Aloft (from the plane)

San Diego, here we come! AAR, Torrey pines and Thanksgiving!

Droplets

My "Religion of Trees" students didn't want to sketch outdoors because of the rain. In vain did I say it was fun struggling with an umbrella while drawing...! So instead I suggested we bring leaves inside and draw them. I tried drawing this hophorn-beam leaf, but not before it requested a selfie with my notebook.

Saturated colors

First rain in over a month makes the remaining fall colors pop!

T-dor

Went tonight to the Transgender Day of Rememb-rance Vigil at Union Theological Seminary, a student- organized gathering. I've not gone to what I learned is known as tee-dor in years past, but in the current season, where the party of our president-elect has put a target on every trans person's back, it seemed the least I could do. 

The organizers had placed framed photographs of most of the twenty-eight trans people killed in the US in the past year on two tables in a small sea of flickering LED votives, together with text about "how they lived, not how they died." But projected on a screen was a series of names and photographs of trans people who died around the world, organized by date, and including how their lives ended: shot, strangled, suicide, stabbed, run over, shot, decapitated, burned, stabbed... There were hundreds.

The program included some reflections and some performances. As we came in (a little late), a seminarian was speaking about her fear of dying poor and alone, of "not dying well" ... but since God is most with those most excluded, she reflected, why was she afraid of being where God was most present? Should we not be concerned to live well, not just to die well? A later speaker read the description of the suffering servant from Deutero-Isaiah, re-pronouned, something like this: 

they were despised and rejected by others; a person of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces they were despised, and we held them of no account. Surely they have borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted them stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But they were wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon them was the punishment that made us whole, and by their bruises we are healed.... (Isa 53:3-5)

A first musical offering was a tender, quiet improvisation on Celtic harp. In a second, someone performed diabolically difficult settings of Rachmaninof's second piano concerto and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for solo piano, the sound cascading gloriously through the darkened chapel. And all while the slide show continued. The gentle harp evoked the inner beauty of all these rendered ancestors too soon, and the lush gorgeousness of the virtuoso piano seemed a tribute to the courage and vibrancy of the lives they lived, all in the face of ugly incomprehension and murderous hatred. 

I can't imagine what it is like to be part of this targeted family, knowing that at next year's TDOR there will be new pictures on the table and slides on the screen, some perhaps of people you knew and loved.

 

I'd started the day with this prayer, distributed by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, moved by the power of imagining God calling each by their chosen name. But that was just abstract. After this vigil I better appreciate the cost, and the glory, of claiming your true name, and know God delights in their living truth and mourns their martyrdom.

Mandalic

The atrium of the Robert Lehman wing of the Met has been turned into a giant (secular) mandala by Tibetan American artist Tenzing Rigdol. The whole is called "Biography of a Thought," whose acronym - BOAT - appears on the left edge of the first panel, as a figure, representing the painter, is pitched from it into

one of many mandala-inspired circles, reflected in the handmade carpet below, which incorporate symbols of contemporary challenges (like George Floyd). These bob in an agitated ocean beneath a segmented sky on three sides before one arrives at calm sea. The exhibition itself unspools in the rooms surrounding.

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

Vigilance

Went this evening to an interfaith "Vigil for the Healing of the World" at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was a program put together before the election, in anticipation of a fractured electorate, an uncertain or contested outcome, and rumblings or realities of violence, but there is no violence, as our side doesn't do that. Given where we are instead, the prayers and readings and musical performances for healing and reconciliation, listening and uniting resonated less than the repeated reassurances, from one tradition after another, that darkness doesn't overcome light, that a single light, a candle, "this little light of mine" offers comfort and reminds us that darkness will not prevail, that there will be light in the morning. We ended with tapers, the light quickly spreading through the cavernous nave of the Cathedral. (What to do with the lit tapers is always a question.)

Moving through sections on Dignity, Justice and Peace, the vigil was beautifully and earnestly put together, a demonstration of the sweet promise of interreligious harmony and solidarity. But it didn't move me as I'd been hoping to be moved. I realize now I had been hoping to weep, to be among many people also feeling bereft and betrayed and at risk as we enter what will unquestionably be a dark age for many. I've felt numb all day and the numbness is still there. But religious traditions at their best don't give false comfort: this moment is dark. Despite the inevitable dilutions of interfaith performances, these representatives of organized religion know that being together for each other is what we can do, and will even more urgently need to do going forward. I don't doubt I'll tap back into what we did do, incomplete as it was, in the seasons of hardship ahead.

I also went to a prayer gathering eight years ago, after the first calamity, under the sky in Washington Square Park. That wasn't as artfully curated an event as this, as top-down, as decorous. Huddling together in the cold rather than seated in rows in a heated fortress of a church, our feelings were more exposed. We'll need all these ways of being there for those whom the new regime will target, and when we too become targets.

But actually there was something in tonight's service, a poem read right at the start, that is nourishing me already. It connects to an important thing we learned the first time. It is not incidentally that they caused you worry and fear: your worry and fear is their object. And they are led by a shambling master of casual cruelty and monopolizing attention. If you let him, he will drive you to despair through a kind of slow torture of daily cuts, each act of cruelty or disdain primed and spread out for maximal pain. This time last time, the sadism was just beginning with the drip-feed announcement of one after another outrageous choice for positions in the cabinet: a climate denier for interior, an enemy of public schools for education... I can hear rumblings of a repeat already. His bloodthirsty cronies are looking forward to hearing our howls of impotent horror. 

