the unexpected sacrament of tears...

This weekend I participated in a funeral Mass for a colleague as part of a pick-up choir. There were over 50 of us singing, weeping, celebrating, and sight-reading 30+ minutes of opening choral music prior to supporting the necessary liturgical chants, psalms, and antiphons. A precious friend and former colleague directed the ensemble and played organ, too. Artistically, it was a challenge that worked out well. It was also a sacred obligation of friendship, commitment, and solidarity.

The deceased was a beloved musician in our small community. Seven years ago, he played the pipe organ for our celebration and performance of Paul Winter's "Missa Gaia." He directed a choir in the hill towns of Western Massachusetts and supported the Spanish and English masses at St. Mark's Roman Catholic Church. He was, by all accounts, a real mensch! It was wonderful to be singing in a real choir again. As much as I have come to cherish our quiet, live-streaming time of weekly contemplation, to be a part of the whole was soul food. And, as I knew I would, I found myself weeping tears of grief as well as joy - especially during a setting of "On Eagle's Wings."

Those tears erupted again yesterday during my reflection on the Transfiguration as prelude to the Lenten fast. They took me completely by surprise and, as I have learned to do, I simply let them flow. The wisdom keeper, Frederick Buechner, has been my guide on this practice and he got it so right when he wrote:

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

Freely flowing tears have long been a sacred charism for me although I fought them for decades. As a young boy I openly wept over flowers. As an adolescent, I found myself crying during certain hymns in church. Or over poems or songs that opened my heart. I spontaneously wept when JFK was murdered. So, too, with MLK. And I was a total mess watching the tribute to Robert Kennedy during the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Tears flowed when our daughters were born, when we celebrated their birthdays, as I watched them dance or play live music or when they joined me in singing Springsteen songs in the car. At times they were tears of wonder and gratitude; they could easily become tears of regret or fear; and more times than I care to recall they were tears mixed with confession and prayers for forgiveness. For most of my adult life, I fought with these tears - holding them back or wrestling them silent through agonizing acts of the will - mostly because I associated tears with weakness. That's in the cultural air breathed by men of the industrialized West; but also an acquired phobia within violent households.

But some 25 years ago, at the quiet request of my beloved, I started honoring my tears as a gift from God. A charism of deep connection, if you will. I'm still practicing acceptance, but trust I'm learning. At least a little bit. When they showed up again yesterday during our "Small is Holy" reflection, I was stunned. Afterwards, I gave thanks to the Lord, but I must confess at being bewildered in the moment: they were real but completely unexpected. As I sat with this truth in the twilight yesterday I became aware of layer upon layer of sorrow: the funeral, the ecstasy of singing live music again, the agony and fear over the war in Ukraine, pandemic weariness, resistance to the frigid air, worries over Lucie as she ages, concern for Di's health, missing my friends in L'Arche Ottawa, and probably tons more that I cannot yet find words to describe. Small wonder they bubbled over as I was full to overflowing. 

Fr. Ed Hays helped me make a measure of peace with my tears when he called them a "sacrament" - a visible and outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace. Jesus wept. Jeremiah and Isaiah, too. Peter and Magdalene wept as did the mother of our Lord. I am in good company - and expect LOTS more tears as Lent 2022 ripens. Psalm 126 puts it like this: May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. I am going to use this "Kyrie and Jesus Prayer" from Ukraine as part of my personal quiet time this Lent. You might find it refreshing, too.

    

small is holy: blessed are the weird wrap-up

  

Last week brought our "Beatitudes for the Weird" series to a close. Here is the live stream from my weekly Sunday evening: "Small is Holy" on FB. Here, too, is my written text celebrating Krista Tippett and Padraig O'Tuama as two advocates for revolutionary grace. This coming Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday in my tradition, we'll consider the symbolism of the mystical mountain time before the descent into the silence of Lent. Please join me if you can @ 4 pm.

Every week, as I sit down at this desk to ponder why the words of ancient Scripture might matter to me and maybe you, I almost always experience the surprise of grace: it could be the grace of Jesus in the text or the grace of the sunlight upon the snow just outside my window; sometimes it’s the grace of a poem recently found or wonderfully rediscovered, the grace of a song or two that speaks to my heart, or simply the grace of silence. At the start of this week, knowing I would be wandering within the wisdom of Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama, I found myself singing once more a song Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote back in 2011 called, “Why Shouldn’t We?” I heard it first in a motel somewhere along the road – and loved it. But, as too often occurs, I lost track of it only to have it pop back into consciousness 11 years later as a gentle answer to one of my prayers. It goes in part like this:

We believe in things that we cannot see: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

Hands that heal can set a chained man free: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

We believe in things they say we cannot change: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

We had heroes once and we will again: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

So come on darling, feel your spirits rise; 

Come on children, open up your eyes

God is all around, Buddha's at the gate, 

Allah hears your prayers, it's not too late

And we believe in things that can't be done: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

Lift up your heart, put down your gun: 

Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we?

Come on darling – come on children - 

God is all around, Buddha's at the gate,

Allah hears your prayers, it's not too late – why shouldn’t we?

I think the refrain, why shouldn’t we, expresses the heart of Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel for today: Why shouldn’t we act beyond our reptilian minds and learn to love our enemies? Why NOT be a person of grace rather than retaliation? What would it look like to imagine and then incarnate our deepest dreams of freedom, solidarity, and? You may say I’m dreamer… but I’m NOT the only one who wonders what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding. Why shouldn’t we, indeed. Poet and theologian, Padraig O’Tuama, put it like this in his poem: the facts of life.

That you were born - and you will die. 

That you will sometimes love enough - and sometimes not.

That you will lie – if only to yourself. That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.

That you will live – that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who once were strangers – and may well still be. That life isn’t fair. 

That life is sometimes good and sometimes better than good. 

That life is often not so good. That life is real and if you can survive it, well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning’s scarce. That you will learn to live with regret. 

That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constraining. That you will probably be okay. 

That you must accept change before you die but you will die anyway. 

So, you might as well live and you might as well love.

You might as well love. You might as well love.

This evening I want to share three essential take-aways with you from the appointed text as amplified and adorned by the insights Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama. They are two of my go-to wisdom keepers who, alongside Alana Levandowski, Richard Rohr, Parker Palmer, and Carrie New-comer, I often turn to in my quest to keep my heart and mind open. Their humor, humility, honesty, and humanity shine like a candle in the night for me.

And I’ve found that I need their guidance and integrity to help me stay grounded within the God’s grace. Once, while driving home from L’Arche Ottawa at about this time of year, I heard Ms. Tippett interview the lyric poet, Gregory Orr. His work was new to me while his anguish was all too familiar. In the middle of their conversation, as I cruised through the washed out frozen greys and browns of winter along Interstate 81 in upstate NY, Orr offered this qualification to his agnosticism which I heard not as negation but rather a brilliant contemporary proclamation of faith: “To be alive: not just the carcass, but the spark” he said. “That’s crudely put, but if we’re not supposed to dance... why all this music?”

Oh, Precious Lord: do words get any BETTER than that? I think NOT. Since that

day I’ve been indebted to Krista Tippett’s weird, blessed calling to celebrate the linkage publicly and creatively between science, spirituality, and the arts. Both she and O’Tuama give shape and form to Carpenter’s refrain: Why Shouldn’t We? So, pray with me now as I use a prayer from the Corrymela com-munity that O’Tuama once shepherded: God of our comforts, O God of our discomforts: give our eyes the sense to see when we've had too much. And give our arms the strength to share a load no one should carry. You came to us when we didn't care and now we fear you'll go. May your peace not come with easy security, but with questions that really dig in and make us whole. In the spirit of all that is holy: Amen.

There are three grace-filled insights from today’s gospel according to St. Luke that strike me as simultaneously radical in practice and revolutionary for culture. Sadly, over the years they’ve been obscured, diminished, and domesticated by sentimentality and bourgeois piety. But they once turned the world upside down in South Africa under apartheid and did much the same thing when incarnated in our own Civil Rights movement during the 60’s – so why shouldn’t they do so again? You see, matter how rigorously we’ve tried to render these words tame, reducing them to an emasculated Golden Rule or guide to a fair and balanced return on investments, God refuses to repeal the revolutionary, nonviolent love that is the essence of grace in lives lived authentically. When Jesus told us to, “Be merciful, that is generous with compassion, as our spiritual Father is merciful,” he was NOT asking us to play nice. He was advising us to quit keeping score so that our world might be saturated with blessings instead of blood lust and revenge. I want to start at the conclusion of this text and work backwards to describe the interrelated truths woven in to the tapestry of a grace-filled spirituality.

