Once I crossed the Sierra Madres
with a bus driver named Arturo
who had one arm
and a stick-shift bus.
Sometimes between the
the shift and wheel Arturo’s
good right arm would
pause to make the sign
of the cross toward a portrait
of the Virgin that banged
the windshield from a string.
The lesson here is that
never is a miracle more than
beating the percentages.
Perhaps Arturo still is
waving down the
twisted camino
at each shrine
along the way.
“What’s your hurry?”
always he will ask—
“Do you think you
don’t have time to
find your grave?”
Over winter solstice, I watched my father tending to KG, his first grandchild, with unconditional love. We had just celebrated her one year birthday and she was beginning to cruise around with increased confidence. As she found herself standing in front of my mother’s highly breakable ceramic nativity scene, KG began to methodically hand each figure to my father. He gratefully received them from her and moved them to another shelf.
My sister, the mother of the much adored child said, “No, KG. No touch.” My dad just stayed there, receiving each figurine from the determined Katie Grace. “I’ll catch them,” he said. “I don’t really tell her no.”
Now I confess, my sister and I both nearly fell off the sofa in that moment. Who was this man gently hovering over his grandchild with a blissful air of yes, the same man who was forever telling us no as children?
“ No! Kristy quit! No, no! Deanna don’t!”
I mean sometimes we thought those were our names: Deanna Don’t and Kristy Quit.
Did someone body snatch our father?
Upon further reflection, I think it is maybe a little less complicated than alien body snatching. I think my father has had an epiphany about unconditional love.
The way that child lights up every time her Pop Pop walks into the room. How she reaches for him no matter who is holding her.
It is powerful to be loved that way. It breaks open our hearts. It tells us we are enough and calls us to love others with broken open hearts. Radically inclusive, unjudging hearts.
Beloveds, may you all know that you are loved the way KG loves her Pop Pop. Unquestioned, unjudged. Loved. Beloved. Yearned toward. Reached for. Held.
May this knowledge continually break open our hearts so that we can experience the divine love of the universe and shine the light of this love onto each other.
May this season of Epiphany bring you not only the sweetness of King Cake – may it also bring you the sweetness of receiving the unconditional love of the universe.
Early in ministry, there are skills to be learned. Preaching, counseling, the coffee-hour nod that says, “Yes, I’m listening,” even if it’s not true. Oh, and another one. Boredom. Overcoming it? No. Letting it pull you down below where you can breathe, and then holding you there. For hours. It’s important to know how to be there, in boredom. But for me, it was something that didn’t come easy. Some skills will take practice.
Apprentice clergy go through a form of ritual hazing known as Clinical Pastoral Education. Here’s how it works. For a few months, full-time, you’re a hospital chaplain. Your mission? To offer support when situations get bleak. To help people face pivotal, primal questions just at the moment something vital is being torn from their lives. And also? Despite the plastic badge that says “Chaplain,” you have not the foggiest how a person would do this. Like when someone lifts her tear-stained face, and says, “Why would God let this happen?” And, in response, you decide now is the time to fetch everyone coffee.
Later, with other glassy-eyed lambs of the chaplaincy, you gather in a conference room with a senior chaplain, to think about what you have done. You do this through something they call a “Verbatim.” It’s just like it sounds—a blow-by-blow you write up of some fumbling interaction you’ve just had with a patient. The purpose is to reveal how very far your attempts are from whatever it is Jesus might have done, had he himself served a turn as a summertime chaplain. With a Verbatim, the lambs become wolves, tearing each word apart. Why, for instance, when the conversation turned to cancer, did you launch into a long story about the time your aunt thought she had leprosy, but it only turned out to be a bad rash on her neck?
Still, basic incompetence has never stopped me, and it would not this time. I got myself assigned to the edgiest units. Ones with names like “Critical” and “Emergency.” No hang-nails for me. No mere broken limbs. Give me “touch-and-go.” Give me “hours to live.” Throw in the surprise arrival of an estranged sister, and I’d be all a-tingle. I strolled the halls, seeking crisis. Buttered up the tough nurses, so they’d let me know when anything truly awful went down. The family room outside surgery was a good place to find trouble. The family room is where the dutiful adult children endure their hopeless grown siblings as loved ones off somewhere undergo God knows what. The dutiful ones keep information in a folder, and they keep track of the time. The hopeless ones are tear-stained wrecks, sprawled on a sofa that’s strewn with wet Kleenex. With luck, they’ve been drinking. Here’s how a chaplain can stir up some business. Walk into a family room, perch on a chair and murmur, “So, tell me, how is everyone?” Like fish in a barrel, friends. Fish in a barrel.
As we breathlessly parsed the Verbatims, the chaplain supervisor rarely ever spoke. He hailed from the great state of New Hampshire, and was a motionless model of the state’s famed reserve. One got the sense that you could have taken a bucket of ice water filled with dead mackerel and dumped it over his head, and the most he would do would be to glance out the window, and emit a slight sigh. It was clear, however, from the way he would occasionally purse his lips in the midst of my Verbatims, that he was of the opinion that a person could stand to tone it down just a hair. Of course, those dry lips that pursed and un-pursed could have meant anything. In the absence of a bucket of ice water, and the way the hospital air-conditioning sucked all the moisture right out of the air, it could have been simply that the poor man was just parched.
In any case, my ministry was one of inserting myself where I wasn’t strictly required. For example, a sober conversation with the heartbroken family of an eighteen-year-old about whether the time had come, finally, to turn off the machines that had kept their boy alive. Already, the small room held the hospital’s medical ethicist, a representative from the organ donation company, and another chaplain named Frank. Did they benefit, as well, from my luminous presence, the guttural tones of my active listening? Because the answer to that question was not yet clear to me, I made sure to be there. Up in critical care, I appeared in the room of a man who was dying alone. He was beyond speech by now. Conversation was out. Companionable silence is something I can do for two minutes, three tops. At last, I hit upon an idea. What the old fellow probably needed was for me to hum hymns. So, that’s what I did. “Old Rugged Cross.” “Amazing Grace.” And, even though it was the middle of summer, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” In my defense, I did hum it slow so it came out a dirge.
Later, in the Verbatim, someone gently mentioned the effect that even a brief outburst of humming can have on the nerves on a typical day, let alone in the hours one is attempting to peaceably die. A otherwise kindly soul said that, in fact, my humming might have helped to hasten the poor man’s demise. Another wondered whether the nurses who had popped in and out all afternoon might have been not actually smiling approvingly at the humming young chaplain, as I had reported, but instead only smirking.
An old friend says I went into ministry for the second-hand thrills. The chance for a front-row seat to life’s wreckage. As if I were a ghoul. Which, years later, still seems off-base. I went into ministry for a regular paycheck. God knows I was not ever going to be any good for much else. You know how all the want ads say the employer is seeking a “detail person?” Well, me, that is not. I once spent ten minutes looking for my glasses only to realize that I was wearing them. My only talents are whistling and catching peanuts tossed into the air in my mouth. Besides, since I was a kid, people have sought me out to tell me their problems, and—God forgive me—through it all, I have been fascinated. Fascinated by how people can manage to get themselves into such an intractable mess. And fascinated by how they can get themselves out. Or else learn to live with it. Or how sometimes they learn to live with it, but then are transported out of trouble through no effort at all of their own, in a way that some will call grace, and others call luck. If there were bleachers on the sidelines of human society, I would enjoy sitting there, watching. Well, watching and cheering. Taking honest delight. Perhaps with buttered popcorn. Yes, I had advice, but I offered it like anyone sitting up in the bleachers who calls out advice—with the full confidence that it will be ignored. By the end of my twenties, it had dawned on me that, to get by in this world, I would probably need to get paid doing something. And ministry seemed easier than teaching kindergarten. So, I was in. And, ok, maybe it promised a front-row seat. Not to the wreckage. But to what stirs within it.
There came the day, late in the summer, when nothing was happening in Critical Care. Nothing in Emergency. I was bored, restless. So, I wandered up to other units, outside my assignment. In one room, a woman lay dying, her family gathered around. But the nice-enough priest sitting there didn’t seem to grasp that this was his moment to shine. I forget how I convinced him, but soon, I’d replaced him, intent on marching the whole family through all the stages of grief, perhaps twice, before the old woman had even taken her last dying breath. Was I badgering these poor souls? Who can say. But, whatever the case, I was summoned for a chat with the chaplain supervisor.
He said that if I went into parish ministry without learning how to be bored, there would come a Tuesday afternoon when things would be slow, and I would stir trouble up out of my own need for action. For the rest of the shift, he said, I was to walk the halls, but to visit with no one. To practice being bored. For me, that afternoon, ghosting the halls without purpose, was more difficult than responding to people who’d been hurt in a wreck. It took some time before I was able to breathe. Walking by rooms where people seemed upset, especially, was like walking by the donuts at a Weight Watchers meeting. Just one? But I couldn’t. And, I will tell you that, as I walked, I realized that, even without an eager chaplain on hand, people would continue to suffer and also to find ways to lessen their suffering. They would die, and the ones they left behind would figure out how to live. Sometimes, these things would happen more easily if I were not there. Sometimes, my absence helped more than my presence. The Taoists have a word called “wu-wei,” the power of inaction. It is there when one is in harmony with the Tao. With the way of all things. Another person might say, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” As if there were a power beyond the merely human.
For over ten years, I have served the same congregation in the same little town. Have I stirred up trouble? Oh, yes. Ask my people. They’ll tell you. But, here’s the thing: without ongoing study in the practice of boredom, without learning wu-wei, a ministry composed purely of action could have made things dramatically worse.
Sometimes it takes a lie
to keep a religion. “It’s
merely a game,” they
told the priests–“how
we fast for days, then
cut a tall pole to climb.
How we costume and
dance. It means nothing,
how we chant in circles
and bleed chickens.
How we climb and fly
round and around in air.
Come, watch–it’s only
a game that gives us joy.”
(And, they didn’t say,
aloud, keeps the earth
going well, returned
to its right turning again.)
“Merely a game we play,
round and around in
thirteen and thirteen turns.
It’s a game–come watch,
priests. Be amazed” (how
sometimes it takes a lie
to keep your religion.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danza_de_los_Voladores
As the Community Minister for the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, I spend a lot of my time immersed in the injustice of layers of oppression. New Orleanians still trying to get back into their homes over 8 years after they were flooded out, transgender women forced to be housed with and often abused by men in prison and in shelters, a football field of wetlands lost in this state every half hour … Each day there’s more. Family diagnosed with chronic diseases, babies born too soon, people die… and.
AND Christmas comes each year in this country, whether you celebrate it or not. While I often find myself in the position of protesting the dominion of the dominant culture, I don’t fight Christmas. I choose to enjoy Christmas. I think that Christmas can be sweetly subversive.
Hey World – people are ill and homeless and jobless and imprisoned and killed! For most of the year, most of the world ignores these hard truths, pretending that the poor are poor because of poor choices instead of acknowledging a system of oppression that radically tilts the playing field towards some –and away from others.
But come Christmas, pretending stops – at least for a moment. Suddenly we collect coats and toys and feel good stories about providing shelter and hope to families down on their luck.
Suddenly we tell a story about a great leader born in questionable circumstances, sharing his birthday crib with the donkey’s dinner, soon exiled to the immigrant life in Eygpt with his family.
Rumors of premarital sex, poverty, immigration … you name it, the Christmas story goes there…
And tells us – joy to the world. Hope has come.
Let there be peace and kindness and respect among all creation.
It’s a 6th Principle: The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All!
Yes, I know. That’s not exactly how the scriptures or even the carols go.
But I am grateful for the promise of this season…For once a year our deeply embedded cultural story tells the world:
Children are precious.
Where you are born should not predict the quality nor the value of your life.
Women too have the holy within them.
It matters that we bear witness to each other and to the vast brilliance of the universe.
Sometimes knowledge needs to bow to intuition.
Life is a gift, utterly unpredictable, infinitely possible.
There is hope for change.
And where there is hope, friends, there is joy. Beloveds, may there be joy for you and your loved ones today and every days.
I was walking in City Park with a community organizer this week when suddenly we were only the width of the boardwalk away from a Great Egret, its fancy fringe plumes fluttering in the morning breeze. We paused, taking in the beauty, marveling at the unexpected joy of such a close encounter.
A few minutes later, on the other side of the lake path, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a pelican swooping in for breakfast. (With all due apologies to the fish), I clapped my hands in delight when I watched the pelican give the throaty head waggle that signifies success.
And I noticed, as our walk continued, that our conversation had transitioned as we were present to the beauty and wonder of where we were. A talk that had begun with the challenges and frustrations we were facing was giving way to some creative collaboration, some hope, some joy.
May you too find beauty in this world to give you hope and joy, to point the way towards collaboration, community, creative resistance to all that would tell us we are less than, not enough.
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –
Emily Dickinson
“Yule” (jul) means “wheel” in Norse. The Norse looked at this time of year, facing the darkest and longest night, “Mother Night,” as they called it, and told a story of the night the goddess Frigga left her spinning wheel and labored long and hard to give birth to the light of a new year.
Hiding in the Christian advent wreath is Frigga’s wheel. And the mistletoe? Well!
Odin, the All-Father, and his wife Frigga (or Frigg or “Fria” in Old Saxon) had twin sons, Baldur and Hodur (or Tyr,god of war).
