Thanksgiving, Sacrament and Psychology

"Thanksgiving" and "Eucharist" mean the same thing. Literally, "eucharist" means "good gift," the way to say "thank you" in Koine Greek, language of the New Testament.

So writes Bishop Daniel Martins reflecting on the gospel assigned for Thanksgiving Day in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, I am the bread of life (John 6.35). I read this in the devotional quarterly Forward Day by Day, holding my paper cup of Hampton Inn coffee at a window looking out at dawn over Flowood, Mississippi. I reserve my first sip until I pray Psalm 51, "Lord, open Thou our lips, and my mouth shall proclaim Thy praise." The coffee, the prayer, the morning routine itself, is all a sacrament, a practice that is the outward and visible sign of an inward grace.


Now Bishop Martins has made clear how thanksgiving itself is a sacrament, tied to the central ritual of the church. The Bishop advised his readers that day to "make a special list of all the things for which you are particularly thankful this year."


I didn't need more convincing. Just last week, NPR had reported on an article about gratitude in the Harvard Medical School's Health journal. "In positive psychology research," the article reports, "gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness." For example, one experiment compared a group who listed what had made them grateful every week for 10 weeks, and one group who listed what had irritated them. "Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships." -Harvard Health website


Here's the list I scribbled at the bottom of that page. Happily, I find that all of them are covered on my blog, which has turned into an ongoing account of what makes me grateful:


I am grateful for 30 years of friendship with Jason, whose interest in cycling during his teen years drew me into that sport, too. Though I see him only twice a year, for bike rides at our respective birthdays, I think of him every single time I get on a bike. [Photo: Scenes from this year's Thanksgiving ride around the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Mississippi. Read more at My Cycling Page]

I am grateful for Susan, our Friday night walks to the Marietta Square for cocktails and dinner, her taking me to surgery, her being with me through my dog Mia's whole life to the last moments, and all the activities and talks that I summarized in my scrawl as "comfort, advice, amusement." [Photo: An evening out with Susan under a beautiful early autumn sky on Marietta Square at Shillings restaurant. Little did we know that the owners would soon retire and close the restaurant, separating us without warning from a community of waiters we've known for years.]

I am grateful for Suzanne, who, now living an hour away, keeps connected with me through concerts, meals, and texts. Now she's studying leadership -- as if she hadn't already demonstrated leadership in her work for a medical company, for my church, and for her choir. [Photo: Suzanne (left) in a concert cabaret to raise money for the Cathedral Choir, for which she managed catering and drinks.]

I am grateful for Mom's turn for the better this year, certainly thanks to the care and security of routine provided by the staff of Arbor Terrace and her Visiting Angels Laura, Denise, and others. [Photo: Mom's favorite photo, taken after fish tacos at 3 Amigos restaurant. Every week, same waiters, same food; every week, a pleasant surprise for Mom. Read more at my post, "Everything's Funny!" 09/2019

I am grateful for dogs. This year, Mia lived with pleasure and affection right up to her last days (see "Gratitude for Mia" 07/2019). Then I welcomed Brandy into my home, rescued from destruction by Our Pal's Place, who paid for her heartworm treatment. Fully recovered, she's an energetic and affectionate little being who practices gratitude every day. [Photo collage: Mia (left) in July 2019 and Brandy (lower right) very early in our new relationship. See more reflections on how dogs bless us at my page Loving Dogs]

I am grateful for the leadership team at our middle school -- especially Ira, David, Susan, and administrative assistant Terri. They're kind, and funny, and they're pushing me to keep growing after 39 years of teaching. I woke sweating from a dream of backing away from the challenge of descending a muddy cliff face, my principal Ira waiting in vain for me to follow through. In real life, I'd been a doubter when he announced that 7th grade teachers would spend a week with our classes at a camp, where zip-line and cliff-climbing would be among the activities. In the end, I felt the effort had been worth it, helping me to appreciate a different side to our kids, and maybe helping them to appreciate their teachers in a different way. [Photo: The climbing wall activity. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but I did it!]

I am thankful for NPR, whose programs I enjoyed on my drive to and from Mississippi, as I have enjoyed them every day for decades. Driving home, I heard Ira Flato's Science Fridays, which included a fun story about "face mites," stubby little worms with eight legs that populate every human body on the planet by the thousands. When the subject is politics, as it was that day for the program 1A, our hosts are polite and curious, much less emotionally involved than I would be.
[Photo: NPR is the soundtrack of life for me, and for both Susan and Brandy, pictured here at the start of a walk in the cemetery.]

Out of Ordinary Time

The first thing ...to say about ordinary time is, this week it runs out. Unlike those special Sundays that fall around Christmas and Easter, the 24 Sundays after Pentecost are designated only by ordinal numbers 1st through 24th, marked in green on the Liturgical calendar.

