Mary Karr's "Sinners Welcome": Discomfort and Joy

A hand at your back gently pushes you out into your life: the image appears in poems that open and close Mary Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (New York: Harper Perennials, 2006). In between, the poems help us to feel both the stifling power of the boxes that encase us and the joy of escape.

Not having read Karr's trend-setting memoirs, I pieced together from different poems the narrative of a mother who grows up with her son. He's a nearly-mythical being, angel or god-baby, born in a hurricane, appearing "in a flash...a tiny blaze" as trees fell and power lines "snapped and hissed like cobras" ("A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son" 62). From a tiny "pearl" he grew to be a "muscled obelisk" now "pawing" through the refrigerator for a snack. She remembers his Mother's Day gift, an aquarium full of crickets singing "as if I were the sun / Which I was, I guess, to him, / and him to me" ("Pluck" 29-30). In his room after he's gone to college, she reflects,

If you've never been a kid, and choose to raise one, know
he'll wind up raising you. From whatever small drop
of care you start out with, he'll have to grow an ocean
and you a boat on which to sail from yourself
forever, else you'll both drown. ("Son's Room" 54)

In this poem, she calls her alcoholism a "sarcophagus" that "boxed" her in before his baby cries "ripped through the swaths of ether I hid in." Nearly twenty years pass in a line as "he grinned up and eventually down / to me from his towering height" and his breathing, his life, freed her from her "ribcage," her self.

A series of poems surtitled "Descending Theology" expresses the abstract doctrine of the Trinity in terms physical enough to make us squirm. The surtitle references the Nicene Creed, the Lord "came down from heaven."  In other places she refers to God's incarnation by that word's literal meaning "enfleshment," as when the crucified Christ, separated from his body, "ached for two hands made of meat / he could reach to the end of" (61). Her version of the familiar Christmas story is not for the squeamish:

But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid
the child knew nothing
of its own fire....
He came out a sticky grub, flailing
the load of his own limbs...
("Descending Theology: The Nativity" 9)

The Trinity pervades her retelling of the Crucifixion. She spares no gruesome detail as she describes the nails, the sagging rib cage, the suffocation, wondering "if some less / than loving watcher / watches us." Then "under massed thunderheads" the man on the cross feels his soul "leak away, then surge" as "wind / sucks him into the light stream" and "he's snatched back, held close" (52). In Karr's imagination, the Resurrection is wholly physical, the word "Spirit" translated literally as "breath": "In the corpse's core," she writes, "the stone fist of his heart / began to bang on the stiff chest's door / and breath spilled back into that battered shape." She rounds out the Trinity with the assurance to us, "Now it's your limbs he longs to flow into... as warm water / shatters at birth...."

Being freed from an enclosed space (tomb, womb, room, rib cage) to draw in air is often part of the experience in this collection. She writes in "Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife" that she now will "glorify the force that stayed" her mother's hand from using the knife on five-year-old Mary (59), and that an "aperture" opened in her heart "(not a dagger slot)" moving the child to "guzzle down breath like sweet spirits // as if a pillow just slid off my face" (60). A sullen juvenile delinquent whom the poet once tutored seemed a hopeless cause, though there's a hint of connection and regret when she writes to him "you ignored -- when I saw you wave at lunch -- my flinch," and she hopes that, in prison, "some organism drew your care," even if it was just a cockroach, or "some inmate / in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut / since he lacked hands" so that the "stone" could "roll back" from the "tomb hole" in his heart (12). I stopped breathing as her lines drew me into the experience of a man falling through ice and being whipped by the current downstream, "numb lips pressed to the river's spine, to suck slid inches of air" ("The Ice Fisherman" 50).

These motifs mix with gratitude in her evocation of a live performance of Mozart's Piano concerto in "A Major" (16). She plays freely with language, as when she puns on a "corps" of players "in funeral dress" lining up around the piano that's like a "sarcophagus" as it contains, like an Egyptian tomb, "flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds, Egyptian forest groves." The "dread-locked," "lion-headed" soloist "strides" to the piano (Awadagin Pratt - I recognized him before I saw the dedication) - the orchestra's bows tilt "like the tiny masts of lifted sails," and the "piano's notes unknot / some inner ropes in me." When there's a "wave," we're thinking of nautical metaphors, but it's the "broad wave of the maestro's wand" that sets off the musical journey, "the notes skittering us along like surf." At the end of the concert, crying, she reflects "I never haven't breathed so long." In this poem, as in others, she has associated regimentation and order with cages and death, but this time she puns, "I've seen a death with order, meant but no way mean." The pianist has "sprung our sternums wide / and freed us from our numbered seats."

Other poems tell of the challenges and consolations of writing. "I came awake in kindergarten," she writes, "caged" in a desk "under the letter K," reflecting now that "in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid," its names and vows, and how, when she comes to "the valley of the shadow of blank," she can lean on her "spinal K," i.e., letters, "a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am" (3). A harsh word in grad school from a celebrated teacher opened her "un-mascara'ed eye" to see the challenge of an "intricate" world "impossible // to transcribe on the small bare page" (15).  Recreating childhood observations of her family at home on an ordinary day, she tells how her-ten-year old self grabbed paper to write it down ("Still Memory" 65).

