A Liturgy from Selected Writings of John Updike

With the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer in one hand, and a personal library of writings by John Updike in the other, I pieced together the following worship service.   At the time, around Spring 1987, I was studying with other adults at St. James' Episcopal Church, Jackson, MS, in the program known as "Education for Ministry" (EfM), created by the School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee. 

I added for my fellow students this caveat, that this "in no way" meant to replace Scripture or Prayer Book with this one man's work, but only to "evoke some of the thoughts that will occur in tonight's reflections."

*  *  *

OPENING SENTENCES:  

LEADER: (from an essay by Updike)

We know that we live and we know that we will die.  We love the creation that upholds us and sense that is is good, yet pain and plague and destruction are everywhere.

PEOPLE:  Our help is in the Name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.

 

HYMN: (from Updike's poem Midpoint)

(read responsively by half-verse)

An easy humanism walks the land;*

      We choose to take an otherworldly stand.

The Truth arrives as if by telegraph:*

       One dot; two dots; a silence; then a laugh.

Praise KIERKEGAARD, who splintered HEGEL's creed

Upon the rock of Existential need;*

        Praise BARTH, who told how saving Faith can flow

        From Terror's oscillating Yes and No.

Each passing moment masks a tender face;*

        Nothing has had to be, but is by Grace.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit;*

        As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

FIRST  READING (from Updike's story "The Astronomer," to depict what Kierkegaard called "dread")

We ate dinner by the window, from which the Hudson appeared a massive rent opened in a tenuous web of light....  I felt the structure I had painstakingly built up within myself wasting away;  my faith, my prayers, my churchgoing... all dwindled to the thinnest filaments of illusion, and in one flash, I knew, they would burn to nothing.  I felt behind [the atheist's] eyes immensities of space and gas, seemed to see with him through my own evanescent body into gigantic systems of dead but furious matter, suns like match heads, planets like cinders, galaxies that were swirls of ash, and beyond them, more galaxies, and more, fleeing with sickening speed beyond the rim that our most powerful telescopes could reach.

 

SECOND READING(from Updike's essay on Satanism)

I call myself Christian by defining a Christian as "a person willing to profess the Apostles' Creed...."  I know no other combination of words that gives such life, that so seeks the crux.  The Creed asks us not to believe in Satan but only in the Hell to which Christ descends.  That Hell (in the sense at least of a profound and desolating absence) exists I do not doubt;  the newspapers give its daily bulletins.  And my sense of things, sentimental I fear, is that wherever a church spire is raised.... this Hell is opposed by a rumor of good news, by an irrational confirmation of the plenitude we feel is our birthright.  The instinct that life is good is where natural theology begins.

 

PRAYERS from the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 385-6

 

CLOSING: (from Updike's novel A Month of Sundays)

To those who find no faith within themselves, I say no seed is so dry it does not hold the code of life within it...

We are found in a desert place

We are in God's palm

We are the apple of His eye.

Let us be grateful here, and here rejoice.

ALL:  Amen. 



[PHOTO: The bell tower of my church, St. James Episcopal, Marietta GA]

Belief in Things Unseen: Views of Trinity and Soul

(Reflections on a sermon by Father Daron Vroon of St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta; a discussion between Krista Tippett and poet/essayist Christian Wiman on her series "On Being" on National Public Radio; and some pages in John Updike's 1986 novel Roger's Version.)

Our young associate rector Daron Vroon eschewed all the usual jokes about Trinity Sunday ("I drew the short straw" is what preachers have said before -- often) and also the usual approach of finding a metaphor to explain the Trinity -- all containing some element of heresy, Vroon explained.

Instead, he spoke of the pleasures of conversation among adults.  There's no agenda, not much information being exchanged, and there's a lot of laughter without a lot of jokes.  He remembered walking in on such conversations during family gatherings.  Our response to the Trinity, he said, should be something like that:  Children  know it's real,  know it's a good thing, know they don't understand it, and  also know that someday, they will be a part of it.

Later, I heard Krista Tippett's 2012 interview with editor of POETRY magazine, Christian Wiman.  Reared a Baptist, he gave up his faith for many years. Falling in love, he reclaimed faith, and then found out that he has a rare, incurable blood cancer.  Their discussion ranged widely, and I heard much that I want to follow up on in one of his books.   But I was taken aback by a little side discussion about "existential angst," and it was Tippett who saw our complaints about "not having enough down time" as our generation's way of expressing that fear of meaningless existence.  Wiman agreed, adding that the idea of "soul" has been replaced by the idea of "self," and we dearly believe that we create meaning for ourselves by projecting the Self  to the public through fame through media, such as blogs, mea culpa.  The soul, Wiman said, is something that expresses itself in personal relationship.  Facebook doesn't count.

He also said something wonderful, quoting old-style critic Blackmur (I've forgotten his initials, but he pervaded my research into Henry James back in the day) saying that literature "adds to our store of reality."

From another angle, a convincing work of fiction by John Updike considers the related question, Is the soul something unseen, apart from the body?  Roger's Version is Updike's riff on Hawthorne's tale of Hester Prynne, her lover Pastor Dimmesdale, and her jealous husband Roger Chillingworth. Updike updates to 1984, probably Boston, and old Roger is a jaded theology professor who is both fascinated and repelled by Dale, a cocksure young born-again Christian who plans to use computers to demonstrate irrefutably God's intelligent design of the universe.  Oh, yes, and Roger imagines that his wife Esther is seeing Dale on the side.  Roger is imagining every sticky detail of one of their adulterous trysts while at the same time explicating heretical Tertullian's strong endorsement of the orthodox doctrine "resurrection of the body."  How, Tertullian asks, in Latin, can the soul be imagined apart from all the organs that give it its defining desires and tastes and expresssions?  Good question.  (Like Flannery O'Connor, I have to admit that I kind of close my eyes during those passages in Updike.  Happily, he italicized the Latin, so I can easily hop over the salty parts to one italic island after another.)

I've followed up on the Wiman reference, and I'm greatly enjoying an interview between him and Bill Moyers available at Krista Tippett's web site.  Here's the link that she provides:  http://www.onbeing.org/blog/bill-moyers-interview-christian-wiman-poetry-love-faith-and-cancer/3751

Desiderata: So What If It's Cheesy?

(Reflections on “Desiderata,” prose poem by Max Ehrman in 1927.)

Is this cheesy?  “You are a child of the universe.  No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.”  How about the advice, “listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story”?