· First, Jesus insists that living into the way of the Lord is NOT about fairness: “If you do good to just those who do good to you, where’s the grace in that” he asks? Let’s be clear that he did NOT say, “where’s the credit in that” as contemporary English Bibles put it. That reduces revolutionary love to a commodity that can be doled out according to equity. Rather, Jesus speaks of charis – GRACE – the compassionate tenderness God freely distributes beyond all calculations and quid pro quos. Grace is NEVER fair and ALWAYS trumps karma for grace is love “above and beyond gratuitous giving.”

· We tend to limit the focus of grace to, “the unmerited, saving love of God” – which it is – but it is also “at the same time, the love Jesus calls us to live out, not as gods or angels, but as ‘child-ren of the Most High,’ human beings created in God’s image.” That means when we live and love without keeping score, “being merciful, just as God is merciful, we’re embodying what theologians call, ‘the imago Dei” as our flesh incarnates God’s spirit. And just so that we don’t miss this truth, Jesus restates it three times: “If you love only those who love you, what grace – charis – have you?”, or better still, “what grace is there in that? Like a drumbeat, he says: What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that? What grace is there in that?” (SALT resource)

Telling those who gathered then – and those who gather now – that grace is how God’s children take on the image of their heavenly Father and Mother, Jesus said that that loving gracefully is how we practice charis – and the more we practice the better the image of God’s Charis” becomes flesh within and among us. Bible scholars want us to know that this is Christ’s “critique of reciprocity (for even sinners take care of their own!) Being “fair” is precisely what God’s love is not… God’s love goes above-and-beyond reciprocity.” The educators at the SALT Project suggest that in this passage Jesus is: Recommending an “unfair” kind of love, an extravagance that benefits not the one who benefits you, but the one who opposes you; or indeed, that gives more to a thief than the thief takes in the first place! There’s a playful spirit of hyperbole darting in and out of these ideas, as if they’re designed to evoke a kind of absurd, ecstatic state of generosity, a state of pure mercy, a state of grace.

Social scientist, Peter Steinke, offers some perspective on the subversive nature of gracious love writing that: when human beings first experience a threat, “self-preservation has more relevance for survival than self-awareness. ”Long before we could ever talk or think, we called on automatic processes for survival. We call on them again and again. Besides, they act faster than the thinking processes. When we are anxious, we act before we think. The Automatic Pilot joins forces with the House of Emotion and dominates. In a reptilian regression our behavior is not mediated through the neocortex. Anxious, we are apt to lose objectivity and civility. We are in a position to be neither responsible nor loving… (for) reason and love are best served in times of calm. In periods of intense anxiety, what is most needed is what is most unavailable: the capacity to be imaginative."

Or to use the words of Jesus: our commitment to live as children of the Most High, humble and human fonts of compassion baptized into the heart of grace,” who strive to live beyond naked self-interest. That’s one of the reasons, I believe, both Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama share weekly radio broadcasts and podcasts. They know we all need times of quiet contemplation, sanctuaries of serenity, where we can calmly listen to the ideas of radical love, think about them, and then discern ways to practice and implement them into our everyday, ordinary walking around lives. In her first book, Speaking of Faith, Tippett wrote: “For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well to understand the whole story of religion in our world.”

In the first interview I heard between Ms. Tippett and O’Tuama, he spoke of walking the 14 stations of the cross every day for years: “I find in them the hope to live courageously when everything, even your own self, fails. In the midst of the difficulty of the time the Stations recollect, I find echoes of a life lived well, a life that was open to the surprise of the unexpected, the truth of a story. I also hear echoes of the impulses towards my own violence and blame mechanisms.” So, every day, he practiced looking for grace in the suffering of the world, owning the agony as well as the solace, and feeling from the inside out what it meant to consciously become a child of the Most High God. O’Tuama incrementally discovered while walking the stations of the cross that this was a spiritual discipline beyond words. An embodied prayer. Each of the 14 traditional stations of the cross do have stories to go with them, of course, words from, “the journey of Jesus from his condemnation to his death,” but they are presented with “images that give us stopping points for our consideration.”

“This points to a need in people,” O’Tuama notes, “to put chapters and stopping points to stories of devotion and meaning. To freeze the frame like this helps the person to put themselves at the heart of a text or in an unnoticed corner of the story or even an ignored point of view. By taking the stories of our tradition and putting personal stations to them... a dialogue between the individual and the story takes place and something called prayer emerges in the thin places between the person and the story. We encounter the heart,” he adds, “the place where the wisdom we didn’t know can greet us… and we can greet that which we call God.” One of the prayers O’Tuama crafted for his retelling of the stations of the cross says: O God of the accused and the accusing, who made the mouth, the ear, and the heart of all in conflict. May we turn ourselves towards that which must be heard, because there we will hear your voice. Amen.

Serendipitously, I discovered that the prayers we use for our L’Arche Ottawa Good Friday stations of the cross are from O’Tuama. His witness is akin to the spirituality of L’Arche where the practice of refusing reciprocity and replacing it with gracious love if foundational. That’s the first insight.

A second has to do with practicing this spirituality of refusing to keep score. Jesus wants us to know that grace simultaneously encourages inner integrity and self-respect within people who have long been abused, hurt, oppressed and/or subjugated; and releases extravagant love into cultures too long driven by possession and violence. Grace is both an antidote to cruelty and greed as well as a spiritual discipline that strengthens self-esteem, inward resolve, and humble dignity. In St. Luke’s gospel, Jesus answers the question: how then shall we live saying:

Love your enemies: do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you, and offer those who strike, beg, or steal not retaliation but rather a startling form of assertive, flip-the-script giving. Here’s my other cheek, not just the first one; here’s my shirt, not just my coat (knowing that most people in Jesus’ audience wore just those two garments, a coat and a shirt); and here’s what you stole from me — keep it, it’s yours (Luke 6:29-30).

Without qualification, Jesus teaches us to: “love our enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). And this last idea, “expecting nothing in return,” is the key as, “Jesus challenges his listeners to love not as a strategy for gain, a quid quo pro, but rather for the sake of love itself, for the sake of the beloved” and one another. (SALT Bible resource)

You may know that Padraig O’Tuama, an out gay theologian and poet, once worked as the director of the Corrymela Community in Belfast, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. It was founded in 1965 just before the so-called “Troubles” erupted again in public. Corrymela physically brings together people who have long mistrusted and even hated one an-other. The intent was: “not to seek to undo the differences but… slowly in the gathered space of cups of tea, shared meals, fireplaces, discussions, debates, disagreements, arguments and prayer to find new ways to name old pains.” O’Tuama put it like this: Listening is a sacrament when the topic is important, when strife divides people in small places, the sacrament of listening is vital. So many people in so many places in the world have difficult relationships with difference. We seek to practice the art of hospitality in the places of hostility and in so doing practice kindness in places most in need of kindness… we do this being shaped by the witness of Jesus who uncovered the hollow heart of victimization.

As a young, gay Irishman, O’Tuama knew what victimization meant from the inside out: both his Roman Catholic culture, and the evangelical sect he lived with for a period of time, loved his wit, his intellect, humor, and love but hated his sexuality. They even forced him to undergo sexual conversion therapy which is cruel, violent, and abusive all in the name of God’s love. In time, O’Tuama cried bullshit: bullshit on abusive religion, bullshit on the violence inflicted on the vulnerable in the name of love, and bullshit on all the spiritual traditions that degraded Christ’s commitment to grace. He distilled his new trust for Jesus alongside his rejection of religion in a poem from his book “readings from the book of exile.”

I used to need to know the end of every story

but these days I only need the start to get me going.

God is the crack where the story begins.

We are the crack where the story gets interesting.

We are the choice of where to begin – the person going out?

The stranger coming in?

God is the fracture, the ache in your voice, 

God is the story flavored with choice.

God is the pillar of salt full of pity,

accusing God for the sulfurous city.

God is the woman who bleeds and who touches. 

We are the story of courage or blushes.

