Choosing Up Disciples—Images of God

Jesus of Nazareth’s disciples, save for one latecomer, an accountant/taxman, named Matthew, were nothing if not a motley, rowdy, band of guys, eking out a living from the daily catch—of fish. Women joined in, but they received little mention in the biblical records. 

Why would Jesus, who hoped to surround himself with loyal followers to whom he would reiterate the basics of the Torah covenant with God and carry on with the vision of a heavenly kingdom on earth, choose people from society’s blue collars? It’s backwards! 

Well, because God does everything backwards—Jesus a prime example, right? 

The truth is that we are ALL among the chosen. It’s just that those whom human society ranks last get to go first in God’s created order, especially animal critters and children who often do know best, because they don’t think it over, and over and over, then rethink it—again. 

There follows a record of our own silly personal “disciples”—images of God, all.  

Here are our own dear “babies”—stuffed and silent: Miss Wise, owl, Leo, lion, Ganley I & II, hedgehogs, Walter, fishie, and Izzy, lady bug. They are very real in our hearts. We talk to them, sometimes through them, and let them sleep with us. 

Here is a very small shoe lost on the playground, then retrieved by a kind adult or an older child. It sits aloft on the pylon that escapes no one’s notice as everyone enters the playground to play.

Here is an elephant family on parade, painted on a changing table in the bathroom of a doctor’s office. It’s cute, right? It’s also sexist: Male leads, female follows, baby girl follows. You can tell the sex, because the girls follow and have lashes to flirt with. Big daddy leads and has no lashes. 

Here is a child full of wise questions and lots of his own talk. Recently, he told his father he “talked in school.” Daddy thought that was great, but son tugged at his father’s shirt and said: “No, Daddy, you don’t understand I TALKED in class. I mean when someone talks to you you’re supposed to answer and talk too, right? ” Daddy got the idea: no talking in class was the teacher’s rule, and the child was making a preemptive confession in case the teacher called his parents. A preemptive strike at six, no less! 

Here is a lion king (painted by Gaby D’Alessandro). He is majesty itself, elegant and outstanding for his roar and his finery. The lioness is nondescript and unadorned. It’s safer for mom to be plain and less attractive to predators, because Mom she stays home with the kid-cubs. In human nature it’s just the opposite—to our peril perhaps yet for our good.  

Here are four really fine adult children of mine—John, Jill, Bev, Rob. I cherish every breath they take and thank God for their well-being daily. Some days I think of them as my prayers-made-flesh. 

Here is an old woman sitting on the back of the truck amidst “junk” collected from a parish clean-up. She is a faithful Christian with a smile of gold. The truck will dispose of the junk but she will stay. She is not junk. 

Here is an infant boy, fisting the leash of the faithful family guard dog who will not sprint off, even after a squirrel. This is love. This child, like all children, including the one you once were, will lead us—with dog’s help.  

In the wreckage 

of our battles

where the powers 

have collided

we find greatness

shyly hiding

in the frailty 

of our children.    (Michael Hudson) 

And here is Nature Herself—dawnsweep over calm waters— Creator’s voiced assurance.  (photo credit, Dr. H.C. Richardson) 

 

 

2021.09.12 Nine Eleven

The perfect remembrance in poetic form by the late Brian Doyle, brilliant writer, author of many books, and former editor-in-chief of the Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, Oregon. His life and career were cruelly interrupted at age 60 by a brain tumor.

LEAP

    by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that. 

And our response was, well, you know.  Sister Stan, Gardening the Soul, entry for 9/11. 

A destructive way of life thrives on fear. Most especially it thrives on fear of love itself, 

the fear of being opened by a force and call of love, the fear of entering into reciprocity.  

2021.09.05 Me and the Syrophoenician Woman

One of my favorite small stories in all Holy Scripture highlights the brief encounter Jesus has with a woman he encountered as he traveled through the Greek region of Tyre and Sidon preaching the reign of God. I focus on a story that draws me into it with all my heart, and I find myself  praying into the story as if it were mine. This small story is called a pericope, a snippet, one among many that interrupts but does not detract from the flow and urgency of the Gospel: pay attention to the loving purposes of God—NOW. 

