"Anne Frank" Lives On Stage at The Walker School

[Photo: Gillian Stoltz as "Margot" and Katrin Surkan as "Anne", Anne's movie - star pin - ups in the background (from the Walker School's Facebook page)]

We left the theatre after The Diary of Anne Frank feeling uplifted by affection for the characters and inspired by the power of creativity and kindness to make life where none would seem possible.

But we had entered the tiny Mozley Studio Theatre at The Walker School feeling trapped. The set, as oppressive as impressive, was designed by Mr. Bill Schreiner from ideas that director Mrs. Katie Arjona brought back from her own pilgrimage to the secret annex in Amsterdam. A cutaway view of annex and attic filled the space so that the audience, too, felt packed together with the characters. The stage, raised to remind us that the action is up stairs, also pressed the actors' heads close to the actual ceiling of the theatre, a tight squeeze emphasized by heavy - looking artificial rafters.  To enhance our feeling of being enclosed with no escape possible, Arjona kept actors busy in character on stage even during the audience's intermission.

[Left to right: Kraler, Otto Frank, the Van Daans, and Mrs. Frank. Photo from The Walker School's Facebook page.]

The play would seem oppressive enough without the set design. Though I'd never read the book nor seen the play, Anne Frank's face and story are part of our culture, well known to me since grade school. What could it offer, besides drabness, darkness, and its characters' sad endings?

The playwrights find a rhythm in the story, cycles of dejection, anger, and accommodation to reduced circumstances. At first, the Frank family has to adjust to their tiny annex. Teenaged daughter Margot (Gillian Stoltz) is morose, and her mother (Ellie Collerton) is resentful, but Otto Frank (Carter Ezell) reassures them, and young Anne (Katrin Surkan) is ebullient, skipping around the perimeter. No sooner have they adjusted to their reduced circumstances, than the Van Daans enter the already - cramped space. Again, there's a period of adjustment, as we get to know the comically self-absorbed parents Mr. Van Daan (Jared Garvin), obsessed with food, and Mrs. Van Daan (Emmalissa Perkerson) clinging to her fur coat and her idea of elegance. They bring their shy teenaged son Peter (Caden Virant). Again, through give and take, the families reach equilibrium. Then, Otto Frank's loyal employees Kraler (Toby Allers) and Miep (Jordan Gomez) bring in another refugee, Mr. Dussel (Sean Lewis) who brings his finicky ways and, also, devastating news from "outside."

Each adjustment to worsening situation brings a breakthrough to greater understanding and compassion, mostly through the agency of Anne. She grows up before our eyes over the two years of the action. At first, Anne and her mother are estranged; Anne cannot get Peter to relate to her; she discloses her thoughts to us in the diary she keeps closed to others' prying. As Anne, Katrin Surkan was a generous actress, lavishing all her energy on others, drawing them out. In a memorable scene, she has found creative ways to make gifts for everyone at Hanukkah, each person astonished in turn. The last iteration of the cycle brings the characters to a pinnacle of love and understanding, and the inevitable end comes as a shock.

The sixth graders in my drama class appreciated so much of the play, having seen just one act. For them, that "fourth wall" was almost palpable, and those moments when Anne broke it were a relief. They learned from seeing how every actor stayed in character, engaged in some "stage business" that didn't distract us while our attention focused elsewhere. When I asked the younger actors to imitate the walks of the different characters, the sixth graders could identify each one instantly, a tribute to the actors' full - bodied characterizations.

The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, newly adapted by Wendy Kesselman. Presented at The Walker School, Marietta GA, March 6 - 9, 2019. Director, Katie Arjona. Scenic and Lighting Design, Bill Schreiner. Original Sound Design, Dan Moises Shreier; Additional Sound Design, Hayes Zierden.

ANNE FRANK Katrin Surkan
MR. OTTO FRANK Carter Ezell
MRS. EDITH FRANK Ellie Collerton
MARGOT FRANK Gillian Stoltz
MRS. VAN DAAN Emmalissa Perkerson
MR. VAN DAAN Jared Garvin
PETER VAN DAAN Caden Virant
MR. DUSSELL Sean Lewis
MIEP Jordan Gomez
MR. KRALER Toby Allers
ENSEMBLE Dylan Alfi, Mason Duecker, and Ronan Ezell

Ravel Revealed: Pianist Von Oeyen

Pianist Andrew Von Oeyen's nacreous blue eyes focused intensely on wringing music from the grand Steinway on stage at cozy, acoustically - live Spivey Hall in Morrow GA, near Atlanta last month. Playing his own transcription of Massenet's "Meditation" from Thais, fragrant chords billowing under a probing melody, he sometimes bent down to the keyboard as if he searched for just the right note to end the phrase. So many phrases had ended in silence that we weren't sure which note was last in the piece before he launched us into the different world of  "Le Jeu des Contraires" by Henri Dutilleux, a piece as gnarly as the first was gentle. Von Oeyen chased patterns of notes up and down the keyboard, smacking some down, teasing out others. Spikey and spicy, the piece was fun for its texture and color.

But the center piece of the concert was Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, written mid-way between Massenet's lush 19th century sound and the mid-20th-century atonality of Dutilleux.

Tombeau is a suite of six classical dances that I've known for decades only through the composer's orchestration of four movements.  When Von Oeyen played, I enjoyed hearing two of the movements for the first time.  The orchestral version dresses the music up in colors and textures; on the keyboard, Von Oeyen revealed the motifs that hooked movements together. and made visually clear the structure of the piece, how Ravel provided his pianist with islands of rest, where Von Oeyen could settle into an ostinato pattern, sitting up straight and looking comfortable, before he leaned into a new upwelling of notes, distinct as water droplets from a fountain.

The piece, begun as a tribute to the seventeenth - century composer, finished as a celebration of Ravel's close friends who died in the Great War.  While the notes often scintillate and skip up and down the keyboard, the composer layers some dissonance and deep hues in the harmony that hint that these aren't dances for now, but dances of memory.  The piece is non - stop pleasure, and may be my favorite of all music I know.  I'm grateful to Von Oeyen for helping me to hear it in a new way.

Von Oeyen followed up in the second half with Liszt's Sonata in B minor. For an encore, he played Robert Schuman and then a very Ravel - like version of Gershwin's "The Man I Love."

The Apostles' Creed as a Prayer

In a workshop on worship for mentors of the EfM program (Education for Ministry of Sewanee, The University of the South), I worked with fellow mentors Nanette and David to create a liturgy from the Apostles' Creed.

We were taking off from a suggestion in Diana Butler Bass's essay about the creed, that it can be recited as a kind of prayer (see blogpost in 02/2015 "Believing and Beloving"). The word "to believe" comes from German "lieben," or "love": "to belove." The word "creed" comes from credo, something different from the Latin word for "I have an opinion." "Credo" means something more like "I entrust myself to." So when we say the Creed as a checklist of intellectual propositions that we accept, we're short - changing it. Instead, we are declaring our trust in the beings of the Trinity, and pledging our lives to living the story that the creed tells.

We assigned each member of our group a passage from the Creed, written on a piece of paper, and gave everyone in the workshop time to find and copy on the page a text of scripture or from another source that illustrates or expands their passage. When it came time to worship, we read the creed in unison; then read it one passage at a time, placing the pages in the center of our circle at the end of each reading; then we recited the creed again.

The effect, we hope, is to make the creed what Bass imagines it to be, an icon of words. I explained that the creed would become like one of the stained glass windows at our meeting place, St. Philip's Cathedral [see photo]: we see the images of the window itself, but also can look through to the sky and world beyond.

Here's what we read today as a group in worship:


I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

A reading from Job ch. 38 - 39

Then the Lord answered out of the whirlwind: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?... Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place? Do you give the horse his might? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soar?"

I believe in Jesus Christ, his Son our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

A reading from Luke
The angel Gabriel was sent from God... to a virgin, and the virgin's name was Mary.... And the Angel said, "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus."

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead.

A reading from Luke 24.46
Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.

On the third day he rose again.

A personal meditation by Kathryn
Walking toward Cavalry, Jesus fell and rose, fell and rose again, three times. We, too, fall again and again. Thanks be to God who shows us how to rise again and again. And still we rise.

