Michelle Obama's "Becoming," part one

Knowing very little about the former first lady, I was intrigued to hear her memoir recommended as one of the best books of the year for the quality of its writing, "especially in the earlier part" before it gets into politics and the White House years. So far, at the 16% mark, she's Michelle Robinson, reared on Euclid Avenue in Chicago, now a student at Princeton, and I'm enjoying every page.

The quality of the writing means her ability to conjure people with thumbnail sketches. We get to know relatives named Southside and Dandy. Her gregarious older brother Craig, who, "in his ambling and smiley way, had conveniently broken every trail for me [and] created sunshine that I could just step into" (56), goes to Princeton, "leaving a six - foot -six, two - hundred pound gap in our daily lives" (58). There's the music teacher downstairs whose piano is such a wreck of chipped keys and missing notes, that young Michelle in her recital at a concert hall can't find middle C among perfectly formed keys. Later, we meet Santita before we learn that her father is a black man preparing to run for President, Jesse Jackson; and Czerny, her boss at Princeton's "Third World Center" (a sort of Black Student Union), "a swift - moving and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals and seemed always to be having four or five ideas at once" (76).

Most, we pick up Michelle's admiration and gratitude for her independent stay - at - home mom and her father, a former boxer fighting multiple sclerosis.   In the self - absorbed way of teenagers, she never considered her parents' married life apart from what she saw. This cues her reflection on something she learned many years later, that her mother considered leaving her husband every spring. Why? Michelle has never asked, and tells us she doesn't need to. "I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it's a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately -- even alone" (51). Then, Michelle tries a thought experiment about what it was like to be her mother during the winter.

If you've never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron - gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and day - time, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There's ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped. There's the sound of that scraping in the early mornings.... City snowplows thunder through the streets as the white snow gets piled up and sooty, until nothing is pristine.

She continues her thought experiment, imagining being a young mother when spring begins to change the landscape. The woman takes out windows to wipe the glass and scrub the sills. Looking out and breathing in fresh air change the woman's sense of her life.

Maybe you spend the whole day considering new ways to live before finally you fit every window back into its frame and empty your bucket of Pine - Sol into the sink. And maybe now all your certainty returns, because yes, truly, it's spring and once again you've made the choice to stay.

That's remarkable writing, turning vibrant description of a literal place and time into a metaphor, using that metaphor to explore the psychology of another person's thinking, all the while hinting at what the author has experienced in her own marriage.

While she keeps moving forward in time, she finds unobtrusive ways to fill us in on past and future. For example, when her brother suddenly decides to put the family through a fire drill that entails the father's lying helpless on the floor, Michelle cues in a few paragraphs about her father's lifelong attitude of service to others and his involvement with the community through Chicago Democratic politics. The anecdote about a college roommate's blithe unconcern for picking up and keeping things in order ends in a reflection that this was a good corrective to her own mania for order, and good preparation for marriage to a man who "felt no compunction, really ever, to fold his clothes" (80).

She also works insights into the work, expressed with elegant brevity. "You don't really know how attached you are until you move away," she writes, feeling like "a cork floating on the ocean of another place" (77). Run - ins with bad educators give her occasions to develop an idea across several chapters, how "failure is a feeling long before it's an actual result" (66). Coming to ninth grade at a magnet school, she heard a voice inside calling her, "not enough, not enough," self - doubt "like a malignant cell that threatened to divide and divide again, unless I could find some way to stop it" (56).

I've just read about her first couple years at Princeton. She explains what readers like me -- white, male -- might not understand without help. "At Princeton, I needed my black friends." The mostly - white, mostly affluent, mostly male population was a different world, where "you learn only slowly that your new peers had been given SAT tutoring or college - caliber teaching in high school or had gone to boarding school and thus weren't grappling with the difficulties of being away from home for the first time" (74). She uses that childhood piano recital for an analogy:

It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you'd never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you're asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else. This is doable, of course -- minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time -- but it takes energy.

So that's why being among black friends was a relief.

That's as far as I've read. As I'm often taking breaks from two or three books at a time to try some new one, it may be awhile before I get back to this one. So far, so good!

A White Nationalist's Change of Mind: Heart Came First

[Eli Saslow. Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. New York: Doubleday, 2018. Page references, from the Kindle edition, may not correspond to the physical book's pages.]

When Derek Black apologized for his role in taking white nationalism mainstream, one of the more printable responses from former fans posted to his father Don's racist Stormfront website, was that Derek had become "part of the population that doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so [they] ignore and bury the real science" (Saslow 222). Facts and rational argument were as important as race to Derek before he changed, and remained so after. His distraught father argued with his estranged son for hours, and was shaken because "It wasn't like he couldn't use his brain anymore. He still made rational arguments," leaving Don only "pretty sure" that racism was right (233). Rational arguments and facts got Derek over the line from racism, but it was by his concern for feelings and relationships that, in his own words, he "grew past" his "bubble" (218).

Author Eli Saslow shapes Derek's story almost like a romantic comedy. First, Derek's a fish out of water at New College in Sarasota, Florida, 80% white but "a hotbed of multiculturalism" (22). Nevertheless, his proud father boasts on their radio talk show, "It's not like any of these little commies are going to impact his thinking. If anyone is going to be influenced here, it will be them." The first person Derek meets on campus is someone he's prepared to despise, a young Hispanic man named Juan. Both arriving late for orientation, they help each other to find their way, and stay friends from then on. Then Derek's attracted to a friendly young woman who finds him fascinating; she's Jewish. Derek thinks, if his friends knew who he really was, they wouldn't like him. Tension builds, and Derek can't get up the courage to "come out," so he does the Cinderella thing: his glass slipper is a magazine he leaves behind in the gym that features an interview with Derek Black, rising star of the White Nationalist movement.

Once outed, Derek is a pariah on campus until a Jewish friend, Matthew Stevenson, invites him to join a diverse group for Friday night Shabbat dinners [see photo - Derek at left, Matthew standing]. Stevenson tells Saslow that he genuinely liked Derek. "Matthew [and friends Moshe and Juan] offered him an implicit agreement: They would pretend to be oblivious about his white nationalist convictions, so long as Derek treated them with respect and kept his beliefs to himself" (82).