God is the story of whatever works, 

God is the twist at the end and the quirks.

We are the start, and we are the center, 

we’re the characters, narrators, inventors.

God is the bit that we can’t explain – 

maybe the healing, maybe the pain.

We are the bit that God can’t explain,

maybe the harmony, maybe the strain.

God is the plot, and we are the writers, 

the story of winners, the story of fighters,

The story of love, and the story of rupture, 

the story of stories, the story without structure.

And here’s the thing: Padraig O’Tuama was able to go on to the work of reconciliation and peace-making in troubled Ireland, South Africa, and throughout Europe because his wounds had been cherished by the presence of Jesus from the inside out, and, because he consciously practiced welcoming the revolutionary love of Jesus as normative for all the Creator’s children. O’Tuama learned what both Walter Wink and Howard Thurman taught: that Jesus practiced a nonviolent third way of love that brought choice and dignity to people living under the bootheel of Roman occupation and fortified individuals with God’s grace. Remember that in the time of Christ ancient Israel become a vassal state of the Empire where soldiers daily used and abused their power to humiliate and break the spirit of peasant farmers.

O’Tuama, Wink, and Thurman maintain that Jesus wasn’t speaking hypothetically when asked: how do I love my enemy? He knew his people had been degraded by Roman occupation troops. His answers, therefore, assert a grace-filled moral jiu jitsu that resurrect inner dignity and incarnate outward freedom into what once looked like a no-win situation:

· Specifically, Jesus taught that if a soldier struck you across the face in an act of degradation you could retaliate – and be imprisoned. You might ignore decide to ignore the violence and internalize the shame. Or you could offer your other cheek as an act of resistance born of inward integrity.

· The same follows for the command to carry the pack of a soldier in the occupation’s army - one of many indignities relished by the mercenaries. Jesus advised loving non-cooperation that refused both denial and retaliation with grace. You have no power over me. You may order me to carry your gear for a mile but I choose to carry it for two because I am a child of the Most High God living into the image of my calling.

This was part of the spirituality shared with the resistance movement of South Africa that contributed to the collapse of apartheid. It is what Dr. King and others shared, too as they trained the real freedom convoys to dismantled Jim Crow segregation throughout the American South. And this is what Padraig O’Tuama incarnated in his recovery from the religious poison of homophobia as one of Northern Irelands healers and peacemakers: he practiced sharing love with himself so that he could share grace with others. Krista Tippett does much the same thing with her ON BEING radio projects. She vigorously searches and researches living examples of real people incarnating grace in this time and space. Serendipitously, her show this weekend welcomes two American Buddhists discussing how to love our enemies. She put it like this in her third book, Becoming Wise:

Spiritual humility is not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.

Tippett moved beyond the rigidity of her Southern Baptist literalism to celebrate compassion. O’Tuama deep sixed the fear, shame, and violence of Irish homophobia as foundational to real conflict resolution. I see them as celebrants of a 21st century spirituality which refuses to keep score. It chooses dignity over debasement and love over the multiplicity of ways hatred can infiltrate our hearts, traditions, and culture. Tippett often says: Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes a spiritual muscle of memory. I believe she’s on to something when she says:

The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions...they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religion’s traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an in-effectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this the “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present.

There is a playful, tender invitation in today’s words from Jesus that encourages us NOT to make his insights into LAWS in the narrow sense – never “a dour list of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” – but more like a “provocative artist painting pictures of love, icons” of the stations of the cross that we can embody every day.” Krista Tippett and Padraig O’Tuama show us that God is kind to the ungrateful and gracious to all whether we deserve it or not. They contend that because we are made in the image of God, nourishing and practicing gracious love is how that image matures within us. This embodied prayer is not only how we experience intimacy with the holy now, but how Thy will is done on earth as it is already done in heaven. My affirmation of faith today is clear:

Come on darlings, feel your spirit rise; 

come on children, open up your eyes.

God is all around, Buddha’s at the gate, 

Allah hears our prayers, it’s not too late

Why shouldn’t we – oh, why shouldn’t we.

small is holy for lent: the sabbath prayers of wendell berry

As my "Blessed Are the Weird" series on "Small is Holy" (https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531) comes to an end, I've been wondering if it was time to bring my live streaming to a close. It started with the pandemic lockdown two years ago and has been a place for a small group of friends to check-in for spiritual encouragement and reflection.

I'm a believer that to "every thing there is a season," so I've been wondering whether or not this season has come and gone? I have learned a great deal. I have enjoyed being in virtual community with a number of dear friends. And, I choose to believe that for these past two years the "Small is Holy" gig met a small need. With so much of the Western world coming to grips with covid as an endemic rather than pandemic, however, I've had to ask myself: is there value in continuing every Sunday evening at 4 pm? I certainly DON"T want to overstay my welcome nor do I want to keep plugging away at what might become Jimmy's vanity project.

So, as I am want to do these days (after learning the hard way NOT to rush into quick decisions) I've been sitting with the questions for a few weeks. Yesterday, some clarity of sorts broke through the haze. First, I sensed it might be satisfying to use the SALT Project's Lenten series focused on Wendell Berry's Sabbath Poems as a shared practice. And second, the reason for doing so is NOT to be productive nor utilitarian. Instead, like this Charles Schultz PEANUTS meme suggests, it's to be present and tender-hearted even as the nation lurches towards some type of normalcy (as well as chaos!)

As I wrote in my little song of the same name:

Thinking big and acting strong led me into all that's wrong
Hitting bottom taught me well strategies to get through hell.
Touch the wound in front of you – that’s all you can really do.
Keep it close, don’t turn away, make room for what’s real today.
Small is me, small is you, small is holy and rings true.
Small is hard, small reveals the way our hearts can be healed.

So, dear friends, if you'd like a little company for your Lenten journey, it you are interested or curious about the Sabbath Poems of Wendell Berry, or if you simply want a little quiet reflection, silence, song, and prayer at the close of the day each Sunday: let's give it a go. Be in touch and I'll send you the SALT Project's study guide. I've purchased the rights to share it with a select group of friends. I hope you'll join me.

random thoughts that may lead nowhere or...

One of those unexpected AHA moments reached up and smacked me this weekend when I realized that I will turn 70 in July. For years, Di and I have been talking about doing a 60/70 road trip. We spent an extended time in Canada for the 50/60 event. We took six weeks in the UK at the 25th anniversary of my ordination. We had planned a Nova Scotia and PEI journey for our 25th wedding anniversary until COVID put the kibosh on that adventure. (We compensated two years later with a late summer visit to Montreal and then a few days in the Eastern Townships over Thanksgiving.) All of which is to say that the idea of making this sojourn was not startling. No, what knocked me on my butt was the realization that this hallowed time was now upon us and COVID or not, ready or not, our birthdays were a'coming.

We were watching one of our nightly European mysteries on TV when the subject came up again. We were kicking around ideas when all of a sudden I blurted: "Wait a minute, that's THIS year! OMG!" Having dinner with our daughter and son-in-law the next day added gravitas to this awakening. They tenderly smiled at my surprise, wondered how we were planning to mark the occasion, and then served us a stunning Middle Eastern supper. Tentatively, we are now thinking again about trying to get up to Nova Scotia and PEI: we can drive, take our time, and be reasonably assured that the contagion will be in check by late August. It's a grand time to be there as we discovered some 15 years ago. And while we both would love to visit London and Scotland again, that seems unlikely for a ton of reasons. One more encounter with the way aging asks us to make peace with letting go of another small part of our former lives.

This relinquishing is inevitable given health, mobility, and finances. If COVID has taught me anything it has something to do with acceptance, yes? This time two years ago life was full and then, over night, it came to a crashing halt. We talked about this at supper this weekend with our children, too. We had just returned from Tucson, been to Ottawa a few times in January and February, and then celebrated our daughter's birthday at a favorite local Mexican restaurant. Then, BAM, lockdown. Who knew it would essentially be a two year endurance test? Especially those of us over 60. Or with health conditions. Or those who could not work from home? The late Sr. Macrina Wiederkehr - author, retreat leader, and vocation director at St. Scholastica Monastery in Ft. Smith, AK - put it like this in her poem, "The Sacrament of Letting Go."

