of the psalmist who gave a damn, prayed a damn. (Translation, Pamela Greenberg, portion of Psalm 19)  

The sky unfolds story of your presence;
the firmament tells of the work of your hands.

There is no word or phrase
in which the voice of your creation is not heard.

Throughout all the earth, rope
of your hopefulness goes forth,

and their words reach the end
of the world’s long stretch of land.

2021.02.21 Ashes Change Hearts

    “Most loving God [sic], whose will it is to give thanks for all
    things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our
    care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless fear
    and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may
    hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and, which
    you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord;
    who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
    one God, now and forever.” AMEN.

We rarely get to pray together this Collect for the Eighth Sunday after Epiphany (BCP, p. 216), because Easter is a moveable feast and we seldom get eight Epiphany Sundays. Somehow this prayer feels to me like standing shivering at the end of the high diving board looking down, feeling small and anxious at eleven. Do I have the nerve to jump? How cold will the water be? Can I do this or not?  Then I inhale deeply, grab my small nose, and jump wildly into the air. The water does catch me. I do surface triumphant. Now all I have to do is refrain from boasting.  

This Collect takes my soul on a dive toward humility—being right-sized, not too big and not too small. It is a difficult spiritual balance to strike. This prayer helps me prepare for a season of reflection, and retreat, and deep personal honesty—diving into myself, praying that the smudge of ashes I just received has mysteriously prepared me.
 

ASH WEDNESDAY, 2021    

I think ashes are powerful symbols through which the Church alerts us to our mortality, how profoundly vulnerable and fragile our sweet lives are—and how valuable.

The ritual reminds me of the nursery rhyme: “Ring-a-round-a Rosie.”  We children joined hands in a circle, then skipped around singing as if we all had a pocket of posies. Then we sang:  “Ashes, Ashes we all fall down.” We’d collapse to the ground on our bums, laughing with glee before we hopped up to repeat our dance.  

Of course we had no idea about the grim implications of this rhyme, understood by some to refer to the rosy rash one got during the 1665 Black Plague in London, herbal posies carried to ward off the smell of the disease.  We kindergarteners just loved it for fun and games. Faster. Faster. We whirled around. Falling down was the best part. We didn’t give death a thought.  BUT……. once one of the girls circling fell down and did not, could not, despite urging, get up. (As I recall she had a heart event, needed immediate treatment, and returned to school in time.)  

What I remember most, about this trauma was how instantly and firmly, our collective terror  gripped us. This ashes event lives on vividly in my mind, even as I dip my thumb into a bowl of blessed ashes and press it firmly onto the forehead of an upturned recipient, saying “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  I don’t feel negative. I do feel solemn. How desperately I want to add something Easterish, but I don’t. I just do not. Silence matters. Solemnity matters.

Then I just jump into Lent. After all, the Bible has said that it’s time to change my heart and turn about and wonder what in hell I am doing now, and what I have done in my little life, and whether I need to notice something new, or repent of something bad.

I can’t think of a single thing, so I think I’ll just follow my gut that tells me to strip down and streak the halls of the retirement residence where I live. I resist that temptation, mostly because of vanity. My aging body is a thing not to behold. Still, the thought itself has lifted my mood.

Mark's Gospel tells us that Jesus, properly awakened, heads not to church, not safely home, not for the road to proclaim and preach, but into the wilderness where he will figure out his own jumping in— his own right-sizedness—as the dry desert winds buffet and buffer his body and soul. 

Will he be a Messiah?  Or will he simply be Beloved?

Mark’s gospel account is honest and brusk:
    All we know is that Jesus’s adult baptism jolted him with his spiritual identity and calling, that he was sorely tempted, and that his discernment took a very long time—forty days a metaphor suggesting some time.
    All we know is that Jesus faithfully used his one mind, and his one heart to make his one plan: I will tell people about the God I know best, the God I believe in and who I believe believes in me.

