Thankfulness

Well, it's been a while.

It's been a challenging few months; Beloved has had struggles with her depression and her job; I've had a new job (which I love, but being new somewhere sort of demands that you raise the level of your game), and there have been a couple of other "extra effort" sorts of circumstances. I've had NO time to write, or even to think too deeply or for too long.

Which is, perhaps, a blessing in disguise. ;-)

And we're heading into December, which is generally my most stressful month of the year. But today I'm in a good place with it. The last few days have taught me some stuff; Beloved and I stayed home and had a quiet Thanksgiving together, and it's been a terrific weekend framed by wonderful worship services at my home church.

For the six of you who are still reading after this long hiatus, I shall spill out the wisdom that's presently in my tenuous grasp:

• In times of stress, sometimes you have to pare down to the essentials as a family. Being able to say "No, thank you" is a critical survival skill.
• Remembering to do something sweet and surprising during such a time can have extra impact. Beloved got me a "real" version of this piece of art, had it beautifully framed and gave it to me on Thanksgiving. Ummm...wow. I get a bit weepy just thinking about it. The Ruth passage it references was read at our wedding.
• Ask for help when you need it. (I know...duh, but I'm still working on this lesson, after years of Life's gracious re-presentation of opportunities to learn it.)
• Speak your truth, even when it's difficult. Sometimes the only way forward is through.
• Love is all around. Look for its impish grin peeking at you around corners and beckoning you.
• Finally, from Meister Eckhart: if the only prayer you say in your life is "thank you," that would suffice.

About that last one--though I find much of contemporary culture (at least that part that relates to getting/having/sharing our stuff) seriously out of whack, I have to say that a day set aside for pondering the gifts of our lives, and being thankful for them, is a not-so-distant relative of the Biblical concept of jubilee. In the same way that jubilee released people from debt and punishment, intentional thankfulness releases us from the bindings of fear and despair by reframing our vision.

• Instead of worrying about what might be, we see what is.
• Instead of focusing on the material (and its potential for loss), thankfulness rightly locates us in the abundance of God's mercy and love.
• Instead of ruminating about "I," we find ourselves in relationship with "Thou" (and "thou," and "thou," and "thou...").

This is all to the good, and I'm facing December with a lens of quiet confidence and with a singing heart...at least, for today.

Deo gratias.

Thoughts for the first music rehearsal of a new program year...

...from Thomas Merton:

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound

but because of the silence that is in it:

without the alternation of sound and silence,

there would be no rhythm.

If we strive to be happy

by filling in the silences of life with sound,

productive

by turning all life's leisure into work,

and real

by turning all our being into doing,

we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.

If we have not silence,

God is not heard in our music.

If we have not rest,

God does not bless our work.

If we twist our lives out of shape

in order to fill every corner of them

with action and experience,

God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts

and leave us empty.

Come to the table

My friend Daniel is a composer. I've sung--and programmed-- several of his works, with my congregation and with three different choirs. My favorite of those works is a hymn he wrote, which is part of my personal canon of hymns; it could easily have been included in my post of a few weeks ago (in fact, several of you did just that in your response to my question!). For those of you who haven't heard it, the words are

Come to the table; come as you are.
Come as you're able; see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

Bring your burdens and your cares;
take them to the Lord in prayer.
In our weakness God is there; can't you see?

Come to the table; come as you are.
Come as you're able; see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

In the mercy that abounds,
and accepting love we've found,
by the blessed tie we're bound as family.

Won't you come to the table, come as you are,
come as you're able--see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

(c) Daniel L. Pederson

There's a persistence in this text--I think it does a really good job of painting God's utterly open invitation to all comers. I like that it puts that invitation in our mouths. I like that it acknowledges our burdens, our need for mercy. I like the combination of plural and singular pronouns that sets a context of "us," instead of only "me" (and yet, it feels personal to sing it). I like that it assures that mercy and grace are available for the asking. Most of all, I like that it helps us to sing our way into a love that's so much bigger than we are, it can't help but spill over the rim of any cup that tries to contain it.