This morning, I heard a bland reading of these words over an uninspired “smooth jazz” accompaniment.  It's 43 years after I heard the dear old actor Vincent Price recite these words on Carol Burnett’s TV show -- over a soft-rock music track and the gospel choir's refrain "You are a chi-i-ld of the universe!"   In the early 1970s, when hippie counter-culture was being sold over - the - counter, this "prose poem" called Desiderata appeared in little gift books and inspirational posters.  I haven't thought of it much since then.   

But if it’s little more than a compendium of fortune cookie sentiments, well, I’m sorry:  It had great impact on one earnestly agnostic 7^th grade boy in 1971.

Back then, hungry for a religion and angry at churchy classmates who relegated my Jewish buddy to Hell for not accepting Jesus, I copied Desiderata in the fanciest script I could manage and made a little shrine around it.   Back then, I was told, it was an anonymous poem from centuries past.  For awhile, that was my religion.

It was good advice.  A  slightly built 7^th grade comic book geek who listened to Mama Cass and the Carpenters, painfully envious of the bigger boys who played football and listened to Steppenwolf,  I needed to remember, “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

Just last week, I decided not to finish reading a novel, saying to myself that I should avoid  “vexations to the spirit.”  Now I’m reminded where that phrase came from:  “Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.”  Good advice, good reason.

Here’s some more good advice: “Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.”   That’s what reading literature and poetry do, and morning prayers, too.  (See my article, "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard It All Before.")

“But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.”  I needed those words this morning, as I fretted about things left undone.

The Seventies are remembered now in terms of America’s retreat from the world because of Vietnam, disillusion with authority because of Watergate, and replacement of supposed Sixties' “idealism” by smiley faces and "Have a Nice Day."    “Desiderata” offered a guilt-free, kind-hearted, ecumenical secular religious view of life.  That was a good side to the Seventies, a sweetness that seems naïve to us now.

But who doesn’t need to be reminded of the sentiment in these final lines?  “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.”

The Met's Giulio Cesare: Opera in Adolescence

(Reflection on Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare, seen live broadcast in HD to a local movie theatre from the Metropolitan Opera 27 April 2013.   Directed by David McVicar.)

When a seventh grade boy passes through a wide doorway, he's likely to jump up to touch the lintel.  A couple of years before, he was too small and too weak to reach so high, and he loves to try out his new capabilities. For me, a teacher of seventh grade, my students' trying out their new powers of understanding and athleticism compensates for more irksome and awkward traits. 

The Met's production of Giulio Cesare reminds me of them.  Written at a time when opera itself was young, Handel’s opera displays a seventh grade writer's cartoonish characters, insouciant disregard for credibility, and joyful creative energy.

The energy comes primarily from Handel’s music.  It rocks along in dance rhythms most of the time, and he loves to strum power chords for dramatic effect as much as any heavy metal band.  Like an adolescent musician, he loves to dazzle us with breakneck speed in furious string parts and even in sung lines.  When the songs do slow down, as in the sumptuous duet for female voices at the end of act one, the beat pulses underneath, while the voices sustain long lines that swell and turn in unexpected places.   

The libretto combines favorite seventh grade motifs: revenge, romance, power, and random violence.  The story of a boy and his mother who seek revenge is wrapped around a story of a princess and prince who fall in love at first sight.   

For this production, the director let the stage action go wherever the music and words suggested.  Cleopatra (Natalie Desai)’s dances veered between Ruby Keeler and Lady Gaga.  Marx Brothers came to mind in a slapstick competition between Cleopatra and her arrogant brother Tolomeo, and in a seduction scene that involves a bathtub, a bed, and feigned sleep to seduce Julius Caesar (David Daniel).   But we also had gruesome bloody effects for a severed head, battles, and a stabbing, not to mention the spectacle of the literally bloodthirsty mother bathing her hands and her boy’s face in the gore at the moment their revenge is realized.

So the characters are remote; the repetitions in Handel’s A – B – A arias lengthen the opera by 90 minutes; and, yes, there’s cognitive dissonance when soprano voices emanate from three grown men, and when a grown woman plays a boy.   Yet the five hours’ running time passed quickly, and I felt exhilarated at the end.   It was like watching seventh graders showing off on a playground how high they can jump, how fast they can run, how funny they can be.   

Arts in Education: Are the Students Ecstatic?

(Every few semesters, the task of giving the opening address for our middle school's art departmental awards falls to me.  Some previous addresses are here on the blog.  Today, we had a shorter time for our awards because we shared the assembly with Foreign Language awards.)

I am Scott Smoot, and I am happy to share our arts awards assembly with foreign language awards.

I'm happy, but I'm not ecstatic.

I'm happy, because it was foreign language class that made me sensitive to root meanings of words we use every day, and the experience of doing art happens to relate to the root meaning of the word ecstatic.  When something happens by luck to go our way, happy is the emotion we feel.

But an ecstatic feeling, while very pleasant, is something else entirely.  The word ecstatic combines a prefix meaning "out of" with the Latin root relating to status, statue and state.  When we are in a state outside of ourselves, we can fairly call the feeling ecstatic.

Or we could also call it doing art.  Artists must learn to step outside of themselves to see their work from another person's perspective.  For a musician, that means hearing how the instrument blends with others; for a visual artist, it means appealing to the viewer; for a singer or actor, it means getting into the thoughts and feelings of another person expressed in a song or script.    

Today we recognize arts students whom we would call exemplary.  That is, they are good examples of what it takes to make good art.  Exemplary artists concentrate on their business in class, and they use time outside of class to practice or revise.  They ask questions, make changes, and take satisfaction from nothing less than the best work they can imagine. 

Besides showing effort, they have an attitude that I'm calling "ecstatic."  They lose the self-conscious fear of looking foolish or different that can paralyze middle schoolers.  They are willing to listen to music that their peers don't appreciate.  They are willing to put their inner imaginations out there for all to see.  For the sake of making a better performance, they are willing to cooperate with classmates who may not share all the same interests.

They are also willing to be loud,  to be goofy, to cry on cue.   That can make exemplary arts students annoying.  As Mrs. Drew once observed, behaviors that may earn demerits from academic teachers, from arts teachers, earn awards.

We now present these tokens of appreciation to students whose effort and attitude provided examples that raised a bar for the class and inspired their teachers. 

The Turn of the Screw in Atlanta

(Reflections on THE TURN OF THE SCREW, an opera based on the novella by Henry James.  Music by Benjamin Britten.  Libretto by Myfanwy Piper. Production by Georgia State University Opera Theatre, Carroll Freeman, artistic director and stage director.  Michael Palmer, conductor. Performance April 20, 2013.)

