Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount: Providing Context

Our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon [see photo, from blessing of the animals] has preached on parts of the Sermon on the Mount during the last month, bringing new light from Jewish tradition on familiar sayings of Jesus.

When Fr. Daron shows how Matthew draws parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of the tribes of Israel, the sermon on the mount becomes more than just a moral teaching. The pharaoh's slaughter of infant boys, the flight of young Moses out of Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, and the crossing of the Jordan parallel the birth of Jesus, the sojourn in Egypt, the 40 days in the wilderness, and the baptism by John. So when Matthew writes that Jesus went up on the mountain, we should be thinking of Moses; and the sermon on the mount parallels the giving of the Law.

Fr. Daron explained a puzzling little phrase in Matthew: "Jesus opened his mouth and spoke." Why not "Jesus spoke?" How else could Jesus speak except by opening his mouth? But when Moses met God at Sinai face to face, the Hebrew expression for that is "mouth to mouth." Ah HA!

Like the first four commandments, the first beatitudes concern our spiritual relationship to God. The latter commandments and beatitudes guide our relationships to others. Fr. Daron stresses that the word translated as "righteousness" connotes "justice," so it's not about our own obedience to the law, but about seeking social justice. Fr. Daron challenged us to think on one beatitude a week.

Today, Fr. Daron took up the part of the sermon where Jesus couples what you have heard it said with but I say to you. You have heard it said, do not kill; but I say to you that you have committed murder if you bear hatred in your heart. Ditto fornication and lust, divorce and adultery, oaths and dishonesty -- a person's honesty should be known from his way of living, not dependent on an oath. The Pharisees' strict compliance with the law wasn't strict enough because it falls far short of fulfilling God's purpose, which was to change our hearts (cf. Isaiah and Amos).

The Pharisees had a question, Fr. Daron said. When the original temple was built in the time of Solomon, we read that the Lord's presence descended and filled the temple. Nothing like that happened when the temple was rebuilt after the Jews' exile in Babylon, in the time of Ezra and Nehemia, about 500 years before Jesus. Why had the glory of the Lord not descended on the temple again?

The Pharisees concluded from numerous scriptures that God would come down only when His people were obedient. So the Pharisees enforced obedience, and hedged the law with even more laws so that no one came even close to breaking a commandment. This would bring God down to expel the Romans and restore the Davidic line of kings. Jesus undercut their authority and their whole mission: no wonder they wanted him to die.

When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law, he meant literally, fill it to the brim. It's not about what we don't do. Every day that you don't kill someone or don't commit adultery, you have NOT necessarily fulfilled God's will. We are to move beyond anger, respect women, and live with integrity. It was never about getting to heaven when you die, but about how we live now.

[See an appreciation of Fr. Daron and a decade of his sermons at More than Skin Deep: The First Ten Years (10/2022)]

Living a Life that Matters: Rabbi Kushner on Jacob

Harold S. Kushner

Some days ago, I uncovered two unread books in my basement, Listening to Midlife and Living a Life that Matters. Too late for those, I guess. I wasn't yet 50 when I bought them at a long-gone local bookstore almost 15 years ago.

Yet Living a Life that Matters by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner still resonates. I'm especially drawn to what Kushner sees in the story of Jacob in Genesis.

Kushner compares Jacob's story to a play in three acts: boy, suitor, and patriarch. The arc of the play is implied by the character's name change. Jacob, his name in youth, relates to Hebrew akav "crookedness," while the name he later earns, Israel ("he wrestles with God") relates to yashar "straight."

In the story, Jacob masquerades as his brother Esau to trick their father into passing his legacy on to him instead of Esau, his firstborn son. Kushner speculates that it's deeper than that: Jacob wants the strength and boldness of Esau; he feels incomplete. (22)

Kushner observes that, lacking curtains or chapter headings, the ancient text marks transitions from one act to the next with dream-like epiphanies in the night, a ladder to heaven and an all-night wrestling match with an unnamed being. The first of these happens at the end of the day when Jacob fled his home where Esau has sworn to kill him. Ashamed and afraid, Jacob envisions a bridge between earth and heaven. Kushner says this image gives Jacob hope that he can reach higher (21). That night Jacob bargains with God: for divine help, he will give God a tithe of his earnings.

In the second act, he is the first (the only?) character in the Bible who falls in love. Others take wives, are given wives, coming to appreciate them later, but for Jacob and Rebekah, it's love at first sight. Rebekah's father tricks Jacob as badly as Jacob tricked Isaac, fooling Jacob into marrying the less lively older sister Leah. We're told that Jacob hated Leah. Kushner speculates that she was always a living reminder of Jacob's own malfeasance. Jacob has to wait 14 years to consummate his love for Rebekah. He builds a family and wealth, and readies himself for a return to Esau.

[My poem Angels Never Know grows from Jacob's story.]

In the second transition between acts, Jacob has sent his family ahead. We're told that Jacob was alone. But then he's wrestling with someone who doesn't give a name. Who is it? I've heard it's God, it's an angel, it's a devil, it's a spirit of the place. Kushner thinks it's Jacob's own self, equally strong, equally adept. Jacob's fighting his own fear; Kushner says he's fighting his own impulse to use some underhanded way to avoid meeting Esau face to face. Jacob's injured, but survives, a lesson to take away, that he doesn't have to be afraid. Again, Jacob prays, but this time he does not bargain with God but requests strength to do the right thing (31).

Across the three acts, Kushner sees Jacob moving from amorality and selfish ambition, shame being the only sin, to a morality of integrity, in which the primary sin is to fail to live up to your ideals (21). Kushner tells us the scripture calls him "shalem, whole, united within himself" (107). He lives the rest of his life raising the brothers who will constitute the nation of Israel, and he carries his love for Rebekah to the end.

What does Jacob's story have to do with Kushner's readers leading lives that matter? Kushner's chapter following his analysis of the Jacob story is titled "Family and Friends: We are Who We Love." Essentially, it's what I've known for years, said simply in a lyric by Comden and Green, Make someone happy / make just one someone happy / and you will be happy, too (see blogpost of 11/2006). Kushner tugs at my heart when he refers to adolescents, himself included, who were "redeemed from self-doubt" by a parent or teacher who let them know what Jacob's first dream told him: you are someone who will matter. Kushner steps out from behind his screen of authority to tell of his son killed in middle school by a rare genetic disorder, whose classmates years later cited him again and again as their inspiration and a shaping influence on their lives.

Kushner's message resonates with what I believe as a Christian: We cannot bring the Messiah down to solve the world's problems, but we can bring the Messiah down for someone else.

[Harold S. Kushner. Living a Life that Matters. (New York: Knopf, 2001.)]

Finding Allies at "Desolation Mountain" : Cork O'Connor Series #17

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A plane carrying a Senator crashes at Desolation Mountain in William Kent Krueger's novel of that name, 17th of his series featuring detective Cork O'Connor. The crash is a partial fulfillment of a vision that has kept the young man Stephen O'Connor awake, in which he sees an eagle with red-white-and-blue tail shot out of the sky by an arrow. But, then, why does he continue to have the vision after the incident? And what is the presence Stephen senses behind him in the vision, so monstrous that he's afraid to turn and see it?

From that beginning, this story has a strong downward tug into chaos and malevolence. The little Minnesota town of Aurora is overwhelmed with investigators from a half-dozen federal agencies. Good people disappear, and (sad to say) dogs die. There are white nationalist vigilantes and also a para-military group commanded by Gerard, whose allegiance we don't know. Even Cork's adopted grandson Waaboo (Ojibwe "little rabbit") is troubled by a vision of a many-headed monster.

