Ken's Blog

Last Post

2008-02-12T18:18:00.000-05:00

This will be my last post from this blog page. Next week, my new publishing website, www.kenarnoldbooks.com, will go live. It will contain a new blog space, KABlog, which will be open to contributions from other writers. I will continue to post something there once a week on same schedule, but you will have the pleasure of hearing other voices as well as mine. I encourage you to visit the new website and blog--and to sign up there for our newsletter, which will keep you up to date on our forthcoming books and bloggers.

I have been writing this blog for just about a year. Over that time I have talked frequently about the Episcopal Church and its struggles with dissidents--the conservatives who have been outraged by the consecration of a practicing gay bishop (for those of you on the outside, there are plenty of gay priests and bishops in the church, but Gene Robinson, the gay bishop in question, did not pretend to be other than who he is and did not hide his partnered relationship). That story continues to play itself out, but increasingly over the year I have found it to be tiresome. It is about life on a theological pinhead, for the most part. The serious issues of our time are not being ignored by the church--or churches--but on the whole the real work on global warming, armed conflict, economic injustice, and racial tensions is being done by groups not associated with the church. (Before some of you write to me about this, I know of the few exceptions and that in some parts of the country and the world, important and risky work is being done. My point remains: most of the church's attention is directed toward the small print.)

The presidential election has turned out to be more important that some of my earlier posts suggested I thought it would be. The emergence of Barack Obama is a hopeful sign, if only because he has brought out more voters and seems willing to raise the issues that matter most. (I do not believe that he is not a politician, however. He is a very able politician.) Hillary Clinton remains a strong and viable option, leaving us Democrats in the unusual position of having two similarly strong candidates to choose between (assuming that the current Obama sweep doesn't knock Clinton out). And even John McCain isn't just another zombie from the Reagan tomb. We still have our heads in the sand when it comes to the problems of our extravagant and wasteful way of life. I have nothing wise to say about the escalating problem of the global climate; I do plan to publish some books this year about it, however.

In the past year, Connie and I have moved from New York City to Portland, Oregon, changing cities and employment. We have started a new publishing company; I have finished the first draft of a new book on Christianity tentatively titled The Christian Atheist. Connie has finished a book manuscript and begun another. We are both actively writing and seeking publishers, while working every day to find new authors to publish. It's been a hectic and in some ways frightening year for us. There was even a time last spring when we were not sure how we were going to survive or where we were going to live.

But here we are. In the end, it is where we need to be. The shift from this blog space into a new one is, in a small way, indicative of the changes. We are moving into a broader environment, one in which we intend to flourish. I hope that those of you who have been reading this blog will make the trip over to the new space. Some exciting publishing will be happing there, in addition to these weekly ruminations, rantings, and redactions (not sure those all mean something here but I got interested in "r" words).

Let me close with a haiku:

dry leaves cling
to the Butterfly Maple
oh! last summer

Ashes

2008-02-05T02:13:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it is meaningful that Fat Tuesday is also SuperDuper Tuesday. After the feasting come the ashes, if you go in for that sort of thing. (Even if you don't, they will come.)

Some years ago when I was the on-call chaplain for St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan, I went into the wards on Ash Wednesday to put ashes on foreheads and remind people they were going to die. There was great eagerness among the nurses in particular, who were positively gleeful as they lined up. I recall that as I was imposing ashes on the nurses in the Intensive Care Unit a man in the room nearby went into cardiac arrest. The doctors rushed in to save his life. I am not sure exactly what they were doing; I was busy marking the smiling nurses with death. I had not gotten to him yet.

This brief recollection is just a prelude to a poem, which I wrote a few weeks ago, not thinking about Lent at all. It is not a poem about Lent, but it is about ashes. As the poem says, that is enough.

Ashes

Scatter them you said
on the Columbia where Multnomah Falls
bisects the cliff’s face
knife plunged through the rock
a flash of brilliance in the sun
so that they sink into the everlasting flow of things
dissolve into memory
into fact
into the western sun
what I want you said is to leave the country
lose myself in the Pacific

it was one of those conversations
we did not plan to have
how do you want to be memorialized
I asked
when you’re gone
what songs should we sing
and what do we do with the body
you no longer need
and we are too creeped out to keep

burn it you said

and I agreed
I do not want to be deposited in dirt
I said
nor in the family vault
burn mine too
and you and all my friends
be joyful on a hill
among the spruce and rock
and if you cannot bear to watch
the flames consume me
recall the heat of all the passions
of our days and feel within
the unexpected power of
what bursts forth when we let go
of what we were

you smiled and said ok
we’ll dance for you like dervishes
but if I’m gone before you
just be sure you dump
my ashes in the river
that’s enough

Art and Grace

2008-01-28T21:17:00.001-05:00

On Saturday I went to Seattle by train, my maiden voyage to the soggy city. The purpose of my trip was to be present for the creation of a chapter of a national organization of artists in the Episcopal Church, known as ECVA (Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts). As a member of the board, I wanted to meet some of these artists and see their work in person (we can see a lot of it online at www.ecva.org--you can too).

The artwork was wonderful--a great variety of themes and materials, from fabric to photography, enamel to sculpture. One enigmatic head of Jesus with blue eyes and vaguely Hispanic features was a fresh and somehow disturbing take on a common image. It was almost an icon but also just a photograph mounted on gold. A small box with a dozen nails driven into it sat serenely beside beautiful enamel pendants--and at the other end of the table was a cloth book, each page stitched in homage to community gardens, the cover comprised of dirty gardening gloves. A precise drawing of a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil was a Zen masterpiece.

It was worth the trip to see the work and hear the artists talk about what they had made and how they brought to their art spirit as well as technique. All art, I think, is spiritual in some way; at the core of a work of art is that ineffable something that transforms technique.

A couple of us talked later about whether an image of Jesus or the Madonna would read as a religious object to someone who knew nothing of the story behind the images or of the religious tradition that begat them. I argued that viewers would know that these were spirit-filled images, just as Rothko paintings, which do not contain realistic objects or people, are clearly spiritual at their core and in their effect on viewers. Buddhist art can similarly inspire reverence, even when the viewer knows nothing of Buddhism or the "saints" who animate its memory.

But the most important event of the evening, for me, was an encounter with one artist who had shown us an apron she had made, using materials from a thrift shop that caters to the homeless. It was a simple apron, hardly what we would term art. After the formal presentations, she came up to me and asked if I published work by other writers (I had been introduced as a publisher and she wasn't sure whether I just published myself). I said I did. She told me that she had been homeless herself and while she was in the shelter had written poems.

Her manner was diffident. She was almost girlish in her movements, swinging side to side, twisting a foot nervously behind an ankle--even though she was at least sixty years old. I said that we were planning to publish a book in which her poems might fit, and I offered to read them.

She quickly touched my arm, embarrassed that her motives had been misunderstood, and said, "Oh, no. I have someone who wants to publish them. No, I just wanted to know what you are doing so I can pray for you. For your success."

I admit to being stunned. I assumed I was doing something for her by offering to read her poems, which I also believed were probably not very good. But on the contrary she was offering to do something for me. I gave her my card and she also wrote my wife's name, Connie, on it, so that she could pray specifically for both of us.

I could see in her a spirit at work that had nothing to do with the traditional stories and images we associate with grace. She was, however, a channel of grace, or of the spirit, the heartbeat of the universe, what the Buddhists call a Bodhisattva, or what we, Saturday, were calling an artist.

I suspect her poems are as wonderful as her apron.

King and Heschel

2008-01-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

Some years ago a friend told me that he read Martin Luther Kings Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on this day of recollection. I began doing it myself and am struck every time by its power. The letter was written while King was held in solitary confinement in April 1963 in response to a statement from eight white, "liberal" Alabama clergy admonishing King to pursue racial justice through the courts not in the streets. Episcopal Bishop C.C. Jones Carpenter was the instigator and first signer of the clergy statement, "Call to Unity." Despite his credentials as a critic of segregation, Carpenter, as the senior Episcopal bishop in the US, failed to lend his prestige to King's efforts. Carpenter criticized King for a lack of respectability (according to Taylor Branch in his magisterial Parting the Waters, America in the King Years, 1954-63). Alas, it is just what one might expect from an Episcopalian.

King's letter is nothing less than a definitive statement about the need for prophetic action to achieve social change. For us in an election year, as we listen to the sound bites and moral shuffling of the candidates, it is a reminder of how far we have fallen from the mountain on which King stood. I have said this before, in an earlier post, but it bears repeating: the church has fallen silent as a prophetic witness. No one speaks with moral authority from the pulpit, with the possible exception of Jim Wallis. But in the streets where poverty continues to destroy the lives of men and women and children of color, and in the fields where migrant workers are exploited for our collective benefit (and then excoriated by opportunistic politicians for being immigrants and poor), there are few with the courage or the will to object.

We live in a state of governmental control that has, over the years, grown tighter, but we have scarcely noticed. At play in our consumer gardens, we worry mostly about our perquisites. We are like the proverbial frog in the slowing warming water that, when it reaches boiling, will cook us before we know what has happened. And yet no church leaders speak out against the slow evaporation of our basic liberties.

We live next to the federal building here in Portland and the other day Connie saw a woman standing in one of the windows with a pair of binoculars focused on a floor somewhere below ours. We had heard a story when we moved in about federal agents raiding the apartment we now live in because the resident was cleaning a rifle (he was a former member of the military who owned the gun legally). I offer this image as a symbol of the way we have become accustomed to living. We are watched, we watch each other, we have accepted the basic premises of a police state.

King and the black Americans of his day--and of the country from its beginnings--lived in a police state. Those of us who were teenagers in the 60s remember the dogs and the fire hoses, the murders and jailings. I was in Lynchburg, Virginia, as a college student between 1962 and 1966, and was dragged out of bed to be beaten for my modest civil rights activities. The local newspaper published a front-page notice edged in black suggesting I go back north to be with my communist buddies. The paper made it clear where I might be found. The rumor was the American Nazi Party was looking for me.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail" is addressed to all of us who urge care and caution, who are content in our wealth and respectability. Bishop Carpenter, by all accounts a decent man, stands for our cowardice. Decent though we are, we are content to allow the poorest and the least powerful to be sacrificed to our need for order and security. "We know through painful experience," King wrote, "that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor." Are we oppressed? Surely, that is an overstatement. Analogously, we might ask: has global warming inconvenienced or hurt us? Not yet.

The churches are silent. Our political leaders are compromised nearly beyond redemption. Who is there like King and his comrades in the 60s that might bring to our public dialog the moral clarity of "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

As it happens, this year some Jewish leaders are also remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel this week; he would be 101 years old. A mystic, scholar, and activist, Heschel marched with King in Selma. But he represents that other side of activism, the meditative preparation required if one is to survive solitary confinement, ostracism, and rebuke--if one is to meet death with equanimity. In his brief book, The Sabbath, Heschel writes of the sanctification of time. "In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more....There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern." The Sabbath offers another vision of who we are called to be.

These things in space are the idols of empire, and we have fallen before them in worship. Although King and his fellow activists were extraordinarily successful in bending the will of empire to justice, their accomplishments are slowly being eroded by our national obsession with security. We live in the empire. We are each implicated in its actions everywhere. We are all in a Birmingham jail. And we are silent.

Rain

2008-01-09T01:24:00.000-05:00

It's that season of the year in Portland in which nearly every day is a rainy day. Not necessarily all day, but sometimes it is. The streets are wet whether there has been rain that day or not. Along what is known as the Park Blocks, a green pedestrian mall near our apartment, the ground is puddled. The squirrels are soaked but don't seem to mind. In fact, no one seems to mind being wet. It is a fact of life. At the same time, there is also some sun almost every day, often in the mornings, and the clouds blow quickly north or east, sweeping away the patches of blue, the sun itself, and yet they are high and somehow lighter than the clouds I recall from New York that seemed to sit on the city like a portent of doom. Not so long ago, as we were entering this season, I wrote a poem that expresses something of what it's like here in the rain. Here it is.

Rain

Most days it is predicted

but doesn’t always come although the clouds do
they rumble in from the west
where the ocean whips them up
then collapse on the mountains east of us

when it comes there is no warning no excitement
just the rain where before there was no rain
slant lines across the view
usually from the south

we walk around in it

sometimes it rains here
and at the same time over there is no rain but sun
or on one occasion as we sat in a restaurant
hail bouncing on the street
as if some kids were playing hailball
and in the next block up
bright sun dry street

At noon I walk through the rain to the dumpling café
for dumplings

how’s your day goin the guy behind the counter asks
people ask that question a lot here
I say ok
it’s nice and steamy in here
but surprisingly warm out there I say

we look at the rain

nothing to complain about he says
the rain comes and goes

Ten Books

2008-01-01T15:41:00.000-05:00

At the end of the year, lists of the ten best this and thats proliferate. There are multiple ten best book lists, usually focused on what was newly published in the year. Here is my list of the ten best books I read in 2007--and it turns out that a goodly number were also published during the year. I have left out all but two of the books I read as part of the research for my new book, which I am revising before submitting to a publisher in the next couple of months, even though many of them were fascinating. They were also heavily theological, and who needs theology on New Year's Day.

So, here goes (in no particular order).

1. The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano. A strange book that I was reading for months--it seemed for the whole year--about poets on the run. Broken up into apparently disconnected sections, the bulk of the book lacks plot or even coherent narrative. And yet it is so well written, so engagingly literate, so suggestive, that I literally had to finish it. It is like a mysterious person you feel you have to get to know, but the more time you spend with him/her, the more elusive, the more intriguing s/he becomes. How to account for the allure of this book....and it's a translation, so who knows how much better it must be in Spanish.

2. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson. A novel that turns up on almost everyone's list for the year--and for that reason I thought of leaving it off of mine. But I just finished it a week or so ago and it is still so fresh. At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it or get through it. Like Bolano's book, this one is very long. But the fast and truthful dialog, the voices that seemed to come out of my own head, drew me in and on. There is a quality to this of The Heart of Darkness, I would guess intentional, that adds weight to what seems almost a casual thriller. Except there is no thriller plot. The book illuminates the moral bankruptcy of Vietnam, as if we needed to hear that, while offering an odd and disturbing insight into what it takes to live after catastrophe--which we do need to hear.

3. All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P. Jones. This collection of stories came out in 2006, but I picked it up around the time I was in Washington, DC, for the ordination of my niece. As it happens, Jones writes vividly and particularly about DC, complete with addresses, and one of the stories I read soon after the ordination takes place on the street where the church was located. Meaningless to fiction, of course, but at the same time it illustrates how immediately alive these stories are, as if one were right there just this morning. Jones is a wonderful writer. His stories feel like entire novels condensed into a relatively few pages. They also tell the white world more about American race than most of us will ever learn by just walking around in our protected skin.

4. After Dark, by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is my favorite writer of fiction right now, and this was his new novel for 2007. I don't think it is up to Kafka on the Shore (2005), but it is a good book to read if you want an intro to Murakami's world and style. He can be disconcertingly allusive or off-hand. His characters are often too ephemeral to take hold of and the world he inhabits is often a distortion of the world in which we live, just beyond recognition, but disconcertingly familiar. In this book, we watch, as voyeurs, one woman asleep while her sister slips almost thoughtlessly into the night world of Tokyo that never sleeps; but the sleeper somehow effects what happens in our waking world. The boundaries between realities, as in all of Murakami, are distressingly permeable.

5. Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. I can hear you now: Ken, how could you! Philip Roth is so, uh, mean, sexist, obsessive....Right. All true. It's like reading John Updike, I hate myself in the morning. What sucked me in here is that this novel about one of Roth's alter-egos, Nathan Zuckerman, is also about the fears and physical distress that accompany prostate cancer. I could identify with Zuckerman. It's a well-written book, as Roth books are, and you might enjoy it, especially if you've had prostate cancer or might one day. Ok, it's a book for guys who fret about impotence and death (that would be all of us). That's ok, I think, every now and then.

