2015.05.10 Two Original Mother's Day Proclamations

I have a very old photo of me and my mother. I'm about four and she's in her early thirties. She is perky and pretty and I am sour and serious. She called me a sourpuss and I was. She had proclaimed me a "miracle." I hated being a miracle.

But Mom also gave me a book, published in 1934, called The Little Book About God. The book shaped me in ways I didn't understand. When I was near fifty Mom gave me a framed quote in multicolored calligraphy: "God danced the day you were born." On the sides are smaller inscriptions: “You are loved, you are beautiful, you are gift of God, His own possession.” And: “You are gift to all mankind, His gift of love to them you are His.” She had ordered it from an Abbey Press catalog.

Mom has been dead now for 17years, and I can only guess at her motives. What I can say is that such praise was for me unbearable, not to mention quite untrue. Not until after she died and I started to become a woman and a priest, did I retrieve the fullness of myself and know that my mother had given me God. I still have The Little Book About God and the calligraphy.

Still, with my penchant for words, I have to include another less personal proclamation in original words written in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe. Howe was an abolitionist. She wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and worked to establish a Mother’s Peace Day.  In 1907 Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia campaigned to have the day recognized as a national holiday, which was accomplished in 1914 by President Woodrow Wilson. This proclamation is still shaping the world and humanity.

The Original Mother’s Day Proclamation: Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.



Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.



From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.



As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.



In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
                                                                        
If Mom were still alive, she might say, “Well, darling, I told you so—in my fashion of course.”

2015.05.03 What Shines Through Matters

The barbarity and cruelty of the way people treat each other and their environment is sadly not often surprising. Although it may shock, it is violence that is easily denied or forgotten, or both.

What is truly surprising is the way people treat each other with exceptional proportions of love and consideration, compassion and truth in the midst of cruel circumstances. This is what’s truly stunning, because it shines through the horror and the grit, and it is what we remember more than the horror. It is also what we tend to call divine—and what we remember.

These are a few of my favorite divine things.

Think about fairy tales. How can they be good for children? Many children have see-through minds and hearts. They scream and shrink away from terror, yes. Some pretend it's a hoot. And some see through it, not as if it were a trick or a tease, but as if there really were some Goodness to see, too.

I remember the cottage and the seven little men of grace who welcomed Snow White into their home and their weird ways. They were very diverse, representing every kind of mood and personality imaginable, and far from perfect. But they had a little home and they offered it to her. Oh, they debated the invitation, but they got themselves to agree on hospitality if not salvation.

The little men were in disarray and Snow White helped them. They needed a good wife. But before they realized the gifts she brought to their mess, they welcomed her into their lives.

They are the ones I remember and love best—not the beautiful maiden in distress, not the frightening chase through the dark forest, not the wicked stepmother with the mirror, and the poison apple, and not even the arrival of Prince Charming and his magic kiss, but the community of misshapen little dwarves. But that’s me. Others may remember the dark parts with more clarity.

What is hard to admit, however, is that Godde remembers ALL the parts and people of such tales with equal vividness and equal reverence. I want Godde to favor only the good, and sanction that, as I do. But I guess that is one difference between divinity and humanity. Godde doesn’t have to see through anything. But we do, and we call that see-through vision divine.

Here is a picture that illustrates what shines through. It may as well have been created by God Creator because it shines through dense darkness and the darkness does not go away. It’s a holocaust survivor effort, recently exhibited in a collection called Forbidden Art. It’s not realistic—or is it?

2015.04.26 WHY PRAY?

A granddaughter asked me not long ago, “Grammy, why do you pray?” Her tone was not child-innocent, it was edgy-young-teen-of-fifteen.

Momentarily flummoxed, I had no idea why I prayed. But this was a near-emergency—my aging religious faith vs. her budding religious skepticism—so I  blurted out, “I pray because I love.” She snorted but didn’t retort, then grabbed a couple of french fries from my plate. After she’d swallowed them whole she grinned and said “Okay to have a couple of your fries, Grammy?”  Sassy!  And I love her.

So that IS why I pray. I love. I also pray about her, which is to say that she is on my heart daily, along with all my children and grandchildren and several million other concerns from world peace to the barely audible wheeze I’d heard in my lungs this morning.

