You heard it here first

I used a very polysyllabic word today, then added a further syllable, marking almost certainly the first time that the eight syllables of cisheteropatriarchy were uttered from the sanctuary of the Church of the Holy Apostles. This was part of an otherwise genial "stewardship homily" - an annual series in which three parishioners share what the church means to them and why they support it. Mine was this year's second, and fell on All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day Commemoration, already a full slate, so I kept my remarks brief - except for that word!

I gave a last stewardship homily once before - seventeeen years ago! - and that was the framework for my remarks today. Much has happened since 2009, including that I'm becoming one of the church's old-timers, but I focused on only one: the long awaited completion of our Mission House renovation, which was already a desideratum back then, when it was known as the "elevator project." It was a special joy to invoke the name of the late parishioner whose passion project this was, while gesturing toward the mission house entrance: "Marnie, we did it!"

The polysyllabic word came a little later, as I reflected on how grateful I am to be part of the Episcopal Church, the Diocese and New York, and our own church, in these times where we witness true Christianity in the face of those "so-called Christians who are trying to force a reactionary white supremacist heteropatriarchy on us all." That's a lot of syllables, I quipped after heteropatriarchy, but let me add another ... and it was time for cisheteropatriarchy!

I recalled inspiring preaching on the sin/heresy of Christian nationalism from our bishop, two years ago, and from our rector, regularly - gesturing toward where Bishop Heyd had spoken (from the floor) and toward the pulpit. All this makes sense in this place, I added, taking in the whole space with a gesture, which saw the ordination of the first openly lesbian priest in the Episcopal Church in 1977, just three years after the Episcopal Church had been forcibly nudged to accept the ordination of women, acknowledging with a gesture our female clergy leaders.

I've mentioned my gestures as they were part of my shpiel. I'd begun, in fact, acknowledging that I'd heard last week's stewardship homily virtually, and pointed toward the livestream camera in the choir loft to which, since returning from the pandemic, the congregation makes a point to wave during each service. While the polysyllables were probably lost on many in the congregation, I think everyone got a sense of the powerful work the congregation does on so many fronts, and that this work deserves, and needs, support. My closing word? "Pledge!"

Boo

Who's dressing up for Hallowe'en?

VLC

If last Monday's event critical of engaged scholarship felt a little un-New School, tonight's book launch for Eyal Weizman's Ungrounding, hosted by our Vera List Center for Art and Politics, was a tonic. Not the content, a meticulous and devastating forensic indictment of the Israeli's state's efforts to uproot Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip. But the energy and resolve in a packed Wollman Hall. Research and critical analysis can make a difference in a world of injustices, and should be supported.

In the cards

Visit to "Religion of Trees" today by a photo-grapher colleague who's just produced a New York Street Tree Tarot deck. The deck (which our class explored on its own last week) was eight years in the making, we learned, bringing together his abiding passion for street trees with a first year studio at Parsons School of Design where he'd been helping students develop tarot decks of their own. "When are you going to make one," people kept asking... In the event, his beautifully produced deck (and manual) came out just as New York was swooning over the Tarot exhibition at the Morgan - serendipity!

But before we got into his tarot, he took us out to observe some street trees whose often very difficult lives are visible if you pay attention, and before that he spread out some leaves on the table of our antiseptic classroom. Picked up in the park by where he lives in the north Bronx were leaves of kanzan cherry, pin oak and maple (and a cottonwood stick which feels like a magic wand). Amazing how little it takes to bring nature into a space, he observed. Take one home, he urged.

Surfacing

Talking to a friend today about our trip to Venice, which ended just two weeks ago (!), I found myself enthusing about two completely opposite works of art, Giovanni Antonio Fumiani's vast trompe-l'oeuil ceiling of San Pantaleone (1680-1704), perhaps the largest painting on canvas in the world, and a cannily perfect conceptual work by Joseph Kosuth (1965) on display at a special exhibition at the Berggruen Institute on La Giudecca. Sharing the improbable gift of these works helped me savor the gift of our trip, too; undigested, my memories have been defaulting to the surface views of Canaletto cliché.

Touched

In Religion of Trees today, we delved into Stephanie Kaza's incredibly embodied Buddhist practice-buoyed Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology, noting how tactile her encounters were, starting with "extend[ing] a shy hand" in response to an alder's invitation. 

I am simply trying to say hello across the barriers of form and language. I believe the hands communicate this intention most honestly. The voice and mind are not direct enough. Or perhaps they are too complex for the first step of making contact. Besides, the tree and I have such different minds and voices. I don't know the language of these alders at all. I can only guess at the shape of a tree's mind and what it knows about life on the edge of a pond. (Boulder: Shambalah, [1993] 2019), 25

Connected by touch she discovers affinities in respect to water, light and rhythms... In further chapters I assigned, Kaza's hands dip into a manzanita's magnetic energy, stack a woodpile and even operate a chainsaw. So of course our drawing prompt was "a human touching a tree," which students took in terrifically different directions. 

