Mom's Feminist Marriage

Frances Smoot ca. 1970

When Dad retired, he complained that just going to the bank, the store, and the post office had taken him all morning. Mom quipped, "Try it with three small children in the car." Thus Mom described her life as a wife and mother in the 1960s.

So Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke to her. Friedan begins her book with a survey of the best selling women's magazines. In 1960, a year of startling changes in politics, culture, and technology, McCall's and Woman's Day contained no mention of the world beyond the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Women, now largely college-educated, were dependent on their men and spending their days on trivial chores.

But household chores are sacred, women were told, not trivial. The "feminine mystique" was the party line that women, with their mysterious child-bearing powers, were "closer to nature" than men, to be cherished and protected from the harsh realities of the working-day world. (The hit TV sitcom Bewitched embodied the myth of the mystique, as a super-powered wife stays home doing chores while her husband goes to work, so that he can have what he calls a "normal family." Made explicit, the feminine mystique was ridiculous.)

Years later, Mom remembered how she drove with Friedan's book to a signing in downtown Pittsburgh. "But when I got to the front of the line, I saw how ugly she was and thought, no wonder her husband left her!" Mom dropped out of line.

Still, within a couple of years, Mom was changing her life. When my big sister was in elementary school, Mom became President of the PTA. She was also elected chairwoman of the local chapter of the Republican party [I remember being fascinated by the gavel that she brought home.]

So she was a community leader when Dad told her he'd taken a new job in Chicago and we'd be moving. "And you didn't even ask me?" she said. Decades later, Dad was still abashed about that. "She went along with it that time," he said, "but I never made that mistake again."

In that same conversation with my parents, they were astounded that I didn't remember Mom's Day Off. Saturdays, Dad fed us breakfast, supervised cartoon-watching, and took us on excursions to the garden center and hardware store, while she dressed up and drove away to no-one-knows where. Mom told me that her Saturdays probably saved their marriage.

In the 1970s, Mom went back to work as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School. (She'd taught sixth grade one semester before her first child started to show.) Dad encouraged her to get her Master's in Education. Laughing, they told me that he even wrote some of her papers. She became the team leader for 3rd grade and created the school's summer program, which she directed for two decades. Mom also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.” When she was called forward at an all-school faculty meeting to be honored at her retirement for her 33 years of service, she astonished the crowd by doing a handspring.

Super-powered indeed.

[See my page Family Corner for much more about Mom, Dad, and their families. See my Dementia Diary about the downs and occasional ups in Mom's life since she moved alone to a retirement home near me. See also Bewitched Craft for more ways that the sitcom reflected its time.]

Dementia Diary: Mom at 89

In the photos below, Mom receives a necklace given by her mother to Mom's cousin Pat. When my sister and I visited Pat this month, she gave us the necklace for Mom to have. It made a great birthday present when Mom turned 89 a few days later.

These days, Mom appears to be engaged in anything I say with her Visiting Angel Laura. Sometimes she comments. Although her speech consists largely of half-words and non-sequiturs, her tone and expression clue us in on whether she's expressing a concern, recounting an amusing anecdote, or making a tart comment.

She didn't say much of anything during my visit Friday. I stood beside her wheelchair holding her hand while Laura chatted with me. With her free hand, Mom felt my arm and sometimes leaned in to kiss it.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward DxD Aug-Oct 2023 - Faith is a Body Thing

Every morning I read scripture assigned for that day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

AugustFr. Allen W. Farabee of Florida found so many life lessons and life questions in the scriptures for August that I'll just list highlights.

• The "hillside picnic" in Mark 6, when the crowd is anxious about having enough food, reminds Farabee of grocery-store raids at the start of COVID. For most of us, food insecurity was a frightening new experience. "In the end, the crowd is asked to sit down, and they are served -- and all eat are filled."
• "The first words spoken by a person to God in the Bible express fear" (Adam: I heard you...and I was afraid.) Stepping into the boat from the surface of the lake, Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Farabee comments: "In the end, it is all we want to hear."
• In the Greek marketplace, Paul speaks the language of the Athenians. Farabee asks, "Where are you called to proclaim the Good News? In what ways will you need to 'speak the language?'" (I reflected that this blog is my way of doing that -- as I find God in the books and movies and musicals of secular artists.)
• God emptied himself and took the form of a slave, in Phil.2.5-7; those who want to save their life will lose it, in Mark 8.35. Farabee comments, "I don't think such a premise can be debated. It is unprovable. But this reversal is the way of life. So says Jesus. And I believe him." That's pretty close to being the only creed we need.
• Most of our sins are not as gross as David's murderous determination to rape Uriah's wife Bathsheba, but sin still "distorts our lives." To illustrate, Farabee tells how he broke a date in 6th grade when a more attractive girl asked him to the dance. Life went on, he said, "but my soul has never forgotten. Nor should it." Yet God still used even David, and God is still at work in us.
• Psalm 88 ends without hope. Farabee recalls a time when he served a congregation that rejected him, when he "could have prayed Psalm 88 over and over." He reassures us, "Don't skip over the darkness. God is still there."
• "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink...?" Jesus asks James and John. Seeing that everyone is able to be killed, Farabee asks just what "able" means in this context? Are we "able?"
• I never noticed what Farabee points out, that the Prayer Book schedules readings that celebrate the goodness of creation for Saturdays. "Our faith begins in the goodness of creation -- or it will lead us nowhere."
• The broken pieces of rejected pottery outside an artisan's studio seemed wasteful to Farabee, until he saw the finished products inside. This gives a different spin on Mark 12.10 (a quote from Psalm 118). The stone that the builders rejected could have been a first draft, a model, for something much better. "Trust God to turn waste into glory."
• Psalm 140.10 prays for hot coals to fall upon the enemy. Farabee says, we've wished that too. "Come on. Admit it. We get hurt or offended or maligned... and the bitter impulses of our souls bubble to the surface, searing out better selves." But remember another verse for the same day, 143.10, "Teach me to do what pleases you, for you are my God."

At the end of August, Farabee responds to Mark 14.17, Jesus coming to dinner with the twelve on what will be a night of betrayal. "If you remember," Farabee writes, "we began this month scattered on the hillside, hungry... worried there would not be enough." How fitting that we end with Jesus, friends, Passover bread and wine, signifying the promise of God's kingdom. Farabee's last words to us are: "Try to remember Jesus each time you break bread, feed the hungry, and share what you have."

SeptemberJodi Belcher holds a doctor of divinity degree from Duke and continues to live and teach in Durham. What stood out to me in her morning meditations was her emphasis on the body in our scriptures. Belcher tells us how, as a teenager, she got the impression that faith was purely spiritual and the body was bad. I can identify.

She finds physicality in prayer, as when Jacob "wrestles" all night with his inner demon, and Jesus is praying apart from his friends and "falling apart" with tears at Gethsemane. In the sweeping grandeur of the Exodus story, Belcher notices "grace notes of earth and flesh" when Moses and the Lord "find each other": the flock, the bare feet, the sacred ground, and a couple of basic questions, "Who am I? Who are you?" For Belcher, the familiar phrase "faith without works is dead" is telling us "faith is a body thing," not a spiritual feeling or intellectual belief, and mostly involves "welcoming and caring for bodies, our own and our neighbor's." transition to social ills - "wages cry out" in James 5.4 -- which I read after hearing a piece on "true price of immigration"

Other familiar scriptures are more comforting or more urgent when taken as physical realities, not metaphors. "I am with you," the Lord repeats three times to Jacob (Gen 28.15). Picturing Psalm 23, Belcher wonders how "goodness shall follow me all the days of my life," since she imagines the Shepherd leading us from the front. Is goodness perhaps something we leave behind wherever we go? When Paul assures the Philippians that God "will transform the body of our humiliation [to] be conformed to the body of His glory," Belcher isn't sure what Paul is imagining (and I bet Paul wasn't, either), but at least the apostle is telling us that our bodies are worth resurrecting. Again, God derides Jonah for mourning the withering of a shrub while thinking that God wouldn't care about the destruction of Nineveh, where there are 20,000 human bodies "besides many animals." (Belcher comments that the story doesn't say that love is more important than justice, but that justice can go beyond punishment and oppression.)