6. The Laying on of Hands, stories by Alan Bennett. A paperback collection from 2002 I picked up in the Fall. I had not read Bennett before. Two of the three long stories here will lead me to look up more of this work. The first, "The Laying on of Hands," is a must read for Episcopalians, Anglicans, and Anglophiles: it is a screamingly funny and precise evisceration of church liturgical politics. The third, "Father! Father! Burning Bright," is a touching but also wickedly pointed account of a dutiful son waiting at the bedside of his dying father. We don't write like this in the United States because we don't understand our own class structure well enough--mainly, I suppose, because we don't think we have one.

7. Messenger, New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, by Ellen Bryant Voight. I read quite a lot of poetry, but this was someone I had not read (shame on me). Voight is a clear and evocative writer with a narrative line that is subtle and sorrowing. The books consists of selections from other books and serves to send one back to the originals to experience the the shape of the work. "All ears, nose, tongue and gut,/ dogs know if something's wrong;/ chickens don't know a thing, their brains/ are little more than optic nerve...." The beginning of a long book sequence titled Kyrie, about the Influenza epidemic of 1918. Curls your hair.

8. Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, by Richard Smoley. For those of you who, like me, are fed up with traditional Christianity and its smugness, this book offers a smart and informative overview of what the church has effectively hidden all these centuries. Elaine Pagel writes about this tradition, and you may have read her, but Smoley gives us even more. The spiritual world he describes feels strange to one steeped in the dogmatic theologies of the church, as if one has happened upon a midnight rite of passage that is supposed to be vile but turns out to be not only illuminating but liberating.

9. I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. I read Hofstadter's book as part of the research for my book (that's also why I picked up Smoley). What interests Hofstadter is the nature of consciousness--Who Am I?--or, as he puts it, what it means to have or be a human soul, without the religious connotations. Hint: consciousness is shared. Part of what drives the author is the death of his wife and his yearning to know what or how we live on, not just as memory, in the consciousness of others. It's a provocative and sometimes annoying book. You may know Hofstadter from Godel, Escher, and Bach way back in 1979. This is an easier but equally mind-bending read.

10. Elia Kazan, by Richard Schickel. This biography was first published in 2005, the paper edition in 2006. I've wanted to read it since it was first published but just got around to it in 2007. Schickel is a good writer and brings to life the nuts and bolts of Kazan's work in theater and film. Most helpfully, he gives us some deeper sense of why Kazan testified against his fellow "communists" before Congress. I think that Schickel bends over too far to exonerate Kazan, but he makes a strong argument in his defense. Most importantly, Kazan's work is well examined here. And it is at the heart of our best theater and film of the mid-twentieth century. Go back and watch "On the Waterfront," "A Streetcar Named Desire," or "A Face in the Crowd" to recall how deeply we know this work--and how much better it is than almost anything you can see today on the screen or stage.

Ok. Long post. Apologies. May you all have a year of blessings and blossoms.

Santa Turned Away by White House

2007-12-26T14:35:00.000-05:00

Ok, I published a new post on Monday but this came in this morning from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I wanted those who read this blog to see it too.

Merry Christmas. Seriously.

2007-12-24T17:55:00.000-05:00

Last year, you may recall, there was a lot of angst about putting "Christ back in Christmas," especially on the Fox Network. I don't know if the anxiety has been as high this Christmas, but the presence of Christ in the season is not in doubt, whether we say "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or something more "religious."

One way to read the incarnation is that the divine, or the elemental life force that animates the universe, is manifest in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. The story of the birth of Jesus is clearly a myth designed to show us how we are children of this elemental force and that our arrival is an occasion of hope and joy. Jesus stands in for each of us, as do his beleaguered parents and the poor and rich alike who seek enlightenment. The star is not out there but within. We can re-enact the birth scene, as St. Francis did (and as we imitate each year in pageants and creches), but we are limiting our understanding of incarnation if we insist on the historical "truth" of this birth story. Too many details are simply wrong; the story is not consistently told. But the myth is powerful because it gives us hope in our own future. And that has value in our difficult times.

In the United States, the Christmas story is one of economic success. For most retailers--and publishers, as I well know from my own work history--without Christmas there is no profit. If we did not have Christmas, we would have to invent another holiday that encourages people to buy. Christmas is the engine of our economy, one could argue. In that sense, the holiday is wholly (and holy) one of the Christ event, in which the incarnation finds its ultimate validity by disappearing into our secular lives. The near disappearance of overt Christian observance in Europe and in the UK is a sign of the complete success of the incarnation. We can no longer tell the difference between secular and spiritual life. They are one.

In other words, the season is not about god coming in and taking over.

The devout might protest that the secular has taken over, that the spiritual is gone. But that is a perspective that claims for the spiritual a separate sphere and meaning. By the myth of the birth of Jesus we in fact are shown the opposite: that the spiritual inheres in the secular and the less we insist on separating the two, the better off we will be.

But be careful: the message is not that theocracy is the answer. We have seen too often that theocracy is a death-delivering system that crushes human spirit and creativity. I am talking about secularism, humanism, whatever word you want to use, in which the sacred is part of and subservient to daily life. The arrival of Jesus, as the myth clearly shows, is about how the elemental force of life that drives all things is not a Ruler. It opens a way and steps aside.

Do I like the commercialism of the season? No. In fact, we aren't buying gifts this year. But we actually take this time, even in spending sprees that are meaningless, to say the words that express the deepest longings of our hearts: that we might have peace, that we might be good to one another, that we might be free of our fears. It might take a new HDTV to make those wishes manifest. The makers of the televisions receive their wages, as do the workers who sell them. When the Wise Men in one version of the myth show up with gifts, no one complains, even though as gifts they are on a par with that tie you'll never wear.

As my parents always said, and probably meant, "it's the thought that counts." Having thoughts of comfort and joy at a given moment of every year is good, even if we do not explicitly connect them with mythic events or a religion that often seems out of touch with what's really going on.

Merry Christmas. Seriously.

PS: Last week I identified some trees in Oregon as Birches, thereby showing my east coast roots and ignorance of local flora. A friend wrote to say that I probably saw Alders. I know that Frost writes in his poem, "Birches," that boys might have been swinging on them; I think boys could swing from Alders too. It might be worth a try.

To the Beach

2007-12-18T09:54:00.000-05:00

My daughter Ruth is visiting for a few days, glad to be in the northwest instead of Philadelphia where, as in the rest of the northeast, the weather is at best cold and sloppy. Yesterday, we drove to Cannon Beach, a town on the ocean whose main attraction is Haystack Rock, which juts out of the surf like a bishop's mitre. Several of these startling behemoths guard the Oregon shore. They are lava formations (our major mountains--Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Ranier--are volcanoes, one not as dormant as the others). The temperature was in the mid-forties and, despite forecasts, the sun was shining or at least visible through a light cloud cover while we were in Cannon Beach.

Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."

Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.

During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."

Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."

Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.

Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.

A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."

After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."

GodTubed

2007-12-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine whose job it is to keep up with the world of the weird told me about GodTube last week. It is the "Christian" equivalent of YouTube, featuring videos with supposedly uplifting, mostly evangelical content. "Broadcast Him" is the tag line. There are music videos as well as playlettes showcasing the dangers of sin. And of course advertisements, one for Liberty University right at the top of the landing page. See it for yourself: www.godtube.com.

After a week in which Mitt Romney appeared on television to affirm his Christian credentials for Iowan Republican Evangelicals, it seems a kind of GodTube was everywhere. Those of you who watch TV probably saw endless replays of what he had to say, interminable discussions of what it means that a major candidate has to explain his religion, reruns of JFK defending his Catholicism, talking religious heads, etc. Religion was big last week. It will stay big throughout the election year, I think, because everyone running for office feels s/he has to pander to the Christian Right in one form or another. And you cannot be other than Christian if you want to be president. Imagine a Muslim trying to address the nation and concluding with a phrase other than God bless America. Allah, anyone? Or an observant Jew declining to mention the name of the Holy One at all.

The fact is, Romney really has nothing to say about religion. I am content that he is a practicing Mormon down to his underwear and that if he is elected president (he won't be, of course) he will behave no more badly than our current leader. He could hardly be worse. As governor of Massachusetts, he left the state about as liberal as he found it. Listening to him pontificate about his faith must be ten times more painful than reading his words. I hope the others don't follow suit. I don't want to hear Clinton talk about being a Methodist, nor Huckabee tell me about his personal relationship with the Savior and Redeemer of the World.

It is rhetorical nonsense. I was struck that some commentators were concerned that Romney did not argue for the inclusion of nonbelievers in the American civic landscape. Nonbelievers are doing just fine, thank you. The voice of Christopher Hitchens was heard, strident as always, last week in an article condemning, of all things, Hanukkah as a primitive throwback that Jews should repudiate. I also found an image of Santa on the Cross, which Landover Baptist Church (http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/33515) puts on t-shirts and mugs as a pro-Christian (put Christ back in Christmas) statement. The image here also decorates a thong on their website. These are some pretty rad Baptists.

Religion is dished up to us daily in a variety of repulsive forms. One of the most offensive is currently running in movie theaters. Perhaps you've seen it. The video is an advertisement for the National Guard. It features a band on a hillside singing with that breathy sincere sound while soldiers, in Iraq and our own Revolutionary War, rescue children and promise to be there whenever we need them. It is a religious message in every sense of the term, offering salvation, security, and really bad music to true believers (in the American military way). It is exactly the kind of music featured on GodTube, except it extols the citizen soldier instead of Jesus. Both of course are redeemers.

If you haven't already been subjected to the video at a movie theater, you can download the MP3 file and listen to it at http://www.1800goguard.com/movie/index2.php. When we first heard it a couple of weeks ago here in Portland, the audience began hissing before it finished playing. It's one of the reasons we like living here.

What's my point this week? We could use some serious, and less noisy, faith practice in this country (not more religion--we have too much of that). What we have now is a parody of faith: marketing, manipulation, and unbridled ego. Another example of religion as parody, and I'll finish with this one, is from the Episcopal Church, my favorite institution. A diocese in California has officially voted itself out of the church because it, the diocese, knows itself to be purer than those of us who sup with gays and take communion from women priests. The bishop in this diocese sounds just like Romney or any of our political candidates: unctuous, full of himself, and lacking in credibility. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom

2007-12-04T14:17:00.001-05:00

A friend wrote to me this morning asking if were building an ark. Given the news about the weather in the northwest these past few days, his inquiry was not without merit. It has rained. But the suffering caused by a convergence of Pacific storms has not afflicted us much here in Portland. We are a hundred miles from the Pacific, and there is a coastal range between us and most of the furor. One town, Vernonia, just thirty-five miles away to the northwest was isolated by mudslides and residents had to be evacuated by the National Guard. Some people have died. So the fact that we were mostly spared in Portland is not the story.

It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)

We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.

In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.

A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?

That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.

At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.

But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.

We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.

Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.

Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?

Jesus for President

2007-11-26T11:51:00.001-05:00

I have not used the powerful platform of this blog to advocate for a particular political candidate. But this weekend I discovered that there is an alternative candidate that the liberal media has not been covering. Even worse, this candidate, whom many of you know and love, has run before. If you Google the name of his movement, "Jesus for President," you will find that as long ago as 2000 (remember the turn of the millenium?), this good man was a candidate. He and his surrogates have been using YouTube as a medium for getting out the message (a problem for them back in 2000), and if you want to see more of the campaign and its message, go to YouTube and search for "Jesus for President." I think you will realize, as I have, that the answer to our nation's problems is right in front of us.

Here (below) is one of the most effective of the campaign's video spots. In it, the Son of God appears as himself, most surprising, perhaps, for his choice of clothing. It looks like a Christmas sweater from his mom. But the message is one we all need to hear, particularly the parts in which he corrects some of the misinformation in the Bible (which he refers to as a biography).

Bishop Ken endorses Jesus. And so do I. What about you? Will you put your politics where your faith is? Obama, Hilary, John, Rudy, Mitt, John, Fred, Harry, and Dave (just to make sure I have covered them all) are telling us that they pray. Well, why not go right to the top and elect the one to whom or through whom they pray? I have not heard the leaders of America's churches speak about Jesus' candidacy. I wonder why they are so quiet. Since the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is the one I look to for guidance, I will ask her directly (I know she reads this blog): When are you going to endorse Jesus? (And, by the way, I saw your performance as Kate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There" and I thought you were fabulous.)

The Parish of Despair

2007-11-14T13:27:00.001-05:00

I want to pause to note the passing of The Rev. Chad Varah, shown here (in a photo from Reuters) on what might be a precursor to the cell phone before miniaturization. You have to love this guy. He set up a hot line for the suicidal and founded Samaritans, a charity that worked to prevent suicides. Here are some of the other major reasons to love him (as indicated in the New York Times obit this morning, which I urge you to read in full for all of the juicy details):

1. The Samaritans was named from a headline in The Daily Mirror. Father Varah disapproved of the name for his organization because he believed that religious teachings, presumably including Bible verses and stories meant to be instructive, should be avoided in helping the desperate. Treat em don’t preach to em.

2. He chose as his parish one that had a single parishioner—the lord mayor, as it happened—which gave him the opportunity to serve, as he put it, “the parish of despair.”

3. Father Varah supplemented his undoubtedly meager income writing for comic strips, an avocation I suspect most priests are not irreverent enough to pursue. (I do know of one cartooning Episcopal priest, Jay Sidebotham, the exception that proves the rule.)

4. When called to testify in the obscenity trial of Linda Lovelace, who starred in the pornographic film Deep Throat (the one that started pornography chic), he was questioned about the commandment forbidding adultery (which he had previously made clear in writings for what the Times calls a “sexually frank magazine” he did not always condemn). His response was, “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?” You go, guy!

5. He retired at the age of 92—at which point he was still getting around on public transportation. He died at 95 in Basingstoke, England. The rest of the Anglican Communion must be relieved.

6. He once characterized Pope John Paul II as “an ignorant Polish peasant” for his condemnation of contraception. I don’t know if the late pope was either ignorant or a peasant (I have my opinion), but what you have to admire is Father Varah’s willingness to say what he thought in public and for attribution (another uncommon trait in clergy).

7. He believed in reincarnation.

Be careful out there. Father Chad Varah could return as a member of your congregation. You won’t like what he has to say if you’re an orthodox Christian (whatever that is). And for god’s sake don’t put him on the vestry.

Anniversary

2007-11-07T01:16:00.000-05:00

As some of you know, I suffered an emotional collapse just over a year ago—All Saints Day, to be exact. It took me a few months to recover, with the help of an excellent psychiatrist and some medication, although it has taken this full year to begin to feel like myself again (whoever that might be). I no longer take meds. Leaving the New York City stress factory has helped my healing. Being able to retire as an Episcopal clergy has been a pivotal blessing: The Episcopal Church (or, to be fair, any church) is a petri dish for killer stress. Moving to Portland, Oregon, has revived my spirit and improved my vision. Everyone here is so positive—and, as those of you who know me know, I have to struggle to see the good news. But mostly I think I am just happy to be more than four thousand miles away from the east coast, where I lived all of my former life (although I miss many of you who live there, especially my [adult] children and my aging mother).

We have a surprising number of new friends here, most of them writers. I have been writing almost constantly since we got here in June. I have nearly finished a book critiquing the church (but also offering some reflections on what I see as a way out of the current Christianity quagmire). There have been several short stories (a new genre for me), a fistful of poems, notes for a new play, and the draft of the first third of a novel.

A couple of my older plays are being read by theaters—one of them, Enlightenment, is based on the last years of Thomas Merton; it has not been produced. It excites me to know that theaters are interested in it. The idea for the play was first suggested to me in the early 1980s by my agent at the time, Lucy Kroll. She was right that I should write it, but the play itself had to await the publication of Merton’s complete journals because of privacy issues. When the journals came out in the late 90s, I read them all and quickly wrote the play. It had been gestating for a long time and was ready to be born. After one staged reading in New York, however, the script sat in my desk drawer for seven years while I worked long, frustrating, and mostly fruitless hours for the church. Last month I completed a revision and sent it off to a theater here on the west coast. When it is produced—and I know it will be—I will let you know. Soon, I hope.

Perhaps the most unexpected accomplishment of these months has been the founding of my new publishing company, KenArnoldBooks, which will issue its first four titles in January and February of 2008. The launch party will be in early March. I will have much more to say about the publishing program as time goes on—but it should surprise no one who reads this blog that I am looking for books that are radical in their perspective, daring and provocative. I am not seeking to publish orthodox thinkers or writers. Nor am I only interested in religion—but insofar as I am publishing books with a spiritual bent, they will represent all traditions.