This same God believes in all living things—including you and me, and the black squirrel who just sprinted and skimmed across the snow-laden chain link fence, pleased I bet with his or her athleticism. 

TO LOVE OR TO FIGHT? That Is the Question.

Today is Valentines Day, a day on which we deeply honor the eternal value of LOVE, a word as difficult to define as Divinity, and as essential to the well-being of every living thing as food and water.

I am completely persuaded,  as I have been for years, that language matters. The words we use advertise what we value most, who we are, and how we see ourselves and others. Words tell the truth about whatever dominates the mind and heart of an individual, a culture, a society, a nation, a country, a world. 

 Today, and for centuries, the word-of-choice to indicate our highest values, has been FIGHT.  (Fight has Germanic origin and relates loosely to fencing, a sport that is lethal, potentially death-dealing, yet requires great skill with movements that look like a graceful dance.)

We FIGHT. It’s the behavior of choice. We FIGHT for and against. Wars are the preferred solutions to sin, cruelty, discrimination, and injustice. FIGHT is the strategy and the ironic path to peace.

We FIGHT cancer and depression or mental illness, and if we lose such “fights” we die, which means we’ve LOST the FIGHT.   

FIGHT is the way small boys on a playground prove their mettle, gain acceptance and popularity.  Young girls also learn to FIGHT—underhandedly. And just look at the video games our young children play, most all are about war and FIGHTS.

Religions FIGHT against each other. They FIGHT for their own God. FIGHT(ing) images projected onto Divinity in sacred texts are more numerous than images of LOVE.

Sports have become FIGHTS. We sing FIGHT songs. We make FIGHTER jets and train FIGHTER  pilots. Politicians FIGHT for votes. We FIGHT for healthcare and the right to freedom and relief from poverty. Why not work for such things? We even FIGHT for peace.

The news throughout the 2021 impeachment trial cited the word FIGHT countless times. It was used to prove the ex-President innocent of charges that his FIGHT language incited acts of domestic terrorism. It was used also to demonstrate that all politicians, even those who leveled FIGHT-charges against the president, use FIGHT.

FIGHT was the word used to convict, and FIGHT the word to assure innocence.

FIGHT is such common parlance in the world of politics, medicine, religion, social discourse, business, entertainment, education, and family life that FIGHT has become benign. That is tragic, if not fatal. That assures that LOVE cannot and does not win. Even when we do fight FOR love, like in wars or duels, it is not very successful, because our goal is to win, not to love.  

                                         *  *  *  * 
And yet there is just one day—today—in the year dedicated to LOVE and to the value of coupling and relationships that enhance goodness in self and other. Rituals that surround LOVE on this one day, which happens to fall on Sunday this year, are costly (flowers, cards, jewelry, pricey chocolates)—icons of LOVE.

Valentine’s Day has many roots from ancient times, yet it is universally dedicated to LOVE, and falls on the same day each year. We will not forget it, even if it can make us sad. That’s because Valentine’s Day is a collective ritual, not unlike the sacraments of worship, always the same day, always in the bleak mid winter, always celebrating the same value, and acted out not just by human couples but by loving families and creatures—even pets or stuffed teddy bear confidants—who know about LOVE, affection, listening, compassion, care, loneliness, and yes, God.  

Why the heart shape? Well, because without a beating heart there IS no life, no pulse. On this day we try very, very hard not to fight. On this day we recognize the invaluable beauty of LOVE. It is only by LOVE that this planet will survive and thrive.  
 
My prayer to God is to LOVE those with whom I passionately disagree and/or of whom I’m afraid aka “enemies,” because I cannot yet. The divine goal and purpose is always LOVE not fight. Choose LOVE—every day just a little bit. Make every day Valentine's Day.

My "Racism"—Anecdotal History. Part Sixteen. Living Into Immanence.

