2021.07.25 Sneaky Creepy

There’s a familiar story from Mark’s gospel. The fishermen disciples of Jesus were in a boat fishing in the wee hours of the morning. They struggled against fierce winds and waters. When they saw Jesus skimming the surf they thought it was a ghost and were “terrified.”  They knew better. Jesus said, “Calm yourselves. It’s me.”  Then he got into their boat, and the wind died down. They were stunned and incredulous, despite everything they had been taught. “Their minds were closed.”  (Mark 6:52, The Inclusive Bible)

Their minds were closed. How easily and quickly our good intentions snap shut when we see something completely out of our ordinary line of thinking. I so want to be open-minded, anti-racist, yet it doesn’t take much to close my mind. People who are too afraid to be vaccinated close my mind, for example. Arguing is ineffective. Listening and following the precautions is effective.

Racist attitudes are not alway overt. In fact, like bacteria, according to my pulmonologist, they are tiny and can sneak quietly into any vulnerable scenario and raise bacterial hell—disease, social or individual, biological or societal, artistic or legal.  

I felt like those disciples when I read this tragic wee story. I decided it wasn’t true—just a poem not even by a celebrity author. Yet it would not leave me alone.  It sat on my desk staring at me until I paid attention. 

Dance Amari

for Amari Diaw

Amari Diaw was four years old in 2003 when she faced being banned from her dance school recital in New Bedford, Massachusetts, because she wore her hair in braids that could not be “slicked back and pulled into a bun.”

Do not untie your hair Amari. Do not,

For perfect plies and pirouettes, turn

From native locks or wish for whiteness.

Kick up your thick-boned legs

In cultured protestation

Avoid unbraided simulation

Take first position

Stand on pointed principles

Deconstruct the dance politic.

Do not untie your hair Amari. D not,

For perfect plies and pirouettes, turn

From native locks or wish for whiteness.

Kick up your thick-boned legs

In cultured protestation

Avoid unbraided simulation

Take first position

Stand on pointed principles

Deconstruct the dance politic. 

This poem was written by poet Rhonda Ward, former poet laureate of New London, Connecticut. It was published in Poet’s Corner in the Hartford Courant, 6/20/21. Here is a portrait of the poet.

 

I was stunned, shocked, nauseous, appalled, and weepy when I read this out loud three times, before I copied it down. Four years old—a little child with balletic dreams like so many small girls in tutus entertain. What is free of ugly bias? What is sacred? Who is untouched? What beauty can survive? There’s a “dance politic"?

One of my granddaughters participates in a dance company in her town. She is now one of the stars and a very fine dancer, however her very first recital at age four paralyzed her with terror, probably at the sight of an audience. She stood frozen in space and time, unable to dance what she had so well rehearsed. Frozen.

Do you know what spiritual paralysis is? It’s what you feel when your are suddenly excluded from participation in a group you love because of something you cannot help, something endemic to your nature, something you were born with, something you love, something you fear. It’s what I felt when I at last digested this story and let it into my heart/soul. 

People will naturally ask: what happened? Outcome is not the point. What happened is the point. What happened is itself the answer, is itself the answer.  

All I know is that when the souls of little ones or adults freeze, God thaws all souls, that they may act together to deconstruct dance politic and its many, many siblings. Thawing hurts. So does opening your mind, and so does closing your mind. 

Walking on water might be easier, eh? 

2021.07.18 Is There a Chapel In The House?

I live at McLean Village, a retirement community in Simsbury, Connecticut, full of saints and sinners like me—all of us very practiced in our saintly and sinful habits. Few would admit to such “lofty” terms, but there is truth in both for most. 

One day I was taking a walk around the property and I spotted this lovely old piece of church furniture—prayer equipment. It’s called a prie-dieu (French for pray God). This is a good phrase to describe the activity for which this furniture is intended. There is a small desk on which a book perches in case you are leading prayers, or in case you forget the words in sudden precatory stage fright, or in case your prayer simply falls into silence. That happens when you realize that you are on your knees suddenly praying not for God, or to God, but in God.  

On this sunny day I was wide awake when I spotted this prie-dieu standing all alone and ready. For what I didn’t know, since the chapel was solidly locked, its renovations in process and delayed. The prie-dieu looked lonely so I went to it and knelt down. I asked God to help us accomplish the obvious: open this chapel space so we can have a sacred place on campus dedicated to your Presence, begging for our own presence, and mourning, not the absence of presence but its waning. 

I felt like an orphan begging entrance, or a child at play with a fascinating foreign object newly discovered, or an old priest, filled with needful, wistful loneliness, untethered from traditional worship, church artifacts, and song. 