But there's an equally strong tug upwards towards light, even lightness. Cork's grown children are inured to threats and know how to fight back. From the families of everyone who disappears, Cork picks up an array of allies who grow into their roles as ad hoc crimefighters. Cork's old friend Bo Sorenson joins the team. As always in this series, there's also Henry Meloux, a mide or "healer" now over 100 years old, whose hermitage swells with visitors as de facto HQ for the good guys.

The most thrilling part of the story is also slapstick funny. Cork assigns his son to take their least-favorite Ojibwe relative to a safe place. Beulah, a product of the Federal government's efforts to expunge Indian culture out of Ojibwe children, is a Christian of the sour judgmental kind, innocent of both wilderness and physical exertion. It's already funny to see her in a canary-yellow helmet bundled into Stephen's ATV clutching the safety bar; when the bad guys force them off-road, it's fun to see that Stephen -- formerly a frail and needy little boy -- is now an Ojibwe action hero saddled with this prim and panicked sidekick. (Think African Queen.)

Stephen also reaches out to Winston Harmon, a "willowy" young teen of Ojibwe descent, an artist in whom Stephen sees some of his own sensitive nature.

I laughed and, yes, I cried. Great addition to a great series. I'm half way through Lightning Strike; the one after that is still in hardback. Don't look behind, Mr. Krueger: I'm catching up.

[Links to my reflections on other Krueger novels are listed at my Crime Fiction page ]

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Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry

Never get used to this begins Derek Walcott in a poem from The Bounty (1997). That could mean, "Wow, I never do get used to this" or, "Note to Self: never allow yourself to get used to this!" Walcott always means both/and not either/or.

This in context means both sunrise over the ocean viewed from the Caribbean island St. Lucia, where he was born, and the craft by which he explored that ocean -- craft meaning both a boat such as the one he sees on the horizon and the craft of writing poetry. Though he feels his gift fading out of this page and gently mocks the poetry of his younger self -- what did it know of death? Only what you had read of it -- he is grateful. He plays with phrases from Roman Catholic practice, the Ave Maria when he replaces ocean "waves" with Aves, the rosary in regard to the surf fingering its beads, and "Hail Mary full of grace" with hail heron and gull full of grace. Joking aside, he tells himself that he has come to his end praising and giving thanks. By the end of the poem, he's thinking of the same seascape at night, and the yachts studying their reflections in the water like black glass -- which suggests both literal boats and a peripatetic Nobel-prize-winner pondering his life.

This poem set off fireworks in the margins of my copy from Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., 2007), where my pen made arcs, stars, and circles to mark all those both/ands and other features: the stately iambic pace; rhymes and other wordplay; his painter's eye for visual details; healthy self-deprecation; the horizon where, in numerous poems, he sees both his home when he's away and the world beyond when he's home; and gratitude that toes the edge of faith but never wades in. I wrote a note on the back flap that this one poem encapsulates what I've learned to enjoy in all of Walcott's work.

I wrote the same note about a dozen more of his poems, at least. In all my notes, I've been telling myself Never get used to -- and never forget:

• His visit to Arkansas, ca. 1986. Walking before sunrise from his hotel past a Confederate memorial, he is suddenly aware that police nearby would likely take interest in a large black man out at that hour. In the silence that falls when he enters the diner, A fork clicks / on its plate; a cough's rifle shot / shivers the chandeliered room. The allusions to a rifle and trigger bring an overtone of violence into a mundane scene, typical of how Walcott regularly layers metaphorical meaning over literal details. ("Arkansas Testament" 203)
• A belfry like the exclamation point at the end of a Swiss village (from The Prodigal 289)
• A hotel worker in Rome who also embodies Rome in herself:

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs. (from Midsummer, II, 174)

• Coming home from the beach with his twin brother used to be such a thing! he remembers in The Prodigal (295): The body would be singing / with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin and iced water was a gasping benediction
• A walk up a hill to a baptism at an Episcopal church in Laventile, Trinidad in a 1965 poem is also a journey through class and time. To go downhill from here, he writes, is to ascend in socio-economic class. Thinking of the Middle Passage through which all their ancestors arrived here, Walcott sees that the poor there are still clamped below their hatch, / breeding like felonies / whose lives revolve around prison, graveyard, church. Walcott mocks the pretensions of the Episcopalians who have given themselves whole-heartedly to the rites and ways of their old colonial overlords.
• The comedy of a middle-aged poet, world traveller, jostled on public transport by working-class people from the neighborhood where he grew up. He admires the beautiful young woman across the aisle as if he were painting her, calling her the light of the world. After a basket-laden old woman on the street yells at the driver, Pas quittez moi a terre, literally, don't leave me on this earth, Walcott rings changes on her phrase to the point of feeling guilty for having abandoned his people on this earth. Ready to weep, he exits the bus at his luxury hotel, only to be given another light in an act of kindness by the driver. ("The Light of the World" 184)
• Gentle assurance from beyond the grave to a family grieving for a child

  I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

  snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle
  of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

  dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces
  howling like statues, you call a goodbye

  is--I wish you would listen to me--a different welcome... ("For Adrian" 196).

Allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after Walcott's death in 2017. I'm not surprised: I don't sense that he took women seriously. Except for Walcott's mother, women do not have a voice in the poems I've read. They are described by their attractive parts. In contrast, Walcott writes long poems dedicated to his male friends, including Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, in which he focuses on their writing, their ideas, their conversations, their virtues. Even Walcott's numerous wives are mentioned only with passing regret for his not caring enough for them.

So, like many poets, he may not have lived up to his best work. I know little about Walcott beyond what's in the verses. Some of those got too specialized for me -- I couldn't make headway through Omeros, his Nobel-prize winning transposition of the Odyssey to the Caribbean of his childhood. Tiepelo's Hound, which is both a biography of a Renaissance painter and a memoir of his own artistic development, has great moments, but reading it was like solving a puzzle.

Even so, his precise language and rich layering of metaphor on reality serve largely to express praise and gratitude. As Robert Frost said about poetry in general, reading the poetry of Derek Walcott "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

Trust No One in "Sulfur Springs," Cork O'Connor Series #16

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To keep his crime series fresh, author William Kent Krueger takes his detective Cork O'Connor somewhere new around every five novels. In other books, we've come to know Cork, his growing family, and his hometown of Aurora on the edge of the Ojibwe reservation. He's spent some time in Chicago, mountains out west, and north of the Canada border. But Krueger sometimes takes us deep into communities far from Aurora in Copper River (#6 in the series), in Northwest Angle (#11) and in one I've read most recently, Sulfur Springs (#16).

The precipitating action is a phone message to Rainy Bisonette, longtime lover of Cork, now his wife. Her son Peter out in Arizona leaves a garbled message through heavy static about someone named "Rodriguez," that he has "killed him," and "they'll be looking for me." He doesn't return urgent calls from his mother and Cork, so they board a plane for Arizona.

The town of Sulfur Springs is Aurora's opposite: oppressively hot and arid, on edge because of drug trade and illegal migration from the southern border. Nearly everyone who speaks to Cork tells him to "trust no one but family" in Sulfur Springs. Trust and doubt color the entire novel, leaving no one untouched, not even Rainy, whose previous marriage to a drug lord named Mondragon is news to Cork. Still, Krueger gives us rich description to show the beauty and danger of nature in this unfamiliar setting.