Today is Sunday, and we priest spouses read and prayed and broke bread together. When I read aloud yet without a congregation, I sink into the text. I envision and dramatize it. Today I read the familiar story in II Kings about the Shunammite widow and the prophet Elisha. In short, the wealthy widow who had often offered the wandering prophet hospitality, now all but scoffed at the idea that she might need something to repay her generosity. I’m fine, she said. (How many times do we say that when we know it is not quite true?)

Elisha, however, is compulsive and insists on recompense. She is cheeky, calls Elisha’s prophetic bluff, and boldly tells him not to mess with her In God’s name, Elisha pushes his luck. The women gets pregnant, bears a son, loves him like crazy and of course he dies. (I say "of course" because biblical stories always take treacherous turns.) The mother, in a raging sorrow, chases after Elisha. “Did I ask you for a son, O prophet? Did I not tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?’ ”

You would think Elisha being a bit of an amateur, would give up, but no, he carries it to extremes. He ends up stretching his warm body onto the son’s cold dead body—twice. Like any good miracle it works out against all odds. The story shot me back to a time in my life when I felt like the Shunammite.


Scene XLVIII.  Sinking In

I’d experienced the thrill of pushing life into the world with the force of my uterus—my womb alive/creating. Childbirth had reconnected me with God in my flesh—immanent in a forceful, profoundly painful, fruitful way. I had children to love. The sprawling blossoming lives of my four children kept me alive as I pursued the God I knew as a child, in my children, and now I needed more—for myself.

I entered a decade of death—my youngest sister died in 1979; the parish priest and my chief supporter left; Dad died in 1983; my divorce from my husband of twenty years was finalized in 1983; I had suffered rejection in the ordination process in the Episcopal church in 1978 and 1981.

My chosen vocational course was left in a shambles of doubt, my self-love dwindling, and my soul trembling with fear and rage. I had no idea who I was, where I would go, who I could love. Many people in grief lose their grip on their connection with faith or God or theology, but— paradoxically or ironically or both—mine strengthened. I continued to pursue God’s identity with foolish yet honest greed as if I could contain, possess, ground, or at least secure Divinity.  

How odd that my frantic search for God would be my anti-racism training—or part of it anyway.

Scene XLIX. Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit

“The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God . . .”  (I Cor. 2:10b)  This phrase leapt off the thin crinkly page of my overused Bible. It was a phrase from  St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. I engaged with this passage because it was central to a course I was taking,  and because it contained a spirituality that ran deep—as deep as the very soul of God Godself. Paul’s teaching went on and on as Paul does, but my grabby soul latched onto this one phrase as salvation.  

The course was offered by a favorite professor, Luke Johnson. It was  a journal course on experiential theology with no required reading, so students flocked to it. “Christian Existence as Life in the Spirit” based its premise on the biblical phrase that had hooked me. I was ready to let the Spirit run wild. I was running wild by then, too. Was I led by the Spirit or was the Spirit leading me? To me these felt different. I never found out—exactly.

We heard lectures on big, fat, unmanageable theological words— grace, holy, faith, sin, idolatry, prayer, possessions, sexuality and gender, anger, freedom, truth—then wrote our own experiences of these ideas.

I had to let go of the tyranny of my intellect. I couldn’t think my way out of this, so I wrote and it hurt.

Scene L. The Organizing Power of the Holy: Life Narrative.

“God is in me from my beginning.” That was my first sentence. I elaborated a bit on  immanence, but then I suddenly wrote: “I am early aware that God in me is hard on me.” What? If this Spirit searched into the depths of God as if by torch and searchlight, then there seemed no escape from this Spirit—even for God. I wanted such intimacy and distrusted my worth. I wanted to know once again that I mattered in the flesh. Where was Holy? Luke said that the Holy had organizing power. Organizing? I needed internal organization. I just hadn’t counted on such a right-brain process.

Without warning I wrote about black Carol Lee and the painful compromise I’d made to exclude her from my birthday party, because I wanted it to be at our racist white beach club. Was that holy? I wrote: “Part of the little-girl-God in me dies. Is God black?”  