It had been raining and the kneeler cushion was soaked. So were my knees when I finally arose and resumed my walk. So were my cheeks from all the longing I felt in the midst of the necessary isolation in a pandemic. Activity is minimal and minimized. Prayer, personal and corporate, is the only vital way back to Life. Prayer is the bread of Life. So I pray. I’m nourished. 

Grateful to be vaccinated and well and pained to be alone. 

  Grateful for the voice, laughs, and hugs of a very much alive husband. 

Pained to imagine death, loss—absence—of all flesh with its pleasures          

           and its pains, its temptations and its astounding capacity to embody heaven and hell, saint and sinner, at once.

2021.07.11 I Know This, Said The Child

When Jesus of Nazareth chose his disciples, he didn’t look for them in expected places, such as his own temple, authority figures of his day. No, he chose working people, the poor, the mentally ill, and children—those who knew their need of God.
            
                            *  *  *  *

When the family of my youngest son made their first visit to see our new digs, seven-year-old Dylan whipped breezily through our apartment, commenting on nothing except how huge our bed was, and asking “When are we going to get pizza?” Nevertheless, when he came into my office and looked at the home altar where I kneel to pray, he stopped and took a longer-than-a glance look. I imagined he was thinking how weird his Grammy was, but then he pointed to the small wooden crucifix arrayed in seashells in the center.

I remembered when I'd decided to buy this little item. I snuck into a tiny gift shop located downstairs under a large shopping mall and run by some Carmelite sisters. It felt almost secretive, illegal, to be selling religious artifacts while above so many people were engaged in one of the most important worshipful activities in American life—shopping.  I was shopping too—underground, for a crucifix. But I’d been in spiritual direction with a Jesuit, and I knew I had to meet Jesus on the cross without a flinch or a moan—or at least with all my own flinches and moans.
 
Resisting my habitual impulse to explain, or invade the moment with resurrection talk, I shut up as I watched Dylan. Pointing at the crucifix, the little boy said: “Oh, I know this one. They shot lots of darts and spears into him and he died. It was very sad. But he was good.” Then he shot off, leaving me puzzled and amazed.

Dylan had been baptized Christian as an infant and privately by a willing Congregational minister on a Florida visit to his maternal grandpa. It was, in my opinion, one of those side-deals with little attempt to honor the sacrament of becoming a Christian in community. I confess I’d felt angry, hoping to have the honor of baptizing him as I had my other grandchildren. But who dares fuss about baptismal rights or rites?

This wise child has never been to church, but he has his own unique way of being in the world.

Where did his stunningly accurate and uncomplicated summation of Jesus’s crucifixion come from?
        A fantasy sport on his little game screen?
        Eager first grade classmate’s “evangelism”?
        The biblical prophet, Isaiah (11:6) in which little children shall lead the way to the kingdom?

Jesus in Mark 10, miming the prophet, teaching that we enter the kingdom of God as children?    

Theologians may continue, and will continue, to debate and fuss over the theology of the crucified one we call Lord, as in how could a good God allow such an unjust and cruel thing happen to a Christ, a Messiah—and worse, a Beloved Son?

So go, already, buy a crucifix you can hold and rejoice in what you can’t explain.

2021.07.04 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal History. Part Nineteen. Formative Influences

It’s called Independence Day, isn’t it? Historically, it meant America’s Declaration of Independence—freedom from British rule.  Well, okay, and we have not lived out our precious independence in equitable ways, now have we? You could call it white independence, or wealthy white independence. I have discovered that one’s personal independence is something that comes with courage and creativity and grit and education and experimentation—plus sweet accidentally perceived divine grace. It comes with the help of many others, faith in God, and Love, and it can take years. It’s worth some strife to get it spread out right. 

Scene LVI. Reading Rita

I had read the autobiographical novel by Rita Mae Brown Rubyfruit Jungle published in 1973.  Brown, born in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who left her at an orphanage from which a cousin of her mother rescued Rita and raised her in Pennsylvania and Florida. 

She hitchhiked to New York City in the 1960s and got advanced degrees in Classics and English at NYU. Brown was also a writer who used her gift, not as a political act, but rather to eschew the label of “lesbian”. Labeling confines and defines and separates—a very common but ungodly practice.   

When I read Rubyfruit Jungle I was initially amazed at such transparent candor, then wowed by the sex a woman could experience—all by herself if she so desired or even with another woman.  I tried it all, and WOW. Masturbation and a sexual experience with a lesbian seminarian friend awakened me to my own sexual power—not simply to “fight” for feminist causes or to procreate, but to relish and cherish my own body—to its fullest., for its own sake. It also taught me never to condemn the sexual preferences of others—sexism. 