He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

A reading from Mark 16.19
And then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it.

He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

A reading from 2 Corinthians 5.10
For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.

And, from 1 Corinthians 4.5
Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time. Wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the matters of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints....

A reading from 1 Corinthians 1
I appeal to you brothers and sisters in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

...the forgiveness of sins...

A reading from Psalm 32.1
Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is covered.

An anonymous prayer found at Buchenwald
Think not of the pain inflicted by our captors, but the fruit borne by our condition, love, brotherhood, sacrifice, devotion; so that when our captors come to judgement, let the fruit borne be their forgiveness.

...the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Readings from the Book of Common Prayer, p. 493
I am the Resurrection and the life. Give us faith to see in death the gate of eternal life, until we are reunited with those who have come before. A personal comment by Fr. Holland: The resurrection occurs in life as well as in death.

A reading from Romans 8
Nothing can separate us from the love of God: no height or depth, no power or principality -- not even death itself.

A reading from John 3.16
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that those who believe in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

We repeated the Creed in unison. David suggests that, whenever possible, the papers collected at center should be burned at the conclusion of the creed, as an offering of prayer, like incense.

"All Saints": Refugees Revive an Episcopal Church

All Saints takes its title directly from an Episcopal church in Smyrna, Tennessee that lost a large number of parishioners who couldn't tolerate the national church's acceptance of a gay bishop and a female presiding bishop. Those left behind were stuck with the mortgage on a new building on new property. Tennessee's bishop sent Michael Spurlock, a young man fresh out of seminary, to lead services and oversee the sale of the property.

The title could also refer to a disparate group of individuals who came together from as far away as Myanmar to build that church into a vibrant center of worship, education, and service. The book tells the life story of Spurlock, who was an angry atheist before his relationship with opera singer Aimee Marcoux turned him towards the Episcopal church -- and marriage; Ye Win, guerrilla fighter for his Karen people against the repressive Myanmar regime; Bu Christ, Anglican priest operating at risk to his life in Myanmar; retired Gulf War veteran Paul Adams, problem - solver and agnostic who just happens to have had experience teaching English as a second language: these, and more, saints, all.


As we get to know their backgrounds, we see these people help each other. The influx of Karen people brings energy to the church, and parishioners step up to help ease the Karen into America. A parishioner in a power - driven wheelchair, recognized from a news story, hears someone say, "You're from that church that saved all those refugees." She replies, "No, all those refugees saved us!"


As these people learn to trust each other, they learn to trust in God's providence. Several times, Spurlock finds exactly the amount of money the church needs at exactly the moment he needs it -- which he sees as the answer to prayer. Readying the church for sale, Spurlock takes a lonely walk around the church's vast property and hears a voice -- "it wasn't mine!" he says later -- pointing out that the church has land and around 70 under employed Karen whose expertise is farming: together, they establish a farm that feeds Karen families, supplies local foodbanks, and makes a profit. When watering the acres proves impossible, Spurlock meets a man on a hiking trail who just happens to have a spare 1000 gallon water tank to give away. Are these divine interventions, or does the man of faith see what he looks for -- and does faith open him up to look for help?

The story portrays faith as openness to relationships, and the trust that develops through those relationships, not as a set of intellectual propositions -- although the pastor does run the agnostic Paul Adams through the Nicene Creed, checking off all the items that Adams has come to believe as he has worked with Karen, so impressed was he by the ways they've risked their lives for faith. Faith grows through habits of worship and intentional hospitality that build the community. In these ways, and in the willingness on both sides to honor the others' cultural differences, the book All Saints illustrates much of what I've been reading in books of theology this year.

The book, now adapted as a film, is by Michael Spurlock and Jeanette Windle, All Saints: The Surprising Story of How Refugees from Burma Brought Life to a Dying Church. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.

Atlanta Opera's "Dead Man Walking"

Jake Heggie was a novice at composing opera when acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally collaborated with him to adapt Sister Helen Prejean's memoir Dead Man Walking. But Heggie's background in both concert music and musical theatre served him well, first time out. Heggie's music propels the action, sustains tension under monologues, and ties scenes together thematically. Though I had not seen the opera since it was new (Cincinnati Opera, 2002), Heggie's music instantly brought back emotional memory of that first time: the dread during the prologue, the warmth of an original hymn tune "He Will Gather Us Around," and, most of all, the heart - breaking pavane as each parent remembers the last words they said to their children.

While the real Sister Helen Prejean speaks out against the death penalty, Heggie and McNally don't stack the deck. They leave no doubt that "Joseph DeRocher" (Michael Mayes, baritone) is entirely guilty, dramatizing his savage murder of a teenage couple; nor is there ever doubt that the death penalty by lethal injection will be executed on him. They don't make "Sister Helen" (Jamie Barton, mezzo - soprano) a saint: challenged to say if she "really" believes "this monster deserves to live," she replies, "I believe that is what my Lord and Savior wants me to believe. I'm trying to get there." Confronting the parents, she appears to be what they tell her that she is, naïve, oblivious to their needs while she attends to the convict, and ineffectual as she repeats, "I'm sorry... I'm sorry." Meanwhile, DeRocher is defensive, pugnacious, unwilling to admit his guilt.


Instead of taking one side, Heggie and McNally go inside: They ask, what good, if any, can be salvaged from the horrible situation that DeRocher himself created for himself and for all the others? One of the parents "Owen Hart" (Wayne Tigges, bass), remarks to "Sister Helen" that he and she are both victims of the killer. As many scenes take place in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, we also see that the inmates and officers are equally trapped, frightened, and resentful of each other.


Our sympathies are engaged most strongly when "Mrs. Patrick DeRocher" (Maria Zifchak, mezzo - soprano) testifies to a clemency board, her two younger boys watching, along with Sister Helen and the parents of the victims. Singing simply of her son when he was a child, she's interrupted by Mr. Hart's plain description of what DeRocher did to his daughter. What follows is the moment of the opera that I've never been able to discuss with anyone, because (even now) I tear up. (In 2002, I'd looked forward to seeing diva Fredricka Van Stade in the role; but I was so wrapped up in this drama that I didn't realize until intermission that she had been the mother.)

The singing actors played their roles with energy and integrity; the orchestra and chorus were strong and clear.

While Dead Man Walking sidesteps easy answers, one unfortunate image in Atlanta's production makes me uneasy in another way. Because the convicted killer is strapped down for lethal injection, his arms are spread in a manner that could be construed to make him Christ - like. I've surveyed still images from other productions to see that some designers have wisely chosen to play down that resemblance; only Atlanta's production punched it up, making the execution chamber's wall cruciform. That's a jarring and inappropriate statement imposed on the action. At his end, Joseph De Rocher seeks forgiveness, and he looks for love in the face of Sister Helen; but he is not anyone's redeemer, innocent sacrificial lamb, or a sacrifice of any sort. The designer's intrusion marred the production in its last moments.

[I met Jake Heggie a few years ago, at the Atlanta premier of his opera Three Decembers. See my post of 05/31/2015.]

Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in the Cosmos

For "The Drama of the Cosmos," final chapter of his book Mysteries of Faith, Mark McIntosh works with an analogy close to my heart: life is like a play, the divine Author and Director collaborating with us on our roles. But we're like McIntosh in his school's 8th grade musical, saying lines and pretending to feelings that he didn't understand (148). "Most of us engage in benign or humdrum exploitations of the world around us," he writes, while an actor "who is really living the part" will be able to risk "true presence" to others (147), and be "able to turn what was a mere stage prop into something significant and meaningful." The church, he says, teaches us how to live into our roles, to be present with others and to care for creation.

Further, McIntosh imagines humankind as "third - rate actors, rehearsing over and over again fragments of unrelated plays," little dramas that never connect (151). Jesus seems to have had the effect of drawing people out of those lives and into reality, as McIntosh cites the disciples' leaving their fishing boat in an instant (Mark 1.16-17), and the promise that we can become children of God (John 1.12-13). I've always read that promise as assurance of inheriting eternal life; McIntosh sees it as redirection of our present - day lives (150).