Jesus is in hiding. He is in foreign territory, a Jew in Gentile land. He has stopped to take a much needed rest, a breather, when the woman suddenly invades his retreat time. I feel suddenly drawn into the story with strong feelings I’d rather not heed that invade my own quiet . I'm drawn not to poor tired Jesus but to the woman, all alone on a dusty road, out of her mind with fear and need, believing her daughter to be possessed by a demon, and feeling the desperate powerlessness most anyone would feel when one’s own beloved child is near death. This woman has run out of resources. Yes, Jesus is her last resort. And yes, she is a Gentile, and Jesus is a “trespassing” Jew. 

*  *  *  *

I once felt this way when of one of my sons was near death and lying in the ICU after several surgeries for ulcerative colitis run wild enough that his colon had to be removed. There was promise for repair and construction of an ersatz colon, but the post-surgical remaining intestinal track had adhered. It was entirely stuck together, thus impassable. The surgeon operated again to cut all the folds apart one from another, restitch each separately, refold the lot, close up, then pray like hell that it all would hold well enough to enable digestion. Would my thirty-two year old son ever eat or drink anything by mouth again? Would he live? The surgeon was honest enough to say he hoped so. He hoped so. 

I felt just like that Syrophoenician mother must have felt. I was possibly about to see my young son John die. I lived and worked in a place that felt like hundreds of miles away as I drove back and forth from Gloucester, Massachusetts to Bridgeport Hospital in Bridgeport Connecticut for weeks. I begged and pleaded and silently caved. My parish community prayed week after week for John. Just the thought of this prayer net sustained me, even though I knew only half of them would remember in spite of my incessant prayer nagging. 

The Syrophoenician mother had no such support, so she turned to Jesus of whom she had dimly heard. She was not Jewish, but she decided to ask him anyway, so she knelt before him to ask for help. Jesus turned her down, saying he had come for his own people, Israel: “Let the children of the household be fed first. It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Mark 7: 27)  The woman persisted. “Yes Rabbi, but even the dogs under the table get to eat the family’s scraps, the crumbs under the master’s table.” (In Matthew’s version of this story Jesus turns her away again, and a third time.) Jesus, caught up short, turns to the woman: “For saying this you may go home, the demon has left your daughter.” The woman goes home and finds her daughter lying on a bed and the “demon” gone. 

 

Had something stirred within this woman—something strong enough to cause her to stop begging and asking for the same thing over and over? I wondered. I did ken that she had uttered something so true, and so gospel, and so stunning that Jesus had changed his mind. 

*  *  *  *

My John survived, and my prayers were as intense as the woman’s in the biblical story, although after a while prayer-pleading felt rote—although annoyingly necessary when my heart’s desire was so strong and so persistent. I often visited John during the week when no one else was there. I just sat in a chair at the foot of his hospital bed reading without comprehension. I have no idea what book I read, but I remember I felt becalmed. Later John told me that occasionally he would open his eyes and see me sitting there quietly, and it gave him a sense of comfort.  

My prayer-pleading became a steady, sturdy, silent hum. 

Several surgeries later John came out of the hospital and began his long return to health. Surgery is one thing, multiple surgeries another, and recovery still another—mental and physical exhaustion and pain, not to mention the dramatic effects of ongoing post-traumatic stress hammering away in his mind and heart. Mine too.  

With John’s permission I share an astonishing healing moment. The hospital chaplain, a friend of mine, and I stood at either side of John’s bed. She was Jewish, I a Christian priest. We decided to say together the one prayer we both knew by heart: Psalm 23. John told me after he was feeling better, that the moment of that prayer psalm was a moment when he did not care if he lived. But then his whole room filled with a very bright light. It lasted just seconds, and in those seconds, John said: “I suddenly decided to live. I wanted to live. I really wanted to live.”  I will not dis-grace this moment with any analysis. It stands on its own, and I remain grateful. John is now fifty and a healthy and vibrant father of two lovely children. Amen. Allelujah! 

