Who You Gonna Listen To?

Who You Gonna Listen To?

Wikipedia has introduced a great word: disambiguation, or to disambiguate. Which essentially means the fact of showing the differences between two or more meanings clearly. We shall attempt to disambiguate three Scenes in the Divine Narrative about which competing claims have been made throughout the ages. And how to sort out the voice of life from the counter-voices of death.

Act One – Trouble in the Garden. Genesis 2:15-17; Genesis 3:1-19

In creation God blesses the creatures of the sea and the air, and humans, male and female. Upon creation giving rise to humans, they are placed in a garden. It is a Garden called Earth. The creatures cares for the garden. The garden sustains the creatures. It’s pretty simple, with very few rules: Eat of all the trees but one. Seems simple enough. There is a man, a woman, and trees and other plants to sustain them. Only one tree is to be avoided which can bring death. What can go wrong?

There are two other characters in the story. One is God. God acts with strong and decisive verbs: God formed, God breathed, God planted, God put, God made, God took, God commanded. God is a self-starter, capable of transformative acts. The actions of God are what we know about God. Nothing else is said about God except how God acts. God says not to eat of the one tree for in the day you eat of it you will die. [Texts For Preaching, CD Rom version, p 184]

The Other is a snake. By contrast, the snake has no strong verbs, does nothing, has no power to act, is incapable of transformative intervention. The serpent can only talk. And although God is given no characteristics, the snake, we are told, is “crafty,” which it turns out is a play on words: crafty–arûm is a play on the word “naked”–arôm. It is easy to see where this is going. [Ibid]

The snake says to the woman it is OK to eat from the forbidden tree. She says, no, if we do eat it or touch it we will die. Note, she adds to what God has said. There was nothing said about touching. The snake says, no, you will become like God! The woman, we are told, “sees that the tree was good – as God had said about each stage of creation – and to be desired, or coveted – later, the only one of the ten commandments that is repeated twice, “you shall not covet.” Oops. She eats. The man eats. Oh no, they say, we are naked. Their innocence has died, and shame and blame are introduced. When God inquires, the man says it’s the woman’s fault, and your fault for giving me a woman; she says it’s the snakes fault. And I will submit the problem here is that they believed a lie – the snake said they would become like God, and just a short way back in Genesis chapter 1 we learned that they were already like God – created in God’s image, male and female were they created in the image of God. [Genesis 1:26]

Taken on its own terms, this narrative does not concern a “fall” or “original sin.” It is rather a narrative that invites awareness of the contradictions that resist God’s good intention and distort human innocence. The narrative sorts out the competing, conflicting voices that seek to define human destiny. Lent is a time to sort out the voice of life and the counter-voices of death. Who you gonna listen to? is the lesson here. Life is full of competing voices. Boy don’t we know that!

And we do well to note that God curses only the snake and the ground. Not the couple.

Act Two – Sin Abounds, but Grace Abounds More! Romans 5:12-19

Around the year 56 CE, the apostle Paul writes a letter to the church in Rome, some 20 or 25 years before the Gospel of Matthew. Paul speaks of the rupture that occurred in the garden as “Adam’s sin.” Note, the woman is not blamed here – that only occurs in later Christian art when Michelangelo paints her, not the snake, as a cunning and crafty seductress. Note Paul also suggests no notions of “the Fall,” or “original sin.” That comes much later with Augustine asserting that sin is transmitted generation to generation by birth, and that unbaptized infants go to hell, around the beginning of the fifth century CE. Paul asserts no such things here. For Paul, sin is whatever separates us from the love of God. That is, sin is not simply a bad action, but rather a “power under which humankind has lived since Adam and which causes separation from—even rejection of—God… the issues Paul raises in this text need always to be lifted up for believers, many of whom continue to understand sin as an individual act that is morally “bad” and grace as a reward for right belief or right action. Paul’s acknowledgment of the universality of sin and of what might be called the “superuniversality” of grace comes into such a context as a genuine word of good news.” [Ibid 188-189] Raising again the question of who are we going to listen to?

Act Three. Matthew 4:1-11

Most translations read that the Spirit-Breath of God leads Jesus to be tempted by the devil. Perhaps translators fail us here, as the word for tempted, peirazó, typically means to try, attempt or test, and the words used in this text, diabolos and satan, typically mean adversary, prosecutor, accuser or tester; not the medieval sorts of meanings they would later take on. Just declared at his baptism to be God’s Son, God’s own Spirit leads him off to be tested for forty days to be sure he is up to the task of Being God’s Son and God’s Beloved. What takes place is similar to cutting sessions between musicians like pianists or guitarists, challenging one another to up their game.