In this novel, Krueger develops further the theme of the ogichidaa, an Ojibwe word for the kind of person Cork is, a "guardian" for his people. Rainy's son Peter turns out to be one of these, a leader who is safeguarding migrants from both a rapacious drug gang and a racist vigilante group. Watching the relationship develop between Cork and Peter is a highlight of the novel, especially when Peter is involved in a confrontation between his natural father and his adopted one. When Cork tells him he's a part of Cork's life, now, Peter asks, "Like family?" "No, not like. Family." (276)

I come away from the novel with impressions of two strong scenes that parallel each other. In both scenes, Cork, Rainy, and her ex face a young man involved in the drug trade. In the second instance, it's the son of drug lord Rodriguez, a privileged young man shielded from consequences until the moment that Cork gets the drop on him. At the earlier instance, the young man is younger than 20, shares the name Pedro with Rainy's son, and sobs when Mondragon orders him shot. Rainy intervenes, and Cork tells us

I saw what Rainy saw, a kid way over his head in something that he regretted now because of the present consequences but that, if he survived and grew wise, he might regret later for all the right reasons. (171)

Later, Cork reflects on how he has often tried not to think of his opponents as human beings, to shield himself emotionally when having to use deadly force.

But Pedro had had a profound impact on me. He wasn't much younger than my own son, Stephen. He'd come from a small village, and God knows how he'd gotten himself mixed up with people like the Rodriguezes. Maybe those [other gang members killed in a shootout] were no different.... Every child is born a clean sheet of possibility, and no mother dreams of her beautiful baby ending up dead in an alley or rotting in the black of a forgotten mine. (175)

Krueger has always orchestrated his stories to reach suspenseful high-impact showdowns. This is no exception.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" Nov-Dec 2022 | Jan 2023

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

November 2022
English teacher Todd Hague of Tyler, TX began his meditations on All Saints Day with the confession that he experienced a lot of suffering in the preceding 12 months. With that in mind, I was drawn to comfort he finds in harsh sayings:

• The raging seas that cover the earth symbolize chaos in Sirach 43.23, but "the Lord places islands in it." Hague says friends and church can be "islands" in our lives.
• "Sometimes guilt is like a physical malady," Hague writes, and the nightmares in Revelation can help us stay awake (Rev 16.15) to "keep watch over our thoughts, intentions, and actions."
• Anyone unwilling to work should not eat is tough love from Paul (2 Thess 3.10-11) also proclaimed to the upper-class idlers at Jamestown. (For middle schoolers, I called it "the thesis sentence for America.") Hague finds its spiritual application:"when fulfillment comes too easily, it sours...Empty pleasures that require nothing of us fail to feed us."
• When Paul seems harsh, Hague remembers that "much of Paul's ministry involved breaking through old centers of tribalism and traditions." Hague admits, "I have very little in common with many people in my congregation... But we kneel at the same communion rail and confess our sins to the same Christ."
• Zebedee was probably dismayed when his sons James and John left him in his fishing boat literally holding the bag: there went all of his expectations for the future. Hague asks, "What expectations can you let die so that you might live more fully in Christ?"
• Psalm 102.2-4 expresses misery, My days drift by like smoke, but Hague offers an image from cowboy author Louis L'amour's book of poetry Smoke from this Altar. A lone figure sits at a campfire under the stars, smoke rising. For L'amour, it's an image of prayer.

December 2022After a career in marketing and communications, Sallie Schisler was called to ministry in southern Ohio. What stands out for me in her meditations are practical ways to tame demons in our personal lives.

Schisler remembers "The Devil made me do it," a catch phrase for comedian Flip Wilson. But "no one's laughing" when Satan enters Judas, who then betrays Jesus. Rage is one reaction to betrayal, but Psalm 37.9, appointed for that same day, reminds us, "rage... leads only to evil." Schisler recommends we get help with our feelings of anger and "set small goals" for dealing with our sense of powerlessness. (I'd just had a financial setback; a small goal to save just $60 a week helped me to regain a sense of security.)

The small blossoms on a fig tree are signs of the coming of spring, Jesus observes. Schisler reminds us how our "smallest actions" can be signs of God's love for others.

In a couple of scriptures, Schisler simply warns us that these aren't just stories of the past.

• 2 Peter 2.19 people are slaves to whatever masters them goes with the scientific conclusion that we're "wired" for addiction. Schisler cites addictions to work, shopping, and various substances, and I recognize myself and people close to me in that list.
• We can't take comfort in the fact that Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents was long ago: "There are many ways to kill our children," Schisler cautions.

January 2023 Elis Lui is the youth minister at Christ Church in Bronxville NY. She finds messages that appeal to youth and retirees alike.

New things I now declare (Is 42.9) puts Lui in mind of the "quirks and different perspectives" her church members "bring to the shared table." We're not to pretend we don't see those differences, but are to allow love to supersede them. Likewise, Eph 4.9 gives us Paul imprisoned telling us that "captivity is captive." We can't pretend not to suffer, she says, but pain and loss do not have to "define our lives."

Rabbis gave Lui some insights. When God asks Cain what's happened to Abel, Cain answers sarcastically, "Am I my brother's keeper?" One Rabbi said that all of scripture and the rabbinic tradition can be summed up in God's unspoken response: Yes, you are your brother's keeper. Another Rabbi told her that we should carry two slips of paper with us at all times, a different message on each: the world was created for me and I am but ashes and dust. "Wisdom," he told her, "is learning when to read which slip of paper."

Lui tells how she suddenly heard familiar scriptures in new ways. God shall give you your heart's desires (Ps 37.4) sounded to her like a promise to give her stuff; with a shift in emphasis, it means that God will let her know what her heart truly desires. That saying by Jesus that only those who do God's will are his brother and sister and mother sounded like he's disowning his family; Lui takes it as an opening to imagine God the Father as also God the Mother, the Sister, the Brother -- and she challenges us to begin our prayers to God from those different angles.

Lui recounts times when disciples do not recognize Jesus until he makes a small word or gesture: walking on water unrecognized, he tells them not to be afraid; mistaken for the gardener, he simply says Mary's name; at Emmaus, he breaks the bread to share it. Lui concludes,

Where might you be overlooking Jesus in your life? Saint Benedict reminds us to welcome every stranger as Christ himself. At every turn, it is a small intimate action that only Jesus would know that reveals God to us: the breaking of bread with our community, the quiet reassurance to take heart even in times of trouble, the quiet whisper of our own name.

A line from Gal 4.9 about coming to know God [and] to be known by God recognizes that we are works in process. By coincidence, I read that just after I'd run across an analogy by crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (friend of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien), who sees similarity between God's relationship to us and her relationship to the characters in her novels: they exist solely by and through her, yet her intentions for them change as they develop through their stories. Lui writes a reassurance that must be especially welcome to adolescents, "God delights when we grow and change into more of who we were created to be."

"Assassins" on Target

When a production of Assassins hits its target, it sometimes kills the applause. How do you clap when you're cringing?

In the 1990 musical by book writer John Weidman and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the characters are drawn from history, all the misfits who've aimed guns at U.S.Presidents from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Their delusions make us laugh, but their earnest self-justifications can make us profoundly uncomfortable.

After a pause to show that the assassins' methods and views are not necessarily those of the audience, we cheered this past weekend at the Jennie Anderson Theatre in Marietta GA to tell the actors and musicians how we appreciated the expressive pitch-perfect voices, flawless performance of music that demanded precision, and commitment to playing characters who could easily have been presented as caricatures.