Slowly
She celebrated the sacrament of

Letting Go…
First she surrendered her Green
Then the Orange, yellow, and Red…
Finally she let go of her Brown…
Shedding her last leaf
She stood empty and silent, stripped bare
Leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust…
Shedding her last leaf
She watched its journey to the ground…
She stood in silence,
Wearing the color of emptiness
Her branches wondering:
How do you give shade, with so much gone?
And then, the sacrament of waiting began
The sunrise and sunset watched with
Tenderness, clothing her with silhouettes
They kept her hope alive.
They helped her understand that
her vulnerability
her dependence and need
her emptiness
her readiness to receive
were giving her a new kind of beauty.
Every morning and every evening she stood in silence and celebrated
the sacrament of waiting.

This never comes easily to any of us. My AA friends insist that acceptance is a life-long learning event that humbles and reshapes everything we once considered to be true. We can fight it, ignore it, challenge it, deny it, live into it begrudgingly, or embrace it. Whatever we choose, and it's probably a bit of all of this and more, the promise of God's peace and serenity within only comes through making peace with the sacrament of letting go. The last episode of "Afterlife," the Ricky Gervais show about grieving, expresses this with depth and tenderness. (I recommend watching the whole arc unfold over three seasons.)

It's now clearly time for the 60/70 road trip to take on its own wonderful life as we start to plan, save, do some modest physical training for long walks, and all the rest.  

blessed are the weird: jesus, mary lou williams and frank zappa

Introduction
Today’s invitation in Scripture and Story is to choose to practice being captivated by Christ’s love. That’s how I hear the words of Jesus in St. Luke’s gospel: he’s asking the people of his era as well as ours to explore a way of being that lives in the moment, honors the grace that shapes ALL of creation, seeks out beauty, refuses to be squeezed into the mold of utilitarianism, brings healing to the hurting, and trusts that the sun will come up again tomorrow morning. It is a way of participating in the love God that shares blessings rather than hoards them. That’s the part of Jesus’ message from the appointed gospel that I want to emphasize this evening: Blessed are you when people hate you, and exclude you, revile and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

· As St. Luke has emphasized throughout the first third of this gospel, Jesus is consciously re-claiming the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel that by some accounts has laid dormant for one thousand years. He is also giving shape and form to his mother’s song we know as Mary’s Magnificat as he lifts up the lowly, heals the wounded, stands in solidarity with the destitute, and welcomes the outcast into the bounty of God’s heavenly banquet table.

· To identify himself as the “Son of Man” – literally bar-adam in Aramaic or ho huios tou anthropou in Greek – is to tell us that Jesus understands himself to be a prophet like Ezekiel or Daniel; an ordinary, grassroots working soul given a mission by the divine to be executed within the nit and grit of real life. It is intentionally different from the phrase “Son of God” which the institutional church claimed for Jesus after his death. To be the fully HUMAN one, a child of humanity as the Hebrew Bible tells us over 107 times, is to be all about solidarity. What I want to share this evening is:

· First, a deep take on the unique insights of Jesus concerning God’s grace from the perspective of a prophet.

· And second, how two creative American composers – Mary Lou Williams and Frances Vincent Zappa – gave expression to the soul of the sacred through their music. It is my conviction that a “still speaking God” is not encumbered nor silenced by a culture’s chaos. As the Hebrew scriptures assure us: the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever! Through secularism, be-yond indifference, decadence, and disdain, and most certainly wherever compassionate free-dom is experienced and celebrated.

The wise Martin Buber put it like this: “In our age in which the true meaning of every word is encompassed by delusion and falsehood, and the original intention of the human glance is stifled by tenacious mistrust, it is of decisive importance to find again the genuineness of speech and existence as WE… Humankind will not persist in existence if we do not learn anew to persist in it as a WE."

In that spirit of radical and sacred solidarity, let me ask you to pray with me before moving into our time of reflection...

Biblical Insights
First, a few insights from today’s gospel lesson from St. Luke. The heart of chapter

six in St. Luke’s story has been called the Sermon on the Plain to distinguish it from St. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount – and the physicality of the sermon is every bit as important as the spirituality. St. Matthew paints Jesus as the new Moses while St. Luke shapes the story to emphasize the ancient prophets. In Matthew, this message takes place on a mountain among a handful of elite disciples which evokes a sense of Moses receiving Torah on Mt. Sinai. Luke, on the other hand, says that the sermon happened at the base of the mountain, in the middle of a crowd of ordinary people rather than a select few, where “Jesus came down (from his place of solitude and prayer on the mountain) and stood among the people on a level place.” This level place is saturated with nuance for those with ears to hear:

· In the verses we use for Advent, the prophetic poet Isaiah, declares that Messiah will bring new life to God’s people by making straight and level the uneven ground of the wilderness and smoothing out the rough places so that NO ONE is denied God’s grace and justice. I can’t help but think of Ezekiel, too, who God commands: cry out to the Spirit of Holiness from within the level valley of dry bones and bring new life to all that is dead.

· And let’s not forget that there is a hint of Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, here as well: St. Luke kicks off his story with Miriam of Nazareth singing praise to the Lord for setting grace and justice in motion so that the wounded will be made whole, the discarded embraced, and the poor liberated. For five chapters Jesus has been precisely doing this as he wandered through the borderlands of ancient Israel healing the sick, nourishing the hungry, and loving the out-casts.

And now, after he’s established his bona fides and paid his dues by getting down and dirty for five chapters, Jesus physically stands among his people and articulates what Mary’s Song, as the heart of Jubilee, looks like in real life: it is a new creation, a level place where everyone is empowered to enter God’s loving presence, and none are forgotten. Chapter six of St. Luke’s gospel completes the sermon of Jesus as prophet that he began in chapter four which, you may recall, set in motion the lynch mob among the elite of his hometown synagogue: Jesus as prophet is one take away here ok?

A second is to be found in the word blessed which Jesus uses four times. I’ve found it useful to know both how this word evolved in his context and why Jesus prophetically inverts its historic usage as another sign of God’s new creation. Our Western tradition has been woefully imprecise - even insipid – when it comes to talking about the blessings Jesus proclaims in these Beatitudes.

Sometimes we’ve equated Jesus’ words with happiness, relegating blessing to the realm of feelings. Other times we’ve believed that the Beatitudes were a hierarchy of ethical recommendations were Jesus told us “Go out and BECOME poor, hungry, sad, and outcast.” These, and other one-dimensional explanations, however, don’t do much to help us realize the new creation and level playing field of God’s grace. So, let me try this overview which is indebted Diana Butler Bass in her book Gratefulness where Dr. Bass writes:

What are blessings? The English noun “blessing” means “gift from God” and is derived from the verb “to bless,” “to hallow, or to make holy.” Over time, “bless” became associated with “bliss,” meaning merriment, happiness, and favor. So, “blessing” came to be used in two senses—as both a sacred gift and something that makes one happy – where gifts and gratitude are always of a piece and blessings and thanks go together… how then do we make sense of the Beatitudes and their challenge because clearly, we do NOT give thanks for poverty, hunger, or grief as Jesus did in his sermon. Most contemporary people have a very different idea of what makes a blessed life: Money, beauty, power, achievement, and fame—we hold these things in esteem – believing that if only we had them, or just one of them (in abundance), we would be blessed. We identify bless-ings as material things and consumer goods.

But that’s NOT what the New Testament Greek word, makarios, means – and a quick survey of its etymology has some value. Originally in Greek culture makarios was a reference to the gods: they were the only beings who had obtained happiness and contentment beyond all cares, labor, and death. To be blessed, in its first use, pointed to those who lived beyond this world.

· In time, that other-worldly quality to makarios added a new layer of meaning: to be blessed now referred to the dead – “those who had reached beyond all suffering and dwelt forever within the realm of the gods beyond earthly life.” Scholars tell us that to be blessed in this second phase of the word mean you had to be a god – or exist within the god’s world through death.

· And the third expansion of makarios built on the notion that all who lived “beyond the cares of earthly life” were blessed – including the wealthy and elite of Greek culture. The upper crust of society… who had the riches and power to put themselves above the normal cares and worries of the lesser folk who had to struggle and worry and work” were now called blessed, too.

