Category Archives: religion

after Advent III

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Yesterday I joined a new network of blogging Episcopalians. I had been part of an older network that seems to have gone defunct, but this new one has garnered twenty-nine members already and looks to have a good future. One reason I joined is that I got a very nice invitation, written as a comment on my last blog post, from proprietor, Lisa Jones. I’m convinced that folks like Lisa and her young family are the best hope we have as Episcopalians looking at declining church numbers. That’s certainly been the case in my parish.

St. John’s Episcopal Church is the second oldest surviving Episcopal church in the city of St. Louis, founded in 1841. Only Christ Church Cathedral is older. I served two terms as Senior Warden of St. Johns, from 2006 until 2012. During that time we increased membership and budgets so that the parish now supports a strong pastoral size congregation that is on the verge of becoming program size. Here is a photo of our present building, where the congregation moved in 1908. And here’s a video (embedded below) that tells our story. It was made by the national church in 2012 and illustrates what I think is needed if our national church is to reverse its present decline.

St. John’s had declined to a handful of members at the fime I first attended a service, partly because of changing demographics and partly for other reasons. One index of our growth is that we now have a thriving children’s program supported by a number of young families who have joined us over the past eight or ten years. We built some new nursery and sunday school spaces in 2010. Here is a picture that we recently featured on our Facebook page. It includes many of our youngest members. If you look at our Facebook page today, You’ll see a spread of photos from last Sunday’s Christmas Pageant in which you’ll see these same children and others. We’re blessed.

And we informally call St. John’s Tower Grove Church, affirming that we strive to be relevant to the Tower Grove/South Grand community in which we are embedded, with programs such as Peace Meal, Isaiah 58 Ministries, Integrity, and our partnership with Mann School. Also as we are called to a progressive ministry of relevance to the times in which we find ourselves, we seek to continue the work of the gospel as we are given to understand it.

In my last post I wrote about why I need the dark time of Advent, as the days grow shorter whilst a new liturgical year begins. It’s appropriate, I think, that we begin a new Christian year with a time set aside for reflection and waiting. What begins is the familiar story of the history of salvation, which is also the history of human being. We are called annually to renew that history in a world from which suffering and death and injustice and hypocrisy and crime have not only never disappeared but have also remained parts of our fundamental experience in the richest nation on earth.

Like many churches, my church has several congregations. We serve a meal every Saturday that is free and open to all who come, not just during Advent but all year. Some who come are homeless. However, in advent we might reflect that in serving this meal we honor Jesus’ Parable of the Banquet, which ought to remind us that the risk to our spiritual lives is always the practice of indifference to misfortune, and in modern times particularly the practice of ideological indifference. Advent reminds us that there is a darkness deeper than winter and calls us to a particular mindfulness. The vulnerability of the homeless, the hungry, the destitute, is our own.

Kyrie Eleison—God bless us every one!

Advent II

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It was an indifferent Sunday, the second Sunday of Advent. I skipped church. Outside the temperature sat at about 25 degrees where it has been more or less for the past three days. Most of our main streets are clear, but we remain frost bound, much of the city still covered by a thin mixture of sleet and snow. Light snow fell off and on around town; we had a bit through the day. Our dogs hibernated, taking in the warmth of their place. Something about this cold snap has dampened their enthusiasm for playing in the snow, which they often like for short stretches of time. Perhaps it was the sky outside, colored that indifferent white that suggests more weather, though we’re told temperatures will rise above freezing by Tuesday and the sun will return. I’m hearing from friends and family in Texas of thick sheets of ice that have created lots of hardship in the wake of this southern winter storm that has just touched us here in Saint Louis.

Advent is traditionally the season of last things, wherein the Christian orthodox faithful have for centuries been invited to ponder the mysteries of heaven, hell, death, and judgment. That Advent, the real one, contrasts sharply with the unfolding Christmas of conspicuous consumption that now begins right after Halloween and picks up speed during the run-up to Thanksgiving. This is the Christmas the paranoid right imagines to be under siege by the forces of secularism and alien religion; though it’s hard to imagine anything more secular than the Christmas of The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, the Christmas the Grinch stole. Tiny Tim is a secular icon, belonging more to Advent than to Christmas, and his “God bless us, every one!” is the least sentimental utterance in Dickens’ story. Tiny Tim is the terrible vulnerability in us, what ought to remind us as we go about our blessed lives that the blessedness is not ours. It’s a gift. We delude ourselves when we think we own it or have earned it. We are all of us at bottom unaccommodated, such poor bare forked animals as Lear became when his pitiless daughters drove him crazy. That’s what Advent is about; it has always had a secular dimension.