L-R: Byck, Guiteau, Fromme, Zangara, Booth, Oswald, Czolgosz, Moore, Hinckley

The cast made strong impressions:

• Michael Joshua Williams in a grimy Santa suit as unemployed tire salesman Samuel Byck in tears because he can't tell from the media what is true anymore;
• Lukas Chaviano as Charles Guiteau, with a warm smile and tireless optimism right up to the moment he faces the noose -- and then summons the will to accept that, too;
• Cameron Scofield as hippie Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Jessica Miesel as scatterbrained suburban housewife Sarah Jane Moore, abandoned by everyone else, bonding with each other over Charles Manson;
• Chase Sumner as college dropout John Hinckley, Jr., taunted by Fromme for never having a girl friend and joining her in a soft-rock duet addressed to their idols (Jodie Foster and Manson);
• Claudio Pestana as immigrant ditch-digger Giuseppi Zangara who "never had no chance" and doesn't care about his target "so long as it's king";
• Marcus Hopkins-Turner as factory worker Leon Czolgosz, dignified, lonely, brooding on the injustice of his position;
• Jordan Patrick as hapless Lee Harvey Oswald, with his soft admission, "yes," all he wants is for someone to care about him (even if it's hatred they feel); and
• Craig Smith as John Wilkes Booth, lamenting in the score's most beautiful musical passage "the country is not what it was / when there's blood in the clover" a few measures before he sings the score's ugliest lyric.

As quasi-emcees, Ithica Tell gave her rich low voice to the "Proprietor" in the opening song, and cheerful "Balladeer" Skyler Brown looked genuinely stricken when his optimistic paean to the American Dream is overwhelmed by "Another National Anthem" for "the ones who can't get in to the ballpark."

This was a "concert version" that didn't have, and didn't need, a set. Director Clifton Guterman made a striking and meaningful backdrop from a vast American flag on which images of the assassins' targets were projected. Under the flag, the orchestra sat in full view upstage of most of the action. Around a central platform just large enough to bear 11 actors, a semicircle of chairs gave the assassins a place to watch each others' scenes. In a nice touch, director Clifton Guterman suited each chair to the character and their time: an ornate white rattan chair for Booth, a 70s easy chair from the Hinckley family basement, and even an airplane seat for Byck, who planned to hijack a jet to drop on Richard Nixon's White House.

The effect of the assassins rising from their chairs to join Oswald on that platform was creepy enough to make me catch my breath, and yet it felt like what the whole show was heading to: the misfits who couldn't connect to anyone in their lives connect to each other through Oswald's assassination of Kennedy. Booth calls it "the real conspiracy."

The orchestra, conducted by Holt McCarley, sounded bigger than they were and better than I've heard outside of New York. As Sondheim often interweaves different musics for different characters to tell their stories (e.g., a Sousa march for American tourists plays parallel to a tarantella for the Italian assassin Zangara), it was fun to watch McCarley corral all the moving pieces through tempo changes to reach climactic points together -- gunshots, an electrocution, a hanging. Being able to see the orchestra was a plus.

Because this production didn't include supporting actors, assassins variously doubled as a soldier, a reporter, and bystanders. Without an actress to play Emma Goldman, this production cut the scene at a train station where Czolgosz offers to carry luggage for the socialist orator. Perceiving how the man is lonely and ashamed of his scars from his work in a furnace, she touches his face and tells him that his scars make him beautiful. It's the only tender moment in the script, and I missed it.

The cast shortage did give the actors the opportunity to play sympathetic characters for a song late in the show, "Something Just Broke." Sondheim interweaves stories from everyday Americans across the decades who recall where they were when they learned "the President's been shot." They didn't have to like the President to agree that "Something just spoke, / something I wish I hadn't heard."

The line acquired new resonance with the January 6 insurrection. I wish it hadn't.

Earlier Posts about Assassins
[See my Sondheim page for curated links to my articles about the composer, his craft, his colleagues, and his shows. I wrote about Joe Mantello's production of Assassins in 2004 with Neil Patrick Harris as both "Balladeer" and "Oswald." After seeing several productions around Atlanta, I wrote in 2012 how low budgets and even vocal weakness don't diminish the show's emotional impact. See Sondheim Mini-Festival in Atlanta.]

Books 14 and 15 in the Cork O'Connor Series: Deep "Canyon"

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For books 14 and 15 of the series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, author William Kent Krueger dreamed up two of his most memorable openings. These two books also give us two halves of one arc in a crisis for the hero Cork, whose loved ones observe to each other that he has lost something essential. The friends and family who support him through his trouble grow both in number and in depth.

Windigo Island Readers of the series know from Ojibwe tradition that the cannibal spirit called a "windigo" will call the name of its next victim in the wind, and that the only way to defeat a windigo is to become one.

This novel opens with Native boys in their early teens who canoe to Windigo Island for a daring stunt. As a long-time middle school teacher, I can attest to Krueger's accuracy and sympathy depicting this age: we're fully on the boys' side when the weather turns suddenly and the wind calls out one name. Then they see the creature.

Chapter two involves the detective and his grown daughter Jenny in the search for two missing Native girls in their teens. As the trail leads quickly into the business of child trafficking led by a brute named Windigo, Cork's anger grows until, some chapters later, he is becoming what he opposes. Cork gave up firearms earlier in the series, but here he aims a gun at a man's old dog. A new character, Daniel English, tells Jenny, "Something [in Cork] died there." It's a relief that Krueger shifts away from Cork to tell the story through Jenny's perceptions.

Krueger alludes many times to a tribal adage, that two wolves battle inside all of us, Love and Fear: the one we feed will win. In Windigo Island, there's a lot to fear -- powerful men with guns, flame, explosions -- but the fear of disappointing a loved one is strongest.

Manitou Canyon Krueger frontloads this story with foreboding. A band of Natives, including a woman, a tall man, and a teenaged boy with a rifle encamp above a secluded lake. The boy learns that the name of his target is Cork O'Connor. He sights the shoreline, and the woman behind him whispers "Bang."

In the pages that follow, Krueger sets Cork on a hunt for a millionaire engineer, once Cork's friend in childhood, missing from a fishing trip on that same lake.

Visions, important to the Ojibwe traditions of Cork's family, deepen the dread. Cork's memories of failures and fatalities in Novembers of other years make this November "cruelest" month. His loved ones sense that he has changed. His son Stephen comes home early from a vision quest because he has such a strong sense of danger enveloping his father. And a new character, Leah, still angry after five decades that the Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux rejected her, now comes to him for help, terrified from her waking dream: hundreds of fish with human faces, gasping, drowning. 

Stephen and Cork come to recognitions about their roles in life as healer and guardian, respectively.

While this novel goes to dark places, there are buds of hope along the way that open as in time-lapse photography to make this novel a bouquet of reconciliation and gratitude. How many detective novels have ever left me feeling that way? I can't think of one.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.

Tom Wayman Works: Poems 1973-1993

In "What Good Poems are For," a man in his 50s reads one of Tom Wayman's works to strangers in a bar because the poem was about work he did, what he knew about, / written by somebody like himself ("What Good Poems are For," Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993). The poem could've been any number of Wayman's works that come at industry from different angles.

In "The Factory Hour" (68), the poet depicts the work day as a voyage on the blue tide of the early morning sun. The workers share experiences of car pools, the grey plastic lunch bucket and safety boots. Walking in through the asphalt yard / we enter the hull of the vessel for a voyage marked by the sounds of machines, the drone of the PA system, and short breaks. We're immersed in the sounds and feeling of the journey.

One of the co-workers named by the PA gets his own poem on the next page of Wayman's collection, a paean to the experience of the iron itself, dormant for eons before it's pulled into the light and transformed miraculously to bolts with purpose ("Neil Watt's Poem" 70). Playful in its personification and language (the iron proclaims We are ore), the poem conveys awe, admiration, and pride. In another poem, one worker's steady beat draws all the men into a joyful jam/dance. The foreman goes away shaking his head ("Industrial Music" 100).

The foreman is a bad guy, or at least incompetent, in many of Wayman's poems. The foreman harangues his workers to go faster, but when they team up to finish ahead of schedule -- showing how superfluous he is -- he obstructs them ("Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air" 155). The foreman at the sugar silo who's supposed to monitor safety from uptop is MIA while men deep in the silo risk their lives ("One Lump or Two" 201). When Wayman, just hired, asks to be trained for his dangerous new job, the foreman says only, "Nothing to worry about... Can you start tomorrow?" ("Wayman in the Workforce: Actively Seeking Employment" 66). The foreman in "Factory Time" is so polite on Friday afternoon, long cheques dripping out of his hands (102).