From the earliest pages of this book, McIntosh has written of "attention" to moments of beauty or tension that break through our lives, and "desire." That ties in with the drama analogy, too, as characters' desires, called "objectives," animate the actors in their roles. The threads of attention and desire tie together in the final chapter, where McIntosh observes how Jesus operates in his earthly ministry, not by "merely" preaching but by redirecting our desire. "He puts his hands on our heads and directs our gaze right through the world's antic posing to the One who loves him, and thus he suggests to each of us a new identity" (154). McIntosh gives us a wonderful passage from Augustine, a list of senses that God has transformed to new desire, ending with touch: "You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace" (155).

Observing that Jesus chose to form a community to share his ministry, McIntosh concludes the book making the case that we learn how to be our true selves through the church. He cites Simone Weil's idea that "'to be' most fully is to 'be for another'; our lives need "freeing up" from being "constrained, wasted, exhausted in self - preservation" (161). My qualm about all this is to observe that fellowship of teams, squadrons and even physical therapy clinics are all places where we practice giving and growth. What takes the church beyond those places? McIntosh's earlier chapters provide some answers: this kind of growth and care is what church is intended for, and the church plugs us into the intellectual - aesthetic - narrative universe of Anglican liturgy and theology.

(In a note, McIntosh credits Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, author of a five - volume exploration of Theo - Drama.)

Related Readings on this Blog
Blogposts about McIntosh's earlier chapters:

• "Not the Moral but the Story" concerns chapters 1 and 2 (01/19/2019)
  
• "How Episcopalians Believe" concerns chapter 4 (01/26/2019)
  
• "Jesus Saves - But How?" concerns chapter 6 (01/30/2019)

For more about redirecting desire and achieving communion with God through the institution of the church, see Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing. My response, "Spirituality Needs Community," was posted 09/27/2012. Also related to how Episcopalians believe is "Believing and Beloving," my response to Diana Butler Bass's "Christianity After Religion" (02/26/2015).
More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

Theology Before Breakfast: Forward Day by Day, Nov. 2018 - Jan, 2019

Each morning for many years, now, the quarterly publication Forward Day by Day has let me know where we are in the endless cycle of Scripture readings assigned by the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and has offered short responses by a different author each month. As I read, I often check mark insights that make me go "Ah!" or "Hmm." I distill those checked passages in my blog.

Episcopal priest Jeffrey Queen wrote for November 2018. Rachel Jones, associate editor of Forward DxD wrote in December. January's author has been Linda Buskirk, consultant for the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Gems in ScriptureThe authors Queen and Jones drew attention to facets of Scripture that I don't recall noticing before.

Ruth 1.16 Where you go, I will go. This promise of a young widow, a foreigner, to her bereft Hebrew mother - in - law, makes a sweet personal story. But Queen asserts, "In these words, Ruth is the voice of God" speaking to us. God's big "P" Promise of faithfulness to us feels more intimate and personal when I think of it in the context of Ruth's story.

Joel 2.21-22 Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things! Do not fear, you animals of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit.... We don't often think of Joel, nor of God's attention to creatures aside from ourselves. "Joel helps us expand [our] vision to consider the implications of God's salvation upon all creation." The author reminds us of saints Francis and Seraphim (19th century Russian orthodox saint), famous for their care of God's other creatures.

James 1.19-20 Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger... The passage is familiar; Queen applies it to our instant connectivity world - wide. In January, Linda Buskirk finds other parallels between ancient scripture and modern technology: the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us now includes "the Cloud". She sees a modern phenomenon in the "deluded" idol - worshiper of Isaiah 44.20, who cannot save himself or say, "Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?"

Here we are, millennia later, with churches closing for lack of attendance while crowds keep all night vigil for the newest smart phone. Ancient and modern idol worshipers share a common yearning, planted deep within each of us by our Creator. We yearn because the Holy Spirit whispers in our hearts, "There is more."

The authors sometimes offer aesthetic appreciations of Scripture. Jeremiah, in his fiery laments and enthusiastic hopes, speaks directly to the hearts of young adults, writes Jones. She compares the range of human emotions to a piano keyboard and says that Psalm 22 "hits all 88 keys." She never gets tired of seeing stars in the night sky as a "canopy" stretched above us by the Creator in Isaiah 4.5.

Analogies to ExperienceFor Christmas day, Jones observes that the Trinity gambled heavily on one modest 13 - year - old girl: she could have stayed frightened and refused. This was a succinct reminder of an insight gained at a retreat, where I first saw Henry Ossawa Tanner's painting of the Annunciation, and first read Denise Levertov's poem on the subject, both of which emphasize Mary's ambivalence. (See my blogpost of 12/04/2014).

"Our life's work is just to walk each other home." That simple image packs a lot of content. Jones takes it from Ram Dass, author of Here and Now (1971), brought to Jones's mind for the New Year's Eve reading from John's gospel about Jesus knowing where he's from and where he's going.

"A believer who lives 'unreflectively' is like a person with a well - stocked wine cellar who has never uncorked a bottle." That's from Meister Eckhart by way of Buskirk's response to Psalm 119.66, Teach me discernment and knowledge. She remembers the Episcopal Church when she joined in 1978, two years after the ordination of women, a time when the current prayer book was in its test run. She couldn't understand why there was so much upheaval. She seems to ask, What's discernment for, if you're afraid to explore your wine cellar?

Perhaps because Buskirk is involved with capital fundraising, she draws helpful analogies between concepts in Scripture and current law. When Jesus tells his disciples that they can achieve whatever they attempt in His name, Buskirk explains how her aging mother bestowed on her the power of attorney. "She relied on me to choose what was best. I had to rely on what I knew about her, what she valued and needed, to make those choices on her behalf." She continues:

Jesus grants us similar responsibility over our own lives. We can have a good chat with Jesus about our options, but honestly, an answer is not likely to float down on a dove. We must rely on our understanding of God's nature to know what to ask for and make decisions that will build up a safe, loving, peaceful kingdom that glorifies its Creator.

How Episcopalian of her that she imagines asking God for answers to prayer, not for individual matters, but for building up the kingdom on earth.

On the Feast of the Epiphany, Buskirk reminds us of "reading of the will" scenes, usually revealing dysfunction in a family. But she reminds us that we are heirs to Jesus, and I'm reminded how the assurance of my investments and Mom's Living Trust bolster my confidence even in rough times. (See another angle on that blessing in my blogpost of 12/30/2017, The Privilege is Mine).

To Paul's exhortation to "know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3.19), Buskirk confesses that she'd always thought the key to spiritual growth was to gain more knowledge. But she learned from Franciscan Sister Norma Rocklage, "To be really who we are, we need to subtract from ourselves, not add.... Our true self is to get rid of whatever we have piled on ourselves that gets in the way."


Finally, I take away from Buskirk's month of meditations a bit of advice for these fractious times, perhaps learned in business negotiations.

Consider an issue about which you are passionate. Invite someone with an opposing view to respectful, experimental conversation about this topic. Pose this question to each other: If laws and/or hearts in society were in agreement with your position, what would the desired outcomes be? Listen to each other's answers. Can you find common ground in the answers?

I imagine so. She writes this in response to Ephesians 4.7, But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift.


Action Items for EfM
Every page of the issue ends with an action item, something related to the meditation or Scripture to try or to ask. As a mentor in our church's chapter of EfM (see our class page), I'm often looking for ideas along those lines. Here are a few that strike me.

• The Jews' story, central to their whole lives as a community, is the Exodus. What's yours?
• What gamble have you taken?
• How does where you're from influence where you're going?
• Add a gratitude list to your prayer list.
• Tonight, even if it's cold, take a walk to appreciate the "canopy" of stars.
• Think what "gifts" you can share with your community (1 Cor. 12.4-6)
• Recall the last time you were changed or challenged by something in Scripture.
• Are there some treasures in your spiritual attic that you haven't opened and shared?

McIntosh, chapter 6: Jesus Saves -- But, How?

With a single matter - of - fact observation in the book Mysteries of Faith, theologian Mark McIntosh drives a stake through the heart of the Punishing God that has haunted me since seventh grade.