The Tester invites Jesus to perform three miracles. Jesus refuses. The careful reader will note that Jesus always responds with words from Deuteronomy, that book which relates a long speech or sermon by Moses to the people reminding them of the essentials of their covenant relationship  with God they have learned in their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. Our question is: What do we learn about Jesus from this story?

In the language of Deuteronomy, we learn who he is and who he is not. That Jesus does not perform miracles on demand, or to show off. He lives out of Divine Grace. His trust in God does not depend on a show of power. He is obedient to the will of God over against “the kingdoms

of the world and their splendor.” He serves only one master. And readers are invited to find in his experience an image of what it means to be faithful in their own lives. [Ibid 190]

He finally orders Satan to depart. And he does. The Adversary/Tester has no power over Jesus, while Jesus issues commands and Satan obeys. Jesus wins the cutting session. “To be sure, Satan will return, but the secret in keeping the Adversary/Tester at bay is out: it is in being faithful to one’s vocation to be God’s child, clinging tenaciously to one’s divine calling.” [Ibid p191]

Throughout these three acts we learn to be more attentive to the actual details of the stories than what we have been told they mean. We learn to be attentive to the question: Who we gonna listen to? Because at the end of the day our answer to that question makes all the difference in and for the world. Lent is a time to sort out the voice of life from the counter-voices of death.

Ash Wednesday Coda 2020: Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein: An Ash Wednesday Coda

As I was wrapping up my homily last evening, standing in the aisle at Christ Church, Rock Spring Parish, speaking on the symbolism of, “You are dust , and to dust you shall return,” and that moment of creation in Genesis 2 when God breathes into a handful of dust, animating the first human, and as we are told in Genesis 1, “ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them;” I commented on how from the beginning of time, we are created equal, male and female.

Then, I felt the need to depart from my prepared remarks. Harvey Weinstein, I said. As I heard the verdict announced in his New York trial, and how this was a “monumental step forward” for our society in addressing how men, especially men in power positions, mistreat, abuse and assault women, I was initially relieved to hear that he had been charged on two counts, but that then I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. How could it be in the year 2020, one hundred years after the 19^th Amendment and Women’s Suffrage, 2000 years after Jesus, and three or more thousand years after so much of the Biblical tradition advocates for women that we hail an incremental moment in the cause for women in America and the world, how can it be that we see this as “monumental” when it ought to be simply the right judgment on behalf of women who at this very moment are being abused, assaulted, placed in cages at our southern border, and suffering further degradation in our country’s prisons.

We are told, by Weinstein’s lawyer, that he is “in disbelief” in the verdict. Disbelief. While thousands of women are in disbelief that they have not been accorded justice in their own cases. That rape kits sit on shelves in police departments across the land not being tested. That women are asked and even encouraged to sign waivers not to prosecute rape and abuse charges by those empowered to protect them and enforce the laws.

I found myself shaking as I disclosed my disbelief that we are still in such an abysmal place in defending the rights of women that we have the temerity to see this one judgment against this one powerful man as “a monumental step forward.” Until there is justice and a sense of equality for women both here and around the world, we are in no way making monumental steps forward as human beings. We clearly have a long way to go. A long long way to go. It just needed to be said before we could move forward in the confession of our individual and corporate societal sins last evening. And today. And every day going forward.  

Ash Wednesday 2020

Burning The Palms

Every year I burn last year's palms for ashes, I am impressed with the vehemence of the flame. They burn nearly white hot; my mind turns to the eighth chapter of the Song of Songs which is understood as a love poem describing God/YHWH’s Love for God’s people:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

   as a seal upon your arm;

for love is strong as death,

   passion fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

   a raging flame.

Many waters cannot quench love,

   neither can floods drown it.

If one offered for love

   all the wealth of one’s house,

   it would be utterly scorned.

The palms and excitement of Palm Sunday quickly recedes as soon our savior hangs on the cross, demonstrating God’s love for humankind, a love that many waters cannot quench. A love and a God characterized throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” This is, in part, what Ash Wednesday is meant to remind us.

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

The tenderness of God’s unquenchable love is demonstrated in this scene from the prophet Joel. The people are in dire circumstances. They appeal to God, and yet have nothing to sacrifice to God’s name. The prophet imagines that God himself enters the sanctuary and leaves the grain and wine offering on behalf of his people.