Ben Thomas as "Quint" (GSU Opera's Facebook page)

 

For the opera The Turn of the Screw, librettist Myfanwy Piper strips 99% of the words from Henry James’s ghostly tale of the same name, but her skeleton of the story leaves Benjamin Britten room for music that propels the story and sustains tension. Carroll Freeman, director of the recent production by Georgia State University Opera Theatre, made choices that kept focus on character and music.

Like the libretto, the set for this production was skeletal, mere platforms and a curtain of chains.  Lights on a scrim provided variety and mood, and, for the chapel scene, the projection of a rose window. Young members of the orchestra might as well have been characters, as we could see their intent concentration on Britten’s score.  The ghosts “Quint” and “Miss Jessel” were portrayed by trios of singers in shrouds and fright wigs.  Their voices emanated from behind us and before us, above and beside us.  They danced together around young Miles and around the Governess, and it was easy to see why the Governess and young Miles might be overwhelmed.  

Miles was played by a tousle-headed soprano in trousers whose bearing and costumes grew more masculine as the opera progressed.  The Governess’s affectionate embraces seemed to become more grasping, both protective and possessive. 

Those of us who have read the story can argue endlessly over whether the ghosts are “real” to young Miles and Flora, or whether those two children are innocent victims of a delusional Governess.  Britten keeps some of the ambiguity, as when the Governess sings that she hopes to see her absent employer one more time.  Immediately, she does see him, only to realize instantly that it’s a stranger who will later be identified as “Quint.” She thinks of the man, she sees the man, and is instantly frightened of him:  Has her imagination supplied the vision?  Britten’s music suggests that possibility when the malignant ghosts sing the refrain to their triumphant duet, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”  It’s a tune we first heard when the Governess arrived at Bly.

I am grateful to have been able at last to see this piece live.

 

Perfect Ragtime by Atlanta Lyric Theatre

image from ALT's Facebook page

RAGTIME, the musical.
Book by Terrence McNally
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens.
Production by Atlantic Lyric Theatre at the Strand Theatre, Marietta, GA
Production directed by Alan Kilpatrick.
Performance of April 18, 2013.)

Colorful, warm, ingenious, and crammed full of energetic and soulful songs, the musical RAGTIME unfolds the interrelated stories of three families and numerous celebrities of the early 1900s with clarity and efficiency. Aside from narrowness of stage and muddy acoustics at Marietta’s restored Strand Theatre, nothing lacked in the production by the Atlanta Lyric Theatre.Voices, staging, band, and design all sold the material to us with clarity and vigor.

The songs are beautifully crafted and fitting to the historical era and to the characters. Taken together, they move the story along, signaling by style when we move from the parlor songs of genteel Anglos to a honky-tonk or church with Black characters, to the Eastern European immigrants in town. Ragtime is itself important to the story and a metaphor for a “ragged time” of transition when whites, blacks, and immigrants were all drawn to the sound. Lyrics sound natural as speech, while neat rhymes point up meaningful thoughts; the songs build to climaxes sometimes loud, sometimes pensive.

The only problem is that every second or third song seems to be teaching us something about America in the 1900s, until we feel that we’re watching a great story wrapped in an essay. We're taught by the remarkable opening number how everything certain in the lives of complacent wealthy Anglos is soon to be shaken by encounters with Blacks and Immigrants. This is acted out in song and dance, in which these groups cakewalk around each other and back away from confrontations.  It's very effective. But the next song tells us the same thing, from the point of view of the complacent Anglo “Mother.” As her world does crumble, she tells us about it in three more songs, two shared with others who are having similar experiences.By the end of show, when “Mother” reflected  a fourth time how life can’t go “Back to Before,” actress Christy Baggett's beautiful and earnest singing  could not keep us from feeling that she'd been used to reiterate a thesis statement. 

With two anthems, “Wheels of a Dream” and “Make Them Hear You,” the songwriters use the character Coalhouse (played by Kevin Harry) as a spokesman for all people of color in America early in the 20^th century. Mr. Harry sang with conviction, his powerful voice sustaining long notes over the climaxes, and he earned thunderous applause -- as a spokesman.  Then he went back to being Coalhouse.

One number, "He Wanted to Say," is led by socialist activist Emma Goldman (Ingrid Cole) with a big voice and big heart.  Eventually, the entire ensemble is singing a rousing anthem consisting of all the things that "Younger Brother" (Matthew Kacergis) feels about the injustices of life in the USA.  Yet this lecture on social ills and White man's guilt is made funny and personal because it's all the stuff that the character cannot put in coherent form. 

Social commentary is acted out for laughs with "What a Game,"  depicting the Father's misguided effort to connect to his young son by taking him to a baseball game.  Father learns to his discomfort, and to his son's delight, that the "gentleman's game" has been appropriated by the working class, and it isn't as genteel as it used to be in his days at Harvard. 

"The Courtship" alternates music and dialogue, covering months during which Coalhouse tries to atone for the way he wronged Sarah (played by Jeanette Illidge), mother of his child. There's a gentle duet between immigrant father Tateh (Stanley Allyn Owen) and "Mother," discovering kinship as parents across a wide social divide ("Nothing Like the City").  Deep in the second act, when Coalhouse seeks vengeance for the killing of his beloved Sarah, he remembers meeting her at the club where he played piano, and he re-enacts his love song to her, “Sarah Brown Eyes.” Sarah appears upstage of him, and each mimes dancing with the other, several steps apart. We know it’s a memory, and we can guess what’s ahead, but this bittersweet interlude was a highpoint of the show.

Poet Richard Blanco: Not Grievance, but Gratitude

(Reflections on LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by Richard Blanco. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.)

Blanco at inauguration, Jan. 2013

President Obama may have appointed Richard Blanco his inaugural poet because a gay son of Cuban immigrants unites two categories that divide our parties. Publicity suggested as much, focused on his Cuban grandmother’s scorn for her grandson's "effeminacy."  Interviewers were interested in his causes for grievance.  But, while poems of his latest collection frequently relate to his growing up “a boy afraid of being a boy” (“Afternoons as Endora” 33), who “had to sing with [his father] like a real Cuban” (“Cousin Consuelo, On Piano” 12), his main impulse is to preserve memories of those people he has loved. 

The first poem, from which LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL takes its title, gives a keynote.  ”There should be nothing here I don’t remember,” the epigraph tells us, and we can hear a driver muttering that the motel he remembers from childhood “should still be / rising out of the sand like a cake decoration” (1), but then, “My brother and I should still be pretending / we don’t know our parents,” embarrassed by their “scruffy” appearance and “reek” of garlic; and his father “should still be” poolside watching the two sons “he’ll never see / grow into men who will be proud of him.”  The ambivalence is thick, but the conclusion is clear, that the poet, now ashamed of the shame he felt, wants to redeem that time.