Gradually, Derek opens up enough to engage in talks and long email exchanges with a young woman, Allison, who exposes the discredited science and incomplete history upon which Derek had built his rational racism.

More than just data, Derek tried to think about the perspectives of the friends he'd made during weekly Shabbat dinners at New College. There was Moshe, whose family had somehow survived the Holocaust; and Matthew, who didn't feel comfortable wearing his yarmulke in parts of the South; and Juan, a first - generation college student who was saving money during his senior year by forgoing student housing and sleeping instead in the gym. Sometimes there were ten people seated at the Shabbat table on Friday nights: one gay, one black, one Hispanic, two Jewish, several female. And then there was Derek. He was white. He was male. He was straight. He had his college tuition fully paid for and his parents' credit card tucked into his pocket. "In no reality am I the person at that table who's been discriminated against." (202)

Allison urges him to speak out, not to keep his change of heart to himself. He's convinced when he hears classmates speak of their experiences at an anti - racism rally, and he owns his part in causing their trouble.

The last part of the story, where he's a new man, stops being a comedy. Saslow has interviewed Don Black and other members of Derek's family, along with Derek's godfather David Duke and former colleague Richard Spencer. When Saslow relays their stories, dismay shows through.   Don tells Derek on the phone that it would have been better had the son never been born; then calls back some minutes later, voice trembling, to say he was sorry, he didn't mean it. That's painful.

After that rupture, Derek changed his name and retreated into obscurity, until he heard his own vocabulary and concepts promoted by Donald Trump. Following the election, he wrote an op - ed in the New York Times, and cooperated with Saslow on this book.

Related Blog Posts
Derek's story demonstrates one of the main points of Shankar Vedantam's book, The Hidden Brain. We decide what we believe, first; we find rational support, second. (See my blog post, 9/21/2017).

"White Episcopalian reads Living Into God's Dream" (12/17/2018) surveys a book of essays about "dismantling racism in America," and the gist of it is what we see Matthew and friends doing with Derek in this book. The relationship opens up a crack in the rationale.

"'Rule of Law' and Sympathy" (12/26/2018) questions whether a cool, rationalistic approach to law is good enough.

Mary Poppins Returns

More than aerial views of old London, more than underwater ballet and animated episodes, more even than the spectacle of nearly every cast member rising upwards with balloons, the strongest takeaway image from Mary Poppins Returns is of Emily Blunt's descent hundreds of feet to alight with a graceful, purposeful step: Mary Poppins stepping out of the sky and, for many of us, out of our past.

The other takeaway is of Emily Blunt's eyes. Pale blue - gray, often seen in reflection, they convey feelings independently from Mary Poppins's prim smile: anticipatory delight, disapproval, determination, tenderness, and sadness. We catch that sadness at the end, as we did 44 years ago when Julie Andrews's Mary Poppins, having restored the emotionally remote Mr. Banks to his children Jane and Michael, floated off unnoticed among flying kites in the last number.


In this sequel, it's grown - up "Michael Banks" (Ben Whishaw) who has withdrawn from his three children, mourning for his wife, beset by self - doubt and financial ruin. Early in the movie, searching the attic for a document to save the family home from foreclosure, Michael opens a musical jewelry box. Its little tune accompanies "A Conversation" with his late wife about what it's been like "since you went away," ending with his plaintive question, "When you went away -- where did you go?"

The father's need, and the children's efforts to help him, fill up the rest of the movie. Mary Poppins herself hangs back, observing with those beautiful eyes.

The movie was directed by Rob Marshall, with a screenplay written by David Magee and a story by Magee, Marshall, and John DeLuca. The songs and score for the film were composed by Marc Shaiman, with song lyrics written by Scott Wittman and Shaiman.

The story "rhymes" with the original, says Lin - Manuel Miranda (playing "Jack" in the movie). (Vincent Dowd, BBC, 12/26/18). [That's a necessary thing, but also distracting, as I was constantly aware of the creators' thinking: "Step in Time" was an athletic dance for a troupe of chimney sweeps on the rooftops of London; let's make "Trip a Little Light Fantastic" an athletic dance for a troupe of lamplighters under the London streets. The original Mrs. Banks was a suffragette; let's devote her daughter Jane to the labor movement.

But the creators also apparently agreed with my friend Susan, who, even as a child, lost interest during the intentionally charming musical episodes that padded the original movie - "Jolly Holiday" inside a chalk painting, and "I Love to Laugh" with an eccentric uncle. For the sequel, every antic episode connects with the children's initiatives to save their father. For example, the children crack their mother's "priceless" china bowl when they argue over pawning it to pay their father's debts. Mary Poppins takes the children with Jack into the landscape painted on the ceramic -- a great conceit as the road is cracked, and the rim of the horizon is a literal rim. The next day, to repair the bowl, Mary Poppins leads them to the fix - it shop of her cousin Topsy, played with an olio of accents by Meryl Streep, Hollywood's queen of accents. In both movies, the turning point happens in a confrontation with the father's employer at the bank, but this time, it's the children standing up to the president on their father's behalf.

What worked to prepare the original's emotional payoff still works for the sequel. In 1964, Julie Andrews sang a touching song at the children's bedtime about the little old woman who calls "feed the birds, tuppence a bag" to people like Mr. Banks, too wrapped up in his own business to notice. Now, Emily Blunt puts the children to bed with a song about "lost things," an oblique answer to Mr. Banks's question, "Where did you go?" In the original, it's young Michael returning tuppence to his father that changes the man's heart; now it's the children's reprising the song about lost things, and he gets the answer to his question: She's here, he says to his children, in your eyes, in your smile.... It's the heart of the story, and it lands.


The music doesn't draw attention to itself, always directing us towards the story. Except for the melancholy "Conversation" and a jaunty song about the "Royal Doulton Music Hall," every song is a lesson addressed to the kids - why you should use your imagination, where lost things go, how a change in perspective can change your outlook, how the cover is not the book, how to seek light when you're lost, and, twice, where to look for encouragement (up).