So, a year after a frightening encounter with demons, I am engaged with the work that has always mattered most to me: writing and publishing. And for the first time in my life I am doing both with as much freedom as we ever achieve. I can write (almost) whatever I please and publish only what interests me.

May you all know such freedom in your own lives. If you do, hold on to it; if you don’t, do something now. We so quickly run out of time. The demons are always waiting.

Rev. Ruth

2007-10-30T18:41:00.000-05:00

I got a call from my daughter Ruth on Saturday, the first time we had spoken since she returned from Colombia, S.A., a few weeks ago. She had gone to Medellin in particular because that is the city where she was born twenty-seven years ago. We adopted her when she was six months old and suffering from malnourishment. I remember our time in Medellin as a nightmare of Colombian bureaucracy and poisoned air. The city sits in a bowl among mountains, and in those days the atmosphere was a barely breathable carbon monoxide soup. The day we were supposed to leave Medellin for Bogota to pick up her U.S. visa, we learned that the embassy would be closed in observance of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Say, what? I spoke with an official there who said that the closure was out of respect for the local customs and that she would ordinarily be glad to come in and handle the visa for us except that her daughter was being confirmed that day. A big party was planned.

Ruth tells me that Medellin is now a tourist destination, a pretty cool place. While she was there, I saw an article in the New York Times Sunday Travel section saying the same thing. The city has come a long way from the 1980s when the drug trade was about to take over the economy. There are still dangerous parts of the country, of course, because a civil war continues. I confess to having worried about her while she was gone, but every now and then I’d get a text message from her saying something like, “Spending the day at the beach. Having a great time.” She’s a gregarious young woman and met a lot of people, it seems, who took her around to see the sights. She was in good hands.

When she called, I asked her, “What’s up?” And she started to giggle. “I’m the Rev. Ruth Arnold,” she laughed. And what did that mean? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “my friend in Albuquerque” where she went to college “wants me to marry her and her fiancé next June and they said I could go on this website, Universal Life Church Monastery, and get ordained. So I did.” She laughed and laughed.

I looked up the website while we were talking, and there it was. I loved the headline, so reminiscent of the early McDonald’s burger stands: “Over 20 million ordained since 1959.” I should have known about this option back in the late 1980s when I was turning my life inside out to get the Episcopal Church to agree to ordain me. I noticed on the ULC website that I could still become a Doctor of Metaphysics, which has a certain appeal. (How many certified metaphysicians do you know?) But my daughter clearly loved the fact that she got ordained in fifteen minutes on line, whereas I had spent eight years in order to become a . . . deacon. She’s right. It’s pretty funny.

But, you might say, that’s different. You’re ordained in a real church by a bishop in Apostolic Succession, a direct line straight back to Jesus himself.

Right.

I’m going to fill out this application for my metaphysical degree. Won’t take a minute.

Uh-oh, I hear Bishop Ken stomping down the corridors of the other world heading my way. I’m in trouble. Hit “Send” now!

Justa!

2007-10-23T16:39:00.000-05:00

“Justa, Justa. Come quickly.”

I was working quietly in my new home office here in Portland this morning when Bishop Ken interrupted, as he has a habit of doing, by calling to me imperiously from the other world. [For those of you who missed last week's post, Bishop Thomas Ken was active in Britain in the 17th century; he has begun to visit me, Deacon Ken, from the beyond, attracted, I believe, by the similarity of our names. A friend wondered if the bishop speaks to me from the radiator. He does not. He speaks to me as all bishops do, out of nowhere and in a loud voice.]

“I’ve told you, my name is Ken,” I said.

“No, no,” he chortled. “Justa. As in, Justa Deacon.” He laughed uproariously. “S'blood, I crack me up.”

“What do you want? I’m busy.”

“Did I ever tell you about how I refused to allow the King to park his trollop, Nell Gwyn, in my residence? You see, I was Royal Chaplain to King Charles and he thought maybe he could hide his mistress in my apartments and escape notice. Well, I can tell you I wasted no time in sending His Royal Highness a pretty sharp rebuke.”

“I’ve read about it. Very courageous of you.”

“But did you hear what I wrote? ‘The Royal Chaplain shall not double as the Royal Pimp.’ Pretty good, eh what? Anyway, that is how I came to be appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells. The King reportedly declared—I have this on the highest authority—‘None shall have this bishopric save that little man who refused lodging to poor Nellie!’ And when he died, the King that is, it was I he summoned to be with him at the end. Not that I’m actually such a little man, mind you.”

“That’s great,” I said, putting a Charlie Parker disc on the Bose. “But no one cares about King Charles and his mistress anymore. The church has more important matters to attend to than who’s sleeping with whom.”

“Ah,” Bishop Ken sighed. “I could have been executed for my stance. For what are your bishops prepared to die?”

“Church property and pensions.”

There was a knowing silence from the other world.

“Oh, dear, Justa. I’ve run out of tobacco. Be a good lad, will you, and fetch some for me.”

I turned up the volume on “Salt Peanuts.”

Bishop Ken Speaks

2007-10-16T12:41:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention that the author of this blog, whatever that may be, hath written calumnies against the Church, and yet being a deacon hath not attached himself as he should to a Bishop upon whom he may rely for counsel. I, Bishop Ken, have offered myself in Christian Charitie to tutor this wayward deacon in the ways of his calling. I may therefore on occasion intercede for him here and correct his lack of knowledge (but he being but a deacon is not charged to know anything but rather to do as he is told).

First, it is to be acknowledged that my half-brother-in-law, Izaak Walton, angler of some fame, who with my half-sister Anne did rear me from my birth in 1637, has informed me of Deacon Ken’s prowess as a fisherman, a sport of dignity, which alas I never learned from Mr. Walton. I know not what became of my natural parents. Nonetheless, it is a good thing to spend time in the country among rivers and the fishes and I commend the deacon for his attention to God’s creation.

However, and second, the goodly deacon, as I understand his wife Constance is prone to call him, for reasons unclear, has on occasion spoken sharply to bishops, admonishing them in their behavior. I hereby order him, in love and charitie, as his new bishop father in Christ, to desist from such speaking. The bishop is the sole keeper of the Word and it is his office to admonish, not the deacon’s. The deacon's office is to be admonished.

Deacon, I command you to attend upon me in the morning with my tea and toast and prepare to dress me for the Lord’s service, after which you may eat and take communion to the poor and sicke, whilst I attend to higher things.

Hold it, Bishop. I just want to point out that you challenged the king in the matter of the Declaration of Indulgence and were imprisoned in the Tower of London. And then refused to take an oath to William and Mary and were relieved of your office as a result. Like you, I think that there are times when leaders in the church have to speak out against those who abuse their power. For example, we have a regime in this country that tortures prisoners, denies health care to children, murders the innocent citizens of other countries, lies to its citizens, deports and mistreats the strangers in our midst....

Ah, Deacon Ken, it is true that on occasion one must refuse illegitimate power. In telling me, your bishop, of these terrible acts, you are doing your diaconal--and indeed Christian--duty. I commend you for it. What benighted country is this that you speak of? Its leaders are behaving shamefully if what you say is true. Perhaps you could tell me the name of church leaders to whom I could speak about these deplorable conditions. I wonder that they, your bishops, are silent on these matters. They too, by their inaction, abuse their authority.

Cycling to St. Paul

2007-10-09T11:32:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, I went cycling with Mark, a new friend here in Portland. He drove us to Champoeg Park (pronounced “shampoo-ee.”) twenty miles or so out of the city. Because I don’t have a car, I bike mostly in and around the city, which has miles of paths and bike lanes. It was good to get out and see some of the Oregon country, which is flat where we were riding. Along the road were fields planted with firs of various sorts, mostly Christmas trees, I think, and a couple of large hickory nut groves (around here, the nuts are called filberts). The nuts turn up in creative restaurant dishes around town. You can buy them fresh in the open air markets. The nuts were lying on the ground along the road we were traveling.

We decided to go to St. Paul, a town that hosts a somewhat famous rodeo on July 4th. The town itself is not much. Not far from the Willamette River, which also flows through Portland, it is a Roman Catholic hot spot. The church is located centrally—and I did not see any other denominations represented there, just the brick RC Church and the high school, also Catholic. Street names like Mission Road, Convent Avenue, Church Avenue gave away its identity. We rode into town by the church and out again into the countryside, noting on the way a couple of coffee shops we might visit. We decided on Banker’s Cup, which had a porch and pretty good coffee. Mark and I sat on the porch, looking across the parking lot at a couple of sheds that stored farm equipment (or something else, I couldn’t tell what). On the side of one of the sheds was an old billboard advertising the rodeo. On the bumper of an SUV in the parking lot was a sign reading: “You can’t be Catholic and pro-choice.”

“I told you it’s a Catholic town,” Mark said.

The sky is wide open in Oregon and out there on the plain you could see its great expanse. There were some puffy clouds behind the sheds. Not much was happening and we were happy to sit there drinking coffee.

Mark told me he had been raised Catholic but by the time he was twelve or thirteen he and his friends had figured out that the religion was essentially bogus, even as they went through the motions. When they skipped religious classes, they spent a lot of their time talking about the “theology” of avoiding the priests and their increasingly doubtful view of reality. They understood, he said, that it all rested on the veracity of the priests, whom they knew to be untrustworthy. Once their authority was in question, the rest of the infrastructure fell with them, all the way up to the Pope. He was talking as much about Christianity in general as Catholicism in particular.

I said that, indicating the expansive sky and clouds in front of us, many people I know in the church would talk about the beauty of God’s creation and describe how their emotions reflected God’s call to them from and as part of that creation. Mark responded that he saw the natural world as it is, and that is good enough.

Knowing that I am ordained in the Episcopal Church, I think Mark was curious to know how I would respond. And basically I had to agree with him. These days, when I look at the world I do not see a deity, nor do I hear a deity’s call to creation. What Mark had abandoned was a belief system—Christianity’s doctrines—that no longer reflected what he saw around him or what he experienced. And the argument for abandoning the system is a strong one.

I think a lot of people feel the same way. The Christian creedal world does not speak to them, except as a framework for control or denial, and they want none of it. Around here, in Portland, I’m told that about ten percent of the population attends church.

“People want meaning,” I said. “The church for the most part doesn’t give them a sense of meaning. It explains nothing. If the church is going to survive, it needs to figure out how to do that again.”

I still have an interest in the church's survival, but it's a hard position to maintain.

For me, the natural world has meaning, but it isn’t Christian meaning. The Buddhist explanation of reality resonates more strongly with me these days, but there is something missing there too. Its explanation of the origins of things makes more sense—all arising in mutual dependency out of the void—and its rejection of a theistic deity also sounds right. But that does not answer the twenty-first century yearning for meaning, which for most people is found more often in the company of another, whether a friend or a family member or a lover, or in a book or in music.

We had a good ride. On the way back we talked about some books we both like, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the fiction of Haruki Murakami, for example. Sunday morning we plan to ride again, this time along the Columbia River.

New Church, True Church

2007-10-01T14:29:00.001-05:00

I understand that the dissident Episcopal Churches meeting in Pittsburgh last week intend to move forward with the formation of an institution reflecting a “more unified orthodox Anglicanism in North America,” now that the House of Bishops has failed to accede to the demands of the Anglican Primates A joint statement from the Anglican Communion Network affirmed: “We, with others gathered in Pittsburgh for the Common Cause Council of Bishops, are committed to remaining within biblical Christianity even as The Episcopal Church once again has chosen to continue on its own tragic course.”

Good idea. I know that the leaders of the Episcopal Church are trying to keep the dissidents from leaving by creating special arrangements for Episcopal visitations and so forth, but I think that the church should encourage those who disagree with the direction the church has taken to leave. This position is contrary to the long-cherished Anglican desire to keep everyone together by following, as a church, the middle road, the way of compromise. The problem is that the differences between those who believe that the Episcopal Church is on the right path and those who disagree reflect completely different religious perspectives.

The dissidents espouse a faith based on the notion of a Sky God who hands down immutable laws, found in the Christian Bible, to priests and bishops who are authorized to speak authoritatively for this God. The myth on which their faith is built describes the sacrifice of this God’s son for the salvation of sinners, who may receive this grace by repenting of their sins (as described in the above-noted immutable laws) and returning to righteous ways (as described by the above-identified priests and bishops).

The Episcopal Church opposed by these dissidents actually believes pretty much the same thing when it comes to official doctrine (see, for example, the Nicene Creed), but is nonetheless struggling with the idea that a church might be born that is about a path of spiritual maturity following the way of Christ as opposed to a set of orthodox beliefs required for admission to heaven. The House of Bishops made statements opposing the war in Iraq and racism (good, good), as well as affirming its support for justice and dignity for gays and lesbians (very good).

These two branches of the Anglican Communion are not speaking the same theological language. Two churches are already in place. Why not allow them to be formally established? Some suggest that this approach does not reflect Christian virtues of love and community. But on the contrary, we Christians have always found our way along the path of Christ by stepping out of the existing institutional structures. The reformation must be ongoing or the church will simply whither and die. I believe that the Episcopal Church that seeks justice for gays and lesbians is going in the right direction, but I do not want to stand in the way of those, like Robert Duncan, who believe otherwise. We should support his and his fellow orthodox believers in finding the way back to their true faith.

Trumping the Gospel

2007-09-24T19:52:00.000-05:00

Last week, an estimated 60,000 people descended on Jena, Louisiana, to protest the unequal treatment before the law of whites and blacks in that town. Mykal Bell, a black seventeen-year-old, had been tried as an adult for attempted murder; his conviction was overturned by an appeals court. But Bell remains in jail. Who knows why. Oh, yes, he’s black. Dangerous. More dangerous than the white boys who hung nooses on their tree in the school yard as a warning to blacks who sat under it.

Earlier in the summer, I wrote about this case, at a time when little attention was being paid. Last week, the plight of these young men was all over the news. The media finally woke up to what was happening in Louisiana (not my doing but the work of many others). The church remains asleep, as events in another part of Louisiana demonstrate.

The Bishops of the Episcopal Church happened to begin their semi-annual meeting in New Orleans last week just before the protesters arrived in Jena from all over the country. Before the bishops is the earth-shattering question of how they should respond to an ultimatum from the rest of the Anglican Communion that could result in a split between the Episcopal Church and the others. Readers of this blog know that the issue revolves around whether homosexuals can be bishops and whether they can be sexual as priests and bishops and whether they can be married. Yawn.

A couple of days after the Jena Six protest the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, preached at a Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans that included the blessing of the hand-built "Elysian Trumpet," dedicated to the memory of all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield played "Amazing Grace" on the it. I do not doubt that this event was moving and appropriate to memorialize the victims of Hurricane Katrina (or, rather, the victims of governmental incompetence, beginning with the inadequate attention given to levees affecting the African-Americans living in the Ninth Ward and continuing with federal mismanagement of the aftermath--but that wasn't mentioned).

So far as I can tell, no bishops joined the Jena protest. They were in church.

The issue before the Episcopal Church is whether it will continue to be a church of hierarchy and privilege. That is what is really at stake in Louisiana. A new church might come into being, one that is wholly inclusive and one that is marked not by meetings of men and women in fancy clothes counting angels on the head of a pin, but rather by men and women who go to places like Jena and put their bodies on the line for justice. (I note that the bishops did put on work clothes and build houses or something like that. There were a lot of photos taken. Praise them in their plaid shirts and blue jeans, praise them for their hammers, the nails....)

Be not afraid, however, the old church is firmly in command, according to dispatches from Louisiana. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who came to listen, rejoices that the bishops are “passionate” about the Anglican Communion. Passionate. Bishop Katharine spoke passionately and eloquently about “trumpeting the Gospel” in her sermon. She imagined an inclusive procession of all God's people (going I'm not sure where). It really was good, beautifully written. Hearts beat faster as she preached. But as usual it was mostly talk--sound and fury, signifying nothing. The church at its best in ceremonial display and eloquence.

The real split the bishops should be concerned about is the one that is already killing the Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the Christian Churches: the split between those who are tired of what one writer called “the narcissism of small differences” and the clueless who are parsing doctrine in Louisiana this week.