Scene LVII. Toni

Getting to know Toni Morrison, nee Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, happened to me through reading her novel Beloved published in 1988, the year I was ordained priest, although I didn’t read it until the early 1990s. Morrison converted to Roman Catholicism at age 12, the very year my parents moved me out of my city into a suburb. I too would dabble in Roman Catholicism, seeing the liturgy as embodied, mystical, and inclusive. Morrison added Anthony, hence Toni, to her name, choosing St. Anthony of Padua as her baptismal name.  

“Toni” of Padua (1195-1231) was a Portuguese Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, noted for his knowledge of scripture, powerful preaching, and devotion to the poor and the sick. He is the patron saint of lost things, including causes and respect. 

This saint was a nerd—studied and read and wrote a lot.  So did Toni Morrison. So did I. Words fueled my life engine—soul motors.  

When Morrison was young she had an argument with a little black girl about whether there was a real God or not. “I said there was, and she said there wasn’t and she had proof: she had prayed for, and not been given, blue eyes. I just remember listening to her and imagining her with blue eyes, and it was a grotesque thing. She had these high cheek bones and these great big slanted dark eyes, and all I remember thinking was that if she had blue eyes she would be horrible.” (Anecdote taken from Hilton Als July 27, 2020, New Yorker profile of Morrison, “Ghosts In the House.”)  

In and through Morrison’s writing I felt liberated—also frightened. The energy that surged through her words and characters flew into me like a sharp arrow piercing my soul. Morrison’s language itself set me on fire for words. The story of Beloved, about a runaway slave who murders her child rather than allow it to be captured, chilled me to the bone. It stung me with the memory of Carol Lee and my first racist decision as a teen, caused me to wonder if God had murdered Jesus, and jolted me into realizing that my parents’ decision to move to the white suburbs from my beloved city was not, as my adolescent ego had imagined, to ruin my life. It was racist—fleeing the Puerto Rican influx. 

But it was Morrison’s language itself that healed my horror, and taught me to appreciate my own female flesh and fall more deeply in love with the religious idea of Incarnation. Flesh was suddenly a verb.

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” 

This is what I look like in Black mirrors. Godde, help me to flesh myself in Your mirror. 

2021.06.27 The Mantilla

It’s June—month of wedding joy and blooming fleurs. I find it annoying that the parables Jesus of Nazareth doled out are never, ever pure. Okay, he calms a storm and exorcizes demons, and raises the apparent dead. Yes, BUT, there are still raging storms and death-dealing illnesses, physical and mental. Sometimes I curse this God who loves us all enough not to override the freedom Nature, including human nature, enjoys, a freedom bestowed on the best and the worst of us all. And you never know what kind of freedom you have, or you need, or will need.  

It's still June, therefore:

Dear Coherent Mercy,

Yes, I wore a mantilla at my first wedding. At the urging of my mother, I bought it in Spain where I lived with two families, one in Madrid and another in Santander (now my bank!) over six weeks in the summer of 1960 after my college graduation.  

I loved Spain, fell madly in sophomoric love of course with a young man named Pepe, and cried all the way home on the plane. I truly had no idea who I was or what I wanted, but I had at least been obedient enough to follow my mother’s plans and buy the mantilla in Spain. Spain was Roman Catholicism on steroids, and I knew the mantilla veil had all kinds of religious associations—paternalistic, patriarchal, puristic and prurient, but I was following my mother. Within two years I donned my mantilla and married the boy named Bill back home, walking unsteadily on my father’s steady arm, down, a long church aisle to marry.  I loved Bill,  just not enough to compensate for or extinguish my self-uncertainty.    

After the wedding my mother whisked my dress and the mantilla off to her good friend who had moved to California, so this friend’s daughter could wear it in her wedding. All this happened unbeknownst to me, or at least in a communication so veiled I didn’t get it; or by then I had stopped listening to my mother with both ears. Anyway, mom told me she had sent my dress and mantilla off to the local cleaners to be “preserved” in a sealed “coffin”—cardboard box all its own. It would keep “forever, darling” she told me. Unlike my marriage but who knew that then?

Anyway, years later when I remarried and we were moving from Connecticut to Massachusetts, I retrieved from our attic the box in which my dress was buried and opened it. I screamed. My husband came running. The dress inside the box was eaten alive, the fabric torn, yellowed, shredded as if mice or moths had eaten away at it. On closer examination, I saw that this dress was NOT my dress. AND there was no mantilla at all. Either it got entirely eaten, or God knows. It’s a Miss Havisham kind of story really. I do adore Dickens!

