"August:Osage County" Theater Review/Life Review

We just saw the play “August: Osage County” starring Estelle Parsons at Boston’s Colonial Theater. It was a three act play, lasting three hours with two intermissions which could have been three because of the intensity of the drama.

For those of us who grew up in families like the dysfunctional/addictive one portrayed in the play it was a life review, an opportunity to view from a distance the way we were—and for some still are.

For me it was a panoramic view on a small stage. It brought tears, laughter, honest empathy and hardy applause for the resilience of all the characters who, in spite of being almost destroyed by the ravages of addiction, forge, each in their own way and according to their own personality, a path to freedom— or at least to another chance at freedom giving life.

But this play, written by Tracy Letts, is a classic tragedy showing as much appreciation for the vulnerability of human life as the classic Greek tragedians did. The matriarch takes pills; the patriarch drinks, but the tragic hero is the whole family (parents, daughters, aunt, granddaughter, cousin and in-laws.) The tragic flaw is lack of boundaries. The individual is subsumed into the chaotic death-dealing dynamic of a system in which the power of the whole nearly obliterates the parts. In family therapy this is called enmeshment. I call it the sprout family (can’t pick up one without picking them all up.)

People caught up in an enmeshed system divorce their minds.

The opposite of enmeshment is estrangement, a way some systems develop to control the many threatening feelings (anger, guilt, fear, sorrow) that naturally arise but are too dangerous to express in response to the disease of addiction. This is as much of a control strategy as enmeshment. It just looks different, more like a bunch of closely related people all in thick rubber suits with slits for the eyes. They don't talk, feel, hear, touch (just brush up against each other if necessary)—and can barely see. But they all feel safe as they go about the business of living together.

People caught up in estranged systems divorce their hearts.

Either way you sob inside.

This is life as apocalypse now. It’s like living life in a mine field with no time or energy for anything but constant watchfulness and mental, emotional and physical tension.

In this play each daughter copes, taking on a role in order to control the chaos. The oldest is the “hero” who tries to achieve some respectability for the whole by doing it right, if not perfectly. The middle daughter is the “clown,” trying to control by distracting attention from the pain, and the youngest daughter is the “lost child” who controls by being passive and self-denying, believing that her quietism alone will control the raucus “caucus.” All roles fail to achieve the desired end.

The central characters (parents, daughters, aunt, granddaughter, cousin and in-laws) are drawn and rendered with tenderness not sentimentality and a fierce attentiveness to the irony and humor of the situation. But somehow they all care about each other. And in the end their individuality breaks through the armor of the adopted role. Who cares if their choices are functional? Who cares about the outcome at this point? Truth is revealed. They leave one by one.

All this unfolds because of an excellent script, exceptionally gifted actors and an unexpected twist in the parental dynamic that bring both death and new life.

Estelle Parsons plays the “villain” no less trapped in the system than the others but rising above it in spite of her drug-induced haze by telling the truth with a scalpel for a tongue and no compassion. Yet we witness a transformation here too although she ends up as tragedy would have it abandoned, sick, and as wounded as the rest with less chance of escape.

I found redemption, something I think all great art must have, not only in the characters' individual triumphs but in the final collapse of the matriarch who stumbles upstairs to seek refuge in the arms of the outsider, the family housekeeper, the one who stays for the most part outside the melee and so is able to cradle the pathetic matriarch and croon a lullaby.

2010.05.05 Fleshing It Out

All flesh.
Beautiful young and beautiful old.
Wrinkled and smooth,
bright pink, coffee, opaque silver, chocolate
freckle-flecked and acne-pocked—meeting ground for divine grace.
All flesh.
Flesh bloated with Spirit—meeting ground for grace
I wonder if flesh energy alone
propels this train forward, hurdles it into the big city
transporting people (SRO)
people eager to
walk twenty miles for hunger,
some hoping to make it
some sure they will never tire
all ready for their own thirst and hunger
and wholehearted pride

But I, not walking today, get caught in the roil,
the heat that spins off all that energy.
I close my eyes, thank them all, feel grateful
for the great kenosis at Park Street
center of the Hub—or the Universe.