In this collection, gratitude is the emotion that comes across most, for an interested student who "knows what I know, or used to know" ("Winter Term's End" 34); for teachers and colleagues;  and for a once-fierce cat who, leaning into her for comfort at the end, leads her to pray, "Lord, before my own death,/let me learn from this animal's deep release into my arms" (47). There are poems of regret and some that made me cringe. Even with those, as she observes in her essay, "There's always joy in seeing how others see, even when it entails a stab of pain" (89).

In an afterword "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," Karr writes that learning to pray "thank you" was her entry into faith and out of addiction. Long before she believed in God, she'd felt the "awe" of poetry, how a poet far away in time and space could connect to her life. Now she aims to express joy in her work, though she admits "I still tend to be a gloomy and serotonin-challenged bitch" (90).

I like to think that those hands pushing gently at the open and close of the book are a sly suggestion of hands pressed together, framing the poetry as prayer.

Firebombing and Force: What's "Strong?"

Both sides - the demonstrators who told WABE "we tried non-violence and it didn't work [so] burn [Atlanta] down!" and the President who threatened looters with "thousands and thousands" of armed soldiers and "vicious attack dogs" -- are deluding themselves that one great show of strength will end the problem once and for all.

To impose discipline once and for all, I did the worst things I've ever done -- hitting the dog, losing my temper at a student. Even when you get the satisfaction of feeling your power over others, their fear of you builds a reservoir of rage and resentment. Whatever you hoped for -- a loving pet, students eager to learn from you, a community of mutual trust and respect -- you've doomed it. Next time, the demonstrations of power on both sides will be even more destructive.

Our President called governors "weak" and threatened to override them with "strength." He said, "You're dominating or ... you're a jerk." In response, commentator George F. Will called the President a "weak person’s idea of a strong person, [a] chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities" (June 1).

If our President were to open the Bible he brandished the other night, he might see numerous times when his kind of "strength" failed God Himself, when awesome force failed to make His people do right once and for all. God tried expulsion from Eden, a world-wide flood, fire from heaven, and opening the earth to swallow the rebels. Psalm 78 alone gives 72 verses' worth of God's forceful actions that didn't have lasting effect. It works the other way, too: when emperors exerted force to make the Jews bow down to them once and for all, the Jews refuse, dance in the furnace, sleep beside lions, and light the menorah.

Jesus lived under oppression from his birth to his death. The massacre of babies at his birth was to protect Herod's claim to the throne; the crucifixion was to stop the Jesus movement once and for all. Theologian Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., outlines how other Jews resisted Roman oppression. Some, such as Herod and the much-reviled tax collectors, cooperated with the Romans; the Pharisees enforced Jewish identity and separation from the Romans; the Zealots advocated violent insurrection. Among the apostles of Jesus were some from each group. Thurman shows how each of their ways came with an intolerable cost, from loss of self-respect to violent retribution.

Jesus offered another kind of strength: radical respect for the other, love on a societal scale. Jesus stood up, told the truth to the religious and political authorities, but did not shun Nicodemus the Pharisee nor the Roman centurion whose daughter was ill. At the start of his ministry, Jesus refused Satan's temptation to bring about the kingdom of God by power. Jesus exalted the poor and weak and welcomed outcasts and foreigners. Asked would he forgive anyone as many as seven times, he replied, "Seventy times seven." When Peter defended him, Jesus commanded Peter to put the sword away. Hanging from the cross, he was mocked for having power to save others but not himself.

In our present context, what would Jesus' kind of strength look like? Our creator "became flesh and dwelt among us," says John's Gospel. I imagined what would happen if police officers facing a crowd were to take off their armor, put down their weapons, and join the demonstration. To my surprise, I learned that's what happened in Flint, Michigan and other places around the country. [See collage]

So, once again, the second time in just a couple of weeks, a camera has broadcast the killing of an unarmed black man by white men confident the state will back any white man who claims to have felt threatened by a black man. Once again, while politicians express dismay at the most recent killing, some (such as the President's spokesman Jake Tapper) deny that this kind of event happens routinely.  Once again, both sides face off.

Once and for all, can we agree that there's a better way?

Blogposts of related interest:
• Racism is about fear before it's about hate (07/2016)
• Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy. (12/2015)
• A year before George Will called the President a "weak person's idea of a strong person," I wrote how this president is a 13-year-old boy's idea of a great leader: America's First Teen President and Other Adolescent Power Fantasies (07/2019).

Theology for Breakfast: Keepsakes & Armor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Memorial Day: "Mostly Ghosts" by Bee Donley

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

Dementia Diary: What Virus?

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

Good news: "Really? What virus?"

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

Asynchronicity for Deep Dive Education in Middle School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Sondheim, We're Still Here

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

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

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


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


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

Theology for Breakfast: "Faith in God is Never Abstract"

Some mornings, reading meditations on the day's scripture in Forward Day by Day, I mark ideas that I should reflect on again and again. The author of meditations for February 2020 was Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity Church, NYC. Reviewing what I checked there, I see a theme emerge, coalescing in a single strong statement: "Faith in God is never abstract."

The context for Fr. Mark's statement is Psalm 89.2, "You have set Your faithfulness firmly in the heavens." Fr. Mark reminds us Episcopalians of the baptismal vows that we've renewed many times, actions that we are to take. I'm reminded that the ancients called the sky "firmament" because they envisioned it as a solid globe that revolved around us.