Memory: My second daughter Jill had a horrifying sledding accident when she was about eight. I had left the three oldest children with my parents and taken the baby to visit friends in lower Connecticut. Jill and her cousin were thrilled with the snow. Jill slid on an ice patch and ran headlong into a barbed wire fence. Screaming and covered with blood, she ran back to the house for help, her frightened cousin right behind her, calling, “Jill, are you all right?” Jill was not all right. When she got to the house Ether opened the door and sprang into action at the sight. She grabbed Jill up into her strong arms, got towels, yelled for my father who came running. He drove as fast as he dared to the hospital, and Ether sat in the back seat holding Jill . She pressed her head to stanch the bleeding. Jill later told me: “She held my head so hard against her body, like she was holding me together.” At the hospital a brilliant plastic surgeon named Dr. Platt stitched Jill’s face up and saved her eyes.

Ether was black. Dr. Platt was a woman. Is God black and female? Yes.

The memory about Jill’s accident came to me when I was writing my journal chapter on Faith: Obedience and Creative Fidelity. We were supposed to focus on Jesus, but Abraham came to mind. In the story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac in order to prove his faith God stopped Abraham from faithful obedience—just in time. God loved Abraham more than his obedient faith, and Abraham loved God unlimitd by obediential demands.

I wrote: “God is going against himself in this request and call. God has asked Abraham to disobey him, to choose against the promise. But God himself is more important to Abraham than God’s promise. How about that? God is not defined by his promise!”  Professor Luke wrote in the margins: “Yes. Good.”

Was I getting God? Did I have the Holy? My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. My daughter Jill helped me again. She by now was seventeen and expressing angry feelings, telling me she did not feel loved. When I asked what she wanted she said she wanted to go see our family therapist with just me. I felt afraid, but we went and Jill blurted out: “I feel second best. You value your church activities more than me.”  

I made explanations.The therapist invited Jill to keep repeating her feelings. I was locked up inside my own fears and wrote: “She was hurt, and I was getting a bandaid. I couldn’t open myself to her wound without sacrificing my faithful obedience to my own “good mother” illusion.” I had made an idol of my motherhood. The ordination committee had told me that I could not be a good mother and a good priest at once. A “dual vocation” they called it. I wrote: “In fact, what blocked me in that process (ordination) was the same thing that was so painfully blocking me with Jill. I had made an idol of my motherhood. . . . I could not be creatively faithful to what was my real love as a parent to Jill, because I was being destructively faithful to my self as a perfectly caring and loving mother.”  
                                   *  *  *  * 

To be a mother is no more or less holy than to be a priest. All I had to do was choose, I thought. To be black or a woman was no more or less holy than to be white. But I couldn’t choose my sex or the color of my skin. Could God? More tears, more years, my search continued, but for today right now, this.
            
    The grace of God cannot be fixed
    or fastened to a sanctioned spot;
    when we move as the Spirit moves,
    there is no place where God is not.  
                 Michael Hudson, text. Doxology/Eighth Tune

2021.01.31 My "Racism"—Anecdotal HIstory. Part Fifteen. Immanence

The arrival of 2021 is freighted and illuminated with grand dreams, even some magical thinking—new executive leadership at the federal level, a vaccine that will immunize the entire global population against a lethal virus and end a death-dealing pandemic, a bipartisan effort to alleviate ongoing global warming and save our planet Earth, bipartisan policy and legislation that will save democracy and end racial, class, gender, and economic inequities, and finally, multi-faith cooperation to end the crisis of inequality by promoting an image of Divinity that is both true to scholarship and frees Godde’s image and identity from limitations imposed by patriarchalism’s sexist language.

My hopes and dreams of all the years are at stake. What in my own history will help me weather such a deluge, help me not succumb to white supremacy? Am I too white?  