Who knows whether he will not turn and relent,

and leave a blessing behind him,

a grain offering and a drink offering

for the Lord, your God?

Again, we know that in the end God did make the ultimate self-sacrifice on our behalf, when breathing his last he handed over his Spirit to us, one and all.

Thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return….

As this ash of last Palm Sunday’s palms is emblazoned on our foreheads, we are to recall that moment in creation, Genesis chapter 2, when our God, the creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen, scoops up a handful of dust and breathes life into it creating  Adam, A-tha-ma, literally “of the earth”.  This is among the most ancient of legends in our scriptures, pre-dating the seven-day unfolding of creation in Genesis chapter 1. Today science has confirmed that we are indeed made, every cell in our mortal bodies, of cosmic stardust, the most elemental dust of all creation. This dust connects us to one another, to all of creation all the way back to the creator, the source, the beginning of all there is.

This ash is to remind us that Yes, we are dust, but we are holy dust, animated by God’s own breath; it is God’s own Spirit that enlivens us and sustains us day in and day out. Out of this dust we are created in the image of God, male and female, equally created in God’s image, as God’s beloved who are to belove creation and everything therein.  We are dust, and to dust we shall return, for we come from Love, we return to Love, and Love is all around, all the time, for ever and ever. Love’s flashes are flashes of fire, a vehement flame! Many waters cannot quench the love represented in these ashes. Amen.

The Transfiguration Collage

The Transfiguration Collage

Collage, from the French: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together" is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music and literature too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.

Max Ernst, a pioneer of surrealism, once wrote, “What is collage? It is something like the alchemy of the visual image. The miracle of the total transfiguration of beings and objects with or without modification of their physical or anatomical aspect.” He went on to write that the most noble conquest of collage is “the irrational.” And he was tempted to see in collage, “the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane.”

The scene in Matthew 17:1–8 (also depicted in Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36) is, even by New Testament standards, often described by scholars as unusual and surreal. We call it The Transfiguration of Jesus. The story teller blends imagery and personages from such disparate Biblical eras as Moses in the Exodus and Wilderness narratives, who delivers the terms of the covenant; Elijah, the first of a series of prophets who challenge the faithfulness of God’s people in obeying the commands of the covenant, and particularly challenge and chastise the civil and religious authorities in Jerusalem for their misdeeds; Jesus and three of his first four disciples, whom he has just told that they must pick up their crosses and follow him [Matthew 16:24-28]; the pillar of cloud from the wilderness sojourn; a mountain, often the site for teaching and close encounters with the Holy, the Divine, the Ground of all Being, and a reminder of Sinai where Moses receives the commands that are to shape the moral life of the community of God’s people. It is an alchemy of visual and narrative images across more than a thousand years that become totally transfigured both with and without “modification of their physical or anatomical aspect.”

It would be fair, in the words of Max Ernst, to call this passage a collage as it very much is a “chance meeting of two, (or in this case more), distant realities on an unfamiliar plane with some modifications: Jesus’s face shines like the Sun, and his clothes become “dazzling white.” He is talking with Moses and Elijah, two figures with no graves and no description of their dying. As disorienting as it may still be to us some two thousand years later, try to imagine the psychic impact it must have had on the witnesses, Peter, James and John – who not very long before had spent their days on a lake called the Sea of Galilee fishing and mending their nets.

Peter, who in a sense represents any of us who attempt to make sense out of this unexpected and surreal vision, starts babbling about setting up some temporary dwellings like the tents in which God’s people lived in for forty years as they were being shaped and formed as Israel, those who live with and strive with God – one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus. His impulse seems to be to settle in, to somehow render this alchemical transfiguring moment a continuing reality. Let’s not return to the brokenness of the world, but remain here in the presence of the Light of the World and these great icons past and present. It is clear that Matthew sees Peter’s offer as a trivial, ludicrous outburst: typical of any such religious talk that is often ill-timed, diversionary and even divisive. Peter is interrupted as a cloud covers the mountain top, as it had at Sinai, and by the same voice heard at Jesus’s baptism, repeating what had been said then: “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased!” But this time with the added admonishment, “Listen to him!” And just as suddenly, the disciples fall to the ground in fear and trembling. This may be the moment of real understanding of what he had told them six days before: that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem, be raised from the dead, and that they must pick up their cross and follow him with similar lives of self-sacrifice and compassionate service to the needs of others – all others without qualification.