Emily Blunt, on NPR's Fresh Air explained how she recorded her songs with full orchestra, then acted the songs with soundtrack playing, then, finally, filmed the songs with instrumental tracks playing only in an earpiece, while people on the set heard her sing a cappella. What we hear in the movie, then, is a seamless collage, transitions from dialogue to music and back. In the first notes we hear, the orchestrations recall the lush, shimmering sound of the original overture; traces of the original score by Richard and Robert Sherman are discernible in the underscoring.

So, full disclosure: I had nightmares before the movie came out, envisioning an action - hero Mary Poppins rocketing across the clouds on her back, reclining like a Vargas girl. I woke up sweating, afraid to have the memory of the original ruined. It would be hard to overstate how the original movie, one of the first I ever saw, shaped my world view. (See "Mary Poppins Meets Scrooge: Saving Mr. Banks," my blog post of 12/26/2013). The lyrics tripled my vocabulary. I identified with young Michael (my age at the time), identified Mother with Julie Andrews, and, most of all, identified with the distance between father and children. Driving home from this sequel, I wept. Why? The movie seems to be aimed, not so much at today's children, or even today's parents, but at the hearts of Boomers: My bright young mother, my ambitious young father, my dreamy young self -- Where have they gone? I know, I heard Mary Poppins say it, "Maybe all you're missing lives inside of you."

That's good. But I miss the days when someone would descend from the sky and walk into my life with a graceful, purposeful step.

[Directed and produced by Rob Marshall, "Mary Poppins Returns" features Emily Blunt in the title role, and also stars Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Julie Walters with Colin Firth and Meryl Streep. Music by Marc Shaiman. Lyrics by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. Screenplay by David Magee, from story by Magee, Rob Marshall, and John DeLuca.]

"Rule of Law" and Sympathy

We've recently had emotionally charged news stories of children dying of illness despite efforts by border control officials; but emotions were high before, when we saw images of children separated from parents in May, and, during the previous administration, children in cages. Should sympathy change policy? Jeff Sessions, when Attorney General, told his colleagues that letting "sympathy to personal circumstances" influence law enforcement not only sets up "nebulous legal standards" but does "violence" to the rule of law. ( Newsweek, 9/11/2018). Can "rule of law" make no room for sympathy?

By "rule of law," Sessions appears to mean nothing more than government's bearing downward on lawbreakers. By that definition, "rule of law" in America is nothing exceptional. Every tyrant has imprisoned thieves, murderers, and suspicious foreigners, from Pharaoh to Bashar Al - Assad.

But "rule of law" aims upward at the government. From the early use of the phrase by Englishmen who opposed high - handed behavior of King James I, "rule of law" has applied to those who wield the power, as a guarantee that individuals will all be accorded the benefit of a hearing on all the facts and all applicable laws, their dignity respected during the process. Constitutional limits on the will of any leader and even on the will of the majority are the way to ensure that no individual or minority should, in John Locke's words (1690), be "subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man." Worse even than the fear of death is the thought that any government, gang, or tribe could rip us from our families, cage us, brutalize us, or isolate us.

When enforcement of our laws entails the subjection of anyone to that kind of treatment, it should give us pause. This month, I'm happy to say, we didn't just hit pause, we pressed reset when Congress and President reformed the draconian policy of "three strikes, you're out." Enacted to deter crime during the 1990s, mandatory life sentences resulted in a ballooning population of non - violent prisoners with no hope; deterrent effect was nil. Our sympathies are aroused for those drug offenders because they posed no threat to others, and because we have better understanding how addictive behavior isn't deterred by consequences.


If our sympathies are aroused, that should indicate something wrong with our law, and we should put the brakes on enforcement until we can straighten out procedures. That's not some new radical group's idea: Jesus turned religious statutes on their heads when, for example, the Sabbath ban on work conflicted with his healing people: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." We honor law - breaker Martin Luther King, Jr., who quoted St. Augustine, "an unjust law is no law at all." While he advocated breaking racist ordinances, he also insisted its being done "lovingly," without violence, so that the onus would be on law enforcement, public opinion, and political legislators to make changes. After police violently halted demonstrators at Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge, world wide sympathy was aroused; President Johnson sent troops to protect demonstrators from mobs and Alabama's law enforcement; civil rights legislation followed soon after.

As with the "three - strikes" answer to drug possession, deterrence by zero - tolerance may not be the only answer. We have wiggle - room within law, as when President Obama used administrative discretion to give priority to deporting violent undocumented immigrants over deportation of "Dreamers," the way an officer may bypass speeders to pursue a weaving drunk driver. Besides, "push factors" drive families from other countries, and we are powerful enough to have influence on those; we don't have to rely on deterrence.

There's room for sympathy in the rule of law.

Little Jesus at Large

Outside of my church, the season we call Advent has been eclipsed by a birthday celebration for little baby Jesus, or, more generally, for the spirit of giving. We've got all that at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta, Georgia: we provided presents for children of low - income parents through our "Giving Tree"; our nave this evening will be overrun by little children re-enacting the nativity; and, at midnight, our adult choir will sing Lauridsen's setting of the ancient text O Magnum Mysterium, "O great mystery, wonderful sacrament, that the animals in a stable should see the new - born Lord lying in a manger!"

But we always get a more pointed message, too. Here it is in notes I made twelve years ago from an on-line meditation by then - assisting priest Kirk Lee.

Kirk began, "I have a hard time believing that God raises up oppressive and evil people simply as a means for showing his ultimate power." He could be referring to Herod in the birth narrative, or to the apocalyptic readings we've had in Advent about earthquakes, persecutions, and wars to come. Kirk continues,

I do believe that ordinary people like you and me allow oppressive and evil people to rise up. We do so because we are not by nature proactive in denouncing wrongdoing. We give the oppressors and the evil ones the benefit of time to prove themselves, before we act. Usually, this is at the expense of many kind and innocent people.

Kirk wonders at how we wait until the problem gets so much worse: "Do any of us allow an infection to spread through the body by not treating it as early as possible?" His pointed message is that God shows his power through us, moving us "to right the wrong perpetrated on kind and innocent people."

