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.