Perhaps inevitably, as a member of the GLBT community, I care about that. Not for the sake of using a hymn to promote "diversity," but because it's authentically healing. Beloved and I chose it for our wedding; a lesbian friend later told us that it moved her to tears with its radical welcome at a time when her own recently-former church community had made her decidedly unwelcome. This hymn has offered the same message to many other people who have felt themselves outside the embrace of God and community, whatever their reasons.

It's robust, bountiful.

Musically, it sings with the ease of a hymn, in four parts...and yet, there's a harmonic and melodic freshness that accomplishes what so many don't--it bridges styles to the point at which style is no longer a question. It's eminently singable and, well, just appealing.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and we'll go to my sister's house, to her welcome table. Today, I woke up before the alarm (thanks to Linus's paw on my nose) with this hymn playing in my head. In the half hour or so before the beeping began, I started compiling my "I'm thankful for..." list. It's a long list. Afterward, I popped out of bed, humming "Come to the Table."

Thankfulness is powerful. I think it's helpful that a day is set aside for it on the American calendar this week, in the midst of so much anxiety about the economy and many other, very real boogeymen of this period in history. Because thankfulness is an antidote to anxiety: it grounds us in our giftedness; it locates us in relationship to God and to one another; and on this particular day, it plunks us down at a table of comparative plenty to receive again the gifts of the land and the fruits of our (and many others') labors. We finally take a moment to notice the people and the things that make our lives meaningful...that make them possible. And while our eyes are fixed on those gifts, we turn away from the fears that cow and shrink us. We live large, inside the promise of goodness to come...of goodness that has already come.

It's a holy communion table.

And so, friends, my hope for you on this holiday is that you come as you are to the table, remembering who--and whose--you are.

Thanks be to God.

Bread, circuses and Emmanuel

... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,

the People have abdicated our duties;

for the People who once upon a time

handed out military command,

high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself

and anxiously hopes for just two things:

bread and circuses.

-- Juvenal

Do you remember where you were when the planes hit the World Trade Center?

I do. It's sort of the New Defining Question for people of my age, replacing the moon landing and the Kennedy/King assassinations as the Moment When Everything Changed.

Except that it didn't, really. WE did. We comfortable Americans looked fear full in the face, and it changed us.

Like so many others, I was standing in my living room, toothbrush hanging out of my mouth, jaw agape as the horror and magnitude of the moment settled over me. I remember watching the flames and the shocked look on Matt Lauer's face, thinking to myself, "The world has just shifted. Nothing will ever be the same again. This will be a new Dark Age."

That was the shock and horror talking. But there are a lot of ways in which that has been true: War. Fear. Suspicion of our neighbors. A quest for personal and national security at all costs. A wish to not know what we know now: that life is dangerous, and our first-world sense of security and entitlement is an idol.

Really--no price seems to be too high in order to go back to a time when we average Americans didn't have to think of ourselves as vulnerable, of our archetype as anything less than heroic. We can no longer maintain our happy illusion that we're the cavalry, or at least the cowboy, in that Great Global Motion Picture. Because the danger and anger and insecurity of the world has landed on our own doorstep, and our hands have blood on them, too.

There have always been people who have been willing to try to see the world realistically...to be true citizens of their communities, their countries, their world. And, well-fed as most of us in the States are, it's scarily easy to let others do that seeing for us, and to keep on driving to Wal-Mart in our gas guzzlers, one of the many versions of Clear Channel on the radio, seducing us into just one more level of disengagement.

If we can't have safety, we'll settle for the illusion of safety. We'd like our bread and circuses, thank you.

But what about those moments when life takes us by the hand and makes us see the burning building or the hungry child or the scary diagnosis? When our next-door neighbor loses her house to foreclosure, or when an angry, messed-up guy hoses a church sanctuary with gunfire? What do we do then? Turn up the radio? Buy a new toy?

Love to. But it doesn't really work, does it?

So then, the questions remain:

• What do we do when we realize again we are not specially favored, safe from the vagaries of life?
  
• How do we muster the courage to be more fully citizens of our world, our communities, and to really inhabit our own lives?
• Where do we turn our faces when, on one side, there is the seduction of bread and circuses, and on the other, the blackness of the abyss (in any of its many forms)? How do we keep these things from distracting us?