In other writings, Fr. Mark asks us to remember specific acts in the life of Jesus, and specific people in our own lives, that demonstrate grace.

When we remember the gracious acts of others we live more graciously. Recounting the gracious deeds of the Lord also encourages and instructs us about how to behave with grace. Nothing keeps our hearts more full of compassion and love than when we celebrate God's grace in our lives. (February 18).

Back in February, the daily readings were taking us through the stories of Abraham, reminding Fr. Mark that "the Bible is, at its heart, a love story" (February 7). He explains, "Abraham knows what he wants - a family, a place to belong - and finds these things in his relationship to God." God loves Abraham even when the old man errs. Fr. Mark continues,

Abraham and Sarah fall in love with God and each other, over and over. They teach their family to do the same, and in good time Isaac and Rebekah begin to write their own love story to God. Jacob and Leah and Rachel follow soon after, and the children of Israel are firmly established according to God's promises.

One meditation isn't by Fr. Mark, but from the dark days of World War II, Forward Day by Day of November 26, 1944, reprinted now as part of a celebration of Forward's 85th anniversary. That day, the meditator described looking out from windows along the spiral staircases of old watchtowers in Europe. Windows may look in the same direction at the same things, but the perspective is different as you advance up the stairs. In the same way, our perspective on passages in scripture and events in our own lives change with time.

Firmness, remembering specifics, following our vows: these are faith, not in abstract, but in deed.

"Deep Gloom Enshrouds the Nations" - Isaiah 60.1-3

"Arise, shine, for your light has come!" sings Isaiah in one of the canticles offered in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for morning worship. I've loved this "Third Song of Isaiah" for its positive vision, so much a part of American history from 1630 onwards, of a people whose way of life is a light to the nations. [I've considered America through the lens of this canticle other times: Does God Bless America? (07/2017), and City on a Hill: Vision for America (06/2018)]

But these days, I've had to pause and shudder at the second verse:

For behold, darkness covers the land.
A deep gloom enshrouds the nations.

I'll admit that I, privileged to have a home, and work, and my health, have not felt so gloomy.

• My friend Jason has sent me a mask and daily updates of pandemic statistics that show some stabilization.
  
• My students have settled into a routine of writing for me and each other on a website discussion board and checking in for Zoom meetings that usually leave me feeling better for having seen and heard the kids.
  
• Brandy has loved having me home, and we take daily walks with our friend Susan.
  
• Caregivers at Arbor Terrace, plus Visiting Angels Laura and others, keep Mom company day and night. When Laura has helped me to communicate on WhatsApp, Mom hasn't been aware that she hasn't seen me in weeks.
  
• Though the county has closed down the Silver Comet Trail, I've been able to ride the 38 mile Stone Mountain loop once or twice a week as the weather has warmed.

For an introverted guy whose idea of the good life is writing on my blog, walking my dog, riding my bike, and closing each day with drinks, dinner, and a good book, this new life isn't so bad.

But then Susan remarked off-handedly, "We're all grieving." She didn't have to explain; I immediately teared up. I'm grieving for the way life was, the things I thought I could count on, the plans I'd made -- all gone. The wait staff who knew us by sight, the launderer who has delivered me clothes, washed and pressed for each week of classes - that's all gone, and they're hurting, I know.

Then there's the news. Every day, I'm hearing of deaths nearby and far away, a world in distress; food banks depleted; doctors overwhelmed here and abroad. NPR and our local NPR station WABE give us personal interviews with people "on the front lines," kind and courageous, but sometimes desperate.

In the past three days, I've had glimpses of a coming Zombie apocalypse, fomented by purveyors of conspiracy theories calling for getting out your guns to fight social distancing. I threw away a respectable-looking faux newspaper, its contents entirely meant to whip up indignation at China and, by extension, people of Chinese descent.

I've got to believe that most of us still know that science is true regardless of who believes in it, and that most of us still carry around in our hearts Isaiah's words, part of our American DNA:

Nations will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning...

Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders.

You will call your walls, Salvation, and all your portals, Praise.

Fear NotFr. Roger Allen, speaking in a prayer service taped before no audience in our church's small Lawrence chapel, drew our attention to a line in today's gospel that I'd overlooked. It's the story we always read in the second Sunday of Easter, when Jesus appears to the disciples and offers his wounds for doubting Thomas to touch. Fr. Roger focused on the line that set up the story: "The doors were shut." Immediately we see the relevance for us, behind our closed doors, watching Roger speak from the locked-up church.

Jesus says to the disciples, "Peace be with you." Roger takes comfort from that, but adds that we are not to be recipients of peace only.

Peace that comes from faith, and care for others, are things we can offer, even at a social distance.

'round Monk

The music of Thelonious Sphere Monk is better than it sounds. That's the consensus, from liner notes of his early albums to on-line forums today.

Around Monk, there's an aura of reverence and mystery. To get inside that aura this past year, I read a Monk bio by Robin DG Kelley, ordered CDs, and played Monk's music regularly.

[Photo: The cover of Time makes Monk look intimidating; the text is worshipful. But in 1964, his Time's up. Rock is about to make jazz irrelevant.]

Robin DG Kelley subtitles his biography of Monk The Life and Times of an American Original, a title that raises the question, original what? Some wit in Wikipedia's article writes that Monk sounds like he's wearing work gloves when he plays the piano. Musical giant Leonard Bernstein, quoted by Kelley, says Monk's "a genius, of course," but a "crude" pianist.