With my notes on Kirk's sermon is a prayer by John Taylor (1914-2001), Bishop of Winchester (1974-1984):

Lord Jesus Christ alive and at large in the world, help me to follow and find you there today, in the places where I work, meet people, spend money, and make plans. Take me as a disciple of your kingdom, to see through your eyes, and hear the questions you are asking, to welcome all men with your trust and truth and to change the things that contradict God’s love, by the power of the Cross and the freedom of your Spirit. Amen.

Little baby Jesus is "alive and at large in the world" through us.

[Image: Visitation of Mary, Rogier van der Weyden, 1440 - 1445, Northern Renaissance]



Yesterday, Fr. Daron Vroon preached on the Visitation (Luke 1.39ff). Elizabeth's unborn son John "leaps" in his mother's womb when her cousin Mary, carrying Jesus, comes to call, and Elizabeth says, "Blessed are you among women! And blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Fr. Daron pointed out that "mother of the Lord" is the first of many titles applied to Mary, including "Created Temple of the Creator" and "House of God." He commented on Mary's song, "Magnificat," in which Mary sees an upturning of the world order: when almighty God takes shape inside a "handmaid," then...

he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.

This upturning literally means a "revolution." Fr. Daron admitted "sheepishly" that, though he has repeated many times the collect for the fourth Sunday in Advent, he never noticed until this week how it relates to this scripture:

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Archbishop Cranmer, writing this collect in the early days of our church, refers not only to the Visitation, but makes us, like Mary, a "mansion" or house for the Lord.

I wrote about this in a lyric for my Advent Cantata nearly 30 years ago (see my post of 12/05/2018), but I saw the coming of Jesus mostly in terms of refreshment, rebirth, renewal; Fr. Daron, Fr. Lee, and Bishop Taylor add a strong element of empowerment and responsibility. They agree: Little Jesus is at large in the world only when we act as his base of operations.

Theology Before Breakfast: Forward Day by Day, August-October 2018

For a few years, now, the quarterly Forward Day by Day has been part of my morning routine, along with giving Mia her dog chow, restocking the birds' feeder and bath, emptying the dishwasher, and making coffee. Since I've memorized the personal daily devotion service "In the Morning" (Book of Common Prayer, 117), I've been able to carry this ritual with me through the day.  During the months covered by this issue, as some changes in curriculum and some anomalies in our schedule threw me off - balance, I've needed often to stop during my day to re-capture the calm of the morning ritual.  

[Photo: The morning breakfast table, laid out with Bible, Forward, and Prayer Book, along with coffee in an Education for Ministry mug, on a coaster crocheted by one of our EfM fellows for Christmas.  Thank you, Erica!]

The August - September - October 2018 issue was written by Episcopalians; respectively, they are Charles D. Thomas, a psychotherapist; Grace Aheron, who lives in "an intentional community" (a contemporary version of a monastery, I gather); and Pamela A. Lewis, former teacher and a lay minister at St. Thomas Church, NYC.

Theological Insights

"Images form our theology," writes Thomas, remembering his childhood image of God as a looming invisible parent, not so different from what we imagine when Job asks the Lord, "Will you not look away from me a while, while I swallow my spittle?" (Job 7.19). Thomas asks what images we have of God - mother? father? smiling? scowling? (Forward Day by Day, 8/29/2018).

"Can anything good come out of Nazareth" (John 1.46)?  Thomas remembers how the late artist Prince, so provocative in his stage persona, seemed to be an unlikely vessel for blessings from God, but Prince was deeply devoted to Jesus and, I happen to know, a generous philanthropist in his hometown. Thomas writes, "to bless the world with unlikely people" is "all God ever does."  (8/9)

Gratitude is a way to the Lord when everything else seems to fail. Thomas is inspired by Psalm 105.1 "Give thanks to the Lord and call upon his Name," and he quotes C. S. Lewis on blessings as a way to God when our prayers seem flat: "The warmth of a ray of sunlight can lead us back to the source of that warmth." (8/16)

Several meditations speak to our doctrine of Incarnation.  That's God with skin on -- as Jesus 2000 years ago, and in our lives today.  "Jesus' ministry is so tactile!" observes Aheron, as "God chooses to come into the world through a body and into a body," then "touching and eating and walking with people every day" (9/25).  

It is fitting that our weekly celebration of his life is one in which we remember his body by doing something physical with our own -- kneeling to pray, standing to sing, passing the peace with embraces, eating and drinking the bread and wine with one another.

That God "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness" (Phil. 2.5 ff) causes Aheron to reflect on the revolutionary ideal of  "downward mobility" in the gospels, and to what seems to her an anomaly, that "God chose to be born into the body of a man."  But then she thinks "God is demonstrating to us an extremely clear example of how someone born into relative societal power -- not to mention cosmic power -- can choose downward mobility to the point of being executed as an enemy of the state" (9/14).

(Time out:  C. S. Lewis, among many others, would say that being born a male wasn't God's choice, but an essential quality of God; as a 7th grade boy once declared after a poet referred to God as She, "Everyone knows that God is a boy!" I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question, "What qualities of 'male' does God have? Does God have a low voice?  Does he shave?"  But the boy was emphatic, and so is Lewis.  The third book in his science fiction trilogy focuses attention on God's masculine identity.  That idea is alien to me, and hurtful to women I know: After millennia of patriarchy, are women still to be set apart, patronized as "separate but equal" participants in creation?)

Aheron uses the idea of "privilege" in a different way, taking off from a passage when Jesus is run out of his hometown when his erstwhile neighbors take up stones to throw at him (John 10.31).  The Crucifixion was no surprise to Jesus because he chooses throughout his ministry "to stand against the powers and principalities of this broken and dying world."  Aheron's friend, called "courageous," responded, "I don't do these things because of bravery.  I do them because I have the privilege to do so."  The Old Testament reading that day tells us that Job used his privilege for good, being a judge who went out of his way to investigate cases, a "father to the poor," and a stayer of executions (Job 29.1-20).