No simple answers, really...at least at the outset. But there's a way in which these questions lead us more deeply into our lives.

Did you ever wonder what was in Abram's mind when God said, "Pack up and go?" I mean, the guy just went. I feel more of a kinship with Moses and Jonah, who basically said, "Me? WHY? Ummm...I've got something in the oven. Let me just finish this project and I'll be right with you. No, really, ME? Do I have to?" Or listen to Jesus, praying in the garden of Gethsemane just before his betrayal, torture and crucifixion: "Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. And yet, not my will, but thine be done."

That last line is where the world turns. Because Jesus found a way out of that human "this is about me and I'm not enough" consciousness and a way into trust: "not my will, but thine." Jesus found a way to hear what God said to all those others in their moments of crisis: basically, "I will be faithful. I am in covenant with you, and I will be with you the whole time."

God is with us all the time. Now, it's easy...even reasonable to say, "So what?" when you're in your own Gethsemane moment. God's presence usually doesn't make the cancer go away or bring back the loved one or close that crack in the earth.

But God's presence gives us ground on which to stand. God's presence locates us in a deeper reality, where despair is not the final answer. God's presence locates us in a reality in which all roads lead not to Rome, but to love and grace.

This world is both beautiful and broken. Flowers bloom while steeples are falling. BUT the reign of God also underlays that world with something stronger and deeper. We can tap into God's reign when we co-create love and grace, when we see past our despair and fear and can truly pray, "Not my will, but thine be done." We tap into God's reign by acknowledging the mess we're in and by reaching out to one another anyway. By telling the truth. By putting one foot in front of the other, even when we're weeping or terrified. By trusting God's promise and sharing our bread.

We don't need to rely on bread and circuses; we have instead the reign of Emmanuel, God With Us. We have instead five simple loaves and two fish that create the abundance to feed, comfort and inspire not just us, but also our neighbor, through us.

So, friends, know that no matter where you are, God is with you. Share your bread. Love one another as God loves us. That's better than security; it's life itself.

Thanks be to God.

Finally, enough cowbell!

Idolatry is the worship of the part as if it's the whole.
–Rabbi Harold Schulweis

Strap yourselves in, folks. This is a big one. (As the medieval poem says, I'm going to stuff "heavene and earth in littel space.")

I posted on Tuesday about community, and about how we all hold pieces of truth. In that post, I referred to a story of Truth as represented by a shattered mirror. As it happens, I've discovered that it's actually a combination of two stories, both heard on my favorite-in-the-whole-world radio program, Public Radio's Speaking of Faith. I'm about to break those stories apart, so that you might have a more accurate sense of their origins, and then bring them back together, so that you might have a sense of the extraordinary thing that happened to me tonight.

SOF is regularly wonderful and thought-provoking; if you haven't heard it before, it's available for podcasting and for streaming here. The archive is a treasure chest. Seriously.

My favorite program was entitled Religion and Our World In Crisis. It was a conversation between Muslim scholar Dr. Khaled Abu el-Fadl and Jewish scholar Dr. Harold Schulweis. They both find a strong relationship between truth and beauty, as well as numerous reasons in their respective holy books for people of all faiths to listen to one another. Their conversation is both fascinating and full of hope.

In humankind, God has created you, male and female,
and made you into diverse nations and tribes
so that you may come to know each other.
–the Koran

To know is to love, and to love is to know.
–Rabbi Schulweis

So...the first half of the composite story in my head came from Rabbi Schulweis:

There is a most remarkable parable illustration that's used in the Talmud. The question is: how could it possibly be that 600,000 Israelites were at the bottom of the mountain when revelation took place, and God spoke with one voice to the entire group, but everyone was convinced that God addressed him or her individually? How could that be?

The answer that a Rabbi Levy gives is: because God appears like a mirror, and everyone looks into that mirror...and, inevitably, a portion of his own self is reflected. But you have to understand that there are multiple visions and that there is no Immaculate Perception.