That’s when it happens. “Jesus does what he has done to the leper, to Peter’s mother-in-law, and to the two blind men: he touches them. Then he speaks words of reassurance. It is another

of the countless vignettes in the scriptures of incredible grace shown to disoriented, fumbling followers, of divine patience with impatient, confused disciples.” [Texts For Preaching:Year A, Brueggmann, et al, p172] “Get up and do not be afraid,” he says. Literally the text reads, “Be raised.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

Confirming: Jesus is connected to the long past and is the future of God’s people; he is God’s Son, God’s Beloved; if he is friends with Moses and Elijah he can be trusted – so listen to him and do what he says and what he himself does. Then, pointing to his resurrection he says, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” And perhaps now they remember that six days earlier he had promised that he would return in glory and that those who follow in his Way will be repaid “for what has been done.” Be raised, he says, for you are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. This is what we are to hear. This is why we are to “listen to him.”  We are to be beloved, and to belove others – all others.

Then he leads them back down from the mountain to begin the life he has been teaching and living himself – A life of reconciliation. A life of repairing the world – what the rabbis call, Tikkun Olam; to repair a broken world and to heal all the broken people therein.

This season of Epiphany begins with the voice from heaven: You are my my Son, my Beloved, with you I am well pleased. And the season ends with the voice from the cloud: This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him. Belove him as I belove you. Belove others as he has beloved you. This collage of images, narratives, and visual and auditory appearances is meant to offer us words of comfort and reassurance in disorienting and even fearful times. The temptation to simply fall to the ground, cover our eyes and ears, and cower in fear as daily disasters, outrages, revelations and attempts to divide us seem to be coming from all directions, is all too real. The temptation, like Peter’s, is to withdraw. Or, like all three disciples, to fall to the ground and be fearful. Or, even worse, get angry.

These are the times, however, when we need to allow Jesus to touch us. To remember that in difficult times throughout the past, figures like Moses, Elijah, John the Baptizer and Jesus have touched God’s people with strong challenges, but also with words of healing, reassurance, and comfort. When we listen to him, he says, “Be raised and do not be afraid.” Be reassured, be patient and compassionate with one another. Accept your belovedness and like me, belove others, all others. This is the cross I want you, I need you, to carry – the cross of belovedness, compassion and a continuation of our common task to repair this tired and broken world.

A collage not only transfigures the beings and objects it displays in new, and surprising array, but has the power to bring about “the miracle of the total transfiguration” of the viewer, the witness, as well. This collage called The Transfiguration of Jesus calls us to be totally transfigured; to become a new whole; to stick together! Be raised; do not be afraid; listen to him!              

Black History Month?

Black History Month?

Jesus says to be reconciled before coming to the altar. A day. A week. A month. Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. Negro History Week. Black History Month. And still. So much yet to reconcile. Can a Day, a Week, or a Month bring about the necessary reconciliation? How about a Year?

Consider: King was assassinated in 1968. It took until 1983 before President Reagan signed the King holiday into law. It was first observed three years later. And, it was first observed in all 50 states in the year 2000. In 1926 the historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro History and life announced the second week of February to be “Negro History Week” – chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and Frederick Douglas on February 14, both of which were already being celebrated in black communities since the late 19^th century.

Black History Month was first proposed by black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in February 1969. The first celebration of Black History Month took place at Kent State one year later, from January 2, 1970 – February 28, 1970. Just two months later, on May 4, The Kent State Shootings took place. It was six years later that President Ford recognized Black History Month during the celebration of our nation’s Bicentennial. He urged Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history".

Despite their being no scientific, genetic or biological difference among human beings – that The Concept of Race is a Lie – the lies persist and there is still much to reconcile. The truth is that we are all one human family that had its origins in Africa. There is no such thing as race – only racism. A day, a week or a month is not getting the job done. Therefore, I will spend A Year – A year of reading literature by authors of other cultures.