Pamela A. Lewis draws attention to a line in Paul's audience before the Roman governor (Acts 24.14-15), "there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous." Showing that Jesus and Paul both claimed to be "fulfilling" or "furthering" law and tradition, not discarding them, Lewis writes, "the idea of a resurrection for both the righteous and sinners is as radical a proposition as any of the rest of Jesus' teachings, staking the bold claim that all are equal before God and worthy of salvation."  Lewis draws the conclusion that "old and new beliefs can coexist," and the Roman governor's lenience shows that "it's better to bend than to be absolutely rigid."

Finally, there's Thomas's rueful admission that he, who had just chosen to ignore the urge to greet and make up with a former friend, now has to write a meditation on Job 6.14, "Those who withhold kindness from a friend forsake the fear of the Almighty."  He cites G. K. Chesterton's idea that coincidences are spiritual puns: "I hope God is laughing at my ego."

Psalms: Platitudes and Attitudes

Any Episcopalian who reads every psalm appointed for each day will read the whole book of Psalms three times in a year, or so I've heard.  Add to that the fact that many of the psalms recycle the same ideas and images, and it gets pretty old for me.  This year, I've made a list of A+ psalms that stand out, and C- ones that are same - old, same - old.

But Aheron, feeling the same way, pushed beyond that feeling in her meditation on Psalm 82.2, "How long will you judge unjustly and show favor to the wicked?"  She observes that laments like this nearly always turn to faith, trust, and "a call for spiritual persistence."  These feel like "platitudes," she writes.  But she remembers that they were written to be sung aloud. "What an incredible gift this act of communal singing must have been to those facing impossible questions together."  She expands this to our liturgical tradition.

We are singing and praying together as a church body but also across time and space with those we love but see no longer. When I view the collective lament in this light, I see its deep authenticity and connection to those who have gone before us and will come after us.

Psalm 69.22, Reproach has broken my heart and it cannot be healed, inspires psychotherapist Thomas to meditate on everlasting damage of harsh words. Patients recount words spoken "years and years ago" and weep.  I can identify.  Thomas asks us, "How will you help yourself to keep your words meaningful without being hurtful or hard?"

Psalm 116.8 I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living helps Aheron support the point that God's reign is for "this life" (italics hers). It's for now, not some future time.

Psalm 106.3 Happy are those who act with justice gives Lewis reason to write, "Vengeance may seem right and justified, but no one ever ends up happy in that scenario."

Psalm 130.4 I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope reminds Lewis to point out, "God also waits for us -- waiting for our desire to be stirred up.... God is patient because we too are worth waiting for."  (cf. Hosea).

Action Items

In EfM, we often look for action items to conclude our theological reflections.  Here are some that struck me most from this issue of Forward Day By Day:

• Check your relationship with money:  How is it now?
• Reflect on the image we now have of God.
• Remember when we were blessed by someone least likely to be a blessing.

I was touched by Job 3.20, Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul? I wonder this when I see some twisted faces and bodies among the patients in memory care.  Some mornings, when I pray, "We praise you for Your saints who have entered into joy; may we also come to share in Your heavenly kingdom," I long for retirement -- not just from my job, but from everything.  The writer Thomas challenges us with a question that day: "What is the one thing you most want from or for your life?  How can you offer that to God?  Do you think you will feel relief?"

Prayer 

from the last page of the August-October issue, 

reprinted from Prayers New and Old:

Teach me, O God, how to take the gift of a day and give it back to you, radiant in faith, spontaneous in joy, and rich in service.  Amen.

White Episcopalian Digests "Living Into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism in America"

(Catherine Meeks, editor. Living into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism in America. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2016.)

"Why is this Black woman still talking about race?" Catherine Meeks, editor of Living into God's Dream, puts that question in the title of one of her essays. People like me -- white, English - speaking -- may ask the question another way: since civil rights laws of the 1960s, can't we all just be colorblind?

People like me need to hear what's expressed in the title of another chapter by Meeks, "It is so Hard to be Black in America." I've read the book for our seminar Education for Ministry (EfM). What follows is a digest of what I read and how I related it to my own experience.

Internalized Oppression

Meeks writes about "internalized oppression" (46).  Not that the oppression doesn't break out into the open: In "A White Lens on Dismantling Racism," Diane D'Souza writes how her brown - skinned husband sweated under the burden of five TSAs' suspicion until she identified him as her husband: "My Whiteness gave my brown husband a pass" (84).

But, internally, people of color carry the burden of white peoples' labels for them. I've seen how it works. When any black man walks into anyplace in America, he knows that everyone who sees him will be judging him by externals -- how he dresses, how he pronounces words, how he moves -- or they're trying not to judge him.

Sure, white people judge white people, too -- they're old, or country, or emo, ex-hippy, or whatever -- but the stakes are higher with a person of color.  When our all - white group discussing Meek's book shared our earliest memories of racial awareness, one memory was positive -- about a kind housekeeper -- and all of our other first memories involved fear, anger, and even disgust.  None of us were taught those feelings: we picked them up from news, from cues on the playground, from conditions in segregated facilities. (See my blogpost about racial fear.)

I know better, and I'm still guilty of leaping to conclusions.  When a black man in jeans and a reflective jacket entered our school's theatre, I nearly redirected him to the maintenance shed out back, realizing just in time that he was father to one of my young actors, coming to the show from work.  Black students sitting together for a varsity football home game saw the women in the next row grab up their purses and, after a decent pause, relocate. Every encounter for a black man in America has the potential for a humiliation or altercation.

I've lived days with "internalized oppression" myself, on occasions when my ill - judged reaction to student behavior has been perceived as mean, unfair, or even scary.  Until the matter is resolved in some public way, by my apology and students expression of forgiveness, I walk the halls under a burden of the kids' perception.  The usual small talk is forced, my mind is distracted when I read or teach, my hands tremble when I open the door to the lunch room, I can't sleep. No wonder, then, that students of color may have stuff on their minds that inhibits their performances on assessments, and measurements of black adults' health show ill - effects of long - term stress, for instance, on blood pressure, and their life expectancy is lower across the board (88). 