When Matthew takes Jesus to his home for dinner, Belcher notes how often Jesus's ministry involves just "sitting with" people who are usually avoided. I saw a demonstration of that when I played piano for a communion service that my church offered at a retirement home. After the last hymn, a woman asked me if I could play "You'll Never Walk Alone" because her sister used to sing it, and "she's being pulled off life support in Florida right now, as we speak." She wept. Mother Pat noticed, and simply sat with her and listened to her. (Meanwhile, I did find the song's chord chart on my phone and played it on the piano, softly).

Anger makes us "liable to judgment" in Matthew 5.22, but anger may also be a physical alarm in response to an injustice or a crack in a relationship. Take care of those when you feel anger, Belcher advises us.

On the same day that Belcher reflects on James 5.4, "wages cry out," I heard a story on NPR about "the true price of immigration." When we figure how underpayment of immigrant men, women, and children for their labor keeps down prices for goods and services, while we save taxpayers' money by cutting immigrants off from such services as English lessons and medical benefits, the thought that wages cry out makes a strong physical image for injustice.

OctoberThe writer for October, Kathryn Nishibayashi, fourth-generation member of St. Mary's in LA and graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, spent 12 years teaching elementary school. I'm grateful to her for reinterpreting the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) as her analogy for teaching. In a few students, now grown and still connected with her, she sees how "the seeds" she had sown took root and helped them to "grow into the people God has made them to be." But, like me, she will never know for most of her students what took, and what didn't. "The gift God gives us is not a certainty in the outcome but the honor of laboring together in the field."

Cycling Istanbul

 ←← | ← ||

Me & Amir biking in Istanbul, virtually.

Before Amir blew past me on a bike trail in Powder Springs GA, I had nothing personal to write about Istanbul. With this selfie and a fist bump, he literally handed me the personal connection I needed.

As I exerted myself to keep up with Amir, my average speed rose higher than it'd been all summer (hernia, surgery). When he relaxed his cadence, I came up alongside him to request that he not slow down.

Unlike me, Amir's a big guy, outgoing, and I soon learned that he is new to Atlanta, works cyber security for Delta and has been to Istanbul on business this year. When I reached my quota of miles for the day, we snapped a selfie, and then he took off after a pair of riders who'd passed us a minute earlier.

Without Amir, my only connection to Istanbul would be the classic crime novel that begins there, Murder on the Orient Express, and screen adaptations that I've loved. For the BBC's version, actor-director David Suchet added a prologue to the Istanbul chapter that punches up questions of law, punishment, and justice raised by the novel. He adds faith to the mix. Here's a link to What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Christie. 

When I met Amir on October 2, I'd covered 300 of the 557 miles to Istanbul from my previous virtual stop in Kiev.  I gave up some riding time in October to COVID and a trip with my sister to Illinois for a visit with our oldest living relative, Cousin Pat.  I finished the last 16 miles today.  [To see my stops in other places, including San Francisco, Quebec, and Dublin, use the arrows at the top of this post and below.]

Miles YTD 2901 || 2nd World Tour Total 16,436 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

From Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party to A Haunting in Venice

(left) The edition I purchased in Ireland, 1977; the cast of the movie, 2023.

 

This is not a doctoral thesis, just a game I played to keep up my interest in Agatha Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, nominal inspiration for A Haunting in Venice, directed by its star actor Kenneth Branagh. I kept a mental inventory of bits from the novel that went into the movie -- which otherwise has nothing to do with the book.

The premise for the book is pretty good, with some promise of atmosphere. During a community Halloween party at the home of Rowena Drake, a small town's most prominent church lady, an awkward girl has been found dead, head submerged in the tub where kids had bobbed for apples minutes before. The teaser is that the girl had boasted loudly about having once seen a murder "years" before, only she hadn't recognized that it was murder at the time. Hercule Poirot, called into the case by his friend Ariadne Oliver, suspects that someone who overheard the girl has killed her to protect their own secret.

But, as Agatha Christie's novels go, Hallowe'en Party seems pretty tired. The murder has already happened when the novel begins, so forget about rich Halloween atmosphere. The dialogue is freighted with red herrings as people speculate about every disturbance of the past few years that the girl might have witnessed -- most of these dismissed out of hand after we've gone through the tedium of reading about them. An inordinate amount of dialogue contains phrases to the effect, nowadays, (young people, parents, legal officials) are too (coddled and immoral, too indulgent, too merciful) and the murderer is probably (one of the insane people -- addicts, probably -- that indulgent policies have allowed to roam among us). The only thing to stand out here is that the town's foreigner -- Olga Seminoff, nursemaid -- gets some respect, not always the case in Dame Agatha's books.

The movie, on the other hand, goes the other direction, more atmosphere than story. Does Venice even celebrate Halloween? A voiceover narrator says that Venice adopted the holiday from American soldiers recently stationed there at the end of World War II. Poirot is staying in Venice, retired from detective work, when his friend Ariadne Oliver invites him to help her "crack" a local seer's seance routine. The movie makers have fun with dark water, visions of the dead, crashing objects, cobwebs and skulls in tunnels, a legend of orphans left to die in the dungeon during the Plague.

I think the movie's creators also had fun picking little bits of Christie's novel to justify their claim to have "adapted" it. Here's what I picked up:

• Big picture: a Halloween party for kids at the home of a socialite named Rowena Drake.  In the novel, she is a widow whose wealthy mother-in-law died suddenly over a year before.  In the movie, she is an opera singer who hasn't sung since her grown daughter drowned in the canal the previous year.
• Ariadne Oliver, mystery novelist, is present. Her supposed love of apples is referenced several times in both stories. She invites Poirot to get involved.
• An intelligent 11-year-old boy named Leopold knows secrets about the adults in the room.
• A nursemaid named Olga Seminoff is under suspicion.
• A pair of teenagers (both of them boys in the novel, a brother and sister in the movie) rig up some ghostly special effects. The ghostly effects include sightings of spirits in mirrors.
• Someone's head is forced underwater in the tub of bobbing apples. 

For me, the best parts of both the movie and the book are those where Poirot goes on a tear, separating false claims and false theories from what must be true.   Branagh's Poirot goes moping through much of the movie, feeling a bit ill, he says, seeing things that he can't possibly be seeing -- so the moments of clarity were welcome.  

The role of the medium was built up to be a larger-than-life character, one that Michelle Yeoh inhabits with no room to spare.  Young Leopold is another scene-stealer. 

Branagh's other two Christies, based on much stronger novels, made sharper, stronger films; but I do enjoy seeing the grand structure he and his writer Michael Green have fabricated from a few clues left by Dame Agatha.

[See my Crime Fiction page for a curated list of my reflections on other Christie books and movies, including a biography of her and a memoir by the actor who portrayed Poirot for decades, David Suchet.]

The Shining onstage with the Atlanta Opera

The story of Stephen King's novel The Shining is familiar even to those who know only a couple of frames from the movie: a small family takes up residence in a big empty resort hotel for the winter, and the father gets cabin fever times 1000. When Atlanta Opera teamed up with the Alliance Theatre to produce the opera based on that story, fans of King and musical theatre alike wondered, what can the composer and librettist give us that we haven't had already?

The composer Paul Moravec told local NPR radio personality Lois Reitzes that music intensifies feelings: scary is more scary, tenderness is more tender. I found that to be true. There's the expected ominous foreboding, but also warmth, a lullabye, and painful husband-wife dialogue. When the story startles us, the music enhances the effect.

With the librettist Mark Campbell, Moravec also compresses huge swaths of Stephen King's novel into memorable moments onstage, using the magic of music to unfold two or more scenes at one time. While hotel employee Dick Hallorann tours the hotel with the mother Wendy and her 11-year-old son Danny, Danny's father Jack Torrance is on the other side of the stage, being confronted by his employer: incidents have come to light that Jack hadn't reported, especially alcohol abuse and his dismissal from a teaching position for hitting a student. While Jack protests that he's okay and everything will be all right, Wendy tries to reassure Danny and herself that everything will be all right.

During this same pair of scenes, we learn two other pieces of consequential information. A flash of light and a musical flourish alert the audience of a special connection between Mr. Hallorann and little Danny, a telepathic communication that Hallorann calls "the shining." If the time comes that Danny needs help, Hallorann promises that he'll hear the call and come as fast as he can. Meanwhile, Jack learns that a previous caretaker went berserk, killed his family and himself. Jack is determined to prove that he is a good provider, a strong protector, a man who doesn't need help. This armor of masculine independence will be a barrier between Jack and Wendy when she sees signs of trouble.

The ghostly inhabitants of the hotel lurk as a chorus that we hear even when we cannot see them, a powerful tool for Moravec and Campbell to show Jack's absorption into their culture of desperate hedonism. The live-action singers are reinforced by eerie animated projections of blurred, glowing versions of themselves. Three men in the group emerge to act like fraternity brothers to initiate Jack into their practices -- chief of which seems to be making "corrections" when a wife or child challenges the head of the family.

Moravec and Campbell integrate dozens of pages of backstory by simply bringing Jack's abusive father in to expand that trio to a quartet of ghosts for an infernal big band number. Does he belong there, who had no connection to the hotel in life? He belongs, if we see the ghosts as manifestations of Jack's own inner demons. The ghosts are real enough to Danny. At one riveting moment, he screams to his mother, "They've got him!" Who? "The people in the hotel!" It's easy to see the hotel as one outpost of a hell that contains more than the whackos who lived there. And we don't need supernatural scaffolding to understand how abuse Jack suffered as a boy left a reservoir of anger that will swamp little Danny when the dam breaks.

Supernatural influence, or the eruption of purely personal evil? The Shining, like a classic that shares many of its features, The Turn of the Screw, is creepy both ways. [That made a good opera, too. See my review of 04/2013]

Because music can imprint a memory through melody, Jack's sincere promise to Danny to love and protect him always rises to prominence from a swirl of music, upping the impact of a fatal decision.

Having now seen the movie, read the book, and heard the opera, I can attest that the single most emotional moment of the story, whatever the form, is as strong here as ever, so strong that I wept during intermission. That's a good thing for an opera.

Between Alice Parker and Eudora Welty: My Experience in the Opera The Ponder Heart

A recent photo of Alice Parker. Inset: Eudora Welty, when I was her neighbor, ca. 1980

 

I'm pleased to learn from a web search that composer Alice Parker received an award for "Sacred in Opera" from the National Opera Association just last year. We go way back. I thought of her last week when I saw her name on music that our choir director pulled out of our library, the pages yellowed with age.

In 1982, with the Choral Society of Jackson, Mississippi, I sang in a workshop production of Alice Parker's fourth opera The Ponder Heart, her text drawn entirely from the novel by Pulitzer-winning writer Eudora Welty, lifelong resident of Jackson. We were to sing the score for potential investors who might be persuaded to fund a full-scale production.

Alice Parker was well-known to all American choral singers for her arrangements of Negro Spirituals and other sacred folk material. The music was published as "the Robert Shaw" series, after the famed choral conductor. Her name was always in smaller print than his, but the arrangements were all hers.

At our first rehearsal, she was courtly, commanding, unflappable and always ready to laugh. In my mind, I see high heels, flowing skirt, tightly cinched waist, straight back, a scarf, and firm hair -- but my memories of her blend with images of elegant movie stars of her vintage -- Lauren Bacall, for instance.

The small town setting of Miss Welty's novel gave Parker opportunities to write in different styles of what we today might call Americana: shape-note singing, blues, and gospel. But I was a music nerd less excited by simple folk tunes than by techniques she used to layer authentic material into the texture of her dramatic story.

My favorite instance of a technical twist was in Parker's arrangement of a sentimental gospel song that began with the words, "Somewhere the sun is shining." In the story, the central character "Uncle Daniel" Ponder falls in love with a certain soprano in the church choir. Given the perception that sopranos are enamored of their upper registers, Alice Parker arranged the soloist's music in a different meter from the choir's, allowing her a couple extra beats to massage her high notes while the choir waltzed on in strict time. (I think we sang in 6/8 while the soprano had some measures in odd meters).

At one rehearsal, the director handed me freshly-composed music for the big trial scene in act II. I was to play it on the piano for the chorus while Miss Parker, in another room, rehearsed the leads. We were all sight-reading, and I recall that it was difficult material with dissonances and varying meter -- my favorite things! After a couple of hours, when Alice Parker heard her music for the first time, I was playing it. The next day, she brought in new music for the same scene, throwing out everything we'd worked on.

I was enraptured, not disappointed. That year I'd been singing with a cassette tape of Marry Me a Little, a musical revue made up entirely of songs cut from Stephen Sondheim's musicals. Having put so much effort into a number that was cut from the opera, I felt that I had paid my dues to join the exalted company of musical theatre professionals.

When we performed the score at New Stage Theatre, located in the neighborhood where both Eudora Welty and I lived, it was a social occasion. Drinks and finger food were laid out on long tables; the musicians took seats on one side of the room, while the wealthy guests sat on the other. Just before we started, Ms. Welty approached and asked me, "Young man, may I have this seat?" She sat at my side throughout the performance.

The guests backed a full-scale production by New Stage. Immersed in my second year of teaching, I did not participate in that one, though I did go to see it, of course. I remember thinking that it was a sweet story, but not one to excite you. The critic from The New York Times said pretty much the same thing. Edward Rothstein concluded, "But what made the music work was some of what Miss Welty called the Ponder heart – a love of simplicity, good humor and plain speaking."

The opera was cited for recognition of Sacred in Opera along with her operas on more overt religious themes. In their citation, the National Opera Association wrote that all of Parker's operas demonstrate “what it means to live a productive life as a member of a community, whether that community is a town, an extended family, or a musical or faith tradition.”

I'll admit that I thought Alice Parker was ancient in 1982. Actually, she was then seven years younger than I am now, and she's still active. If you're Googling yourself, Ms. Parker, and you see these lines, come on to St. James Episcopal in Marietta, GA for our All Saints service, and hear us do your music.

[Update: Alice Parker died on Christmas Day, 2023.]

Dread and Hope for Sondheim's Last Show

On the Vulture page of New York Magazine online, Frank Rich's interview with playwright David Ives and theatre director Joe Mantello has me intrigued about something I've been dreading: Stephen Sondheim's last show Here We Are.

I've seen the films on which the two acts of the show are based (Luis Bunuel's films Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Exterminating Angel). Act one is based on the former, in which well-heeled friends can't get food or even a drink from any vendor they visit, for a variety of unlikely reasons. Act two is based on the latter, in which well-heeled guests have eaten a banquet, but, for no apparent reason, cannot exit the dining room. The Met presented a tedious opera that Thomas Ades made of the latter story. These are, for me, arch social allegories. You hear the premise, you get the point; you don't need it drawn out to three hours.

Still, David Ives is dynamite. A student production of his short play All in the Timing gave me ten of the most delightful minutes of theatre I've ever experienced. Montello's production of Assassins set a new standard for that show (see my recent reflection Assassins On-Target 01/2023). And Sondheim made marvelous shows from dry material, such as the history of the industrialization of Japan in Pacific Overtures, and from off-putting characters, such as a cannibal barber in Sweeney Todd.

But when I heard that Sondheim had not completed any songs for act two when he died on the night of Thanksgiving, 2021, I felt relief that we'd be spared a miserable coda to Sondheim's brilliant career.

[Update: The show is "Three hours of sophistication that I've not seen [on Broadway] in 25 years" (W42st.com) says Paul Ford. The teacher who got me into Sondheim in 1974, Paul went on to play piano for the original productions of many Sondheim shows and wrote a book about it, Lord Knows at Least I Was There (blogpost of 04/2022). ]

The corrected story, according to Ives and Mantello, is that Sondheim et. al. agreed that the second act shouldn't have music. "Why would these people sing?" Sondheim said. In the depths of the pandemic lockdown, Ives and Mantello realized that, logically, they wouldn't.

Of course, as my friend Susan observed, "logically," no one should be singing at all in any musical, except that it's billed as a musical. And for half a musical, she said, Mantello and Ives should charge only half price.

All that aside, I treasure the article because Rich presents us with the parts of his conversation that focused on the creative process behind the show. Rich is a longtime theatre critic for the NY Times who interviewed Sondheim on many stages around the country.

Is there any other artist whose every draft of every piece of his work has been so open to public view? I've been lapping up writing about Sondheim's collaborations and personal writing process since 1974, when, at 15, I read Craig Zadan's Sondheim and Company in one sitting. There are dozens of recordings of Sondheim's songs that never made it into shows that never made it on Broadway. He and his collaborators tell all about intentions, first drafts, and fulfillment in interviews, biography, and memoirs (link to my digests of every single book at my Sondheim page).

The story of his exhilaration in the initial stages and the long periods of enervating self-doubt are still models for creatives and, considering that he was still working at 91, touching. His eyes failing, he ordered oversized music paper so that he could see where he was putting his notes. He didn't want to be "a pointillist composer." When Ives fiddled with a lyric, Sondheim mock-objected, "Come on, I'm an icon of the American Musical Theatre!"

The search for a title is part of the story. For years, it's been referred to variously as Bunuel and as Square One. Because Sondheim procrastinated with so many excuses, including an ingrown toenail, someone suggested The Dog ate My Homework. Montello thinks Here We Are fits because it suggests "a destination, a state of being, and also an offering."

For Ives and Montello, Here We Are is a "distilled, smaller-scale version of a life's work" and "a sort of requiem" for Sondheim.

Here's hoping.

I recommend a blogpost by Showriz, clearly knowledgeable and appreciative of Sondheim.

"Our Father" and other new poems

Images posted with four new poems & birthday selfie from July.  

Since April, I've posted five pieces to my poetry blog First Verse.

• Our Father has resonated with its readers, though the details are all specific to my experience.
• A cat overtakes the real subject in Sleep was inside me.
• As friends laughed about the residences of their 20s, a Biblical theme emerged in First homes.
• I attended a funeral in Boston and bicycled through Atlanta, thanks to live-streaming. The powerful mix of experiences inspired Eulogy

Finally, there's my parody of Rodgers and Hammerstein's standard "My Favorite Things" to sing at a farewell party at St. James for Father Daron Vroon.

The images are by my friend Susan Rouse, except for my sister's cat, portrayed by  Android. 

Don't Let the Boys See You Cry: Good Night, Irene

Coffee and donuts for servicemen - AP, from NPRs website

I taught US History but never heard of the "donut dollies" who followed troops in England, France, and Germany. They dispensed coffee and wise cracks, played jazz bands, and listened to private confessions.

Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea created fiction on the framework of experiences his mother wrote about in her journals. Until she died, he knew little about her story, except that she suffered from nightmares every night of her life.

Urrea builds his story with laughs, friendship, and a rom-com perfect romance with a (fictional) cocksure pilot named Hans "Handyman." Beyond that, the arc of the story follows the trajectory of Allied advances and setbacks.

Irene's commander tells her, "Above all, don't let them see you cry." The part that moves me to tears, again and again, is the gratitude that men express, as in this letter:

I was trying to hide my terror from the other guys, but all I could think of was home. Then I saw you.... I know I was just a face among hundreds of faces, but you looked at me in the eye and gave me coffee and made me laugh

Another side to that story is how many young pilots don't come back. The women's real job was to be "the final blessing from home."

One very tough encounter for Irene, and for me, is a few minutes at the bedside of a horribly burnt soldier so that he won't have to die alone.

I couldn't tell you what happened when, or name more than a handful of characters, but I also couldn't wait each night to get back into the world of Irene and her tall driver Dorothy.

"Unconditional Love" and "the Mystery of Faith": Now I Get It

Sunday I heard two phrases new to me that clicked into place a lot of what I believe.

First, our music director Bryan Black quoted Richard Rohr about "mystery" in our faith. It's not any secret of God's that cannot be understood; rather, a mystery in our faith is something infinitely understandable. Whatever we say to pin it down -- whether it's the doctrine of the Trinity, or the incarnation -- will be insufficient. There remains room for exploration and more implications.

Bryan naturally applied this to great music and the poetry we were singing Sunday, "Blessed be the Pure of Heart." The concluding line that God makes a pure heart "his cradle and his throne" is a good example.

Then, our curate Mother Megan Swett used a phrase new to me in her first sermon for St. James, Marietta. I've long heard of God's "unconditional love" for us, but she said it another way that gives us some agency: in light of God's unconditional love, we must accept our "unconditional worth."

The world, she says, doesn't accept that. Instead, we think we have to create a Self of Worth, and the evil of the world comes from defending that Self, putting that Self ahead of others, or becoming angry and hateful towards those who do not accept the Worth that we have constructed.

In the context of a gospel lesson about taking up our cross and dying to self, she said that's not some performative suffering we do, or some suffering we take on as punishment. It's our Self of Worth that we must give up.

If we were to live as if we believed in our unconditional worth, and in the unconditional worth of others -- well, that would be the kingdom Jesus preached about.

Loved Blue Beetle

I'm glad I took a couple hours this afternoon to see Blue Beetle, the first character I've seen in a DC movie with zero connection to my childhood comic collection. Also, the only one I know who speaks Spanish. NPR liked it, so I gave it a try.

The young actor Xolo Maridueña who plays the central character Jaime Reyes is so sincere that any scene focused on his face is a pleasure. The camera focuses on his face; he's often focused on a member of his family with love, amusement, exuberant pleasure, pain -- he's a giving actor.

Jaime gets possessed by a piece of wearable technology from outer space that flies, protects him, shapes forcefields into any shape at will, etc. etc. -- just what we've come to expect from supersuits. It's also good for a laugh, as during a battle when the generic assistant voice tells Jaime that it must run a system check and reboot. But I enjoyed how Jaime's sweet personality teaches its AI something about love and family; in a fight to the death, the suit teaches him empathy for his opponent.

I enjoyed Jaime's family. They're played for laughs in a kind of Latino family sitcom kind of way. But they're part of the action from the get-go and they come to the rescue. When the grandmother says, "Now is not the time to cry," we know that there will be a time to cry later -- and it touches. (I think back on the original Star Wars trilogy, how the feeling of family that grew around Luke Skywalker was what drew me back to see it so many times.)

The primary villain Susan Sarandan's Victoria Kord is a kind of Martha Stewart of arms manufacturing, energetic and poised. She's almost adolescent in her pleasure when she directs minions to "target the family" so she can watch what the Blue Beetle suit is capable of doing in such an emergency.

As Kord's niece Jennifer, Jaime's love interest, Bruna Marquezine is just as appealing as Xolo. She brings intelligence and determination and beauty to every scene -- and the two of them are a joy together.

A word about Bobby Krlik's music: During the first bars of Krlik's score, Sensemaya came to mind, a 1939 composition by Mexico's prominent classical composer Silvestre Revueltas. Krlik is British with no Mexican connection; I theorize that he took his cue from images of Mayan pyramids in the title sequence and turned to Revueltas' colorful piece. Sensemaya tells in music a Mayan legend about hunting a giant snake, using low brass and dry crackling percussion and massive drumbeats to evoke music of the ancient Mayans. With synthesized sounds and some hip-hop style sampling, that's what I hear in Blue Beetle. If you're reading this, Mr. Krlik, I'd love confirmation. Thanks.

The Reyes family tempts Jaime to open the box that Jenny Kord told him he must not open.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day May-July 2023

Every morning I read scripture assigned for the day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer and then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

May Fr Perry Pauley of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix AZ draws our attention to metaphors that I, for one, have not apprecicated before.

For example, to imagine what a "living stone" might be (1 Peter 2.4-5), Pauley refers to the stones of the cathedral in Phoenix. Because of the climate, the stones still bear the marks of their quarrying a century ago and thus "live" in the story they tell. The "heart of stone" in Ezekiel 11 cues memories for Pauley of times when he has been hard-hearted, and he observes that every one of those times, he was responding to a perceived attack on his sense of self and his place in the world. To react harshly was a natural reaction, "almost a reflex," Pauley writes, but Ezekiel gives hope that God can soften our hearts; a threat to our place in the world might be mitigated simply by remembering our place in God. Pauley, noting that God can't be contained in a temple built of stone, suggests that to dwell in the house of the Lord forever is a mindset; again, I like the idea that God's love is a place. [That idea is foundational to the wonderful Port William novels of Wendell Berry. See my article Love as a Place (09/2009).]

Pauley shows us the metaphors behind Romans 12, do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit. Zeal stems from a word for boiling, and ardent from a word for burning. Paul isn't telling us just to be cheerleaders: Pauley points out that both words are about transfers of energy that transform their subjects, as water becomes steam and wood turns to ash.

Our reluctance to ask for help comes up several times in Pauley's meditations. Pleas for help are plentiful in Scripture, but with the apostles' panic in the storm-toseed boat, Pauley wonders if Jesus snaps, "Where is your faith?" not because they woke him up in their terror but because they had waited until they were out of other options. The story of the woman who stoops to touch just the hem of Jesus's robe reminds Pauley of an ex-Marine who kept apologizing to his church for needing help: Jesus's tender response to the woman is a model for how we can offer help "with no strings attached." Pauley tells us that beneficiaries often report feeling worse after they receive help, because they feel themselves to be weak. "Recognizing our weakness can be liberating," Pauley writes, and "we can borrow strength."

Responding to 1 Cor. 1.22, Pauley writes about his favorite part of baptism, when he gets to "seal" the person "as Christ's own forever." He thinks of it as a "first installment" of joy to come. Around the time I read that, I attended a cozy evening service for Ascension at which the Rector invited our comments. A woman "of a certain age" whose illness has kept her away from church got very emotional as she seemed to realize on the spot that her life has been "an ascension from one stage to the next." She assured us that she's not at the last stage, yet.

June I filled fronts and backs of three envelopes with tiny notes about how I related to Terry Stokes's reflections on scriptures assigned for June. Confirmed at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem, educated at Princeton and Yale, he's now a youth pastor in New Jersey.

I personally identified with aspects of his life. Living alone, Stokes doesn't expect to form a traditional family. He takes comfort from the observation that John the Baptist, childless and alone so often, left such a legacy. He observes the effect on him of the rare visitors to his apartment, "how I felt when each person was in the space -- how the house felt, how each of them added a layer of significance to each square foor of a relatively small apartment." In Mt 10/12-13, Jesus seems to imagine "peace" as a "substance ... that can move ... from people to homes and back again," and Stokes resolves to put more into "bestowing spiritual fruit" through hospitality.

Stokes reads how Abraham was sitting at the mouth of his tent when angels approached, and writes how he has always wanted to sit on a front porch to call out to neighbors passing by -- an image I've always liked, too. Stokes challenges us to sit outside our homes and be open to meeting some angels.

Stokes and I both finish fries left on friends' plates at restaurants, though we'd never ask for the first bites. But the first bite is what God commands the Hebrews to give up to the temple. Like Stokes, I thought that was a discipline of self-denial, but Stokes draws attention to Dt. 26.11: "Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house." I'll remember that the next time someone disparages the Hebrew Scriptures for harsh legalism and exclusivity.

I appreciate a couple of insights to scripture that Stokes derives from childhood experiences that we have in common. Stokes remembers delivering the message I like you for friends who trusted him to represent them well to the girls they liked. I'll think of that when I read Paul's odd word to the Corinthians, "You are my letter." Reading about "the weight of glory" in 2 Cor 4.17, Stokes wonders, "Isn't weight supposed to be a bad thing?" Then he remembers how he loved to lug his heavy scooter up the hill to ride it back down. A weight can be a privilege.

Stokes explores a tension in the way we Americans read scripture. We tend to turn passages about property and poverty into teachings about our personal spirituality. He knows it's wrong for him to go the other way, as he tends to see economics and politics in parables such as the one about the unjust judge that's all about prayer, the gospel writer tells us. Stokes admits, "I run the risk of removing the dimension of personal piety from my interpretations altogether in favor of making everything immediatley practical and political." But neither will he ignore the other kinds of questions just because they're "on the surface." He wonders as I do, in this time when all churches are in decline according to the metrics of attendance and pledging, if this time might be an opportunity for the metrics Paul applied to the churches he started in Corinth and elsewhere, "collectivism, love, earnestness, energy, and generosity."

A couple other observations counteract our tendencies to confuse knowing about Jesus with believing in Jesus, and to judge others. Peter, he said, knew about Jesus when he denied him three times. When Jesus commissions Peter three times to "feed my sheep" and knows this time Peter will follow through to martyrdom, not because of the knowledge of Jesus, but love. Then, in Luke 22.31-32, it's Satan who sifts us like chaff from wheat, as he does in Job, where he "demanded a chance to reveal Job, the poster boy for wheat, for the chaff that he really was deep down." That urge that comes with phrases like "tough love" and "upholding standards" is an urge that Satan uses. Unlike Satan, Jesus "overwrites our denial with affirmation and recommissions us to strengthen our siblings."

[I reflected on the shadow side of standards in Standards v. Specifications (04/2015)]

Reading how unknowable are God's thoughts in Psalm 139, Stokes speculates how the experience of incarnation might have changed God's thinking from the Old Testament times.

I'm adding to my wish list Stokes's book Prayers for the People: Things We Didn't Know We Could Say to God, in which he has composed collects for everyday crises: engaging in small talk, for going into a Target, and for asymmetrical friendships.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

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Photo from Simon and Schuster

12 year old Odie O'Bannon lies his way to expensive new shoes for himself, his older brother Albert, and their buddy Mose. In the tale he spins for the shopkeeper's wife, Odie expresses such longing that "even I felt sorry for me" (107).

His real story is tough enough: they're escaping a labor camp for orphans, heading down the Mississippi on a raft. It's the Depression in the Midwest, and the boys are wanted by the police because, first, Odie killed an abusive instructor and, second, the boys supposedly kidnapped the little girl Emmy. In truth, they have rescued her from the despicable matron of the orphanage.

So early in the novel This Tender Land, author William Kent Krueger is calling to mind both Charles Dickens' plucky orphans and Mark Twain's resourceful liar Huck Finn. Odie even takes the cover name "Buck."

Krueger shows a special affinity for portraying young adults who have intelligence, sensitivity, and a fierce sense of justice. In his crime series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, the most affecting storylines involve children, including Cork's own and also Cork himself in childhood. [See appreciations of the Cork series at my Crime Fiction page] Krueger's other stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace also features brothers forced suddenly to grow up -- along with their parents.

Each section of This Tender Land has its own arc, as the kids land in a different community, learn how to survive or thrive there, and then have to escape. Through all the episodes, we witness Odie's growing understanding of the love between him and his brother, Mose's deepening sense of identity, and the emergence of a kind of mystical power in Emmy.

Late in the book, we learn Odie's full name, Odysseus. How could I have missed that other literary connection? (Especially since one of the bad guys early on is a cyclops, "One-Eyed Jack"). While Dickens and Twain wrote in wholly material worlds, Homer filled the world of his story with gods and sorcery. Krueger, too, opens his story to the possibility of spiritual forces involved in the lives of his characters.

The first words of the book allude to Genesis, how God created not only the heavens and the earth, but also the gift of storytelling. Odie is not only a storyteller, but a musician whose harmonica soothes bitter men and brings people together. The most charismatic character among the supporting cast is a beautiful but scarred faith healer who calls herself Eve. Her section of the book is called "High Heaven" (as in, something stinks to...), but the miracles don't end when her deceptions are exposed.

By the end, Krueger has made us feel something that must motivate the novelist: Good storytelling doesn't just open up the past, or just entertain in the present, but can change the future.

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Hey, Flash, Read This

Ezra Miller as the Flash times two, and Sasha Calli as Kara El, a.k.a. Supergirl

 

Social media pundits bashed The Flash even before it opened, for reasons to do with schisms at Warner Brothers and extra-curricular activities of its young star Ezra Miller. If the actor's feeling down about all that, here's a pick-me-up aimed right at Ezra Miller, who perfectly embodied the charming vision of the director and writers:

Ezra, as Barry Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, you twitch with nerves, your eyes scan others' faces for social cues, and you're flummoxed when a substitute barista throws off your morning routine. Before you run at super-speed, you go through a wind-up ritual that's part Kung-fu, part Speedy Gonzales. When you blurt out what's on your mind (because, Wonder Woman's magic lasso), you say, "I know there's such a thing as sex but I've never experienced it." You have no friends except the super-hero celebrities whom you call by their first names (Clark, Bruce, Diana...) the way a freshman waterboy might drop the names of seniors on the team. You're as funny and lovable as any of the kids I taught in middle school who had great talent and no social skills.

You do find a friend, thanks to time-travel and movie technology. He's you, a couple years younger, and he's as geeky as you. You tell him, "People are always asking me to shut up, and now I know why." Like you, he's a slob. But in his alternate universe, he knows nothing of the tragedy that has shaped your life -- the murder of his/your mother and the wrongful conviction of his/your father for the crime. Growing up with two loving parents, he has the confidence you lack, and friends, young women among them. Innocent of the pain you've experienced, he flips out when he experiences loss. That's you, too, and it's very affecting.

So, too, is your emotional crisis when you encounter your mother (Maribel Verdu) on the day she will die. Her tenderness to you, a young man, a stranger to her, is at the heart of this movie -- though it happens in a supermarket. Her fate turns on whether or not she remembers to pick up spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Spaghetti shows up again in Batman's kitchen. Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne uses pasta to explain the multi-verse to you. Time isn't linear like the uncooked pasta he hands to you. He dumps cooked spaghetti in a bowl and says, the multi-verse is like that: some strands run almost parallel, while others intersect at different points. Dumping sauce on top, Wayne says your effort to change only one thing in the past has created "a hot mess." Listening as Barry and Barry the younger, you are clueless and more clueless. When Keaton adds cheese, you have to explain to your younger self, "the metaphor is over." Of all the explanations of the multi-verse I've seen in the last couple of years (Everything Everywhere..., Spider-man, and even Barbie), this was the most fun. Props to the writer Christina Hodson for using just words with the props at hand in the kitchen, and props to you, you, and Keaton for making it funny.

I enjoy how you and the creatives imagine the Flash's response to an explosion at a high-rise hospital. You climb falling debris like a ladder to study the mayhem. You see nine newborns hurtling from the top floor, along with knives, broken glass, a microwave oven, a service dog that looks like he's having fun, a gurney, and a screaming nurse. At first, you look bewildered.

Let's pause a moment to note that critics -- even one who admits he only saw the trailer -- cite this scene for its "bad CGI." The babies especially don't look real. But I understand the distortions to be how things look to a guy who perceives at the speed of light. Besides, one of the babies does look just fine, smiling and clearly delighted with free-fall -- the director's child, if I read the credits correctly.

Back to the moment: I like that we're watching you formulate your response and that you smile before you jump into action. I like that your first priority is breakfast: from the microwave, you pluck a burrito and devour it -- at light-speed, we guess. Then you manipulate all the other pieces into place like an extravagant Rube-Goldberg contraption so that babies, dog, and nurse line up safely in a row. Rescue with flair. You even take a bow.

I'm sorry that I seem to be the only one to applaud. I hope you get your life and career back together.

Bikin' Kiev

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Scott Smoot (right, in Ukraine jersey) with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, virtually.

We're all Ukrainians now. (See my poem, Ukraine, Second Week.) But even before Putin's invasion, I had reason to put Kiev on my bike tour of places in the world I've "lived or loved."

The world tour is virtual: I've biked 536 miles on trails around Atlanta during the last 32 days. That distance takes me from Moscow to Kiev.

Before the 1980s, I knew Kiev as the source of a chicken dish my mom sometimes made, and I loved "The Great Gates of Kiev," grand finale of composer Modest Moussourgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I'm touched by his transformation of his jaunty "promenade" into a monument to the composer's late friend, whose design for the gates was never realized.

Then I met Eugene from Ukraine, enrolled in 7th grade where I taught in Mississippi. I wrote about him in my essay about a great detective novel set in Ukraine, and Eugene's father Arkady contributed some comments. See Arkadya. I think about Eugene often, and told generations of middle school students about my adventures with this undersized kid who carried himself like Arnold Shwarzenegger. As often as I imitate his quirky English, I remember him with affection. He must be close to 50 years old now; he was funny, talented, and intense.

Miles YTD 2215 || 2nd World Tour Total 15,750 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

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Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Retired Middle School Teacher liked Barbie

Expectations weren't high for this one, and Greta Gerwig's Barbie was, for awhile, only what I expected. It starts as an elaborate comedy sketch as Barbie and Ken leave their perfect Barbie world for a visit to our real one. My own 8th grade drama class wrote the same sketch with fairy tale characters around ten years ago.

But then we realize that the core of the story is the estrangement of tween-age girl Sasha and her mother. Sasha now will have nothing to do with her old Barbie doll or her mom. The anxiety of middle school, the mother's sense of loss, and Barbie's shock and pain turned this comedy sketch into something I recognized as real. Barbie, embodied by Margot Robbie, sheds tears, a new experience for her, as Sasha attacks her for ruining girls' lives.

Ken has been only Barbie's accessory in Barbie Land where every night is Girls' Night, but, in the real world, Ryan Gosling shows the awareness dawning that a man is empowered simply by being male.

Gosling provides a lot of the comedy in this movie. Simu Liu as his rival Ken looks like he's having a lot of fun, and the two of them lead a cast of great dancers in a parody of an 80s power ballad. I'm also delighted to see Michael Cera back on screen as Ken's "buddy" Allen, a doll introduced then ignored in 1966. Cera was a comedy genius in the raunchy but touching Superbad ten or so years ago.

America Ferrera as the mother of Sasha delivers a soliloquy worthy of Shakespeare, cataloguing the ironies and paradoxes of what's expected of women in our society.

The movie has political resonances without even trying. Since the 1970s, one of our political parties has successfully branded itself as the party of hard men with the women who adore them, and has branded the other one as the party of effeminate men and shrill angry women. The schema is intellectually shallow, but emotionally deeply effective, hitting us in our sense of self. In the movie, the conflict of boys v. girls plays out in a cartoonish way and reaches reconciliation. If only it can be so.

One very simple line probably should be recited regularly by every young couple: Ken cries that "it's always 'Barbie and Ken.'" Barbie, on her way to enlightenment, teaches him, "No, it's Barbie, and it's Ken."

There's an odd moment when Barbie, dejected, sits at a bus stop next to an old lady. Barbie brightens and says, "You're beautiful!" The old lady says she knows. It made me think of how Barbie's story parallels that of the Buddha, who was raised a prince in a walled garden, shielded from illness, poverty, old age, and death.

This silly-seeming entertainment resonates.

Derek Walcott's Bounty: Quick Dispatch from the Front Lines

Since I read the selected poems of Derek Walcott, I've wanted more. Poet/critic Christian Wiman called the 1998 book The Bounty "a great book," enough for me to order it online with 1-click.

[See my appreciation, Never Get used to Derek Walcott's Poetry (01/2023).]

I'm only a few pages into it. As usual with Walcott, I've had to re-read portions and google some references to get oriented. He's worth the trouble. Besides, there are incidental pleasures that keep me going.

Here's a pair of lines that made me laugh out loud, they're so apt and so connected to what I see on my bike rides through wooded Georgia every day: Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air,// squirrels spring up like questions,...

Those are lines from stanza vii of the opening eponymous poem, which may be about a visit to his mother's grave, which may be located near a beach on the island of St. Lucia, but somehow is related to a seaside English town where Victorian nature poet John Clare is buried. I'll have to get back to the book on that one.

Bike in the USSR

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 Scott Smoot in Moscow, virtually

I visited Moscow in June 1977 on tour with the Westminster Ensemble, directed by Frank Boggs. My Kodak pocket camera took the photo of Red Square then. My Android took the selfie this morning. I thought I'd boldly declare my support for Ukraine with my new bike jersey, though I also thought to keep my sunglasses on so Putin won't be able to recognize me. Don't want Novichok in my Gatorade.

The distance to Moscow from Minsk is 444 miles, the distance I've traveled on bike trails around Atlanta since May 2. I post a photo from each place I virtually visit along with the story of my connection to that place. (To see stops from the whole world tour, use the arrows under the headline.)

I look back with regret on how we snickered at the Russians for accepting Communism's mindless bureacracy and petty tyranny. In private, we ridiculed a winter fashion show in midsummer; plumbing fixtures unconnected to any source of water; signatures required from three functionaries in different corners of a store to check out with one item; a museum of science and atheism squatting in a beautiful church; a sediment of boiled grey rhubarb in a drink that every restaurant served us; teens mobbing us after our show who dispersed at the approach of men in suits who corraled us upstairs for "open dialogue" with "young people" in their 30s. Finding fault was our teenage version of patriotism; but these people were our hosts.

I cringe thinking about a lot of the stuff I thought and did back then. At seventeen, I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about the things that mattered to me, and I had hardly an inkling of things that didn't -- such as American civics, other cultures, history after World War I, and current events.

About one thing, I was prescient. After rehearsals, our director Frank Boggs sometimes joined his teenaged cohort in a circle for sharing thoughts and feelings. One time I said how deeply grateful I was for the friendships I had developed with classmates and especially everyone in the Ensemble, but I wondered if adults experience friendships like that. Frank said, "You'll still have friends, but the intensity won't be the same."

When we returned to Atlanta from our tour, I burst into tears. This, I told Mom, was the end of something. "It'll never be the same again." I was right.

Miles YTD 1707 miles || 2nd World Tour Total 15,242 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Kiev

[Our Ensemble also toured Poland. See my virtual bike trip to Warsaw with a link to more about Frank Boggs.]

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Barbara Taylor Brown's Holy Envy: Practice the Evangelism of the Rose

Having preached that "God is not partial to Christians," a priest was challenged after the service by a parishioner who asked her, "Then what am I doing here?"

In Barbara Taylor Brown's book Holy Envy, the author acknowledges "that everyone wants to play on the winning team," but calls that feeling "the worst possible reason to practice any religion." She continues, "If the man who asked that question could not think of a dozen better reasons to be a Christian than that, then what, indeed, was he doing there?"

Brown became a priest to spite her atheist parents, but stepped away from the altar when she felt that she and the Episcopal church had confused Christ's "living water" with the well.

She took a position teaching world religions at Georgia's Piedmont College in the rural foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. There, she faced that same competitive approach to faith right away, in a young Christian man who asked if she was going to teach what was wrong with the religions. If not, he would drop the class, because he was afraid of losing his faith. (He dropped the class.)

I so identify with the fear that impinges on faith for Christians. A tract about the hell that awaits non-believers scared me to tears in 7th grade. Then I became angry at Christianity for condemning my Jewish friends.

That childhood fear of hell gnawed at Brown even as she was teaching. She dealt with that by remembering, "My best view of divine reality is still a partial view." She points out that Jesus says as much to the man who addresses him as "good teacher": Why do you call me good? ... No one is good but God alone. Playing off a metaphor by Thich Nhat Hanh that "the wave also lives the life of water", Taylor writes, "I am riding on the truth of that, trusting God alone to guide my wave and carry me ashore."

The most entertaining and moving parts of the book are anecdotes about her students.