I remember some priest asked the Presiding Bishop some years ago when she spoke to the diocesan clergy of Massachusetts at our conference: “What do you think about prayer?” (I do think it was a rather saucy adolescent question.) The PB threw up her hands and just said, “Do it!” Later she added that she prayed when she ran.

Public prayer is powerful and recitative. However, personal prayer is a sluicy thing. The assumption behind prayer is that there is a greater power than the human looking out for the universe in kindly, not kingly or silly, ways. When we pray we access and release that greater energy. We call this Mystery by many names (God, Allah, Wisdom, Christ, Adonai, YHWH, and more) and when we evoke it in prayer it is a matter of connection and hope, not control. 

No one really understands prayer but many of us do it. There is no one who can’t pray, and probably no one who has never prayed or called out in some way. My own praying makes an art form of wordiness. Yet when I am on a retreat of silence and solitude, after my yammering, I fall into contemplative prayer, which is much the same as breathing meditation: after a while your heart becomes one with the sacred heart. Thump, thump, thump. 

In other words, God is Goodness and Love and, in a deeply spiritual way, massages the fabric of earthly life enabling replication of this goodness and love—imperfectly but surely. 

Thank god I did not rattle on in such abstract ways to a fifteen year old. But here is what I hope she got:
    We pray because we love, because we care.
    We pray because people and things matter to us.
    We pray because we seek faith and because we have faith.
    We pray with certainty and we pray because we don’t know.
    We pray because we seek God as God seeks us. Prayer is more mutual than we think.    
    And as Christians, we pray because Jesus prayed.

The psalmist in Psalm 119:9 (Pamela Greenberg translation) declares:

“With all my heart-muscle I have sought you.”

Seek with all your heart muscle and you will find.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Prayer is muscular. According to Benedictine monastic, David Steindl-Rast, OSB, the antidote for exhaustion is not rest but whole-heartedness. Whatever you do, including pray, do it with all your heart-muscle. Thump. Thump. Thump
   

2015.04.19 LOST. PLEASE HELP: A LOVE NOTE

There was a note in the bathroom of a local restaurant.The note was an e-mail copied and distributed about the neighborhood. It read something like: Lost, one quadroceptor. Please watch for it and please, please return it. E-mail us if you find it.

For some reason the note broke my heart. It was like one of those painful postings you see on phone poles or in restrooms, or anywhere where someone might notice it and come to the rescue. You know the kind: Lost: a black and white kitten named PussyPoo, or worse, a little boy who answers to the name of Timmy, has disappeared from the park. Last seen wearing a blue jacket—and you stop reading. 

But I’ve never seen a note about a thing, a toy I figured, obviously precious to its owner. Did a child write this e-mail?

I had no idea what a quadroceptor was but I knew this one was very important to someone who was very important to whoever posted the sign—a love note.

A quadroceptor is the classic toy reinvented. It's autonomous.  It flies like a  helicopter, zooming all over the house or outdoors. It even flies through windows. It's a drone!  And some small pilot mans the remote controls.

I imagined that the handwritten note was dictated by a child to a parent. I imagined that they went around together to post it. I thought that the parent couldn’t bear the broken heart of a child, and would do everything to try to fix it, and hopefully would not have launched into a little lecture about, “It’s only a toy!”  Or something more shaming. 

I still look for that quadroceptor—more than a toy. 

Children teach us about hearts and show us the lost art of grieving. Young children feel things deeply and do not easily discriminate about relative values until they mature. Death becomes an enemy only when children listen to adults talk about it. Often, then, death becomes an act of God, a God who “takes” someone away. Is this a body-snatcher God? Honestly I do not know how divine love survives with all the errant projections upon its graces. But children are naturally more given to profligate loving, grieving, saving, and finding than they are to destruction, a behavior they learn soon enough.

