Theology for Breakfast: Keepsakes & Armor

Richelle Thompson. Daily reflections on scripture in Forward Day by Day, May 2020. Cincinnati: Forward Movement.

"For my days drift away like smoke," sighs the psalmist (102.3) some 2700 years before shelter-in-place orders. When Richelle Thompson was composing her meditations for Forward Day by Day, COVID-19 was not yet a thing. But her bite-sized essays have been a consistent pleasure to mark the passing of this month.

When her days are like smoke, and she lies awake in bed like that sparrow lonely on a housetop (102.7), she gives thanks that Psalms so often express exactly what she feels. She challenges us, when the days drift by, to pray to be as fully present in each moment as God is to us.

For Richelle Thompson, gratitude is equipment like the "helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit" (Eph. 6.17) to prepare us like superheroes "to face, if not evil, then the challenges of the day." She suggests other protections:

• Encouraging passages of scripture that, like God, stay with you wherever you go (Joshua 1.9); Thompson compares these to cherished tokens on her desk from other times in her life that remind her of what she's come through and what she wants to do;
• Lists of details like all those instructions for the ark in Exodus 25, which remind Thompson of instructions from IKEA. She wonders if Exodus is telling us that small details matter? She challenges us to keep a list this week of small acts of faithful generosity;
• Lists of things for which you are grateful;
• The names of laypersons in your faith community you can lift up for doing amazing things in your midst.

Besides lists, storytelling can make an even greater difference in our lives. Thompson observes that Jesus speaks in parables (Matthew 13.10) so that his teachings come as "lived experiences" instead of "rote recitations." She shares a couple of memorable examples from her own family that will stick with me, I hope. When the psalmist prays, "let me not be disappointed" (119.116), Thompson tells us of a beach house intended to be a reunion spot for generations of her family, until divorce wrecked that dream. The good news is, new traditions grew up around the place, and the disappointment is redeemed. Thompson relates the parable of seeds to parenting as a great act of faith. She recounts how her two teenage children in separate incidents used their own money to buy shoes -- one pair for a barefoot child at an after-school care center, another for a classmate who'd worn the same sneakers for three years. The teens had been especially difficult that week, but these acts of generosity came as reassurance that the seeds planted early in their lives were bearing fruit.

A couple of her stories riff on Biblical lines about gates. "I am the gate," Jesus says (John 10.9), but Thompson tells of her daughter's gate-phobic horse. Her daughter's competitors set aside their rivalry to lure and nudge the horse through the gate into the arena. Do we need to be nudges, or nudged? The narrow gate (Matthew 7.14) reminds her of a retreat called "Narrowgate" on a cattle ranch where a trench overlaid with metal pipes is enough to keep cattle from crossing through a wide gate into the parking lot. The cattle, having poor depth perception, are frightened off by shadows in the trough. We, too, may draw back from wide gates in our lives from unfounded fear.

Sometimes Thompson finds a positive spin on scriptures that have bothered her. She wonders of Paul's admonition wives obey your husbands (Col. 3.18) might not have been "a blunt tool" to suppress women but Paul's "lever" to lift women up into the consciousness of his highly patriarchal listeners? Bothered by political strife, she tries to pray for enemies and trust God (Mt 5.44). She wonders why the passages that compare God to a refining fire always use silver for the image, instead of gold or copper (Ps 66.9). She reads that silver is more resistant to corrosion, and more reflective: Could it be that those refined by God thereby become more persevering and reflective of His love?

At the end of each reading is a one-line challenge with the motto, Going Forward, and Thompson's seem especially promising. She challenges us to think on a scripture that bothers us, to find a new way to hear it. She challenges us to take the commandment literally to love our neighbors -- and to invite actual neighbors in. Responding to Psalm 40.13-14, she urges us to let ourselves admit "God, I am overwhelmed." Relating the stone that the builders rejected to young gadflies Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai, she challenges us to think of an unlikely person who speaks an important truth that we may need to remember. She asks, "How could you surprise someone with a gift of grace today?" Wondering about the phrase "stiff-necked people" in Ex. 33.36, which appears more than 40 other times in scripture, always as a quality that God detests, Thompson challenges us to discern the difference between determination and stubborness.