Now add to the Greek evolution of makarios the spirituality of the Hebrew tradition in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, used throughout the Middle East that was shaped by the book of Deuteronomy in Torah. Here it was taught, as the story of Job discloses, the belief that if you lived right you were rewarded by the Lord. Blessing in this context meant “right living or righteousness… where material abundance, a good wife (in the patriarchal scheme of things), many children, rich crops, honor, wisdom, beauty, and good health” were God’s blessed pay off. As Pastor Stoffregen puts it: “a blessed person here had more things than the ordinary soul for to be blessed meant having bigger and more beautiful things than everyone else.”

· To which Jesus said: NO, these insights and permutations of blessing are simultaneously insightful and ignorant of God’s grace. They are a blessing, as far as they go, but their limitations are a curse. Blessing, Jesus insisted, was living in harmony with God’s will. It was experiencing a life shaped by God’s favor and grace.

· To which he then added: Look at the poor – THEY are favored by God – which does NOT mean we can earn God’s blessed love by being or become poor, hungry or outcast. But rather that something sacred is set in motion for all of creation among the poor – and how we respond to their pain.

In the communities of L’Arche – small, intentional gatherings of people with and without intellectual disabilities – we’ve discerned three connected truths concerning God’s blessing of the poor. 

First, their pain gives those of us with more resources a chance to share. As has been said before: mission is how the wounded heal the healthy. Or as the Eucharistic liturgy puts it: sharing by all, means scarcity for none. Second, our sharing of time, resources, and love brings a measure of healing to those most in need. And third, as we learn to walk together in humble love, those with privilege discover how to give it up while those who are most in need learn to claim their own gifts as equals on the level playing field of God’s new creation. Henri Nouwen used to say that L’Arche taught him how to practice “downward mobility” so that his new friends in community could trust God lifting up the lowly as the powerful participated in bringing down their own thrones just as Mary proclaimed. Jesus announces a reversal that brings healing to the poor as the rich and power-ful participate in the dismantling of privilege.

· This is NOT noblese oblige: it is not pity or even charity. It is the healing of creation one heart at a time. Without deep and challenging encounters with the wounded, many of us wounded, bourgeois intellectuals will stay locked in our bubbles of privilege. The poet, Marie Howe, put it like this in “The Star Market.”

· Story of a core member, music, and me...

When Jesus told his people – and tells us now – that the poor hold the key to God’s favor in the real world he was overturning all hierarchical understandings of blessing. Dr. Bass notes that:

The Beatitudes move blessing from a feeling — happiness — to the practice of radical equality. God gives gifts to everyone… and offers unique gifts to the vulnerable and those at the bottom of society. The rich, the sated, the mirthful, the proud have a very hard time understanding this. Gifts are not only for the few, but wildly distributed for all. And the people at the bottom? History’s losers? God’s favor resides with them. God has uniquely blessed them with what we ALL need to become whole. That means the proper response is… gratitude. Blessing is an invitation to give thanks — and a vision of a very different sort of world.

That’s what I see being lived out in both of today’s celebrants: Mary Lou Williams who incarnated the sermon of Jesus in a variety of ways, and, Frank Zappa, who was as far from saintly as you can be in the 20th century, but still celebrated and lifted-up the lowly, the so-called freaks and outsiders as fundamental souls for the healing of the world. You will remember, perhaps, that I’ve been read-ing the appointed gospel texts through the lens of Nordby’s Poem, Beatitudes for the Weird, which announces:

Observations about Mary Lou Williams and Frank Zappa... go to link for Small is Holy @ https://fb.watch/b9lgKdcTvw/

time to shift gears yet again and become quieter still...

The poet/folk singer, Bob Franke, put it like this forty years ago on the closing cut of his 1982 recording, One Evening in Chicago: "The Spirit blows where she will... so beware of the man selling tickets!" Solid advice on so many fronts. If you are not familiar with Franke, run - do not walk - but run to a platform that allows you to listen to his brilliant tunes. Here's one of my favorites, "For Real," that captures the essence of living faithfully.

Like so many of us of a certain age, at this point in the journey it feels like time to use my energy and effort more judiciously: with care and compassion for self and others. To that end, I am making a slight shift in the style of my Sunday evening prayer live stream: "Small is Holy." For the better part of the pandemic I've been offering spoken, sung, and liturgical reflections on staying the course during these hard times. I've shared thorough biblical reflections on the various gospel texts of the common lectionary and tried to keep them grounded in our sojourn through the contagion.

What I sense this moment calls for, however, is something slightly different: a more quiet, contemplative time for spiritual nourishment that is a bit more informal albeit it still liturgically grounded in the mystical cycle of the church year. You see, for the past 25+ years while serving various congregations in Cleveland, Tucson, and Pittsfield, I shared a simple midday Eucharist each week. It began with Fr. Jim O'Donnell's Thursday night Eucharist in Cleveland, part of his humble ministry of presence guided by the spirituality of Charles de Foucault. My focus was equally influenced by Fr. Henri Nouwen's radically inclusive midday Eucharist that he began while teaching at Yale. Over the years, this simple feast became my anchor.

Now that we are shifting gears yet again during another phase of the contagion, I want to go deeper into the quiet. So rather than construct more intricate and complex Sunday ruminations as I have for the past two years, it seems as if the time has come for a more spontaneous style of contemplation. Still rooted in the gospel of Christ's radical hospitality and grace, mind you, but let intense. At least that's what seems authentic to me right now. There are a host of great political preachers out here: the Rev. Dr. William Barber being one of the best. Some of the online messages from the Riverside Church, the Middle Collegiate Church in NYC with the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, or the worship and teaching ministries of Trinity Church Wall Street are intense, engaging, joyful and justice oriented, too. My work is something smaller. Quieter - never at odds with my colleagues who are engaged in more public encounters - just distinct. So, if you're looking for a bold public witness: check these wonderful and faithful places of worship out. 

If, however, you want to journey inward, too, you might find solace and substance with me at "Small is Holy" each Sunday @ 4 pm here: https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531

the sacrament of letting go...

Today is a perfect midwinter day in New England: the dog is sleeping after a full weekend with the grandchildren; a light, dry snow is falling continuously; I am preparing homemade chicken rice soup from the remains of Saturday's feast; and Di's laptop has returned fully restored. There's a mountain of laundry to do, spiritual reflections to draft, too as well as dusting, vacuuming, and Zoom meetings to attend... Just not right now - today is all about simmering, resting, and reflecting. Yesterday, on "Small is Holy" (https:// www.facebook. com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531) I shared this poem by Macrina Wiederkehr:

Slowly

She celebrated the sacrament of

Letting go...

First she surrendered her Green

Then the Orange, Yellow, and Red...

Finally she let go of her Brown...

Shedding her last leaf

She stood empty and silent, stripped bare

Leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust...

Shedding her last leaf

She watched its journey to the ground

She stood in silence,

Wearing the color of emptiness

Her branches wondering:

How do you give shade, with so much gone?

And then the sacrament of waiting began

The sunrise and sunset watched with

Tenderness, clothing her with silhouettes

They kept her hope alive.

They helped her understand that

her vulnerability

her dependence and need

her emptiness

her readiness to rece4ive

were giving her a new kind of beauty.

Every morning and every evening she stood in silence and celebrated

the sacrament of waiting.

I cherish a day such as this and seek to live into it fully. For even in this new phase of my journey, deep silence must not be taken for granted. A photo my daughter took on our walk through the woods yesterday captures some of what's at stake.

Perspective. A sense of place. Honoring what is mine to honor and respectfully celebrating the sacrament of letting go.

more rest and reflection than research and writing this week...

This was a practice what you've preached week: more rest and reflection than writing and research. So, it was a gentle contemplative retreat for "Small is Holy" this week. Be well, friends, take care and stay safe.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1369426316809577

the blessing of pandemic weariness...

As we approach the start of Covid: Year Three, I confess to being weary. In this, I am no different than the rest of us - and therein lies a humble reality that feels like a blessing. At least among those with whom I correspond regularly - and that small circle of friends who periodically check-in during my Sunday evening "Small is Holy" livestreaming reflections on FB - I have experienced a unique and even holy sense of solidarity. As the pandemic ripens, ebbs, flows, baffles, and morphs into something still unimagined and vexing, our virtual connections have become a God-send to me. Something I never want to ever take for granted. That's why I give thanks to God today that over the weekend I encountered what I think of as one of the pandemic's periodic low points: not despair nor inertia, not deep physical or emotional exhaustion either, just a sense that my soul was aching softly just below the surface. Truth be told, it was a longing for deeper connection and self-care.