And I enjoy the secular Christmas as most American do, though I avoid the various shopping excesses some of my friends like. I also enjoy such ecumenical events as I can honestly celebrate. The rare convergence of Thanksgiving with Hanukkah this year gave me the blessed opportunity to witness the lighting of a Menorah at my table on the day and haltingly to attempt to hum along as friends sang a Hebrew song. Often the beginning of Advent has been my occasion to listen to “Wachet Auf” with its wonderful pastiche of typology figured and transfigured in Bach’s resplendent melodies: pointing towards traditional tropes of heaven, mostly, though acknowledging that the sudden breaking of that realm into the ordinary real carries an edge of judgment. The readiness at which the bridesmaids seem to fail is attainable, if at all, only through the prayer and meditation Advent urges, the contemplation of the end of life as disclosed in its many beginnings. But this year, perhaps because of the weather but more likely because of history, I’m in a darker humor. At a time when I am personally blessed beyond any anticipation I ever had about how my life might close (and I’m in no hurry for that to happen), I am more and more distressed that my public life is disfigured almost beyond recognition. I am surrounded by needless want, desolation, dearth, and ideological hardness of heart proclaimed, sometimes by people I love, as a kind of Christian justice. And at this season of all seasons it is particularly distressing to think of the following phenomena I take as signs of the times.

Feeding the hungry: Food banks everywhere have been strained beyond their capacity during the great recession. The refusal by Congress to extend SNAP and unemployment benefits that were part of the stimulus package has exacerbated that strain, increasing the suffering index in this country and putting even more pressure on benevolent institutions. Right wing politicians are fond of extolling the virtues of private philanthropy as the remedy for social ills; but now in city after city ordinances are being passed that prevent private agencies from feeding the homeless. I’m hearing no right-wing protest about these terrible laws. Indeed I take Bill O’Reilly’s now famous rant about the poor to be a summation of the political right’s understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

Health insurance: The Affordable Care Act isn’t what I would have liked to see enacted. My view of the matter is pretty much summarized at the beginning of a recent Nation editorial. However, I think the intention and potential of the act was and will be to improve our present system of private insurance, to increase coverage and ensure greater fairness. This is a moral issue, but the forces arrayed against the success of the act (some of them engaging in outright sabotage) are also believers in the gospel according to O’Reilly, no matter that many of them enjoy the benefits of Medicare or have children who are taking advantage of Medicaid. There is a broad spectrum of belief in the land that if you are sick or hungry or homeless it’s your fault and you don’t deserve help. Even if you have a preexisting condition, it’s your fault and you don’t deserve to have health insurance.

Social justice: Our Country’s traditional reliance on the will of the people is everywhere under attack: in state after state through attempts to enact voter suppression legislation (I’ve written a fair amount about this already), in public policy that has systematically promoted corporate interests and the interests of wealth while denying and suppressing the interests of consumers and workers, and in the nation’s capitol where the public interest as expressed in poll after poll on issues as varied as monetary policy, entitlements, and the environment is regularly flouted. That John Boehner claims to represent the American people is laughable. President Obama’s recent speech about economic inequality was moving, but his policies will do nothing to correct it. Indeed, he failed even to address its worst accomplishments. Small wonder, since his administration has actively fostered the theft of worker pensions in Detroit. We have arrived at a place where Time can write in relation to the labor struggle at Boeing’s Seattle plant:

Given what has gone on in the steel, mining, aluminum, chemical, auto and tire industries among others in the last couple of decades, you would think the IAM would understand that labor costs have to be globally competitive. In the global economy, every job is part of a labor arbitrage. Airframe work is already being farmed out by Boeing to Japan, the Middle East and Asia, where the big customers are.

This is now conventional wisdom, and almost nobody, certainly nobody in the mainstream press seems to understand the moral horror of it. It is the teaching of neoliberal economics, which has destroyed the city of Detroit, is in the process of destroying the state of Wisconsin, and even reaches into the arts, as the spectacle of the destruction of the Minnesota Orchestra by its management will attest. The orchestra’s musicians have been locked out for a year and a half, but the orchestra’s failed CEO continues to draw an exorbitant salary and massive bonuses.

