Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Feb-Mar-Apr 2023

Every morning for years I've read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

February
Page Pelphrey offers her reflections from Christ Church in Connecticut and her perspective as both a teacher of languages and a mother.

Her meditations are framed with comments about Forward Day by Day itself. Her grandmother gave copies to loved ones, and Pelphrey was reading it years before she got the gig to write it. She admits that she hasn't told anyone that she's writing for the publication, in case it somehow doesn't work out. That's her usual approach to good news, but Isaiah 58 tells us to "Shout out! Do not hold back!"

Pelphrey positions scripture and her life within a broader social context. For her, Isaiah's metaphor for Israel as a ruined vineyard resonates with her own small community ripped apart by partisan politics. She has changed her registration to "independent" as a proclamation that she will not trust her "tribe" more than the Lord.

She guesses that we all see ourselves as the poor widow in the parable, but admits that others see her as rich: "I need to focus on my life, not on the person in the pew next to me."

The peeved reaction of Jesus to the fig tree that bore no fruit is one of many stories of Bible heroes "losing it." They allow us to "forgive ourselves" for our own human frailty.

By the end of her series, she tells us how preparing to write her reflections for Forward has helped her to see all of life "through the lens of Scripture and [our] Baptismal Covenant." She challenges us to write our own. [I can attest to the power of writing reflections. Our parish produced devotion books for years, and the ones I wrote stay with me. See links to them at my page Theology for Breakfast.]

March
Episcopal priest Rob Gieselman at St. Stephen's in Belvedere CA is father of two grown children, a gardener, hiker, and dog-walker. He studied law and economics.

He lets us see his shadow side: formerly evangelical, he struggled with self-loathing, self-righteousness, his need for definite answers, the hard time he has admitting he's wrong. So he's also sensitive to some ways we fool ourselves. For instance, he admits to "a propensity to obfuscate, to hide like Adam in the Garden." He confesses to us that his confessions to God can become exercises in self-abasement when they should be about being honest and honoring God's word in himself.

We can imagine late nights during his evangelical phase when he tried to straighten what he calls a "tangled knot" in our faith: "You cannot earn grace, as it is a gift, yet failure to exercise your faith diminishes grace." He notes that Jesus doesn't ask the crippled man at the pool, "Have you tried hard enough?" but "Do you want to be made well?"

For those who think faith depends on definite answers, Gieselman offers a couple of homely alternatives. Gieselman's daughter was "not a hugger," but she would lean into him. Faith is "leaning into" God, not some certain things we think or do. As Gieselman's dogs bound from side to side in the eddies of a stream, Jesus doesn't speak in straight lines, either, but in eddies of meaning.

Having struggled with ego in his faith, Gieselman offers an effective switch: Imagine how God experiences us. Anticipating the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, Gieselman imagines the Holy Spirit being able to pass through time and alternate universes as easily as wind passes through a screen. That's why the Spirit bypassed David's big brothers for a boy with potential that no one else saw. Gieselman asks us to imagine seeing others as God sees them.

April
Priest and poet Kim Becker, Cherokee and self-confessed "word nerd," has helped me out with a poem. All April long, I've been struggling to complete a poem about words, how they're insufficient to convey the depth and breadth of God. Words, I've been thinking, are like threads of a net straining to contain fish trawled from just one corner of a vast sea. Near the end of the month, Becker meditated on a word from Jesus from Luke 5.4, "Put out into the deep water." She writes:

I love the ocean, but I have a fear of deep water -- and of whatever might live in that deep water! I prefer watching the waves to being in them.... [W]hen it comes to my relationship with God, I have often stayed in the shallows. It is easy to go it by rote, without allowing myself to enter more fully into the vulnerability of a life of faith... secure in the one who is ruddering our ship.

Becker recommends others' works in some of her writings. I like the title Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler. She has reminded me of a book encountered early in my adulthood, forgotten till now, that has influenced me ever since, Morton Kelsey's Dreams: A Way to Listen to God. Then, she cites a translation unfamiliar to me from Psalm 5.1, "Lord, give heed to my sighing." A sigh speaks without words, she says, and we should listen to the sighs of others -- including those of creatures with more than two legs.

[For many, many more reflections on tradition, experiences, and beliefs of the Episcopal Church, see my page Those Crazy Episcopalians.]

Sermon Puts the Us in Emmaus

Not three minutes after I laid aside the Gospel reading because I already knew it so well, the Rev. Pat Miller (a.k.a. Mo[ther] Pat) preached that the road to Emmaus is a story we skip over because we all know it so well.