Of course the brutal cold and perpetual grey skies haven't helped: parts of this feeling regularly show up inside me about this time of year. That's why, before COVID, we slipped away to Tucson for a breather. Nothing like perpetual sun, warm wind, the smell of creosote in the desert after it rains, good friends, and excellent Mexican food to fix what's broken. We'd actually started making plans to get away from the gloom when Omicron put a halt to this year's adventure. While vaccinated and boostered, we had no desire to risk air travel right now. Just the thought of mixing with those who have chosen NOT to be vaccinated caused me to cancel online arrangements. Add to that the reality of so many flights being both cancelled and/or delayed because of sickness was equally exasperating. What's more, the dear friends who had invited us to rest from the cold in the desert have delicate health issues of their own and we would never do anything to compromise their well being. 

So, making peace with January and February in the Berkshires became our spiritual challenge. One joy is that we will play with our grandchildren this weekend, weather permitting, and visit with the Massachusetts clan the following weekend. We reclaimed and restocked our bird feeders, too and now our wee friends have returned to greet us throughout the day. As today is the Feast Day of St. Brigid of Kildare I will dust the house, scrub the floors, and then make three St. Brigid crosses to grace our thresholds. We began making some kitchen upgrade plans to add another layer of beauty to our monastic solitude. And, as an act of self-care, I've given myself permission to pause my study and writing for Sunday and just chill. It simply felt like too much was needed to rush into my reflection on Mary Lou Williams and Frank Zappa this week. Digital editor, Ayu Sutriasa, at YES Magazine recently wrote that this January has felt particularly daunting:

Pandemic anxiety feels like a whole new ballgame. If you’re anything like me, maybe some of your tried-and-true coping mechanisms just aren’t cutting it right now (which is totally understandable.) When writer and psychologist Gabes Torres told me she wanted to write a piece on navigating pandemic anxiety by centering the body, it was an obvious yes. Just reading her draft, I felt validated in everything I’ve been feeling since the omicron surge. And my biggest takeaway? Remember to trust and tend to my body. I hope you find some peace and comfort in her brilliant, tender words, as I did. (Check out her reflection on trusting your body here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2022/01/27/pandemic-anxiety-let-the-body-lead)

Once I let go of my self-imposed Sunday commitment, I felt like dancing. I still wanted to be engaged and connected. That is life-giving and sacred to me. But I needed to do so this week without pressure. Practicing what you've periodically preached doesn't always come easy to any of us. But listening to and then trusting the embodied wisdom within called to me in ways I could feel and hear - that's why I believe my weariness was and is a blessing. I look forward to reflecting on this week's gospel with you, sharing silence and song, too on Sunday's "Small is Holy." And, I trust that you will find it a time of simple contemplation and rest. You may tune in here @ 4 pm on Sunday: https://www.facebook.com/Be-Still-and-Know-913217865701531 

blessed are the weird: dorothy day, lou reed, and prophetic compassion

Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann – child of German Reform immigrants who grew-up in the Midwest as the heir to the intellectual and social justice legacy of both Niebuhr brothers and this nation’s most accessible interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures for English-speaking Christians – once described the work of ancient Israel’s prophets as uncredentialed artists who were:

Moved the way every good poet is moved to describe the world differently

according to the gifts of their insight… In their own time and every time since, the people that control the power structures do not know what to make of them, so they characteristically try to silence them. And what power people always discover – then, now, and always – is that you cannot finally silence poets. They just keep coming at you in threatening and transformative ways. (On Being with Krista Tippett.)

Today’s text from the gospel according to St. Luke reverberates with the same type of prophetic poetry that agitated and threatened some in the home synagogue of Jesus and continues to provoke power brokers today. Lou Reed, from the realm of rock’n’roll, and Dorothy Day, cofounder of the revolutionary Catholic Worker movement, lived fully into this prophetic tradition. The first time I listened to “Busload of Faith” where St. Lou snarls – “You can't depend on the goodly hearted, the goodly hearted made lamp-shades and soap. You can't depend on the Sacrament: no Father, no Holy Ghost. You can't depend on any churches unless there's real estate that you want to buy. You can't depend on a lot of things: you need a busload of faith to get by!” – I heard the same challenge of judgement and hope that Professor Brueggemann insists God requires from all anoint-ed with the prophetic imagination. Back in 2011, Krista Tippet asked Brueggemann: can you tell us “Who the prophets ARE?” and the good professor replied, “Artists who rise up from the landscape without pedigree or credentialing to speak words of sacred judgement and hope. Perhaps these two passages will clarify.”

For judgement, Jeremiah 4: “I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid waste…before God’s fierce anger”. This text is a prophetic poem of creation in reversal. You go from heaven and earth to mountains, to birds, to humans. He’s describing it all being taken away at one time. When I hear that kind of poetry, I get chill bumps because it’s so contemporary – what so many people are now experiencing in the world. It is as though the ordered world is being taken away from us and is so powerfully exquisite. The other text is Isaiah 43: “Do not remember the former things nor consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” What the prophet is telling his people is just forget about the Exodus, forget about all the ancient miracles, and pay attention to the new miracles of rebirth and new creation that God is enacting before your very eyes. I often wonder when I read that, what was it like the day the poet got those words? What did it feel like and how did he share that? Of course, we don’t know… but it just keeps ringing in our ears.

Whether it’s Jeremiah or Jesus, Isaiah or Dorothy Day, Walter Brueggemann or Lou Reed, ALL agree that an anointed prophet is an artist who shakes up the status quo by naming our wounds, encouraging grief as catharsis and confession rather than denial, and helping a culture learn how to wait upon the Lord for inspiration rather than reactively rushing into half-baked actions. Inspired artists create space for hope to be born in the most unlikely places like Mary birthing Jesus into a manger. Speaking from a desolate and dangerous dive on the Lower East Side, Dorothy Day said that:

Our greatest challenge is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which starts with-in each of us. We have all known the long loneliness and intuitively know that the solution to our longing is love born in community. Please pray with me as I reflect on this with you…

Gracious Source of All Wisdom and Compassion: you have shown us that where there is separation, there is pain. And where there is pani, there is a story. And where there is a story, there is understanding and misunderstanding, listening and not listening. May we – separated peoples, estranged strangers, unfriended families, divided communities – turn toward each other, and turn toward our stories with understanding and listening, with argument and acceptance, challenge, change and consolation. Because, if God is to be found, God will be found in the space between. Amen. (Padraig O'Tuama)

Today’s reading from the Revised Common Lectionary of the of the Ecumenical Western Church is a continuation of last week’s lesson concerning the start of the public ministry of Jesus. I often use the appointed readings of the ecumenical church as one modest commitment to Christian unity. It’s a discipline of solidarity with sisters and brothers throughout the world who wrestle with the same sacred words together. There are other circumstances that sometimes warrant looking beyond our shared readings, but as a rule, following the common lectionary has been a trusted practice for nearly half a century.

To recap for those who are new to our reflections: last Sunday I unpacked some of what was going on in St. Luke’s story of Jesus proclaiming himself an advocate of Jubilee justice. From his home synagogue: he’s teaching his kin that he’s a prophet in the mode of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, and Hosea; he’s confirming that his anointing is inspired by the spirit of holiness encountered during his initiation by John in the Jordan River; he’s incarnating the wisdom spirituality of balance by integra-ting the sacred feminine of his beloved mother, Miriam of Nazareth, with the divine masculine of his wild man, baptizing cousin. And he’s artistically articulating the judgement and hope of his Jubilee commitment. We covered a LOT of ground last week so please know you can always go back to this FB site and replay it, ok? If this is your first time with us, you should also know that we’re looking at our lessons through the lens of Jacob Nordby’s poem: A Beatitudes for the Weird.

During the quiet liturgical season of Epiphany, roughly the 8 weeks in-between the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th and the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday on March 2nd, we’re honoring the blessed weird among us – the poets, misfits, writers, mystics, heretics, painters, and troubadours – for they teach us to see the world through different eyes. To date, the gifts of Richard Rohr, Alana Levandowski, Henri Nouwen, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousufzai, James Baldwin, and Kaitlin Curtice have been considered – and today we’ll add Dorothy Day and Lou Reed.

