2015.03.01 Astrolatry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015.02.22 Anita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015.02.15 A Face To Remember

This image mesmerized me. I saw it in the Boston Globe Arts section of February 10, 2015.

It's a painting (hanging at the Worcester Art Museum) by the Spanish artist, Bartolomé Estebán Murillo (1618-82) of thirteenth century Spanish saint Rosa of Viterbo. This child survived religious persecution, life as an orphan, and is credited with healing miracles, required in the Roman Catholic Church for sainthood, but waived by Pope Francis I for one papal saint. What counts as a miracle today?

Rosa's religious faith not only held through suffering but increased and, at 15, she tried to establish a monastery. What keeps us longing, and paradoxically trusting, a God some still hold responsible for everything, from weather to our own sins? What?

To me this painting, despite, and even because of, its realism, is like an icon through which I can see divinity. I was struck first by the utter lack of sentimentality. Then I felt beckoned by her liquid eyes. Her mouth is poised to say something. I listened. What is she saying? It's like trying to imagine what Jesus wrote in the sand just before he turned the rules of his culture upside down and saved a woman about to be stoned for adultery. He sent the angry, stone-bearing crowd packing: "Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone." Such rare wisdom holds purchase today, and for all time.

I noticed the flowers  next, and only as I was about to turn aside, did I see the crucifix. It seemed almost an aside, meant to be very much a part of the reality of human life. It was obviously something which formed this child and helped her have hope, as much as the flowers did. And now she looks out at the world to say?

Pace t'imploro! 

(This last line from Verdi's opera, Aida, means "I pray for thy peace." It's the poignant song of a lover.  (It's opera after all!)

 Imploro—such a strong word. Imploro.

2015.02.08 I'd Know Scout Anywhere

This photo looks just as I thought seven-year-old Scout, aka Jean Louise Finch, would look by the time she reached 88. Isn’t she beautiful? I wonder if authors who create strong characters write themselves into them, not just personality and speech, but the actual image itself.

 This photo is Harper Lee, the woman who is now 88 and who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, starring a little girl named Scout. Scout grew up in Macomb, Alabama, pretty much had the run of the streets, including places she wasn’t supposed to go, like the courthouse where her Daddy, whom she called by his name, Atticus, was defending a black man against charges of raping a white woman in the 1930s.

Mockingbird, published in 1960, is one of the most beloved novels in history—right up there with the Bible and Shakespeare. Oh, and Agatha Christie, too. Lee exposed the pain of racism through the eyes of a young child who, with wide eyes and a discerning heart, questioned everything, wanting to know, and even more wanting to understand, why people behaved “not nice” to other people.

Scout was lucky to have Atticus Finch as a father— patient enough to address with candor the child’s dilemmas about race, class, mental deficiency, and human kindness. Atticus, despite his own grief at the loss of his young wife, or maybe because of it, made room for his daughter’s unformed convictions about justice to grow within the safe bounds of affection and manners.  Atticus Finch goes down in history as one of the best fathers ever.

I saw a television documentary interviewing the actors many years after they had played Atticus and Scout in the 1962 movie version of Mockingbird. Mary Badham, who played Scout as a child, said that Gregory Peck, who played Atticus, treated her in real life just as he did in the film. Nice!

                         

The new novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written in the mid-1950s, and features Scout as an adult woman. Lee thought it “a pretty decent effort,” but her editor liked the flashbacks from Scout’s childhood so much he persuaded Lee to write the novel from the child’s point of view. “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told,” Lee said. She hadn’t realized the original book had survived, “so was delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of friends and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will be published after all these years.”

I include the above quote from a Feb. 4 piece in the Boston Globe, because some writers are wondering whether Lee, in her advanced years, was fully aware of what was happening as she released an old and, apparently not to be edited, manuscript for publication. Many writers save all their first drafts and shrink from the idea of anyone seeing them in their naked state. Should we make sure the old stuff is shredded? It’s an issue about control of one’s own intellectual property and a valid concern for awareness. 

If you can believe the quote from Lee, and I do, then would a “dear friend” act this way? And what about Lee’s own satisfaction with her first book and her recent careful considerations about the project, not to mention her “delight” at the discovery and the publication. Is 88 too old to be making such discernments?

Most all my old manuscript stuff, raw and pretty lousy, is still somewhere in my computer. I’m not famous, nor likely to be, so it’s not of much concern to me. Even if I were, though, I might just let it go and let it be. Honestly, even greed, if that is a motivator, couldn’t ruin Harper Lee’s reputation, and who could forget Scout—ever? There is something eternal in a great story that not much can tarnish.