The Gospel is being trumped, not trumpeted.

Water in the Desert

2007-09-18T12:59:00.000-05:00

Last Friday evening, I was sitting at a bar in the Ramada Plaza Hotel at JFK Airport in New York, eating my fish and chips, as the Lou Dobbs nightly program began. Some of you may know that Lou Dobbs has been especially tenacious about the “problem” of illegal immigrants (especially those pesky Mexicans) in the US. Dobbs himself was away, but his substitute (whose name I missed, but she’s also a regular) continued to read from the same script. She decried the renewed efforts by those pernicious Democrats to resurrect the “amnesty” proposals that have already been twice rejected by congress. “When,” she wanted to know, “will they understand and abide by the will of the people?” The Russian woman behind the bar brought me a glass of Cabernet.

Well, I don’t know about the will of the people. In this administration, and in some media environments, it is hard to separate information from manipulation. But clearly the attempt to demonize immigrants and particularly Hispanics, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is going forward. Migrant workers from Mexico are an easy target, as are “towel heads” and other undesirables. It has been a part of our history since its beginnings, that the foreigners are the cause of our problems. Never mind that we are all foreigners.

I referred in my last blog entry to a migrant workers’ aid program in Arizona supported by my aunt’s congregation, First Christian Church in Tucson. The program is called Humane Borders. Its ministry is to migrant workers crossing the desert from Mexico into the US who do not have food or water for the journey. Many of them die. Humane Borders maintains water stations in the desert, presently over eighty of them, with the help of 8,000 volunteers. The program has been underway since 2000.

Humane Borders also advocates for legislative change. There are six actions the group recommends (see their website, www.humaneborders.org for information on the group and its work): (1) legalize the undocumented now living and working in the US; (2) begin a responsible guest worker program by issuing work visas directly to migrants so that they are not tied to any one employer or sector of the economy and allow workers to be organized; (3) increase the number of visas for Mexican nationals; (4) demilitarize the border; (5) support economic development in Mexico; (6) provide federal aid for local medical service providers, law enforcement and adjudication, land owners and managers.

The program Humane Borders recommends sounds like a reasonable one to me, more so that the Dobbs approach, which is to nail up the doors and windows. This xenophobic reaction is increasingly common in this country. One of the Humane Borders workers, Sr. Elizabeth (a Franciscan, I believe), was in Minnesota for the summer. Speaking to the media while she was there, she described her work as ministering to Jesus in the desert. The group’s newsletter, “Desert Fountain,” remarks: “You’d have thought she was giving guns to terrorists. . . . In a matter of days, over 500 emails were compiled by the St. Cloud newspaper.” The emails did not applaud the analogy or her ministry.

Take a look at what Humane Borders is doing. It is a worthwhile model for faith-based action, prophetic and sustainable.

Next week I will talk about the New Sanctuary Movement, which is aimed at supported immigrants facing deportation. It too is prophetic and essential, but a lot more dangerous. You don't have to ask Lou Dobbs what he thinks of either of these responses to the reality (not the problem) of human need among migrant workers and immigrants.

Meanwhile, I note that the Episcopal Church House of Bishops meeting begins September 20. Apparently the most important question on the agenda has to do with how the church will respond to demands from the "traditionalists" in the Anglican Communion that it become less inclusive and adhere to myth-based doctrines forbidding sexual relations between people, or perhaps even animals, of the same gender. What is there to discuss?

One group of Christians is giving water to people in the desert. Another is consumed with its own existence as an institution. How sad for the Episcopal Church. Perhaps Humane Borders can show the Episcopalians where to find living water before they (we) die of thirst in the desert.

The Big Three

2007-09-04T15:31:00.000-05:00

Three issues are occupying my attention right now. Perhaps they are important to you too. One of my goals for the month is to become more engaged in each of them in some way.

The first and most immediately pressing is the war in Iraq. On the weekend we saw a movie I commend to all of you: No End in Sight. It is a documentary that explains clearly (and for me for the first time) how policy decisions in Washington and the Green Zone led to the insurgency and our almost certain defeat in Iraq. It is a compelling and horrifying film. Despite the continuing chaos and government floundering (and I include here the Democrats as well), too many Americans are silent. The churches are virtually comatose. There is a vote coming in Congress about the future of the war that will be based on the success of the so-called “surge”—escalation by any other name—which has clearly not been successful in bringing about political stability. I am joining with PDX Peace, a Portland-based group, to apply pressure on local senators and representatives in a series of Wednesday vigils to collect signatures opposing the continuation of the war. Please be in touch with your own congressional delegations. The lack of pressure from the public is translated by government officials as support for the status quo.

The second is an issue that I have discussed before: sex trafficking, particularly in the United States. There is an article by Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times that talks specifically about the situation in Las Vegas, where the sex trade is booming under the leadership (if that word applies here) of the present mayor, Oscar Goodman. Herbert describes the situation facing teenagers, some as young as fourteen, who engage in prostitution at widely advertised sex clubs. When I was in Vegas three years ago for a meeting of the National Episcopal Council of Clergy Associations, hosted by the bishop of Nevada, Katherine Jefferts-Shori (now the Presiding Bishop of the church), I saw the billboards hauled by pickups through the streets advertising the services of young women who could be delivered to your hotel room. Although prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas, the mayor would like to make it so. Meanwhile, the sex trafficking business is alive and well in the city. It is hard to know what to do about this situation since the sex trade is a routine part of our cultural life. We ignore it and the impact it has on young people. I know it must be part of the Portland, Oregon, landscape: we have more strip joints per capita than any other city in the country. And therefore I assume young boys and girls are being trafficked through here. After all, the city is a major international port. I wonder if the Presiding Bishop might like to return to Las Vegas and make a public statement about the sex trafficking business there. I’m sure she knows Mayor Goodman. Maybe a lot of us would be willing to go with her. Meanwhile, I’m sending this blog to Bishop Itty here in Portland asking if he’d like put together a group to tour some sex clubs to see about how many dancers are under age.

Third, the situation for illegal immigrants—and legal immigrants—is growing worse. When some young people were executed in Newark, New Jersey, not too long ago, a couple of the killers turned out to be of Hispanic origin. I thought at the time that some politician would use that information to suggest that Hispanics are dangerous. And, sure enough, that’s what happened. There is a modest sanctuary movement growing in the country among churches that are concerned that the Hispanics will be targeted next as the newest cause of all American ills. It appears that some Republican candidates for President are already talking about the immigration issue in terms previously used by Bush the First when he abducted the image of Willie Horton to race bait the country. My aunt is a minister in the Disciples of Christ Church in Arizona, and her congregation is engaged in a simple ministry, providing water to immigrants as they make their way across the desert. What might other churches do to support the men and women who do so much of the work that supports our social structure as they come increasingly under attack by the government? I don’t have an answer.

I offer these issues as those of primary importance to me right now. Naturally, I hope that some of you are working on them and perhaps have some ideas to pass along about what we might do to end the war, end sex trafficking, and end discrimination against Hispanic immigrants. Perhaps you could also share with us what is of deepest concern to you. The question is what we do to make a difference as individuals and as members of faith or action communities. Prayer is good, of course. Now what?

Books You Haven't Read (Maybe)

2007-08-27T12:50:00.000-05:00

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle blog (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-sellers-books-that-just-keep.html) lists ten best-sellers you have probably never heard of or read. Here's the list with sales or in-print figures:

1. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (614,000 copies sold)
2. Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. (325,000 in print)
3. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (close to 600,000 in print)
4. Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (83,000 sold)
5. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (over 200,000 in print)
6. How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland (over 50,000 in print)
7. Best Friends. by Martha Moody (over 500,000 in print)
8. I Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (130,000 sold)
9. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl (782,000 paperbacks in print)
10. Interventions, by Noam Chomsky (nearly 25,000 in print)11. Honky, by Dalton Conley (90,000 in print)

A couple of the authors are familiar. But what’s fascinating about the list is what it says, or doesn’t say, about American culture. The Best Seller lists are in themselves interesting indicators, but at the same time the books that make it there are (somewhat) understandable. The authors are famous; the titles are provocative; the buzz has been generated and we salivate and buy. But the ten books in the NBCC list are just weird.

What are these books doing here? What does it mean that the biggest seller is a first book mystery story (The Dante Club) about a group of nineteenth-century Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who gather to translate the Inferno and find themselves on the trail of a serial killer? Who are these 700,000+ readers?

Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir by a Hmong immigrant—and is one of the most-often assigned books in freshman college courses. Did you know that?

Take a look at the other books. Read about them on Amazon.com. One of the fascinating aspects of this list is how intelligent most of these these books are, unlike so much of what is normally on the best-seller lists. Rigoberto Menchu? I remember when this book came out—and I also recall that it was later thought to be a fraud, not written by the presumed author at all. (I don't know if that was ever proved or not.) It’s a radical critique of colonial US culture. Best Friends is another first novel, this one about college chums.

What’s my point here? (I'm trying to find one.) Those of us who are interested in contemporary culture and what makes it go find helpful direction in the book world. What are people buying and reading? (Why was Mary Gordon's book about her mother and Roman Catholicism reveiwed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review yesterday?) Does it mean anything that people are buying these ten books and not ten others of perhaps equal value? (Maybe they are and those books are on someone else's list.) What about the fact that many of these titles were initially reviewed tepidly or even negatively. Pearl’s was recommended only for the largest library collections by Library Journal—ie, too dense for most people. In publishing we used to say that a negative review is just as helpful as a positive review.

There are no books with “religious” themes here. The list is obviously eclectic, however--not at all "scientific" or representative. It is not meant to reflect any particular reality except that of the blogger who thought this was an interesting collection of best-sellers most of us haven’t heard of. We know that The Left Behind series of books outsells everything, except maybe The Purpose Driven Life and the Harry Potter books.

We also know the Holy Bible outsells everything. The Koran anyone?

Well, I thought you might find this list as interesting as I did. If you are still looking for something to read this summer, maybe one of these books will attract your attention.

I'm not reading any of them. Right now, my leisure reading of choice is Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the Library of America series. I'm halfway through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich from that collection. Dick is one of those writers being recovered by American readers. All of a sudden. Who knows why? It's kind of like this list of books.

Professionally, I'm reading Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. It definitively takes apart the Intelligent Design argument, but it also raises some pretty serious questions about the whole idea of a created universe for those who think of themselves as Christian and evolutionists. Really? Have you thought that through? Can you explain how the Creator God who is interested in us personally also made/makes the universe and all of its suffering so that we might worship him/her/it?

Ok, I've slipped from frivolous end-of-August space filling to something serious. Sorry. Go back to reading Danielle Steele.

Instructions: A Poem

2007-08-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

No music, please
Only silence such as I have entered
only the ambient squall of traffic
airline passengers in falling flight
the shuffling of impatient feet
a chair

and let me be hidden from the congregation
congregated for me
neither in vessel nor box
but truly somewhere else than where they are
not out of disrespect for them
and grief
but my necessity

I am gone
let that be clearly known
by darkness and the silence
by the emptiness I have gathered
let no one pray or bark a word of praise
let there be no story telling
of the time I did or did not do whatever
nor retelling of the jokes I never told so well
let no one that I’ve loved come near
the stage of my departing
you know why
you know what I have been and done
as others do not know
this is your chance
to forget

I send you these instructions having seen
the beyond not far from any
there is no point in explaining
it is not what you expect

do you remember walking on the shore
of Oregon to Haystack Rock between
the clouded heads at either end
of Cannon Beach
and families in recumbent bikes
like crabs escaping withering tide
but circling back and back
the overcast above the rock crackled
by the gulls and chilling rain
the goofy dogs erupting from the waves
without a clue
torpedoed us

where I am is nothing

for god’s sake don’t say anything
to give my life away

God Is Dead, OK?

2007-08-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

Ron Currie, Jr., is not a writer I have encountered before. A couple of weeks ago in Powell’s bookstore here in Portland I spotted the title of his book, God Is Dead, and thought, “Well, that’s old news.” Flash back to the fifties and the “God is dead” theology that famously made the cover of Time. I picked up the book and was hooked by the first sentence: “Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.” I bought the book.

The Dinka woman, aka God, is killed by the Janjaweed, and word of his/her death spreads quickly. The end of the Supreme Being is catastrophic….or is it? This is the implicit question in Currie’s clever and horrifying fiction.

The world of the first chapter is all too familiar and includes a hilarious and outrageous appearance by Colin Powell who tries to rescue the Dinka woman, in spite of official consternation that he is taking an interest in this lowlife woman. She changes Powell, who suddenly begins to tell the truth. In a riveting telephone call with President Bush, he calls the President a “silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker.” All right.

God apologizes to a young man she has asked Powell to find for her—not actually the one she asked for but an imposter:

“Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as [anyone] of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer.”

As God lies awaiting death, he closes his eyes and wishes “for someone he could pray to.”

That’s the first chapter. What’s an author to do next? Currie describes a world sunk in chaos and war, horror and cruelty. It seems like a cliché—God is dead and now everything, as the philosophers used to say, is possible. Morality flies out the window. As one character says, talking about violence in the world, “there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.” Martial law is declared; the National Guard moves into every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy rises to an epidemic scale. Looting of Little Debbie snack cakes escalates. Serious shit.

But then the cliché begins to turn on itself. Feral dogs that fed on God’s corpse begin to speaking a “mishmash of Greek and Hebrew and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.” It's a story straight out of supermarket tabloids. Temples are built to them. But among people braced for the end of everything, a gradual realization dawns: nothing has changed. “God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.”

Needing something to revere in place of God, the people of the US begin to worship children: “God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.” Since, as the author observes, Americans virtually worship children already, the step to actual worship is easy. Evolutionary Psychologists try to break Americans of this idolatry, but it is not easy.
When war erupts between the Postmodern Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychological forces, the Evo Psychs threaten invasion of the United States. All hell really is about to break loose in the name of absurd ideologies.

What we realize as we read the evocative and unnerving stories Currie has written is that the world after God is the world we already live in. Time was right. God Is Dead is a fable of our own times and our own culture, our idolatry and indifference, our cruel warrior mentality, our false religions. Despite our high rates of religious observance and our national assertion of belief in God, we Americans in fact behave exactly as we would if we knew for a fact that God does not exist. We simply worship what makes us feel good and secure. For all we know or care, a Dinka woman eaten by dogs in the Sudan might well be God.

What’s the Sudan thing again? I mean, like, whatever.

Currie has written fiction but it is, like all good stories, simply the backside of our daily lives.

A Redwood on the Streetcar

2007-08-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

Connie and I discovered a nursery in Northwest Portland last week at the end of NW 18th Street by the railroad tracks, about as far north as you can go in Portland before you fall into the Willamette River. Peter, who runs the nursery, is a copper-haired Belgian who works alone among hundreds of plants. He likes to talk to visitors and seems mostly unconcerned about actually selling much of anything. On our first visit, we bought three potted Begonias and two Dogwoods (small) for our 5 by 8 foot terrace. There was already a small Butterfly Japanese Maple there.

A lot of foliage for a small space, admittedly; and we also have a breakfast table and two chairs. But it’s cozy not crowded. A place of joy. We added along the front of the balcony some Mums and a couple of other flowers whose names I lost. Then we returned to see Peter: we wanted an evergreen of some sort in front of the living room window that overlooks the terrace. He showed us around on a 90-degree sunny afternoon. A freight train pulled up alongside the nursery, its engine throbbing rhythmically.

Most of the conifers we looked at were too large, the pots half the size of our terrace. Or they were too small, ornamentals we would not be able to see from the living room. Then he showed us a Redwood. Sequoia. It was about four feet in height with a dogleg left or right depending on your vantage point. It was exquisite.

“It grows to be the tallest tree in the world,” Peter said. “It’ll reach 500 feet.”

“We could angle it over the street,” I suggested.

“Cut a hole in the terraces above us,” Connie offered.

Peter said, “It will stay small if you leave it in a small pot.”

We could put a Redwood on our terrace?

We paid Peter the $29 he insisted was the price and we squeezed our Redwood into our blue shopping cart and walked it back to the streetcar and rolled it on. We got a seat. The Redwood stood.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said one man, “a tree on the streetcar.”