(To catch readers up in this “racism” series, I write about 1980; I’m in seminary, a commuter, hoping to be ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and learning some new theological words that assure me that the image of God is not, well, white.)  

                                                    *  *  *  *

Scene XLI. The Christian Testament, Called “New”

In my second year at Yale Divinity School, I sat in the same huge lecture hall, my pen poised, my mind open. I was ready for the New Testament—“our” testament, the one starring Jesus, the hero of Christianity. I wondered whether anything could top the Old Testament, also why this one was not called “young” instead of “new.”

I was a Christian; I did not know Jesus except through stained glass windows or sermons from mile-high pulpits. The sermons were either sentimental or divinely untouchable. It was obvious Jesus was divine, but not clear how he got that way. I felt guilty about my ignorance—a little.

Nevertheless, I was alert and bewitched just to be where I was.  


Scene XLII. Luke Timothy Johnson and Immanence Theology

This professor was spry, darn near jolly-old-elfish, and laughed a lot.

This man promised something new. We were to begin with the biblically obvious order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The syllabus, however,  indicated that we would begin with Mark whose gospel was chronologically first. Every Sunday School thing I’d ingested was about to be dashed on the rocks of scholarship.

The room fell silent. Into the solemn silence someone sneezed—loudly and explosively. Luke Johnson responded without missing a beat: “God bless you and all vegetative processes.” Everyone laughed—and breathed. Thus was launched the New Testament. Thus began my first inkling that Jesus was human like us, and like his predecessors in the Old Testament.   

I was to benefit from Luke Johnson’s scholarship as well as his style and his pastoral care. He was totally delighted doing what he was doing—lecturing about holy texts to unformed—or ill-formed—students, some even middle-aged! This professor’s spirituality was contagious. I made an appointment to talk with him about my fears and frets about the Episcopal Church and my having been turned down in the Connecticut ordination process. I knew Luke was Roman Catholic, had even been a monastic. He too had been hurt by his church when he tried to get laicized. I was trying to get un-laicized. He wanted out of the ranks and I wanted in.

“I loved the Bible and your course, of course,” I stammered when we met. Luke nodded. “I am trying to get ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, and the resistance to women priests is, well, stiff.” Luke listened to my feelings with care. He was supportive with no answers. As we wrapped up I stood to leave just as another professor walked by Luke’s open office door. He was a learned professorial type—tall, erect, and fully uniformed in black with the traditional high-rise Anglican clerical collar. He was a nice man, kind and learned, specializing in Patristics (old guys—the Fathers—who articulated early church politics and theological justifications thereof). We students liked him, while also joking that we bet he slept in his collar.

Nodding in his direction, Luke said softly with a smile: “Lyn you don’t fit the model.” He added, “But God knows who you are, so trust God.” That could be good or not such good news.

For now I would dive into my latest God-word: Immanence. Luke used this word a lot and I thought he lived it pretty well. Immanence attracted me. It was close to imminence but with much more— ah!—profundity. Imm-AH-nence had not been on any of the lists of God-defining words I’d heard in Sunday School or from any pulpit.  Now I heard it from an academic podium and soon would read more in an essay about the Jesus of history written by a man named Marcus Borg.

One reason I found Immanence so alluring was that it described the God I’d met under the table as a child— intimate, reachable, and silently conversational. Immanent means “remaining within.” Pulpit Gods were mostly transcendent, almighty, unreachable, and remaining without. Jesus knew all about Immanence.


Scene XLIII. Bill Muehl and Immanent Preaching

As I was rejoicing over Immanence I was simultaneously more and more exposed to people in seminary whose skin was not white like mine. God, I figured, was immanent in them as well as in me and all living things. This I got from the Genesis Creation story, but Immanence was the classy theological word for it—a word that made racist imagery for God impossible.