That idea of memories “still” living comes up often in this collection.  When he visits on his mother’s patio, “It’s always summer” and “Everything I am is here still” with a banyan tree nearby “dropping roots / as thick as my legs from its branches,” a fine image of how self is rooted in memory of a place (27).  The home of his Americanized aunt is both “the house we never went to again, [and] the house I never left” (Tia Margarita Johnson’s House in Hollywood” 11).  His own wide fingers, the veins on his knuckles, and ten little mirrors that are his fingernails reflect his father (“My Father, My Hands” 45). 

Photographs would seem to preserve memory, but Blanco invests some photos with meanings that are at least double.  He was posed to look perfect for a photo at Sears, except that he wouldn’t smile (“Birthday Portrait” 57). He poses a cousin at the Statue of Liberty with some irony (13), praying “may this be her country more than / it is mine when she lifts her Diet Coke like a torch… and hold still when I say, Smile.”  In childhood, Blanco is alarmed and mystified by a cheesy staged photo (“Mama with Indians: 1973, 2007” 59).  No irony, only gratitude, colors a memory of his father at the kitchen table planning how he’d provide for his son, “though there’s no black-and-white to prove it” (“Papa at the Kitchen Table” 43). 

The theme of memory takes a new direction in his apostrophe to a cousin (whose photo, he thinks, must be “somewhere”):  “Tell me / it’s true, we’re everything we remember, / tell me memories never fail us…” (68).  But what happens when the memory’s gone?  He remembers for his aged aunt what she cannot (69), and he reminisces with another aunt to avoid discussing the prognosis that brought him for the visit (72).  With his mother, he visits the grave where there’s surely nothing left of Blanco’s father but cuff links, the wedding ring, and “Bones, Teeth” (73).  Watching his mother step into the water at the beach, worrying the way she used to worry about him, Blanco sees her as Boticelli’s Venus in reverse, stepping back into the sea, “her eyes fixed on the horizon / at nothing I can see” (61).

Blanco gives us a lot of laughs for a “sad” boy who wouldn't smile for his portrait, who fit nowhere.  His family makes bets about who’ll be Miss America.  But, when Miss Ohio is crowned, “Gloves up to her elbows, velvet down / to her feet, crying diamonds into her bouquet / the queen of our country,” no one in the family knows where Ohio is (“Betting on America” 9). Considering celebrities with his name, he affects the pinky ring of Richard Dawson on Family Feud and knows he’s “as wholesome as Richie Cunningham” on Happy Days (7), and eventually arrives at an Anglicization of his name that encapsulates all of his adolescent pretensions.  “Killing Mark” tells about ways that an active imagination can kill a loved one who hasn’t arrived home at the expected time.  As the more sedentary of two middle-aged brothers, I especially appreciate “My Brother on Mt. Barker” (41) in which the less athletic one envies the one who skis with apparent ease:

…Funny, that’s the way

It’s always been: me looking up at him

conquering mountains, secretly wishing

I could be as daring as he, less like me. 

The poet wonders how “blood is not enough / to explain this handful of memories” that relate them.  But all’s well when the brother “tumbles down” and complains, “Damn, my bones are killing me.”  Been there, felt that!

Blanco often uses balanced phrases that reflect his in-the-middle, neither – one – nor – the – other identity.  So, his Tia Margarita Johnson’s home was “the house with a flower garden, not chickens” (11), a formula ("house with... not...") repeated many more times.  Blanco frames his ambivalent thoughts about America and Cuba in a sort of prayer for his cousin, that she “may always” do some things, and “may never” do the others (13). Other poems are built on repetition of single phrases:  “some days" and  “sometimes” (“Some Days The Sea” 77);  and “Maybe” (48).  A striking poem closes the collection asserting “I’ve been writing this since” a certain summer, since a certain class, since a certain night, and “since my eyes started seeing less, my knees aching more” (“Since Unfinished” 79-81).  He has arrived at another great "middle" condition, middle age.

Even in this cursory survey of the poems, a reader may pick up on an image that repeats in this collection: the sea.  Of course, writing of Florida, Cuba, and of his present home in Maine, he often pictures the sea.   “Today," he writes, "the waves open their lions’ mouths hungry / for the shore” (“Some Days the Sea” 77). But the previous poem in the collection asks, “Why am I always imagining the sea?” (“Place of Mind” 76), and it suggests that, like drops of rain that gather into streams and flow to the ocean, our individual lives and memories flow back into the larger sea of family history.  Imagining his great-grandparents’ love and life in Cuba, and what he might have been had they settled elsewhere, he concludes, “I’m a consequence, a drop / of rain,” “in the middle of a story I don’t know” (15).  An aunt at the end of her life is “like a wave drunk by the sand” or “a raindrop returned to the sea” (70).  The image is comforting in one way, though disturbing for a childless gay man when he watches his mother tend his father’s grave:  “Who’ll visit with flowers, speak to what’s left of me?” (74). 

Of course, if Blanco keeps producing works like this, he can find his answer in Shakespeare:  “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It also gives life to your father, the aunts, and those other places and times you want to honor.

More on Richard Blanco

• In mid-winter and mid-life, I was feeling pretty badly, and found Solace in Blanco Verse.
  
• It Takes a Pueblo is my reflection on Blanco's loving memoir.

Parable of the Ski Instructor

You know the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the one about the Good Samaritan, but here’s the newly-discovered parable of the ski instructor.  Our Education for Ministry (EfM) class didn’t so much write it as uncover the implications of a single metaphor that we found to describe common experiences in our own lives -- a process EfM calls "theological reflection."  Once we saw the metaphor, we agreed that we'd been in this situation many times --  "every day of my life," said one participant -- and we saw how God works in all of the different outcomes.  

I've taken it upon myself to turn our metaphor (see picture) into a full-blown parable. So, here goes:

There once was a ski instructor who led three novice skiers to the pinnacle of a high hill.  The instructor put his arm around the shoulders of the first skier and said, “You have the training you need to try this hill.  Won’t you go ahead?”    Down the skier went, avoiding the trees and rocks, arriving at the resort below, where she yelled, “This was the greatest experience of my life!”