After class one student lingered and asked me what tree first touched me, sparking my interest in this subject, and a parried. The Lang courtyard maples, of course. But there must have been others, deeper in my past. By happy coincidence a Facebook group I don't remember joining called "Trees of life" today shared this 1907 painting by Koloman Moser which sang to me. The scene looked familiar, and indeed it is: a view of the Raxalpe, a place we often went when our family lived in Vienna. The Rax is above the treeline but to get there (or if you walk down, having taken the ropeway up) you have to travel through the verdant worlds so beautifully depicted here. Couldn't not share!

DIY+

This year's round of first year interviews/conversations with alums yielded a rich harvest today. I scaled it back a little from last year, when pairs of students were tasked with interviewing two alums. For good and bad reasons that ended up with each student anxiously interviewing just one alum on their own. So this year pairs of students (in one case a team of three) were assigned a single alum to talk to, and all managed to make it work. The students' work together, during and after the interview made for better conversations and better reports, too.

So what did we learn? The six alums interviewed, ranging from the classes of 2006 to 2018, were a diverse group - two born abroad, one in Boriken - and had very different majors while at Lang: literature, economics, sociology, culture and media, fine arts - and one student who made religious studies their major, not just a minor! Since departing they have worked and studied in fields from education to journalism to art therapy to ministry. They shared with students engagement of various forms with Zoroastrian, Christian, Muslim, Taino and (mostly secular) Jewish tradition - most availing themselves of some Buddhist practices, too. They spoke of rituals they participated in with more and less conviction, and when some mentioned partners, it emerged that none of the partners were in the same religious space.

Each shared (and the interviewing students were able to solicit, understand and share) fascinating thoughts on DIY religion. An atheist alum described developing an appreciation for religious conviction in her graduate school friends, and offered a secular appreciation of the work of communal gathering. In college she was figuring herself out, she said, and now takes joy in being able to help others do the same. A "nontraditional Christian" described religious experiences while riding horses, and how reincarnation made more sense to her than heaven or hell. A priest distinguished her own DIY religious life from her work as a clergyperson, and recommended songs that criticize Christian hypocrisy by ex-Christians familiar with the tropes of faith. The Taino student described the inspired DIY of reviving and reconstructing a tradition the colonizer thought dead - a tradition they carefully don't call a religion. 

My favorite insight? The Muslim alum reflected that all religion must be DIY, and that that is as it should be. The Quran is beyond complete human comprehension, so the best we can do is interpret thoughtfully (optimally reading it in the original Arabic, and attentive to the human penchant for self-dealing interpretation). Indeed, DIY religion - doing your best to understand and live it out - is God's will. It would be sacrilegious to suggest that Allah didn't anticipate all these interpretations. Wow!

The interviews will bear one more harvest of fruit: the student interviewers were tasked with asking their alum interlocutors for recommended readings. They have two weeks to track these down, read/watch/listen to them, and tell the class about them. We can look forward to hearing about everything from theology of disability to a self-help book by a queer astrology influencer. More anon!

Loaves and fishes

Not too shabby, considering...!

Esperança e alegria

 LULA!

Peeps

Went for the annual leaf peeping trip this weekend. Given my teaching schedule this semester, I can't swing an Adirondacks stay so we made do with the northern Catskills. Far enough north, it turned out, to be well "past peak" according to the 

New York Foliage Map. The maples, with a few luminous exceptions, were already a memory, a red shag carpet beneath clear blue punctured by wintry greys. But bright bands of oaks proved virtuosic in radiant yellows, browns, reds and and even deep purples, while beeches glowed green and gold and hemlock shimmered almost bluish green. The drive up offered the comically compressed fall we're accustomed to, the drive back the Cassandra-like return to carefree red and heedless green.

Rededicated!

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.

Tragic scene

Still reeling from these brutal enrollment numbers, just published by our Institutional Research office, I was confronted with the White Oak Tower card in my colleague Matthew Lopez-Jensen's "Street Tree Tarot," which we were exploring in "Religion of Trees." Outside intervention required!

Fall in the city

overhead and also underfoot

Assemblage

Very cool out of the box thinking in "Religion of Trees" today. I'd divided the class into teams each charged with reading and giving a short presentation on an important book on our subject, together with a handout. A handout - how retro in the age of AI-assisted powerpoints!!! 

The group entrusted with Mircea Eliade had handouts, but it turned out they were all different, each with some lines from the text on the top, some images below, and a number on the back. Students were invited to tape their sheet on the board in order, and before long we saw the outline of a tree which turned out to be a banyan! IThis was both a fun way to get people engaged and a quite brilliant illustration of Eliade's method, assembling examples from every place under the sun into supposedly universal patterns. These shared patterns were discernible only through the comparative method, he claimed; indeed the meaning of any given example was indiscernible without this larger comparative scaffolding.