Pain and grief we must and can't but feel, but not at his bidding. This awareness might have been one reason Pádraig Ó Tuama =, the gay Irish poet and theologian who started the vigil, began with a reading of his poem "Rite of Baptism." It includes these lines:

Some of our people will hate you as they hate themselves. 
You must create a life 
without giving them all your life’s attention.

In the grim time ahead, keep watch instead with and for those who love.

Howl

A map showing a rightward shift from sea to shining sea. However bamboozled by right-wing media about the economy, the 2020 election, crime, etc., many of my fellow citizens are cool with the cruel.

You are not giving up, and neither am I

The pain you feel is because of what you love. You can keep walking whether it is sunny or raining. Everything we can save is worth saving.

Rebecca Solnit has become my North Star.

 

 

 

 

How could they?

Election day morning!

Precipice

Calm before the storm. Not calm exactly but a steady drone of calls for this and that, playing on every feeling one might be having. (The best are modest - Only if you can afford it - or combos: WE'RE CRYING tears of joy...) It's too much to handle, as if my $47 or $3 or postcards alone could save every seat in congress. A nervous tango of dread and hope, each trailing its own indecisive polls and predictions, has come to a still point. Tomorrow the real trouble begins, even if our better angels prevail. Pray for peace.

November mood

Ready for the future... Keep Calm-ala and Carry On-ala!

Snap!

Me disappearing into a tree

Sprigs of understanding

What a pleasure to find at the American Folk Art Museum the originals of some of the Shaker Gift Drawings I found reproduced in a book when we visited Canterbury Shaker Village last year! This "Sprig of Understanding" appears in Polly Jane Reed's "A Present from Mother Lucy to Eliza Ann Taylor" (1849), one of several drawings in which every image is labeled.

Some trees from drawings already shared with this blog: 

A new one: Polly Collins' "The Gospel Union, Fruit-Bearing Tree" (1855)

It's not all trees, of course, most conspicuously in Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks' "Sacred Sheet"(1843), a calligraphy of tongues!

Lava lamp

A little blast from the past, courtesy of Facebook: eleven years ago!

Vote cast

At my local polling station, they ran out of "I VOTED EARLY" stickers.

Peak foliage

When I arrived in my office yesterday it looked like the colored objects on the window sill had gone to town on the leafscape.

Today they really let loose. From the 4th floor skybridge and looking down from my classroom on the 6th floor - what splendor!

But many of the leaves let loose too. By the end end of a blustery day, the red leaves of the northernmost tree were mostly on the ground.

Early morning light

Shadow play!

Rockland Lake

Just a little north of us, fall is farther along. In this swamp it seems to linger at ground level in bright colors as the trees prepare for winter.

Correlations

Behold the eye-popping view down on the Lang courtyard maples, through a gap in the window from my classroom on the 6th floor. I swooned Most of my pictures, like this one at left, are taken from the fourth floor. Since the leaves' undersides are pale, the deep red is diluted a bit. Down in the courtyard below, the light is golden but the flaming colors are visible only among the fallen leaves. 

But that was enough today to allow for a charmed conversation with a Chinese student I'm doing an independent study with. (We're reading around James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and have moved into David Yaden and Andrew Newberg's Varieties of Spiritual Experience which - how to put it? - lacks James' existential urgency. More about that another time (for me this is prep for one of my spring 2025 classes, a course around James' Varieties).

After lamenting that the studies Yaden and Newberg synthesized offered at best correlations - areas of the brain or surveys that light up during particular kinds of reported or live experience, but what causes what? - we found ourselves talking about what they call the "circumstances" in which spiritual experiences seem more likely to arise. This is a useful complement to James, who rather too quickly privileges experience in "solitude." Contemplative practices, repetitive rituals, nature, etc. are discussed, but we wound up talking together about language, and why it's often said (sic!) that spiritual experiences are ineffable, beyond language. Don't you need a name or category for certain kinds of experience even to recognize what they are - even if that word is "ineffable"? or 道可道 非常道 名可名 非常名?

We were thinking of the subjects of Tonya Luhrmann's studies, who are attentive to the possibility that something in their own inner monologue - an attempted dialogue with God - didn't just come from themselves. If there are such things, knowing of their possibility - having names for them - would make all the difference. What other linguistic things might change people's experience - either make them aware of otherwise unrecognized realms of experience or make them think such realms exist? I suggested the habitual use by a whole society of a phrase like inshallah (God willing) could make a person aware of every juncture as potentially one in which the divine intervenes, make any event an occasion for gratitude. 

But perhaps even more was given to those who knew more than one language (as James did, fluent in German and French), allowing them to experience everything as something linguistically modulated... My student was thinking Sapir-Whorff, and told me the English language makes him, he thinks, more open to spiritual experience (and God). Were there any realities Mandarin alone offered him awareness of, I asked? He mentioned count nouns (counters, classifiers), something which to a non-native seems pretty arbitrary, but he was thinking especially about the ways human lives are counted: 一百条命. That this was the same counter used for other long things, like ribbons, roads and rivers, made it seem obvious that lives were something of which one would have many.

Is English, which renders everything an object or a subject, better, as it insists on linear causality, I wondered? We considered western languages which gender all nouns, as English doesn't. Or pronouns English has shed, like the intimate thou (as in the inshallah-like "thy will be done"), not to mention the long lost dual (which Chinese has analogs, I think, in 俩 or even 咱们), or the middle voice. The student mentioned ki, the new pronoun Robin Wall Kimmerer proposed for living things, which made the whole space light up a little more. Spirit was flowing, though don't ask me to tell you what caused what! And kin were part of it all along, it seemed!