The tree made everyone smile, especially when we told them it was a Redwood. Then an infirm woman boarded, young but crack-addict skinny, and I offered her my seat. She smiled with teeth that went in all directions and bowed a gracious thanks. I angled the Redwood over her head, “to give you some shade.”

She smiled up at me. “Well, thank you, sir.”

The streetcar hummed along 11th Avenue past the library, the Redwood branches swaying over her head, and she looked cool in the shade of the tallest tree in the world, which now sits on our terrace in front of the living room window.

Jena Six Update

2007-07-30T18:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the work of a lot of people, there has been a development in the Jena Six case. According to a friend who is following it closely, the sentencing of Mychal Bell has been postponed to 9/20, and the FBI is going to Jena to investigate civil rights abuses! For those of us who have become somewhat cynical about these matters, that does not mean as much as it might. But at least the sentencing has been postponed.

There is still work to do; pressure on local authorities and church leaders needs to be maintained, even increased. Please contact anyone you know who can help bring this issue to light. The New York Times has yet to cover this story. One of you must know someone at the Times.

Deacon Ormonde Plater, who is in Louisiana, has written eloquently on the Jena Six. See http://oplater.blogspot.com/2007/07/jena-six.html.

I am also told by The Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Louisiana that the church leaders are aware of and looking into the situation. That’s good to hear. Please encourage them and offer your support.

This morning I read an article by a British atheist who described the Church of England as a dog mostly concerned with scratching its own fleas (which he named, by example, as gay marriage and women’s ordination). His point is that the church (and I include now the Episcopal Church) is too often only concerned with its internal affairs, many of which are not as important as the church makes them seem. Here is a matter of considerable concern to people of faith who believe that God is a God who asks us to do justice. In Jena, Louisiana, there are no Episcopal churches. All the more reason for us to be there.

The Case of the Jena Six

2007-07-27T16:31:00.001-05:00

A friend of ours has told us about a case in Louisiana that is shocking and I hope some of you will look into. There is some urgency: on Monday a black high school student could be sentenced to decades in jail for . . . well, it’s not clear. What we do know is that some of he black students in Jena High School (Jena, Louisiana, central part of the state) sat under what is known there as the “white tree”—where the white students sit. That led to a fight and an seriously injured white student. The six black students are charged with attempted murder. Oh, I didn’t mention that the day after the black students sat under the white tree three nooses were found hanging from it.

Local officials call the nooses a prank. An all-white jury convicted 17-year-old Mychal Bell after a two-day “trial.” He will be sentenced on Monday.

To learn more go to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml

Also: www.demoncracynow.org

You can find an online petition at : www.petitiononline.com/aZ51CqmR/petition.html

For information on faith-based social justice groups you may want to contact, see http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=get_connected.directory (Sojourners). Actions are planned around the country.

There has not been much national coverage of this case (there are five other young black people yet to be tried), but some of us have tried to stir up interest.

Please do what you can to bring pressure to bear on the Louisiana officials involved. The Executive Director of the Louisiana Chapter of The American Civil Liberties Union calls the case one of obvious racial discrimination. The area, he says, is a racial powder keg. Does anyone know of Episcopal or other leaders in Central or other parts of Louisiana who can look into what’s happening?

Torture Is Us

2007-07-23T19:08:00.000-05:00

Among the ways we are being “cooked by the culture” (the title of last week’s post) is our acceptance of torture as national policy. As Christians, of course, we are against it and in various public utterances have even called on the Bush administration to publicly renounce torture. The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in March passed a resolution condemning the use of torture and “the practice of extraordinary rendition” and called upon the US government to comply with “The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment”; the resolution also, somewhat astonishingly, stated: "That members of the Episcopal Church, including military chaplains, commit themselves to supporting U.S. military and civilian personnel who refuse to obey orders to practice torture or engage in extraordinary rendition or who face discipline for exposing such illegal conduct."

Good for the Episcopal Church. That is an exemplary commitment to support those who might engage in civil disobedience. It's the kind of action the church should be taking. I for one would like to know what has been done to implement this policy. Perhaps Bishop George Packard, the Bishop for Military Chaplains, or the Secretary of Executive Council, The Rev. Gregory Straub, could make a public statement of the church’s position, loudly and clearly, and tell us and the other religious leaders what we are doing to support those who refuse to engage in torture.

A group known as the Evangelicals for Human Rights has issued a statement on torture that I hope leaders of the Episcopal Church and other denominations will support. You can read it on the HRE website, www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, and take the time to sign the statement. I think it is particularly important for non-evangelicals to sign. The truth is that some of the evangelical organizations have been more active on social justice issues than the mainline denominations (as in, for example, Darfur). The HRE website also had a list of resources that are worth looking at (including a link to a sermon by Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge).

The statement from HRE is stronger and more grounded than the one from the Episcopal Church Executive Council. It concludes forcefully:

“The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.”

I urge the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as others in church leadership positions, to sign this statement. And to make it known that the church is in solidarity with evangelicals on this issue. And to make public its own actions to communicate our support to those in the military who might be forced to engage in torture.

And one more thing: could Bishop Packard tell us what the nature of that support is? Is it more than moral? More than prayer? Do we offer sanctuary? Legal defense?

We are cooked by the culture when we make statements for the sake of appearances and do nothing to back them up. I wonder what the Evangelicals for Human Rights plan to do now that they have expressed their opposition to the policies of the US government on torture. (How hard is it to be opposed?)

What is to be done? Who will lead?

Cooked by the Culture

2007-07-16T12:02:00.000-05:00

My daughter Ruth was born twenty-seven and a half years ago in Medellin, Colombia. My former wife and I adopted her just twenty-seven years ago next month. Yesterday, she flew to Medellin on her first trip to the city where she was born. When she was twelve, we went to the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, but Medellin was too dangerous then. The drug cartel was in charge, and her city was at the heart of it. Yesterday's New York Times ran an article about how Medellin is now a place of optimism; the new mayor is trying to make it lively, attractive, safe. Ruth told me before she left that Medellin is now safer than Philadelphia, where she lives. There is still a guerilla war going on in Colombia; some parts of it are definitely dangerous. She knows that. But she plans to travel around the country she left so long ago, taking care but not shirking the realities of her own life. She will be there about a month, returning close to the time she came to this country as an infant.

When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.

Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.

I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.

Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.

And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.

I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.

I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.

As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.

A Kairos Moment

2007-07-09T11:54:00.000-05:00

The present reminds me of the Nixon administration and the years leading to the end of the war in Vietnam and the president's resignation. I am sure I am not alone in having this sense of deja vu (and those of you who follow the New York Times Magazine are reminded weekly of this connection to our past in Megan Kelso's "Watergate Sue"). It is all depressingly familiar. This morning I was reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in connection with a new book I am writing, and was forcefully reminded of how irrelevant the institutional church is in today's crisis. Our religious leaders have very little to say to us as the war drags on, as people are losing their homes and their lives, as so many suffer from the lack of compassion in our government: no, make that our own lack of compassion. The rich get richer and we just don't care very much as long as we get our share.

Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.

Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.

The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).

Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"

He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."

What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"

The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.

Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.

But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?

We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.

Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.

Sick on the Bus

2007-07-02T11:01:00.000-05:00

The Number 17 Bus stops a block away from our apartment in downtown Portland and goes thirteen miles out to Sauvie Island, which is a rural paradise in the Columbia River. You can pick your own berries there. I rode my bicycle out to Sauvie Island Saturday morning but was not quite up to another ten miles around the island itself. The ride out was along an industrial area, not exactly beautiful, but I could have taken the bus and just cruised the island. Portland buses have bicycle racks on the front. Portland buses are amazing.

We can ride the 17 to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where we went to church yesterday morning. It is located in the northwest section of the city, near the Pearl District, where the arts are concentrated.

We caught the bus at about 9:25. I asked the driver the nearest stop to 19th and Glisan (pronounced Gleeson) and she smiled, "19th and Glisan." "Close enough," I said. The bus drivers here are incredibly friendly and helpful. A few stops along, she turned and said to an elderly man seated behind her and said, "This is your stop." But it the ride became even more remarkable.

Soon after we turned on Glisan, somewhere around 13th Avenue, we stopped at a light. A homeless man--or at least he looked homeless, and not at all well--had gotten on a stop before. He had that grizzled look of a hard life, a crusty white beard, sunken cheeks, pants gathered at his waist with a long belt. He shuffled as he walked. There were not many people on the bus. He sat somewhere behind us. At the light, he scuttled to the front and spoke to the driver.

"You have to be sick?" she asked. "Ok, go out. I'll wait."

The man got off the bus and threw up on the dirt at the base of a tree. He came back and thanked the driver.

"That's ok," she said. "Let me know if you have to be sick again."

He started back to his seat but, before the bus began moving, returned quickly.

"You have to be sick again," the driver asked. He nodded. She opened the door. He got out, doubled over. You could see that he was holding vomit to avoid throwing up on the bus. He spewed a yellowish liquid at the base of the tree and returned to the bus, which had been standing at a green light, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

The driver said, "Ok now?"

"Yeah."

"Medication?"

"Yeah."

"Ok. Let me know if you have to be sick again. I'll stop. We'll wait for you. And thanks for not getting sick on the bus. I appreciate that."

We all did.

This was definitely not New York City or perhaps any other city in the country. The man was considerate of the rest of us. When he vomited, it was not on the sidewalk. The driver was concerned for his well being and acted on that concern. No one in the bus got upset at having to sit through two lights while a homeless man was sick.

We went on to church, but we both felt that we had already been there. On the bus.

Summer Views of Mt. Hood

2007-06-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

Friday morning I decided to ride my bike into the western hills of Portland where the Japanese Garden is located. It's only three miles from our apartment but the road to the Garden is steep. I've been biking along the river on the Springwater Corridor, a multi-use path for bikers, runners, and walkers, which is mostly flat. It was time to tackle the slopes. The only way out of Portland is over the hills.

We became members of the Japanese Garden as soon as we settled in. At just over five acres it is small but the design packs in a space- and mind-expanding array of plants and paths, two dry gardens, a pond busy with carp, a tea pavilion, and borrowed scenery that includes the Cascades. Even when there are crowds, it is possible to slip off into a corner behind a Japanese Maple and be alone.

Jefferson Street, where we are located, turns into Canyon Road just as the serious climb begins. I got about two blocks before I had to stop to breathe. I looked ahead; ahead was still up. Stopped again at the top of the next hill, I was panting when an elderly woman asked if I needed help. Yeah, I gasped, I'm lost. Where's the Japanese Garden (near by, I hoped)? Oh, she said, go up to the corner and turn left. You'll see the signs. I stood and pedaled to the top, turned left, turned right. Stopped to breathe. Not a walk in the park.

And so it went for another couple of endless hills. The scenery, by the way, was gorgeous, conifers of all sorts wedged among maples and a dozen varieties of green (I have to learn more about these trees). The clean air made my screaming leg muscles almost glad. At the top of the penultimate hill to the Garden, you can keep biking up the steepest incline or pick up your bike and climb the steps cut into a hillside. I picked up my bike. The switchback steps ascend a couple of hundred feet--not too bad given how far I'd come.

The Unitarian-Universalists were in town for their annual convention. I met a few coming down as I was heading up. You could tell they were UUs, as Connie and I call them, because they were wearing t-shirts with a flame on the chest. I felt like a sterling example of Portland culture hauling my bike on my shoulder up to the Garden. Grinning. Yeah, I do this all the time. Clean air, clean living.

There was an art show in the main pavillion, showcasing northwest artists who had created images based on the Garden. I bought a small collage by a resident of Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, and stuck it in my backpack. I went out to the graveled space in front of the pavilion and looked out across the city of Portland to the Cascades, which gently framed the city's modest skyline. Mt. Hood was not visible.

Hood looks like Mt. Fuji, just as this view from the Garden reminded me of a similar view I recalled from one of the Imperial Gardens overlooking Kyoto, Japan. On clear days you can see Hood from almost any part of the city, including our apartment terrace. I have begun writing a series of haiku, "Summer Views of Mt. Hood" (derived from the printmaker, Hokusai's, series, Views of Mt. Fuji). Here are a few of my haiku.

1

Extended wings
balancing a crow on a high spruce twig
fold carefully

2

Dawn silhouette
floating snowcap at noon
faded in evening marshgrass

3

Against darkening skies
at morning
the white cone advances

4

Pasted on the window
of the Wells Fargo tower
the mountain’s face

5

Crows call to crows
summer light rises
with the mountain

6

The eastern hills
edged in sharp pines
rain clouds shroud Mt.Hood

Speaking in Anglican Tongue

2007-06-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church issued a statement last week that caught my interest. It was titled, “The Episcopal Church’s Commitment to Common Life in the Anglican Communion.” (Read it at www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_86804_ENG_HTM.htm.) Those of you who don’t care about the Anglican Communion—and you are legion—might hold on for a moment because the subject of this entry is the misuse of language; the example is specific but the point is more general and one that is especially relevant to our common public life today.

The communiqué was a response to demands by Anglican Primates (Bishops-in-Charge of other national churches around the world) that the Episcopal Church stop ordaining gays in same-sex partnerships (ie, not celibate). The Primates imposed a deadline of September 30, 2007. In its statement, the Executive Council said:

“. . . the requests of the Primates are of a nature that can only properly be dealt with by our General Convention. Neither the Executive Council, the Presiding Bishop, nor the House of Bishops can give binding interpretations of General Convention resolutions nor make an ‘unequivocal common commitment’ to denying future decisions by dioceses or General Convention. We question the authority of the Primates to impose deadlines and demands upon any of the churches of the Anglican Communion or to prescribe the relationships within any of the other instruments of our common life, including the Anglican Consultative Council.”

In other, clearer language: “You can’t tell us what to do.”

Read the second sentence in the quote above. Can you tell me what it means? And can you tell me how this statement belongs in a statement about the church’s commitment to common life? The entire statement is written in a similarly legalistic and obfuscatory style. It is a political message dressed up in churchy language. Those who have tried to make the Episcopal Church change its ways and have interfered in the constituted governing authority of the church are addressed here as “brothers and sisters” (there are no sister Primates, by the way). The communiqué denies it is resting its message on legalities, asserting instead that it speaks out of loving concern for relationship in Christ.

That may well reflect the feelings of those who drafted the communiqué. I can’t claim to know their hearts. They are certainly good people. But the unintended effect of the language used is to suggest insincerity and even deceit. It is a speaking in tongues. If I were on the other side of this issue, I would respond: Bullshit.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, makes a distinction that is perhaps helpful here between prophesy and speaking in tongues. (I thought it appropriate to bring in scripture since the communiqué itself begins with scripture, although a strange passage, in my opinion, for those seeking reconciliation.) The Council’s communiqué speaks in tongues, abusing the language of theology in the service of politics. The Episcopal Church is behaving prophetically in its stance on gays and women but politically in its dealings with the Anglican Communion. Paul says this:

“. . .those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church.”

The subject of this communiqué is not a mystery in the Spirit but an effort to placate members of the Communion who do not accept the stance of the American Church. It is a stall. It is in effect a lie. The Church is saying, "Well, we can’t do what you want because it isn’t the way we do things, and anyway, the point here is that we’re in relationship and we have to do something vague in Christ that allows us all to keep on as we are." Or something like that.

When we speak in tongues we mislead, intentionally or unintentionally, or as Paul says, build ourselves up. Corporate Speak is also like this. Political candidates always speak in tongues. So, increasingly, does the church. Unity bought at the price of deception and accommodation is no unity at all.

Some years ago when I was working in a parish in Manhattan I saw the implications of pandering to the toxic people among us. The few destroyed the work of many because we did not confront them directly. Everyone in every organization has seen the same thing. Toxicity spreads. In relationships, when your spouse continues to drink and beat the kids, you separate from him or her to protect yourself and your children. If a member of the church continues to accommodate those who abuse blacks or women or gays, while asseting a loving relationship to all, it is behaving hypocritically and in fact enabling discrimination.

In a true instead of rhetorical loving relationship, the Episcopal Church would not be worried about what to do if the family throws it out. It would be leaving.