We still can laugh about a time John came to visit us in Gloucester and we went to church. After church he commented:  “Mom, how come so many people here know me? They say hello to me by name as if they know me?”

2021.08.29 My "Racism"—Part Twenty-One, Saint/Sinners

Mark’s gospel reminds us that any and all gifts—sacramental liturgies, music, scriptures, even personal gifts within our own flesh, we receive from God. The paradox is this: gifts we praise the most we must give away in order to retain their deepest value. We can experience God’s gifts yet we cannot own, control, or possess them. 

I can’t help but notice, as I think about my own racism, that many women I’ve followed and admired are women of color or lesbians—or at least women who barked at the edges of tradition and made their way from the “outback” of religious tradition into the center where they continue to ruffle the feathers of patriarchy in the church. They are gifted prophets, prophets of transformation, my chosen prophets, ancient and modern, few of them white, all of them healers of my natural, learned, and inherited racism, all of them saints and sinners.   

  *  *  *  *  

Who is not a saint and a sinner?  Ask anyone to tell the truth about both, and you’ll get some kind of definitional sleight of mind, or else denial, usually of the saint category, or, as a last resort, a humble nod and shrug, feigning modest sainthood. No haloes appear. Could it be that sin makes a better God-story? 

Scene LVIII.  Mary Virgin, Mother of the Church, Theotokos

One of the most famous and ill-reputed female heroes of the biblical and church tradition is Mary, the mother of Jesus. She has many names, most of them honorific. Mary was a real woman, a woman who “miraculously” found herself with child, aka pregnant, while she was “betrothed”— engaged, not yet wed. She didn’t lie about it, but listened to God’s voice guiding, not condemning, her from within. Nevertheless, the Church, in its embarrassment at scriptural transparency, elevated her to a place of great esteem, made her a virgin blessed forever, and virtually eliminated any masculine role for both conception AND parenting—unless you want to put faith in God as both sperm donor AND Heavenly Father forever.  

See how patriarchal religious politics accomplished and set in cement the following sins: 

-impugned the female body as a conception machine

-settled on Mary Magdalene as the scapegoat, creating The Magdalene Syndrome, the ugly, unjust brush with which many women are tarred—some innocent and some errant and unforgiven. (see Spiritual Lemons blog post, 8/1/21) 

-enslaved sexual activity within marriage

-put celibacy on a moral high holy ground

-made marriage a sacrament, not of blessing but of control 

-outlawed divorce, birth control and abortion, further imprisoning women

-contributed to poverty, overpopulation, despair, and crime

-made sure Divinity was advertised as transcendent, almighty, and masculine

-locked the image of God into parenting titles 

Women today, and historically, including my own grandmothers, have empowered themselves to change patriarchy in church and state by asserting their gifts, offering their bodies and their voices. They continue to be silenced and abused for their efforts, but they do not stop. I long for the day when the church will let Mary step off her pedestal, relinquish her virginal holiness, and preach her Magnificat to churches and seminaries.  

Scene LIX. My Grandmothers

Eleanor Sampson Gillespie, my paternal grandmother whom I called Grahmmy, gave up her aspirations to be an opera singer in order to get married and have children. She boasted long and often about being one of the first women in her family to graduate from college, in this case Vassar, class of “aughty-aught” (that’s 1900). She fulfilled her “assigned” vocation well with six children, four sons and two daughters, all of whom called her Ma. My dad, Scottishly named McDonald, was #5, sandwiched between two sisters, not always comfortably. Ma was an imposing presence, pigeon-chested like any proper diva would be. She had a beautiful singing voice, and most evenings after dinner she would assemble her “boys” gathering them around the piano to sing. She sang along with gusto. A family “opera.” 