The instructor put his arm around the shoulders of the second skier and said, “You have the training you need to try this hill.  Won’t you go ahead?”  The second skier asked, “If I discover that it’s too scary, can I return?”  The instructor explained that, once launched, the skier would have no good way to stop. The second skier said, “Here goes!” and launched, but struck a tree.  Alerted by the ski instructor, EMTs from the resort rushed to save him, and airlifted him to the hospital.

Seeing this, the third skier said to the instructor, “I know that you have given me the training I need to try this hill.  But I’ve decided that this is not the time for me, just yet.  I will remove my skis and take the ski-lift down to the resort.  Perhaps I will take up canoeing instead.”

The ski instructor put his arms around her and said, “I’ll see you down at the resort.”

Robert Spano and the ASO: Bringing New Composers into the Family

(reflections on a concert April 5 by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, music director Robert Spano conducting.)

Robert Spano’s long-range plans for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra are coming to fruition.  He has

ASO's Kurth with young composer Primous

intentionally developed an “Atlanta School” of composers over the past decade, so that we’ve grown used to hearing new or nearly-new works by Higdon, Gandolfi, Golijov, and Theofanidas, among others.Though four of five works on Friday night’s program date from the 2000s, the audience responded as if this were nothing unusual, and they welcomed even the most unfamiliar pieces into the family.

The youngest composer was fifteen-year-old Commodore Primous III.  Brought to the ASO through its “Next Generation” program and mentored by ASO bass player Michael Kurth, Primous endeared himself to the audience during a recorded interview with Mr. Spano, who asked him to play his piece on piano.  The gangly young man played octaves with his left hand while the thumb and forefinger of his right ran a rapid descent from the high end of the keyboard, and it was very pleasant in a George-Winstony kind of way.  With Kurth’s help, Primous added layers of harmony and countermelody to those parts for left and right hands, and built his “Lullaby” into something very different that he now calls The Triumph of Day. After the piece was over, Primous bounded up on stage for his standing ovation – pretty common response by our affectionate audience. 

Kurth’s own composition Everything Lasts Forever takes inspiration for its three movements from graffiti in the neighborhood not far from where we were seated.  He, too, got the video interview with Spano, and he admitted that, as a player with the ASO, he knows what’s frustrating and he knows what kind of challenges the players want.  It sounded to me as though he exposed each section of the orchestra enough to justify caling this a concerto for orchestra. 

Kurth’s interview included photos of the graffiti that he used for his “program.”  Images of feet by a tagger with moniker “Toes” suggested a foot-stomp motif that kicked off the piece.  Dancing around different sections of the orchestra, these stomps developed through different colors and moods.  A black-and-white image of a bird to which some tagger later added a red heart, inspired “Bird Song Love.”  It’s a simple song played first on celesta, repeated with new colors added on top, until it developed into something much bigger for full orchestra.  The foot stomps returned in the sweet third movement, gently this time, to tie the piece together in a way that satisfied and charmed.

Yet a third video interview (the most I’ve seen in one concert) re-introduced us to Marcus Roberts, whom I last saw when he improvised fresh cadenzas for Gershwin (was it Rhapsody or his Concerto?) some years ago.  Roberts composed Spirit of the Blues: Piano Concerto in C minor at an electronic keyboard, layering different parts on top of each other to build the orchestral score.  He admitted to Spano in the interview that he’d had trouble with structure, and my own impression on first hearing is that he never did escape the box of the classical formula of  orchestral passage – solo cadenza – orchestra passage, etc.   Even playing his own solos, Roberts seemed constrained.  While every bit of the piece was fine in itself, I didn’t feel that it took us anywhere.

The other two pieces on the program were textbook examples of how to take a listener on a journey, and they are both “in the family,” too. 

Bernstein’s West Side Story dance suite had been in the repertoire only ten years, when I and my sixth grade classmates sat in the balcony of this very hall to hear the ASO play it in 1971.  As often as I hear this familiar piece, Lenny catches me by surprise with the ways that he prepares the transitions from one melody to the next.  Admittedly, he made that easy for himself when he’d built many of the songs in his musical on the interval of the augmented fourth that the “Jets” gang uses for its signature whistle.  It plays at the start of the suite, emerges again from the busy texture of the Prologue to mark its transition to “Somewhere,” and reappears in tunes we know as “Maria” and “Cool.”  Bernstein reuses certain textures to mark our progress from one movement to another, as when we hear fragmentary flights of melody by flutes chasing little bursts of percussion while the orchestra sits in tense silence; and when the bass section plucks a funeral march under stretched out song-lines in the high strings. 

Rainbow Body by Christopher Theofanidas premiered in Atlanta in 2000, so it’s already older now than Bernstein’s piece was when I first heard it.  Spano and the ASO schedule Rainbow Body every fiew years, and their recording of it is played often on our local NPR station, so it’s an old friend in the repertoire.   Based on a line from 12^th century composer Hildegard van Bingen, the piece builds like a dance from some characteristic gestures:  a stately statement of the melody in the brass, a sparkling fountain of sound that rises suddenly as punctuation at junctures of the piece, and a dark rumbling fragment of Hildegard’s melody.  By the end, when these sounds reinforce each other, they all contribute to a glorious finale for the piece, and for the concert.  

MAD Sanity

A cover I loved at age 8, blending my two favorite icons

(Reflection on MAD magazine, after hearing an interview with John Ficarra on Bob Edwards' Weekend radio show.)

"Everyone thinks that MAD was at its best the year they first read it," says John Ficarra, editor of MAD today.  MAD's mission, he says, is "subverting minds."

Truly, MAD was a sane balance for the craziness of the time.  My introduction to MAD was 1968, one of the single most tumultuous years in American history, when national self-confidence was shaken by "generation gap," political assassinations, riots and the exposure in Vietnam of our leaders' dishonesty and incompetence.

My window on all that was Alfred E. Neuman's "What - me worry?" face.  Hippies v. Hardhats, Spy v. Spy, Hawks v. Doves, KKK v. Black Panthers-- MAD's creators found a laughable angle on just about everything but assassinations, and that helped when the world was too scary or depressing.  (Note: NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" serves this way for me today.)

I recall a feature "If Comics Adopt Nudity like the Movies," and take-offs on "Midnight Cowboy" and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," making fun of promiscuity, hypocrisy, and Timothy Leary's drug culture.  My introduction to the Ten Commandments was through a feature that juxtaposed images of Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, et. al. with "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," and an actress kissing Oscar beside the ban on graven idols.  In a mock advertisement, Adolf Hitler endorses cigarette companies for their success killing more people than he ever dreamed.