On the other hand -- literally -- no less an authority than Duke Ellington, from the stage of the Rainbow Grill, announced, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr. Thelonious Monk" (Kelley 430). Monk was gratified, but what about the right hand? The audience was left to wonder.

Monk in performance seems to slap at keys, with much collateral damage. (See him play "Epistrophy" with Charlie Rouse in 1963 on Youtube). For lovely recordings by Miles Davis on "'round Midnight" and Carmen McRae's wonderful tribute album, the bands filter out some of the rough edges that we hear in Monk's own playing.

But Monk could play right notes fast, had he chosen to do so. Kelley starts his biography with the story how Monk, on a dare, sight-reads a Rachmaninoff score at breakneck speed. Thus Kelley refutes both the accusations of Monk's detractors and the racial stereotypes of white admirers, to the effect that Monk was either uneducated and undisciplined or else instinctual and child-like.

That Monk could match the more popular flowing virtuosic style, but wouldn't, suggests that his interest in the music was in some other kind of beauty. Monk himself seems to have embraced that idea. His 1956 tune "Brilliant Corners" may be his way of reading the phrase "rough edges," and his title for a 1967 tune could be his motto, "Ugly Beauty."

Ellington's praise may sound like a left - handed compliment, but I think it's key. While Monk struggled for recognition through the rise of be - bop jazz, his promoters claimed that he was on the cutting edge of the movement, a visionary, ahead of his time. Not so his left hand technique, which was deeply rooted in gospel music -- he toured with an evangelist early in his career -- and in the "stride" piano of his mentors. Stride requires the left hand to leap octaves from the piano's lowest bass notes to the middle of the keyboard. That's a leap of faith unless you're an expert. The gradual movement up or down in the bass note gives the piece its structure; over that strong foundation, the right hand can indulge in whimsical dissonances for color and punctuation.

About those dissonances, Kelley writes,

Monk's chords were a product of years of training, experimentation, and a solid understanding of music theory. Monk knew it, which is why he became so annoyed when critics, musicians, even his admirers, described his chords as "wrong" or "weird."

Monk's pride and joy seems to be how he makes so much from so little. He repeats phrases to create larger patterns. That's close to the meaning of the word "epistrophy," the title he chose for an early hit that he never tired of recording. Most of Monk's song "Well, You Needn't" (a.k.a. "It's Over Now") consists of one rapid motif ("ya'NEEDn't") run up and down the scale.

His popular ballad "'round Midnight" fits the AABA profile of most American standards, but it, too, shows Monk's love of a strong bass and controlled melody. Over a slow stepwise fall of bass notes, the tune slithers around in tiny half-steps, then jumps wide intervals, suggesting sighs and outcries. Making the most of his material, Monk builds the song's B-section from a variation of the last phrase of the A-section.

I wonder if Monk resisted prettying up his compositions because he wanted the audience to see the craftsmanship -- the foundation, joints, and beams -- not a facade?

In the same way that he focused each song on just a small amount of material, Monk focused his career on a small repertoire. Monk mostly performed selections from his own narrow catalogue of around 70 tunes, played mostly at a slow speed.

He wanted spontaneity from his players, but he also commanded them to "stick to the melody." Many times, Kelley tells us how a player joining Monk on stage would feel it was a "trial by fire," even Monk's own son Toot. Monk wouldn't say what the next song would be, and wouldn't provide a written score.

Monk the man comes across as shy, but fierce in defending his music. He drove himself to ill health on club dates, tours, and concert hall performances to support wife Nellie, son Toot and daughter Boo Boo. When he suffered with what we now call bipolar disorder, his family supported him. For Monk, "family" extended to include fellow musicians Charlie Rouse, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and his patron the Baroness Pannonica.

The arc of Kelley's narrative is Monk's gradual building of an appreciative fan base until, just as he came into his own in the early 1960s, the folk-rock-pop industry sidelined jazz. Monk, who had been far out and avant-garde, was considered old-fashioned by 1970.

I end my year of Monk feeling comfortable with his music. It isn't pretty, it isn't smooth, but it's colorful, well-crafted, clever, whimsical, always distinctly Monk. I turn up the radio when I recognize a piece of his, and I smile.

Butterflies & Live Stream for Easter in Isolation

We Episcopalians retire the word "alleluia" from our songs and prayers during Lent. At St. James, Marietta, youngsters on Ash Wednesday bury hand-made butterflies bearing the word. The alleluia butterflies are usually resurrected for the Easter Vigil on Saturday night.

This strange year, when there could be no gathering in the church, blessings upon Child Education Director Nancy Eubanks for bringing out all those butterflies to line Polk Street, Church Street, and the 120 Loop.

The tug of the church this morning was so strong that Brandy and I joined our friend Susan in a walk from her home to the church. As we sidled past squirrels, other dogs, and one unflappable cat, Brandy appropriately barked to raise the dead.

[Photo by Susan, at the moment that Brandy noticed a dog in the distance.]

Home again, we tuned into Facebook where Fr. Daron and his family live streamed the Easter service from their living room. In his sermon, Fr. Daron said that Christ's Easter miracle doesn't erase suffering and death from our lives -- the resurrected Jesus still bears his wounds. The difference is, since God has been in the midst of suffering, sin, loneliness, anxiety, that we can be assured of light at the end of our tunnel.