Marguerite Gordon Hall Adams, my maternal grandmother whom I called Ga, and occasionally Goggie or Gagarrhea, if I was angry, defied her family and eloped with her beloved when she was eighteen. Ga grew us in Medford Massachusetts, born into a well-to-do family and living in a large house, let’s say small mansion. She met and fell in love with a man by the name of Avon Franklin Adams, an impresario who imported musical talent from Europe to this country, specifically to New York City, quite bereft in the 1920s of classical musicians. He brought violinist Jascha Heifitz and Alma Gluck, soprano and concert singer, to name just two—both Jewish.  

A.F. Adams’s Jewish identity horrified the Hall family. So the young couple eloped! They were married in Manhattan at the non-denominational Church of the Strangers, established in 1868 by the Rev. Charles Alexander Force Deems. He was a Methodist elder who moved to New York City from North Carolina to pastor the Church of the Strangers on January 1, ’91 (that’s 1891).  

I can’t tell you how fascinating my research was to establish my grandfather’s Jewishness, and therefore my own. He died when my mother was just twelve. She was the youngest child of four, born in1912 when Ga was forty-five, and her father’s favorite. It was apparently mutual, yet she kept the secret of his Jewishness for reasons of her own at which I could only guess. I wish I could have met him. I remain proud of my heritage. 

Scene LX My First Patient in Alcohol/Drug Rehabilitation. 

My experience in parish ministry was, frankly, exhausting. I had trained in and worked in chaplaincy ministry in two general hospitals and one drug/alcohol rehabilitation hospital  in Connecticut. To be a chaplain is a gift I give wherever I am. 

Chaplaincy is a more expansive ministry than parish ministry. A chaplain does not have to comply with, rely on, or “sell”, any one set of religious principles. There are many people who are hospitalized and in need of someone to listen to all their fears, pains, and the deep needs of their souls. They may want to talk to a pastor of their religious preference, and yet many simply long for a listening and compassionate ear, perhaps a prayer or a blessing if this is what they wish. Chaplains by intention transcend religious boundaries. They may have their personal commitments, but they do not wear these on their sleeves. This was especially important with the addiction population, some of whom were openly hostile to religion while their recovery program required that they at least remain open to the idea of a power greater than themselves to support them in their quest for sobriety. 

The first patient assigned to my counsel and care at the treatment center was a young black woman I will call Rochelle. I went to meet her in the detoxification unit and she screamed at me: “Get the hell outta here, you fucking white religious freak!” I was terrified and split. My supervisor was sympathetic but would not change the patient assignment. I would be Rochelle’s counselor for four weeks. Four!  I needed a higher power more than Rochelle! 

I wondered if there was a trigger, other than the pangs of detoxification, for Rochellles’ hostile outburst. As I wondered I fingered the small gold cross I wore around my neck. Bingo! She had probably reacted to the Jesus image. It was a gift to me from my second husband and I still treasure it because it has no corpus on the tiny cross but simply an empty space. That said a lot to me about God’s desire to free us from suffering and pain, not to impose it. We did enough of that all by ourselves. I resolved never again to wear that cross while I worked at this treatment center. My resolve failed. 

I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but I remember wallowing in the Serenity Prayer, the prayer recovering people often use at their meetings. 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference. AMEN

While I focused on the serenity to accept what I couldn’t change, that is, Rochelle’s animosity toward me, I could stop wearing my cross. I could make myself look completely neutral and safe. I could. But I didn’t. 

When Rochelle was discharged from the detox unit and released into the ongoing program of education and counseling support to help her sustain sobriety, she came to my office. I had my cross on. God, grant me the serenity just to shut up about our first meeting. I did. Rochelle poured out her story to me and I listened with compassion. Whew! I had gotten away with the cross. But just as Rochelle was getting ready to leave the session, she pointed to my cross;. “Oh, that is such a beautiful little cross, so small and is it empty?”  “Would you like to see it close up,” I offered. She did. I removed the cross and handed it to her. She held it and fingered it briefly. I resisted a tiny temptation to give it to her, thank God. She returned it to me with a big grin and a thanks. I did not resist the temptation to consider myself a hot shot chaplain, but I did remember to fondle my small cross and thank Jesus for his corpuscular “absence” from it.  

