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.)