Something else that MAD always showed was consistent craftsmanship.  Mort Drucker's caricatures were dead-on target; Sergio Aragones' marginal cartoons were admirably compact, of necessity;  Al Jaffee's fold-ins were ingenious and skillful;  I loved the cover art.  I learned irony from Dave Berg, as in his "lighter side of fitness" cartoon feature, when an older man at a gym asks a younger one why he spends his time on machines that row nowhere, run nowhere, and bike nowhere.  "They get me somewhere," the young man says, "Away from my wife!"  MAD's parodies of poems and songs, meticulously matching original rhyme-schemes and meter, got me started on a life-long hobby, as in this song from MAD's sequel to "The Sound of Music":

You are forty,
Going on forty-one,
Already past your prime.
No man has wed you,
Each man has fled you,
Except for Father Time....

I find online many MAD tribute sites where covers and articles are available for viewing. 

The Coup, Chapter One: Updike's Playground

(reflections on The Coup by John Updike. New York: Fawcett Crest Paperback edition, 1979).

John Updike overlays so many strands of story, cultural commentary, and jokes in the first chapter of The Coup  (1978) that  I want to underline every paragraph.  So I’m reflecting on it right away. More may follow. 

For The Coup’s first chapter, we’re in the land of Kush,  a constitutional monarchy “with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed” (17).  The first incident of the book occurs in 1973, “at the end of the wet season, which had been dry”(21).  Being an artificial political state imposed by European colonialists on a kingdom called Wajiji, Kush doesn’t even have a history.  Its borders bracketing clashing tribes with different languages and traditions, Kush is only “an idea” (21), but in that way, it is no more imaginary than most post-colonial African nations  in the 1970s.  Kush’s political system uneasily combines populist Islam and atheist Marxism.  Its economy is perpetual disaster, its Saharan north starving in drought and its south subsisting on peanuts.  (Doh! Another joke!)   The land is rich only in diseases (16).

Our guide to the nation is narrator Colonel Hakim Felix Ellelou, whose narrative voice is Updike’s playground.   Writing in exile or prison (we’re not told which, yet), Ellelou writes in decorous third person, except when the mask slips, which is often.   “There are two selves,” he explains, “the one who acts and the ‘I’ who experiences” (17).  He admits that the “historical performer bearing the name of Ellelou was no less mysterious to me than to the American press wherein he was never presented save snidely… in the same spirit the beer-crazed mob of American boobs cheers on… the crunched leg of the unhome team left tackle.”  Mixing “wherein” with “boobs” and “the unhome team,” Ellelou’s English is that of a foreigner who has absorbed some American slang into his outdated formal training – a formal trainwreck.

When dialogue begins, between President Ellelou and the old king whom he has imprisoned,  it is rich in polite hostility, rhetorical arabesques, and drole commentary on the World.    Here are the very first lines:

 “Splendor of Splendors,” Ellelou began, “thy unworthy servant greets thee.”

“A beggar salutes a rich man,” the king responded.  “Why have you honored me, Ellelou, and when will I be free?”

“When Allah the Compassionate deems thy people strong enough to endure the glory of thy reign.”  (23)

Because “all their languages were second languages,” the French and Arabic (and English) that replace their tribal tongues are “clumsy masks their thoughts must put on” (23). 

I read the book thirty years ago, and I retain vague memories.  In flashback, Updike will give us Ellelou as a foreign student in a small Midwestern college, attracted to a blonde coed who’ll end up as one of his four wives.  Near the end, there’ll be a scene of a hapless, well-intentioned American official atop crates of breakfast cereal when Ellelou sets the whole supply on fire.  The wives and the fire are both mentioned in this first chapter. 

A year after The Coup was published was celebrated by Van Morrison in his song “Dead or Alive” as 1979, “the rule of the tyrants’ decline…/ From Uganda to Nicaragua, / it’s bombs and bullets all the time.”    Updike was paying closer attention than I and my pals at Duke to the rise of Islam as a strong political force that was about to burst into American headlines. 

There’s a lot to look forward to.

 Blog Note: I’ve read all of Updike’s novels, stories, and poems.  I’ve written about him many times on this blog.  Use the search bar at the top of this page especially for observations about his last books of poems and stories, his hits COUPLES and WITCHES OF EASTWICK (with sequel WIDOWS…), and his problematic novels TERRORIST and SEEK MY FACE.

Jung Over, Part Two: Geography of the Self

Last month, I took instruction from a dream concocted by my unconscious mind, and wrote about it on this blog. It was confirmation of Karl Jung's theories of dreams.

This time, I've re-read something in John Updike that I experienced in a dream, and once again I find confirmation for Karl Jung's teachings.  Jung thought that dreams of homes are dreams of our own bodies;  the human inhabitant is the soul. 

Updike begins his memoir Self-Consciousness with a long essay about his childhood home.  When he was around 50, he left his Mother and second wife watching the movie Being There in the old cinema of Shillington, PA, while he took the chance to wander up and down the street where he'd lived as a young boy, and where he'd strutted as a teenager.  "You had to be there" never was more appropos, as he detailed ordinary places to the point that I was just about exasperated. That the whole town was merely the furniture of his consciousness, and he, center of this universe, was almost embarrassing.  But then he reached his conclusion:

Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them is the center of the universe.  What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God? ... [Reviewing the town] I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed. (40-41).

Elsewhere in this blog, I review Updike's final book of poetry, in which he writes one more time of his Shillington childhood, admitting that he has written of these many times, because "for me, they have no bottom." (See my Updike page.)

My Shillington is Cincinnati.  My grandmother lived in a modest but immaculate home in Madeira, north of the city.  It was a home purchased by her son, my Uncle Jack, in the late 1940s.  She moved in when Jack and his wife Blanche moved to the swanky Indian Hills neighborhood. 

Not long after my grandmother died, I had a vivid dream from which I awoke with tears streaming down my face.  That was unprecedented, and I took notice!  In the dream, not so different from my actual final visit to her home following her funeral, I searched every room of her home for "the secret to me."  Something there, I didn't know what, was the key to my personality and my future.  I cried because I could not find it.

A moment's reflection, after I awoke, revealed that the "key" was nothing in the house, but the house itself:  a sense of myself as loved, worthy, special, that I felt whenever I visited my grandmother's home.  Her antiques and her notions of interior decoration (pink shag rug in the kitchen, pink marbled wall paper and chandeliered sconces in the tiny bathroom)  made the place, for me, the epitome of class.

Updike's memoir moves on to other topics.  He modestly focuses on his physical weaknesses that, by forcing him to compensate, contributed to his eventual success.  His sense of indignities as one of the poor boys in Shillington motivated his "revenge" of becoming the town's single celebrity.  His account of the humiliations of stuttering turns into an account of his success as a writer in a chapter called "Getting the Words Out." 