2021.08.22 Who Is My God?

The disciples of Jesus asked him more than once what to do, how to do it, whom to trust, and the like. Finally they cave and ask again: To whom should we go, you have the words of eternal truth? We’re still asking.

*  *  *  *  

Do you remember the delighting children’s book called Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman about a tiny hatchling bird who hops out of his nest while Mama is off looking for food? The baby can’t fly yet so he walks/hops all over in search of his mother, asking every imaginable critter and object he encounters, even an old car: Are you my mother?  The book of course has a happy (resolved) ending, because all good books do, but I will tell you that the little bird alters his question to resolve his quest.  

I bet lots of people search for God the way the tiny bird searches for his mother—endlessly inquiring in every direction: Are you my God? 

The Church says: No, but people have called me a mother.

The Bible says: Not me, I ask all the same questions

The priest says: Close but no dice, birdie. I’m a man!

The tree says: Not God but God made me, I think. Check my roots.

The Buddha says: Don’t bug me, bird, I’m Oming.

The river says: Not me. I drown people who ask silly things.

The seagull says: Are you kidding, midget? Fly off.

The mountain says: Climb every one of my kind, kid. 

The Christ says: Check with the Father. 

The teacher says: Read another book. 

The psychotherapist says: Think of a time when you felt completely loved as is.

The theologian says: God doesn’t leave you, birdie. Get another God, not Mama.

The agnostic says: I don’t know.

The atheist says: There is no God. Get a grip!

The Virgin Mary says: I’m a virgin, but some think I’m God—gender aside.  

St. Ignatius of Loyola:  Pray and Discern 

The little bird collapses into exhaustion, sobs, and falls into a heap—when suddenly he hears a quiet voice: Try your wings, kid.

  *  *  *  *  

There is much more to finding God than the search alone. After you seek, you ask more and more questions, you find many, many answers. Then you seek, ask, and find more and more answers until you are exhausted. Do all the good you can, go home, look in the mirror, grin—and trust. 

2021.08.15 Ichi-go. Ichi-e

Do you think my computer leapt to another language font or secret app? The phrase Ichi-go ichi-e is Japanese. It means “one time, one meeting”—no moment in life is repeatable. Still, we continue to think we can “go back to something” after we’ve left it “just for a minute.”  It is not really possible to do this, perfectly or even well enough, because inside the mind all time exists at once (past, present, future)—each dimension fighting vigorously for dominance. 

But do not give up trying to cherish every second for the love of God. 

Today in our liturgical calendar we remember the biblical story called The Visitation. We live as if it were our own, the moment in which Mary of many names— Mary of Nazareth, Mother of the Church, Immaculate, Virgin, BVM, Mother of God, Blessed among women, Holy, and more—praised God with such radical and ENORMOUS force, that it stuns. The Gospel of Luke places into Mary’s mouth the words of an ancient hymn, The Magnificat. (Luke 1:46-55, Inclusive Bible translation.)  All this over being pregnant? NO, all this because Mary and her elderly cousin Elizabeth—both at once in one moment—cherished what their God had told them would/could be accomplished: that which they desired with all their hearts and in all their fervent prayers. The Church of  the Visitation, Ein Karem, Israel. 

Mary said:

My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,

and my spirit rejoices in you, my Savior.

For you have looked with favor

upon your lowly servant,

and from this day forward

all generations will call me blessed.

For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me;

and holy is your Name. 

Your mercy reaches from age to age 

for those who fear you.

You have shown strength with your arm

you have scattered the proud in their conceit;

you have deposed the might from their thrones

and raised the lowly to high places.

You have filled the hungry with good things,

while you have sent the rich away empty.

You have come to the aid of Israel your servant,

mindful of your mercy—

the promise you made to our ancestors—

to Sarah and Abraham

and their descendants forever.

Such extremes of thankful praise are rare and short-lived. Every moment of my own aging, ebbing life is such a moment. Our fragile warring planet trembles every second with this prayerful awareness, this humble, grateful, trustful, momentary praise. 

Ichi-go ichi-e.