McIntosh is already deep into his chapter about how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus save us, when he drops in this observation: the Eastern Orthodox Church never developed the idea of a punishing God who required Jesus to pay Him for our sins. Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras writes that the Western Church, when it adopted this theory early on,

changed the truth of God by subordinating the freedom of his love to the relentless necessity of an egocentric and savage justice which demanded sadistic satisfaction.(128)

Yannaros attributes this difference to Roman law and western individualism. McIntosh adds, after Yannaros,

it is no wonder, given the dominance of this theory in the west since the time of the Reformation, that so many westerners have rebelled against such a punitive idea and ended up as atheists.

Been there, done that! Given a comic - book tract in 7th grade by a malicious Baptist named Sidney, I was first terrified at the image of the sinner being tossed in the lake of fire (screaming on the way down, "I didn't kno - o - ow!"); then, I was revolted at the notion that my buddy Gerald deserved eternal damnation for being Jewish, while Sidney would be saved. I became an angry atheist, a stance that I kept well into high school.

For McIntosh, it's the transactional, zero - sum, you've - only - got - one - life - to - live approach to living that demanded the death of Jesus. It's the approach that says, "there is only a limited amount of life to be had, and if I am going to have my share then yours must be crushed and poured out to me" (115). Because Jesus embodied God's bountiful love for all, he threatened the status of those who governed and held authority. They found laws and reasons to have him punished; Sidney and his ilk still do.

That same view is what the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus destroy. It's only in that view of scarcity that believers have to be scared. Jesus exposed that view as a lie when he became one of us, "so that through death he might … free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death" (Hebrews 2.15).

[Another blogpost (10/30/2018) brought together different threads of Christian tradition about the crucifixion's saving powers: "Angles on the Crucifixion." ]

For McIntosh, from the time we hid from God in Eden, straight through the Bible, sin has been our individualistic preoccupation with getting what we deserve -- reward or punishment. Jesus threatened those whose authority and privilege depended on rewards and punishments. In that way of looking at things, Jesus' death is a punishment. Jesus explains their view: "An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me." (John 16.2-3). McIntosh says that his resurrection, with healing and forgiveness, demonstrates the falseness of that approach (119), and also demonstrates that God had nothing to do with the Crucifixion.

But doesn't God punish sin? McIntosh says that we experience punishment, not because God lays it on us, but because, like an alcoholic confronted by loving friends who intervene, we feel like our identity and independence are under attack (133). The punishing God is "an idol, a projection of my own self - condemnation."

Throughout the chapter, McIntosh finds ways to say that Jesus embraces or "loves" death; he doesn't negate it. ("Death has to mean something," wrote poet Christian Wiman. (See blogpost of 08/03/2013) We can trust. "As this trusting mind of Christ begins to grow in us, the tyranny of sin and death is destroyed. Sin can no longer terrify us into hiding from God."

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

A Jung Man's Dream

In a dream I saw a cathedral carved from black stone at the peak of a mountain in a cold northern kingdom. The people there made their cathedral both beautiful and inaccessible, to be a pure gift to the glory of God. The king gave up his throne to serve as caretaker for the empty cathedral. I saw him, dressed in a monk's robe, walking in the warm sunlight tinted by colorful stained glass windows. He had my face.


That king was close friend to another king, another version of me, who ruled a southern coastal kingdom, noisy and thriving with trade and the activity of its energetic inhabitants. That king wrote his friend letters about how he longed to retreat to that mountaintop cathedral, but his people clamored for constant attention.

Both kings were eager to hear more from their sons who were exploring the world in a two - man boat.

[First two images: A composite of my dream, and sunlight through stained glass.]

A Dream from Jung DaysWhen a dream is just a rambling recital of images with meaning only to me, I keep it to myself. But when dreams of mine have confirmed the theories of psychologist Karl Jung, I share them on this blog -- in the interest of science, of course.

When I had that dream in the 1980s, Jung was all the rage. He was central to popular works by mythologist Joseph Campbell and theologian Henri Nouwen, bestselling novels by Robertson Davies, and a unique off - Broadway play by James Lapine, Twelve Dreams. (About Davies, see my reflections 07/23/2010, 04/14/2014 and 03/19/2016)

Jung's salient theories are that the language of dreams is metaphor; that our unconscious minds alert us in dreams to truths that we are too preoccupied to recognize in our waking lives; that the metaphors come, not just from our own experience, but from a great collective unconscious shared with all humanity across millennia; and that the universe also speaks to us through "synchronicity," meaningful coincidence.

The images of the dream encapsulated my sense of my life at that time: a school teacher among eighth graders in Mississippi, I was certainly king among clamorous southerners. An introverted Episcopalian, I've also felt removed from the people and business around me. That mountaintop cathedral was a fine image of how I live "in my head" with music, literature, art, and theology. The two sides meet in that boat, exploring the world, "at sea," moving on to the next place.

This dream urged me to move on to something new. While the fathers were committed to their stations, they felt joy knowing that their two sons were headed off to points unknown in their boat. At the time, while I was committed to teaching English and Drama, I was learning to regret not having majored in music. I'd been discouraged from it by the head of the music department at Duke (on the grounds that the music major was for performers and scholars, not composers), and I lacked the knowledge and facility of my musical friends. So I'd fallen back on two majors that came easily to me, literature and drama. Encouraged by the dream, I initiated private lessons with wonderful composer James Sclater (read about him at my blogpost of 11/02/2105).

The dream came to mind this month because of a story I heard on NPR's Snap Judgment about a modern - day hermit, Christopher Knight. Jung would probably attribute widespread interest in Knight to an unconscious collective need. A quick scan for "hermit" on the internet yields a "hermit" among the deck of Tarot cards, a repository of images that Jungians see as universal, collective archetypes. (About Knight, see my blogpost of 01/20/2019). Evidently, many of us can identify with Knight's yearning to escape the tug of relentless events and obligations.

As I was thinking about posting this dream, my browser unbidden offered up a photo of a real place that combines all parts of my dream, Turkey's island of Cappadocia where the ancient inhabitants of Uchisar carved their church and many homes into the stone of the mountain. Synchronicity?

Long Division

One playful dog and I
divided by

7 hours’ class
plus 3 of practice
plus 2 commutes (rainy, dark, and cold)

equals

me, jogging up the steps
dropping my books at the top

plus Mia
prancing at the open door, ball in her teeth,

over
        joyed.

About this little poem I wrote this poem to demonstrate to seventh graders that a poem and a math equation have a lot in common. An equation is a simple sentence with one verb, "equals," arrived at by reducing and simplifying all the terms to the common denominators.  In a poem, the writer reduces and simplifies all the details of a specific experience until it's expressed by its common denominators -- the details that the common reader will be able to appreciate.

To demonstrate, I showed the students the poem above, after I showed them my free write:

I remember I drove home after seven hours of classes and meetings and answering emails and grading papers and then dealing with two hours of musical rehearsals. Traffic was bad as it was in the morning, and the streets were wet, mist hit the window, and it was already dark. I thought about Mia, my pit bull – mix dog, probably hungry, probably lying on the couch, alone all day long. I worried about whether she was feeling anxious, and I felt guilty that I have to leave her alone so long when we’re doing a musical. I wouldn’t even be able to take her for a walk because of the rain. So when I parked my car in the garage, I pounded up the stairs and burst through the door, and there Mia bowed, stretched, wagged her tail, and dropped her yellow ball at my feet to play fetch.

To put it all in math terms adds a level of fun word play.  For a poem written at a stoplight on the way to school, it strikes me as pretty good.

How Episcopalians Believe: "Sanctifying Perceptions by Forming the Imagination"

"Singing it, you feel like you're praying," said Sharon.

Our choir at St. James Episcopal Church in Marietta GA had just rehearsed Morten Lauridsen's O Nata Lux for the umpteenth time, our director shaping our performance to be less about notes and more about texture, color, expressive phrasing, and dynamic contrast. Sharon and I agreed, we could've rehearsed it umpteen times more!

The inspiration comes only in part from the words. In Latin, the first line tenderly responds to the birth of baby Jesus, "O light born from Light," and the rest builds to ecstatic proclamations -- about what, I'm not sure; I've forgotten the translation printed inside the front cover of the music, but I feel -- we feel -- unified as a choir and in union with God when we sing it.

