Category Archives: church

snakes alive

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Banks win again: The banks have beaten us all in the senate yet another time, having succeeded in gutting legislation to ease bankruptcy of its central measure that would have allowed judges to lower the amounts owed on home mortgages. It would appear that the administration, in failing to push for the provision, has concluded that its economic strategy is succeeding on a macro level and is willing to sacrifice the interest of individual homeowners in order to keep the bankers, and their lobbyists, happy. Yesterday’s New York Times had the story.

Grieving for Dr. Tiller: Not all Christians and Christian groups are opposed to abortion — not all even to late term abortion. Last Monday my church hosted a local memorial for Dr. George Tiller sponsored by Faith Aloud. Well over 200 attended, and we learned later that many more did not attend because they were fearful about security. The Rev. Rebecca Turner, Faith Aloud Executive Director, remarked truly, I thought, that the presentation of Randall Terry’s statement by CBS News, was like asking the head of the Ku Klux Klan to comment on a lynching. Media Matters comments on the Randall Terry polemic by remembering a Leslie Stahl piece that links Terry directly to violence. Judith Warner’s column in yesterday’s New York Times is moving indeed.

Answered: A question I asked a couple of posts back has now been answered. The Obama administration is considering proposing legislation to allow five Guantanamo detainees to plead guilty to capital crimes. These five were allegedly involved in the 9/11 plot and have been extensively tortured and held without trial for many years. Today’s New York Times quotes David Glazier, who has written critically about the commission system in the past as saying: “This unfortunately strikes me as an effort to get rid of the problem in the easiest way possible, which is to have those people plead guilty and presumably be executed. But I think it’s going to lack international credibility.” But according to Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, a Guantanamo defense lawyer, the government is “trying to give the 9/11 guys what they want: let them plead guilty and get the death penalty and not have to have a trial.” These five detainees “have seemed to be daring the United States to put them to death,” according to New York Times reporter, William Glaberson.

Here’s the most interesting paragraph in Glaberson’s piece about this.

The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates by an administration task force on detention.

Interesting, because it suggests a program of leaks designed to contextualize whatever decision the administration finally takes about the Guantanamo detainees. There seem to be no good choices open. The matter of Guantanamo and the fates of the prisoners there is so seriously compromised by the depredations of the former administration that no actions remain that are simple, legal, or just.

completing the figure

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It’s good to think that one can learn something even in one’s seventh decade when the brain has begun to stiffen with the rest of one’s body. Today I think I have learned something, or at least thought about something familiar in a new way. Easter isn’t about welcoming the happy morning, at least not at first.

I had been thinking about the Easter Vigil, how we light new fire in darkness at the begining of the service and begin the Mass with bells and organ sounding for the first time in three days. A friend had written me to say that his pastor had quoted James Weldon Johnson’s lines about Gabriel’s silver trumpet in her Easter sermon. Somehow it occurred to me that the passage from death to life must be a sudden occurrence, the body snapped into being like a spoken thing. That’s why resurrection, if there be such, is different from birth.

And that’s why scripture tells us that God comes suddenly — when one is unprepared — like a thief in the night. The watchmen cries out from his high tower; but God comes with the watchman’s utterance still unheard, and nothing is the same afterwards. It’s the twinkling of an eye of which Paul speaks. It’s the bugler in Krakow cut off in mid voluntary by an arrow in the throat. And it’s because of the traditional painful imagery that surrounds the whole idea in scripture that I missed it. It isn’t at first about judgment at all. It’s about hierophany.

I think Mozart understood what I’m talking about, and maybe that’s why the Glorias in one of his most famous mass settings sting the ear and run up the scale like birds flushed from underbrush, startling the bonae voluntatis, “the living and the dead in the twinkling of an eye . . . caught up in the middle of the air,” as the poet says.

ubi caritas

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Last evening many Christians will have sung this hymn, as they gathered in their churches to honor Jesus’ commandment that they love one another. It’s a hymn I especially love. It evokes the memory of a person I loved at whose funeral I sang, with others, this beautiful setting by Maurice Duruflé.

Here’s another performance by a different group. It’s a bit truncated at the beginning, but I like the cathedral sound.

in the midst of life . . .

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Yesterday I attended a funeral.

I didn’t know the deceased, the father of a friend and colleague. I went to support my friend, to join with him and his family, many of whom I also don’t know, in paying attention, and in enacting the formal gestures by which we honor the end of a life.

All lives are significant. It’s not my purpose here to make any distinctions between persons. I was brought up to believe that one went to funerals, and I’m thinking here about what that may mean to me–now that I’m getting close enough to my own funeral that I can think about it as a palpable thing.

My companion on the 150 mile journey to Sikeston, Missouri, where the funeral was held in a Presbyterian church, was another colleague and friend, a member of the Society of Jesus who is more familiar with funerals than I am by virtue of his vocation as a priest. But we were both brought up to believe that you went to funerals, and as we talked about this shared experience, my friend remembered a little essay that he likes to use in classes sometimes. It’s called “Always go to the Funeral,” and it was written by Deirdre Sullivan as part of the This I Believe series on NPR.

I like the homeliness of Sullivan’s thoughts. Here’s the heart of it, perhaps:

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. . . . In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

For me, there’s still more. I remember a funeral years ago, when the priest (a man I loved) read the great prayer that opens the prayerbook service, with it’s solemn quotation from Job, from the back of the church — taking us all in:

As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.
After my awaking, he will raise me up;
and in my body I shall see God.
I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him
who is my friend and not a stranger.

Death is always inconvenient and sudden, even if expected. We who are not dead are called out of life to pay attention to a sudden absence. A certain one there was, and that one is no more. And so one goes the funeral–to bear witness and in the enactment know again and for the first time the age-old gestures of bereavement and consolation to the bereaved, who are also ourselves no matter we didn’t know the deceased.

The church was full for my friend’s father’s funeral. There was comfort in that beyond the familiar words from John’s gospel, “Let not your heart be troubled . . . ,” even for a stranger to the place and its community who were mostly to me just folks. Here’s how Sullivan describes a similar experience at her father’s funeral.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Not friends, not loved-ones, not the communion of saints, just “folks in the church” gathered together — knowing what we know.