Everybody sees according to his particular history, according to his narrative. So what should be done? What should be done is that we should find out from each other: what did you see? When we gather together and form a collective kind of image, then we have a clearer picture as to what God is.

So. Pretty great.

Story Number Two came from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who (a cancer patient herself) has an unusual way of interacting with her patients: she listens to them. (Not slamming doctors here, but if you listen to the SOF program Listening Generously, you'll know what I mean.) Dr. Remen's grandfather was a mystic; he told her a story for her fourth birthday that stuck with me...about the concept of tikkun olam, the repair of the world (which Schulweis and el-Fadl also talked about):

Ms. Tippett: You recount this idea of the Kabbalah, which I had known, but — I don't know, I think maybe because you're a storyteller, it was very vivid for me. That — this idea that at the beginning of the creation, the holy was broken up, right?

Dr. Remen: Oh, the story of the birthday of the world, yes.

Ms. Tippett: Is that how he told it to you?

Dr. Remen: Yes, exactly. Actually, Krista, this was my fourth birthday present, this story. In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It's the restoration of the world.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Dr. Remen: And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility. It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you.

Ms. Tippett: The world into which you have proximity.

Dr. Remen: That's where our power is, yeah. Yeah.

And now you can see this warming up, right?

So...Beloved and I went to the orchestra tonight. On the program was a percussion concerto on the tune Veni, Veni Emmanuel (that's right, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," the one you know!) by Scottish composer James MacMillan. MacMillan is a devout lay Dominican who often employs religious themes in his work.

It was extraordinary, performed by the excellent Minnesota Orchestra and the virtuosic percussionist Colin Currie. (Soloist part includes 6 temple blocks, 2 wood blocks, 2 bongos, bass tubular bells, 2 cowbells, 2 congas, large cymbal, sizzle cymbal, bass drum w/pedal, 6 gongs, 5-octave marimba, 2 tam-tams, 2 timbales, 6 tom-toms and vibraphone.) Whew! VERY exciting music.

This clip is the last two of five continuous sections, described thus by the composer:

The climax of the work presents the plainsong as a chorale followed by the opening fanfares, providing a backdrop for an energetic drum cadenza. In the final coda the all-pervasive heartbeats are emphatically pounded out on drums and timpani as the music reaches an unexpected conclusion...

At the very end of the piece the music takes a liturgical detour from Advent to Easter—right into the Gloria of the Easter Vigil in fact—as the proclamation of liberation finds embodiment in the Risen Christ.

About five minutes into the clip (which is not the MN Orchestra), you'll notice a tinkling sound. Listen for it.





That sound is the rest of the orchestra playing little bits of broken mirror, tapping them with small metal rods.

Theologically speaking, that is a home run for me. Not in the sense that "Yea, Christianity wins!" Yech—far too simplistic. Instead, it seems to me that Christ—who came to repair the world—is represented as a beautiful expression of the Kabbalistic broken light...of the Muslim connectedness of truth and beauty...of the Talmudic coming together of many points of view.

I think old Abraham must be grinning right now; the three Abrahamic faiths shared a lovely dance tonight.

What if that depth of beauty underlies everything in our world, which waits for us to know and love one another, and to heal what's broken? And all we have to do is find that hidden light?

But that's a whole separate post.

Shalom, y'all.

P.S. It's Saturday morning now, and my friend Ruth also has some loveliness to share on this topic. Check it out!

P.P.S. And now it's Tuesday, and you've GOT to read Shalom's sermon using these ideas. Wow.

Puddles of patience

I want to give a shout-out to our friend Shalom over at Mine Unbelief. She wrote a really wonderful post about waiting, which is not something I enjoy or do particularly well. Check it out, and be sure to click through to the poem!

Of oysters and ballerinas

Come, join the dance of Trinity, before all worlds begun—
the interweaving of the Three, the Father, Spirit, Son.
The universe of space and time did not arise by chance,
but as the Three, in love and hope, made room within their dance.

Come, see the face of Trinity, newborn in Bethlehem;
then bloodied by a crown of thorns outside Jerusalem.
The dance of Trinity is meant for human flesh and bone;
when fear confines the dance in death, God rolls away the stone.