[Photo: A clock face representation of the liturgical calendar, hanging on the wall in the children's chapel, prepared by Nancy Eubanks, director of Children's Education at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA. There's another sliver of green ordinary time between Epiphany and Lent.]

Second I'd intended to blog about Marie Howe's collection of poems The Kingdom of Ordinary Time for 24 weeks, but other projects came first, and time slipped away. This was the second summer in a row that's happened. Somehow that seems to be an essential lesson for ordinary time, how easily we let it slip past without doing what we'd intended.


Third Howe frequently draws on her Catholic upbringing with love, insight, and humor, as in the Prologue to Ordinary Time:

The rules, once again, applied
One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish...
And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story,
and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it.

Howe imagines Gospel events with startling specificity. At Resurrection, Jesus feels "surprise and hurt" when "pouring back into" the hand with broken fingers, the body too small like "the sky trying to fit into a tunnel"; he awakes "in the dark alone." In "Sometimes the Moon Sat in the Well at Night," first of five "Poems from the Life of Mary," the poet's Mary tells first how she would stir water in the well with a stick "as if water were light, and the stick / a wand that made the light follow," then how "water broke" over rocks in rivers and moonlight shone in water pooled in a woman's skirt -- delicate images for the unimaginable lines from Scripture, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Another poem, "You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago" gives us lovely images of hearing water drop from the oars as a loved one rows across a lake at evening; how that lake is "sky that fell as rain," and "the wind is sky moving." Howe could be speaking of the lives of Jesus and Mary, so far away from us, and yet near to us at the same time.


Fourth Readings assigned for these 24 weeks by the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer answer the question, "What are we supposed to do now that Jesus has ascended and the Holy Spirit has descended?" We read about setting up government, failures of kings, obedience to the law, and justice for the vulnerable; healing and prayer; waiting patiently and faithfully. Near the end of ordinary time, we're reminded of all the saints, and all the forgotten souls. Last, we celebrate Christ the King, his authority over all powers on earth -- his being "Author" of all.


Fifth Howe makes much of the ordinary, reminding us that between-time, which is most of life, is all we really have -- so, what we really must appreciate. ("You must remember this" was my earlier blogpost about Howe, 07/2017.) The first poem after the prologue, "The World," lists commonplace things that I don't often care enough to notice. In "Prayer,"she confesses, "My days and nights pour through me like complaints / and become a story I forgot to tell."


Last Starting with the first Sunday of Advent this week, we get back into readings and songs about the birth and life and resurrection of Jesus, all beautiful and dramatic. Those holy days are the high-stake tent poles of the year, leaving me to think of ordinary time as a long, flat, tedious stretch. But, between Howe and the habit of reading all those scripture passages, I'm fired up about paying attention to God and the world around me, learning to treasure ordinary time.

FOOTLOOSE, the Musical, at The Walker School

Even if, like me, you never saw the 1984 film, you don't need a roadmap to see where the story of Footloose: the Musical is going. That didn't spoil the trip when I saw the production at The Walker School last week. You could lean in to enjoy the journey with young actors who displayed discipline and heart.

The story is constructed on a classic template. We're greeted by "Footloose," a high energy opening number, recognizable from the first riff played by the excellent pit orchestra. The central figure of the dance is Ren McCormack (Ashwin Sequiera), an appealing street-smart Chicago boy getting ribbed by his friends for moving to rural Bomont, Texas. In affectionate banter with his mother Ethel (Bonamy Brantley), we learn that his father left them, she can't support them, and they'll be staying with family in a tiny town.

A series of songs lays out the rest of the situation: the town "On Any Sunday" will be worshipping with the stern Reverend Shaw Moore (Bill Li), but down at the burger joint, his daughter Ariel (Kiely Gilbert) dances in red cowboy boots while the local toughs sing "She Gets Around." At his new school, Ren learns that the town council, led by the Reverend, forbids dancing, and he protests, "I Can't Stand Still."  We foresee how Ren, like the eponymous Music Man of a classic musical, will stand up to the killjoy council, bring new life to the town, and find love himself in the process.


As a teacher in Walker's Middle School, my greatest pleasure isn't the story, but how these kids -- some of whom I remember as sixth graders -- embody their roles. For instance, junior Hailey Noel, playing the Reverend's wife Vi, sings knowingly of "Learning to Be Silent." She's joined on stage, in separate areas, separate chairs, by sophomore Brantley and senior Gilbert, to form a trio of disaffected women, all the more affecting for a kind of split vision: we know that these are kids, acting, and they know we know, yet we're all committed to the characters and their stories. When Ariel and Rusty (freshman Lily Berry) sing "Let's Hear it for the Boy" while Rusty's shy, clumsy boyfriend Willard (sophomore Toby Allers) learns to dance, it's not just a gag, it's a joy. And I never thought I'd care about "Almost Paradise," perhaps the eightiest of all eighties love duets, but I teared up when Ren and Ariel, in a nook under the town bridge, share their deepest feelings and sing the song to each other.