Colorblindness Isn't the Answer

Being "colorblind" is neither possible nor desirable (45), as it means denying a part of identity that comes from racial experiences -- as bad as imposing an identity on someone based on race. Poet Langston Hughes said it well, in a low - key way, with his essay in verse, "Theme for English B." As "the only colored student" in the class, he responds to his white professor's assignment to tell about himself. Hughes details his long commute back to his room in Harlem before telling of the things he likes, including "being in love" and "Bessie, Bop, and Bach." He muses:

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

A sweet student in my seventh grade class said exactly what being colorblind really means when she summed up this poem: "He wants his professor to know that even though he's black, he's just like normal people."

Instead of trying to be color blind, suppose guys who look like me open up to appreciating what racial and ethnic differences present to us?

As a homeschooling blogger called "Heritage Mom" writes in her article about starting a black homeschool group to do "black things" and to get away, once in awhile, from the judgement of white parents, there are indeed cultural differences in the ways black parents interact with their kids -- involving intimacy, speech, loudness, humor -- that make white people feel uncomfortable.  She and her children have to "code switch" among whites, and can relax around each other (see her wonderful article here: "Why I Need a Black Homeschool Group, Part 2.").

Reading that, I was reminded how white American students of mine felt when they attended school in Japan. The culture of the Japanese school involved standing together to bow for any adult who entered the room, and students with wet towels crawling shoulder - to - shoulder across the floor to wipe the cafeteria clean after lunch. (Students of mine for 38 years have reacted as if wiping a table or holding a broom demeaned them.) It occurs to me that disapproving Japanese parents probably looked askance at those American kids for their boisterousness, their selfishness, their lack of discipline, and their resistance to acting normal.

The white mom who said that her group with one black family was just a colorblind group, while meeting with a black group is "reverse racism," speaks from the same place as that seventh grade girl.

Meeks's book reminded me that "White" used to be, not normal, but the superior category on a list of 100 classifications on the US census, ca. 1900. It's been years, but I remember reading that list. As I recall, Irish and Italians barely made it in the top fifty; Jews, Hispanics, Greeks were listed closer to Asians and American Indians; the census listed darkest skins last. The book points out that the post - Reconstruction migration of blacks to the north brought about a new definition of White to be, simply, not black. When "white," with all that encompassed, became the norm, then people of every other racial classification were, by implication, a problem. Federal law and local custom "redlined" non-whites in areas where property values would be low, by trash dumps, dividing highways, factories. While generations of my family built up wealth from property, Black families could not. (See my blogpost, The Privilege is Mine.) We're living with the legacy of all this today.

ForgivenessWhat can be done to "dismantle" racism so pervasive as to be taken for granted, unrecognized, a part of the air we breathe? For American Episcopalians, we can start from words written into our foundational documents. The Constitution is a fair blueprint for dismantling racism: writing with the stated goal of "supporting the common good and promoting the general welfare... the carvers of the Constitution were imagining a better world than they had the will to create" (48). We recite a promise at every baptism "to strive for justice and peace among all people and to respect the dignity of every human being" (104). But we've had these words a long time, and progress towards living them out is slow.

From first chapter to last, the authors focus on work that must be done internally, by all of us, black and white. Luther E. Smith writes, "The transformation of hearts alone will not undo racism [but is] essential" to the eventual "interpersonal process" (4). Several authors cite Howard Thurman, theologian and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., who convincingly casts Jesus' ministry as one of ending Roman oppression, one heart at a time, through love. (See my blogpost Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy). Philosopher / psychologist William James is at the center of Lerita Coleman Brown's article, "Dissecting Racism: Healing Minds, Cultivating Spirits," as she proposes that we get in touch with our spiritual selves -- something different from identity based on relationships, including race and religion: who are we just in ourselves (23)?

The seventh chapter comes closest to presenting a path forward. Lynn W. Huber writes that telling our stories to each other is the best place to start. That's something I teach to my own students, even while I instruct them in writing "persuasive essays": no matter how eloquent you are and how forceful your ideas, the audience doesn't engage until a sentence begins, "For example, one time …" Our discussion group got into this book via personal stories. In fact, Huber's own example is my strongest takeaway from the book, and it doesn't even concern race. Feeling "angry and impotent" because of a friend who owed her a large sum, she finally wrote the friend that she'd consider payment a present, and, "as of now, you owe me nothing: the debt is cancelled" (116). Huber writes of the huge relief she felt, proving what Nelson Mandela said, "Refusing forgiveness is like taking poison and expecting it to kill the other person."

"Forgiveness" turns out to be part of the answer, but not before Meeks writes of her strong response to the statements of "forgiveness" from families of victims within days after the killing of nine people in a Charleston church:

Of course I believe that forgiveness is important, but three days following the murder of a loved one will not be the day that it happens.
I understand what happened. To the White supremacy constructs at work in our society, forgiveness was the only acceptable emotion for Blacks to express. During slavery, Black people were not allowed to show signs of rage, indignation, or grief because of the prevailing myth of "happy darkies." (55)

For racism, there's a lot of forgiving to do. Black people who've internalized the pressures of being outside the white definition of normal need to forgive themselves; people like me need to "revisit uncomfortable parts of our history." D'Souza writes of such an encounter in Boston where citizens revisited what whites remember as the "busing crisis" of the 1970s, and black residents of Boston remember as one violent blip in a decades - long struggle against enforced inferiority of segregated black schools (92 ff.).

Huber writes what forgiveness is not (114):

Forgiveness is not forgetting. If we could forget the offense, it wouldn't need to be forgiven.
Forgiveness is not condoning. If the offense were excusable, it wouldn't need to be forgiven.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation. The former is a one person job. The latter is a two person job, and requires repentance and amendment of life from the offender in order to be safe for the person mistreated.
Forgiveness is not about the offender. It is really about you and your freedom.