That’s where we’ve been. What I want to scrutinize now is why the hometown

community of Jesus freaked-out? Why did they cop an attitude of disrespect to shame him into silence? And descend later into a frenzied violent horde every bit as terrifying and revolting as a lynch mob? What is going on here – and why does it matter to us today? Too often this story has been used to excuse our anti-Semitism suggesting that the real reason the synagogue turned on Jesus has to do with Jewish ethnocentricity and xenophobia. Dr. Amy Jill-Levine at Duke Theological Seminary, co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, writes: “Christians have tried to explain the fury of the congregation by claiming that Jews… wanted to reserve the messianic benefits Jesus promises for themselves (and so) seek to kill Jesus because of his positive message for the Gentiles.” Clearly St. Luke intends some of this by including this story in his gospel. He tends to elevate Christ’s outreach to Gentiles while denigrating the synagogue’s leadership. But such a spin violates the ministry of Jesus and misrepresents the trajectory of Jewish history as well. Dr. Levine adds this clarification:

Jews in general had positive relations with Gentiles as witnessed by the Court of the Gentiles in the Jerusalem Temple. Gentiles were often patrons of local synagogues and, as Acts 10 tells us, often worshipped there as non-Jewish “god-fearers.” Further, Jews expected the redemption of righteous Gentiles… to come streaming into Zion as the prophet Zechariah states upon the arrival of the Messiah. “In those days ten men from the nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, and grasping his garment say: Let us go with you for we have heard that the Lord is here.”

Why the vitriol, vehemence, and violence then from the Lord’s hometown synagogue? My hunch is that there are at least two reasons: first, some in that crowd chose not to see Jesus as an anointed prophet inspired by God’s spirit because of his ancestry; and second, others feared that while the Jubilee might be good news for the poor, it would not be such good news for the wealthy.

No sooner did Jesus finish teaching about Jubilee, the acceptable year of God’s justice and compassion, then we’re told that some spoke well of him, but others started to grumble saying: “Is this not Joseph’s son?” In a parallel version, chapter six of St. Mark’s gospel adds that some also said: “Where did all this wisdom come from in THIS man? Isn’t he the carpenter son of Mary and the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon?” There is a sociological difference between our 21st century quasi-egalitarian Western culture and the ancient codes of honor and shame in the Mediterranean world of the 1st CE. The Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels notes that: “Like everything else in antiquity, honor was a limited good. If someone gained, someone else lost. To be recognized for his prophetic wisdom and holy man deeds of power meant that honor due an-other person or family in Nazareth was diminished. Claims to more than one’s appointed share of honor determined at and by birth… including family of origin, blood relations, inherited honor, social status and achievements of family members” had consequences.

Raising questions about Joseph’s carpenter son – or worse yet St. Mark’s text that ignores his paternity entirely naming only momma as in “Whose bastard kid is this, anyway?” – finds the elites of the synagogue using a time-tested slur to cut Jesus down to size. “How could such astounding teaching and healing come from one born to a lowly, itinerant, manual craftsman?” This was more than a casual inquiry: it was an insult that modern Westerners tend to gloss over. Those from the Eastern Orthodox Church, however, have historically taken stock of what’s going on.

They have consistently named the ridicule and shame being dumped on Jesus as part of what’s taking place in the synagogue as a cruel attempt to belittle “Jesus’ birth status… and his father’s working-class vocation.” Which better explains Jesus’ pointed – even snarky – reply. Scholars suggest that given his culture, Jesus was ready for this attack: “No doubt you will quote proverbs to me like “Physician, heal thyself.” But let me remind YOU that there have been times in our past when our own prophets healed those outside the fold – like Elijah feeding the starving heathen widow in Sidon but not his kin during the famine, or, Elisha cleansing the Gentile leper in Syria without doing so in Israel – If you trusted the awesome grace of the Lord you would NOT look to limitations, but to the abundance of God’s love.” Not only was Jesus using the Jewish prophetic tradition to stifle any critique about his status and honor, he was also reminding the elite that God regularly raises up those from the periphery to bring about new healing and hope to the totality of society. That strikes me as one of the reasons the synagogue crowd became so ugly.

The other is that should Jesus actually be inaugurating a year of Jubilee where land was returned to the homeless, debtors released from prison, slaves set free, and wealth shared on behalf of the common good, then the Latin American liberation theologians got it right: good news becomes bad news before it becomes blessed news again for everyone. As in our own day, if Jubilee happened, the 1% would have to pay their fair share of taxes, share their resources, and let go of some of their privilege so that everyone might thrive. In the last year, we, too have seen what it looks like when people’s fear morphs into violence towards those they feel have disrespected them or supplanted their privilege. Black Lives Matter is one contemporary manifestation of the soul of Jesus in action refusing to let insult and fear limit God’s love for ALL our sisters and brothers – especially those who have historically been locked out of freedom by race, class, or sexuality. 

Same too Dr. Barber’s Poor People’s Movement which is creating a public forum of

testimony, agitation, and art to take on the agony of institutional sin. In organized acts of prophetic nonviolence, they are exposing the wounds of American society in the 21st century with the same creativity as Jesus. It is into this legacy that God’s beloved Dorothy Day felt called with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength. Hers was a way of being totally at odds with 20th century American culture, mainstream Roman Catholic spirituality, and the agenda of America’s leftist activists. Her way was NOT weird to St. Francis or St. Clare, the poustinias of Russian Orthodoxy, the ancient Celtic monks, or the worker priest movement in France; but it was overwhelmingly weird to the rest of Western culture.

I know I was weirded out by aspects of the Catholic Worker movement, first as a boycott organizer with the farm workers union in Kansas City, and later visiting St. Joseph House of Hospitality in NYC as a grad student. In the early 80’s, I was a liberation theology seminarian just returned from Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Somehow the Spirit put me in touch with Gene Palumbo, a reporter for WBAI radio who later covered Central America for the National Catholic Reporter. We hit it off so I was invited to the Worker house in the Bowery one weekend for a seminar featuring Segundo Galilea of Santiago, Chile. Gene worked and lived at St. Joseph house, serving breakfast to the homeless poor on Saturday mornings and free lancing at NYC’s Pacifica radio station, too.

On Friday evening he took me to Vespers and Eucharist before the roundtable peace and justice discussion – and I confess it felt like Marat Sade to me. Galilea, a quiet, intense, intellectual Roman Catholic priest, stood speaking quietly about God’s preferential option for the poor while street people and those of varying degrees of psychological distress wandered freely through the hall. There was shouting, interrupting, and sometimes screeching from some unseen upstairs dormitory that unnerved me. By pure force of the will, I returned for breakfast the next day only to flee a few hours later as the seminar became a sensory and emotional overload. I was exhausted and even horrified as there was too much chaos and noise for this bourgeois seminary hot shot to take in.

And yet this was how Dorothy incarnated her calling from God: St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality and later Maryhouse was open to all needing shelter from the storm and respite from society’s judgement. Not only was her life before the Worker one wild and weird ride of ecstatic ups and devastating downs, so too her nearly 50-year engagement among the least of these our sisters and brothers until her death in 1980.

Dorothy Day was born and died in NYC – living, studying, and working all over the United States for 83 years – in service to the poor whether a journalist for socialist newspapers, an activist with the International Workers of the World union – the Wobblies – a nurse, a housekeeper, wife, or mother. She used to say: “Since when are WORDS the only acceptable form of prayer?” While living with her parents and four siblings in Oakland, Dorothy experienced the agony of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake but also saw the heroic ecstasy of ordinary people responding to tragedy with extraordinary compassion. After the earthquake, she was introduced to the urban slums and Anglican worship as her family had to relocated to Chicago. She sang in the choir, prayed for the poor, and mystically let her soul get lost in the Eucharistic liturgy. At 14 she was baptized, at 17 started college at Champaign-Urbana only to quit two years and move back to NYC after becoming enthralled with the lives of Christian mystics.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1915 was a heady place for an idealistic young woman and Dorothy Day threw herself into the bohemian splendor of the era with abandon joining protests, taking lovers, enduring an illegal abortion, celebrating the arts, working as a journalist, entering marriage, birthing a daughter, and eventually leaving her marriage to grow deeper in prayer. Dur-ing those years she was befriended by Sister Aloysius of Staten Island who tenderly served as her spiritual director. Eventually Dorothy embraced Roman Catholicism. But as the Great Depression deepened, she became increasingly despondent with politics, the church, the activism of the communist left, and life itself wondering aloud:

“What would the world look like if we took care of the poor as we do our Bibles!” In Washington, DC 1932 while covering a national demonstration as a journalist, she went to pray for new direction at the National Catholic Shrine. When she got home, Peter Maurin was waiting for her on her door-step – a reality Day always spoke of as her answer to prayer. Maurin, a self-educated, spiritual anarchist, came to the US from France by way of Montreal and helped Dorothy reclaim a life of faith by integrating her intellect with physical acts of mercy. On May Day 1933, they co-founded the Catholic Worker movement to be the best of Catholicism and Communism made practical by acts of radical hospitality: “There is another way,” she told those with ears to hear, “despair is not our only reality. The Catholic Church has a social program that cares for the spiritual AND physical well-being of every person.” Come to see us...