* * * *

I wrote this poem because I suddenly felt awed by so much enspirited human flesh eager to help others raise money so all flesh would have enough to eat. I thought of the God of Jesus who chose to create, empower, inhabit all human flesh; I thought of the biblical prophet Joel who centuries ago wrote a true vision and put it in the divine mouth. “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see vision. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.” (Joel 2:28)

And here it was, realized on the T in Boston early one Sunday morning.

True Love is Always Steadfast and Chooses Life

Just recently my marriage partner, aka husband (I can hardly keep up with gender role diversity!) said something beautiful and true.

We were engaging in a regular practice at our Education for Ministry (EfM) group. We call it spoking in. Doing spokes is a metaphor for checking in or getting on board together after we have prayed and before we begin the theological reflection for the day.

Spoking-in is a metaphor. It brings to mind the image of a wheel with a sturdy rim and center and many spokes to connect center to outer edges. For us the center is Christ, the rim is the huge embrace of Godde keeping it all safe and moving, and our lives with all their many complexities are the spokes.

Often we mentors offer a suggestion or question to focus the group’s spokes. This week the question came from a scriptural invitation. It contains promise and consequence in the mouth of God (Deuteronomy 30:19) who tells the faithful: “See, I have set before you life and death, good and evil, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live . . .”

We asked the group to share a time, recent or distant, when they had made a conscious decision to choose life. (It’s an easy question—and not, if you dare to think about it.) Responses ranged from taking a pass and time to reflect, to recalling major life choices, to sharing choices still beset with uncertainty.

My husband, co-mentor and brother priest responded with care saying something like: “Over the years I have chosen life many times as a father. I have chosen life by choosing to let my children have their own lives, that they may live. I have chosen to be steadfast in love and keep connection rather than to try to intervene or control.”

I felt tears as I listened to this fatherly love.

I have watched this style of his and seen his frustrations too, and my own. Why didn’t you say something? How come you didn’t ask?

I also felt some envy since I can be a mother whose love blurts and blats my own thoughts or anxieties. Maybe it’s my chatty gender. Many times I am quite wise in spite of it all.

There’s a place for all style and kinds of love of course, and all kinds are held in the mystery of divine love which supports us from within in the courage to speak out as well as the serenity to accept and wait.

All true love is steadfast; all true love chooses life.

The Church Abused: Passive Aggression

Last week I posted about the abuses of the Church which are legion over the centuries in all denominations and in all religious institutions.

The Church is also the most abused institution I know. I admit it’s the one I know best but.......

It is accused of power and control issues, but there are many ways in which the “faithful” visit their own power and control issues on the church. Aggressive use of power, real or imagined, is met with passive aggression: the art of doing something that will disrupt, a little or a lot, someone else’s life—and look innocent. Believe me, it’s aggression hidden and requiring far more cunning.

Which comes first aggression or passive aggression isn’t knowable and doesn’t matter. I often ask couples how they each exercise control over the other and then how they get even. The innocent one looks stunned and the one who thinks him or herself to be guilty looks relieved. Their relationship is stuck in aggression, outright and hidden. The innocent are not so innocent.

Let me count the ways:

Always there for me for ever and ever amen: There is an assumption that the church should be or is at your service without consideration that the church and its clergy and staff also have lives, schedules, calendars and limits. For example, calling a month before your entire wedding is set in cement to tell the parish church that you wish the ceremony to take place on this time, date. Get angry if the answer is no. Someone else says yes of course hoping to gain a new member (carrott #1) and your parish is the bad “guy.”

Lying: Promising to attend church so the child you insist must be baptized can grow up and into the Christian faith and then forgetting the commitment you probably never intended to keep anyway. It’s insulting. The church gets used.

Godlike expectations for human beings: The church is expected to be like God—all loving all the time, forgetting that God is divine and has a more expansive heart than human beings.

Financial or emotional blackmail: The church suffers blows to budget and ego from blackmail, reducing or eliminating financial support because things aren’t going to your liking and indicating support will return when the place conforms. Or threatening abandonment, "I'll leave if......"

Annihilation by narcissism: Arriving late every Sunday and parading grandly all the way to the front row preferably during the sermon.

Wink, wink: Smile mightily as if happy with it all, then grumble behind closed doors or in parking lots.