But, especially in a time like this, we naturally wonder, where is that light? Fr. Daron reminded us of Martha, who believed in the resurrection at the last day, yet didn't feel comforted by that knowledge when her brother Lazarus died; the apostles, though they had the assurance of eternal life, ran away after the crucifixion. Can we be any different? Fr. Daron said, yes, because we have the Holy Spirit in our midst.

Spivey Hall Scores with Team Sports

Just before the pandemic shut down both sports arenas and concert stages, recitals at Spivey Hall south of Atlanta already had me relating chamber music to team sports. Then a Weekend Edition sports reporter, mourning the cancellations of March Madness, compared sports to music: both bring us together with joy.

Though I get no joy from competition, I do treasure some sports memories of teamwork and personal prowess. One is the vivid memory of a high school football game in rural Mississippi, circa 1983. Junior Eric Bluntson, a little guy built like a fireplug, clutched the ball. While his teammates ran parallel to create a barrier on Eric's right, Eric weaved, dodged, deflected, and jumped over opponents eighty yards for a touchdown.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center was like that. They performed at Spivey Hall February 23. Especially in the finale of the D major woodwind quintet by Anton Reicha, contemporary of Mozart, each player took a turn with a different musical phrase while the rest of the team followed a few beats away in parallel. Throughout the set of pieces, we sensed joy and camaraderie as players kept their eyes on each other to match tempos and to attain clean cut-offs. For pauses and humorously understated endings, Gyorgi Ligeti's piece Six Bagetelles demanded most team coordination and got the most laughs.

"The Voice of the Guitar" February 29 featured guitarist Milos Karadaglic with string players of 12 Ensemble. Milos sometimes played solo, sometimes shared the stage with the strings, and sometimes gave the stage to strings alone. He was the star player, the one telling us how he fell in love with the guitar's voice, and how his appreciation developed through exposure to pioneering virtuosos, how he learned the repertoire, and how a hand injury gave him impetus to listen and learn from composers in the realm of pop music - Paul Simon, Radiohead, and the Beatles. Throughout the program, verbally and with smiles and nods, he expressed confidence and pleasure in his teammates.

Sometimes, in sports, it's an individual's superhuman feat that transcends the score. I remember an overheated gym, an overheated crowd screaming, the home team down by two at the buzzer in double overtime, when home team sophomore Brad Teague hurled the ball the full length of the court: swish for three!

Angela Hewitt's piano recital March 8 certainly qualified as a superhuman feat of precision, control, sensitivity. She played Bach's Four Duets, Eighteen Little Preludes, the Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, and, after intermission, the French Overture in B Minor, followed at last by the Italian Concerto in F major.

Even at this solo recital, there was a team aspect to the music that her playing brought out to us. That left hand so often danced around the right hand, sometimes following in parallel, or, like the basketball player guarding the one with the ball, the left hand hopped this way and that to cover the right hand's surprising pivots.

For a lovely encore, she chose the serene "While Sheep Safely Graze."

Little did we suspect that would be the final concert of the season. But the pleasure of individual virtuosity and teamwork keeps on.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Spivey Hall
Sunday February 23, 2020, 3 pm
• Michael Brown, Piano
• Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
• Stephen Taylor, oboe
• Sebastian Manz, clarinet
• Peter Kolkay, bassoon
• Radovan Vlatkovic, horn

Milos: The Voice of the Guitar
Spivey Hall
Saturday, February 29, 2020, 3 pm
• Milos Karadaglic, classical guitar
  with members of
  12 Ensemble
• Eloisa-Fleur Thom, violin
• Alesaandro Ruisi, violin
• Matthew Kettle, viola
• Max Ruisi, cello
• Toby Hughes, double bass

Angela Hewitt, Piano
Spivey Hall
Sunday, March 8, 2020, 3 pm

Little Piston Illuminates Big Picture: NPR's Positive Story

"No rant, no rage, no hype" says a self-promo at National Public Radio, and that sums up about half of the reason I listen to NPR. The network's amiable staff also work hard to find positive human angles on the stories of the day.

Boy, did I need to hear Morning Edition's airing of "The Parable of the Piston" from NPR's Planet Money podcast.

To get a handle on the world-wide effort to combat this pandemic, reporters Kenny Malone and Karen Duffin looked at one tiny piece that will go into the hundreds of thousands of ventilators that must be produced over the next few weeks, and one man involved in that effort, Todd Olson.

[Photo: The piston. From the Twitter feed of NPR's Planet Money podcast.]

We first hear Olson in his apology. "I've been working till about 10, 11 o'clock at night, so you might just have to make me work till midnight." CEO of Twin City Die Castings Company, he's used to more predictable hours, making car parts for GM and Ford.

Then he received a call from GM to join in nationwide effort to supply some 700 different parts that go into a single ventilator. He was eager join a life-saving mission called "Project V" (for "Ventilator"), joking that the name made him feel "like James Bond."

For the reporters, he explained the technical considerations to make a mold for these small integral parts, and the risk if the measurements were off by a fraction of a millimeter. As the reporters recorded him, he described the very first piston off the assembly line. He's ecstatic when it works. Then we hear...

OLSON: Well, those are the first piston parts for Project V - part of history right now. I'm going to get out of their way here. They've got some work to do. And...