Once a cat we had in NYC flew out of a window and fell six stories down onto concrete. She used to race back and forth across the width of our apartment, jumping up onto the radiators at each end and pivoting to race back. One of the radiators was under a window. That day the window was open. I was about nine. My back was turned to the sight but I remember my mother’s face shattered into a thousand pieces. She had seen what happened. She cared little, not at all really, for the cat whose name was Lilliput. But it was my first pet. Sobbing and choking with terror and grief, I ran to the window, climbed up on the radiator sill and looked down. I saw, not a flattened, limp heap of mangled and bloody fur on the pavement, but a small cat slowly rising to its feet to look around and let out the loudest yowl imaginable. Then it walked around trying to figure out a way out of the back alley while my mother and I raced to the rescue as fast as we could. Lilliput was uninjured, though she yowled  inconsolably for hours, which was her right really. She rose up. She lived on for years.  

The note about the lost quadroceptor could have been written by God. And the amazing risen cat  seemed to me as a child like God’s doing. It still does. It’s a heart thing.   

2015.04.12 Forty In Forty: Sisterhood

Siblings are a blessing and a curse. It’s hard to live with them and impossible to live without them. They know you very well, well enough to torment you, and well enough to defend you, no matter what—also well enough to love you into death and beyond.

I am the oldest of three sisters. There are approximately three years between us each. Our mother had three miscarriages before me and two before my younger sister, Laurie. Our youngest sister, Jeanie, died prematurely of brain aneurysms when she was 34, just five months before I would turn 40. She broke our hearts and broke up our troika.

I have no idea if heaven is a state of being in which we two living sisters will see our “baby” sister, again, but it’s a nice hope. We have lots of love to catch up on, and lots of stories to tell, and lots of need to be we three again. 

When I moved away from "home" I gave many years of scrapbooks to my children and theirs, so I don’t have childhood photos of us three sisters to share, alas. Nor do I have a photo of Jeanie alone, although I wake up to see her face in a group photo with her husband and three children taken just before she died. 

Two out of three of us are alive today: Laurie (left) now, at 73 and me at 76. We have been through all kinds of hell and damnation. Okay, I exaggerate, but I’ve lost count of how many times we have broken up and tentatively come back together—just because we are sisters. Now we are old enough to embrace intimacy, and also be ourselves. Age helps some things. We both will probably live into 2019, 40 years after Jeanie died.

                                 

                                                                      

Forty is a conventional number. In the Bible it is also a symbolic number, signifying a very long time. The Israelites wandered in the desert wilderness for “40” years. Jesus headed into the wilderness after his baptism. For “40” days and nights he discerned his vocation. It took a long time, but he decided  to withstand the temptation to exploit others with his spiritual gifts. He would, instead, do the unifying work of God.  

It takes a long time to grow up and into unity.

(A note: before you pummel yourself, or blame your sibling, consider your larger context—just to see whether anyone, with good intention, might have told you, "You're as good as your sister," or "You are the a perfect gift from God.")

*  *  *  *

In a NY Times Magazine article, “40 Portraits in 40 Years” (October 3, 2014), Susan Minot wrote the story behind a series of photographs, taken from 1975 to 2015 by artist Nicholas Nixon of his wife and her three sisters. I have seen the exhibit; it is transfixing, this photographic documentation of sibling affection, sibling difference, and sibling aging.

Here is the 1975 photo:


Over the years the annual photo became a project in which the artist and the subjects collaborated. Without wardrobing or make-up, the four sisters stayed as they were, year after year, enduring together within the truth of aging. “Everyone won’t be here forever” was implied.

This sisterhood admitted public observation, but not entry. It is remarkable that, in this age of the selfie, there does not seem to be evidence of attention-seeking. As I gazed at these sisters they gazed back at me, steadfastly. They had eye contact perfected, yet they never looked self-conscious. Sad often, showing signs of sibling wear and tear perhaps, but not possessed by their own image. Was this the way of these sisters?  Or was it the skill and eye of an artist who knows how to catch the truth without fanfare? Probably both.

According to Minot,“Nixon has pulled off a paradox: The creation of photographs in which privacy is also the subject. The sisters’ privacy has remained of utmost concern to the artist, and it shows in the work. Year after year, up to the last stunning shot with its triumphant shadowy mood, their faces and stances say, Yes, we will give you our image, but nothing else.”

There is something profoundly god-like in this last statement, something we humans who believe ourselves to be made in the image of God might take to heart. 

The sisters in 2015.