As the music was more than its words, what distinguishes Episcopalians may be less about what we say we believe -- and more about how we believe it.


How We Believe: Mysteries of Faith (McIntosh), Ch. 4I came to the Episcopal church from Bible study groups in college, rigorous about faith in a very college - boy way. Meeting in a dorm room after homework sessions, we could be forgiven for thinking that the Bible was a textbook and faith was a quiz. Check the right boxes for beliefs, disavow bad behavior, and you're going to graduate to a desirable place when you die.

For a series of books aimed at helping Episcopalians understand their church's salient qualities, theologian Mark McIntosh has written about how we come to know God in Mysteries of Faith. In chapter four, "The Voice of God," about revelation, he surveys how the idea of "knowing" something used to have another aspect, participatory and intimate -- as Adam "knew" Eve (74). Since the seventeenth century, "knowing" has been reduced to an intellectual assent to statements.

Interestingly, today both fundamentalists on one side and revisionist liberal Christians on the other remain locked into this early modern scientific approach to knowing. Revelation itself remains for them either encapsulated in tidy, numbered propositions or reduced to whatever domain of science they tend to favor most, such as psychology.

McIntosh's alternative to those views is that we come to know some things, such as the meaning of the word "love," only through experiences and relationships.

McIntosh cites professor / theologian Hans Frei's historical survey of the ways the faithful have read Scripture, seeing by the end of the 20th century two basic approaches. Scholars saw Scripture "as though it belonged either to the genre of literal historical record -- in which case conservatives claimed it was a reliable record and liberals that it was faulty -- or to the genre of ancient myth" (86).


For McIntosh, the Scriptures read aloud at every Episcopal worship service public and private, are like a sacrament. Episcopalians understand that to mean the outward and visible form, in a rite such as eucharist or baptism, of a spiritual reality. Scripture's "outward and visible forms -- stories, prophecy, poetry, letters -- are the revelation of God's invisible and ungraspable presence" (86).

McIntosh writes that we encounter God not through a bottom - line - pop - quiz lesson of Scripture, but through the language itself. He's describing what our choir experiences when we participate in creating music that is like a prayer. Earlier in the book, he has described how Scripture tells one overarching story from Genesis to Revelation, a story that super - charges the way we perceive our day - by -day lives. (See my reflection on earlier chapters, "Not the Moral, but the Story" 01/09/2019)

I recognize these ideas from other ancient sources. "As you pray, so you live," says one ancient source. Monasteries and abbeys imposed habits to form the souls of the religious, whose robes are called "habits." The same theory bolsters Islam, as the faithful must practice their faith daily with body, voice, and wallet. A thousand years ago, when "believing" had the active connotation of "beloving," St. Anselm said, "We do not understand in order to believe, but we believe in order to understand."


How We Believe: James K. A. Smith on "formative disciplines"A reading offered alongside McIntosh for this week's lesson in Education for Ministry (see EfM class blog) brings all of these thoughts into focus. Worship for Episcopalians, as for Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox churches, is guided by liturgy, those readings, songs, prayers, and rituals that take us through the whole story of God's love for His creation, day by day, season by season, year by year, cycles within cycles. Philosophy professor James K. A. Smith explains the theory behind all that in a succinct paragraph reprinted in EfM's Reading and Reflection Guide, 2018-2019, p. 118-119.

If historic Christian worship and ancient spiritual disciplines carry the Story that seeps into our social imaginary, this is in no small part because liturgical practices are also intentionally aesthetic and tap into our imaginative core. It is no accident that the poetry of the psalms has long constituted the church's prayerbook, nor is it mere coincidence that the worship of the people of God has always been marked by singing. …[The] inherited treasury of formative disciplines has been characterized by an allusivity and metaphoricity that means more than we can say.

Smith here packs in some phrases that together describe how Episcopalians are supposed to experience belief, through re-living in a social imaginary God's overarching Story, re - told every liturgical year through discipline of habitual prayer with song and scripture, morning, noon, and night, with corporate worship and eucharist weekly at least, until the metaphors and allusions, jumping to mind in all situations, meaning more than words can say, can sanctify perception by forming the imagination.

I must say, there's a huge "if" at the beginning of all that. Southern writer William Alexander Percy claimed in his memoir Lanterns on the Levy that the glorious phrases of the King James Bible and Prayer Book seeped into the sleepy brains of undergraduates at their mandatory morning chapel services, transforming them; but, perhaps, as a writer, he was already receptive. I meet Episcopalians for whom the music and repeated prayers are so much filler; what they want is a pointed message at the sermon, communion as a kind of vaccine against hell, and a blessing on the way out the door to real life.

There's another caveat about this emphasis on liturgy. Theologian Verna Dozier wrote Living into God's Dream as a corrective to those of us -- she means most of us -- who substitute worship of Jesus for following his example (04/03/2018). Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., writes in Jesus and the Disinherited about his shift of emphasis away from the other - worldly take - all - the - world - and - give - me - Jesus kind of faith to an emphasis on freeing the oppressed here and now (12/24/2015).

But readings like these by McIntosh and Smith have had their effect on me over the past few years. My morning ritual begins when I set up the coffee to brew while I feed the dog and prepare bookmarks in the Bible for readings. With my first cup of coffee, I start the prayer book's "Daily Devotions" for the morning (137). When I get to the Creed, I take the suggestion of Diana Butler Bass to think of it as a prayer -- not just, "I believe this is true" but also, "let these cosmic truths be the context for the day ahead." With plainchant to help me, I've memorized the service, and often repeat it in the car on the way to work, or even lying awake in the wee small hours of the morning. On stressful days, I can simply think the tune, and there rises in me that feeling of trust.

Is "a feeling of trust" enough to make Episcopalians into faithful servants of Jesus, the true "body of Christ" in our world today? I can only testify that the anxiety about obligations and nagging guilt about daily peccadilloes that I used to feel are tamed now by a quiet sense of God's pervasive presence. If I take that out with me out into the world, what difference does God make through me?

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

Other blogposts of mine relate to these ideas:

• "O Praise Hymn," (10/23/12) explains the expressions of the music, even apart from the words;
• "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before"(01/06/17) reflects on Inwardly Digest, Derek Olsen's guide to the Book of Common Prayer;
• I recall first becoming aware of the Episcopal church as a "full immersion" experience in "An Especially Good Friday"(03/26/16)

Dementia Diary: Imagine a Liturgy for Dementia

In a dream, I saw a service prepared in the chapel of the Episcopal school where Mom taught 33 years. Old colleagues had gathered and were prepared to speak tributes to her; children of grownup students that she had taught were prepared to recite a poem related to what she had given her students; my relatives were there, and my late father was watching anxiously from the side. Family and friends from her life in Valdosta GA had come up, bringing a young Min - Pin related genetically to Mom's beloved Sassy.


The altar was decorated with flowers and photos of Mom, brightly lit. A gently sloping ramp had been added, so that Mom could process alone down the aisle and up to the altar, as her unsteady gait makes steps risky.


Before the ceremony, she grew anxious about not remembering any of these people, of looking foolish. I hugged her close to assure her that we all loved her, and everyone wanted to bless her while she could still feel appreciated.

Episcopalian myself, I wondered during the dream about where this unfamiliar liturgy came from. It seemed to be modeled on the wedding ceremony, but who or what was waiting at the altar? Jesus, I suppose.

My dream left me feeling reassured, too. Mom is going alone up to a different existence, even as she continues to live. Let us accept that, and celebrate her life while we can.

[Photo: Mom's quite content to stay in bed to noon or later. I lured her up with a cup of coffee and Frank Sinatra on my phone, singing "One for My Baby"]

"North Pond Hermit" on NPR's Snap Judgment

The true story of a legendary hermit is so compelling that I didn't want to miss a syllable of today's broadcast on NPR's Snap Judgment. I stayed in the carport to hear the end on my car radio.