There’s more if you can believe it. Just this year I got a Facebook post from the young woman, still living in California, who wore my dress and mantilla in her own wedding. She sent me pictures of herself in my dress. The mantilla was beautiful on her, more beautiful than I remember it being on me. I’ll have to check. This young woman was a good friend of my youngest sister who died young at aged 34, so we shared memories, and she assured me that her mother, my mother’s friend, had snatched up the dress and mantilla and mailed them back to my mother right after the wedding at which it had made its second appearance. My mother I assumed whisked it off to the cleaner to be “boxed.”

All this is true to my dying day, and I have no idea where my original dress and mantilla are. Luckily, I’m not attached to it and my mother is dead by 22 years—not by my hand. She had self-uncertainty problems too. She had loved me too much to let me be.

Sorry to unload all this on you, my love, but you triggered more story. Is it not stories that keep the world spinning and grinning and alive in this existence of mixed blessings?  The Bible tells us so. And you, Coherent Mercy, manage to cohere all our stories into one and keep us free.  

So, thanks.

2021.06.20 Dad

I loved my father through thick and thin, and he is, in fact, one reason I never call God Father.

Everyone thinks my aversion to God as Father is just my feminist politics, or my distaste for traditional theological language that confines divinity within the corset of excessive almightiness, ultra-distancing transcendence, exclusive masculinity, and fatherhood forever and ever amen.

Yes, I know the earthly Jesus is remembered as using the term Abba for God, but why wouldn’t he do that?  He was a Jewish son of the covenant. Also, Abba was natural and intimate, suitable for just what he wanted to convey about God’s loving presence—and not enough.

Some people think I would eliminate “Father” for God, because I was abused by my earthly father and therefore Father is negative, frightening. That may be true for some, but not for me. I loved my dad, and I always knew for certain that he was not divine—not God, only godly.   

Dad gave me my name. I was, in my mother’s dreams, supposed to be Michael McDonald, named after my dad: McDonald Gillespie—such a handsome name. He was very handsome in fact, with thick dark hair, a solemn yet dignified air, a crisp sense of humor, and a ski-jump nose. I look like him—nose and all. I have a better picture in the "somewhere" category, but here is Dad when I was about three and earned him an exemption from WWII.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He died with his dappled-gray but still thick mane in tact, and, so far, mine remains thus. The name they liked was Linda with a middle name Hall, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. My father wanted to call me Lin, but the spelling didn’t work, so he changed the spelling to LYnda to call me Lyn or Lynnie. Between natural looks and naming, in addition to my own personality—shy, taciturn and, let’s just say, not extroverted but boldly introverted—I was “baptized” by my father. 

Dad drank and smoked to help his personality along. I did the same. He died at 71 of smoking-induced esophageal cancer. He smoked right up to his end, claiming in his sardonic way that he had to smoke Lucky Strikes, because the advertising company in which he rose to the executive level advertised this brand. I knew and he knew that was blarney, but we knew little about addictions back then.  “Everyone’s doing it” is probably the worst reason in the world to do anything. Still, human beings, like all other animals, instinctively continue to think that copy-catting is a worthy rationale for most behavior.

Until it’s not quite right.

My father was brave. I saw this in two particular ways.  We summered at a farm in upstate New York and once Dad, city boy through and through, was invited to help Farmer Kurt to prod an angry bull onto a truck—nasty business. The stud bull had done his sperm-work with cows, and now he had to return to his own farm. This bull was enraged, snorting, bellowing, and tossing his well-horned and bulky head before he charged with all his bullish might, at several men, including Dad, protected by a mere pitchfork, pale imitatio of bullness. Kurtie had named this bull Donny after my dad. I was miniscule at eight and stood way back to watch. Terrified. 

The bull veered left right toward my dad. “Jump back fast, Donny,” Kurt yelled. “He’s headed for you.” Daddy jumped away just in time.

The men and their forks won. They finally got the rampaging bull onto the truck and off. Daddy returned to get me and take me home. On the way home I jabbered about how scared I was. My father listened and, I noted, failed to brag. I asked, “Were you afraid, Daddy?”  “You bet I was, Lynnie!”  

It was in that moment of modest truth that I knew my father had true courage—not God but godly.