Why should the foreman earn more than the ones who exhaust their bodies all day? "Socialism" in Canada wasn't such a dirty word in the 1970s the way it has been in the US, but Wayman still doesn't hammer us with Marx. Some of these poems did wear me down, ones that seem like documentaries, in which Wayman gives distinctive voices to many men and women on the workforce. I prefer the playfulness in "Paper, Scissors, Stone" (192), which makes a children's game of figuring the worth of work:

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.

Wayman figures everyone should be paid the same for their time. Sixteen years earlier, figuring how hourly expenses squeeze hourly wages every hour of the day, Wayman gives us this delightful vision of harmony and justice:

...every bright season, chemical workers
in the factory of the leaf
effortlessly, without wages, and with everything they want
change sunshine and water into a living thing ("It is Seven O'clock" 41).

So Wayman's poems give us trees and sunshine, too, with friendship, love, and whimsy.

He has a dialogue with his poor tired body: "You go to work if you're so keen," / it says. "Me, I'm going back to sleep." ("Routines" 72). He empathizes with "The Feet," so important during the day, but made to lie down naked / in a part of the bed no one visits... with nothing to do, crossed like a blind horse putting his head over the neck of another blind horse (145).

He plays with personification: Some unfamiliar people who call to him from a bar say they're his needs, including talkative Friendship, a guy with hard hat and hammer named Shelter, and the unnamed woman who smiles every time he looks her way. Wayman asks, Shouldn't there be someone here named, uh, New Stereo? ("Meeting Needs" 178). Things get uncomfortable when he asks about "the Major," as in, Major Social Change. His "Kitchen Poem" is both a cooking lesson and an allegory for global inequities (106). [This inspired my poem On Track.]

Wayman comes up to the edge of scorn when he's dealing with consumer culture, but he doesn't forget the humanity of the misguided. Each object in a suburban home "whispers" its four numbers all day long -- purchase date, price, savings, and present worth -- until the woman of the house goes berserk ("Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Richmond" 109). After he tells us that a particular family's TV is like a grandmother, he carries that idea through the day so vividly that it's not a screen I picture in the corner of the family room, but a little old lady talking to herself ("Grandmother" 114). The chatter of radios and the whining of tourists intrude on the reverence of trees gathered at a mountain like worshipers at a cathedral ("The Banffiad: The Silence That is Like a Song" 49).

The title poem of the collection, "Have I Missed Anything?" is Wayman's greatest hit. He gives a special page to it on his website. It was a meme before there were memes, circulated by FAX, posted to professors' office doors, passed around teachers' lounges, often attributed to "Anonymous." It's all the snarky things that come to a teacher's mind when a student returning from absence asks that question.

My gateway to Wayman was "What Good Poems Are For" (1986) from Christian Wiman's anthology Home. Wayman imagines that a poem is like a potted plant on a sunlit windowsill in a lake by a cabin, a decoration you might not notice -- but you'd notice its absence. As I've been writing poems all year, I can identify with Wayman's experience:

Only those who work on the plant
know how slowly it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one... (131).

Catching up with 30 more years of Wayman's work, I have work to do.

The Bike in the Piazza: Venice

←← | ← || →

Scott Smoot on a bike in Venice, virtually

Since November 8, I've biked 130 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Milano to 38 miles west of Venice. With inclement biking weather, I've completed the remaining 38 miles swimming at the West Cobb County Aquatic Center. Let's pretend that I swam the canals.

In the photo, I'm in St. Mark's Square, known to locals as Piazza San Marco. Glass barriers have kept out most of the flood waters. At the far end of the square stands the basilica of San Marco, the white building topped by crosses and cupolas.

When Mom and Dad took me along for a visit to Italy in January 1991, demonstrators protested in the piazza. Bombing had just begun in the first Gulf War. Something else that had just begun was CNN, which we could view each night in our hotel.

My strongest emotional connection to this place, however, is music for worship in the basilica composed in 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi, a local musician. Because choirs of singers and instruments at San Marco faced each other in balconies across the nave, Monteverdi often wrote antiphonal pieces for one side to echo the other.

I was still new to the Episcopal Church when a wonderful 2-LP recording of his Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) came out around 1984. Director Andrew Parrott restored the chanting of the worship service with Monteverdi's music. The Episcopal liturgy helped me to appreciate this Catholic liturgy. I played the album during Saturday afternoons, which I had made my Sabbath (Sundays I was always busy with choir and preparations for class Monday).

Something else I love about the Vespers is Monteverdi's eclectic mix of styles. Plainchant calls us to worship; then comes a grand brass fanfare (from THE first opera, his Orfeo) with chorus singing homophonically -- a first, when composers thought in terms of counterpoint, not chords. Some of it is dance music; "Surge Amica" from the Song of Solomon is a love song by soloist with lute. The mix of styles appealed to me, much the same way that Leonard Bernstein's Mass (11/2013) had done. I emulated both when I studied composition with Dr. James Sclater (11/2015) beginning in 1987.

My title for this blogpost alludes to a wonderful musical by Adam Guettel which I write about in A Little "Light" Music (01/2008).

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

Sasha Sagan on the Richness of Ritual

"I was taught to be skeptical, not cynical," Sasha Sagan told an interviewer on NPR this past week. 

She comes from parents famous for their writing and video presentations of a secular, scientific, and humane world view. Her mother Ann Druyan produced Cosmos, the documentary series that made the late Carl Sagan's voice and image familiar nationwide. Sasha Sagan's book For Small Creatures Such as We was the subject of the interview. In her book, she offers the insight that rituals enrich our lives, whether or not we believe in God. 

 Here are a few notes I made after I heard the interview:

• "Every ritual is a portal to another way of being." I can see that, as I experience both the scripted rituals of the Prayer Book and the habitual rituals involved in dog care, friendship, and daily routines -- actions that bond me to another, re-center my thinking, or prepare me to make an effort.
• Knowing that the universe is so huge and we are of so little matter to it makes us more significant, more of a miracle just by our chance existence.
• Her mother's favorite toast at Thanksgiving is, "You don't need to know whom to thank for you to feel thankful."
• Her interviewer mentioned how seeing the moon is a "special event" for her little daughter; Sasha jumped on that as a perfect example of an attitude that she would cultivate.
• Mathematicians have proven that we all breathe in atoms that were breathed out by everyone who ever lived. Simply deep breathing, then, becomes a ritual of connection to all those in history whom we honor, and to all whom we have loved and see no longer.
• The kinds of rituals she has in mind needn't be contrived or solemn. During the early days of COVID, she (or the interviewer?) made a ritual of wiping little hands with the "potion" that sanitized her fingers that had shared the playground with runny-nosed friends. A family she knows will howl at the moon before bedtime. A cab driver eavesdropping on a young couple anxious about their future, told them to lighten up and just sing their ABCs, which they've done every week ever since.

Ritual, I know, can be a control valve that lessens anxiety, a reminder of past joys, a re-adjustment of perspective. My faith is sustained by ritual. Part of that faith is the assurance that God's spirit is working in each of us, whether we know it or not, and the urge to pray or praise is the work of the Spirit in us.