Blaming: Authority and leadership are automatic enemies, scapegoated for anything. Here authority is confused with control and is demonized irrationally.

Hiding: refusal to respond to invitations to come talk about things because, you argue, you won’t get what you want so what’s the point. There is a point to reconciling conversation that is mutual and open and builds community whether any unfamiliar hymns are used or not.

Reactivity: One “bad” sermon, one “awful” hymn, even a significant loss of members in reaction to some change brings swift, silent, cowardly revenge: the evil eye, the rumor monger, the hit and run, the ample sigh, the sweet lie—anything but connection.

Chronic sourpuss: no explanation necessary.

This all is trivial and not abusive until you it becomes a way of life. Then it is like a constantly dripping faucet that makes rust, an ongoing corrosion that eats away at the system. Most church communities survive and get stronger but it still hurts and some communities become defensive, reactive, aggressive, a close inner group fortress full of fear. Abuses happen in closed systems.

The first three behaviors noted in the Bible are passive aggressive: lying, hiding and blaming. Adam and Eve are persuaded that Yahweh God has been deceptively restrictive on the advice of a snake, so they eat the forbidden fruit. When God comes to see how they’re doing they hide and cover their nakedness; then they lie about what has happened followed by passing blame around like a hot potato, the buck around ending it up on the snake’s slithery back for all time. The Bible gets it.

God was innocent of aggressive tactics but the church is not. God, however, offers the one healing solution for both sides of the tug of war: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. It's a great commandment. Helps you get a grip on who's in charge.

* * * *

I am grateful that most parishes I know well in the Episcopal church do not make this a way of life. I'm also grateful that I have learned not to take it personally, most of the time. And most of all I am grateful to know this truth: that there is nothing like a community of prayer and compassion, a community defined by this identity and ethic, that is in fact there for me at all times. It's called Church.

The Church: Wholehearted for Godde's Sake

The Church is one of the most reactive institutions I know.

Something comes up in the culture, a trend, a fad or a deep movement toward secularization ( currently in vogue) and the Church leaps in to organize programs that are relevant, hang new signs that are attractive and LARGE, create kicky ads and slogans, beef up its church school, etc.

These strategic quick fixes may bear some short term fruit but usually they are hasty and don’t take root or ripen because these efforts are anxiety-driven. This is abusive all round.

Anxiety kills Spirit.

Clergy get exhausted and churchgoers and seekers are absent, apathetic or overworked. Over-reactivity for short term gain is sinful according to one Kabbalist (ancient Jewish mystical tradition) definition of sin as superficiality.

The worst abuse however is self-abuse, self-forgetting. The Church forgets to love the God who calls it into being and instead serves the almighty market to sell itself.

The only healing for this compulsive pattern is whole-heartedness. Know who you are, what you have to give and what you can do. What the Church does that is unique to its vocation is teach about Holy Scriptures, create liturgies that give meaning and ritual shape to people’s lives, build a welcoming community of prayer and sacrament, and provide pastoral care and compassion in times of need.

I do not include social justice because this is the work of all decent citizens and because there are many agencies involved with this work. It is not the Church’s job or her gift to be one more such organization. It is the Church’s job to encourage its members to devote a portion of their time to such work outside the Church.

To be wholehearted isn’t always obvious or easy. Poet David Whyte tells a story on himself. He was working in a social service agency, racing from thing to thing, task to task, desperately engaged in the work of helping others. One day he raced into a conference room in which he thought there might be a meeting he was supposed to attend and said to those assembled, “Has anyone seen David?” After laughter they sent the exhausted David himself home for the rest of the day.

Once home Whyte spent the evening with his friend and monastic brother David Steindl-Rast who listened to Whyte’s tale of overwork, reactivity and fatigue. Steindl-Rast told Whyte that the antidote to exhaustion was not rest. Astonished, Whyte looked at his friend and said, “What is it then?” Brother David said, “Wholeheartedness.”

Their talk led Whyte to consult his heart, find there his true gift and passion for poetry and to risk quitting his job and becoming a poet. Since then he has written many beautiful volumes of fine poetry and also used his poetry to help people in both church and corporate settings find their own hearts.

David Whyte wrote in his poem "Sweet Darkness": Sometimes it takes darkness/and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn/that anything or anyone that does not/bring you alive is too small for you.