MALONE: OK. How are you feeling right now?

OLSON: I'm feeling awesome. This is pretty cool. We've been in business a hundred years, and this might well be our biggest moment in a hundred years.

MALONE: That is quite a statement, Todd.

OLSON: Yep.

So, that little piece of history fits into the big picture of hundreds of thousands of people behind the front lines of the battle against the pandemic. NPR and our local station WABE have been playing us interviews with a truck driver proud of carrying loads of sanitizer and paper products where they're needed, and a nurse who understands why people "part like oil on water" when he steps into the grocery store wearing his (clean) scrubs. These are alleviating my anxiety and weariness with bad news.

Addendum: A few days later, NPR's Here and Now featured a music critic's classical picks for pick-me-ups, all from Russia. After some Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, she played Stravinsky's Firebird. After some percussive early parts of the ballet, she skipped to the finale, when "this solo horn rises from the orchestra." I started to tear up. As the music swelled, the interviewer Robin Young narrated what she imagined, everyone's throwing open their windows and coming out into the warmth, COVID-19 gone. I was sobbing. Does any other radio station do that? Nah. (And, of course, thank you, Stravinsky.)

Other recent responses to stories on NPR:

• "Trans Eye for a Bible Guy" (03/2020) appreciates an episode of It's Been a Minute featuring Sam Sanders' interview with the author of "Dear Prudence" program about the observation that the Bible is full of people who are, in a way, "trans."
• "Look into Residente" (03/2020) reports on Maria Hinajosa's extensive interview with this Puerto Rican hip-hop artist on her wonderful program Latino USA.
• "Christmas Present: Rosemary Clooney on Fresh Air" (12/2019) responds to a re-broadcast of a wonderful on-stage interview between Terry Gross and the famous singer in the late 1990s.

Opening Day

No one comes within six feet of any guy in bike shorts except bad drivers and buses, so my sport is safe: they won't be closing down cycling season.

Yesterday was opening day for serious biking season, and perfect for it. The sun warmed Atlanta slowly from 70 to 80 as I rode the Stone Mountain Trail for the first time this year, tenth year I've been riding that trail. Sure, there've been some spring training rides earlier this month, truncated because Paulding County closed off, first, the trailside rest stops, then the trail itself. But this was a satisfying return to places I've missed:

Clockwise, from top left: start at Martin Luther King Center on Boulevard, parking lot unusually empty; new bicycle bridge over eight lanes of I-285 to Clarkston, a vibrant town with America's highest concentration of refugees; first glimpse this year of Stone Mountain (where Hairston becomes Mountain Industrial Highway); gateway to the Lake Clair neighborhood, an underpass highly decorated with graffiti and publicly commissioned spray paint art; "Art Lot" in Avondale, not far from the original Waffle House, now a museum.

Stats in 2020, so far: From the first day of 2020, I've had 11 rides, 225 miles, average 14.8 m.p.h.
Grand total 24,124 miles, 2001 - 2020*
25,000 miles = earth's circumference. 876 miles to go.

Bonhoeffer's Virtual Monastery for a Time of Virus

When the congregation cannot congregate, can church continue?

Because of Covid-19, our bishop has closed off all services, choir rehearsals, and pastoral visits until late May, if then. Suddenly, the book my Episcopalian friends and I were already reading seems more timely than I'd thought. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a few ideas about the predicament of the church in a time of "social distancing."

When the Nazis broke up Dietrich Bonhoeffer's community of seminarians, the Lutheran theologian imagined ways to keep the community's worship and work going in their diaspora, described in his book Living Together (translated by Daniel W. Bloesch, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). It's a virtual monastery, built not with stones, but with scheduling.

Bonhoeffer wrote the book after his visit to English parishes, and the Anglican influence shows. So far as chapter two, Bonhoeffer has mostly given an eloquent rationale for daily habits still laid out in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (BCP)1979. Rise early to pray with psalms (25); read passages of old and new testaments in their entirety so that we may be "attentive listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story [for] God is with us today only as long as we are there" (35); chant (37); make prayer a combination of fixed form and spontaneous petitions (44-45): These are all things that I've done already this morning, as most mornings, just my dog Brandy and me, Bible on the kitchen table with the prayer book open to "Morning Prayer II" (BCP 75). Of course, Bonhoeffer insists on the eucharist, central to any Episcopal Sunday service, by which we recognize our Lord, as the apostles recognized the risen Jesus only after he broke bread (46).

The morning prayer carries over into our day, Bonhoeffer writes, to achieve the "unity of prayer and work" by "finding the You of God behind the It of the day's work" (50). He recommends a midday prayer service, such as we have in the BCP (51); likewise, prayers and readings for the evening meal. At the close of the day, he recommends the service for Compline. He warns, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger" (Eph.4.26, in DB 53), and then rest assured by the Psalter's hymn to God, "Yours is the day, yours also the night."

Also timely is Bonhoeffer's chapter about "The Day Alone." Bonhoeffer teaches us to develop a habit of "silence," which he distinguishes from the inability to talk, whether that's enforced by a rule or by isolation. Receptivity is the key component of silence, as in the Gospel story of Zachary, the high priest struck dumb in the temple. "If he had accepted [God's] revelation, he may perhaps have come out of the temple not incapable of speaking, but silent" (Ernest Hello in DB 57).