A new month brings a new author in Forward. I'm looking forward.

Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect

Poet Mary Karr once rejected prayer along with "any god who'd want people kneeling and snivelling." A friend interrupted: "You don't do it for God, you a------" (Karr 78).

Karr discovered that prayer, even the kneeling part, changes the pray-er. "Like poetry," she writes,"prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: 'true' and 'beautiful'" (74). (Mary Karr. "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer." Essay in Sinners Welcome. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.)

Forming a prayer that comes close to being a poem is something that my adult class at St. James Episcopal Church does each week. We follow the curriculum "Education for Ministry" (EfM) devised by the School of Theology at the University of the South, Sewanee. Each week we apply our readings from Scripture, history, and theology to a story or artifact brought to us by someone in the class. We end by collaborating on a collect, intended to "collect" all our thoughts into one unified prayer, often one sentence. We wrestle with the problem of finding the words that are both true to what has emerged from our discussions, and beautiful.

Here's a collect that we composed when our student Erica brought us Mary Karr's poem "Etchings in a Time of Plague," which could've been our time, early in America's COVID-19 emergency. But Karr published the poem in 1993, the height of the AIDS epidemic. The title refers to a Medieval etching of a cart carrying plague victims, one white hand sticking out of the carnage like a flower. In the poem, a subway rider lifts her eyes "from the valley" of the art book in her lap to see a "frail" young man. In her mind, he becomes "everyone you've ever loved" and, at their stop, she thinks, "Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair." After our discussion, we wrote this:

Collect for a Call to Action
Eternal God, when Your hand set Ezekiel in a desolate valley to proclaim hope, dry bones rose to new life: may we, like Ezekiel, look up from our personal valleys to act as Your hand and voice to those who need comfort. Amen.

For tying together all the strands of an occasion, this collect might deserve a prize. The "valley" line of the poem brought to mind Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones, fresh from Sunday's scripture reading. Before we'd read the poem, we'd discussed an essay about "vocation," God's "call" to us to act. Valley, plague, a skeletal body, a hand, and a call to action: we packed it all in one sentence.

Derek Olsen outlines the form of the collect in his guide to the Book of Common Prayer Inwardly Digest. A collect begins with an invocation calling God by a trait appropriate to the occasion. (For ours, perhaps "Life-giving God" would be more fitting.) Olsen calls the next part "the relative clause / acknowledgement," a reminder of a characteristic or action of God that fits the occasion. Here, it's Ezekiel's famous prophecy. Then there's "the petition," a request of God, followed by the "statement of purpose / result." At the end is a "doxology," here shortened to "amen."

More than the form, which can vary, it's unity that distinguishes a collect.  For contrast, Olsen cites the prayer attributed to St. Francis, Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon.... Karr calls it both prayer and poem, for her a gateway into faith.  Yet Francis's prayer, being a list of several balanced petitions, lacks the concentrated focus of a collect.

During our first Zoom meeting in March - we called it ZfM - we had brought EfM's process of theological reflection to bear on our own COVID-19 experiences. The cruise ship Diamond Princess emerged as a metaphor to explain how we'd taken so many small routine pleasures for granted and had allowed minor annoyances to consume us while we'd blithely missed signs of the pandemic to come. Looking for an analog in our tradition, we remembered the once-proud city of Nineveh in the book of Jonah. Here's what we wrote:

Collect for a Time of Upheaval
Almighty and merciful God, when You through Jonah warned Nineveh that the great city would fall to nothing in just forty days, the citizens repented, fasted, and averted catastrophe: May we, shocked by sudden awareness of our precarious condition, see with new clarity the beauty and value in routines we have taken for granted, and abjure the fruitless anxieties that have distracted us from You. Amen

For me, being an English teacher, part of the fun is to pack all of the discussion into a single forward-moving sentence. The collect marches smoothly in iambic steps through the story of Nineveh until the accents reverse after the dash "may WE -- SHOCKED by SUDden a-WAREness," appropriately stopping us in our tracks. The rhythm is one reason why Olsen advises that a single trained reader deliver the collects. They are written to sound beautiful, "charming the ear by putting similar sounds close to one another" and flowing in "rhythms and cadences" that crowds' voices would muddy (131).