Come, speak aloud of Trinity, as wind and tongues of flame
set people free at Pentecost to tell the Savior's name.
We know the yoke of sin and death, our necks have worn it smooth;
go tell the world of weight and woe that we are free to move!

Within the dance of Trinity, before all worlds begun,
we sing the praises of the three, the Father, Spirit, Son.
Let voices rise and interweave, by love and hope set free,
to shape in song this joy, this life: the dance of Trinity.

--Richard Leach

Every pastor I know struggles with how and what to preach on Trinity Sunday. And no wonder: it's the only Sunday of the year set aside just for a doctrinal statement, and we're trying to put words around the unsayable, in order to express that which is ultimately unknowable.

It seems to me that the question gets at something elemental in our lives as people of faith: we have a hard time expressing what we really believe, deep in their souls. It's perhaps more an issue for Christians, since (in comparison to followers of Judaism and Islam, the other Abrahamic faiths) we seem to define ourselves intellectually...perhaps more by belief than by practice, more by creeds than by deeds.

And then there's the problem of how to deal with the homiletical, liturgical, and communal concerns intrinsic to the question. So it's really no wonder that we struggle with Trinity Sunday.

Time to change the "angle of approach," as Krista Tippett would say. My own personal leaning is to examine the Trinity in terms of relationship...as a dance, as our community did on Sunday, and as our hymn of the day (above) suggests.

It was one of those days that the Holy Spirit turned the whole into much more than the sum of its parts. I'm going to try to give you a flavor of that experience. I know that it won't quite work, but it's worth listening for the way the Spirit helped the voices to "rise and interweave...to shape in song this joy, this life: the dance of Trinity."

We gathered for worship singing a lively, African song:

Come all you people, come and praise the Most High. (3x)
Come now and worship the Lord.
Come all you people, come and praise the Savior. (3x)
Come now and worship the Lord.
Come all you people, come and praise the Spirit. (3x)
Come now and worship the Lord.

We spent some time and energy on the presentation of the Genesis creation reading. We had two excellent lectors, and interspersed a hip-hop refrain, complete with dance moves, at several points in the text (led by our children):

Creation sings your praise! This is the day the Lord has made!
Rejoice! Rejoice! And again, I say rejoice!

--Dave Scherer, AGAPE minsitries

Then Wonderful Colleague enlivened the relationship of Creator and Spirit during the children's sermon. Gathering them around the baptismal font, he told them to put their hands in front of their mouths and say "RUACH!" (Hebrew for "Spirit") and feel the movement. (enthusiastic response) Then they did the same thing over the waters of the font, recalling God's voice moving upon the waters in Genesis. So, in the story of creation, the Ruach moves upon the waters, the Logos brings creation into being, both proceeding from the Creator. (Reader, do you hear that dance music cranking up?)

The children's choir sang and played chimes:

The Lord is great! Everybody sing: praise the Lord, alleluia!
The Lord made us! Everybody sing: praise the Lord, alleluia!
God made the beasts, the birds in the tree,
the fish in the water, and God made me!

Then Wonderful Colleague preached. He talked about how much we like to define things, to wrap words around them so that we may understand that which we cannot understand. Someone once remarked to him that for us to try to describe God is like an oyster trying to describe a ballerina: there are problems both of comprehension and description.

LOVED that. (Reader, are your feet starting to tap now?)

But, he continued, our inability to wrap our brains around God doesn't mean that we are separated from God. He spoke of that enlivening presence all around us: in the quiet moss on the rocks, in the strength of the rocks themselves, in one another...in the dance.

We sang the hymn at the top of this post.

We shared the meal, and experienced the presence of Christ (AND the Great Cloud of Witnesses), while we sang:

Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty,
early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee;
holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessèd Trinity!

We blessed our high school and college graduates with the following prayer:

Holy Trinity, you call us to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give these graduates faith to go out with good courage, knowing that your hand is leading them and your love supporting them through Jesus Christ our Lord, Bless and watch over these graduates in all that is to come, in the name + of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We received the benediction from the Adult Choir, reminding us of places in which God is present:

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the gentle night to you.
Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.
Deep peace of Christ, the light of the world, to you.