And it would assert what it believes and why the current situation is intolerable in clear and forthright, even loving, language. The present communiqué is not a statement of love. It is a statement of aggression and deceit. Don’t believe it. The real subject is political power—something the new Presiding Bishop has claimed to abhor—and self-protection. The subject is money and property and power. It always is, even in the church.

That is not prophesy, no matter what prophetic work the Church does behind the veil of its snake-oil language.

Planet Portland

2007-06-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

We all have heard, I imagine, that after death the second most stressful life event is moving (my guess is that the stress of death is that felt by the survivors). Divorce comes third, job loss next. Connie and I are still blissfully married; no comment about jobs.

Moving to Portland has been an almost unalloyed pleasure. Looking out the window I see the varigated greens of a park; below our (small) terrace along Jefferson the trees obliterate the road. Beyond, Mt. Hood goes through its daily changes: a silhouette in the morning, a floating snowcap at noon, fading at dusk, and then fully revealed against dark clouds. It is like Mt. Fuji in so many ways, coming and going. Far to the north this morning I saw the outline of Mt. Adams. Both Adams and Hood are inactive volcanoes; somewhere out there is Mt. St. Helens, visible from the western hills on a very clear day.

A crow alights on the top and thinnest twig of a swaying conifer (not sure yet what kind) at eye level with my terrace. The twig is an improbable landing site. His broad wings extended balance him, his body adjusts, teeters, head still. Then the wings tilt. He settles, stops moving. The wings fold as carefully as origami. He looks around, satisfied with his perch, with the world.

We are like that, satisfied with our perch. Sunday morning, reading the New York Times, we could see twenty blocks down 3rd Avenue toward the Pearl District, which is where the art galleries mostly are--Portland's Greenwich Village--and not a single car was moving. Not one. We are located in the middle of downtown next to the federal building, across from the Wells Fargo Tower, and the nights are so quiet we wake to see if the city is still out there.

The first three days were hot and sunny, not typical but welcome. This morning was rainy, heavy clouds moving in from the Pacific. (The ocean is to the west, remember that.) The dramatic sky is always performing: right now there are heavy white cotton clouds above an eastward tending layer of gray, bordering a west-side wedgewood blue. To the south rain-laden dark gray hovers over Oregon State Health University's elevated tramway. But no rain at the moment. Here, there are people who don't believe in umbrellas. They walk out in the rain and the notrain.

Sunday evening we walked down to the Willamette River (rhymes with DamnIt), bought some sorbet, and sat on a bench overlooking the marina. Because this is Rose Festival Week here (the one hundredth anniversary no less) there is a lot of merriment, high-school girls hoping to be elected queen standing around in evening gowns. Two square-riggers are maneuvering into battle positions before us and begin to fire blanks, the explosions echoing along the city as the night before fireworks announced the beginning of the week's celebrations. On the river is a carnival with rides and music. Walkers and cyclists mosey around, making way for one another. We stop in astonishment at a slingshot ride that catapaults two people strapped into a kind of carnival loveseat straight up into the sky at least a hundred feet, maybe more. They crash earthward on bungy cords and are again flung up into Sunday's clear blue and for a moment it appears they will keep going, set free.

We are terrified by the daring of it.

But it's also how we feel this week. Slingshot into space, landing on this other planet: the holodeck of the Enterprise? Exhilerated by the daring of it.

More about Planet Portland to come as we explore the wonders of this distant colony in a galaxy far away.

I'm Not Invited Either

2007-05-25T08:32:00.000-05:00

I know I'm moving and not supposed to be doing another post for a couple of weeks (don't tell Connie) but the recent news about Gene Robinson's being excluded from Lambeth next year requires some comment (and I'm far from being the first).

Let's see: a gay bishop equals an illegally consecrated bishop equals (maybe) an archbishop associated with human rights violations equals.....

This grouping of the excluded simply supports what I've said before: we are seeing the church associate itself with the criminalization of gay identity. That's the slippery slope.

The Presiding Bishop has been speaking out on all the right issues, in my opinion: the war, immigration, etc. I am delighted that she is going public on social justice matters that we care about. But her initial response to Williams--let's not get excited--is simply institutional cowardice.

When you are in a bad marriage--TEC and the Anglican Communion, for example--and you have had counseling and have promised to do better and STILL are unfaithful to one another, continue to violate commitments, it is time for a separation. This latest outrage, even if in the end it gets worked out (ok for Gene to come as something else--maybe a goat?), is something KJS and the church needs to reject. Either Gene goes as himself or none of us goes.

Ok, I haven't been invited either, but that's because I'm a deacon. We never get invited to go anywhere. Well, except to leave town. Westward, ho!

Talking about the Body, 4

2007-05-21T11:53:00.000-05:00

Augustine, the fourth-century bishop, enjoyed sleeping with women. He liked sex. His monogamous relationship with a woman who bore his child was not a marriage. The arrangement between the two of them was sexual. Their one child was probably a mistake; clearly, Augustine and his concubine used birth control. He put aside his concubine, who became a voluntary widow, so that he might marry properly and enter the governing class. The girl chosen for him by his mother, Monica, was Catholic and she, his mother, hoped Augustine might himself become a baptized Catholic as a result of the union.

Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.

The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."

The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"

But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.

What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.

For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.

How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.

Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.

The Church of St. Jamestown

2007-05-14T10:17:00.000-05:00

I had planned to continue my reflections on the body today, but the Episcopal Church advertisement in the Saturday New York Times, on the OpEd page, derailed that intention. The ad, which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, represents in almost every respect the problem with the Episcopal Church today.

The ad is wordy, dense, backward-looking.

The headline, "Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward," is about as dull and institutional as a headline can be.

The content begins with history, buildings, and, finally, in paragraph 7, The Boook of Common Prayer.

It appears that the people in the Episcopal Church have differing points of view but it isn't clear about what.

And then there is a reiteration of our English heritage as a church (the word English outnumbers the word Jesus three to one), as if that is a big selling point.

The ad says we struggle over how to interpret faith for today, how to maintain tradition, how to disagree. Some people leave us, some come back. But: TO WHAT? WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?

We are moving forward in mission all over the world--a world we are committed to transforming to one of justice, peace, wholeness, holy living (as Jesus taught). We get around to that message in paragraph twelve. Is that the core of our belief?

It is apparent in a couple of other references that the church has been in the right place at the right time (for gays and lesbians, for example), but the overwhelming impression created by this unfortunate ad is that the Episcopal Church is the First Church of St. Jamestown: stuck in the past, unaware of its own mission and message for the world of today, inordinately proud of its buildings (especially the big ones), and unable to articulate a vision for the future that might mean something in the twenty-first century. Historically, Jamestown is significant for this country and the church, but it was also a slave-owning settlement and the first step toward the extermination of native culture. It is not the shining icon of the church of today.

The ad also reinforces the old image of the Episcopal Church as the conservative party (the people with money and power) at prayer. Its very placement on the OpEd page of the Times speaks of power, the establishment, and immobility. It is addressed pre-eminently to the demographic that now rules the church, people of my age (over 50--I'm 63). No one under forty will "get" it or even see it.

The ad invites the reader (assuming he/she gets through all of the type to the bottom of the ad) to "come and grow" and offers a website link to both the main church website and a come and grow site. Click on www.comeandgrow.org and tell me you're excited about the mission and message of the church. Tell me what it is. Tell me what Episcopalians believe and why anyone should move a muscle to come into one of our churches.

A pdf of this ad is available on the church's website, presumably for parishes to download and perhaps run in local media. I think it's a very bad idea. Anyway, you can read it at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/newYorkTimes_opAd.pdf

The Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the mainline churches, are terrible at marketing themselves. (Please see http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com --the blog to "frustrate, educate, and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ"--for some helpful information on how to do what the Episcopal Church, as this ad definitively establishes, does not know how to do.)

Come and grow? I don't think so. Sit there and stagnate is more like it.

Here's an alternative idea: Go into the world and give people in despair the Good News. Tell them what that Good News is and why they should care. Give them some hope. And maybe show some faces of real people.

They can get the history and the architectural details later.

Talking about the Body, 3

2007-05-07T08:17:00.000-05:00

Our difficulty with the body of Jesus--how he could have been both human and God--translated to the same issue for our own bodies: how we can have in us an eternal soul and yet live in a material realm. If the body misbehaves, then the soul is soiled. As children of the sexual act, we are inevitably defiled. We are born of women. In part, the problem of Jesus' body is solved by making Mary innocent of sexual defilement: she is perpetually virgin and is not impregnated by a human. Jesus is born free of sin: he has the same human body, which in itself is a source of sin, but he is sinless because of his origin in spirit not in flesh.

Our bodies encase our souls, which through Jesus the Christ may be released into eternal bliss--BUT, wonder of wonders, a bliss enjoyed nonetheless in a body. The resurrected Jesus is in a body too but now one that mirrors for us what we can become if we live in him and follow his way. Jesus was human but not sexual. (The Renaissance paintings that show witnesses pointing to the infant's genitals are not acknowledging his sexuality but his human[male]ness.) He is sinless in part because he does not act sexually. Like mother like son.

The early church endorsed this perspective in suggesting that the body was superfluous; the sooner we get out of it, the better. On his way to a welcome martyrdom, Ignatius writes: "Let me be fodder for wild beasts--that is how I can get to God. . . .I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. . . .It is a fine thing to cut oneself off from the lusts that are in the world, for 'every passion of the flesh wages war against the Spirit,' and 'neither fornicators nor the effeminate nor homosexuals will inherit the Kingdom of God.' . . . Therefore we should guard the flesh as God's temple. For just as you were called in the flesh, you will come in the flesh."

Note that homosexuals and the effeminate are equally damned for their fleshly acts along with fornicators of all sorts. They sin by their actions, by their behaviors, by their very embodiment. This perspective is relevant to the present dispute in the church over the role of gays. It is ok for someone to be gay so long as he/she does not engage in sex with others who are gay. The celibate gay is acceptible, just as the man who might want to engage in sex outside of marriage with a woman is acceptible so long as he doesn't act on his desire. A man who acts and looks effeminate is also violating the order of things and causes others to lose control.

The early church urged celibacy on everyone, male and female, married and unmarried, in order to purify the soul. Tertullian described the body as a "unified organism." As Peter Brown writes in his book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Tertullian's "insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete 'body,' 'set in the mould' of the outer body." Temptation in the form of woman was the biggest problem: baptism did nothing to alter the fact of woman's seductiveness. As with present-day Islam, women were to be veiled to reduce the danger of their inherent seductiveness. (Hence, the problem with male effeminacy.)

Christ, in fact, came to earth, according to Clement, "to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs. . . . They say that the Saviour himself said: 'I come to undo the works of women,' meaning by this 'female,' sexual desire, and by 'work,' birth and the corruption of death."

The virginal will have less trouble at the last days than the sexually active; those who have been active and then renounce sexual acts can also be saved. Their souls may be purified and worthy of the new body of the society of God.

In our religion, modern Christianity, we have taken this to mean that we shall have eternal life, meet our friends, look the way we now look, etc. We don't have to renounce sexual acts of pleasure (it was rare for early Christians to have sex for pleasure; sex was for procreation and it was therefore likely that a couple with three children may have had intercourse precisely three times), but we do have to be washed clean in baptism and repent of our sins, the fleshly acts, for the most part, that are deeply feared in the faith. (This is the essential difference between the conservative and the liberal churches, between a barrier to full membership rooted in repentence and purity and the open door of full inclusion--although the desire of a convicted pedophile to be a member of a congregation has troubled the faithful on both sides.)

Gays, of course, are in permanent danger because for them to repent requires complete renunciation (celibacy), as it did for heterosexuals in the early church. The "conservatives" of today--Martin Minns and Peter Akinola, for example--partake of that early mentality that demands renunciation of the flesh as a matter of sexual purity and practice, except in the performance of one's duty as a married man and woman. The acts of the flesh, all of them, endanger the immortal soul. And only a man ordained according to the Catholic faith can protect us. (The necessity that the priest/bishop be pure is, of course, an ancient heresy.)

To return for a moment to Ignatius: "The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. . . . The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong as their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. . . . The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven."

Next time, I will talk about Augustine, as one must in thinking about this subject. A look ahead: Augustine writes in Book 6 of the Confessions: "I was bound by this need of the flesh, and dragged with me the chain of its poisonous delight, fearing to be set free."

Moving On

2007-04-30T10:14:00.000-05:00

My back hurts this morning, as it did yesterday morning, following a day spent purging books from my library. Connie and I are moving to Portland, Oregon, June 1, and one of the most expensive items you can move is books. We already have more than our shelves will bear. My desk is stacked with books--new ones bought in the last two months that I am still reading, and others I've moved to the desk because I want to refer to them when I'm writing.

The move to Portland is something we have contemplated for a long time but assumed it would be several years before we actually did it. I thought I would continue to work in New York until at least the age of 67 or so and then we would retire to Portland. As those of you who have kept up with this blog know, my work for the church has ended. It is time to be somewhere else, somewhere less intense than New York City. We love New York, to coin a phrase. Connie has lived here over twenty years, I've been here twelve (with two years for both of us in Boston along the way). But Portland offers wonders that New York lacks, particularly access to the natural beauty of the mountains and rivers of the Northwest. The Columbia River Gorge is less than two hours away, as is the Pacific Ocean in the other direction. In twenty minutes from our apartment, we can be in the western hills among cedars in the Japanese Garden (the best, most people think, outside of Japan). From our living room window, we overlook a park in the city that contains stones from Souchow, China.

The cost of living is lower in Portland, which is important to us semi-retired folk. There is great public transportation: it costs nothing to ride buses, streetcar, and rapid transit in downtown Portland. We can walk the length of the city in thirty minutes. Great restaurants, interesting indie movie theaters, the Portland Museum of Art five minutes away, an auditorium that hosts theater and performers right next door, a bistro up the street.....and by the way the rain thing is not as bad as you've heard. This last month has been rainier in NYC than in Portland.

I plan to write for the next year or so, although I am hoping to do some consulting and editorial work for publishers on a project basis. We will see if I can bring in some money writing. Connie will also be writing, finishing her next book and continuing to work on selling her previous manuscripts. We look forward to a creative, stimulating life in our new city.

For me, it feels like a new beginning in so many ways--a chance to return to the creative writing I have always done but seldom been able to focus on. There are two or three projects in the works. Last week I sent some poems to a magazine for the first time in thirty years! My web site, http://webworks.ken-arnold.com will have updates on where publications are expected, as well as work online that I hope will be stimulating and even provocative. I will be posting a new piece there in the next week.

Some of what I'm reading right now--books you might find interesting if you don't know about them:

Messenger: New and Selected Poems, by Ellen Bryant Voight. A writer of clean lines and good sense (and senses--she sees and hears so well).

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, short stories by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is presently my favorite writer. His novels are an adventure, the stories sharp and surprising.

A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine, by John K. Nelson. After my visit to Japan last summer I became more aware of the intricacies of Shinto, which lacks the institutional weight of most religions (never mind the state-sponsored Shinto of the war years--this is different.)

The Art of Setting Stones & Other Writings from the Japanese Garden, by Marc Peter Keane. Lovely prose.

Carried Away: A Selection of Stories, by Alice Munro. The new Everyman's Library collection. As good as anyone can be.

Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang. Novellas and stories by a Chinese writer I'd never heard of. Touching and hard-edged, as was her life.

The Savage Detectives, a novel by Roberto Bolano. An acquired taste. He died young and this novel is a big sprawling legacy, beautiful prose and tough going.

Back on the Fire, essays by Gary Snyder. One of my favorite authors. Essays mostly about nature and the world in peril.

Next week I plan to return to my reflections on Christianity and the body, once my own body is feeling a bit better.

Talking about the Body, 2

2007-04-24T09:43:00.000-05:00

We are all aware, I think, of the deep antagonism toward women from the early days of the church, which continues to be enshrined in our church polities, theologies, and habits of mind. Even though most churches now ordain women, with pominent and significant exceptions, there remains a lingering scent of impurity and impropriety in the presence of women on altars and in clerical garb. Women in the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church were not treated well by male colleagues (prior to the elevation of a woman to lead the church--I don't know how women are treated now). One female bishop told me as recently as last summer of outrageous dismissive behavior by her fellow male bishops. I assume that the basic attitudes of patriarchal males have not changed overnight.