Perhaps the Church could in this, its time of darkness and dangerous reactivity, re-enlist its own tired heart, not to self-serve but to dare to be wholehearted—for Godde's sake.

Holy Week Holy Postscripts

Debriefing is often the most fun part of any celebration on which everyone has worked hard. In a parish church everyone—clergy, staff, musicians, preachers, lectors, dramatists, flower arrangers, acolytes, worship assistants, and congregational participants—works hard. They all bring creativity, energy, imagination, practice and love to making this a beautiful and moving offering to the God of Jesus Christ.

All this energy in one tent of worship is a petri dish for wonders—holy ones.

It is a tradition at St. John’s Episcopal in Gloucester, MA. to have special services on significant holy days just for children.

On Maundy Thursday all the children got bare foot and sat on the floor in a circle—giggling and not resisting the tickling temptation. We explained that in Jesus’s day the roads were dirt and feet got dirty. To wash your feet happened more than at your weekly bath. It was also a gesture of hospitality to wash tired dirty feet, not just to make sure your floor didn’t get dirty. The children were invited to have their feet washed by clergy or to do it for each other. Most chose clergy. The small group got quieter as we prepared the ritual. Feet are vulnerable. Suddenly as we were about to begin one small boy spoke up, “What if someone has no feet?” Quiet changed to silence. No one tried to answer but you knew they got it. The Holy had entered the space.

On Good Friday we had a quiet, mostly non-verbal service with music, silence and a few poems. The mood wasn’t black just somber. A large wooden cross stood against the empty altar and people were invited to come forward if they wished to reverence the cross in any way that moved them. It’s amazing who comes and how they come. A couple in their sixties with joint pains, heaviness of body and spirit and cancer survival came forward together. He touched the cross with his hands and stood almost leaning into it, a heavy man leaning into the hope of the Holy with all his bulk. His wife stood next to him and when he stepped back she came forward and bowed her head deeply. Each took a communion wafer from the reserved sacrament on the altar, then turned and arm in arm returned to their seats. The Holy had entered the space.

At the Great Vigil of Easter there was a dramatic enactment of the biblical story of the women who came at dawn on Easter morning with their oils and spices, hushed voices, their lanterns lit to anoint the body of the man who had changed their lives. The women and this year a couple of kids and one tagalong man came into a darkened church, advanced toward the front, worried about the guards and the huge stone that had been placed at the entrance to the tomb. As they got closer a child ran ahead and screamed “The stone is gone. It’s gone. Look!”

They all rushed to see, held up their lanterns and cautiously entered the tomb area ( at the foot of the high altar) where there was nothing but a white shroud (tablecloth.) They were women. They would have talked, right?

As they gathered round the shroud, they picked it up and passed it around and each one shared her or his own story of faith. There was not script. We rehearsed the staging and the sequence but it was improvised. As they shared stories the light slowly came up. Here are a few highlights:

“When I was a child I was hurt every day by my mother. Then I saw Jesus and the children in a stained glass window and I instantly became one of his children. I felt he protected me and loved me. I can feel him now”
“God has done a wonderful thing!”
“Like when I got healed in only four days when the surgeon said a week.” (ten year old boy)
“My brother died suddenly but he left Jesus with us. We believed in his love and Jesus’ love too.”
“But what does all this mean?” (young girl fifteen)
A woman sings a song she learned in her native Sierra Leone, “Jesus is Lord.......”
“I’m always on the outside just like now. Ever since my Dad left us when I was small I’ve been outside. No more. No more.” (a man who had been standing outside the tomb area rushes in to join the women in the tomb.)
“Well Jesus didn’t heal me after my stroke! I asked him and he said nothing just looked at me with love. I was angry but I believed the love. Now I have my family’s love to help me.”
“My dog died. I loved him. He was my best friend, one of our family. The rest are still here. But I still miss Teddy.” (eleven year old girl)
“But Jesus taught us how to dance.” (9 year old girl does a little pirouhette)
“ Dawn is almost breaking. We better go. Tell the others.”

The teenage girl returns to the tomb area alone, picks up the shroud and carefully folds it then places it back down. As she rises to leave she stops twice, turns to the congregation and asks twice again, “What does this all mean?”

