the embrace of june's feast days and our rock'n'soul music...

June is saturated in feast days - Pentecost, Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Nativity of John the Baptist, and Saints Peter and Paul Day being the most significant - and I find myself reveling in the bounty. I didn't grow up with feast days. The Congregational Way threw that baby out with the bath water of the Reformation along with contemplative prayer, liturgy, chant, and the importance of discerning tradition. Our "solo scriptura" was both an earnest and arrogant attempt to reclaim primitive Christianity from institutionalization and empire. The mentors of my first nascent spirituality were cock sure they had a monopoly on the truth and soon joined the ranks of our earlier religious despots who somehow made peace in their souls with the misogyny and violence of the witch hunts, burning so-called heretics at the stake, torture, and genocide. 

I was duly indoctrinated and bought the sanitized mythology of the Pilgrims as celebrants of religious freedom without once wondering what happened to the first inhabitants of New England. Through prayer, study, resentment, and a degree of acceptance I've come to see my Puritan ancestors as haughty, adolescent bullies who convinced themselves of their own righteousness while wounding, abusing, and violating the land, its first caretakers, and all who couldn't stomach their religious zeal. There are aspects of my tradition that I cherish, it's rugged non-conformist tendencies being paramount, but this has included incarnating Merton's insight about learning to "grow where we're planted." I have had to reclaim so many spiritual babies from their discarded bathwater over the years including the sanctity of Eucharist, feast and fast days, mystical wisdom, and liturgical prayer being the most important. Thank God for communities like Taize, Celebration, and Iona who have been allies in reclaiming our lost treasures with a measure of humility.

I suppose its no wonder that ALL of my spiritual directors have been Roman Catholic - some priests some renegades - but all grounded in prayer, study, and the challenge of sorting out what is sacred and what is dross from tradition. Same holds true for many of my intellectual mentors including Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister, and Henri Nouwen. As Sr. Joan puts it: we must learn how to see the eagle within the egg if we're to renew what is holy in our traditions. A few brilliant and non-conformist women scholars from the Reformed tradition have been blessings, too: Cynthia Bourgeault, Barbara Brown Taylor, Margaret Guenther, Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tribble, and Kathleen Norris being the most important. Add into the mix Walter Wink, Gustavo Gutierrez, Clarence Jordan, Thomas Keating, Mary Oliver, MLK, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Bono, Springsteen, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Zappa, and Robert Bly and you have the faculty that has guided me through the haze into clarity over the past 60 years.

All of this is prelude to this moment when I've been reconnected to my earliest calling of sharing both rock'n'soul music for the body and mind (to paraphrase Country Joe and the Fish) and the spiritual renewal of individuals and congregations. Back in 1968, shortly after Dr. King's assassination, I was in the Potter's House in Washington, DC with my church youth group when I sensed a "call to ministry." As the artists of the Church of the Savior did experimental liturgy in their coffee house ministry, I "heard" the Spirit whisper: "You could do this, too!" Fifty seven years later this journey keeps on truckin' in ways that delight and astound me. Like the Dead still sing: What a LONG strange trip it's been! I feel that way weeding the garden, preaching in Palmer, playing music at the Sideline Saloon and Methuselah in Pittsfield, being grandad to my precious Lou and Anna, and loving my life partner. 

Last night at the Sideline, my heart was full to overflowing when the crowd started to get up and dance to our music. And clap. And singalong: whoa-wo listen to the music! When Dave played his extended lead guitar breaks during "Can't You See" I was in the zone of solidarity and ecstasy. In many ways, our wee band, ALL of Us, is a throwback playing with and reforming our rock'n'soul tradition. We're kin to the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, Joan Osborne, Dylan, Springsteen, Beatles, and ZZ Top: let's boogie while we can and care for one another tenderly in the process.  When this happens the blessings of our feast days becomes real for me in ways that transcend words. 

       

anti-zionism is NOT the same as anti-semitism

Let me start off by acknowledging that OFTEN I am late to the party practically, politically, theologically, sometimes spiritually but RARELY emotionally. My soul grasps the wounds and blessings of creation long before my head catches up to my heart. That's part of the legacy of being an adult child of alcoholics where rage was mixed with affection and safety came and went without warning. Being outwardly cautious, therefore, not only became my default position during times of conflict, but became a discipline I cultivated as I matured. My hesitations are a natural part of a childhood legacy - I KNOW I am terrified of conflict and physical violence - as well as part of my quest for wisdom and humility. In many situations, I find its best to go slowly rather than spontaneously both to sort out what is authentic and true when feelings are swirling and because no one can see their own shadow. Watching and waiting, observing and testing the waters of life have proven to be healthier and safer for me than all the alternatives. 

Which isn't to say I haven't rushed to judgment. Clearly, I have in matters of the heart, politics, the buzz of a party, the heat of an argument and so much more. But as St. Irenaeus of Lyons insisted during the second century CE: we were made to grow into the image of God by learning from our mistakes. There is NO original sin, just humans growing in faith and becoming incrementally more Christlike in the process. The Eastern Orthodox celebrate this as "divinization" and I affirm it in spades. As life has ripened, my mantra has become: be still and know! As well as: follow me and learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

Consequently, most of the time, it takes forever for me to share my take on the events of the day: not only are they transitory - and often a distraction from living into Christ's compassion - but shifting sands that are rarely clear at the outset. I am not one who will jump on today's cause celebre: intellectually, morally, politically, and ethically I can't do it. And that brings me to the agony of owning that Israel's war against Hamas is genocide. Today's horrors are the most naked example of Israel's historic hatred of Palestine. At times over the past 78 years their violence has been clandestine, at other times blatantly vulgar, and always a violation of the spirit of hope that emerged out of the ashes of  the Holocaust. 

I know such a conclusion is generational, ok? Like many of my peace-making peers, for decades I only heard part of the story. I was morally blinded by the incomprehensible horrors of Auschwitz. I knew nothing of the Nakba. I only read what the NY Times wanted me to read. Until the 90's I believed that Israel truly acted only defensively against aggressors hell-bent on its destruction. And while that's part of the truth, it's not the whole truth so help me God as the nearly 40,000 and counting Palestinian deaths document. The terrorist slaughter of October 7th can never be excused or rationalized as a righteous consequence of oppression. But let's be clear: the wildly disproportionate violence the IDF has rained down upon women and children as well as the innocent sick and elderly - to say nothing of the campaign of starvation currently in place throughout Gaza - stands as proof of Israel's commitment to genocide. I hate that this is true. But I hate the brutality and death that innocent Palestinians are enduring more than my own broken heart. 

So, what I have long known within - and been hesitant to say out loud - is now all too obvious . As Chris Hedges presciently wrote in February: 

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed. Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza. https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/chris-hedges-let-them-eat-dirt/

Pope Francis has noted us that: we are living in an era overcome by the magnitude of the violence and the acute hopelessness that surfaces when the scale of destruction, violence and injustice comes to the surface... this sense of apathy and willful ignorance arises in the face of global violence. In today's world, the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading, and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable and globalized indifference, born of deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive illusion: thinking that we are all-powerful, while failing to realize that we are all in the same boat. Or as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: few of us are guilty, but all of us are responsible. 

My caution has its place - I will always trust it - but now it has run its course and can serve only to excuse and deny the genocide born of blind and arrogant Zionism.