In the midst of all the bad news and worry, it was wonderful to be present to celebrate something good and hopeful - the rededication of the Holy Apostles Mission House, now not only fully ADA-accessible and kitted out with gorgeous colorful new spaces but boasting a bright new entrance. Assorted political representatives joined the bishop to mark the occasion, a rededication also of the kind of community so sorely needed at this juncture.
We sang two pieces by Francis Poulenc in church today. One of them, "Salve Regina," I remembered from the first time I encountered Poulenc's sacred music (in a Nacht der Musik performance in a neogothic church in Braunschweig years ago!), and its weird loveliness floored me again.
But singing it today I was overwhelmed in a different way, too. Many of us have been seeking ways to challenge the demonic machismo of white Christian nationalism. This isn't the God of the Bible, we cry, not how Jesus lived. Having moved from the Roman Catholic to the Episcopal Church, however it hadn't occurred to me that what we needed - who we need - is Mary. Protestantism's discomfort with the feminine (including the femininity of God and Jesus) is part of the problem...
Fun fact: The motet is dated "Noizay mai 1941," the very time at which Poulenc helped found the anti-fascist Front National des Musiciens.
Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).
The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all.
I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now?
We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?
Today's was a short poem by Mary Oliver, suitably entitled "Praying."
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
The first reader/commenter pronounced this was the "New York City poem" she'd been looking for! She'd thought she was the only person who paid attention to vacant lots. Others appreciated "just / pay attention" and "this isn't a contest" and "a doorway / into thanks" and the quiet miracle of "another voice." I reflected on how "a few / small stones" prefigure the push to "patch // a few words together." (I tend to be the animist in this group, seeing our human feelings and noticings and doings anticipated in the more-than-human world.) But all of us found ourselves thinking about the poetry of overlooked, perhaps unbeautiful city scenes as "silence[s] in which / another voice may speak."
What about those ugly piles of dirty snow, someone mentioned, and I had to share that I find them beautiful, have a phoneful of images of them - and shared two you've seen (the second and third from here). The unexpected multimedia turn was warmly appreciated. "One of those could be something a gallery in Chelsea," the organizer enthused. As I tried to articulate how hard it was not to sense design and intention in the way seeds and twigs and grit were lined up as the snow melted, the initial reader/commenter had an epiphany: all the things that wind up in the snow are distributed on the ground in a new way as it melts.
patch // a few stones together and don't try / to make them elaborate !
And it was fun to watch it from the side, rather than be part of it, as I have been for nine years: a three-year term on vestry, and then thrice two years as one of the church's two wardens.
We've been through a lot in that time, from the calling of a new rector to the zoom-diaspora disruptions of the pandemic to a current capital campaign updating our physical plant, and it was nice to have a ring-side seat ... though really the wardens' place is inside the ring! At a diocesan wardens' conference and then again at last summer's CCD (College for Congregational Development), I learned that my ride has been unusually smooth. In demographically challenged or less well-run congregations, and without the kind of managerial support we are afforded by the professional staff of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, there's more and harder work for wardens to do.
I had an earlier stint in the lay leadership, a term on vestry from 2010-13, as we went through an earlier clergy transition. Reading my reflections on the end of that chapter (thank you, blog!), I realize I've metabolized all the transitions we witnessed then, as, indeed, I've already metabolized those of this longer stint.
At that point I reflected that successful change is made possible by the continuity in what isn't changing - space, community, liturgy, polity - whether those are better understood as inertia or momentum. I'd like to think my wardenship has contributed to steady momentum! (Space, community and liturgy have all shifted over these nine years, too.) As we confirmed at CCD, Holy Apostles is doing well as Episcopal congregations go, and the imminent completion of the rebuilt Mission House will open further new doors.
In any case, I've done my time. Grateful others are there to take on the work.
For several us it was a return after a few weeks holidaying with family, and catching up we registered how frighteningly the world is changing around us. Our young tenor lead was in Colombia for his grandfather's funeral when the US attacked neighboring Venezuela. An alto told that her two daughters, school music teachers in Minneapolis, reported zoom classes as public schools, which had already instituted "ICE drills," had closed: students were too scared to show up. The soprano lead described herself as shattered by the realization that the government could just kill you and claim you were a terrorist.