And were sent forth into mission with the sending hymn, sung to the same tune as the gathering hymn (Reader, it's OK to get out of that chair and move if you need to dance now...):

Go all you people, go and serve the Most High. (3x)
Go now and work in the world.
Go all you people, go and serve the Savior. (3x)
Go now and love in the world.
Go all you people, go and serve the Spirit. (3x)
Go now and speak in the world,

Please note the typo at the end of that one, which actually appeared in the worship folder. A comma instead of a period, which I thought I'd corrected. But, to paraphrase the lovely Gracie Allen, it seems that I was trying to put a period where God had put a comma. The comma was supposed to be there, I think--to leave us open to participation in those ventures of which we cannot see the ending, to call us out with good courage.

We can't, in the end, say anything truly and comprehensively definitive about God. If we could, as Wonderful Colleague says, our "God" would be too small, and probably made in our own image. BUT:

We can live our lives as part of the Trinity's dance of creation, of love, of renewal, of life.

We can give ourselves to that rhythm, let our hearts follow the arc of that melody, and live in the joyful mystery of it all.

We can find out what happens after the comma, after the last phrase of the music that we have in our hands and hearts as of this exact moment.

Thanks be to God! Let's dance!

Peniel

Let me begin by saying
I never once had the upper hand,
but I gave it everything I had.

I shouldn't have expected
to reach Canaan unscarred.

It has not come easily,
this life.
I had to fight, to scheme
for my birthright
(worth so much more
than a mess of pottage)
for my Rachel
(my beautiful,
scrappy stealer-of-gods)
for my visions
(born on pillow
made of dreamless stone).

I shouldn't have expected
to reach Canaan unscarred.

It did not pass quietly,
this night.
I thought this dream, this fight
was with my twin
(older, stronger,
though I can outwit him)
with my past
(my emulous,
scrappy stealing-of-blessing)
with myself
(born to hold on
to my brother’s heel).

I shouldn't have expected
to reach Canaan unscarred.

He did not give quarter,
this Warrior.
I met Him with everything
I could muster
(cunning, swiftness,
my best feints and holds)
through the night
(stubborn darkness
to the straining dawn)
conceding
(finally) that
I need His blessing.

I certainly don't expect
to become Israel unscarred.

Let me end by saying
I never once had the upper hand,
but I see, right here, the face of God.


The poem is mine; the painting is the work of Eugène Delacroix (1861).

Sprung rhythm

I am a slobbering Benjamin Britten fan.

Like many people, I first encountered him in his Ceremony of Carols, which resurfaces every Christmas season...usually via children's or women's choir, and accompanied by a harp. Lovely and austere. But he truly rocked my world in grad school, when I was introduced to his War Requiem. Britten was horrified by war; a conscientious objector in WWII, he was later commissioned to write a work for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (which was erected next to the bombed-out original–an extraordinary story in itself). Britten did a number of brilliant, gorgeous, innovative things with the composition and the premiere. You can read about some of them here. Oh, and the music is heartbreakingly beautiful, too.

My orientation as a choral director is to groove on the interplay between a worthy text paired with a truly complementary musical setting. If this frisson doesn't exist in a piece of music, I don't want to bother with it, or bother my singers or listeners with it. Britten excels at choosing interesting texts and then marrying them to musical settings which bring out the flavors of those texts.

Thus, he winneth my undying esteem. And he has introduced me to another artist with a unique voice: the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

One of my choirs is working on a set of Britten pieces right now: Ad majorem Dei gloriam (translated: for the greater glory of God–the Jesuit motto), based on Hopkins' poetry. He was a Jesuit priest, trying to honor both the radical, innovative artist and the humble priest halves of himself...a little tormented by both his artistic drive and his homosexual one, especially as they chafed his rather stern personal theology. He probably also struggled with depression, possibly bipolar disorder.

Hopkins was an innovator who broke through the Victorian poetic strictures to create sprung rhythm, which alters traditional poetic scansion to allow for speech rhythm. This dovetails beautifully with Britten's compositional style. And, as it happens, with my biggest area of interest as a conductor.