I'm amused, at 54, to read his description of being in his mid-50s, a bit foolish-looking to others, a bit oblivious to the current popular trends, and yet feeling that his life is really just beginning.  He had become like the father-in-law that he used to ridicule.

I wonder at the fact that I've now spent time rereading a memoir by an author whose complete works I've read, imbibing fictional versions of those same memories.    There's a part of me that feels ashamed to be spending my time and energy on someone so self-absorbed. 

Still, as Updike tells us, the materialists have it all wrong.  If they deny God and the realm of spirit, they deny the "very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept" (250).

Well, Updike is wise, and Jung is right:  my Grandmother's house is also me.  When I was about to leave her home for the last time, I burst into tears and sobs that I hadn't had at the funeral.   I ran back to her bedroom and sobbed, not for her, but for the loss of the little boy who had been her grandson: no one else would remember him.  Thankfully, I was able to keep a couple of chairs from her home, which had seemed to me thrones for a young prince.   I have them, still.

So the places of our youth are also symbols of ourselves.  Jung is right, Updike intuits that, and my dreams to this day confirm it. 

The Whipping Man at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre

In the first 120 seconds of The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez,  a wounded Confederate soldier collapses inside the door of a derelict ante-bellum home and screams out some names.  A black man cautiously advances from a back room carrying a rifle and lantern.  When he realizes that the soldier is a young man of the household, he kneels, lays his hand on the young man's head, and pronounces a blessing in Hebrew, "Baruch Adonai...." 

It's disorienting to juxtapose Jewish tradition with our Civil War expectations, and instantly moving.  The rest of the play unpacks that moment. Plotwise, we learn who those names are, and what has happened to them.  Themewise, the idea of Southern Jews climaxes in a Seder.

We get highly involved with these characters, thanks to the acting of Jeremy Aggers (Caleb, the soldier), Keith Randolph Smith (Simon, the black man),  Another character who first appears as a truly scary apparition through a window, turns out to be comic relief and also catalyst for truth-telling.   He's "John," played by an appealing young local actor John Stewart.

We are embraced by the set, as the beams of the ceiling stretch out over us; and we embrace these three men as they discover the secrets that each is hiding at the start.

The seder itself is a highpoint.  Improvised from rough wartime resources, this ceremonial meal becomes a celebration of release from slavery.  The takeaway moment follows when John, unable to make a choice, is paralyzed with fear.  This is freedom, his mentor Simon says.  And it's not easy. 

Two other moments stand out, because they are so theatrical, and happen almost out of time.  Late in the show we see a kind of flashback with the soldier Caleb standing (he loses a leg in an early scene that induced audible gasps and squirming early in the show), reciting a letter to his beloved, written in the grandiloquent prose of those 19th century letters.  Another moment is occasioned by the fact that Passover in 1865 was also the Good Friday of Abe Lincoln's assassination. Simon re-enacts his  encounter with Lincoln.  Simon bowed; Lincoln bowed. 

The only thing not to like about the show is its title.  Yes, it relates to a revelation in the plot.  But isn't there something that could relate somehow to the freedom, choice, and Passover? 

Meditation for Holy Week: Liturgy as Theatre

Phil. 3:1 To write the same things to you is not irksome to me.

Until Holy Week, I'd had mixed feelings about Episcopal liturgy. The routines were more comforting than "irksome," but I was new to the church, and her traditions did seem to lack spontaneity. 

Then, one Palm Sunday, I understood how all that repetition amplified the impact of small changes. We waved palms, processed to music with bells, chanted prayers, and hissed, "Crucify him!" on cue. The rest of Holy Week brought changes to setting, lighting, and vestments. We re-enacted the Last Supper and sang more austere music.  It hit me then that liturgy is a year-long drama. In fact, it's a musical!  But we're not the audience: we're the actors.  

That doesn't mean we're faking anything.  When I was a sullen teenager, mom used my membership in the drama club to correct my attitude towards my father. "You like to act. You owe it to your father to act as if you can stand to be around him!"  To make my performance convincing to Dad took the effort to ask about his work, to listen to his music, to appreciate the things he did for me.  No surprise:  Acting led to actuality.

In the same way, in church, we recite eloquent prayers even when we don't feel them, we repeat the Creed even though we doubt, and we line up for Eucharist no matter what. Disciplines of Lent and rich drama of Holy Week add emphasis to a year's liturgy.  Taking time to worship as if it's important makes it so.

Creating Innovators with Homework?

In a speech to the faculties of Atlanta-area independent schools yesterday, author Tony Wagner spoke from experience as teacher, administrator, and educational researcher, one who has spent years studying innovators in industry, arts, and education.  He outlined lists of "three most" and "seven most" important practices listed in his book Creating Innovators.During the Q-and-A session that followed, I waited too long to ask my one-word question, "Homework?"  While I waited, I figured out what he'd probably say.

First, if the homework is intended simply to convey factual information, it's a waste of time.  With the world wide web in our pockets, factual information is now a "commodity," worth little. 

But, what if the homework teaches a skill?   Wagner said, in today's market, "It's not what you know, but what you can do with it."   If the homework is akin to practicing a musical instrument, mastering a certain baseball pitch, or working through a new app, then that's a good kind of work.  Could that, too be done in the classroom?  Teams do drill on the basketball court, but the best players practiced countless hours on their own -- Michael Jordan being the famous example. The kind of skill that has to be mastered alone would be highly important to the student, and a waste of class time.

Because Wagner says that the world's job market puts a premium on collaborative creative work, I suppose that he would prefer that class time be spent in getting teams of students to find -- not "the answers," but alternative solutions to problems.   

What would he say about reading assignments in books of literature or accounts of history?  He'd probably ask the purpose for the assignment.   If it's just to learn the facts, he'd say that's not the best use of a student's after-school time.  If the reading exercises a student's discernment, or the application of a lesson to a text, then that's stretching the student's ability, and a good use of time.  Could that time be spent in the classroom, with the teacher available for one-on-one coaching, and time available for students to compare what they learned?   I'd opt for that, if possible -- simply because our lives after school are so full of other things, like blogging, and exercise, and commuting, and dinner, and rehearsals, etc.

But Wagner puts the highest value on passion, and that gives us a kind of homework that will take time and concentraation outside of class.  "If a young person is passionate about something," he said, "they'll master the skills and acquire the information" as needed.  So class time should go to something my colleague Justin Loudermilk introduced to me, his "20% Project."  He allows students 20% of their class time to collaborate on something they care deeply about, and they all take time outside of class to complete it. 