Writer Michael Finkel learned of the hermit through a news story that police had caught a man who, for twenty - seven winters, had taken small items from recreational cabins in dense woods far north in Maine. The mysterious burglar picked locks but broke nothing, and left the cabins as he found them, minus cans of beer (though never "lite"), food items, briefs (never boxers). Locals only surmised his existence, but no one had seen him. They named the hypothetical thief the "North Pond Hermit."


Finkel's imagination was piqued by another detail, that the hermit had stolen a thousand books over the years. The man, identified as Christopher Knight from a high school yearbook from the early 1980s, still wore the same glasses from his class picture. Knight refused to talk to other reporters and writers who contacted him through phone or email, but Finkel tried a handwritten letter, and got a terse reply that showed rigorous candor, an original style, and the dry wit of superior intelligence.

As the radio story proceeds, we learn that Knight simply wanted to be alone. He found social contact awkward, and he didn't see value in the pursuits that occupy our lives. Taking blankets, some food, and some clothes with him, he drove his car deep into the woods and moved around a couple of years before he found an ideal retreat under a tangle of branches, about twenty square feet. Finkel visited the place. "You can hear the wind without feeling it; you can see out, but no one can see in." Knight, never lit a fire, to avoid detection; and, adhering to his own strict code, communicated with no one, not even the residents who left notes inviting him to just list the supplies he needed. The exceptions were a chance encounter with a hiker, when Knight said one word, "Hi." When a grandfather, son, and grandson saw him, he heard the grandfather tell the other two to calm down and leave the man alone; Knight bowed once and disappeared again. Knight regretted only that he had to steal: of that, he was ashamed.

Apprehended, tried by a sympathetic court, he endured jail several months, then worked in his brother's business. Finkel visited, and Knight appeared to be doing fine. But in a unique moment of personal expression, Knight told him he was in agony. (This was my NPR "driveway moment.") Knight made eye contact with Finkel for the first time and asked, "Am I crazy?" Finkel reassured him. Knight told Finkel of the night when, starving, he couldn't walk around his hermitage to generate warmth in the sub-zero cold. Freezing under his blankets, he saw a "lady of the woods" who asked if he was ready to go with her. He perceived that she was Death, and told her, "Not yet." But now he was thinking of surrendering to her.

Reviewers of Finkel's book tell how the author draws on Thoreau's Walden and others' thoughts on "solitude and spirituality" to find resonance with the rest of us.

Knight's written words, read aloud, reminded me of the fictional character "Scobie" in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter who limits his speech and daily journal to purely observable fact and utter truth. Engaged in work and relationships, Scobie inwardly removes himself, a sort of hermit in the world. (See my blogpost 12/09/2014, "Saints in Spite of Themselves".)

Knight brings to mind another fictional character who retreats from a town of gossips and hypocrites in his late teens and never comes out of the family home in daylight again: Boo Radley.

The questions about how Knight survived are interesting, but the why of his story is what compels us; that, and the strained but deep relationship between the compassionate writer and his rebarbative subject. This is a book I may have to read. Thanks to Snap Judgment for yet another intense story to enrich our imaginations.

Men at Sixty: Ready for the Poetry of Donald Justice

When Garrison Keillor read Donald Justice's poem "Men at Forty" on the radio, I went straight to the nearest bookstore to buy Justice's New and Selected Poems. This was back when Keillor, radio, and neighborhood bookstores were all still "a thing," so, I guess it was twenty years ago, when I was just the age for Justice's greatest hit to speak directly to me. Other poems in the collection felt more remote. But, on the strength of "Men at Forty," I've kept the book by my bedside all these years, sampling it once in awhile between other books, learning gradually to appreciate his other poems. Now in my sixtieth year, I think I'm ready to relate to Justice.

Here's the quatrain that stopped me in my tracks:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

Making it general, about all those men in all their houses, Justice allows us to imagine ourselves stopped "on a stair landing." Between floors, as between youth and age, the men feel the solid house moving "like the deck of a ship / Though the swell is gentle."  The men reflect on mirrors:

They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret,
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.

The men are "more fathers than sons themselves, now." To here, the poem already evokes memories and, inevitably, feelings of loss. But Justice moves on to "something" that is "filling" the men, "like the twilight sound / Of the crickets, immense...." The nature of that "something" is a little dark, a little scary, but the movement is "gentle" and the sound of crickets at twilight is a delight: something is going to fill the lives of men at forty, and it seems to be something good. What is it? The poem is better for leaving that to imagination. (But I've read books about it. See Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, my blogpost of 7/18/2014).

At sixty-ish, Justice wrote "Invitation to a Ghost" in memory of a contemporary. "I ask you to come back now as you were in youth," he writes, "Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples." He remembers passionate long talks about poetry. Justice also seems to have lost his confidence, begging his late friend, "Come back now and help me with these verses. / Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life." Reading this now with silver on my temples, I, too, envy my twenty - five - year - old self his confidence.

With the self - doubt in age, however, comes recognition that those passionate and confident young men were also pretentious. A bad line, he reminds his ghost friend "could make you wince: we have all seen it." Justice writes in "Early Poems" of his own work, "How fashionably sad those early poems are!" and pictures them as so many suburban homes "on their clipped lawns" with porches where "bored children sprawl / Reading the comics before their parents rise / -- The rhymes, the meters, how they paralyze!" Justice comforts me with the thought that the loss of self - confidence may be the sign of a good thing, outgrowing cocksureness.

As Justice moved on in years, he moved backwards in view, paying tribute to parents, their parents, to his music teachers, and to the places that he lived in Georgia and especially in Florida. Justice's Selected Poems, published when he was 54, recall sensory impressions of homes and farms, long - gone relatives and piano teachers, "First Death," and "Childhood," which he dedicates to Wordsworth, Rilke and other "poets of a mythical childhood."

The one that somehow stays with me most is among the latest poems in the collection. It's "Vague Memory from Childhood," a re-working of images that he'd used for "Sonatina in Yellow" published in 1973. He remembers "Vast far clouds … darkening /At the end of day," birdsong, and aunts' voices through an open window, while he played outside in the dust, "Caught up in a sort of dream / With sticks and twigs pretending," when someone indoors lights a lamp, "Printing a frail gold geometry on the dust." He has captured a memory very specific to him that I feel I've experienced. Like "Men at Forty," there's that impending darkness, but also the pleasure of being in one's own dreamy world, finding life in sticks and dust, alone, yet bathed in familiar voices and the "frail" golden light, muntins of the window criss - crossing to cast a shadow of foreshortened rectangles.

For an epigraph to the collection, he prints three lines, returning to the "Orpheus" myth:

Orpheus, nothing to look forward to, looked back.
They say he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.

"Nothing to look forward to?" My life isn't so bleak at 59. But I enjoy looking back through Donald Justice's eyes, and look forward to appreciating his poems more in years to come.

"Wild Fire" by Ann Cleeves: Everyone is an Island

The Shetland Islands have provided novelist Ann Cleeves an ideal backdrop for mystery. Their remoteness from the mainland and isolation of their small communities from each other narrows the range of suspects to a few that readers get to know well. Cleeves has found ample opportunity for atmospheric word painting in the stark contrasts of the Shetlands' landscapes and weather. (Read my blogpost, "She Knows Her Place" 11/28/2014.) For Wild Fire, last in her series, she makes certain characters' emotional remoteness a theme that resonates with the setting.

The most sympathetic of these characters is Christopher Fleming, an eleven - year - old on the autistic spectrum. He appears at the end of the first chapter, a small boy drawn to a bonfire set up by local teenagers; they turn to mock him. Soon we learn that Christopher, obsessed with fire, once lit a small fire at school, fueling townspeople's malicious gossip aimed at the boy and his parents, newcomers from London.

Least sympathetic is a young woman named Emma. Nanny to children of another family, the Moncriefs, she has had an ill - concealed relationship with Christopher's father. At that same bonfire, she watches with a small smile while the bullies torment the child. When she's murdered soon after, none of the other characters seems to be broken up about it. She, too, was emotionally guarded and secretive, though she drew attention by hand - made dresses emulating high fashion of the late 1950s. "Her life was a performance" says one character (111); "if you got through the style and the make - up, there was nothing there" (113).