Everything in the story hinges on the moment we know must come, when the young man confronts the stern father.  The actors made it real.  By this point in the second act, Sequeira has projected spontaneity even in choreographed movement, empathy and sincerity in his scenes.  Though no older than Sequeira, Li has seemed throughout the show to be carrying a weight of responsibilities and disappointments that make him old.  When the midnight confrontation between Ren and the Reverend reaches an impasse, and the older man turns in the doorway saying, "I want to be alone," Ren observes, "Excuse me, Sir... you already are." Li's whole body communicated defeat as he sank into a chair and confessed his helplessness to Sequira. It wasn't two senior boys pretending, but a life-saving moment, one I'll cherish.


Months of after-school rehearsals in Katie Arjona's dance studio, in Samantha Walker's chorus room, and on Bill Shreiner's supple, adaptable set of brick and corrugated tin, showed in the ensemble's precise athletic moves, their harmony, and their commitment to the various supporting roles they played.

And, have I said, they were funny? With buddies, Toby Allers sings a hilarious country song "Mama Says" with a memorable refrain, "Once you've driven up a mountain, you can't back down." While the girls in the show sing that they're "Holding Out for a Hero," the young men in the show jumped up on cafe tables to pose like Mr. Universe, an image that, days later, still makes me smile.

FOOTLOOSE, THE MUSICAL. Stage adaptation by Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie, based on the original screenplay by Dean Pitchford. Lyrics by Dean pitchford, music by Tom Snow, additional music by Eric Carmen, Sammy Hagar, Kenny Loggins, and Jim Steinman. Director and Choreographer Katie Arjona, Musical Director and Conductor Todd Motter, Vocal Director Samantha Walker, Scenic Designer Bill Schreiner. Performance by students of The Walker School at the school's Coca-Cola Family Auditorium, Thursday, November 14, 2019.

The Minimalist Zone

A table of links to my blogposts on Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and composers influenced by them. For an updated list, see my page The Minimalist Zone

The composers once called "minimalist," different as they were, shared certain traits. They embraced tonality and repetition at a time when serious composers disdained both; and they all rejected the label "minimalist." As a marketing tool, the label did its job for me in the 1980s. I was sold on the idea of composers who made a lot from a little.

[Photo: AKHNATEN, staged at the Metropolitan Opera, to be broadcast to theatres Live in HD this month.]

Preparing this list, I took an hour or so to listen again to Steve Reich's Variations for orchestra. The colors are bright and warm, the texture transparent. While much of the ensemble percolates with rapid little motifs, sustained chords in the brass loom and fall like stately arches over the action. When we focus closely, we hear each new motif emerge from the background patterns and recede.

Other Reich pieces, even those for small ensembles like Six Pianos, still share most of these traits. Sure, in one way, the music is static, certainly not telling a story or making an argument as Beethoven would do. But, it's a living organic active entity, performed with virtuosic concentration and precision by musicians in close concert, music that we can either let wash over us, or we can concentrate on the way minute shifts in the pattern readjust the whole texture. So focused, relentless, energetic, and connected, Reich's music can be, for player and listener alike, a musical representation of what athletes and creative artists call being "in the zone." (See my review of a live performance of Drumming.)

The other minimalists' compositions put us in the zone, though they have their own signature sounds.

On a purely personal note, I feel grateful to these composers for opening a new chapter in my life. Hearing music by Glass, Reich, and Adams was like watching a painter paint: the joy was in perceiving the process, and composition suddenly became something accessible that I could learn by doing. At age 26, I'd found through the minimalists a new avocation.

Here, then, are my appreciations of the minimalists, a list that I expect to update on my new page, The Minimalist Zone.

Philip Glass
• 05/2016 Philip Glass: An Affinity with Bach? Glass responded to this question on Terry Gross's Fresh Air, in a month when I'd seen a documentary about his life and I'd read his memoir. I enlarge on his answer.
  
• 06/2012 Staging Philip Glass: Kepler at Spoleto . I was gratified to see that the director himself responded to my review.
  
• 01/2009 Oh, Mr. Glass? is what I wanted to tell Philip Glass when I encountered him during a staged concert of AKHNATEN at Emory in 2009.
  
• 07/2008 Jokers at the Gate: Batman and Barbarians concerns timely disturbing themes that showed up both in the libretto of Glass's opera Barbarians at the Gates and in the Batman movie of 2008.
  