She said that it tells the story of us, the regular Christians on our life journeys. It's about all the ways we encounter Jesus -- by hearsay, by Scripture, and, at last, by sacrament. That's so obvious; why have I never thought of that before? Cleopas and the one who doesn't even get named aren't part of Jesus' inner circle, just followers. They're heading the seven miles back home from Jerusalem in "that frozen state" after the death of someone close. They're preoccupied by their cares and the road ahead and somehow don't recognize Jesus. "Jesus kept a straight face while they told him about the crucifixion and the reports of the resurrection -- which they don't believe." Then he reviews the scriptures that lay the foundations for his mission.

They recognize him during an enactment of the eucharist -- that, I'd heard before. I'd not noticed that, by blessing and breaking the bread, Jesus performs the duty of their host. Mo Pat emphasized the joy that excites them so much that, having just arrived home, they leap up and run back, at night, to Jerusalem to spread the news. When they get there, the apostles have also been visited by the resurrected Jesus. Here's where Mo Pat reminded us of that state of mourning when we're like one of the statues that the Snow Queen made of Narnians -- melted and freed. I teared up there.

Mo Pat said, "Now, we may think, Why doesn't Jesus just pop in to see us the way he did for those in that upper room?" She concluded, he does. Of course, it's in communion, it's in the church community. "Go now, run out and tell everyone," she said, "only wait until the end of the service."

The Birds: 60 Years later, a Movie for our Time

The soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds is the soundtrack of our lives. We all hear it every day, played in the trees -- chirping, chattering and cackling. The natural world thanking God for His bounty? After streaming the film, I hear the raucous war council of alien creatures.

The Birds does what the best films do, change the way I see ordinary life. Since I last saw it on black-and-white TV five decades ago, I've had flashbacks to the film whenever crows looked up from their carrion to me, or when, perched on a street lamp, they glowered down at me and my little dog. I expected the film to have lost its potency, its effects and dialogue sure to be dated. Instead, this week it chilled me more than ever. This is a movie for our time.

Screenwriter Evan Hunter (a.k.a. detective novelist Ed McBain) agreed with Hitchcock to begin the film as a romantic comedy. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) "meet cute" at a pet store in San Francisco. He mistakes her for the clerk and she plays the part, although she can't begin to find the birds he wants for his little sister's birthday. When she realizes that he was playing her, she determines to get even. Bearing the gift of two lovebirds, she traces him to the coastal village Bodega Bay in her sporty convertible, sporting a long fur coat and high heels even when she rents a row boat. She's like Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres, a classic fish-out-of-water.

For suspense, Hitchcock teases us with signs of what's to come. He starts with the eerie aural collage of bird calls that plays while silhouettes of birds in flight criss-cross behind the titles. A funnel cloud of gulls circling over San Francisco briefly draws Melanie's attention. When she's in the rowboat, a swooping gull nicks her forehead. But the characters are more concerned with their own lives.

As in all rom-coms, there's a rapprochement between Mitch and Melanie. The spoiled heiress tells sympathetic Mitch that she wants to live a life that matters.

She gets her chance in the very next moment. They're holding hands on a green hill above the little sister's birthday party, literally the high point of the movie -- when the birds attack. Children are screaming, birds are popping balloons, and Melanie joins Mitch in rescuing little kids knocked down by birds that peck and claw at their faces.

From then on, the story is how to find shelter, how to prepare for another attack, how to help each other through this emergency.

That's how I experienced the pandemic in March 2020. We'd heard news stories about outbreaks in distant territories. We discussed contingencies such as a couple of days off from school. Suddenly, it was lockdown, and all our plans from The Before Time were unworkable, canceled, never to return.

The recurring question in The Birds is, "Why?" A drunk quotes scripture to say it's God's punishment for our sins. A woman screams at Melanie, "You brought this on! Everything was normal until you came here!" An ornithologist (Ethel Griffies) says it's mankind who have made the world so inhospitable to nature.

Today, we're aware how our lights at night disorient millions of birds on their nocturnal migrations. Our mirrored skyscrapers are death traps. We've "developed" their habitats. Man-made climate change has shifted seasons so that migrating birds cannot find the insects and seeds they need, and shifts in territory have given avian viruses opportunity to spread. Sixty years later, the real question would be, why not?

I was late this morning. I'm going out to the deck to refill my feeder.

Tippi Hedren's iconic scene, now a famous meme

Warsaw Inspiration: My Return to Poland

←← | ← ||→

Scott Smoot at Warsaw's old town today, virtually.

Pozdrowienia z Atlanta! We greeted Poland with that slogan on our tee shirts when the Westminster Schools' Ensemble toured the country. Friendship Ambassadors Foundation sent us to win Communists over to Democracy with our repertoire of spirituals, Mozart, and Broadway songs. But my strongest memory of Poland is a Communist propaganda film.