Even the lead investigators are estranged from each other. In the first Shetland books, Detective Jimmy Perez met Fran, an artist, married her, then saw her killed. Blaming himself, he fell into a depression that became a drag on the series. Cleves refreshed the story when she introduced a new supervisor for Jimmy, free - spirited Willow. But now, as their relationship deepens, Jimmy in his guilt retreats into his corner again, leaving Willow to commiserate with Jimmy's affable lieutenant Sandy:

He looked at her. 'Are you two alright?'

'Of course,' she said and then, thinking he deserved more than that, 'just a couple of things we need to sort out. Sorry, it must awkward for you.'

'He's not an easy man,' Sandy said. There was a long pause that he clearly hoped she'd fill with more information. When none was forthcoming, he added, 'But if anyone can handle him, it's you.' Another pause. 'You brought him back to us, after that business with Fran. I'll always be grateful for that.' He turned away from her, suddenly embarrassed by the intimacy of the comment. Only the beetroot tinge to the back of his neck stopped her from becoming emotional herself. But seeing his awkwardness, it was a struggle not to laugh. (190)

If other characters are enisled, Sandy's a natural bridge. His humility, compassion, and increasing competence make him the single most delightful character in the series.

While Cleves maintains her third person narrative voice at all times, she gives us the action from different characters' perceptions, sometimes covering the same scene from different perspectives in consecutive chapters. For example, Jimmy glimpses Christopher's parents through a window, and feels that he was "intruding on a moment of intimacy" (64); the next chapter, opening up that moment from the wife's perspective, shows that it was anything but. The first two chapters set up the pattern, as we see the scene of mob cruelty to Christopher at the bonfire, first through Emma's perceptions of it, then via the man at her side.

Cleeves makes a structural use of that bonfire scene. Probing memories of the bonfire time and again throughout the novel, she adds layersa of significance to the details, until our picture of that event is completed at the same moment that the story reaches a climax packed with action and emotional resonance. Shifting the perspectives on the action adds suspense.

In a remarkable chapter, Cleeves takes us into Christopher's strange and beautiful mind. His mother was the one to discover Emma's body in one of the Flemings' outbuildings, and the detectives are searching the grounds. Christopher, who seeks comfort in routine and computer screens, finds "the magic of the screen didn't work":

He was still troubled, not by the break in routine, but by pictures that came into his head, blocking the familiar images on the screen, so he found it impossible to concentrate. This had never happened before. He got to his feet and began to pace backwards and forwards across the bedroom floor, from one window to the other, in an attempt to shake the pictures loose, to send them on their way. It didn't work. Whatever he did, Emma Shearer was lodged in his head.

He walked quicker and tried to order the images, to control them. He decided to treat them like the Pokémon cards he collected. He liked to place the Pokémon characters in the order in which he'd collected them....So he allowed the pictures of Emma Shearer to flash through his head and he sorted them chronologically. (163)

By this device of chronological images, Cleeves efficiently gives us more of Christopher's perspective than he is able to give to the detectives. Christopher remembers that bonfire:

Then, he hadn't seen Emma at first. He'd sat at the top of the bank and watched the wild bird shapes of the flames and felt the sharp, stinging heat. Then they'd turned and seen him. Emma had laughed with the rest of them. Her thin face turned towards him, sharp - edged. She'd looked like a bird herself, pecking towards him, mocking.(164)

This peek into Christopher's efforts to control his mind endears him to us, even while it intensifies our image of Emma's character.

I've often felt in the Shetland books that Cleeves has left herself too much for the detectives to explain following the denoument; but in this one, everything comes together in a way that feels inevitable, and the reveal makes sense, leaving little to explain. Instead, we have a sorting out of relationships, a very satisfying conclusion to the series.


Ann Cleeves. Wild Fire. New York: Minotaur Books, 2018. See links to my posts about many other works by Ann Cleeves on my Crime Fiction page.

Not the Moral, but the Story: Ch.1-2 in "Mysteries of Faith" by Mark McIntosh

[Reflection on Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh, Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Chicago and associate professor of systematic theology and spirituality at Loyola University. The book is part of The New CHURCH'S TEACHING SERIES (Chicago: Cowley Publications, 2000.]

"We do theology not to be clever or well - informed," writes professor and priest Mark McIntosh, "but in order to be drawn into God's own life," a process that McIntosh compares to reading a novel. Drawn into a good novel, we get a "lift," a broadening of horizons, even when we return to our "daily round" (5-6). Theology should do that, he says, keeping us aware of resonances between the daily round and the story of God. In the first two chapters that I've read, McIntosh focuses on those moments of resonance that he calls "mystery."

To explain "mystery," McIntosh tells of his visit to Grand Canyon. It "vanished: when I stepped back just a few feet from the edge... I was completely unaware that this huge reality was right before me." That image helps him to make his point that theology "is walking up to the edge and noticing the mystery before you" (1). Many moments in our lives have this kind of "mystery" or depth to them when we're caught up short. Feeling hurt, or ecstatic, or compassionate, is a starting place; the next step is to find meaning in such moments from context, the intersection of our life experience with others' stories. Knowing God's story from Creation to Revelation, we can find our place in that. Once we understand that others are equally part of that story, we have to recognize, as C. S. Lewis writes, "There are no ordinary people" (9).

In McIntosh's terms, God initiates a conversation through those moments; we've "heard" God when we connect them to Scriptural stories; we converse with God through prayer. These steps or "moments" can be sequential, or a recursive process. Paying attention to these moments, connecting them to stories, and relating to God in prayer: to make these the habit of our lives, he says, is the purpose of theology.  Without it, life becomes like TV talk shows, just a stream of "banal hysteria" in nine - minute segments (14).

McIntosh uses a Christmas memory to explain other aspects of "mystery." McIntosh remembers  coming home from midnight mass with his parents and three siblings. Being the youngest, he was made to wait in new - fallen snow outside his family's picture window while he watched a procession of gifts being stacked by his parents and older siblings.

What entranced me so on that snowy night long ago was not the glimpse of presents, although that was part of it. A deeper kind of marvel tantalized me as I watched my family moving through the house. It seemed that the happiness I could see on their faces and the bounty they carried in their arms were signs of all the love and joy I longed for in our life together. For a moment, though I stood outside peer in, I had been granted a vision of the secret heart and soul of our family. (25)

Like the Grand Canyon anecdote, this is a deep moment, a "mystery," one that he says we recreate in the Episcopal church:

An empty room slowly fills as people trickle in, and soon it becomes a place of prayer filled with all the longing, hope, and pregnant quiet that prayer brings with it. Then a designated band moves up the aisle and into that mysterious space the altar gathers round itself. Later, another group with lights and sacred book comes back down into the people's midst, speaking a Word too intimate to be uttered from far away. Later still the whole place breaks into movement as the flow of communion draws all into its pattern of life poured out, given freely away.

Looking in that window, he also suggests, is the way we "see" the Trinity, longing to be part of it (29).  He writes later that the Spirit is the conversation between Father and Son (no hierarchy involved, here), and that we are what they're talking about.  The trinity isn't a patch up effort after mankind failed to live up to expectations, but the essential communal nature of God(31).

McIntosh's theology connects at many points to what we do in Education for Ministry (EfM), the program that assigned his book.  Each year, we tell our life stories to each other, forced to rethink our stories from a particular angle; McIntosh's emphasis is on seeing God's work in our lives, in the long run.  Each week, we practice theological  reflection, often starting from a "moment of mystery" that one of us has experienced, and we connect those (1) to our own experiences and (2) to novels and movies and (3) to Scripture.  Then, there's this description of a "Jacob" moment that we may have experienced, feeling that we are in the presence of God when we see, perhaps, "the sun set over a northern lake with the sky so richly purple and red you could hardly breathe..." (40).  Isn't that the watercolor, made recently by co - mentor of our EfM group, Susan Rouse?

Finally, he stresses that we relate to stories, and that faith is a relationship, not a bunch of teachings.  Prayer, he says, isn't our effort, but, as Paul writes, the spirit in us (46).  "The work of prayer is the activity of God the Holy Spirit freeing us from the grasping, frightened, self - important bundles of instincts we have been taught to think of as our true selves in order to discover the deep, strong, and passionate person we are created to become in Christ (47)."