A couple other nuggets of wisdom about changing hearts and minds come up in "Diary of a Spoiled White Guy." Don Mosley quotes a mentor, Clarence Jordan, saying, "faith is not belief in spite of evidence but life in scorn of the consequences!" (70) The context is creation of what would become Habitat for Humanity in Georgia of the early 1970s amid threats and drive - by shootings by white supremacists. About trying to teach respect for others regardless of race, Mosley quotes another mentor, Tom Boone, saying, "People act their way into new ways of thinking far more often than they think their ways into new ways of acting" (71). (See also my blogpost A White Nationalist's Change of Mind: Heart Came First (12/2018).

Holy Land
Our discussion group agreed that our favorite essay was the one by our own Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, Robert Wright, "The American South is Our Holy Land." Why?  All over the continent, there are battlefields where American colonists, British soldiers, and Native Americans clashed and died. In the South, we have a place where oppressed people - including women and children -- stood up empty handed against the State and the Mob. We especially were taken by Wright's observation that the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma is like the Jordan River in being physically unimpressive and yet looming large in our historical imaginations.


Wright's work puts me in mind of Georgia native Flannery O'Connor (read my reflection), who wrote of the American South as "God - haunted," our Christian heritage so deeply ingrained and so at odds with daily reality. He also reminds me of Dr. King's book, The Strength to Love (1963), making explicit what was implied in the Civil Rights movement: That the story of the indignities and violence suffered by black people in America is parallel to the story of that of God's chosen, the Jews, and of Jesus himself. King writes to a white audience in 1963,

But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day, we shall win our freedom, but not only for ourselves. Our victory will be a double victory,
because we shall also win your hearts!

After King wrote that, the legal work began to dismantle institutionalized racism. Fifty - five years later, the cultural and religious and psychological work remains.

Four Candles: Last Candle, "Let it Be to Me..."

This is the final part of an Advent cantata I composed years ago. Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

"The Angel Came Down to Earth"

for TRIO OF SOLOISTS and CHORUS
text: Luke 1.25ff - The Trio sings over a "ground" in F major; the chorus sings in D major
TRIO:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city in Galilee named Nazareth.

CHORUS:

The angel came down to earth

TRIO:

--to a virgin betrothed to a man Joseph of the house of David and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel said:

CHORUS:

Hail O favored one, the Lord is with you.

TRIO:

But she was greatly troubled by this saying and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be.

CHORUS:

"Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favor with God."

TRIO:

Do not be afraid...

CHORUS:

"For behold: You will conceive in your womb and bear a son and call his name Jesus. He will be great and be called the son of the most high, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

TRIO:

And Mary said, "How shall this be, since I have no husband?" and the angel said:

CHORUS:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth shall conceive a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was considered barren. For with God...

CHORUS, TRIO:

Nothing will be impossible... Hail O favored one.

TRIO:

And Mary said "Behold, I am your handmaid. Let it be to me according to your word."

CHORUS:

And the angel departed from her.

"Prayer"
text by W. Scott Smoot
inspired by a line from a medieval poem
TRIO and CHORUS:

You planted life
in barren ground,
John heard You speak
in desert air.
Let it be to me according to Thy word.

You raised up land
from stormy seas,
Your angry fire
strips pretense bare.
Let it be to me according to Thy word...
as it was in the beginning.

You sent your angel down to Mary
Two thousand years ago,
To tell her she would grow
with God inside.

What meaning does your Advent carry
Unless I know
Unless even now
I too can grow
with God inside?

Part One | Part Two | Part Three


Let it be to me... (etc.) 

Four Candles: Third Candle

This is the third part of an Advent cantata I composed years ago.  Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

In part one, a mother recently divorced, working a new job, finds herself alone at home. Lighting a fire, she prepares for Christmas by squeezing the four weeks of Advent into one night.

Now she reads Luke 3.7-18 (sung by the Chorus), but its harsh tone repels her. Laying aside the reading, she pulls familiar Christmas decorations from a drawer. But she also finds papers from early in her failed marriage. On impulse, she burns them.

"Into the Fire">
SOPRANO:

A reading from Luke, chapter three... "John said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him:"

CHORUS:

You brood of Vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

SOPRANO:

"Vipers?" I resent that!

CHORUS:

Bear fruit that befits repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves "We have Abraham for our father."

SOPRANO:

Repentance? For what?
I reared two girls, supported their ungrateful father!
Repentance? For what?

CHORUS:

God is able from these stones to raise up children of Israel. Even now the axe is laid to the roots of the tree. Every tree that bears no fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire...(repeats)

SOPRANO: Enough!

"Safe and Warm" (lyrics by W. Scott Smoot)
SOPRANO:

Vipers and hellfire are worlds away
from a child in a manger.
They don't fit the season, or me!
Put the awful readings away.

Here by the fire it's safe and warm.
Pine and candles perfume the den.
Stereo choirs sing ancient songs:
Christmas now as it's always been. 

Christmassy mem'ries are safe and warm,
Better times packed in bottom drawers.
Handling mementoes revives the past,
for the moment, old hope restores. 

Here's the creche that my father made,
set on satin that I crocheted.
Tiny cradle, little angel remind me:
"Be ye not afraid."

Be ye not afraid...
All those years, misled,
All that future, dead.
Look at me sentimentalize a past
false as he was.
It was a dead end,
barren.

Dead and barren...

Afraid of a new year
and a new career
without children at home,
without him. 

CHORUS:

"Every tree that bears no fruit is cut down
and thrown into the fire."
Burn!

SOPRANO:

Burn!
Years lost accepting lies, denying truth,
all to appease the liar.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

Burn!

Little notes he wrote me full of words like "sharing," "growing," "Loving"

Burn!

(During the next several lines, we see her throw papers into a fire.)

Photographs and souvenirs,
Forced good times for twenty years...
Burn!

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

All the self doubt
that our falling out
was somehow my fault.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

How I fear we'll meet,
How our daughters see us compete.

CHORUS:

Burn!

SOPRANO:

How my hate makes me want to probe the wound,
nurse resentments.
Another dead end.
All my hatred --
Burn!

Here by the fire I'm safe and warm,
but it's dark where I look ahead.
Now maybe I can get past the past,
Think of new life,
think of new dreams, new hope --
think of anything instead.