Hodur was a dark and moody boy, a cold loner who spoke to no one. His brother Baldur was a beautiful, radiant boy, and all the gods loved him (excepting one, named Loki).
One day Baldur came to his mother and said, “Mother, for these past seven nights, each night I have had a dream, and that dream shows me that I will die, killed by an arrow made from the branch of a tree.”
As you might suspect, Frigga was very, very worried about her darling boy, and went around to all the trees of the wood, speaking to each one of them and imploring them, “Please, whatever you do, please do not kill my lovely boy Baldur.”
And each tree in its turn promised Frigga that no harm would come to him by one of their branches.
But in her worry and haste, Frigga failed to speak to one family of the woods—one tree—the mistletoe, which grows without having its roots in the earth.
And so it was that Loki—the terrible trickster among the gods, and the only one of the gods who resented Baldur’s radiance and cheerfulness—fashioned an arrow of the mistletoe and, going to visit dark Hodur, Loki said, “Here. Try shooting my marvelous bow! Here’s an enchanted arrow. Try shooting it over the roof of the house.”
And so dark Hodur shot the arrow made of mistletoe. And who should it hit, standing on the other side of the roof beam, but Baldur his brother, who bled to death, writhing in the lush green grass.
As you expect, Frigga was inconsolable. She wept and wept and as she wept the nights reflected her mood, growing longer and longer. And soon darkness seized the world.
Her weeping was so terrible that Odin the All-Father at last could stand it no more, and so he saddled up his horse and rode all the way to the domain of the dead. There, he found Baldur and brought him back to the land of the living.
And so it is that in midsummer, in all the lands of the North, on those nights when the light never really goes away, there is great feasting, celebrating the sunny god Baldur, though people know that already, even on the longest of days, Hodur is notching his murderous arrow.
And in the darkest nights of winter we celebrate Baldur’s return to Frigga’s womb, because on the darkest night, called Mother Night, Baldur will be reborn, thus slowly bringing the light and warmth back again.
This is the celebration at Winter Solstice. And we remember Frigga, the great goddess of the hearth and of fertility, each week in English, with “Fri-day,” “Fria’s Day.”
I suspect nearly everyone feels a bit of desperation sometimes, looking out the window at what is supposed to be the afternoon—and it’s dark out there. It’s night. It oppresses, as Emily Dickinson says, “like the heft of cathedral tunes.”
Yes. Winter feels like a really long church service. Baldur is dead—slain by the mistletoe. That wily trickster Loki has won again and darkness and sadness rule the land.
Wouldn’t it be nice this time of year if we had something to look forward to?
Well, by golly, the ancestors thought of that. In lots of different traditions.
All those candles mean . . . something.
Perhaps Odin is saddling up his horse again.
And Mother Night will soon go into labor once again.
Or perhaps it’s a peasant girl from Palestine.
Or Demeter wailing for her lovely daughter Persephone.
Or some other mom perhaps happy to be beating the IRS deadline.
Whatever. Whoever. It’s good—even for the most protesting of Protestants—to celebrate the circles and cycles of time because they mark a symbolic space in the chaos of reality, and add meaning to the passing of our lives.
And meaning . . . in the winter dark, meaning is a good thing.
December 10, 2013
“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” – so begins the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.
Today marks the 65th Anniversary of this visionary document, created shortly after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of massive global violence, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.
The decades since have been filled with violence and atrocities.
And.
And the arc of the universe has bent toward justice.
For at least there is now an international promise of how we know we are called to be together, a First Principle
guideline leading to a Sixth Principle vision.
To paraphrase the G.I. Joe cartoon of my childhood, “Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.”
May this knowing lead to loving, compassionate doing in the next 65 years.
“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, let us intensify our efforts to fulfill our collective responsibility to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people everywhere.” ~UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
In 1642, during the British Civil War, Protestant troops of Cromwell’s New Model Army celebrated taking the city by looting the cathedral at Winchester. Troops used the stained glass windows for target practice and showed their disdain for monarchy and Catholic saints by smashing open crypts and pitching the bones through the stained glass windows. Construction on Winchester Cathedral had begun in 1079 on a site where a Christian church had stood since the 600s.
This was the second iconoclastic spasm in England. The first, three hundred years earlier, had been under the direction of Henry VIII. At that time, medieval statues had been smashed and used for building material. Perhaps the most egregious instance occurred at Canterbury Cathedral, where the shrine to Thomas A Beckett, constructed in 1220, was smashed to dust in 1538. The shrine, destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims, had long stood for the supremacy of religion over the state. Henry was having none of that.
The Protestant iconoclastic spirit traveled to the Western Hemisphere with the Pilgrims and Puritans, who built wooden meeting houses without adornment or symbol.
Religions are funny about symbols. Hebrew law forbade graven images. Muslim art is abstract and Muslims get testy about depictions of Mohammed. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches split over the question of icons. Worn out Torahs are buried. Don’t burn the Koran. And Bibles? Search the web on that one. Protestants are all over the map in relation to religious symbols.
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, where I serve as minister, is a good example of what we might call the ultimate in Protestant protesting. There are no symbols at all in the sanctuary—called in classic humanist fashion an “assembly hall.” Built in 1951 in the International Style of the time, the walls are brick and wood and glass. Cromwell’s New Model Army would find nothing to complain about in the assembly hall. Kings and saints; icons and symbols have all gone out the window. There is even some suspicion of the one image—deliberately left ambitious in the tradition—of Unitarian Universalism, the chalice.
What’s up with religions and symbols? What is it about images and imagination?
It’s easy to forget that for most of human history there were no movies; no TV shows; no photographs. Not even “realistic” art of the sort that developed in the Renaissance. For the most part, realistic representation occurred only in sculpture, a 3D representation.
There is still debate about whether or not audiences ran in terror upon seeing the first motion picture, Lumiere’s “L’arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,” in 1896. Whatever really happened, the human mind began to change when pictures began to move. Previously, movement had occurred only in reality, dreams, or visions. Now, we see moving images everywhere. What has that done to the human mind?
The image, the symbol, is central to human understanding. The McDonald’s “M” speaks to more people than any other in the world. The Mercedes icon is one of the most often stolen objects in the world. We huddle around glowing screens to watch stories unfold.
Even atheists, in the unadorned walls of an assembly hall, imagine a symbol—even if a negative one—called “god.” John H. Dietrich, a minister at the church I serve and one of the originators of “religious humanism,” said, “The human mind invariably confuses the symbol with the thing symbolized.” The implication: mistrust symbols. Yet, oddly, it is not only the most protesting Protestant who believes this. A Byzantine hymn contains these words: “Free me from symbols, from words, that I may discover the signified.” And Hindu thinkers, in their own forest of symbols, said, neti, neti, “not this, not that.”
We may hurl bones through all the windows of stained glass, yet, somehow, as happened at Winchester Cathedral after the Civil War, the windows will be restored. The citizens of Winchester could not afford to repair the windows to their former glory, so they glued the pieces back together as a hodgepodge, a mosaic. The symbol always comes back.
Planned Parenthood of Louisiana hosted a screening of deepsouth last night in honor of World AIDS Day. Filmmaker Lisa Biagiotti joined the panel after the screening and shared that it was the startling statistics of HIV/AIDS in the south, combined with the SILENCE about this reality – in stark contrast to the national story that HIV/AIDS is “under control” – that drew her to create deepsouth. As Elizabeth Pandolfi writes in her review of the film:
Unlike the rest of the nation, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the South has not been controlled and conquered. Instead, it’s rampant and largely invisible. Deaths from HIV/AIDS are 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country. The South also has the highest rate of incarceration, the highest number of uninsured people, the highest rate of STD infection, the highest rate of poverty — and the list goes on. Those Southerners who are HIV positive are still mired in many of the same problems that patients faced during the early years of the disease, from discrimination to lack of access to care.
Born and raised in the southland, I often respond to news like this with a Gina Forsyth song:
Oh, I love it and I hate it
Every now and then berate it
Oh, the sweet and sunny south where I was born
And yet I know the South is simply the identified patient in the United States – where every place is suffering from an illness greater than HIV/AIDS, an illness endemic to the structure of this nation from its creation. The dis-ease of racism.
Panelist Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision,went directly to the soul of the matter when asked what can be done to address HIV/AIDS in the South. Address racism. Address poverty. Address homelessness. Address food access and healthcare access and daycare options. Address the internalized racial inferiority and internalized racial superiority that destroys lives.
Beloveds, in this interdependent web of all existence, nothing exists outside of relationship.
Let us shine the light of our faith on these connections. Let us address the root illnesses of our nation – structural racism, sexism, heterosexism – every –ism that privileges anyone and demeans another for the superiority of a few. If we spend our lives addressing only the symptoms, the next generation will suffer even more from this dis-ease.
Let the SILENCE be broken by a multitude of voices rising up with truths, with stories that remind us we are all in this together – and together, we can heal. Only together can we heal.
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