I'm remembering Poland now because I've biked 417 miles on trails around Atlanta since the end of February. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Vienna to Warsaw.

In June 1977, Poles didn't need our help to resent the Communist Party. As our bus from the airport entered Warsaw, our guide Marek pointed to an imposing skyscraper and said, "We call that 'our gift from our Russian friends,' the ugliest building in Warsaw." The union Solidarity was already resisting Russian overlords in Gdansk, a port city on our tour that we would come to love.

Our tour started, however, with a documentary film screened for us by the official (Communist) tourist agency. Grainy black-and-white film showed Warsaw's old town square thriving during the 1930s. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded. Then the people of Warsaw rebelled. Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of the city to make an example for all subjugated peoples. A Nazi soldier with a camera panned 360 degrees to document that Hitler's order had been fulfilled, "not one brick should remain on a brick."

Warsaw's old town square, ca. 1945.

Soviet soldiers are presented as liberators in this propaganda film, but the image I've carried in memory all these years is all Pole: men and women picking their ways over a landscape of rubble. They stop, survey the scope of the task ahead, and then a woman stoops to place a brick in her basket.

The kicker was after the movie. We stepped from the grim images in the dark theatre into the beautiful town square of my selfie, rebuilt as it had been pre-war, with the original bricks.

Daunted by a pile of papers to grade, a kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, or any impossible task, I've remembered the landscape of toppled bricks, that woman, her basket, and the beauty of Warsaw's old town center.

[I remember our choral director Frank Boggs here.]

Miles YTD 975 || 2nd World Tour Total 14,510 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Minsk, Belarus

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

Poet Linda Pastan Doesn't Get Old

Studies confirm that poets generally don't live long. We're fortunate that Linda Pastan, who died at 91 this past January, sent updates in verse from the frontier of aging for more than 50 years. In her last two collections of new poems, it's good news, or bad news with her customary wry delivery.

Age has nothing to do with me, she writes for Traveling Light (2011). Alone, she tells us,

...I am any woman
fresh from the shower,
covering the newly rained upon
continent of her body -- hills and valleys --
modestly with a towel.

She's surprised when a gentleman offers her his seat. ("Any Woman" TL 45) An undergraduate during "Q & A" asks, had she known Emily Dickinson personally? Laughter erupts while Pastan weighs different degrees of sarcasm, but Surprise, like love, can catch / our better selves unawares (TL 47), and Pastan gives the blushing young woman a compassionate response that brought me to tears.

In her 80s, Lust still raises its purple flag ("Any Woman"). A bouquet from her husband inspires an erotic fantasia on vegetables ("A Dozen Roses" TL 41). She falls in love with him afresh when she finds an unfamiliar photo from his twenties (TL 9), reflecting on youth's inherent beauty, even an adolescent boy, awkwardness / shadowed by grace, in his own / invisible force field of desire. A lovely poem takes us to "Times Square, 1944" when she was that awkward adolescent, where sailors facing deployment wore their caps / at a cocky angle, like white seabirds / about to take flight as they moved in a roiling surf / through the traffic. They looked at women, but not at the girl who longed to reach out / and embrace them (TL 53).

Still, her body is no longer her friend as in the days when sleep like a good dog / came when summoned (TL 37). She wonders why old and gnarled trees are beautiful while I am merely / old and gnarled ("The Orchard" in Insomnia 2015). For "Anatomy," Pastan sets up an extended metaphor that she follows to its punchline:

In the tenement
of the body
generations have left
their mark

On the stairwell
of bones and the
walls of flesh.

While the genes do their scheduled work, she says, Clutch the bannister / hold on tight. (TL 7).

Favorite subjects for her never grew old. One of her last books A Dog Runs Through It selects poems across five decades brightened by the presence of the dogs she loved. Her many fears show up often: we know from an early poem how she learned from her Jewish grandparents to hear "the Cossacks" coming for her, a generalized dread that never left her: she writes of panic on a plane ("Flight" TL 65) and imagines in "The Ordinary" how it may happen while she's sipping tea or feeding the dog. But she's amused by her own fears. Her uncertain walk down the aisle of the plane brings to mind her walk down the aisle in marriage with only the vague idea of love to keep us aloft.

The Garden of Eden remains another inexhaustible subject for her. Eden poems fill a section of Traveling Light called "Years After the Garden." Every garden dreams of being Eden she writes in "Pastoral," (TL 12), adding slyly to expect apples in the fall. On her patio, a discarded Christmas tree becomes an Eden for wildlife that she refuses to drag to the dump, asking, Must one of us impersonate the serpent? (34). "Eve on her Deathbed" reflects with mild pique on what little is written of her in The Book, how no one noticed in the midst of all those begettings that she had taken a lover, and how, in the end we are no more than our stories (16).