I am eager to read the new novel and believe I will feel Harper Lee’s voice, sense the character of Scout and others, and relish being in Macomb again. Resurrections are risky. I hope this one works. 

Here is my favorite quote from To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus is speaking to Jem, Scout’s older, by a couple of years, brother.

Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”  About sums it up, huh?

2015.02.01 It's a Feast Day! It's Sunday! It's SUPER Day!

Awaking this morning, I first thought: it’s Sunday. Then I thought: it’s the day of the parish Annual Meeting. Then I realized: NO, it’s Superbowl Sunday! This is a day, all hallowed for most Americans, coast to coast—the day we praise our national sport: Football. (Look Ma, not deflated!)

My heart sank, not because I have an outsized aversion to football as such, but because I felt a  familiar feeling: that of being left out—just like I felt when I was young and my mother and sisters would join in trimming the tree while my father dozed, and I fought back tears. Dad was left out, and I felt left out for him. I now understand that I felt love for him and sadness about his remove, and that there was nothing wrong with me. Still, that old feeling sometimes haunts. 

Today it made me think about me and football. When I was a young teen our family religiously went to the Yale/Harvard football games. Daddy was a Yalie. We could easily get to the Yale Bowl for home games. When football Saturday dawned, there was excitement in the air. THE GAME!

We got up early to help Mom pack a magnificent picnic lunch in a hamper:every good food each one of us had ordered for the feast, plus plenty of soda and beer—and something in a thermos that was not for kids. This was the Feast of the Tailgate—station wagons lining the stadium parking lot with their tailgates down and all the goodies displayed. Some people brought candelbra and set tables.

These days bring fond memories, not so much of football, which never seemed like a game, and which, despite many explanations, I could never understand, other than that a first down for our team was good, and our team was good. I did love the pudgy bull dog mascot and watching the male cheerleaders leap in the air, leading us in cheers and song: Boola, Boola, Eee-Lye-Yale. In short, it was a totally enjoyable ritual: all of us together and Dad happy.  I fell asleep in the car on the way home, happy myself. Thanks to football.

Recently, I attended a talk by Steve Almond, author of Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto. Almond, a former Sports writer for the Boston Globe is one of my favorite writers. He’s honest—and blunt. I went because I was curious about football, having read all the hullabaloo about players winding up with concussive disabilities for life. I also went to come to  terms with my own distaste for the stupid violence of this non-sport-like sport everyone loved. I did not agree with the testosterone outlet rationales. Why the holy magic of football, so obviously a “game” that depended on collision?

Almond said that his truth landed when his mother suffered an “insult to the brain.” Learning about the brain, its beauty and its fragility, unearthed the dark side of his own, and the nation’s, fascination with football. He called it “a national addiction which fosters tolerance for violence, greed, racism and homophobia, and part of a larger tribal system.” 

A few key points:
    -We create fantasies that this “game” can be made safer, but there are harmful physiological consequences + physics problems: mass x acceleration = force. The average player weighs 300 pounds, exceeding NFL limits. They have to gain weight to keep their jobs. 
    -The accretion of sub-concussive events is alarming. Argument has been made that men who played pro-football had already had previous concussions, and somehow don't count?  Studies monitoring brain functioning in high school football players indicated that there was diminished brain functioning after play, even when there had been no concussive symptoms beforehand. Not one blow, but a series of hits, concussion or no, reduced brain function after playing.
    -Football is a cash cow, and we build moral rationales to adjust to it. We build stadiums, keep cheering our lungs out. The consumer market is well-reinforced. Too much hype and cheer creates irrational pressure and expectation for more and more and more, with little room for failure. (I thought of the presidential inauguration in 2012 when near-ecstatic (hysterical?), overflow crowds filled the D.C. mall to overflow. What kind of exalted expectation did all that praise create for the office, not to mention the man?)
    -Will take a famous player to confess his disability fully before Almond’s goal can be fulfilled: the disruption of the narrative of complacency we’ve built around our fervent consumption of what amounts to sanctioning conditions of war.  And what about our heroes after we’re done with consuming them briefly as entertainers? (I told you I liked his blunt speech.)

Are even Christian values satisfied when we see a wounded body fallen for a higher cause? In football, those values are greed, lust and violence. What are the values in our Christian faith? I wonder about the high priest Caiaphas, Roman-appointed High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple and a co-conspirator in Jesus’ death. Caiaphas, according to John’s gospel (11:49,18:14), advised the Temple authorities that it was better to have one man die than destroy a whole nation. I’m not saying that this story is fact; I am saying that it contains a moral sanction of scapegoating violence that has become a part of Christian belief and liturgy. (See Gil Bailey’s book, Violence Unveiled.)

Almond suggests ideas for the future: to press for weight limitations in national competitions, training for coaches, mandatory academic grade requirements for players to graduate, and a look at our own cultural values.

Many in Almond’s audience shared fond memories of family connections, especially with Dads. Which brings me back to where I began. I established connections with my dad as an adult that were far more satisfying than the bonds of football. I knew he wasn’t a fan either, except that he, like me, loved being part of the group.

When I learned to play touch football—for girls, they said, I made touchdowns without tackling anyone.

And........it doesn’t escape my notice that we don’t call God “super.” (The rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar” is mocking. The rest of the lyric is: “Do you think you’re what they say you are?”)

I’m of a mind to say that nothing/ no one should be called SUPER. We don’t call God SUPER, so what the blazes are we doing to humanity with our collective need for false heroes?

2015.01.25 Tribute to Marcus Borg—and Mom

Happy 102nd birthday, Mom. Thank you for having always encouraged me to try new things, to speak out for what I believed, even if they were all your ideas. To let you know, though, I have found my own convictions, many of them in favor of women having pride of place in all ways and in all places. That one was your idea, and I agreed. I bet heaven is full of women who now enjoy full inclusion in the wide embrace of Godde—you too!

So about Marcus Borg......  I think my mother would have liked his almost casual approach to big fat unmanageable theological concepts and his humble stance about his considerable scholarship and the mystery of God and Christ he wrote and spoke about— and admitted he didn't "know." Once he was asked by a listener, “How do you know that what you say is true?” After a pause, he said, “I don’t.”

When I first read Borg’s, Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time, I was thrilled that the Jesus I’d come to know through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, was acknowledged by a Jesus scholar of history and culture. I’d fallen in love with this feisty Jew of Nazareth, with dirt under his fingernails and dust on his feet, who spoke pithy, provocative wisdom in one-liners. Thanks to Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong, I knew Christ wasn’t just a figment of my own fertile,  idiosyncratic, prayerful imagination. And I fell in love again.

Borg was a Distinguished  Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University and the Canon Theologian of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. He was not ordained, except maybe by the Holy Spirit of Godde. Ordination is not a requirement for a canon. According to Borg’s wife, an Episcopal priest, to be a canon you only have to be a “big shot.” Boom, boom!

He died on January 21, 2015, at the age of 72, two days after the day we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. Both men were prophets of transformation, King for racism’s evils, and Borg, I would say, for the liberation of the Christian religion from “barbaric” ideas that denigrate the very heart of what Christian’s call God’s Love. What is loving about a God some call Father, who demands payment for sin through the death of a beloved son as a condition for reconciliation and forgiveness?  At a talk in March, 2013 at All Saints, Pasadena, Borg called this understanding of Jesus’ death “a destructive corrosive notion.” I call it devastating theology—unjust to God and humanity, just like racism, et. al.

Even as a child I thought this notion was “really dumb” and bet my own father would never even think of such a thing. I’d also had a very different foundational experience of a God I knew wasn't like this. This helped me discount just about everything I heard in church. But as a kid I was too busy memorizing and reciting all those elaborate Presbyterian definitions, for which I earned awards—little pins I still have. This I did for myself, not for God, although maybe God appreciated my earnest efforts, as any loving God would.

The payment-for-sin idea came in through Anselm of Canterbury in 1098, whose theology prevailed as doctrine, against the objections of his opponent Abelard. Abelard thought better of God and humanity. No wonder the late Madeleine L’Engle, author and faithful Christian, named her dog Abelard! Animals and people are God's gifts for us to love and be loved by— not to kill for God's sake.

The earliest Christians realized that animal sacrifice in the Temple was an offering, a gift, not a payment or ransom. Today, if we're generous, we sacrifice (the word means to make holy) money.  We carry it forward to the altar on plates at the Offertory, and it gets blessed, just like the bread and wine. Money serves grace, not the reverse.

When I celebrate Eucharist and say the words of atonement, I no longer wince, as I first did. (There are revised prayers now, but entrenched doctrine dies hard.) In my mind I change “for our sins” to “because of our sins.”  According to Borg, the word can translate “for” or “because.” And by God, Jesus surely died because of human sin. How often do we crucify Love? Daily I suspect.