Women are not highly regarded by the worldwide church in non-Western societies, and that is especially true of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which objects, along with a number of Episcopal Churches in the US, to the full inclusion of gays in the church and its leadership. I believe that the attitudes toward gays in the church are rooted in attitudes toward women. They share a common origin: an abhorrence of the body and its irrational, sensual ways.

Like women, gays are seen as impure (as I said in my previous post), not for reasons related to menstruation and pregnancy, obviously, but for reasons having to do with an upsetting of what is seen as the natural order. Order comes with reason, according to the traditional male way of thinking, and women are inherently irrational. They are unpredictable. They feel before they think. They are soft edged. They tempt men to violate their allegiance to reason and to orderly action. They tempt men to lose control (sexually and other ways).

Gays are regarded by dominant male leaders in the church in the same way. Gays are too much like women. They care more about the sensual body. They violate natural order and therefore encourage chaos. They are unpredictable because they don't think like "normal" men. They can be soft edged. They may be passive receivers of the male organ, just as women are. (Some bisexual men who engage in homosexual acts deny the are gay if they are the "active" partner. It is the receiver who is gay, ie, not male.)

What I have rehearsed, of course, is a list of stereotypes--I want to be sure you understand that I don't hold these stereotypes myself. But the church is a rational institution in its governance if not in its worship or prayer. It is ok for the masses to sing or dance or wear colorful clothes, ok for women to weep and hold one another, ok for worshipers to be "out of control"--so long as their passions are contained by organized liturgy and constrained by the rules of a rational polity. Gays are allowed in the church as part of the worshiping masses so long as they behave themselves (do not sleep with others of the same gender) and do not "act out" in ways that disrupt the natural order.

Women have been allowed more freedom in many of the denominations and are far more visible now. But they are still regarded by most male leaders as annoyances. They are always making demands, pushing against the barriers. If they team up with gays, then the male hierarchy, perhaps even the very concept of hierarchy, will be threatened. What male leaders fear most is an alliance between gays and women in the church.

It will be harder for the male elite to accept gays as they have, grudgingly, accepted women. For one thing, they are threatened by the proximity of gay males, who tempt them as women do to betray the male body, which the conservatives identify wholly with the Body of Christ.

And that's where theology meets the body in this dispute. Woman doesn't look like Christ, and that has been a sticking point for opponents of the ordination of women. But no one is even willing for a moment to make the argument that there cannot be a gay Christ--even to raise the possibility by denying it is anathema. His is the essential male body that has nothing sexually to do with women or men. His body is pure, as all bodies should be. The early church thought that women would be changed into men at the last day. Straight men.

The body we cannot get rid of is the Body of Christ, which is normative for the church.

Talking about the Body, 1

2007-04-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

Well, here we are a week after the resurrection. The cold continues in the northeast. Yesterday afternoon Eighth Avenue was a flowing river because rain had been falling for twenty-four hours. It was still falling this morning. I have been thinking about the body, not only because this kind of weather makes the body feel miserable--wet clothes, chill in the bone--but because my left wrist is healing from the bicycle fall and I am feeling like a pudding for lack of excercise. I'm not allowed to ride my bike until the hand surgeon says I can.

The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.

The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.

The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.

The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.

Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.

The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.

During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.

Falling, Not Jumping

2007-04-01T10:58:00.000-05:00

I don't remember falling. I remember the moment before, when my bicycle tire caught in the streetcar track on Portland, Oregon's Northrup Street. I was heading up to the hills north of the city along the Willamette River. A fine mist was falling and I was looking forward to the hazy views. When the front tire slid into the track I knew I was going to fall. When I woke up, there were four people hovering over me, one of them holding a cloth to my bleeding forehead. Another assured me I was ok. These were passersby who had removed me from the steetcar tracks and called the fire department, which soon arrived (Engine Company 9, I later learned) with an EMS truck and crew. I could not remember the name of my hotel, nor its address. I think I remembered my name. Fortunately, I had ID, my health insurance card, my wife's cell phone number. The rental bike was not damaged, and the firemen said they'd return it for me. Really? They could hear the New York skepticism in my voice. But I was in no position to argue, strapped tight to a gurney. They were concerned about my neck and a likely concussion.

I did have--do have--a concussion, also a broken bone in my wrist and over my eye. Seven stitches removed yesterday back here in NY. My left arm is in a cast, and my head still hurts. We loved Portland anyway.

Hard to type with a cast. I'll be brief.

This morning, Palm Sunday, I heard sirens, not unusual in NYC, but they were close. I looked out and saw a man standing on the New York Inn sign five floors above 8th Avenue. Two dozen police officers in the street, one on a fire escape trying to talk him down. The man had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the hotel's brick wall, too far from the officer to be touched, but he kept looking over at the policeman talking to him, trying to talk him down. He was listening. Other officers arrived on the roof. One on the next-door building straddled a ledge, held by a safety rope. The avenue full of flashing lights, everyone just watching. Tense. The man stepped out on the sign, balanced above the sidewalk. I thought, he's going and prayed he wouldn't. But he stepped and leaned back, slumped in his clothes as if defeated. Soon, he sat and the officer on the next-door building helped him down.

When the policeman who had been talking to him from the fire escape for an hour came out onto the avenue, the other officers cheered and congratulated him. One of those New York moments.

As I made coffee, I was thinking about how much energy we are willing to dedicate to rescuing, caring for, strangers, myself in Portland, this unknown man who wanted to end his life. What do we do, now that we have been rescued?

Retirement

2007-03-11T14:49:00.000-05:00

I remember when my father took early retirement from the federal government, for which he had worked since the end of World War II. He had reached the highest civil service level he could. For a man who had no college degree, it was quite an achievement, but he was disappointed that he couldn't go higher. He was frustrated by his situation; his superiors were giving him less and less work to do. He had gone as far as he could go in the office--and now they wanted him to leave altogether. When the opportunity to retire came along--one of those budget-cutting actions--he took the package.

He was a young man--I think he must have been in his early fifties. Fortunately, my mother had begun a career in banking and was by then an officer. He could be a house-husband if he wanted to. For awhile he worked for a hardware store and then hooked up with H&R Block, doing "executive taxes" instead of sitting in a walk-in office. He enjoyed numbers and the job suited him. But he also did the cooking--he always loved to cook.

I think it was unsettling for me, when he retired, because everyone seemed worried he wouldn't do anything, that he would just sit around. He didn't. In our family you didn't just sit around.

I had my first job when I was fifteen, although I had worked previous years mowing lawns and babysitting. I'll be sixty-three this month--so I've been working in some way or another for fifty years. Most men my age would expect to work longer, perhaps until seventy. I'm too young to retire, just as my father was.

But this week I am retiring in one official way: as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. My wife and I will also start looking for a cheaper place than New York City to live. There is no doubt I will continue to work in some sense, as a consultant or in some little enterprise of my own. I don't plan to just sit around. But I don't plan to take another full-time job in a company (unless someone wants to make me an irresistable offer--always possible).

Being a deacon is an odd thing. Most deacons don't get paid. I am unusual in having worked in two jobs for the church in which I was classified and paid as clergy. So I have a clergy pension and can retire. Circumstances that I need not go into here make it necessary I do that.

It is an odd feeling, to retire. I will continue to behave as a deacon, particularly as I see my prophetic role as a writer and speaker--very much part of the diaconal calling. Once we move I may want to work in a parish (as a traditional deacon volunteer in parish life), but the truth is I need to rethink my role in this church. And the action of retirement will help me do that.

I had a letter this week from a deacon who was ordained when I was, nine years ago, reminding me and my fellow ordinands from that ceremony that our tenth anniversary is coming up. I spent almost as much time trying to become ordained as I've spent in a collar. Before ordination, one of the key questions is: Why do you think you need to be ordained? Now that I'm about to retire from active duty, as it were, I wonder if I did need to be ordained. What good did it do me or the church? (Other than the modest pension, which was an accident anyway--and not what I mean by the question.)

We don't become ordained for ourselves, of course. Especially deacons: there are not many personal advantages to being one. And yet ordination changes our lives, alters who we are. And if we are right in thinking we are called to ordination, it ought to change the church in some way.

I have a sense of being freed but I can't articulate what I mean by that yet. I only know that this week I am retiring and I don't plan to sit around and do nothing. I'm too young for that. But what has happened to the deacon, the guy who thought God was calling him, through the community of the church. to a particular service? What becomes of him and his vocation?

Sunday Morning

2007-03-04T14:58:00.000-05:00

Since I'm fasting from religion during Lent--note, please, that the issue is religion not belief or faith--Sunday mornings remind me of the sixteen years I dropped out of religion between my sophomore year in college and my inexplicable return in 1979. I suppose a primary alternative to church is the New York Times, if you happen to have developed the Times habit over the years, as my wife and I have. So we read the Times. We have brunch. Because I'm not serving on an altar, I don't have to spend most of the day in the church, returning late afternoon with a kind of fatigue that I feel after no other work or activity. It isn't hard to do something different--when the weather's good, take a long bike ride as I did yesterday--although I must say that reading the New York Times is hardly an edifying experience or a ritual that leads to spiritual insight. (My wife says for her it is.)

But then a church service often fails to be edifying or spiritually insightful as well.

Well, this morning I was watching the workmen in the lot across the street from our apartment as they completed the erection of a fifteen-storey crane with an arm that reaches another ten storeys into the air. They began the work yesterday at dawn (the workers arrive at the construction site every day before dawn, even on the coldest days). Building has been going on at the site for a few months now, with interruptions of one sort or another. I know nothing about these things, so I can't say why there are delays. I assume it's about the arrival of materials. Watching the crane go up this weekend, I expect to see flat-bed trucks arrive tomorrow with long steel girders. The workers will then proceed to put the girders in place and erect a condominium skyscraper, the Platinum Tower, that will block a good part of our apartment's southern light. But that's just a fact of life in New York. Light will be blocked by buildings.

Anyway, as I've observed the workmen at the construction site over these few months, and seen them this weekend, I've been struck by how much of their time seems to be spent wandering around somewhat aimlessly. I can see a dozen men walking about in the morning, perhaps carrying something, but seldom do they seem to stop to do anything. Their motions appear random, and then at the end of the day the site has changed. There are walls, platforms rising out of the concrete bathtub in which it all rests. On Friday, there was not a crane, and then on Sunday there is. A few men were on the girders of the crane, some on the ground held ropes (I think). The whole thing balanced on a slim pile of steel seemed improbable. One man crawls out on the extended arm 100 feet up, without a safety belt, his feet balanced on the girders. The height doesn't seem to bother them.

It's a possible answer to the question, Why is there anything at all? Stuff mills around until it comes together and then you have something.

This morning they started up a smokey engine at the back of the platform on which the crane operator sits, enclosed in his glass casing (nice in this cold weather), and try out various moves. The man on the crane arm stays there while it is moved this way and that. Others crawl around on another platform above the operator's cab doing who knows what. Every now and then I look up from the Times to see how they are doing. They are standing or wandering or looking.

I mention to my wife that it's hard to think of these men in their hard hats as typical guys from the Bronx, say, with beer guts, whose views I am unlikely agree with, when I see them in this effortless motion erect a structure that does not look like it can stand. But it does. They're not in church either, of course.

It occurred to me that life is a bit like this, random motion or effort, that may or may not feel purposeful, but in the end, who knows. A few guys show up and after a day leave a twenty-storey crane behind. They go to a bar maybe, have a beer. No big deal. The main thing is the crane doesn't fall down. Amazing.

Amazing Grace and A Beaver

2007-02-26T11:03:00.000-05:00

I have been ranting lately about the Episcopal Church--and some of you think I'm being extreme about the subject. I admit it. I am. It is probably the only way to be in a community that thrives on accommodation. Look at how our church handled the issue of slavery: we did not split, as other denominations did, but we also simply never addressed the matter honestly. That left us in a position of some awkwardness during the civil rights era. We were simply a segregated church. The same was the case with the ordination of women. It took extreme action to change the dynamics. Someone wrote to say that I am using the divisive tactics of the right. And that is probably accurate. A united church or communion is not the holy grail.

But what I want to write about today is the film, Amazing Grace, which my wife and I saw on Saturday. It is about William Wilberforce and the effort to abolish the slave trade in Britain in the early eighteenth century. Amazing Grace is not a great film, but it is a good film. The acting is fine, the story line is well developed. Good and evil are somewhat less than black and white, although Wilberforce seems to lack all fault. Nonetheless, it is a film we Episcopalians should see and hear carefully. At one point in the story, the House of Commons and the leaders of the church caution that while they agree that slavery is an abomination, it is necessary to go slowly in order to protect business interests. The society runs on the slave trade and there is no easy way to change the order of things without distrupting economic and social comfort. (The same argument is almost always made against social change.) While the British government went carefully, thousands of Africans were sold and died. (What might happen in a forty-day period of reflection on whether gays are human? Gays may die from hate crimes here and around the world, while we pray for guidance.)

In the film there are clergy active on behalf of abolition. They are perceived by those in the mainstream as being "nuts." And indeed they seem to be somewhat off the rails. They are driven by one idea and one wonders if that is such a healthy way to live. But at the same time, it is obvious that Wilberforce is unable to let go of what he hears as a calling from God to take action against an obvious evil. In that, of course, he was absolutely right. As were those who took action against segregation in the US and died in defense of those who could not change the system on their own. The Episcopal Church has a martyr or two among the dead, Jonathan Daniels, to name one. He was vilified by his church and his bishop attempted to rein him in.

Amazing Grace reminds us that social change does not just come about on its own, as our Presiding Bishop intimated in her recent remarks to the staff at the Episcopal Church Center. Progress, she said, is being made. I think the underlying message is: be patient. But left alone, physics tells us, things decay, including the pursuit of justice--although it is interesting to note, that left alone injustice seems to flourish, contrary to the laws of physics. Perhaps evil is above such things. It appears that we need to be instruments of grace in order to counteract the ordinary course of evil. That's what Christians are meant to be.

Bishop John Chane of Washington, DC, has also spoken out on the subject. He says that he will not roll back the clock to appease the Anglican Communion. Take a look at the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and read what he has to say: www. edow.org.

On the good news front, a beaver has returned to the Bronx River, setting up a house where no beavers have been seen in two centuries. Somehow this beaver came to learn that it is ok to be in the Bronx River again, that the right kind of tree is there for him, that there is good clean food. It is not clear whether he is alone. He may be bringing a mate. We can hope. I like to think of this lonely beaver, taking off on his own. Back among his beaver relatives and friends I imagine their is a lot of talk. "Imagine, going off like that on his own. Why does he think he knows more than the rest of us? You watch, he'll be back. Beavers were never meant to be in the Bronx. Am I right? Huh?"

Giving Up Church for Lent

2007-02-21T10:07:00.000-05:00

Following her less than thriumphal return from the meeting of Anglican leaders in Tanzania, the Presiding Bishop of the Episocopal Church has asked the faithful to observe a season of fasting, which she has defined, in part, as temporarily abandoning the church's fundamental embrace of all people. She is saying, in effect: let us temporarily exclude gays from the privileges of inclusion while we ponder whether the "other side" might have a point.

Peter Akinola, head of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, represents the other side. His country is pondering a law that makes gayness a crime. It is a first step toward exterminating gays. Do we really need to reflect prayerfully on whether that might be a good thing? Do we need to ask God's guidance as to the value of all human beings in God's sight? Is this not, in essence, a religious Munich?

During the meeting in Tanzania, the primates (as the leaders of Anglican provinces are called) went to Zanzibar to hold a Eucharist (Episcospeak for Holy Communion) to repent of the Church's involvement in slavery on this two-hundredth anniversary of Wilberforce's successful campaign against slavery in Britain. I think it's wonderful that the primates were feeling penitent about their institution's past sins. But of course the irony is that the primates were knowingly continuing to treat certain humans as less human than they, the essential condition for slavery to flourish.

Not only that, but there was not one word, so far as I can tell, about slavery in the present day: sex trafficking, employment slavery, the ownership of humans. It goes on. There are an estimated 800,000 women in sex trafficking in the world today; some 200,000 of them are in the US. Nigeria is an important hub of the sex trade in Africa and has not signed on to the international agreement to combat the trade in people as sexual objects. Akinola and his US followers have not said a word about this modern-day slavery. Nor has the American church (the General Convention of the Episcopal Church passed a resolution condemning sex trafficking in 2003 but, typically, nothing else seems to have been done about it).