Considering similarities between artists centuries apart who could not have known each others' work, Pastan also writes a good description of her entire career:

So artists dip into a deep but circumscribed pool,
fishing for something new
but sometimes finding
(still dripping with beauty)
the indelible, unknowable familiar. ("Flora" I 50)

But the best news is that she never grew too old to write. For her last collection Insomnia, she wrote

I string words together
wherever I am
in planes, in waiting rooms,

forcing the actual to sink
and disappear
beneath the bright
and shimmering surface
of the half-imagined.

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]

On Holy Saturday, Poems of Remembrance by Dana Gioia

Good Friday at St. James Marietta, image by Android from a photo by choir director Bryan Black.

It's fitting that a cold steady rain falls in Atlanta on this day of the church's ancient calendar, a time of mourning Christ's death before the Easter morning. Also fitting is the set of poems I happened upon today when I turned the page to Part III of Dana Gioia's 99 Poems, called "Remembrance."

Gioia gives the section its own dedication "To the memory of my first son" with the boy's name and this phrase, Briefest of joys, our life together. That, and the day, primed me to receive all of the poems in this section as ones to cherish.

To the keeper of the small gate who is both jeweller of the spider-web and blade of lightning harvesting the sky -- a thrilling allusion to the Grim Reaper -- Gioia writes this "Prayer": I will see you soon enough...but until then I pray, watch over him as a falcon over its flightless young. Gioia's free translation of "The Song" by Maria Rilke includes the phrase from the dedication and this amazing thought, that all that ever touched us -- you and me -- touched us together like a bow / that from two strings could draw one voice. Gioia comes at grief obliquely and all the more strongly for it in poems about a March blizzard and about myths where humans escaped the whims of gods by metaphorphoses.

In some of the poems, grief is expressed as liturgy, and sometimes in what I would call a sacramental rite -- outward and visible signs of an invisible reality. Gioia tells us of a Sicilian tradition that a father plants a tree in thanksgiving for a first son. But in "Planting a Sequoia" the poet and his brother bury a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord with the roots of the tree which he hopes will stand long past his own life. In "Pentecost," the grieving father tells the grieving mother, amid their sleepless nights and the morning's ache for dream's illusion that We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.... "Litany" is a prayer to unbelief / to candles guttering and darkness undivided, / to incense drifting into emptiness.

Few of the poems relate explicitly to the boy in the dedication, and many of the poems honor others. "Night Watch" remembers an uncle, merchant marine, so much of his life passing between continents. At "The Veterans' Cemetery" The afternoon's a single thread of light / sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow. A short poem observes So much of what we live goes on inside and our tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid. Gioia imagines what he would write to long-gone loved ones in "Finding a Box of Family Letters."

There's a startling moment when he shares haunting and touching memories of terminally ill children and their parents from "Special Treatments Ward." He was there with another son. There, the doctors are like "oracles" who pass in and out. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. Then Gioia tells the reader directly that he put this poem aside for 12 years because he wanted not to remember: I'd lost one child and couldn't bear to watch another die. But he's haunted by the ones he left behind when his son recovered.

He reaches accommodation with his feelings in "Majority." Having observed milestones reached by boys born the same year as his first son, he recognizes at 21 years that it's time for the son to move on.

I'm so glad that I discovered this set of poems today when I needed it.

Atlanta's Stone Mountain Bike Trail

Weather's been warm and dry enough to return with my bike to the Stone Mountain Trail. From the Martin Luther King Historic site, including one ring around the mountain, that's 38 miles round trip. There's a variety of neighborhoods, terrain, and sights. (See map at PATHfoundation.org)

In 14 years, I've seen a lot of development and improvements to the pavement, but there's a lot I've not seen. I realized that last week when I needed a bandaid. I took a detour at a light in Clarkston and pedaled over a ridge. Like Dorothy seeing the Emerald City, I was amazed by a vast marketplace, just out of sight all these years.   Dozens of shops cater to Clarkston's wildly diverse population of refugees who've settled there ever since the town welcomed Vietnamese "boat people" in the 70s. Families strolled past in distinctive dress, none speaking English, no families speaking the same language, and all of them smiling and bantering with each other. 

A couple of pieces on my poetry blog First Verse celebrate the trail. When I ride now, I remember Atlanta, Sunrise Saturday and smile at the sights I describe when I pass the sites I describe. A sunny day's ride and the live-streaming of a funeral come together better than I might have expected in Eulogy.

[IMAGE: Android turned a prosaic selfie into a lesson in drawing.  Stone Mountain is highlighted in the background.]