Reading Bonhoeffer with friends in Education for Ministry (EfM, program of the School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee,TN), I have to admit that Bonhoeffer is "preaching to the choir." This four-year program fosters a community that meets once a week for worship and study. What Bonhoeffer calls meditation in silence is something we practice alone and in our seminar, "Theological Reflection," relating a small portion of scripture to our lives in order to discern how the Bible may be speaking to us alone (62).

Bonhoeffer for me slips off the track only when he preaches to the actual choir. Pure unison singing is his ideal, unadulterated by altos seeking attention (41), or by Bonhoeffer's bane, sentimentalism. He deplores "doctrinaire" attitudes towards music, though his attitude towards church music is as doctrinaire as I've ever read. I'd say unison singing, harking back to the Dark Ages, is evocative and emotional in the way such singing, beautifully done, conjures up a sentimental idea of monks and nuns singing away their days behind rose-colored glass. (I've had that dream, literally. See my blogpost of 01/2019).

Behind all of his recommendations is one stricture, repeated in many variations: It's never about you. How you feel, how you get or don't get a worshipful feeling from music or prayer or community or retreat: these are all obstacles in the way between each of us and God, and between our community and God.

Bonhoeffer attacks sentimental ideas of cloistered faith and community. Like Christ, and like Bonhoeffer himself, we are to live "in the midst of enemies," not "among the roses and lilies" (1). We imagine retreating with like-minded believers because we don't feel thankful for the little daily gifts of life:

We think that we should not be satisfied... and that we must be constantly seeking the great gifts. Then we complain that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experiences that God has given to other Christians, and we consider these complaints to be pious (12).

Of all his insights, that last one is my favorite, that we confuse complaining about lack of rich faith experiences to be a sign of our superior piety.

It's a virus, Bonhoeffer writes (66). This sentimental yearning, this self-centered aloneness, even when it originates with just one member of a community, can spread to infect the whole body.

Bonhoeffer's slender volume is a book for our church in our time.

Memo: Trans Eye for a Bible Guy

Collegiality, affability, generosity, curiosity: these are qualities we don't associate with most news shows. But Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It's Been a Minute, reviews even the news of a pandemic with optimism and empathy. Today, being an introvert who enjoys living alone, who looked forward to "social distancing," he admitted that he's already missing people.

PHOTO: Sam Sanders, top; Daniel Mallory Ostberg, by Grace Lavery, below.

One of his guests today was Daniel Mallory Ostberg, writer of the "Dear Prudence" column and memoirist. Sanders as gay man queried Ostberg, trans man, about his theory that the Bible is "all about trans people." Both host and guest grew up in evangelical churches; both felt alienated there, but also loved what they heard. Ostberg listed prophets and apostles who "transitioned" from one state to another, not least of all the Word of God who "transitioned" to be a man who dwelt among us, and transitioned again to the resurrected Jesus.

Ostberg noted the same pattern over and over, that the Lord spoke to someone who had been living one way in the world to tell them that they were really someone else. Ostberg and Sanders both could identify. Sanders read aloud from Ostberg's recent memoir a passage imagining the Jacob - who - became - Israel dealing with people who apologize forgetting to use the new name.

It's a new spin on familiar characters that enriches my understanding of them and of trans people in my life.

Memo: Look into Residente

This Puerto Rican musician I've never heard of has imagination and a searching quality that I respond to. What little I know comes from the program Latino USA:

In 2017, one half of [a popular rap] duo, René Juan Pérez Joglar—better known as Residente—released his first solo album. To find inspiration, he took a genealogical DNA test and traveled to every part of the world that showed up in the test, where he collaborated with local musicians. Now, Residente is working on his second solo album, which involves the brainwaves of worms. Maria Hinojosa sits down with Residente to dig into the mind of the man who has experimented with so many musical genres.

His father was a lawyer and social activist, helping indigent clients. His mother is an actress and Franciscan, giving time and material goods in personal interactions with the needy. Of his faith, I know nothing; but his voice, even groping for an English expression, communicates a humility, self-discipline, and respect for the worth of everyone he meets, and of people he hasn't yet met.

His most recent project builds songs on the sounds of brain waves of worms, but also those of believers deep in prayer.

The clips from the DNA album were most striking. He told how he asked his collaborators to sing whatever they liked, including ancestral songs, and he would propose ideas for how his drum and voice could be layered in. He has shared his composition royalties with them.

Lent: New Insight for the March Forward

Meditations in the March Forward Day by Day are by Episcopalian priest Helen Van Koevering, rector at Saint Raphael the Archangel Episcopal Church in Lexington, Kentucky. For her first meditation, Van Koevering presents an insight, new to me, that has brightened the first Sunday in the somber 40 days of Lent.

PHOTO: Walking with me to the Marietta Square Friday evening, my friend Susan stopped to point out this plant, known popularly as a "Lenten Rose."

Van Koevering comments on the season's origin story. Matthew, chapter four, tells how Jesus, hungry and alone after 40 days' retreat in the wilderness, refuses Satan's appeals to "materialism and worldly power." That's the familiar part. Van Koevering writes,

What happens in the wilderness does not stay in the wilderness, [but] plays out in Jesus' life and ministry. Jesus refuses to turn stones into bread for his own hunger, but soon feeds thousands with a few loaves and fish -- and teaches his disciples to pray for daily bread. Jesus refuses to test God's power [from the height of a tower] and later rests in that power from the height of the Cross. God's own beloved Son refuses the glamour of empire to offer the upside - down kingdom of God and the Way of Love to all.