I read a lot. A lot of white-folks literature. Poetry from Masefield to Wendell Berry to Mary Oliver. Literature from Joyce to James to Banville. I got a head start back in 2012 when I picked up a book of poetry by Tracy K. Smith, an African-American woman: Life On Mars. The book is inspired by her father, a space engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope, and what its like to be of African descent living in America which once claimed that “all men are created equal.” Smith’s book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, and she was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 through 2019. In My God Its Full Of Stars, she writes:

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

In papery green, the room cold, and bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

For all its cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time

The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is –

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

In Smith’s latest book, Wade In The Water, she assembles “found poems,” one fashioned out of letters from slaves sent to fight in the Civil War and their families. The following is a letter from Annie Davis of Bel Air, MD, Aug 25^th, 1864 to Abraham Lincoln:

Mr President  It is my Desire to be free  to go see my people on the eastern shore

my mistress wont let me    you will please let me know if we are free

and what i can do

This idea of mine began when at our diocesan book store, St Bede’s, I picked up a book of essays on what it’s like to be African-American living in America today, The Fire This Time – an homage to the James Baldwin classic, The Fire Next Time, about African-American life in Baldwin’s USA (1962) which drove him, and myriad other black artists to spend most if not all their time in Europe where their talents were more widely and readily recognized and accepted. The essays in The Fire This Time are all by contemporary black writers in America today, most  of whom I had never heard of because…I tend to buy books by white people. It’s edited by Jesmyn Ward, winning author of the National Book Award, for Salvage The Bones. A Year of reading literature like this may help, I thought. So here’s my starting list:

Write This Second: A Poetic Memoir, by Kira Lynne Allen:

What Is A Home Language Poem To A Girl Who’s Never Belonged Anywhere

Not white/never white like Mama/Not black/ never black enough like Daddy/the one who never stays/In 1964/ Bonnie and Bobby become  parents who love each other/but live in fear of anti-miscegenation laws/moving from place to place/dodging bullets bombs fires/living in a war zone together/In 1966/a year before the federal law changes they marry/ but by ’69 their resolve crumbles and they divorce/Still no one in her extended family embraces the child/the living evidence of an illegal birth/Not the white side in Utah/ they say her mother is invisible/so she doesn’t exist/Not the black side in Oakland/ they say her father is a traitor/so to them she talks funny/ In 1971 the sleepy town of Mill Valley/burns her house down/drives her and her mama out…

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi: beginning in 18^th century Ghana, two half sisters are born into different villages unaware of each other. One marries an Englishman who lives in the Cape Coast Castle, the departure point for many slave ships. The other is captured in a raid on her village and imprisoned in the same castle and sold into slavery. Her daughter, Ness, is purchased by one Tom Allan who decides she is too pretty to be a field hand and has her dress as a house slave. She comes out to meet Tom’s wife:

She walked out to her audience of two, her shoulders bared, as well as the bottom halves of her calves, and when Susan Stockham saw her, she fainted outright. It was all Tom Allan could do to catch his wife while shouting at Margaret [another house slave] to change Ness at once. Margaret rushed her into the back room, and left in search of field clothes, and Ness stood in the center of that room, running her hands along her body, reveling in her ugly nakedness. She knew it was the intricate scars on her bare shoulders that had alarmed them all, but the scars weren’t just there. No, her scarred skin was like another body in and of itself shaped like a man hugging her from behind, with his arms hanging around her neck. They went up from her breasts, rounded the hills of her shoulders, and traveled the full, proud length of her back. They licked the top of her buttocks before trailing away into nothing. Ness’s skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder. [p 73-74]

A Good Cry, Nikki Giovanni, what we learn from Tears and Laughter;

The Past…The Present…The Future

There is really nothing/We can do/About the Past/ We cannot be unraped/ We cannot or at least/ Should not take back/Degrees because we no longer like the person/There can be no Justice/Only Revenge/…We cannot undo/The past/ Not the people who kidnapped/Not the people who sold/Nor bought/ Not the ships in which we languished/Nor the buses upon which we had to stand/While others took/Our seats until/One woman said No/We stand for the future/We embrace Peace/Not mongers for War/We cannot undo/The past we can build/The future/Where we go/To Mars we send/A Black woman/Because she will make friends and sing a song/With them/When we go to Pluto/Which will be again/A planet/We send Black children/To learn to ski/When we decide/It is time/To thank the Deity/ For our food…our shelter…our health/We will all…no matter which/Ideology…wrap our arms/Around each other/And be glad we live…at this time/On/This Earth

Collected Poems 1974-2004, Rita Dove, US Poet Laureate 1993-95:

Ripont

We were enroute to the battlefields of the 369^th

The Great War’s Negro Soldiers

who it was said fought like tigers

joking as the shells fell around them

so that the French told the Americans

Send us more like these and they did and so

the Harlem Hellfighters earned their stripes

in the War To End All Wars

…

We made out the year of the battle the name of the town

a bugle sounded as two old soldiers laid down a wreath

and only then did we notice the memorial stone

with the date   today’s   and the names of the fallen

both the French and the Negro…

Tsunami vs the Fukushima 50, poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh

radioactive man

the papers started calling me

Radioactive Man after tests from

the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

revealed the highest radiation levels

in anyone they’d ever screened

I guess I’m the champion, I joke

to reporters who come for interviews

like visitors from another planet

bulky and brightly awkward

in white hazmat suits, they look

like mourners at a Buddhist funeral

…

I’ve seen terrible things:

cages filled with withered songbirds,

horses left to starve in their stalls,

an abandoned puppy that grew

too big for the chain around its neck

I rescue as many as I can:

the dog trapped inside a barn

for months who survived eating

the dead flesh of starved cattle

or the feral ostrich so vicious

the police who border patrol

the nuclear exclusion zone

armed with Geiger counters

nicknamed her The Boss

…

I wait for the cancer or leukemia

and joke to The Boss about

becoming a superhero through

a radioactive ostrich bite

…

I remember I can see my future

in the sick animals I care for

Eye Level, poems, Jennie Xie:

I enter Wat Langka to sit

To still the breath

A steadying out and in, out and in

Still, here in this country, something I can never enter

…

Can it be that nothing

is as far as here?

Just look!

How much past we have

to cover this evening –

Come to think of it,

don’t forget to pick

off this self and that self

along the way.

Though that’s not right –

You spit them out like pits

Traveling and traveling,

but so much interior

unpicked over by the eyes

Nothing is as far as here.

Be Recorder, poems and essays by Carmen Gimenez Smith:

Origins

People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know

because they’ve projected an idea onto me. I’ve developed

a second sense for this – some call it paranoia, but I call it

the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.

This gift was passed on to me from my mother who learned it from

solid and socially constructed doors whooshing inches from her face.

It may seem like a lie to anyone who has not felt the whoosh, but

a door swinging inches from your face is no joke. It feels like being

invisible, which is also what it feels like when someone looks

at your face and thinks you’re someone else. In graduate school

a teacher called me by another woman’s name with not even

brown skin, but what you might call a brown name. That sting

took years to overcome, but I got over it and here

I am with a name that’s at the front of this object, a name

I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.

I purchased the first edition of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings in 1969 in the college book store. I still weep when I read and re-read the chapter depicting a rural country store with one radio and black people from the area huddled around the radio listening to Joe Louis become the heavyweight champion “of the world.” What that meant for them that night is difficult to imagine. The chapter concludes, “It would be an hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home. Those who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town. It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.” [p132]

We try to sum this all up in a day, a week or a month. Who are we kidding? We wake up each morning to more stories of White Nationalism. More stories of Klan marches. More stories of mass shootings, mass incarcerations. More stories of racist graffiti. In the wake of the El Paso shooting and other white supremacist-motivated attacks, just recently the Department of Homeland Security has added white supremacy to its list of domestic terrorism threats, marking the first time since the creation of the department post-9/11 that it has emphasized white nationalist domestic terrorism as a threat on par with that posed by foreign groups.

Can a year of reading literature by other-than-white people make a change? The kind of change we still hope a day, a week or a month might make? I try to imagine, as the Hebrew Prophets urge us to imagine, what the world could be like if we would realize we are all sisters and brothers. There is no such thing as race. That all people are created equal. That we really can love our neighbor – and our enemies. Black history is our history. Is our story. Until we know our story, the whole story, how can we even be reconciled within ourselves, let alone among our selves? We need to hear one another’s stories to be reconciled. We need to listen other voices.

“…So, when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” – Matthew 5: 23-24

I have to wonder sometimes: How do we dare to come to the altar of the Lord with so much left un-reconciled?

The Slowdown – Tracy K Smith – 320 How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This

Essence

Where are we? Who are we? Why are we here? What are we meant to be doing? How are we to go about this thing we call life? These are the elemental questions that humans have been pondering for thousands of years. These, says Huston Smith in his classic book, The World’s Religions, are the basic questions that form the basis of all human religious yearnings.

There are many voices surrounding us on all sides claiming to answer these questions for us – in effect telling us what to do. Yet, we pray: “Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.” We seek freedom and abundance, yet most of us remain enslaved, bonded, to three verbs: “to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual – even on the religious – plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life p 20]

We seek to know the essence of our Being – what it means to be truly human. Jesus offers what we mistakenly believe to be metaphors: we are salt and light – and as such we are capable of fulfilling all that God requires of us as laid out in commandments and reminders from prophets. Prophets. Who were and are poets.