"Empire of Light" Blesses the New Year

My friend Suzanne and I went to Empire of Light on the recommendation of NPR and the reputation of writer/director Sam Mendes. Very glad we did. Also very surprised that a poem by Philip Larkin seems to have had a part in shaping the movie.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a white middle-aged middle manager of the Empire Cinema in Margate, England, 1981, who trains Stephen, a new employee played by Micheal Ward. They find common interest in the design of the old theatre and in caring for an injured bird. There are problems: a daily dose of lithium is all that keeps demons of her mental illness at bay, while he feels more vulnerable every week during a surge of racist nationalism in the U.K.

We want these people to make each other happy, and so do their co-workers (except her abusive boss, played by Colin Firth). The projectionist Norman, played by Toby Jones, teaches Stephen how a thin stream of light passing through still pictures at 24 frames per second registers to the human eye as life, and the darkness between frames doesn't show.

So movies are themselves a metaphor for the hope that both of these people need.

A key moment in their relationship occurs at midnight on New Year's Eve. Another key moment is an admission that "last year is dead," conveyed by the "fullgrown thickness" of trees in spring. We hear that message from Hilary's reading aloud of Philip Larkin's poem "The Trees." Larkin's trees are also telling us, "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

From a movie that has its share of darkness, it's a sweet message.

New Poems at Year's End

For an hour or two every weekday morning, yellow legal pad in my lap, I sit in the poetry workshop I've made in my basement. Since Halloween, I've posted five new poems at First Verse, along with images by my friend Susan Rouse. (One of those is included here.)

• Ghost Story
• Cliff Hanger
• Relay
• Live Stream
• On Track

Although they're all taken from real-life incidents, I had to flash my poetic license a lot.

Like a Sondheim Virgin

I'm no Sondheim virgin. My first experience was the LP of A Little Night Music 50 years ago (thanks to Paul Ford who became Sondheim's go-to pianist ). You might call me a "Sondheimite," but I prefer another term I read recently, "Steveadore."

Still, I do sometimes wonder, if I were to encounter Sondheim's songs for the first time now (as I "discovered" Joni Mitchell some years ago), would their qualities be apparent without my knowing the stories and thematic connections, without the actors who "sell" them? Must you have "been there" to "get" a Sondheim song?

Eleri Ward's album A Perfect Little Death gave me a perfect little opportunity to find out. Ward recorded 13 Sondheim songs in her closet during the COVID lockdown with an acoustic guitar and her laptop. She labels it "indie-folk Sondheim." Hearing just a few seconds of Ward and her guitar, you might mistake her for early Joni Mitchell.

Ward sings the melodies straight. Her accompaniment might be called "stripped down," but what I hear is Ward building up each song the way Sondheim himself did, with a "vamp," a repeated musical pattern. Ward's vamps are just enough to provide a steady beat and an outline of harmony, leaving space for Sondheim's unexpected turns into different keys.

All that said, I'm now going to imagine that I'm hearing these songs for the first time.

First Listens

With the first lines of the first song, I'm disoriented:

And are you beautiful and pale
with yellow hair, like her?
I'd want you beautiful and pale,
the way I've dreamed you were,
Johanna.

The initial word "And" drops us into someone's interior monologue. The woman (or man?) who sings of this Johanna has evidently not seen her recently (if ever), and we haven't a clue who the "her" is that Johanna might be "like," except for the hint that they might be family, expected to resemble each other. The same voice, overdubbed, sings "I feel you, Johanna" and, later, "City on fire." It's all very weird, but intriguing. The voices and images express a strong yearning for both Johanna and "her," a regret for time lost, and resignation to thinking "less and less" of Johanna as "we learn to say 'good-bye.'" Some conflict -- a city on fire? -- is preventing a reunion. You don't have to know the details to know those feelings.

Three songs evoke the domestic life of women (presumably). While these women sing of buttons, bread, the coffee cup, tending the flowers, they all seem to be preoccupied by someone absent. Yet each song has a different character.

• "Every Day a Little Death" perks along like a children's song, before the lines "I would murder him right there, / but first I die." We get the sense that someone who seems in control is letting her mask slip -- just a little.
• "Losing My Mind" starts as a cheerful love note about how "I think about you" all day long, addressed to someone who may be away at work. But then he doesn't come home during her "sleepless nights," and, in a recap of earlier stanzas, frustration replaces cheerfulness. She raises her voice. "Does no one know?" she asks. "You said you loved me," she sings, mournfully, "or were you just being kind?" When she sings "Am I losing my mind?" at the end, almost in a whisper, I think she means it.
• "In Buddy's Eyes" the singer tells us that "life is slow, but it seems exciting 'cause Buddy's there." When she sings of Buddy, her voice warms up: "I'm so lucky, I feel like crying." When she concludes, "the best I ever thought of me / is every minute there to see / in Buddy's eyes," she sounds ecstatic. She has doubts about herself, but she's grateful to the man who doesn't doubt her, climbing to a note high above the range of the rest of the song, but soft, when she sings of his "eyes."

"Pretty Women" is another look at women going about their daily activities, a reverie about how "something in them cheers the air." It's a lovely melody. But something's wrong. I thought Ward was singing in the character of a man, and a line later confirms it: "How [pretty women] make a man sing!" But as the images pile up about women observed from a cool distance -- at their mirrors, in their gardens, silhouetted -- and we hear how women "stay within you, breathing lightly," we get a stalker vibe incongruous with the lovely melody.

Ward's lilting "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" sounds like a Victorian murder ballad. The vocabulary is Dickensian: "He shaved the faces of gentlemen / who never thereafter were heard of again." Rhymes are playful: "Inconspicuous, Sweeney was, / quick and quiet and clean 'e was." Except for the complications of an eerie overdubbed vocal obligato and elaborate middle section about how the title character "heard music that nobody heard," it's a song you might learn around a campfire. I love how Ward's voice dips low to ominous effect for the refrain, "the demon barber of Fleet Street."

Intimacy is worth all the inconveniences of living with someone. That's the message you get from "Being Alive." She sings first how she has to put up with "Someone to hold me too close, someone to know me too well... someone to sit in my chair..." But soon she's singing the same phrases as a prayer: "Somebody hold me too close, Somebody know me too well." She drives the point home with the biggest vocal climax of the album.

The final song "Sunday" is strangely compelling. There's no "you" or "me" in it, only a description of "a perfect park" where people are "strolling through the trees... forever." The park is described in terms of colors and abstract shapes: "blue-purple-yellow-red water" and "the verticals of trees," for two examples. Several overdubbed voices sing harmony, creating a sense that a community is sharing this experience "on an ordinary Sunday." I'm intrigued enough to wish I had someone to connect the dots.

The Sequel Eleri Ward's second Sondheim album is available for download. Her producer's addition of strings has not diluted the strength of her straightforward vocals. It's called Keep a Tender Distance. Every Steveadore knows that phrase from "Marry Me A Little" cut from Company and later restored. I'm waiting for the CD.

[For a curated list of articles about Sondheim, his work and his colleagues, see My Sondheim Page]

Christmas Card with Mom

 

That's Mom with my sister, with me, with her Visiting Angel Laura, and my brother.

With her blood sugar under control, now, she's much cheerier. She's engaged in a conversation, and you can tell she means something when she speaks. Though the words don't make sense, often, they sometimes do. We draw her out on how she wants us to respond, with "How do you feel about that?"

[See my page Dementia Diary for a curated list of blogposts that relate to our 10+ years dealing with the disease.]

"God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer" by Sarah Coakley

The image of the Trinity, from the 15th century, appears with a hymn from the same period in a blog by "A Clerk of Oxford". Here are verses two and three of many more:

2. O three persons in one unity
Being but one god and no mo, [more]
One in substance, essence and might,
O deus sine termino.

3. O, which hast made both day and night,
Heaven and earth round like an O
By thy wisdom and endless might,
O deus sine termino.