That three refusals by Jesus to use power for his own wants should return as a three key displays of God's power working through him: that's a new insight for me. Van Koevering assures us, "The One who says that he is with us always ... is with us in our wild places too."

The World's Fastest Man: Biography of Cyclist Major Taylor

When you stand with a crowd cheering closely-matched rivals, you may feel your own heart race in sympathy with the athletes. But when you read about a contest held 120 years ago, and your heart rate shoots up anyway, what explains that?

Your heart will race for The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero. Author Michael Kranish achieves this in chapter 14.


Before then, Kranish chronicles the life of young Marshall Taylor, son of a Civil War veteran, who earned the nickname "Major" doing stunts on bikes to promote a cycling shop. Coached by a white man, former cycling champion Louis "Birdie" Munger, Major Taylor trains with determination and perseverance, competing whenever possible -- when white men would allow him. Taylor repeatedly faced cycling star Eddie "Cannon" Bald, famous for hanging back in the slip stream of a pack and then passing all with an explosive surge at the last minute. Taylor stunned Bald with his own surge, his "jump."

By chapter 14, Major Taylor is a controversial star in America's most popular, most lucrative, sport:

Now time and money and athleticism had made him into a marvel of a man: muscular, handsome, well groomed, clean shaven. He took great care in his clothing, being able to afford the most fashionable suits, usually of three pieces, a watch on his wrist, a hat to be doffed upon entrance. He delighted in sitting at the piano, playing popular tunes and composing his own music. He wrote poetry and became an amateur photographer... He was also a man of deep faith, entrusting that God would watch over him as he regularly risked his life in such a dangerous sport. (Kranish 150)

Kranish often pauses the hero's life story for a lateral view of his world, so that we appreciate not just one athlete's stats, but what his wins and losses meant as the 20th century approached. Whites north and south were clawing back the gains blacks had made during Reconstruction. Democratic President Grover Cleveland accepted the supremacists' narrative that Southerners were magnanimous in "forgiving" blacks the indignities whites suffered during Reconstruction (48).


Major Taylor threatened the prevalent white supremacist dogma. An editorial in Cycling Life, bearing a cartoon of an ape on a bicycle, asserted that the black man is "a creature of today... a lazy, happy-go-lucky animal" unworthy of competition with whites, and unlikely to afford the $2 entrance fee to race, anyway (50). Taylor proved his stamina finishing 1787 miles in six days of continuous riding -- any time off for sleeping or eating was ad hoc -- before a sellout crowd at a New York velodrome, finishing 8th after a crash in the last 30 minutes. [See The Six Day Race, a video re-enactment of that event.]


Someone defending their identity can't accept facts. If they can't deny a fact, they have to destroy it. Taylor so threatened the white men's identity that a white man who finished after Taylor at the next big race strangled him into unconsciousness before Taylor even got off his bike (97). Southern cyclists refused to compete in a race that Taylor was expected to win and promised to harm him (98).


Racism in one way benefitted Taylor throughout his career, as any race promoted as the showdown between white and black drew huge crowds in the USA, Europe, and Australia.


Such was the case with the rematch between Taylor and a French rider named Edmond Jacquelin in May of 1901, detailed in Kranish's Chapter 14. Jacquelin had mocked Taylor after defeating him at their first match. Who will win the title of World's Fastest Man is answered in the book's title, but Kranish puts us in the saddle to appreciate what it takes for Taylor to do it, and the set up makes victory so satisfying.

[Photograph: Before their rematch, confident Jacquelin offered a handshake with a smirk. Taylor kept his game face on.]

Not long after, one white man named Kimble, outspoken racist defeated by Taylor, does an unexpected thing. With his hand on Taylor's shoulder, Kimble squares off against Taylor's nemesis Floyd McFarland, who colluded with other riders in attempts to beat Taylor. "Yes, Major Taylor did defeat me, and he didn't have to run me off the track or foul me to do it, either."

Taylor was stunned as Kimble continued to face down McFarland. "I do not consider it a disgrace to be beaten by him because he always does it fairly and that is more than any of you can do," Kimble said. Shaking Taylor's hand, he continued, "Major Taylor, I congratulate you on winning this championship race. You're the fastest and squarest man among us" (209).

From this pinnacle, the story slopes downward, as auto racing and other diversions eclipse cycling in popularity. Bitterness at continuous racism estranges his beloved wife Daisy and Sydney, their daughter born in Australia [family pictured below].

Kranish keeps the story interesting, always with those sidelong looks to the broader culture. Among the things about cycling itself that struck me:

• Mark Twain wrote, "Get a bicycle. You won't regret it, if you live" (42).
• New York's young police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt established a bicycle unit capable of outspeeding and outmaneuvering thieves on horseback (84).
• A black fan of Taylor's, injured during a bike race, became a champion boxer, Jack Johnson (253).
• Brakes were an afterthought to the bicycle, as were helmets. When Taylor landed on his head and failed to finish the race, commentators had no concept of concussion; they attributed his poor finish to insufficient training (201).
• At first, cars were considered a fad, noisy, smelly, and dangerous compared to the elegant bicycle (197).

Kranish, Michael. The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero. New York: Scribner, 2019.