The choir director suggested we might, as a body, join a demonstration sometime, an idea we all welcomed. In such terrifying times, the tenor reflected with a wisdom beyond his years, "what can we do but sing?"
Happen to have seen the Brooklyn Museum's version of Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1834) in their Visible Storage yesterday (we'd gone for the unconvincing "Monet and Venice" blockbuster), just in time for the Old Testament reading for Advent 2. As ever, I'm caught short that it nowhere says "the lion shall lie down with the lamb," but this time I was reeling at all the predatory pairings it does mention.
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed[b] together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9 They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9, NRSV)
This year, since we are in a time of predators' revachanchism (cf. esp: Hegseth, Pete), it came to me that none of these pairings is arbitrary. Each must recall a time when a leopard actually killed a kid, a bear mauled a cow, a lion attacked an ox, children were killed by snakes. (It was like the moment you realize that the curious details in monastic and legal codes like the Vinaya and Benedict's Rule are reports of actual episodes.) The sheer volume of cases overwhelms, as does the almost deluvian mixed metaphor of a mountain covered by the sea.
We had a guest preacher in church today, who focused on this reading to complement the gospel account of John the Baptist's call to repent - for the kingdom of God is near. Repentance means turning away, she explained, but you can't change course unless you can imagine an alternative. It seems more urgent than ever to imagine a world without normalized, even celebrated violence. Delightfully, she had learned to feel the nearness of the kingdom through reading Ed Yong's wonderful An Immense World.
Just a pretty pic from Holy Apostles. I'd not been by the north wall of the transept before (during the rebuild of our parish house, the rector's office has been moved into this space, which used to be a small chapel,
over which this ship of faith hung), so hadn't ever had occasion to notice that the clerestory windows above the nave have captions. The one up across the nave from this chapel reads: "I saw the spirit ascending."
The bulletin for our church's Sunday services keeps getting thicker. What started as a brief section on ways one might support those affected by the war in Palestine/Israel (with QR codes) has grown and grown.
I wasn't able to solve the mystery of the Paul of the Cross stained glass windows - the manager told me they had been brought over at some point from some other Passionist campus, he thought maybe in New Jersey but wasn't sure. (I guess nobody else has ever asked.) But I do have a pretty good idea of what CCD (the College for Congregational Development) is, now that I've completed the first half of its curriculum!
We're Episcopalians, but over the course of five intense days I encountered a little of the self-mortification celebrated by Catholics in images like this scourge named AMOR, from one of the mystery windows. This was in part because this intensive really was intense - a schedule from 7:30 to 7:30 each day, with little in the way of breaks. Moving back and forth between plenary and group settings hurrying through complex material, peppered with many moments of "talk to two people near you about X (always something personal) for three minutes," we were all overwhelmed.
But some of us were more overwhelmed than others, or overwhelmed in different ways: this was in fact one of the things we learned. Each of us had to take two "typology" tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory (ICS). While presented with caveats ("this is just one typology," "each of us is all the things, some just take more effort"), we were encouraged publicly to identify with the indicated type - and so all our subsequent interactions were inflected by awareness of the dynamics of differences in orientation.
For what it's worth, these tests suggested I'm sort of an "introvert" and a little less gung-ho about "direct" and "emotionally expressive" speech than many other participants.
For some with similar sensibilities, the garrulous form of this intensive was bruising. Constant talking with many interlocutors is draining rather than energizing, and loads of new information without quiet time for processing overwhelming. Some of my fellow participants were clearly suffering.
My overwhelm peaked on Wednesday after an initially giddy pleasure at just how much was going on. I felt I was at capacity, wasn't taking much more in, and then a poorly designed group activity for which I was the designated facilitator - its already too-short time cut further by the preceding plenary's going overtime - really stressed me out (though my groupmates said they didn't notice!). Thursday was better, in part because the organizers, having learned in a feedback session that not everyone enjoyed the speed-dating tempo, ventilated the agenda a little. (There was even ten minutes set aside for quietly writing down your thoughts!) And today was just coasting... whee!
Having made it through, I am grateful at all we endeavored and grateful to have learned in practice what I've long known in theory: that there are many learning styles. The overwhelm contributed to the sense of achievement at the end, and learning why I was particularly exhausted by it useful self-knowledge... along with the recognition that others were thrilling to what we found tiring. I'll be more attentive to these issues in my teaching - as well, surely, as interactions at church.
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As for the content - what did we (start to) learn? The joys and stresses and overwhelm were all part of it. How do organizations - in this case churches - remain "faithful, healthy and effective" in often overwhelming conditions?
At right is the only of many flow-chart diagrams explicitly about religion. The rest were about how to build and maintain trust, how to gather data, how to manage and direct change, how to resolve conflict, etc. This curriculum, evidently new to all of us (laity and clergy, and not a few members of diocesan staffs, including three bishops!), strikes me as the sort of thing taught in business and management schools. The learning was through case study discussions, "learning through practice." But nothing was just theoretical. All of us were in this congregational-organization development space already, whether we knew it or not... and by the end of it, we all knew it.
The program winds up with a week next summer, but in the meantime the teams from various congregations are tasked with implementing a small-scale "intervention" employing one of the models we got to know. At the same time, conversations have started across congregations, and between congregational and diocesan communities, and will deepen in the shared language of CCD. I'm happy to be part of it. My tenure as warden at Holy Apostles ends in January; perhaps I'll find a place in some of the diocesan initiatives. All "types" got something to give!
For the rest of the day, all our thoughts were with him and his community - and all our communities in this time of peril.
He was able to rejoin us at the retreat center in Queens by the time of Evening Prayer. He assured us that everyone in his community was safe and accounted for, but deeply shaken. And all is not well.
What happened, according to a local news source:
unmasked agents handcuffed an otherwise unidentified male—possibly someone seeking refuge at the church. “We were advised,” wrote [Tarrytown Police John] Chief Barbalet, that they did not have a judicial warrant. Who the individual was, what his legal status was and where he was taken are all questions left unanswered, pending a response from ICE’s media information office in Washington.
Next adventure! As part of a team from my church, I'm spending the next week at the Thomas Berry retreat center in Queens as a student in the intensive College for Congregational Development. (We all committed to going back for another week next summer.) A project of the Episcopal Church, CCD brings together the fields of congregational and organization development. I'll tell you more about both of them when I have a better grasp. For starters the 40 or so of us (mostly from the Diocese of New York, which is sponsoring this cycle) populated this iceberg with visible and invisible challenges to the vitality and sustainability of congregations "of all sizes, locations and conditions." Organization development, we were promised, will bring the hidden factors "above the water line." Icebergs beware!
As another terrifying day of the carnage presidency unfolded this morning, our rector received applause after a sermon. We don't do applause (except for visitors sometimes) - that's not the point of preaching! - but it's happened once before recently (on Easter), and perhaps for the same reason. Both were characteristically rich and erudite sermons, but I think the applause was for the gift of forthrightly speaking the truth. After an account of the ways our liturgy reminds us that God keeps God's promises, a pause, then this:
It’s intellectually dishonest and spiritually insulting to insist that all is well when all is quite patently not well. Given the destruction all around us I imagine that recently many of us have had some version of a conversation that includes the question, “how do we come back from this.” Understandable. And, with all due respect, our faith urges us to ask something different. Because bad times, good times, times of groovy neutrality - we never go back, ever. So the question before all of us becomes how do we move into something new...
Acknowledging hard truths - not just about the destruction unleashed all around, but about the reality that we can't make it go away - allows of true hope.
And the next question, for people of faith, is how are we being called to go further and faster and more compassionately than we ever thought that we could in order to move with God around a space that provides, insists on, life for everyone?
Out of pain and grief come urgency and resolve. In response to destruction there can only be creation. Yet the work requires more than we think we're capable of. Do not the wicked hold all the cards? But today is Pentecost, and she ended by quoting some words of Annie Dillard's (which an internet search informs me are favorites also of Rowan Williams):
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.
Whoosh.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (London, 1984), 40-41
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Today's gospel was the parable of the prodigal son. The preacher had a novel twist on its familiar reproof of the elder brother unwilling to celebrate the return of his wayward brother, who had been presumed lost. The elder son had a "scarcity mindset"! But the father, with an "abundance mindset," was the truly prodigal one - prodigal meaning extravagantly generous. (We'd left the younger brother behind by this point.) We should learn to be prodigal too, as our father is prodigal with forgiveness and love!
But there was a second sermon pushing through this one. The preacher actually began by telling us the news that a super-expensive house in the District of Columbia had just been bought by a shell company, presumably for our unelected megabillionnaire copresident, but that what it cost him was the equivalent of about $60 for a typical middle class person. And at the far end of the retelling of the prodigal son story, she mused about how the drama of the father and his two sons might have looked to their hired hands and the unnamed women of the household (she didn't mention the slaves), and then imagined a version of the story in which the father's "prodigal" largesse extended to everyone. It was all rather confusing. Was she imagining a redistributionist megabillionaire God?
But then this has always been - as it’s supposed to be - a challenging story. Today, perhaps primed by the sermon's prologue, I was stuck on the word "squander" in the description of the younger son's "dissolute living" on claiming his part of the inheritance, which I could not unstick from my sense of what the current regime is doing with everything I hold dear. Is fury at the wanton destruction of moral and cultural capital a scarcity mindset? Must I pray for their repentance and reconciliation, and repent for my own self-righteous squandering of fraternal care?
Went to the spring concert of the Stonewall Chorale last night, a 47-year old group (the nation's oldest gay and lesbian choir) which rehearses and performs in our church. The centerpiece of the program was Sarah Kirkland Snider's 2018 "Mass for the Endangered," to poems by Nathaniel Bellows. It was interesting music but the most joyous thing about the occasion was seeing our church space full to overflowing, a reminder that this precious place means so much to so many. I've said for years that part of its power comes from the many activities and communities it provides a sanctuary for, and it was good to experience this anew as construction makes much of the campus temporarily inaccessible. The Chorale managed just fine without a green room and the crowd seemed unperturbed at the porta-potties outside. Their director informed us that we'd soon have a beautiful new and more accessible entrance.
So glad this morning to find this flag flying at church. This was timely and also necessary. The current regime's vicious attempt to erase trans people from public life led the National Park Service, which maintains the website of the National Register of Historic Places, to replace "LGBT" and "LGBTQ" with the stunted "LGB" across its pages - including the page dedicated to our church. We will not be party to this cruel inhumanity, and are indeed called by our faith to denounce it. Nobody, certainly not a would-be king who thinks he can name and remake reality by fiat, can erase the divine image in every human being. Trans people are among the most authentic people I have ever known, and the attempt to deny their very existence bespeaks a dangerous fear of the reality of our embodiment and our diversity. A friend quipped: you can't do imago dei without dei.
By coincidence, today's Gospel reading included the words which inspired Bishop Budde's appeal to the newly inaugurated president last month: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36). They come after a formulation of the golden rule:
Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. ..." (Luke 27-30)
This is a hard teaching, especially in a time of hatred, curses and abuse, and our preacher (a seminarian from Union Theological Seminary) reminded us that Jesus' words do not say that injustice is not injustice or not to be fought. Rather, they explain that the only way to bring an end to hatred is through love.
The Old Testament reading offered an example of such forgiving love in Joseph (he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat), whom his jealous brothers had sold into slavery, now an advisor to the Pharaoh. As he reveals himself to them when they come to Egypt pleading for help as their land is in famine, he says
He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors...." (Gen 45:4-7)
I'd not heard, or noticed, this as an illustration of the call to love those who persecute us but it's a doozy. The ultimate aim must be not just justice but reconciliation. With those who would define us out of existence! Hard as it is even to imagine, may such a day come soon... But this passage was also a sobering reminder that our troubles have only begun: "there are five more years of famine to come" (45:11).
How important, in such times as these, are communities like this one, affirming the God-given dignity of all God's creations, and giving us a place from which to live that affirmation.
Our church is embarking on a construction project. Actually, it's been in the works for years, and on the to do list for decade. Long referred to as "the elevator project," it's grown to involve a renovation of the whole "Mission House" which abuts the church on the south side, all of whose spaces will now not only be ADA accessible but handsomely redesigned.
Advent 1 already? Wasn't Thanksgiving just five minutes ago?!
At least we got to sing a hymn I've always loved - and a religion of trees hymn to boot! The writer of the text is unknown, but it dates back at least three centuries. What all did apple trees then connote?
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