The Mass continued with the telling of the Exodus story, lighting of the paschal candle, baptisms and the first Eucharist of Easter complete with Alleluias and bells of all kinds brought from homes.

After all had been done to honor this Jesus in story and sacrament we all went to the parish hall and feasted on the First Dessert of Easter!

The Holy had entered this space that night.

Holy Week Holiness

Christian are immersed in a week we call holy, Holy Week in fact. It is our most important week of the church year. Why? Historically, as near as we can figure, this week before Easter is the time, near Jewish Passover (yesterday,) when Jesus entered Jerusalem to confront the powers with the gospel of new life and love. The biblical story details the process which ends tragically with the execution by the state (Rome) of an innocent man. Speaking truth to power is risky.

The Passion story is a powerful one. It may or may not have happened exactly as it is told but something happened, something important to be still telling the story. And there is evidence in extra-biblical sources of the man from Galilee who stirred up the poor and the restless and was crucified.

We call the whole week holy, not just Easter day. Why again? Because all our days, all our ups and down, all our births and deaths, all our joys and sorrow are in God, the God in whom we live, move and have being. All days and weeks are holy, infused with divine grace and easter new life whether we notice and celebrate it or not.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, says the Christian community is meant to be a “mutual hope society.” Hope in the Holy keeps us going.

Holy is a funny word, a word reserved for things religious, monks and nuns, clergy, holy places like sanctuaries, temples consecrated by God for divine purposes. But the word is derived from Dutch/German roots, heilig meaning whole. A little more generic, democratized.

Everyone has natural potential to be whole. To feel whole to me means that what I think, say, feel and do are one. They flow; they’re congruent with each other. For example: I think you are a fool and I say to you, you’re such a fine person, then feel disgust for you ( and myself) and follow that by doing something extra nice for you that you haven’t requested and I don’t have time for............

You get the picture. By the end of the day, who is the fool? I’m twisted up like a corkscrew and mad as a hatter, probably blaming you, the innocent recipient of my lack of integration, wholeness. The Holy in me is dimmed by such patterns of unholiness, and only the Holy breaks through them. Follow the expeerience.

In his book The Idea of the Holy Rudolph Otto defines the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a huge near-terrifying and also fascinating mystery.) One of my seminary professors gave an example: “It’s like you’re on your way upstairs with an armload full of clean laundry and suddenly with no warning there’s a teenager draped across the third step as if from nowhere with a crucial question you must answer now! You nearly drop all the laundry and are tempted to run screaming into the night, dreading the encounter, and at the same time you’re fascinated at how this youthful presence, this body of energy suddenly appeared unable to be ignored.” Fits for me. I was a teen once and had some myself.

I had an experience of the Holy like that when I was trying to write a seminary paper about the Holy and felt stumped. An experience darted into my mind, one long buried and forgotten, an experience of having been sexually molested by an old man stranger in a New York City movie theater when I was eight. The old man had a long white beard and looked just as I thought God looked. The experience left me scared of the God I had loved so I’d stored it all away.

I grew up. I went to seminary, headed for priesthood and still was incomplete with God and myself. Up popped the old man memory thirty years later frightening me and drawing me to follow it.

So I wrote about what had happened and felt whole, holy. My missing piece was now on paper, no longer requiring any of my life energy just to keep the secret. What happened as I mulled over the paper was the Holy in action.

Holy Week is a time when many Christians want more than ever to skip over the reenactments of Jesus’ last three days, especially condemnation, scourging, torture and nails AND the commandment to love one another anyway. It’s just too much!

To meditate on crucifixion is terrifying. What if we could hear Jesus scream? What if all our own losses make us cry? Eeeuw and ow!

To meditate on God’s resurrecting Love can be equally terrifying. Many interested but dutiful or distant followers appear in church on Easter Sunday only to disappear again till next year. What if it’s not true? Is it for me too? Hocus-pocus! To be loved totally is to surrender all pretense. True for non-believers as well as putative believers. It is unbelievable.

But to skip over any part, life, death or resurrection, is like my leaving the old man buried for so long.

The Holy compels us to face truth and to enter— fears, hopes and all— into Mystery.