In time, people did, as there would be over two hundred houses of hospitality spread across the USA, Writing tirelessly for her Catholic Worker paper, Day shared a unique synthesis of theology and politics that bewildered many Americans as she insisted that Christianity is ALL about acts of mercy, not merely membership in a church. In that era of conformity, she asserted that: “those who will not see Christ in the poor are atheists.” Not a message that endeared her to the Catholic hierarchy of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Day regularly took on NYC’s Cardinal Spellman demanding that he abandon the Just War theology for the radical pacifism of Jesus. She linked arms with A.J. Muste and Dave Dellinger to form Liberation Magazine, celebrated the young Fidel Castro when he came to the UN, threw her support behind Vatican II, confronted church and state over the Vietnam War, and cherished being called the original hippie by Abbie Hoffman. Like Jesus in today’s gospel, her witness was often rejected, hated, judged, and shamed – but she stayed the course – running with perseverance the race set before her. So much so when she died in 1980, Cardinal Terrence Cook, with whom she spared in public and private, greeted her funeral procession when it arrived at her home parish: the Church of the Nativity.

She knew that the way of Jesus looked like madness to many addicted to the bottom line: “When people say, what is the sense of our small effort?” she replied, “They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. That is why I confess that I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor… Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world." I see Dorothy Day as one who trusted that God’s Jubilee became flesh in the person and spirituality of Jesus. She gave her life to incarnating that weird blessing living among us as one of God’s visible misfits.

Lou Reed, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. He was NOT saintly

although I speak of him as St. Lou. In some ways, he’s the opposite of Dorothy Day although they once lived in the same neighborhood. He was decadent and surly, promiscuous and brash, broken inside and out, and yet he was thoroughly in love and committed to all who had ever been abandoned, rejected, crushed, or shamed by straight America. Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1942, raised in a Jewish family on Long Island, his clan hailed from the Russian Jewish diaspora of the late 19th century as they fled antisemitism and the violence of pogroms. As often happens with second generation immigrant families, Lou’s accountant father changed their Russian surname from Rabinowitz to Reed to better conform to their new home. Reed’s sister says that as a child, Lou was a sensitive, artistic, and socially awkward boy with a fragile temperament. But that shy guy found some grit and drive when he discovered early rock’n’roll and rhythm and blues: he taught himself to play guitar by listening to the radio and formed his first garage band at 16. At college, however, rock’n’roll wasn’t enough and Reed suffered an emotional and psychological breakdown.

The family psychologist pressured and shamed Reed’s parents until they agreed to put Lou under electroshock therapy. Years later, Reed said that the real reason everyone caved to this torture was NOT his depression or anxiety, but his homosexual urges – which he sang about in “Kill Your Sons” on his second solo album: All you two-bit psychiatrists giving electro shock say they’ll let you live at home, with mom and dad, instead of mental hospital; but every time you tried to read a book you couldn't get to page 17 ‘cause you forgot where you were: Don't you know, they're gonna kill your sons, don't you know, they're gonna kill, kill, kill your sons until they run run run run run run run run away!

This was St. Lou’s charism: brutal honesty about the brokenness just below the surface of the lies we tell one another about the American Dream – with a killer back beat! After therapy, he headed back to college, studying poetry under Delmore Schwartz, once editor of the Partisan Review and one of the first writers to describe the anguish of middle-class Jewish immigrants living in the US after the Great Depression. Schwartz, along with the free jazz movement of Ornette Coleman as well as young Lou’s discovery of intravenous drugs, pushed him into the cultural underground where he chose to shuck it all, move to Manhattan, and find a job writing crank’em out cheap rock’n’roll songs for Pickwick Records.

In 1964, a brash, dissolute Lou Reed formed one of America’s most influential rock

bands, The Velvet Underground, and soon became allies of avant-garde artist Andy Warhol. Brian Eno, record producer of David Bowie, U2 and others, notes that while the first Velvet Underground album only sold ten thousand copies everyone who bought it formed a band! It came out the same year as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper – 1967 – but had NOTHING in common with the Fab Four’s celebration of psychedelia and love. The Velvets championed the depths not the heights, the underdogs, the rejected and abused. The ones who only came out at night: the trans community, the addicts, those who had been thrown into the garbage bin of history by their families and society.

While the Beatles sang: “I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends,” the Velvets sang: “I don't know just where I'm going but I'm gonna try for the kingdom if I can, cause it makes me feel like I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein.” These were America’s weird children who couldn’t fit in yet were learning to create something beautiful albeit fragile from their grief. They discovered a solidarity of the wounded that honored their pain and turned shame into a sacrament. In Nordby’s words, “they were the blessed weird, the misfits and troubadours who teach us to see with new eyes… the blessed who embrace the intensity of life’s pain and live into uncommon ecstasy… the souls who have discovered beauty in ugliness.”

I cannot help but give thanks to God for Lou who in 1970 released his homage to the weird: “Walk on the Wild Side.” It scared the crap out of me the first time I heard it – all that gender-bending, addict talk – and the way Lou looked back then with all that mascara and leather? But slowly and tenderly Lou lured me into listening to life more carefully. St. Lou, you see, was the prophet of the new American underground, heir apparent to Ginsberg and the Beats who had wept and raged as they watched the best minds of their generation be destroyed by madness. He was the aesthetic opposite of the sentimentality of the Beach Boys American Dream – he incarnated the underside – the American Nightmare – with a voice of radical, unconditional love that popular culture did NOT want middle class kids to hear let alone trust.

Oh, could I go ON about this genius, but let me just share this instead. The more time I spent with Lou Reed, the more I heard Christ’s compassionate heart beating with acceptance for every boy or girl, man or woman, who had ever been beaten down or thrown away like used tissue. He showed the power brokers of his day what the face of the despised looked like, how they still ached for love and safety even while running into the gritty streets, dark shadows, and filthy urban alleyways of broken cities. Like the cool geniuses of jazz who looked tough on the outside but played those sweet ballads of the Great American Songbook with heart and soul, St. Lou was a softie, too.

He could kick ass with the best of them, but when he finally got clean and sober in the late 80’s, practicing Tai Chi and Zen Buddhist meditation with his third wife, Laurie Anderson, he let some of that sweet side shine through. Listen to his lament for America during the Reagan regime on the masterpiece: NEW YORK.

 

Or his meditation on grief on MAGIC AND LOSS that chronicles the suicide of a loved one and the slow death by radiation treatment for terminal cancer of another.

  

I experienced a new reverence for St. Lou on October 27, 2013, when he died. A few years earlier he’d received a new liver, but still had complications for the hepatitis B he’d contracted as an intra-venous drug user. In moment of sacred synchronicity, I found out that St. Lou died the same day my friend Michael died a pauper’s death alone in Cleveland. Mike was the addict in recovery who turned me on to AA. And somehow the symmetry of sadness in his death alongside of Lou’s cracked something open in me that I’m still exploring. And I can’t tell you exactly why, except to say that I started deconstructing Lou’s big hit – Sweet Jane – in a quiet and hushed style that became a prayer for me. Usually, “Sweet Jane” is performed with raunchy electric guitars and crashing cymbals. But even the Cowboy Junkies version wasn’t quiet enough for me. So, I kept playing it over and over until it became a holy lament honoring ALL the wounds and sorrows of those we want to heal by love, but can’t. So, before celebrating Eucharist, let me share THIS with you… (see above.)