As we've rehearsed these pieces, the concept of sprung rhythm has stayed with me. Hopkins took well-known structures and found a way to simultaneously honor them and challenge them...to make his home in old forms and still let his unique voice be heard. He took elements of poetic structure such as scansion and word play and Biblical allusion, and rearranged them like so many scrabble tiles. He created a way of writing poetry in which the structure actually changed the shape of the imagery...and he accomplished this not by howling in protest at what didn't suit him (he didn't publish anything in his lifetime), but by quietly staying true to the new music in his own soul.

I have a number of GLBT Christian friends and loved ones who are trying very hard to do the same thing: to be themselves authentically, and to continue to live within the forms of the church. This attention to the sprung rhythm of their own lives costs them something every day:

• the repeated occasion to experience "helpful correction" from Christian brothers and sisters with a different sexual and scriptural orientation–sometimes in the form of anonymous blog posts, sometimes from the pulpit, sometimes in conversation, as if the G, L, B or T person had never heard of a thing called a Bible, and must just have overlooked society's "traditional" take on the family unit–and, sadly, as if this were not already a source of great pain and soul-searching for them
  
• employment difficulties, which range from staying in the closet so that they may also stay in a beloved ministry...to finding a radically smaller pool of available jobs after coming out...to watching others, no more called/beloved by God/gifted for ministry than themselves, sail through the ordination process while they must stand by and wait (for...what, exactly?) because they are honest about themselves
  
• family difficulties, from outright rejection to willful ignorance to being left out of family gatherings and decisions to sterile, unmoving silence...all of which are grounded in church "teaching"
  

And yet...

God spoke through Hopkins' poetry and Britten's music (and yes, both men "batted for my team," each in a different century). God is still speaking every day through the lives of GLBT Christians. One of Hopkins' most common poetic elements was that of epiphany...an experience that most GLBTs (pronounced in my world as "glibbits") I know understand well: a still, small voice that speaks in the deepest recesses of the heart–healing, urging forward, daring each soul to find its own rhythm, sometimes even when it doesn't fit into current forms and established patterns.

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

–GMH

Blessings, grace, and courage to all you churchy GLBT folks out there...and to all our straight brothers and sisters, too. God is with you, singing in your ear. Find and trust the rhythm of the Spirit...and let's dance!

Shalom.

Don't know whether to laugh or to cry...

Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt

Or...I dunno...maybe Jesus' face is pink because he just got embarrassed by this, as some vocal Christians tried to shut down a Hindu religious leader's invocation in the Senate:





I'm continually amazed that people really believe that God needs our "protection." Sounds like righteous hubris to me. Any time we approach God with a "Yo, JC, lemme get this one; I got your back. Let me straighten these fools out..." kind of peer-to-peer attitude with God, we should stop in our tracks. It's usually a sign that we're about to do something (at best) dumb, or (at worst) destructive.

UNLESS–and this is important–that protection we're offering is for the hungry, the outsider, the sick, the weak, and we're addressing God's presence within that person, and humbly trying to get them the things that they need. And we know about those needs because we have extended ourselves, taken the risk of truly listening even though that person might smell bad/like the wrong TV shows/be sinful(!)/see things differently than we do.

That's work that genuinely needs doing. There's no shortage of it, either. Maybe, once everyone's safe and sheltered and clothed and fed–maybe then we could sit down together with a loaf of bread and a glass of wine and argue doctrine?

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

That's Matthew 25:31-40. Nothing at all in there about purity, about doctrine, about the "right person" bearing or receiving God's message. Time and again in the Gospels, Jesus wants us to recognize God's presence within our neighbor. Much of the time, it's a neighbor outside our regular circles. Jesus models it, he preaches it, he suffers for it.

Why is that so hard for us? Why do we continue to believe that we have to get somehow Certified that all our doctrinal/dogmatic ducks are in a row before God can act through our lives? Holy cats, if that were true, God would have been on the sidelines since 32 A.D.

Let's try to keep our eye on the ball, people, huh?

As our Hindu brother in the video clip would say, Namaste.