In the United States, Atlanta and San Francisco are bustling centers of the sex trade, but I have not heard a single word from the bishops in those cities about the crime of slavery under their church noses.

Perhaps some repentence for current sins is in order.

Many members of the Anglican Communion are in countries that participate in sex trafficking. There are also wars on the planet. There is starvation. There is genocide in Sudan. There is stuff for the church to talk about and to do something about.

But the primates assembled in Tanzania could only think about one thing (well, they did mention a few other matters, but we know that they were not the real meat of the meal).

And the leader of the Episcopal Church in the US appears to have agreed with the conclusion of the primates that now would be a good time to consider whether gays really belong. Or whether the rantings of bigots (don't tell me about their pain, please) should engage our Lenten reflection.

The Episcopal Church has finally made itself profoundly irrelevent by concluding that membership in an exclusive, private club (The Anglican Communion)--never mind that it has membership rules that exclude certain "impure" groups--is more important than, well, just about anything.

For me, that means that I am going to take this period of Lent to give up the church, to withhold monetrary support (do not tithe for apartheid), to stay away from its sacred ceremonies and pious follies, and to reflect prayerfully on how those of us who loved a different church might call it back to faithfulness. If you are interested in joining me, let me know. (And if you are not an Episcopalian but believe that your church is also irrelevent to the present real world, feel free to join in--or, rather, opt out.)

Tearing Down the House

2007-02-13T09:33:00.000-05:00

This morning I was reading Donald Richie's lovely little book, The Inland Sea, which is an account of his exploration of the islands and communities that surround the long, narrow sea below the main island of Japan. The book was published first in 1971 and reissued in 2002 by Stone Bridge Press. In a section about Shinto shrines, Richie talks about something I had heard when I was in Kyoto last summer but had not understood: that the great shrine of Ise was torn down every twenty years and rebuilt--and that this had been going on for over a thousand years. (I had heard that all shinto shrines are destroyed and rebuilt in this way, but I don't know if that's true.) Richie speaks of this process as being a way of stopping time, not the building of great structures like the pyramids or the Empire State Building, or cathedrals.

Richie doesn't mention cathedrals, but reading his reflections made me think of the church structures we revere so highly in Christianity. My own parish church is an architectural gem, really quite beautiful. Sometimes it seems that we worship the space itself not in the space. This weekend I am off to Philadelphia for a meeting in the cathedral there, which has been redesigned to accommodate rearrangements of the furniture according to different seasons and festivals. I hear that it is an impressive space, although the preservationists were outraged that it had been gutted and rebuilt. I am looking forward to seeing it.

When I was last there, the space was appointed as a traditional gothic church, dark, pews insisting on their right to dominate, everything oriented rigidly to the altar and priest. I was doing a one-man show that I had created in which I played St. Francis of Assisi. The show could be longer or shorter, depending on the situation, but it always began in the same way: I told the story of Francis when he was confronted by the town bishop and his father for stealing from his father to pay for repairs to the local church. Francis takes off his clothes and goes naked into the woods, declaring that his only father is the one in heaven. I took off my clothes, leaving, however, a pair of shorts to protect the delicate.

After the death of St. Francis, some of his followers tried to carry on his practice of radical poverty, wandering the countryside and resisting the pressures of the church heirarchy to create a permanent church structure and begin to make some money off of the pilgrim trade. Eventually, these radical followers of Francis were declared heretics. It was against the gospel to be poor and to wander freely about. (How can the bishop control what you do or how you worship if he doesn't know where you are?)

In my previous post, I spoke about Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, which owns a lot of real estate and has its own impressive tent of meeting. Since then I notice that the churches in Virginia that wish to break with the Episcopal Church authority there are suing to keep their property. In the end, that's what matters most: who gets what possessions in the divorce.

These musings have a point: church buildings are a burden to the faithful. They substitute as objects of worship; they cost too much to maintain; they become the focus of controversy when larger issues should be addressed (as in the case of parishes leaving the fold); they are not intrinsic to the Christian way, which in the beginning was followed in the homes of the faithful.

Quite simply, I suggest that we get rid of them as quickly as we can. When the dissidents leave the official church, we should let them have the buildings and the burden of caring for them. When congregations are too small for massive structures, they should abandon them and convert them to nightclubs, as has happened with one former Episcopal Church in New York. Where feasible, we should sell the churches and allow them to be torn down and replaced by condominiums.

Thirty-five years ago, when I visited the island of Solentiname in the south of Lake Nicaragua--the home of liberation theology--I went to Mass in a shed with no walls. The cows wandered in and out, chewing cud. The whole thing could easily have been blown down by a strong wind. No problem. It would be easy to put it up again. It seems trite to say: it was clear that the church was not the building. It was the people partying with God.

Perhaps we should adopt the Shinto model and tear down our churches every twenty years or so. Think of all the money and grief we would save. Not to mention the high cost of insurance.

While the Waters Rise

2007-02-05T15:29:00.000-05:00

The Episcopal Church, it seems, has a talent for the ridiculous. Episcopalians form perhaps the easiest group of believers to satirize (and the safest--we just don't get violent). It could be the way our clergy dress up--not only dress up, since Roman Catholics and Christian Orthodox get fancy without being made so much fun of. We Episcopalians make a fetish of our clerical garments--we take them so seriously. A priest I know said, when he was elected bishop, "think of all the great clothes." And he was only half kidding. Another bishop suggested his autobiography might be titled, Men in Skirts. Now, of course, we have women in, um, well, they're already in skirts. Some of this is an ability to mock ourselves and that's a good thing. But we are easily mocked by others, especially perhaps when we try to be serious and important about, for example, the Big Issues Facing the World.

Take this week's issue of The New Yorker, which has a hilarious piece by Rebecca Mead on the latest Trinity Institute conference, "God's Unfinished Future: Why It Matters Now." Apparently the attendees called it "Apocalypse Not" (although the funnier New Yorker typo--did the New Yorker used to have typos?--reads, Apocalpyse Not).

For those who don't follow the Epyscopal Church insider guide, The Trinity Institute programs have for years brought Big Deals in Religion to New York's Trinity Church (downtown Manhattan), the richest church in the world, to talk about Important Subjects. This year's conference was on one of the neglected subjects of Episcopal discourse, the Book of Revelation and the End Times. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists think about the End Times a lot. There is an entire series of books, in fact, The Left Behind Series, that lays out in excruciatingly bad fiction what happens when the End comes and the good are raptured (taken to Heaven) while the Bad are left behind to duke it out with the AntiChrist. At the Very End of Time, when JESUS comes back to judge those left and annihilate the legions of the AntiChrist, it is very bad news indeed. According to the latest installment of the series, Jesus cuts off body parts and blows up infidels. It isn't pretty. And I suspect Episcopalians figure prominently among the dispatched.

Needless to say, when Episcopalians talk about the End, they don't use such graphic, impolite images. As Mead describes it, they get together for canapes and Pinot Noir and say ridiculous things. (I know this to be true.) Mainly, it seems, people concerned with the End are the poor or culturally disadvantaged, of which there were few to none, I'd guess, at Trinity. Peter Gomes noted that we Episcopalians have a greater investment in the present than in the future.

Trinity's investment in the present is huge: it owns much of the real estate in downtown Manhattan. One might think that the church would care about global warming, since the impact on its real estate holdings could be significant, something Mead noted wryly in her article.

What her article suggests to me is that it's not only the world that should be worried about rising waters. For Episcopalians, as the Psalm says, the waters have risen up to our necks. We're drowning as we sip our Pinot Noir and attend, glancing slowly into the mirror, to the creases in our vestments.

Witness for Peace

2007-01-29T16:24:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Robert Drinan died yesterday, January 28, and when I read his obituary I was transported immediately back to the days when he was a Roman Catholic priest in Congress who was outspoken in his opposition to the war in Viet Nam. It is not hard to see in his life and witness something missing in our present Congress. Another priest and congressman was Senator John Danforth, an Episcopalian, who wrote a book last year, Faith and Politics, that grew out of his conviction that the church and particularly its leaders need to speak out on the issues confronting us. Although he does not have much (I think nothing) to say about the war in Iraq, he makes an eloquent case for Christians to engage the culture as reconcilers not dividers. It's a modest book, but it is also rare in being written by an Episcopalian. I don't hear Episcopalians in the public arena as often I do those from other traditions, such as Jim Wallis or Bob Edgar or, until his death last year, William Sloan Coffin. (Except of course for the Christian political right.)

When I read about Drinan's death, I thought I should write a lamentation about the silence of the Episcopal leadership on the issue of the war. I recalled William Stringfellow, an Episcopal layperson, writing that "the church of Christ is called as the advocate of every victim of the rulers of the age," and thought about our silence as tens of thousands of Iraqis die for our carelessness. I found myself recalling fondly the fire of Daniel Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton, and other religious leaders who were willing to take public stands against the war in Viet Nam. Yes, there was a statement from Christian leaders in November 2002 deploring the impending pre-emptive strike against Iraq; one of the leading speakers on behalf of that position, Bob Edgar, of the National Council of Churches, pointed out that the anti-war sentiment had coalesced quickly against Iraq compared to the slower growth of opposition to the war in Viet Nam. He saw that as hopeful, and I suppose it was. (There were no Episcopal signers of that statement, and as an Episcoplian that disturbed me.) There were protests against the war by Episcopalians and other Christians; in Boston, I helped to organize an interfaith witness for peace that drew 3000 people and took away some of the front page of the Boston Globe from Bush's State of the Union address just before the war began. But once the invasion was launched, it seems to me that there were fewer statements and even less action. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church last year approved a resolution calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, but again once the resolution was approved what happened then?

I was encouraged, however, as I sat down to write this piece, to learn that there is a Christian Witness for Peace planned for March 16 (http://www.sojo.net/images/action/cpw_flyer_8x11_color.pdf) in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The event begins with a worship service at the National Cathedral, which doesn't necessarily mean that the Episcopal Church officially supports the event. Most Episcopalians, in fact, are reacting, at least publicly, to the war with their normal butt-scratching indifference to anything that isn't about sex or the purity of the liturgy or the size of the church's pension accounts. Certainly, Episcopal leadership has been mostly silent on the war. The Episcopal Peace Fellowship is a sponsor of the witness scheduled for March 16, but EPF has been continuously active if somewhat invisible for years.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I went to a silent peace vigil at Rockefeller Center during rush hour. It was not especially well attended, but we were glad to be able to say by our presence that we did not approve. I wore my clerical collar, something I rarely do. We stood with the other silent witnesses for about an hour and then people began to disperse. As we left, I saw a priest I know from the Episcopal Church. We smiled wanly at each other. "Just the two of us, huh?" I said. "Well, at least we're here."

As the nation drifts through the war in Iraq toward confrontation with Iran and what will certainly be a debacle for us and the world, I wonder if Christians and other religious leaders really will sit by and watch it happen. Will we be as silent as the good protestant Germans were in the 1930s as the Jews were rounded up? Will we simply allow the greed and arrogance that drives this aggression and our culture to continue in order to protect what we call our life style? After the wars are over and the remnants are left wandering around in the ruins cursing us, we will not be able to say we didn't know. The fires next time are coming for everyone.

We need now the kind of statement of conscience, the Confessing Church, that was created by Bonhoeffer and others in opposition to the Nazi regime (I am not saying that the Bush administration is equivalent to the Nazis, but I am saying that the crisis of conscience and the challenge to faith is equally dire). There have been some efforts in this direction; perhaps this event in Washington will lead to the formation of such a voice of witness. I hope that Episcopal leaders will be there as part of the leadership. But of course it doesn't matter if the Episcopal Church remains on the sidelines. In the long run, no particular denomination matters. What matters is that the faithful from all parts of the Body of Christ will be there and will be witnesses to the peace that we profess.

Flutes in Brooklyn

2007-01-26T14:45:00.000-05:00

People like me who live in Manhattan think of Brooklyn (or almost anywhere else in the world) as a lesser place, requiring a visa. Going there seems like an adventure, requiring careful advance planning. I had to go there this morning for a shakuhachi (traditional Japanese bamboo flute) lesson with a visiting master from Kyoto, Japan, Yoshio Kurahashi. A friend asked where in Brooklyn I was going. I said, "Brooklyn, Brooklyn." She rolled her eyes. Ok, I went to Brooklyn Heights, a nice part of the city. I knew that.

This morning's temperature as I set out was 18 degrees without the wind-chill, which took the thermometer below zero. My wife, Connie, who is from Sioux Falls, told me that New Yorkers (like me) don't understand midwestern cold and can die without proper protection. I put on leg warmers (which I usually wear when I cycle in cold weather; standing in the bedroom wearing only the black warmers and underwear made me look like an exotic dancer). I put on two layers on top--silk against the skin and a sweater--then a parka, wool cap, gloves, heavy socks and boots, scarf. I went out feeling like a child heading into the snow. Pray that I don't fall over.

The apartment where we were having our lesson is small, cozy, appealing with actual tatami mats covering half of the living room floor. Kurahashi was there, he had flown in from Osaka last night, looking just as he did last summer when I was in Kyoto and played the flute with him at his home. The weather then was hot and rainy. There were six of us in Brooklyn today to study with him a piece called Tamagawa, which honors six rivers of that name in Japan. It is a classical piece usually played with a koto accompaniment. Afterwards, I had a private lesson with Kurahashi reviewing a piece I already know, Shin Takasago. One of my problems as a shakuhachi player (never having studied music before) is timing, rhythem, counting. (These are sometimes problems in my life as well. Hmmm.) Playing this piece with Kurahashi was intended to help me with my sense of musical rhythm. Usually I'm nervous when I play with him; today I wasn't. It was a good lesson.

Today is a Friday and until two weeks ago I would have been at work in the morning. At some point during the lesson today, playing a nineteenth-century Japanese composition on an ancient instrument in Brooklyn, I realized that at the same moment the company I ran until two weeks ago was having a board meeting. Board meetings were always stressful, as they are supposed to be. I was fired two weeks ago and therefore didn't have to attend today's board meeting. Undoubtedly, one of the topics of conversation was me and my departure, perhaps even how I had caused the company grief. Who knows. I didn't have to worry about it. I was wearing blue jeans and playing a bamboo flute. I was not dressed in a blue pin-striped suit and yellow tie decorated with elephants. I was not defending any decision I had made. I was playing music and not too badly either.

When I walked back into the street, the freezing wind was blowing off of the river. I pulled my wool cap over my ears and walked along in the sun, whose cold rays made me happy. Imagine playing music on such a winter's day and walking freely through Brooklyn Heights. Exactly there, knowing exactly where.

First Time

2007-01-19T16:06:00.000-05:00

The first post to my new blog. It feels like it ought to mean something, but it doesn't mean much. I managed to get the thing up and running. I am in New York City and from the window in front of my desk I look down into Times Square at 47th Street. Huge images of human beings marketing television shows or movies or Jewish Dating Services loom a block away, just beyond the W Hotel, which houses one of our favorite restaurants, Blue Fin. Morgan Stanley's office building is just to the left of Times Square. We used to be able to see TKTS down there, but it's moved. On Thanksgiving we can see the Macy's Parade as it passes. It's especially fun when the big floats pass between the buildings like UFOs. On New Year's Eve the roar of the city was strangely comforting, like the background hum of the universe magnified. At midnight the sky outside filled with confetti drifting up the way snow does (we're on the seventeenth floor). Of course, we watched the ball drop on television. No way we were going out there in the midst of all those people. Two years ago we went down to the harbor and stayed at a hotel. From our room we could watch fireworks on the harbor. There was almost no one watching. It was as if no one knew you could go down to the harbor and see fireworks on New Year's Eve and be practically alone. This year the street cleaners came out before all of the people were gone, around 12:30, and began sweeping as the rain started to fall. By morning everything was gone, litter, people, the old year. It's the way we prefer the city: quiet and empty on holiday mornings when the midwesterners are still eating breakfast and the New Yorkers are sleeping.