Like Isaiah who helps us to imagine what it really means to observe a fast: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly… Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

Some five hundred years later Matthew’s Jesus confirms, our light, the light of Christ, the light of God’s purpose, shines brightest when we do just these things. [Matthew 25:31-46] This is the essence of our Being. This is why we are here in a world in desperate need of more light. This is how to fulfill our Being light – by reconciliation. By striving for justice and peace and dignity for all people – not some people, not most or a lot of people.

This is what it means to be the salt of the earth. Salt. Another poet of our age, May Sarton writes:

Consider the mysterious salt:

In water it must disappear.

It has no self. It knows no fault.

Not even sight may apprehend it.

No one may gather it or spend it.

It is dissolved and everywhere.

But, out of water into air,

It must resolve into a presence,

Precise and tangible and here.

Faultlessly pure, faultlessly white,

It crystallizes in our sight

And has defined itself to essence.

[In Time Like Air, 1958]

She goes on to say that Love is just as mysterious, and that “In time like air is essence stated.” Jesus is calling us to be Love like Salt – it is to make up the very essence of who we are and why we are here. We come from Love. We return to Love. And Love is all around. Should we forget this elemental essence of our existence, we are made up of a mixture of salt water and stardust – a mixture of light and salt. Funny how the ancient wisdom of Isaiah and Jesus suddenly coalesces with the discovery of our origins in science!

The Apostle Paul calls us to consider what it means to be “truly human” in his Corinthian correspondence: “…we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.” [I Corinthians 2:1-12]

Yet, the “rulers of this age” continue to keep us busy Wanting, Having and Doing; Craving, Clutching and Fussing “on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual – even on the religious – plane,” until we are kept in perpetual unrest.” The secret and hidden wisdom of God calls us to recall the essence of life, the essence of our being made of salt and stardust, is to remind us where we come from, where we are going, and what we are meant to be doing if anything at all, which all revolves around Love – restoring justice, peace and dignity for all people in a world that too often wants us to believe it is every man, woman and child for themselves. This is why Underhill calls us to stop all else and take time to simply Be – for it is in taking time to recollect the essence of being “truly human” that we are set free to be who we are meant to be and remember what we are meant to be doing.

The elements of creation like salt, water, light and stardust - acts of kindness and love for all creatures great and small - define the very essence of who we are and whose we are, which Jesus sums up in just a few words about salt and light. When we live lives of justice, peace and dignity for all people and all of creation, says the poet Isaiah, “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly.”

There is healing from all that seeks to keep us in a state of perpetual unrest. The prophet imagines what that looks like. The apostle calls us to remember what it means to be truly human. Jesus reminds us of our essential essence: what it means to be the salt of the Earth, and the light that shines upon and for others, all others, so that they might join us in giving all glory to the God whose property is always to have mercy; to be set free and given the abundant life as it is made known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

http://www.languageisavirus.com/may-sarton/read_in_time_like_air.php#.Xj6acmhKjIU

I Am Now the Old Man

Waiting. We may as well acknowledge, most of us are waiting for something. Often, we do not know exactly what we are waiting for, but suspect it will be a game changer, a life changer, some sort of new beginning. Yet, some something inside of us hopes or even knows that when it arrives, we will know it is here. I suspect our hope is that Julian of Norwich (1342-ca 1416) is right when she says, “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.”

Just ask Simeon [Luke 2:22-40]. We are told he was righteous, devout, and was waiting for the consolation of Israel. As in the time of the prophet Malachi, the priests in the Temple were becoming lax, lazy and indifferent to their duties. The people were negligent in their support of the temple. Social injustice was rampant, especially since the beginning of the Roman tyranny. And people doubted God’s love. Malachi promised the day would come when all would be purified like gold and restored to order [Malachi 3:1-4].

Simeon had felt the Spirit-Breath of God rest upon him. It was revealed that he would not die before the Lord God’s anointed would appear in Jerusalem. It was forty days after the birth of Jesus. It was time for the boy to be presented to God and redeemed. And it was time for the purification after childbirth for the boy’s mother. The boy’s parents could have sent in offerings, but chose to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and to the Temple. They could not afford the offering of a sheep, so they offered two birds, the offering of he poor of the land.