Hearing black students preach properly and firmly confirmed for me the absurdity of racism. I heard them in the regular chapel worship and in the preaching class required of us all. Students prepared written sermons of course, but the moment of truth came when we had to deliver them—out loud from a pulpit in front of the class and the professor, William (Bill) Muehl. 

 

Meuhl had a sharp, wry wit, was a lawyer by training, and famous for his book All The Damned Angels (1972) deploring all sorts of rigid moralisms and gooey piety about the Cross and its bold dominance in Christian parlance. He once said that a miracle could be performed by accident, and in his book he landed square on the dirty business of Immanence, God’s life in the flesh: “I have had to be content with damned angels and the facts of life.”

I was already suspicious of too much unfleshly transcendence, and really did not adore the cross, although having to preach to Bill Muehl might feel a bit like that. I took courage from the black students who did not seem scared and let it rip with vigor, energy, and an intimacy I loved but knew I didn’t have in me. I was too white.

None of this helped me feel less fearful about Muehl’s critique. I’d heard of it but hadn’t yet experienced it. Good thing because it might have caused me to die before I ever got to the pulpit for my turn.

I remember the text he assigned the day I was to be the preacher in class. It was one of St. Paul’s semicolon-loaded passages in Romans 5— all about justification by faith through grace via Christ, and then actually bragging about your sufferings. I was already suffering. But all would be well, St.Paul assured us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Why? Because God’s love had been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. No problem. As far as I could tell, this passage was supposed to include the answer to all of life’s problems—just not mine right now.

Crucifixion suffering was overkill, and resurrection felt like avoidance of suffering altogeher. So, I focused on “poured” and imagined a huge pitcher full of Divinity, somehow liquified or magically de-solidified, pouring into me for the better. I’d never heard of water-boarding, thank heavens, so water seemed safer to me than Christ’s blood. This was a kind of suffering I figured, because I tried to convey the joyful horror of drowning in God. I passed the class.

Muehl would bemoan the fact that he never understood how students did well in his preaching classes and then got out there and preached “pap” in their parishes. Was I a future pap-preacher? I’d already developed a severe case of pulpit-paralysis in a small class.

Listening to the black students preach helped. These students had to be just as scared as I was, but when they got in that pulpit their words sang with Immanence,  jumped for joy.  It was so intimate that listeners talked back: Preach it sister! Say it! Amen! Yes. I felt exhilarated and daunted all at once.

But I was white.

White preaching was emotionally reserved, distant, bleached—transcendent. Was God even in it?  Was I? Muehl advised against imitation and told me to be myself. “You’ll get used to it,” he told me, adding something like, “but of course you’ll get flack about your female voice, so pitch low." I told him I was an alto.

Nevertheless I promised myself that I would experiment with preaching from the center aisle not the pulpit, maybe without a script, aka “cheat sheet.” Pulpit and written manuscript provided distance and a shield of protection from Immanence. 

My promise would prove impossible to honor—but not completely so.

2021.01.24 'Dom Ring

Today, the third Sunday of Epiphany for Christians, the New Testament Gospel tells the story of Jesus’s choosing his disciples, those he would train for a renewed way of being with God, self and neighbors. It was a Kairos time for his ministry on earth. It is now a Kairos time for us earthlings as we choose new leaders and plot new courses.
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The Greek language give us two words for time: chronos for clock-measurable time and Kairos for time that, for a variety of reasons, many unforeseeable, is simply opportune or favorable. Kairos time is neither measurable nor predictable, yet it is discernible— a time made special by a sense of one’s presence to oneself, all creation, and to the creator. Kairos is God’s time. It knows no bounds, has no measure, and is available to all Creation.

Most days are run by chronos. We are chased by, or chasing, time’s passage, racing against its inevitability as if it were in our control. Some of us run too fast and some too slowly. To accurately asses time and make room to notice Kairos occasions, we have to let go of the dominance of chronos, get conscious of what our own insides and our senses reveal.