• There's the young woman who bolted from Atlanta's Hindu Temple, sobbing for all those idol worshipers who were going to hell and didn't even know it. Weeks later, for her capstone project, she designed a beautiful interfaith worship space for the campus: a dark room, round with reflective wood panels, lit by pools of light so that people would see themselves among neighbors.
• There's the young man, unresponsive until he is suddenly moved by a Hindu exhibit, whispering to Brown over a bowl, "What chakra is this? It's speaking to me." She motions to her heart. Near tears, he just nods.
• Around twelve students, outnumbering the worshipers at a vast empty synagogue in Atlanta, were surprised when the rabbi invited them to join her on the dais to unscroll the Torah. Solemn and joyful -- the moment unaccountably moves me to tears every single time I think of it.
• There's Shlomo, the only Orthodox Jew on campus, very comfortable in his own skin and an eloquent exponent of his own faith. He wasn't out to convert anyone: since God already made a covenant with the whole world after the flood, why should anyone else take on the added requirements of the covenant with Israel?

Shlomo helped Brown to understand the Jewish approach: it's how you live, not what you think, that matters. The Jews don't even have a creed; the shemah ("YHWH is our God, the only God") is as close as they get. Observing how her students, meeting each other for the first time, would often quiz each other on beliefs ("Do you believe in the resurrection? Do you accept the virgin birth?"), Brown wondered how things might be different if these young Christians were to ask, as Shlomo might, How does your faith make a difference? What's the hardest part of loving your neighbor as yourself? What is your favorite way to pray?

Brown points out the historical fact that this "fundamentalist" approach to faith was born and propagated in the early 20th century by a reactionary group, the Biblical Institute of Los Angeles. She opines that polls showing a falling away from "institutional religion" and towards "spirituality" may be a reaction to a gospel message that it's our-way-or-go-to-hell.

She understands the element of competition baked into the scriptures of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Their books were written by people surrounded by oppressors and enemies. No wonder there's competition.

While there is a strong cord of triumphalism and exclusion throughout the Bible, she picks up a parallel thread, a "counter-narrative." It includes a string of "holy outsiders" from the Hebrew tradition (Ruth, Pharaoh's daughter, Cyrus the instrument of God's will, the magi, the Syro-Phoenician woman at the well with Jesus, Roman centurion whose faith "astonishes" Jesus...). The first sermon of Jesus recorded by Luke is on this subject: the foreign general Naaman and the poor widow who hosted Elijah are two outsiders who experienced God's grace. Besides, there are so many passages that warn us not to think that God thinks as we do (Is. 55.8-9), that anyone can own God. In the same sermon when Jesus says "no one enters the gate but by me," he also says, "anyone who knows God knows me."

But how, in the end, does Brown deal with this competition among the religions for which one is true, or most true?

First, Brown does NOT say "all religions are basically the same." That disrespects the uniqueness of these faiths. She does NOT retreat to the "default position" that "yours is true for you, mine is true for me." That shuts off exploration. The fact that she was attracted to aspects of each religion did NOT mean to it was time for her "to convert or -- conversely -- to start making a quilt of spiritual bits and pieces with no strong center."

She cultivates instead a "holy envy." A phrase coined by religion professor from Harvard turned Lutheran bishop in Sweden, "holy envy" is NOT projecting her own experience on other faiths in a craving for some of their intensity -- that's plain old envy. The bishop preached 3 rules of religious understanding: don't compare your best with their worst; don't confuse the container with the contents; don't think you know the other without listening. Brown likens holy envy to how athletes compare their best with the best in others, to make each better.

She gives some examples of holy envy from her time with the students:

• Christians were shocked to learn that Muslims pray more than most Christians do
• Protestant students were touched by the observance of Lent
• a visiting pastor was awed by the crowd at a large masjid bowing in unison

What they envied caused them all to reexamine themselves and what may have been neglected in their own religion -- meditation, for instance, or community pilgrimage in Islam.

This is NOT appropriation of what you like (which smacks of colonial trophies, Brown says). Like fine wines from different lands, Brown writes, "The things I envy have their own terroir." Brown explains, for example, how the Buddhist doctrine that we are responsible for our own salvation ("Be a lamp to yourself") helps her to see Jesus and the Holy Spirit "lighting a fire" in us so that we can each be "the light of the world." That's echoed in the epigram she chose for this book, Andrew Young's claim, "Before I read Gandhi, I couldn't see what difference Jesus made."

To conceive of this world of different faiths, Brown offers metaphors from other authors. The Church's discovery of other traditions was a Copernican revolution in religion that put God at the center and individual planets in orbit with their own qualities and perspectives. The faiths are like the rivers that nourish different lands (Rome's Tiber, Egypt's Nile, India's Ganges, USA's Mississippi...). To share the ground doesn't mean the ground is lost.

I re-read the book this spring in the context of a seminar I co-teach, Education for Ministry (see our EfM class blog). The theme for the year was "living out our faith in a multi-cultural world." We wondered what evangelism looks like when we respect others' faiths. I offered Gandhi's answer to that question, to practice "the evangelism of the rose" -- put it out there, let it be fragrant, allow people to respond as they will.

The World through Spidey-Colored Glasses

The world looks better to me since I saw Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse.

Not that everything's a-OK in the world of Miles Morales, 15-year-old Spider-Man, or in the alternate world of his adored Gwen Stacey. Not only is there a nerd-turned-super-villain wreaking havoc across multiple universes to make Miles sorry for laughing at him, but Miles is also grounded for two months. Meanwhile, in an alternate world, Gwen's father Police Capt. Stacey is relentlessly pursuing Spider-Woman, unaware that she's Gwen.

But so much good humor and goodwill went into the creation of this animated feature that I came out of the theatre cocooned in a protective energy-field of delight. The story zig-zags among dimensions that each have their own visual styles, so we're watching a kind of rapid-fire animated collage much of the time. The inventiveness and funny juxtapositions are exhilarating, with an emphasis on the hilarity.

At key moments, the story slows down for us to savor quiet personal dialogues. Of those, my favorite was at a picnic dinner with Miles and Gwen upside-down under an eave atop a Manhattan skyscraper at sunset. (From their perspective, we see the sun setting upwards, and Gwen's pony tail standing tall.)

My other favorite was any of the scenes when the mom and dad of Miles try to figure out how they can both encourage their fifteen-year-old's independence and yet protect him from forces that would make him doubt his place in the world. It's unspoken that this is a dilemma routinely faced by parents of color.  Even the sympathetic school counselor suggests that Princeton would be a stretch for a kid "like him."  

[The Young Adult novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds gave me a head-start on appreciating Miles and his parents. See my blogpost Behind the Spider-Man Mask (12/2019)]

The parents' fears for him are realized by a cosmic circumstance that has Miles feeling like he doesn't have a right to exist. But he fights back.

Miles picks up allies along his way. There's Spider-Man from "Mumbattan" on an earth where the culture of India predominates, and there's Spider-Punk, very funny, very fearless: in his cool anarchism, he defies authority to give Miles a boost when he needs it.

So I came out of the theatre also feeling better about humankind.

Is it my imagination, colored by the Spider-Verse, that some news is trending positive, at least for now? Polling suggests that most Americans, even most Republicans, object to state houses that interfere with removing books and with teaching children to respect others with differences. The compromise on the borrowing limit gave no side what it wanted, but gave the American people what we needed, the outcome our Constitution was designed to produce. NPR aired interviews with an author writing about how women in the Red Cross gave soldiers of World War II forgiveness and kindness besides coffee and donuts; with elders who as children participated bravely in demonstrations against segregation; with a rock musician who just wants to tell good stories. And NPR's critic Bob Mondelo put me and my friend Susan on to the Spider-Man movie with his rapturous review.

All together, these have me feeling grateful for movies, books, acts of kindness, acts of bravery, and programs that highlight decency through polite conversation -- gifts that we human beings give each other.

Scott and Susan with Miles: We give him two thumbs up.