One other moment I saw his courage was at our family Christmas dinner—his last—in 1982. He was at home recuperating from surgery to excise a large cancerous tumor from his esophagus, but he wasn’t normal at all. He couldn’t swallow, so he had, not only tubes for breathing, but a a tube that went into a bag to drain saliva from the side of his throat, not to mention the feeding tube in his gut. He was still handsome. He sang “Oh Holy Night” in his rich bass voice the night before to the nurse, and on Christmas day we all gathered as usual at the family table. Dad in his wheelchair took his place at the head—unable to taste or chew a single morsel of food or even imbibe a sip of any liquid. He asked the nurse to bring him a cup of coffee. We watched it dribble out and into the waiting catch bowl. “Boy, that hit the spot,” he said as he raised his coffee cup. “Merry Christmas everyone. Merry Christmas.”

Holidays have souls.

Within a week Dad was dead. He just went to bed to groan away his last hours—minute by precious minute. He was not in physical pain, although it sounded as if he were. His job was dying, and he did not “go gentle into that dark night”, as the poet words it. He did go decisively. My sister, my mother, and I kept vigil. I counted his periodic groans by the quarter-hour bong of the old grandfather clock. I went home and actually slept till Mom called at about 6 a.m. Dad was dead.

I don’t know if he had any last words to my mother, but his last words to me were: “What’s the point?”  It was a phrase he often used as he wondered, as most of us do, about the tragic exigencies of life and death. His youngest daughter had predeceased him by just a couple of years. I had no idea what the “point” was, but I promised to let him know if I found out—one of my dumbest and most holy of promises, and one I knew I couldn’t keep.  

The last time I saw my father was as a limp body in the strong sinewy arms of the funeral home director. I noticed how paper thin his dangling legs were and wondered how they had the strength to play so much golf in his last years. You think weird things at such times.

The dying do not care much about the living when they are dying. They have a job to do, a sacred and holy task, and most people do it in their own way— not God but godly.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you to tears. 

2021.06.13 Time Passes—And Passes

The passage of time is neutral. How it may feel, what it can mean, and what one does with one’s time is what matters.

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love
by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn’t fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.

They’re not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.


Jennifer Michael Hecht, “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” from The Next Ancient World. Copyright © 2001 by Jennifer Michael. From The Writers’Almanac, 6/6/21.


The title of this poem alone is enough to make me reflect once more on the holiness of trying. Jesus of Nazareth was idealized at birth, then as he grew was accused of being possessed, crazy, heretical, criminal, and last but not least, suicidally critical of all religious and political authority of his times. For this he was worshiped and executed—all within a short 30 years. He made the most of his time.

In July,1998, I was driving too fast along the Massachusetts Turnpike, racing down to Connecticut, my eyes wet with tears as I munched on a hastily prepared, soggy tunafish sandwich. I’d received a call from the nursing home where my mom had lived for the last four years. The nurse apologized for the first call in which she had informed me that, although Mom was fading toward death, there was no rush. Now there was a rush. She was nearing death as I drove. Would I make it? Please God, let me make it?

My sister was on vacation and not coming home. I’d asked my oldest daughter who lived close by to go to her grandmother’s bedside. She told me later that Gahmy, as she called my mother, had ordered a peanut butter sandwich for her “last meal.” The nurse wondered if that was such a good idea, and Mom replied, “Can you think of a better one?” She then told my daughter that she saw an angel and said of her dying: “This won’t take long, darling.”

But I was speeding. Why? One more goodbye? To say what exactly? I wasn’t sure but, as I checked traffic in my rear-view mirror before I moved into the passing lane to increase my speed, I saw a clear lane. I also say my mother’s face. The image was clear, its message even clearer: “She tried.” I knew suddenly, after a lifetime of struggle with my mom’s zeal over me which I experienced as overbearing “sMOTHERation”, that she had tried. She tried to make everything nice and good for me and my family. Yes, it felt controlling to me, and yes it was her way of trying, the only way she knew. She had tried.

She was dead when I arrived at her bedside, but not by much. My daughter and a chaplain friend were there. What exactly does one do in such moments? You follow your own instincts—not Hollywood’s. I sat beside her and looked at her pale face. Her mouth was agape but not yet stiff, so I closed it, noting that on her lips there was a crooked line of fresh lipstick she’d painted on—by body memory. It was exactly how she would want to look to meet her “Maker”—possibly her own beloved father who had died and left her heartbroken at the tender age of twelve.  

Silently I prayed, Oh God, if you do this sort of thing somewhere in the universe of all our projected heavens, tell my mother our whole story and wipe away her tears—and mine. Oh, and tell her I’m trying, too.   
        
            *  *  *  *

Time passed, and in time, many who knew Jesus well recognized Divinity in his gospel and in his behavior. They wrote it all down, and now, centuries later, many still compete over the correct definitions for goodness/Godness in the world.  And just as many, and more, keep trying, for that is the way of it.

Simply so.