What time is it now?
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When I was a child I begged my mother with annoying persistence: “Sing ‘Dom Ring’. Sing it again, Mommy.”  My mother, not particularly gifted with a singing voice, took a while to figure our what ‘Dom Ring’ meant, and not much longer to say: “Ask Daddy.”

Daddy did have a good voice. I knew this, because I saw pictures of him in lines of singing men dressed in fancy suits called tuxedos. They were called a glee club and named after a famous musician, Mendelssohn. Daddy was famous.   

There were no women in the group, but I was used to such displays of male importance, and besides my Daddy was the handsomest, even though he was mostly too tired to sing ‘Dom Ring’—to me.  ‘Dom Ring came from the British national anthem sung for their Queen, but America stole it, and I made it my personal favorite. Here is the first stanza.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freeDOM RING!

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Not given to paroxysms of patriotic zeal, episodes of urgent flag-waving or flag-burning, or seizures of praise-cheering in church, I have suddenly just now been twice overtaken by surges of patriotic fervor with echoes of “'Dom ring" flooding my heart. Both brought me to tears.

On the day of Epiphany, January 6, 2021, collective ignorance met collective rage. What appeared in full view was America against itself. The well-planned, presidentially-incited, white supremacist attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. was violent and horrifying. Many of us were asleep to this possibility, entirely unprepared for such an insurrection, operating on chronos time only. There hadn’t been time or will to organize such violence, many thought. Not in America, many said. We’re safe and secure here, politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainline Christians said. Our president wouldn’t allow such a thing, many said. This was unprecedented—and indeed it was. Nevertheless, we did have warning signs—misread, little heeded, and imagined to be isolated. I trembled and wept.

Then on January 20th, the United States inaugurated a new President—not chosen by dissent or the will of a dictator, but by the votes of record turnouts of voters. Many labored together, outside of political preferences, to make sure there was no voter fraud and that all vote counts were accurate. This was a Kairos-driven process—unexpected but crucial. The losing candidate finally left, declaring himself the “real” winner of a “stolen” election. He was deprived of nothing except the dignity of truth with humility. I worried and wept.

Would this inauguration come off free of violence, safely, without foreign or domestic interference, and within the structures of tradition?  For 13 days I’d held my breath and prayed like hell. I still held my breath as I watched Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. and Kamala Devi Harris, first black and Asian American woman to serve in executive office, swear on huge bibles, using God’s name, promising to uphold the principles of the Constitution as they held its highest office. This was indeed a Kairos within chronos event. This was a ‘Dom Ring moment. I exhaled and wept for joy.
                 
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On that same day things came together in Kairos time for me personally:     

    1) My country chose Democracy over politics, Constitution over party, and leaders with integrity and a chronos-time commitment to American diversity truly represented in our government. 
    

    2) My husband and I received our first vaccine shots against a deadly virus.
    

    3)  One of my nephews, a long-time heroin addict, for whom I’d prayed incessantly, finally got clean and was willingly admitted to a local Suboxone clinic for treatment.
    

    4) President Biden proclaimed and embodied empathy and mutual respect for the dignity of all humankind and the whole created order, promises central to the baptismal covenant of The Episcopal Church in which I am a priest. America would UNITE NOT FIGHT! Biden’s “whole soul” was/is in this effort. Mine too.

    5) Amanda Gorman, age 22 and the youngest national youth poet laureate ever in this country, recited her brilliant inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”. (Not a grueling self-defeating hill like Sisyphus’s, nor a hill like Jack & Jill’s, down which Jill came tumbling after Jack, of course.) Besides her natural beauty and verve, Amanda Gorman, like Biden, has had to overcome a stutter. Now she preached a gospel of “right not fight”—irresistibly.  
    
    If we merge mercy with might, and might with right,
    then love becomes our legacy in change, our children’s birthright.

    With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
    we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

Maybe this nation, long enthralled with its own freedom, progress and self-love, is ready to turn itself inside out for the freedom, progress and self-love of others. Is that enough unity? Will freedom ring for us all?  We shall make it so—kairologically and chronologically—as we plot together the daily wonders of Epiphany.  

