My "Racism"— Part Twenty-two. Prayer and Chutzpah.

In the testaments of the Holy Bible, in my seminary studies, in my ministries as a priest/pastoral counselor, chaplain, and spiritual director, my “racism” came into glaring focus. So did my wondering about large categories like race and gender. Is there no category called race or gender that is not now called racISM or sexISM? I mean it is the addition of ISM that suggests that the concept before the ISM wields exclusive, or too much, power—psychologically, spiritually and institutionally. 

Over time I’ve grown to understand my own “racism” as intersectional—layered with many other -isms, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, feminism, socialism, fundamentalism, materialism, intellectualism, consumerism. Such complexity describes my lived experience of my “racism”, making it bearable, forgivable, and, dare I say, manageable. 

Carol Lee, my best preteen friend and the black girl I betrayed because I was racist, no longer haunts my soul or pricks my conscience, thanks to Bible stories, the presence of God within me, and the little bird in PD Eastman’s book, “Are You My Mother?” who at last realizes that all his questions, all his earnest questing for his lost mother, all his heroically strenuous efforts have come to naught. He kneels on his tiny exhausted wee bird legs and becomes a prayer. 

I am my prayer to you, says the psalmist in Psalm 109 (Greenberg translation). 

How does one become one’s own prayer? It is not by working obsessively, seeking answers to your prayer, although such efforts are good for your mental muscles and may even be helpful to other people. It is rather to slow down enough to uncross your eyes so as to see beyond your own desire, to slide off the throne of your ruling desire, your immediate worry, to release your held breath, to open your clenched fists, to let your willing tears flow freely, thereby giving God’s Spirit some stretching space in your soul. 

Scene LXI.  Prayer Rose

I discovered this on many many silent retreats in which prayer was the only bloody thing I did. Well, I cheated, but not much. I became a living, walking, breathing prayer. At night in the chapel at Mercy Center in Madison, Connecticut, I knelt alone and gazed at the elongated oil portrait, painted by artist Mary Daly, RSM, of a rose—long stem, thorns, bursting petals against a faintly visible green cross—hanging behind the tabernacle. This to me became the sacred heart of Christ, not bloodied or dead, but beckoning. 

I wanted to walk into this rose. The tabernacle below, containing the sacrament consecrated as Christ’s body and blood, was locked. Locked. I stared. I became a prayer. I climbed the “stalk” of that rose, feeling pricked and torn by thorns, finally to enter the sacred rose-heart of Christ—bruised but breathing. The next day when there was light I drew my own rose and wrote: "I am a rose/You are too/We two rose." 

To make such a climb—powerless, longing, praying—was what it was like to feel called to priesthood in my own religious tradition while trapped in one of those -isms, the sex one, and to be locked out, as I, because of the White-only rules at our beach club, had locked Carol Lee out for her -ism, the race one. Locked out. 

Scene LXII.  Breaking Up the Old Boys’ Club. Women Breach Male Collegiality in the Episcopal Church

In 1974, and again in 1975, groups of Episcopal women deacons organized, inspired by their calling to priesthood. They got political. Some willing bishops broke ranks to ordain these women outside of Church canonical regulations. Prayer, communicating with one another, and their shared desires led them to disobedience—and success. 

These women, on whose shoulders I stood as I pursued my own call to priesthood in the Episcopal Church, acted together to break a small but not insignificant sound barrier in patriarchal Episcopal Church politics. It would take a long time for the Church to swallow the whole law whole, to unlock its heart, to disrupt the “order” of things, and admit women as priests—and eventually as bishops. Here are some of the original 1974 group, the Philadelphia Eleven, lifting up the consecrated body of Christ-in-bread. 

Scene LXIII. The Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman

This small ancient story (Mark 7, Matthew 15) is one of my favorite ones in all scripture. Biblical women to me are not without flesh. Their stories count and help shape my soul. The woman in this small story counted as much to me as the actual women who paved the way to ordination for us all. It took me eleven years of knocking on doors and prayer-begging to be ordained priest. It would have been easier if I were a man, easier if I’d not been divorced and single, therefore dangerous, you know what I mean, harder perhaps if I’d been Black, or burdened by any other -isms, and easier if I had not overexercised and flaunted my natural chutzpah. 

I identified with this Syrophoenician woman, because she too was an outsider, a noisy threat, a Greek, a Gentile, banging on doors, annoying the Rabbi who was on a mission to secure the promised land for his people, the Jews. She was an interruption and a disruption of ordered canonical processes, like all of us women seeking priesthood were. She was even viewed by Jesus himself as unacceptable by standards we could call NationalISM.  He said: “I came for my people Israel!” Locked out she was. He turned her away three times. She kept on asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus I suppose felt a bit bullied yet heard in her cry, her prayer, the reminder of the depth and breadth and inclusivity of God’s own healing mission—not for Jews alone.

I, like her, and like the other women seeking ordination who were trying to overcome ancient biases, never gave up. Never. 

 

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?”