Theology can't remain in the abstract, but must be related in our living (11).

More about McIntosh's BookMcIntosh, Mark. Mysteries of Faith. Vol. 8 in The New Church's Teaching Series. New York: Cowley Publications, 2000.

I've responded to other chapters in other blogposts:

• (01/09/2019)"Not the Moral, but the Story" about chapters 1 and 2.
  
• (01/26/2019)"How Episcopalians Believe" considers chapter 4, along with other sources
  
• (01/30/2019)"Jesus Saves - but how?" about chapter 6
  
• (02/12/2019) "Theologian Mark McIntosh Sees Drama in Cosmos" about chapter 7.

Reflecting on "Roma"

The first minutes of Roma tell us what the author - director Alfonso Cuaron has in store. We're looking down on square tiles, oriented to be diamonds across the screen. While credits fade in and out, white on the light gray stone, we hear no music, but we gradually pick out sounds of water splashing, birds, distant cars, a distant dog barking. Then water washes across the tiles, and we now see the reflection of a morning sky, a plane flying across a square of skylight. At last, we see that it's a young indigenous Mexican woman throwing soapy water on the tile, scrubbing it down.

 This movie will be told through patterns, the daily routine of a middle - class Mexican household in 1971, following in the steps of that young woman Cleo, played by Yalitza Aparicio, one of the family's two housekeepers. We will see Cleo waking the children, speaking tenderly to them, picking up their things, helping them to undress for baths, serving their breakfast. We will see her washing laundry by hand and hanging it up to dry on the rooftop; we will see her joining the family in front of the TV after dinner, before she's sent off to fetch tea for the father; we'll see her turn out all lights in the house before she goes to bed. In the morning, she will again scrub that tiled walkway.

 As the water makes a reflective surface of the pattern, we've the hint that this movie will be the director's reflection on life during his own childhood. In an interview on NPR's Latino USA(12/10/2018), Cuaron told how he was about the age of the youngest boy in the story, a charmer who tells Cleo about "when he was older" flying planes or sailing ships. The sounds we hear at the start are the sounds of Mexico City he remembers from the early 1970s. He chose to make the soundtrack for his movie from nothing but remembered sounds and diagetic music - pop songs on radio, a pretty bad military band, and a street vendor's wonderful musical whistle.

 As the water that washes across the tile leaves the pattern intact, so events wash across this family's life. Big events happen that would be the central episodes in a more common melodramatic kind of movie: fire, earthquake, adultery, the infamous Corpus Cristi massacre of student demonstrators. Here, they pass, leave their effects, and draw Cleo closer to the family she's employed to care for.

  Cuaron says that he based Cleo on the housekeeper in his own childhood. He explores what that time must've been like for her. She's close to the family, but can also be disregarded in a minute, commanded by a child to stop speaking her indigenous language, or berated viciously by the children's mother. We hear about her mother and how government policies are hurting her native village, and she tells a friend about her village. Cuaron follows Cleo on dates with a young tough who, learning she's pregnant, leaves her so fast that he forgets his jacket; Cuaron follows her to a slum outside the city where she confronts him; follows her to the hospital in labor. The emotional impact of that story is very strong. She has some allies: a kind doctor, fellow servants. When the children's father moves out to live with his a mistress, the mother commiserates, "a woman is always alone."

Leaving the theatre, I asked my friend Susan if she thought the mother's line was the "thesis" of the movie, that a woman is always alone. Susan thought, maybe, but then cited another moment in the movie that offers something more positive that defies description in words. We see a Mexican media figure, guru cum Hulk Hogan, when he challenges a field of martial arts trainees to do a yoga - like pose that requires immense inner stillness and concentration: "You won't be able to do it with your eyes closed." A hundred recruits fail, but, trying the pose from the sideline, Cleo succeeds.

 I remembered a moment when the whimsical littlest boy joins Cleo on the roof while she hangs laundry. He lies down and won't answer her questions; he says that he's dead. She lies down too, so that the tops of their heads touch. "What are you doing?" he asks. She says, "I can't tell you. I'm dead." After awhile, she adds, "I like being dead." The camera pans from them and her clothesline, to show housekeepers on rooftops hanging laundry as far as we can see.

Susan later sent a text. She had heard NPR's critic Bob Mondelo extol a scene when Cleo watches over the children on the beach, a tracking shot "that packs more drama in five minutes than most movies have in two hours." Susan writes:

Bob Mondelo talking about the long beach take made me start thinking about what we saw instead of what was said. And we saw more than what was said. At the end we see her ascend -- albeit with a big bag of laundry.

After that shot, the director flashes a dedication, possibly to the "Cleo" of his childhood.

Cuaron also pays tribute, macabre but memorable, to beloved dogs of generations past, and includes at least one dog at every location of the film where a dog could possibly be included.

The film maker also takes us to the neighborhood movie palace, which must have been an inspiration for him. We get a minute or two of a 1969 astronaut movie MAROONED. Is that a meta - cinematic cross - reference to Cuaron's own GRAVITY?

Echoes of my Teacher's Voice

For Episcopalians, the new year started four Sundays before December 25th, and we're still celebrating Christmas. (It's the seventh day, time for swans a - swimming.) So I'm reflecting on a gift that the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer gave me in today's morning devotion time: several memories of my long time mentor Frank Boggs, now in his 92nd year.

[Photo: Selfie with Frank on the balcony of his apartment, June 2017]

Following many days of inspirational passages from Isaiah, I turned with a sigh to the relatively dry book of Numbers for the passage assigned for today, 6.22-27, to find that it's the only passage in that book that I'd circled, one that I can recite, and sing, from memory: "The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you...." A hundred times or more, under Frank's direction, I've sung those words to Peter Lutkin's rich music, a cappella, holding hands with close friends - in concert; on tour in South Carolina, Russia, Poland; at the ends of long days of summer rehearsal; at reunions.

I think of Frank each morning anyway, adding him to the list of people that our parish prays for, because -- well, he's 92. But this reminder in the reading was a nudge to write a note.

Then the Psalm appointed for the morning is the 8th, with another passage that I can recite by heart: "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? … Oh, Lord our God, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth." This touches a memory from way back, one of my first days of chorus with Mr. Boggs. We rehearsed this piece just a few times and put it away. At the time, faith meant less to me than Top 40 hits and show music. But Frank had us contemplate the meaning of these words, and he urged us to bring a sense of wonder in our voices and faces when we sang the text. I still hear his voice, speaking the words in crescendo, impending like a train, "How majestic is Thy name IN ALL THE EARTH!"

Coincidence, or God talking to me? I'm leery of people who see God's hand in coincidences. I prefer G. K. Chesterton's remark that coincidences are God's "puns." The next reading, from Galatians, didn't have any particular associations with Frank. But then I read the gospel.

Luke 2.15-21 is about the shepherds leaving the Christ child. Thanks to Frank, I know what they said, and I know that they were singing music by Hector Berlioz, arranged by John Rutter, my favorite Christmas piece for over forty years:

Blest are ye beyond all measure,
Thou happy father, mother mild!
Guard ye well your heav'nly treasure,
The Prince of Peace, The Holy Child!
God go with you, God protect you,
Guide you safely through the wild!

As coincidences go, finding three connections to Frank Boggs in the scriptures for today isn't so remarkable. With memories of Frank's lessons categorized under so many headings - education, music, theatre, faith, friendship -- it would be more remarkable not to find some echo of his voice in my week.
But for this seventh day of Christmas, the coincidence was a sweet gift. (UPS, take back the swans)



Earlier Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• Tributes to My Teachers: Frank Boggs, choral director(11/9/15)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews I've written over the past twelve years.

For more about the liturgy in the Episcopal Church, see "An Especially Good Friday"(3/26/2016) and "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before" (1/6/2017). Frank Boggs gave me a deep appreciation for musical theatre; I see Episcopalian liturgy as musical theatre -- only the parishioners are participants, not audience, and the story envelopes our lives 24/7: "Liturgy as Theatre" (3/23/2013). Much more is at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians.