Episcopal visitation

Our church had its Episcopal Visitation today. The charming new Bishop of New York Matthew Heyd, an extroverted North Carolinian "church geek" who bounces as he speaks, preached from the floor, making eye contact with everyone. (His motto is "the Holy Spirit moves at ground level.") Today's message was just what I needed, too. 

Today's gospel was the one from Mark where Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple, and warns 

“Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray." (Mark 13:5) 

The bishop reminded us that all the gospels were written from a place of trauma, after the destruction of the Temple and at a time when the religious authorities colluded with the Imperial Roman government. But he described it in terms that spoke also to the trauma of us reeling at the subversion of American democracy undertaken by so-called Christians in the recent election. When he said of Titus, the general who oversaw the destruction of the Temple, "part of his celebration in Rome was what he destroyed in Jerusalem," I nearly wept.

The kind of Christianity Bishop Heyd preached, one of inclusion and community and the recognition of Jesus in everyone we meet, is more desperately needed now than ever. It's not always the Episcopal way to call out those who lead astray. Shamefully, our church did not split over human enslavement! We're doing better these days. One of our other diocesan bishops, Allen Shin, is lead author of the recent report from the House of Bishops Theology Committee, The Crisis of Christian Nationalism, which argues that Christian nationalism

is “a white supremacist national ideology that uses the Christian religion as its justification. Thus, it is fundamentally an apostasy that violates the first and the second of the Ten Commandments.” They explain that the ideology “consists of assumptions about white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon nativism, patriarchy, and militarism.” 

Today's sermon was consonant with that witness.

May these and other bishops make clear that there are many kinds of Christianity in this land... No, that's me being a scholar of religion, deferring to people's self-identification. These times call for theology: may these and other bishops make clear that there are many kinds of false Christianity in this land. And not just bishops.

By your leave

Neighborhood colors

Flights of fancy

After happening on some of the 6th Ave panels of the suite of new mosaics in the 14th Street subway station three weeks ago, today

I discovered some of those at 7th Ave, fabulous birds whose every feather is a world! Whose work is this? Apparently one Fred Tomaselli.

Neolojism

New word I'd rather not have learned: broligarchy.

High-callery

Just a leaf from a big callery pear on West 12th Street. From below, the callery pears seem not to have noticed the change of season, their leaves apparently all green and glossy. Only from a distance does one realize their canopies are already a deep burgundy which, on closer inspection beneath the tree, is mostly dramatic reds and blacks.

We'd read about callery pears in David Haskell's The Songs of Trees for today's "Religion of Trees" class. Their leaves are remarkably unscarred by insects because the tree is a hybrid, its progenitor brought to the US from China when existing American pear trees were decimated by a blight, and remains resistant to local bugs. Values have changed since they were introduced, however, Haskell observes, as we now think more about supporting local populations of pollinators. (And fewer bugs means fewer birds.) Callery pears, besides being high-maintenance and prone to drop branches, seem uncivil. 

Most street trees' existence is solitary and difficult, but I was struck by the loneliness of this virtually untouched leaf.

Still purple

I've been exasperated by the way presidential election results, focused on the Electoral College, are shown for a long time. We're a purple country and have been as long as I can remember - and teetering along the fifty-fifty line for a long time too. Folks need to see this map! (And more detailed ones, when they come in, showing county-level results and, crucially, population rather than geography.) On this website you can compare the flushes of slightly redder or bluer purple across the last dozen presidential elections. We've been bluer, and redder (though my friend M points out that the red wasn't as red in tooth in claw before.) We're like someone who shifts their weight from one leg to the other. 

What's the point of mentioning this? Another razor-thin election! There is nothing like a mandate for the hostile takeover of the levers of government the victors are planning - not that that will stop them (alas!). And no, he doesn't "get" us. We're a sick puppy of a nation, barely living in the same reality, but we don't "deserve" to be got, especially as the we who will suffer most aren't the ones who voted for him. Saying so invites the demon into your heart.

Divine foolishness

The presider at church today ended the service with a blessing "a little longer than usual":

MAY GOD BLESS YOU with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live
deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression,
and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for
justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears,
to shed for those who suffer pain,
rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand
to comfort them and
to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you
with enough foolishness
to believe that you can
make a difference in the world,
so that you can do
what others claim cannot be done,
to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor.

I've heard and been grateful for this benediction before. Often referred to as a Franciscan blessing, it was actually penned by a Benedictine nun in North Dakota named Ruth Marlene Fox in 1985, who called it "A non-traditional blessing." Thank you, Sister Ruth.

Extra dimensions

There's much to love about the Met's "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350." One is the chance to move through a world where the two- and three-dimensional are not yet distinct - part, I suppose, of the argument that it was in places like Siena that the potential of flat surfaces to offer greater depth than sculpture or architecture was discovered. I felt this already early in the exhibition with the "Annunciation" by Duccio, above, one of eight panels from the predella to his enormous "Maestà" reunited here, where everything seems to be moving in and out of spaces as provisional as a folding screen. Not just the angel, who seems to be in three different spaces, and the holy spirit, dispatched through the open ceiling from above also through three spaces, but even Mary, whose robe seems to be reaching out of her space toward us. How fitting for depicting the moment when the incarnation is announced, and enacted.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Madonna del Latte" is less complex, but this Mary seems as ready to bust out of the too narrow niche she's been placed in as the squirmy baby at her breast is to escape her grasp. Can a sculpture give you that sense of overflow, that sense you might be called on to catch this so human child?

And then there's the scene below, one of several narrating the life of St Nicholas, also by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, where not just space but time is torqued. It takes a little while to realize that many episodes of the story of St. Nicholas resuscitating a young boy are shown: the child wanders away unnoticed from a dinner happening at upper right, encountering a devil on the stairs at whose bottom the boy is then strangled by him; at bottom right we see the child twice, once dead on a bed, attended by a mourner, and once rising up, as two powerful beams come through a window, one to the dead and one to the revived boy - beams issuing from the mouth and hand of St. Nicholas, who is inside and outside the picture at left. Space-time is Möbius twisted like that staircase, fitting, again, for depicting the miracle of overcoming the finality of death. Can you do that in just 3-D?

Talking my way through this I realize that part of the charm of these works, ably conveyed by an exhibition design which moved around curves and corners and along unexpected diagonals, is that they are portals to a world beyond this one - beyond but bursting in.

Drought

Fire in the drought-struck woods along the Palisades last night! (Image)

1300s

Met some friends at the Met to see "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350," a gorgeous show we were not the only ones to enjoy even on a Friday night (as the photobombing hand at left can attest). But we arrived at the museum a little early, and took a peek in the Chinese galleries, where a scroll painting almost exactly contemporary with the Sienese awaited, 羅稚川 Luo Zhichuan's "古木寒鴉圖 Crows in Old Trees."

It's hard to make out (I had to come home and check the website) but this was painted in color. The two male pheasants (at the foot of the gnarled tree on the left and to his left) with colorful plumage and red necks at lower left must have stood out against the wintry colors of snow, bare and dried branches and white collared crows. (Download the image from the site and zoom in to see the splashes of color.) The caption suggested the crows might have represented opportunists serving the Mongols who had recently conquered China, banishing the educated ru who traditionally filled the civil service.

Solace