• 04/2008 Glass Full: Gandhi Opera at the Met  relates the experience seeing an opera I'd known well by hearing only, Satyagraha. This wasn't live on screen, but actually at the Met.

Steve Reich
• 05/2016 Stephen and Steve: Sondheim Appreciates Reich . Thanks to YouTube, I saw a staged conversation between the two composers, with performances of pieces that show some mutual appreciation. The Broadway musical Pacific Overtures was the first by Stephen Sondheim to be composed under the influence of Reich. 05/2017 Pacific Overtures: Sondheim's Joy
  
• 07/2012 Drumming Live with Sonic Generator . This review of a live performance is the best piece I've written about Reich, and one of the most satisfying pieces I've written about anything.

John Adams
• 10/2008 Thanks to and from Composer John Adams is my general appreciation of Adams after I read his memoir.
  
• 07/2016 Slow Motion Emotion: John Adams's "Christian Zeal and Activity" explores a piece that chokes me up with something akin to joy.
  
• 10/2015 Nixon's Voice reflects on Nixon in China by Adams, Alice Goodman, and Peter Sellars, along with other representations of Nixon in fiction and film.
  
• 11/2008 Doctor Atomic Staged Two Ways considers the live in HD staging of the Adams - Sellars opera at the Met, and a concert staging in Atlanta.
  
• 07/2006 30 Second Composer on John Adams details my correspondence online with a composer who has worked with Adams.
  
• 07/2006 Composer John Adams Musical Landscapes reflects on Adams's own description of his music. 

Minimalism Adopted by Other Composers
• 04/2008 Nothing Minimal About It concerns a staged concert performance of Michael Nyman's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat at Emory University, 2008.
  
• 11/2018 Nico Muhly's Marnie live in HD from the Met reviews an opera by a composer that I first encountered in person, when I thought he was an undergraduate composition student at the local university. I soon discovered that he was already world-famous, and part-time assistant to Philip Glass. 
• During his long tenure with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano has cultivated composers whose works often show the influence of John Adams. Here are a couple of articles about some of those: 05/2015 Phoenix meets Firebird: Music at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra ; and 04/2013 Robert Spano and the ASO: Bringing New Composers into the Family. Adams's music is frequently performed in Atlanta, and he has been our guest several times. I've seen him conduct his second violin concerto for us.

Episcopal Exiles at Home

By a coincidence that strikes me as meaningful, the first two things I read today say virtually the same thing: Episcopalians, be conscious how we let the prevailing values of secular culture warp our faith.  We are like the Jews returned from Babylon, strangers in their own land who want to fit in.

[Image of the return to Jerusalem of the Babylonian exiles. Julius Chnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius 1794–1874. From AKG-Images]

Bishop Daniel Martins, reflecting on Ezra 9.1-15, gives us the book's context: "The exiles returning from Babylonian enslavement, under Ezra's leadership, struggle to maintain their identity as people and a nation." He allows that Ezra's strictures against intermingling with Gentiles can be "off-putting or offensive." But then he compares his Christian readers to Ezra's people:

We face a similar challenge as we navigate a secular society that exalts egotism, competitiveness, acquisitiveness, vanity, exploitation, violence, and other values contrary to the way God asks us to live. These backward values are embedded in our culture in ways we're not even consciously aware of.
-from Forward Day by Day, November 9, 2019

Theologian Julia Gatta similarly writes about a "cultural matrix" that warps our perceptions.

The advertising world turns toddlers into consumers and pre-teen girls into objects of sexual attraction. Adolescent peer pressure can take a sinister turn with the unlimited possibilities available in social media for exposure and mocking.... [The entertainment industry] capitalizes on violence, ridicules chastity, discounts honesty, and glorifies greed.
-Julia Gatta, Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality, p.17.

These are the "evil powers of this world" that we renounced just last week in our Baptismal covenant. She's not pointing fingers away from herself, as she adds, "It is easy for religious liberals to expose social sin and for religious conservatives to decry personal sin," and that we should remember what Jesus said about seeing the speck in someone else's eye, missing the beam in our own.

These two writers, relating us to the story of the Hebrew exiles and the oft-repeated Baptismal vow, give a sharper focus to my amorphous unease about our culture. I've always felt like an exile in my own land; today I have a clearer sense of why.

Of course, as a teacher, this makes me an alien to my students. A child who attended my own church underscored this during a class when I asked, "When someone strikes you on the cheek, what does Jesus say to do?" Everyone said, "Hit him back!" Of course, I said, "No, turn the other cheek." The class was incredulous. This boy, tears in his eyes, said, "Is that for Episcopals, too?" Sigh.