The Clerk notes that 21st century Christians write tortured arguments about the Trinity while their medieval counterparts wrote beautiful and playful hymns. The "O," she writes, is a standard vocalisation in hymns, but also a common expression of "one," and also an image of the earth and heavens "round like an O."

Looking for images of the Trinity, I ran across an article about conflicts over the doctrine at another blog Anxious Bench (06/2016). One group of Baptists accuses other Baptists of making up a new (false) god by pushing the Trinity; their opponents accuse the others of imposing their own views and limits on the Bible.

My assignment this week, however, has been to read an essay by Sarah Coakley printed in the Reading and Reflection Guide, Volume B used by participants in Education for Ministry (pp. 253-264).

Coakley's "approach" to the Trinity "through prayer" comes with assurances that she understands why Christians would dismiss "seemingly alien formulas" of the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century. The focus of scholarship and devotion on the person of Jesus has been much more appealing to believers in the past 200 years, and the many references to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament are "unsystematic." Even charismatic Christians think of having the Spirit as an expression for having an experience of "God with us." That the Trinity is an obstacle to interfaith dialogues is another point against pushing the doctrine.

Even as Coakley introduces the idea that Christians in silent prayer to God feel they are being prayed in, she first lists caveats. The "phenomenon of prayer is varied" and its descriptions are "inexact," and there's "circularity" in using "certain cherished doctrines" to interpret prayer that has already been influenced by those same doctrines; and other faiths have "contemplative" traditions in which the sense of a Trinity has not arisen.

To all this, Coakley answers that Paul struggled to express his sense of the spirit within that leads us to Christ and God the Father. "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12.3). Christ is not just "an external model," she writes, but indwelling: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2.20).

When we experience abandonment by the Spirit, Coakley writes, it's neither the historical Jesus nor the eternal Father who leaves us. The "dark night of the soul" that St. John Chrysostom (ca.400 CE) wrote about is, she says, "the death-throes of the domineering ego" as the Spirit breaks down our the barriers of our individualism. (The analogy comes to mind of the symptoms that resulted from a recent vaccine: I felt the fight between my body's defenses and the force that was teaching my body to resist the virus.)

Coakley up to this point in the essay is taking bits from Paul and presuming to tell us what our experience will be like when we really pray. I'm on the edge of resenting the essay.

Coakley is on more solid ground when she goes back to the councils that established the Trinity, and even further back, to show that the Trinity was something that Christians experienced and were passionate about. The councils were not "periodic bureaucratic reviews of a continuing theoretical problem." She shows first that Christians of the first three centuries prayed longer, and more often, than we think of today; "spiritual life" was not for specialists. Second, she shows how the liturgy of the eucharist embeds the doctrine of Trinity, even in the simple exchange "May the Spirit of the Lord be with you...And with thy Spirit: it is the Spirit in the priest who invokes the presence of Christ, not the priest's incantation.

While Coakley stresses Christian experience of the Trinity through prayer, she tells us that the councils' trinitarian formulas were "primarily" defenses against alternatives that were "misleading."

Regarding other faiths, Coakley admits that the Trinity is a barrier. "Yet," she writes, "the darkness, the sheer defencelessness of wordless prayer usually lead ... to a greater openness to other traditions."

Just at the end of her essay, Coakley raises the tradition of the Spirit as feminine and motherly, who was called "Our Mother" by Julian of Norwich. Gregory of Nyssa saw a balance of masculine and feminine between Son and Spirit.

[Our clergy's sermons on the Trinity have been helpful to me. See Belief in Things Unseen and Episcopal Wisdom on Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture]

The Rector Retires; The Clerk Reflects

The applicant whom the Rector Search Committee rejected became the chief priest of the corner at Church Street and Polk. That was 11 years ago; now Fr. Roger Allen is retiring from St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, and it's time to reflect.

Origin Story

In 2009, parishioners expressed to a survey their preferences for a priest under 45 years old with children and at least 10 years' experience leading a large congregation. At 57, happily married without children, an ex-lawyer who'd led a small parish only six years, Fr. Roger Allen did not meet specs.

Yet we on the Search Committee heard good things from priests who'd worked with him, and we heard from a gentleman whose parish was destroyed by Katrina a month after Roger's first Sunday there: "Fr. Roger was a tower of strength to us when everything had fallen apart." When Fr. Roger's name was one of three that our committee passed to the Vestry, the Sr. Warden told me that two candidates were perfectly suitable; they elected the one who was extraordinary.

Clerk of the Vestry Looks Back

Soon after Fr. Roger began his tenure at St. James, I became Clerk of the Vestry, so I've not only seen the ups and downs of his service, but I've typed them.

Regarding the business of the church, Fr. Roger exerted control. He consolidated bank accounts and sorted through an array of special funds. He took a hard look at groups and programs that had operated for years without oversight. Some who chafed at his oversight had also criticized the previous rector (unjustly) for not being strong enough: go figure.

Every year, to reach a balanced budget, the Vestry considered cutting programs and personnel. Every year, Fr. Roger maintained that a church cannot thrive if it cuts what's vital to the parish. Have faith, he would say. Every year, parishioners came through with their pledges, expenses were lower than expected, other resources were found, and the budget balanced.

Fr. Roger's choices of personnel made a difference. He gave the parish what it wanted in Associate Rector Fr. Daron Vroon, a young priest with children. (See an appreciation of Fr. Daron.) Peter Waggoner brought children, teens, and college students into the choir program, and established a "St. James School of Music" where musicians could give lessons -- an outreach program that paid dividends to the church in dollars and in participation. Matt Bowers reinvigorated the flagging Youth Ministry; when he moved out of state during COVID, Riley Dugan continued to grow the program. Fr. Roger hired staff from outside of the parish to serve as disinterested professionals: Jenny Mancini, Assistant to Clergy; Charlene Smith, Financial Manager; Amy Goetze, the Director of Communications (someone to manage our web site -- at last!); and Building Superintendent Erik Linso, who saves the church thousands of dollars with DIY proactive repairs.

Fr. Roger's pastoral ministry happened mostly out of my sight, but I got a sense of it early in his tenure. I was still known for chairing the Search Committee when an elderly gentleman accosted me after a service. "Do you know what that rector you got us did last week?" I braced myself. "He stayed all night with me and my wife when she went into the Emergency Room." I know Fr. Roger recently took similar care with a bereaved father. As Clerk taking names of visitors after services, I saw the personal connections Fr. Roger had made to the people who waited in line for a word with him. People routinely clasped both of his hands; they hugged him; they whispered in his ear, and received whispered words back, or a promise, "I'll call you." He has often visited my mother in memory care, but I wouldn't know it if her caregivers hadn't told me.

Until COVID, Fr. Roger saw to it that worship took place at St. James nearly every day. Sundays there were three services for three worship styles (Rite One no music, Rite Two with music, Rite One high church with chanting), plus Evensong spoken, sometimes sung. Weekdays there was morning prayer, and Wednesday evening healing services. Some of my most memorable worship experiences were for feast days I'd never known about in my 30 previous years in the Church. Fr. Daron or Fr. Roger would preach and serve communion for groups of six-to-twelve parishioners on Ascension Day, the Annunciation, and, in the church cemetery, All Soul's Day.

Metrics of all sorts were headed in the right direction, bucking trends in the Diocese, until COVID hit in March 2020, and our church building was practically barricaded by decree of the Bishop. Still, Fr. Roger and his team found ways to do church, adapting to changing protocols. Easter live-streamed from Fr. Daron's living room was memorable -- with mother Julie Vroon keeping her youngest boys respectfully silent, mostly. I stood in for the choir a few times once that was allowed, singing to the camera accompanied by interim organist Paul Kelley. There were eucharists in the parking lot, with priests in masks moving from car to car even in cold wind and rain. No wonder that Fr. Roger, expressing thanks when church at last opened up again, was overcome with emotion and couldn't speak.