Simeon could see that this was a faithful couple, and that the child was the one for whom he had been waiting. We cannot imagine his joy! For this child represented new light for all the world, and relief for the people of Israel. Simeon would be released from his waiting and watching. His life and his mission is fulfilled. But imagine, some stranger, an old man waiting outside the Temple, and as you enter to offer the two birds, this same old man takes your newborn child in his arms and begins to sing. What is he doing?

The parents, however, are amazed at what was being said about their little boy. The old man blesses the parents, and then, turning to Mary says, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed-- and a sword will pierce your own soul too." Before anyone could ponder these words comes an old woman, Anna, 84 years-old, most of those a widow, and also waiting in Jerusalem fasting and praying night and day. She, like the old man, begins to praise God and proclaims to all within the sound of her voice that this child would bring about the redemption of Jerusalem!

For all of us who wait for the world to be turned right-side-up again, we ought to be like the old man and old woman in Jerusalem that day whenever we see a young child. We need to see the potential for a better life, the tremendous potential that resides in each and every child.

When we lived in Connecticut, next door to the rectory and church was a barn converted into a house where Em Tramposch and his wife Jane lived. Em was a nurseryman. He propagated life. At one time he had acres of greenhouses behind the church. Now he had one greenhouse where every morning he sat at his bench, propagating ground covers – vinca, pachysandra and the like – one small cutting at a time while listening to Patsy Cline. I used to enjoy spending an hour or so every now and then talking to Em, admiring his patient work ethic, and absorbing his wisdom.

When we had moved from Maryland to Monroe, CT, we had boxes of perennials, especially day lilies another friend had raised, on the truck. The rectory was not ready, so the boxes sat on the truck in sub-freezing weather for a week or so. Em slowly thawed them out and saved all our frozen plants and nursed them all winter until we could plant them in the spring. That was 1989 and we still have some of those plants in our garden to this day.

Near the end of our time up there, Em had cancer, and was spending his final days lying in a hospital bed in their living room with Jane attending to him day and night. The day after Cerny was born we immediately took her over for Em to see. Like Simeon he reached up, took her in his arms and cradled her beside him for what seemed like a glorious eternity. He smiled. Her full name is Anna Cerny. It was the first time this episode in Luke ever made sense to me – life going out, life coming in. Hope fulfilled. All was well, all was well, all manner of thing was well in that moment Anna Cerny was cradled in Em’s arms, and in his smile. On the day Em died a bird flew into his daughter’s kitchen, looked at her for a few moments, and then flew out the door. She called Jane and found out that when the bird was in her kitchen was the moment her father had died. But that’s another story altogether. Or, is it?

Last May, I arrived at hospital to see our first grandchild, Matthew Moore Kudler, affectionately known as Mo. For a few moments I got to hold him in my arms. Is there anything at all like holding a newborn in your arms no matter whatever else is going on in Washington, D.C, around the world, or anywhere else in the vast expanse of interstellar space or on our fragile island home that spins around a star once every 365 days? Now at every opportunity I get, I hold that child in my arms, until one day I realize, I now am the old man. I am Simeon waiting to see the Lord’s salvation. I am the Anna who begins to praise and sing to anyone who will listen, “Here he is, here is a new child of God, give thanks and know that all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well!” I am the old man! I now have a deeper knowledge of what put that smile on Em Tramposch’s face; what gave him the strength to reach out and take tiny Anna Cerny in his arms and cradle her, holding her tight beside him, knowing that something of his patient and waiting spirit, the same Spirit-Breath that had rested on him long ago, would rest upon her all the days of her life. Lifelong propagator of life, he could depart in peace.

Do we see, sisters and brothers? We are all Simeon and Anna. We are all Em Tramposch. They all help me to see, I am now the old man! This story in Luke that can seem strange and even bizarre means to tell us that God uses simple souls to do much good for all humankind. The Holy Spirit employs ordinary men and women, even infants, as His instruments to bear witness to Jesus, his ideals, his actions and his teachings. God’s Spirit-Breath reveals the presence of the Lord to us when we are receptive and eager to receive new life. In these stories we are meant to recognize the Spirit-Breath of God rests within each of us and within others. All others. Simeon, Anna and Em Tramposch know this and show us how to actively and faithfully wait.  For, “they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” [Isaiah 40:31] Waiting. All of us are waiting for something.

February 2, The Feast of Old Folks! We all can be like Simeon, Anna, and Em Tramposch and proclaim to others that, “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well.”