After his talk on passion, collaboration, and creativity, the very first question from a teacher was about grading.  I'm struck by how often we teachers, threatened by a kind of teaching that isn't like what we experienced, stiff-arm it with a question, "Well, yes, but how are we supposed to grade that?"   Wagner said that he'd recommend having only three grades:  A, B, and "Incomplete."  Sounds like my approach, too: to keep the kids working on a project until it's the best they can do with the objectives they face using the skills they've developed by a deadline. 

After all, I felt affirmed in the choices I've made as a teacher, and motivated to find more ways to collaborate.  My writing students are currently at work "exploring" through research topics of interest to them about which they're curious, asking questions that don't have easy answers.  I wonder if I missed an opportunity to make this, too, collaborative?  I used to have a "magazine" project when I taught history, for which students created a kind of portfolio of essays, stories, time lines, graphs, and reviews related to a chosen theme.  It might be worth considering.

My drama classes do collaborate a lot; next year, with my class time extended from one quarter to a full semester, I should consider more ways to have collaboration. 

Jung Over: Dreams the Morning After

I awoke this morning, disturbed by a dream in which a friend of mine dealt with his teenaged son by jerking him outside and slapping him.   His son hit him back.  Watching in anguish, I thought the father had made a mistake.  I followed the young man up to his room, where he curled up on his bed.

Now, pioneering psychologist Karl Jung took dreams seriously as helpful communications from our unconscious minds to our reasoning conscious minds.  The unconscious, he said, communicates not in words but in metaphor, using symbols and stories.  In his view, even when we dream of others, we're dreaming of an aspect of ourselves.  

Me and Mia

Awake in the dark, I wondered where my dream came from. 

Then I heard the breathing of my own teenager -- a puppy named Mia --  curled up in her bed.   Yesterday, she was more than usually aggressive towards other dogs in the park, and I'd been more forceful than usual pulling her aside and insisting that she sit and stay.  I'd been thinking, "I've handled this badly.  I've got to do something, but forcing her down isn't it.  I don't know what to do."  I'd been feeling remorse, affection, regret, yearning for re-connection to the dog. 

The thoughts and feelings I'd had during that event were exactly those that I shared with "my friend" in the dream. Jung was right:  My heart is telling me to pull back and not to confuse Mia with my mixed signals.  I surely don't want her to associate other dogs with my anger, or to think of my hands as instruments of pain.

This seems to be clear evidence that Jung was on to something real.  Where is he in discourse today? 

Psychology was as present in the first decades of my life as weather -- in cartoons, sitcoms, suspense movies, art, magazine racks, and speculative talk among adolescents (when I was one) -- so it's astonishing to me how Freud, Jung, and dream analysis have vanished from conversation.  The last time I heard anyone take any of that seriously was pre-Prozac, around 1990, Jung was ascendant, and Joseph Campbell had a bestselling book about world mythology and archetypes in our dreams and lives. 

At about that same time, The University of the South was developing Education for Ministry, an undergraduate theological course studied through local parishes.  A central feature of this program is a process of "Theological Reflection," by which participants analyze a real-life event for its concomitant thoughts and feelings.  After everyone recalls events in their lives when they shared the same thoughts and feelings, all use their imaginations to concoct a metaphor for those thoughts and feelings.

We are, in effect, inventing a dream that expresses the reality in the language of the unconcious.

The next step in the process is to cast about in culture and Scripture for another story or image that relates.

There you have Jung in a nutshell:   Our faith stories and our ancient myths speak to us universally as dreams speak to us individually.

Homeboys' Blessings

Jesuit father Greg Boyle was interviewed by Krista Tippett for her radio show "On Being."  He once tried to make peace through shuttle diplomacy among LA's street gangs, but he gave up on that: "There is no conflict," he says, "only violence." 

Instead, he has focused on getting members of different gangs to work side by side on other projects.  He tells of blessing one, adding, "While I love you, you can sometimes be a pain in the butt."  The boy-man replied, "The feeling's mutual."

His main insight seems to have been that all of these boys and "homegirls" are fleeing from something, and he offers something positive to want.  He tells of a boy -- now a man on the other side of drug addiction and crime -- whose mother told him at age six to kill himself and save her the pain of raising him.  She beat him, and he wore three tee shirts into adulthood, to cover up the wounds.  "But now I love my wounds," he says. "How else can I help others with their wounds if I don't love mine?"

Is he afraid of death? He quotes the Dali Lama:  "Death?  It's just a change of clothing."

He quoted Ruskin, that our main calling in life is to "delight in each other."  When Krista Tippett asked him about why he chose the epigram for the book, he confessed,"Oh no, it's my Krista Tippett nightmare coming true.  I don't know why I chose it.  Now I'm revealed as totally shallow." But the poet observes how all of us wish to be told "I love you," and asks why we can't be the one who tells thaqt to others.

So, from a hard-hitting, mean streets area of the world, there's a call from the warm and fuzzy side.

Here's a link to his website:  http://homeboyindustries.org/

God's People Grow Up

Romans 1:14 I am under obligation both to Greeks and barbarians.

A lawyer confessed, "I still think of God the way I did when I was 10." At 40, he had a mature understanding of family, law, and country; but it took a few weeks of our class in EfM (Education for Ministry) for his faith to grow up, too.  

In today's readings, spanning 1000 years of history, we see God's people outgrowing their adolescent view of “enemies.”  First, the Psalmist prays for his enemies to "dissolve ... like snails in slime" (Psalms 58:9).  Later, Jeremiah meets Jerusalem’s enemies face to face at the gate, to pronounce their doom. Then Jesus not only faces the despised Samaritans, but welcomes them, dismaying his disciples. Finally, Paul explains to indignant members of the church that he is "obligated" to "barbarians" as well as to them.  

From "slime" to "obligees" is a huge change in attitude towards outsiders. Was it God who grew more accepting, or did God's people need time to accept that God loves all of His creation?  Then, in the 2000 years since Biblical times, has God continued to spur our growth?   I think history answers that question: When Paul wrote, women were property, slavery was common, and power was both inherited and arbitrary.  So much has changed in ways that even Paul did not anticipate.  

I can't speak for anyone else, but, through the Episcopal Church, my understanding of God in the world has changed -- I would say "deepened" and "grown" -- in ways that I wouldn't have approved when I joined thirty years ago.  Change came partly through study, but more through interaction with wise and gentle parishioners, lay and ordained.  I am still learning to open my mind and heart to people not like me, as we are obliged to do.