Ruth's song

Entreat me not to leave thee,
or to return
from following after thee:
for whither thou goest,
I will go;
and where thou lodgest,
I will lodge:
thy people shall be my people,
and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die,
and there will I be buried:
the LORD do so to me,
and more also,
if ought but death part thee and me.

Ruth 1:16-17 (KJV)

We'll make our way in blithe, concerted grace
within the sun's refracted benediction
which warms the tender, tiny, arcing space
wherein resounds my heart's truest petition:
that we, though stumbling dazed through rayless reach
of night and loss, hold fast to covenant
which binds our hollowed hearts, defying each
reverberation of our keening chant
and as we glean the fields of gleaming gold
and taste their hard-won grains of honeyed wheat
that seeds of fresh joy bloom within our souls
and melodies invite our knowing feet
back to our allemande of blue-tinged leap,
until we rest on wings of cloudless sleep.

Aural grace

Even before we call on Your name
To ask You, O God,
When we seek for the words to glorify
You,
You hear our prayer;
Unceasing love, O unceasing love,
Surpassing all we know.

Glory to the Father,
And to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit.

Even with darkness sealing us in,
We breathe Your name,
And through all the days that follow so
fast,
We trust in You;
Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace,
Beyond all mortal dream.

Both now and for ever,
And unto ages and ages,
Amen.

- Michael Dennis Browne

This is the text to Pilgrim's Hymn, set to the music of Stephen Paulus (local composer and frequent collaborator with Browne). Click the link to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version; turn it up and close your eyes. You'll be glad you did.

Some days, it's so easy to get caught up in the ordinary hassle and pain (or simple "attitudinal arthritis") of the moment, that we forget the beauty that underlays every breath. Vast, silent, shimmering...and ours to dial into.

This text comforts and reassures me, in a cosmic sense. Not in the "if I just trust, everything will come out right" sense, because that denies so much of the experience of being human--the painful part. But rather, I believe in our connection to an immense, generative web of love, which binds and weaves through the Creator, creation, and one another. And that we're all pilgrims, when we're at our best: we seek out the relationship that draws us further into the light, and we keep on climbing up to it, and making our offerings along the way.

The heart of Holy Week is in this text--Christ was sealed into death and darkness, in order that we may experience the light of unceasing love, surpassing all we know.

Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

A vision of grace, or poopy pants?

The only grace we can experience is the grace we can imagine.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved

Yep. I'll buy that. Though I believe I'm saved by grace through faith, there's another dimension to relationship with God in which my experience of that grace is dependent upon me. Which is a little bit of a problem today. Grumpy days, in my little world, diminish my vision in regard to the Big Picture and increase the likelihood that I'll either retreat to the corner to suck my thumb, or behave as if I have poopy pants. :-) I'm guessing that's true for other folks, too.

I wonder what God sees, looking at us. I mean, God would look through the eyes of love, right? (forgive me for the earworm potential there, any of you who lived through weddings in the '70s--ha ha ha) I imagine that God sees not just what we do, but what we intend, for better or worse. Loves us anyway, but there must be a number of dismayed forehead slaps involved, anthropomorphically speaking. "Jeez, kids, do you really have to learn this lesson again?"

It's easy to let God's love for us be a sentimental thing, as if each of us was God's firstborn 4-year-old dressed as a pumpkin in our first Thanksgiving pageant, but that's not what I mean. I think that God sees us in toto. God doesn't have the same egocentric position that we do, but rather can take in all angles of a situation instead of having to wed to one point of view. Some days, I really envy that perspective, 'cause the only one I can truly sustain is my own little one.

So...how to broaden the scope of our imaginations on the grumpy days? Gentle Reader, I open the floor to you...what works for you?

Namaste.

The world is stuffed with beauty

Take a look.

It's all there, waiting for us to notice. In my favorite scene from "The Color Purple," Celie and Shug are walking in a field and talking about Faith and The Way Things Are. Shug, talking about God's wish to be in relationship with us, says, "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." So Celie asks what God does in the face of our heedlessness, and Shug answers that God makes something else people will see, because "It just want to be loved, like us."

What's purple to you today?