COVID was responsible in one way or another for declines in attendance, discontinuation of the small services, and the departure of the choir director. Fr. Roger's appointment of Bryan Black to lead music at St. James may turn out to be one of most enduring and consequential gifts in his legacy. As a baritone in the choir, that's how it feels.

So now Fr. Roger can rest. When Roger introduced me to his wife Elisabeth back during the search process, he said he'd married her because "she's fun!" I'm sure she's thrilled. In the words of that catchy hymn tune (with an even catchier title Ora Labora), a glad sound comes with the setting sun, / "Servants, well done."

Reflections on Sermons I've reflected on sermons by Fr. Roger through the years. I'd make notes on my bulletin, and write on my blog if my teaching schedule gave me the time. Here are my reflections, most recent listed first:

Fr. Roger Allen

• What Puts the "Dead" in the Dead Sea(09/2022) is a parable that Fr. Roger found in a quirk of mideastern geography.
• What's New in that New Commandment from Jesus (05/2022), a question that Fr. Roger Allen answered the day after a horrific shooting in Buffalo.
• For My Eyes Have Seen Thy Salvation (02/2022), my response to that text, and Fr. Roger's questons.
• Sermon in Nine Words (01/2022) by Jesus, with commentary by Fr. Roger Allen
  
• A Silent "Silent Night" and other Tales from Omicron Christmas (12/2021)
• Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture (06/2021) is an olio of highlights and insights by Fr. Roger and Fr. Daron.
• Fear Not (04/2020) is a message by Fr. Roger livestreamed from a barricaded church, added to my own reflection on Isaiah and the pandemic, "Deep Gloom Enshrouds the Nations."
• Christmas Present: Carols and Lessons (12/2019) reflects on Fr. Roger's sermons for three services I attended in 20 hours.
• Episcopal Church at Work (01/2018) So much planning went into making the service; the sermon brought it all together.
• Easter Vigil after a Painful Holy Week (04/2018) Dogs. Diagnoses. Darkness.
• Give me that Organized Religion (08/2017) Fr. Roger Allen on what you miss when you miss church
  
• Ascension Day: It's Up to Us (05/2017) helped convince me that this least loved season of the church year is the one to pay most attention to.
• A New Parable: The Farmer's Third Wish (09/2016)
• Theology with Martini and Ice Cream (08/2016) is a memorable message from Fr. Roger Allen
• Beyond Being Right(02/2015) relays messages about duality from sermons by Fr. Daron and Fr. Roger.
• Jesus Ascended: Then What? responds to a team effort by Fr. Roger and Fr. Daron to focus our attention on the season of "Ordinary Time." (06/2014)
• Father Roger and Water (01/2012)

"Thinking Inside the Box" by Adrienne Raphel

When crossword puzzles first became a fad in America in the 1920s, moral panic ensued. Editorialists in England cried that America was "enslaved" to crosswords; but soon, the English were addicted. We learn this from Adrienne Raphel's Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who can't live without them (p.78).  The book was a gift to me from dear friend Kitty Drew and her late husband Terry Strecker.

Raphel pushes back on those who regard puzzle-solving as a shameful waste of time and effort. She almost convinces.

In favor of crosswords, Raphel offers these facts:

• People at the tops of their fields regularly work(ed) crosswords: Nabokov, Eliot, Auden, Sondheim, Pelosi, President Clinton, Bret Favre, and Yo-Yo Ma (xiv).
• A puzzle saved civilization when it was planted in the London Times as bait to draw puzzle-solvers to Bletchley Park, where they broke the Nazis' enigma code (91).
• Studies show that doing crosswords delays the onset of dementia (ch. 13). (I wish to forget that dementia, when it does hit, hits puzzlers harder.)

Then there's the beneficence of Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times, "puzzle master" of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and "everyone's uncle":

He carries himself with the formal politeness of a foreign affairs diplomat and the wholesomeness of a Midwestern tennis coach. He has a sheepish grin, boyish cheeks, and a trimmed mustache that defies trendiness; his eyes flicker on each blink between anxious to please and slyly ready to deceive. (65)

Raphel meets with Shortz and his assistants at the puzzle-master's home, a "Juilliard of puzzling" for his interns, where they sift through hundreds of submissions from hopeful puzzle-writers nation-wide. Raphel herself writes a puzzle, giving us insight to the tricks, tools, and demands of the craft. Like most of the others she saw at Shortz's home, hers comes back with the notation TDEME. The letters stand for "Theme Didn't Excite Me Enough" (69), but I notice that the pronunciation of the letters could be "tedium."

Is joy a good enough reason to spend a lot of your life doing crosswords? What makes crosswords enjoyable has changed over the decades. During the Shortz tenure at the Times, the puzzles have tilted away from puzzles that rewarded arcane knowledge towards word-play. Unlike his predecessor Eugene T. Maleska, Shortz allows phrases, brand names (ZZZQUIL was one answer), and pop cultural references. Shortz and his team look for "the kind of pattern that puts an involuntary smile on the editors' faces" (70).

In other chapters, Raphel takes us to a crossword-solving competition, she reviews some faux pas that prompted Shortz and his staff to remove their white-male blinders, and she surveys puzzles in fiction.

Still, what good is a puzzle when you've done it? I've a pile of puzzle books going back 15 years. With my notations beside the hardest-won and cleverest answers -- mostly, HA! and AH-HA! -- the books are trophies, stacked and annually dusted with reverence. But I've never reopened one.

Despite Raphel's book, there's an accusing angel inside me charging that I've wasted time solving puzzles that could have gone into studying great literature or creating literature of my own.

The devil's advocate argues that working a crossword, reading a poem, and writing a poem are equally creative. Sure, someone else shaped the piece, leaving us the clues. Still, our imaginations and memories are also struggling to find the perfect word, the interconnection, the shape, the meaning. Coming to puzzles from the other side, we mirror what their creators do.

When I'm writing a poem, closing in on the draft that I will eventually decide is the final one, I feel like I'm uncovering something that I should have seen all along. Like the solution to a crossword, the right words were there -- somewhere in the back of my mind -- the whole time. So, whether I'm creating something myself or re-creating what someone else composed, the sensation is the same.

There's a quasi-religious side to crosswords, too:

• Stephen Sondheim, famous composer-lyricist and the man whose British-styled "cryptic crosswords" introduced the genre to American audiences*, said that's the thing about crosswords: you know there IS a solution.  Sondheim never believed in the Creator of the universe; but he liked believing in the creator of any puzzle.   
  
• Shortz wrote in his introduction to Cartoon Puzzles: "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it." His sense of awe and gratitude is where religion begins.

So, to pass the time with a puzzle is not a waste of time. Neither is reading about it in Raphel's playful book.

*Cryptic clues are two-in-one: first, there's the answer, and then a play on words that gives the answer in another way. "Successor to The Sound of Music" gives you HEIR (a successor) which has the "sound" of music, i.e., air. "Entertain and wind again" gives you REGALE, which consists of the word "gale," i.e., a strong wind, and "re-" again.

I've crossed crosswords and theology before:

• Theology of Crossword Puzzles: A Shortz Sermon is an acrostic on the name of NPR's "puzzle master" for which each line relates a truth about crosswords to a spiritual principle (03/2010)
• Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design (01/2007) relates puzzles to humor and awe
• My poem "Cliff Hanger" was inspired by Raphel's simile for diagramless crosswords: solvers had to figure out where the black squares were, as well as the correct answers, relying on the letters provided like climbers clutching grips to scale a rock wall (105). Across the top of every draft of that poem, I wrote GOD-CLIFF-CROSSWORDS-POETRY