I first read Borg in seminary, a little article on Jesus. This man has something, I thought, and watched for more Borg. His work enlivened my Christianity and refined my understanding of the God of grace I first trusted. Well, once I cheated and betrayed my own theology. I answered a canonical examination question about atonement theology, defending the traditional doctrine. I’d had enough trouble with the Church and wanted to get ordained. I wrote something icky I knew the examiners would love: Wouldn’t it make sense for a guest to wear the proper attire for admission to God’s banquet? (The proper attire would be Jesus Christ, lamb of God, sacrificed to save us— the ticket to get in.) I don’t know if any end justifies specious means, but I was so happy and proud to get ordained that I presumed on divine forgiveness. 

Experientially, and according to personality and circumstances, there are Christians of the First Person of the Trinity who directly experience the sacred in the Creator, and Christians of the second (Christ/Son) and third (Holy Spirit) persons. This capacious articulation protects me from being judgmental, or spiritually competitive. Borg identifies himself as a First Person Christian, having never had a direct experience of Jesus.

So, dear Mom, do you remember that once I asked you if you believed in Jesus Christ? It was at the peak of my Jesus zeal, and worried you might not even be a Christian, because all you ever spoke of was God. “Of course, darling,” you said, and that was that. Well, now you’re in the heavenly rest place of all our yearnings, and you might meet a man named Marcus Borg. If so, he is a First Person Christian, just like you.

Thank you, Marcus Borg.

P.S. I've read most all of Borg's work, also what he and Dom Crossan created together to illuminate for us the path of Christ lived by Jesus, the remarkable man of God. I plan to read Borg's latest and last book, Convictions.  Borg recently said that he gets suspicious if he meets someone of 40 who has several firm convictions, but if, by 60, one has no convictions, it might be time to worry. When I was 4, I had a conviction or two, connected with what mattered to me. By the time I was 40, I had no clear convictions, except one: to find a conviction, or two, and go for it. 

2015.01.18 Images of Boca Grande

Greetings from Florida where I thought it would be warm. Well, it's warmER, but my expectations were off again. So, what's new? I'm on a tiny (10 miles long and a few wide) island called Gasparilla.

It's part of a chain of small islands, including Captiva and the more famous Sanibel, and named after a pirate of old called Gaspar, who led raids and got his name into history. The town in which this small isle is located is called Boca Grande. Its means Big Mouth in Spanish, a designation that refers to the big mouth of the Gulf of Mexico and its inlets. Thanks to the weather, I now have a Boca Grande sweatshirt— advertising my own big mouth.

Thanks to the recommendations of Google-god who spit out my name, I came to lead a women's retreat at St. Andrew's parish. We took a few vacation days as well. On this isle people get around mostly by golf cart, so we have the parish rector's cart on loan. Guess who drives?

And guess who gasps and yells slow down, STOP sign, and other harassments from the front seat?

Someone didn't charge our cart long enough, and the other someone called, "We're out of gas!" as our cart began to buck and jerk. The mate screamed back, "There is no gas; it's a battery, and I charged it!" Not long enough apparently. Nevertheless, we are grateful to the rector, the Rev. Michelle Robertshaw, who came to rescue us in her CAR, which we then could use to continue our touristic adventures while she got help to charge up the little cart. Good to go!

Here is our regular morning visitor, a scavenger. Handsome feathered fellow, well fed. And the little feral cat who, with its many buddies, all trapped, spayed and readied for their cat job of keeping the island's rat population manageable. Makes good eco-sense. Islanders are grateful and feed the cats well. They hang around restaurants purring pleasantly, a feline strategy of begging. It works. 

                                         

Fascinated with all the flora and fauna in this clime, but specially the wild and thick mangroves which keep the island safe and protected from the waters. Also the noble banyan tree, destroyed by hurricanes yet returning bigger and stronger than ever, some of the branches actually growing downward to plant roots below for another outcropping of the tree. Imagine!

Nothing is lacking, except gas stations. This the Johann Fust Memorial Library, restored, beautified by our friend, Alice Gorman, and a dedicated team and lots of generous people. It is a gift to minds, young and old. Cicero said: "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." True!

We fly home tomorrow to northern climes. All in all, it has been a grand visit to a very unique place, filled with retired seniors like us, but with a lot more wealth than we have—a LOT more.

Oh, the retreat.....Spirituality 101, held in a sumptuous home, quiet contrary to ascetical practice, but with a gracious hostess, lots of laughs, and poetry, and wisdom, and bright women who want to know their own soul-worth more deeply and enhance their connection to God through the work of Christ Sophia, the feminine face of the Holy Spirit. Here is St. Andrew's church—a blessing.

Nathanael asked about Jesus of Nazareth, aka the Christ: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said, "Come and see." 

I ask: Can anything good come out of a small church on a little island? Come and see!