One collect was all mine, as our discussion ran long. There's only so much Zoom my eyes can take! Our student Pete had shared a photo of "Holy Water" in a cheap plastic bottle with a stamp attesting to its coming from a spring in Conyers, GA, blessed by Jesus Christ "personally" in 1969. We scoffed at the very idea of holy water as a mass-produced commodity, but then remembered that we kneel reverently to sip Mass-produced consecrated wine: to people outside our tradition, what's the difference? For them, our own rites -- hand-waving, water-sprinkling, bowing, petitions -- are ridiculous.

I'm personally invested in this one. A glance at my Episcopal page reveals that the point where magic meets mystery, where fantasy meets myth, has always been the fulcrum of my faith -- my whole inner life. The form of the collect helped me to bring all of our discussion together to make a statement that, for me, resolves the issues:

Collect for Consecration
Almighty Father and Creator, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, You exalted humble Mary to be vessel of Your birth, You make Yourself present in the ordinary bread at Your altar, and You promise that a spring of living water wells up in each of us to eternal life: now consecrate our senses that we may perceive in our neighbors, our selves, and in all Your creation, Your power to make instruments of Your grace. Amen.

Examples of God's working through scoffed-at vessels pile up against that colon like a stream behind a dam; after the colon we get a release of energy at the recognition of God's power to consecrate us.

Discussing a story of a guest who chooses not to question signs of criminality that he finds in his host's library, we collected examples of how Jesus does ask crucial questions, respecting the unique concerns of each individual he questions. At least for those who know the gospel stories, this collect is a compact manual for how to have difficult discussions:

Collect for Empathy
Lord, creator and sustainer: you asked questions that probed the hearts of the people you met, Will you sell your possessions and follow me? Can you surrender your authority to be newborn? Do you wish to be healed? Train our imaginations so to empathize with those we meet, that we, too, may ask the questions that lead to safety, growth, and health. Amen.

Olsen makes the poetry connection explicit. "A good collect should be like a haiku," he writes...

...in that it gives a unified experience, communicating a single, self-contained thought. Furthermore, this thought may be allusive, using loaded language to point outside of itself to references that a culturally literate interpreter should pick up. Finally, a good collect should leave us with a feeling, an intention, or a resolve to enact that for which we have just prayed (138).

From experience, I'd only add that the feeling you get from reading a good collect is heightened when you've struggled with friends to write one. As Mary Karr's friend might say, you're not writing to change God's mind; you're writing to change your own.

Blogposts of related interest:
• See our EfM class blog.
• About Derek Olsen's book, see more at my blogpost "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before" (01/2017)
• "Mary Karr's Sinners Welcome: Discomfort and Joy" (06/2020).
  

For Memorial Day: "Mostly Ghosts" by Bee Donley

Bee Donley's debut collection of poems Mostly Ghosts (2012) begins with a ghost story told in a smoky bar, Glenn Miller's music playing on the jukebox. As veteran flyers are talking, one swears that his wingman, shot down one day over the Chanel, was back in position the next day: I could see him plainly through the mist.

Bee remembers, "We, the wives and girlfriends, listened and smiled, / ...Loved you extravagantly with our eyes and hands / Knowing we were the unseen." The men's wartime experiences, more compelling than peacetime, has made ghosts of the women who loved them.

[PHOTO: Bee Donley in her late 80s, looking just as I remember her from her late 50s. Photo from an interview with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger]

Among the men she addresses as "you" is one she married, whose grave she visits 46 years after his "untimely" death to discover that the date is wrong. "I wonder," she asks, "if the ghost of that once smiling flier knows how wrong" ("Burial Ground" 6). In these few lines, Donley implies that the ghosts of war never let go of him, and we can guess at the young father's suicide -- something I heard about, never from Bee.


Bee Donley remembers another ghost between lines of the liturgy for "Memorial Day: Morning Prayer" (9). In her telling, a young pilot named Peter Joseph O'Toole becomes vivid to us, though she cannot remember his appearance, or whether he kissed her. "Yet the morning heat walking beneath the live oaks / to the campus P.O. for his daily letters seems real," and his imploring her, I know you probably won't answer, but I've never known a Southern girl before; it would mean a lot to hear from you. But he was killed in his first mission, "And now over sixty years later I pray for this boy I remember only by his name." So do we.


A Marine pilot, her brother, is another ghost made vivid in life and poignant in death through a multi-layered poem, "Reading Wordsworth and Remembering." Beginning with an epigraph from Wordsworth about "the best portion of a good man's life" being "nameless, unremembered acts / of kindness and of love," the poem tells the anecdote of her younger brother's building box kites to delight Bee's five-year-old daughter, his niece. One tangles in a tree; the other falls in a sharp downdraft. Bee shifts to the image of the young pilot's plane suddenly plunged into the sea by downdraft, leaving her "searching cloudless skies for," in one of Wordsworth's most famous lines, "trails of glory."


Other poems in the collection conjure the life of a Southern daughter of a Mississippi landowner. What stands out the most is something she says she learned from her father: "He taught me not to cry... I do hold my shoulders up."


Even enduring treatment for cancer, Bee Donley sat up in bed with plumped pillows and unruffled sheets to offer her apprehensive visitors wine, her hair perfect, collar raised, robe falling about her in a semi-circle, slippered feet tucked to one side -- as if she were posing for a magazine spread on boudoir fashion. Bee was my oldest colleague at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Mississippi, so poised on her high heels, so tireless in her many roles at the school that, seeing how unbowed she was by cancer, I figured she was immortal.


So to see her obituary pop up during a Google search came as something of a surprise, though nearly 40 years passed between then and her death in January 2018. But I was delighted to learn that she published poetry in her 90s. Mostly Ghosts is an apt title for her first collection, because she lives on in the lines.

Dementia Diary: What Virus?

Bad news: I've not been able to visit mom since March 8, because of the virus.

Good news: "Really? What virus?"

Laura Robinson of Visiting Angels, Mom's companion for several years, now, took this photo from inside the dining hall when I came for a visit outside the window. Mom and I spoke through Laura's phone.

Asynchronicity for Deep Dive Education in Middle School

Our Head of Middle School, meeting virtually with me and other department chairs last week, posed a couple of questions. Now that we have had "distance learning" through internet apps for a full quarter, how might learning next year benefit from the experience? The second question seemed unrelated: As our school has provided a strong network of services and teachers to serve students with special learning needs, how can we do the same for highly-motivated students who want more than the usual classroom experience?

The whole time we were meeting, I was nominally "in class," but free to talk because my students had "asynchronous" work to do, editing their portfolios and reading a chapter. They had nearly an hour to work on their own before they would join me for a short synchronous videoconference, part spoken discussion in "break out" rooms, and part written comments on "chat." Students who missed it all did it all by email later in the week.

Later, I saw that the asynchronous techniques of distance learning could be the key to creating a "deep dive" experience for students motivated enough to want it. The answers to all of our Head's practical questions, printed below in italics, fell in to place:

• What are the pre-requisites? What is the interview process? What restrictions are there on the program? Participating fully in regular synchronous classes during the first quarter, students who self-identify as interested in the program are evaluated for traits of curiosity, near-mastery of the skills exercised during class, and willpower to work independently.
• What personnel are involved? In our school, our classes rotate in a cycle of seven days, and each class meets six times. Students who qualify for this program come to half of classes in their field for three days, keeping up with reading and discussion, other days reporting to the media center or a middle school classroom set aside for asynchronous study. During the second quarter, they spend that time researching broadly in their field. They will need a study advisor -- not necessarily the same as their classroom teacher -- and, being middle schoolers, some adult in the room. By the end of the second quarter, they and their study advisor will have mapped out a course of study: sources to read, or people to meet, or data to collect.
• How does this align with extant curriculum, especially with classes in the higher grades? Throughout the third quarter, and some time beyond, the students will do the deep work of following the map they made in the second quarter, collecting data, quotes, impressions, pictures -- whatever -- going deeply into a tangent to the same subject that their classmates are studying. They're not "getting ahead," but going deep.
  