Part Four - the conclusion

Four Candles: Second Candle

This is the second part of an Advent cantata I composed years ago. Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

In Part One, a lawyer (BARITONE SOLO), burned out on his work, came home to find the family out.  Now, resolving to experience Advent in a hurry, he reads the Scripture assigned for the second week of Advent.

The chorus sings the text of Luke 3.1-6, the music starting with all the pomp and parade of that list of names -- Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, et. al. -- before flattening out into arid, elongated chant, to suggest the dry air of wilderness.  

CHORUS:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Phillip, tetrarch of the region of Itrurea, and of Trachonitas, in the high priesthood of Annas, and of Caiaphas, the tetrarch of Abilene, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness, and he went into the region about the Jordan, and he went preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, as it was written in the words of Isaiah the prophet, the voice of one crying in the wilderness "Prepare a way for the Lord; make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, every mountain shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

BARITONE SOLO: "Words"

"The word of God came to John in the wilderness."
Big deal. 

Words fill my wilderness,
Abstract and dry as breath.
Routine and meaningless,
My life explained to death. 

Words define, fix, analyze,
And take your faith apart.
What they mince, they minimize;
The mind scoffs at the heart. 

What once was "justice"
Is just "litigation."
What once was "truth,"
"interpretation."
What's left of "God?"
"Personification"
of hopes that I no longer trust! 

I know too much,
I see too clearly,
Nothing can touch
me, everything's "merely."
Creeds and ideals
I once held dearly...
Mirages that fade into dust --
My dry wilderness -- 

Arid, barren, prayerless.
I'm lost, abject, absurd.
Word, fill my wilderness,
but come without a word.

Part Three

Four Candles: Prologue and First Candle

A sweet fellow undergraduate named DeeDee introduced me to Advent during exam week at Duke in December 1980.  She invited our Bible study regulars up to her room around 11 pm, where we performed the readings for Advent and lit a candle each night, squeezing four Sundays of Advent into one week.


Later, when I studied composition under Dr. James Sclater, I used that experience to create a choral cantata with soloists who played contemporary adults in need of what the season of Advent offers.  I had Bernstein's Mass in mind, interpolating music theatre pieces with liturgical texts.

Four Candles, lyrics and music by W. Scott Smoot. Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

 [Photo: Candles at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta GA, today.]

CHORUS:

Advent, prologue to the year,
Rest before another climb,
Silence for the inner ear,
Space the Church has cleared in time.

SOPRANO

Two cars, two daughters, gone!
One with my "ex," the other dating,
No one expects my decorating.
If I deck the hall,
No one cares at all!
Except me.
This must be like other Christmases;
I'll make it to be!

CHORUS:

Advent, season set aside,
Waiting time the Church ordained,
Listening for that still, small, guide,
So ways lost can be regained.

(ALTO and BARITONE sing their lines simultaneously, in counterpoint)
BARITONE

Case closed, we won. Big deal.
Bankruptcy courts and corporations,
Titles and torts and two vacations.
I want out now; I want out now!
What I mean--
It's time to leave when
Even when you win it's only [another part] of routine!

ALTO

Airport snowbound: My luck.
After awhile in sales meetings,
Forcing a smile with "Season's Greetings"
I wanted home. I want home now!
Just as well, just as well--
I'm home so little,
It'll be like going home to just
another hotel!

(Now, the lines for CHORUS and SOLOISTS all intertwine.)

BARITONE

Lights out, drive home.
Traffic is [stopping]
Jamming the mall with last - gasp shopping.
Now, no one's home.
I need time. I need Advent.

ALTO

Airport hotel.
Taxi! Taxi?
Catch the shuttle.
Traffic is [stopping].
Room, please.
Dine at the coffee shop.
Maybe not eat at all -- just stop!
TV off.
What I need is Advent.

SOPRANO

From the bottom drawer,
Advent candles.
Advent like before
In an empty home.
Stop,
Dim the light

CHORUS

Set against the winter night,
Lively Advent candles burn,
Clear and concentrate our sight,
We who watch for God's return.

Return... reflect... restore... renew.

SOLOISTS (sing variously, coming together on the final 2 lines)

(BASS) Beside the fireplace...a flier from the church
(ALTO) Gift shop candles, cupcake size,
Gideon Bible, improvise.
(SOPRANO)Advent wreath, my mother's;
Prayer book, my daughter's.
(ALL THREE) What a fool to try to squeeze a season into a night!
My own Advent.

CHORUS:

Advent candles number four,
Each a sign of what has been,
Yet they promise something more:
What each life will see again.

First Candle: "Waves"
In this part, a sales representative for a corporation finds herself snowed in at a hotel. Tired of rootless life, she tries to recreate Advent in just one evening, lighting candles from the gift shop, and reading the first Scripture of Advent in the room's Gideons Bible, Luke 21.25-36.

The chorus sings the text, the accompaniment suggesting ocean waves. Then, looking out the window onto a city blanketed in snow, she reflects.

CHORUS

And there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and upon earth distress of nations and perplexity at the roaring of the waves and the sea, men fainting with fear and foreboding at what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Then they will see the son of man coming in a cloud with great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up, raise up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

ALTO:

"Signs in the stars?"
"The roar of the sea?"
Where's the one about room at the inn?
"Men fainting in fear?"
"The end of the world?"
The end is no place to begin.

I wanted a manger,
A silent night,

Not signs of distress
coming in waves
Like disasters all day on T.V.
The chaos on cable news,
Like chaos in ancient times,
Began with the world, in the sea.

"For in the beginning,
The spirit of God
Moved over the face of the deep"
bringing light from the darkness,
Land from the sea,
Life out of chaos.

Where is my land, my home?
Where's a light to guide me?
And when is there time to ask why?
My days come in waves,
I never look deep,
And never look up to the sky.

"The Son of Man coming in a cloud,"
"Redemption is drawing near,"
Bringing light from the darkness,
Land from the sea,
Life out of chaos.

Now I look up:
More snow.
The traffic far below
Winds by like a river of light.
The window makes a frame,
reflects my candle's flame,
Sets my eyes like stars on the night.

Part Two