‘Dom Ring.
 


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2021.01.17 The Acceptable Year of the Lord?

When I watch all the rioting and attacks on our national leadership, I can almost feel the fright oozing or leaking out from the inanimate television screen. It would be easy to turn it off and go to bed, a favored option. But that would be, what? A cop-out? Being like a head-in-the-sand ostrich? Do they really do that out of cowardice?  I am trembling, not inert or inept, but deserted. I feel caught in the middle of a feud without a leader.

Feud is a funny word, of Germanic origin loosely related to hostility or ill will or foe. Definitionally, it means prolonged mutual hostility.When I say FEUD over and over my lips curl and pout and my teeth roll over onto my lower lip, expectorating if I try hard enough. This little-used word has power, somewhat like another famous F-word made powerful for its verboten status. Feud is not the same as conflict or disagreement or out-and-out war demanding a winner. In a feud there is no winner.

The word feud evokes for me the image of a pot of boiling water arrested in a simmer.

Famous feuds include families such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Montagues and the Capulets as portrayed in Romeo and Juliet, or more modernly, the Puerto Ricans and the New York elite in NYC as portrayed in West Side Story. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a feud culture—many tribes vying for territory, investing, or wasting, energy in futile feudal feuds over which tribe was God’s favorite. Jesus was murdered/executed for his efforts at feud- reconciliation. Only fools try to resolve feuds, because feuds are by nature insoluble, emotionally transmissible like a virus, and deeply, unconsciously rooted from generation to generation.   

All feuds have tragic consequences. The original dispute festers, buried deep in the flesh and blood of feuders, generation to generation. Even when the original dispute is forgotten and irrelevant, feuds live on. When my parents, afraid of those Puerto Ricans invading their safe white space, fled the city, my dearly beloved hometown, for the suburbs, I was twelve. I felt like a teenage tragedy all by myself and caught in a feuding culture not of my own making—as impotent as Juliet, María or Jesus or a hapless Pharisee or Hebrew, caught in a feud response not of my making. What I needed were friends to walk with. I found love and knowledge in books, good words, also experiences of loss, humiliation, and deep sorrow.

What a feud need is leaders. Leaders whose power is one of mutual and prolonged self-respect and other-respect—both. This kind of leader comes out of tragedy, grief, faith in God, and that mysterious quality of interior life we call Soul. This kind of leader has qualities that can reassure followers who are attracted out of their need to follow and their ability to intuit spiritual intellectual, emotional, and mental dignity within and without, in self and in others. Such leaders do not feud or succumb to its lies.

MLK Jr. was such a leader. There is much written about him and we all know it or can look it up. He, like all victims of feuding, in this case north/south, died for his efforts, but is never forgotten. It was his birthday on January 15 and his national holy day Jan 18. I offer you his preaching, based on the prayer of the psalmist who in Psalm 90  recognizes that God’s time is now and yesterday and tomorrow, every day newly acceptable. May we make it so. MLK the preacher still lives on. 

Excerpted and paraphrased sermon, delivered  by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 5 June 1966. “Guidelines for a Constructive Church”


The acceptable year of the Lord is any year (Amen) when we decide to do right.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is any year when we will stop lying and cheating. (Amen, Make it plain)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is any year is when we will stop throwing away the precious lives that God has given us. (Make it plain)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when people the world over will elect governance that will act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when we will keep our theology abreast with our technology, our morality abreast with our mentality.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when we will keep the ends for which we live abreast with the means by which we live. (Yes)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is that year (Yes) when all of the leaders of the world will sit down at the conference table (Make it plain) and realize that unless humankind puts an end to war, war will put an end to humankind. (Yes)
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is when we discover that out of one blood Creator God made all people who dwell on the face of the earth.
 

The acceptable year of the Lord is God’s year.