• In the fourth quarter, they collect what they've learned into a form that can be presented to classmates, teachers, parents. Tools that we're using for distance learning could be useful, here. Over time, the school will have accumulated a library of videos and virtual books for use in the classroom.

While the terminology of "asynchronous" learning comes out of the world of on-line experiences that may or may not happen "in real time," technology only facilitates the kind of educational experience that, in my own life, has been most valuable. Looking back through my own secondary education, I realize that all of my ah-ha moments happened because the teacher got out of the way. While we read Faulkner with Mr. Scott, he had us choose another Faulkner novel of our own choice, to write on a topic of our own devising. Mr. Boggs sent me off to put together a program of songs by Sondheim. (Read my tribute, 11/2015). At Duke, Professor Holley assigned a research paper on the first day of class that had to be about something on Duke's campus that had never been researched before. My first draft, due in December was 20 pages long; my second, in May, was 40 with 40 more pages of notes from letters, interviews, and yellowed original documents. (Read my tribute to Dr. Holley 09/2013) A graduate professor at Millsaps College freed me to research solutions to the three greatest classroom challenges that I'd identified during my first three years of teaching, resulting in essays that still fuel what I do.

The program I've laid out, it hits me now, is pretty close to work I've done with all the students in my regular classes. My 8th graders came to two classes a week prepared to learn about American history through documents, but the other two classes, they circulated between conferencing with me and going to the library to work on research for a pair of related papers, one per semester.

At St. Andrew's in Jackson, science teacher John Davis assisted fifth graders who had passions in an area to find grown-up experts in the field who became their "colleagues" on a project, and presented them with much fanfare to a live audience, child and adult both on stage. (I remember especially the one with the life-size papier mache whale.)

So, problems solved. I'm going to ride my bike this morning, so that I can meet my synchronous responsibilities in the afternoon.

Stephen Sondheim, We're Still Here

Somehow I missed the memo about the virtual concert to honor Stephen Sondheim on his 90th birthday. Last night, I watched almost all two and a half hours of Take Me to the World. The performers bring out all that is "passionate, charming [and] clever" in the songs while facing laptop cameras in their own homes, often ending with a direct address of appreciation to Mr. Sondheim. (One says she has to go make dinner.)

Take Me to the World, "I'm Still Here"

Unseen musicians provide note-perfect accompaniment, though a few performers sing unaccompanied: host Raoul Esparza does a portion of "Our Time," Mandy Patinkin sings "Lesson #8" out in a field on a cold day, and Bernadette Peters sang "No One is Alone" leaning up against the wall of her kitchen. Of all the birthday celebrations I've heard and seen, going back fifty years to one performed on the set of the original production of A Little Night Music, this one felt most intimate. I sang along and enjoyed every minute.


But I missed a few minutes at the end that made me cry when I saw them this morning. For a coda, dozens of performers do "I'm Still Here." Though it's a great song, it's not one you cry for, and the performers for once were a little punchy and not all on the beat. They sang the way I've done so many times in the car or the shower, just letting loose. That's where the tears came from: as the faces on screen proliferated, and the voices overlapped, I was made to feel part of the group, a community that includes the big name stars with those who were watching (and donating $400K dollars) -- the community of all those around the world who do know every word and who have sung "I'm Still Here" at the tops of their lungs when no one else was around.


Many of the stars from earlier celebrations are no longer with us. Others sound just as good now as when I first saw them decades ago, and many younger stars, unfamiliar to me, interpreted their songs beautifully. So I'm delighted to see that the community is still here, and still growing.