Clean energy: Ameren Missouri, my supplier of electrical power, has recently agreed to a settlement requiring it to pay a total of $92m in solar energy rebates, $42m of which has already been spent. For years Ameren touted its green energy program but now, in a regulatory climate that gives renewed permission to environmental exploitation, has sought to abandon it and would have suspended the rebate program entirely but for intervention by the solar industry and the Office of Public Counsel. The American Legislative Exchange Council is now pushing measures in many states aimed at stifling renewable energy development on a wider scale. But perhaps a more urgent concern for me at the moment is what is happening in my former home of Denton, Texas, which is being turned into a gas field by Eagle Ridge Energy and other drillers who acquired mineral rights on the QT and are presently surprising UNT students and homeowners around the university by drilling next door and slant drilling underneath them. There have been fracking accidents. Citizens who have participated in the public outcry are being placed on terrorist watch lists. And of course it’s all perfectly legal.

I’m remembering now a conversation with a friend who reacted to an exclamation of mine that Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola was a terrible man. This was at the height of Akinola’s influence in this country on reactionary persons in my church seeking, among other things, to undermine the authority of recently elected Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Akinola was a devout man, my friend told me, she being an admirer of the Presiding Bishop as I was and am. He was a man who was wrong, she said. We should pray for him. Even more years ago I wrote some poems at Advent. This one was published by Green River Press, in an anthology entitled New North Carolina Poetry: The Eighties, edited by my friend Stephen E. Smith. I thought then (and still think) of the Salvationists as a particular sort of good people, no matter their challenges in present inclusive times and their loyalty to outmoded and immoral beliefs about LGBT persons. You’ll see what I mean in the poem, perhaps. Thanks, Stephen.

Salvationists Escaping

The crisis is always the same.
What if, after collecting coats and toys
TV sets, gratuitous old shoes, we should slip
broke and walking out of Sherman’s Atlanta
barely ahead of gangrenous caissons and burning?

And suppose the children were not
the same every year with surprised grandmothers
getting canned goods and hand me downs, but refugees
with swollen bellies begging the roadside
and sooty fingers plucking our penniless sleeves.

It has somehow to start elsewhere.
The world I make love to has always
had your skin. Its roots and contours
swim in your sea, telling each other touching
all the things that are told.

Yet there is always that other, sometimes
so much of it we die for a while or a lifetime
(once as a child I caught the same
tiny fish forty-seven times). In Sherman’s fires
we swim, tiny fish in buffalo grass.

Love because you must before the world wakes
to the dead city and everything gone but smoke.
Tug at each other’s coatsleeves. Do not let go—
as though there were someone to forgive the burning
as though there were someone to love us but ourselves.

The year slows. The days get shorter. Advent doesn’t end with the winter solstice but shortly afterwards. One of the reasons the consumerist Christmas doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers some of my friends is that Christmas has plenty of Pagan background. When the puritans of Boston forbade the celebration of Christmas, they condemned it as an occasion for licentious behavior and as a papist practice, but they also condemned its origin in the Pagan Yule and other celebrations at the solstice. Christmas remains a joyous time for me, a time to play trumpets and ring bells, to remember how the sons of morning filled the sky with their songs and the stirring of their great wings at the coming of the son of man. I love particularly the fact that Christmas seems to make us all a bit more generous, at least for a short time, and the pagan in me revels in the sounds and smells and dreams of the twelve days. This year the Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra may be well on their way towards renewing the life of their ensemble, forming their own nonprofit and raising money, continuing to play concerts on their own, now nominated for a Grammy award.

But I love Advent too because I need the dark time, not that I need the phenomena I have deplored in the preceding paragraphs—but such things are always present. Maybe we carry a bigger load of them this year than in other years; but suffering and death and injustice and hypocrisy and crime are always present. I need the dark time to brood upon them so that I don’t forget, so I don’t lose the ability to tell right from wrong and I’m never seduced by the thought that folk who do not share my good fortune somehow deserve their lack: so that I never fail to honor Tiny Tim and Crazy Lear, refugees from the once and future burnt Atlanta, a place we all know, the place some of us know we come from.

And was Jerusalem builded here . . .

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I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
                                                        —Robinson Jeffers

Yesterday I awoke with strains of Blake’s “Jerusalem” turning over in the back of my mind. Later, I checked in with Melissa Harris-Perry reporting from the Mall on the beginning of festivities celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. As I drifted around the house making breakfast, seeing my beloved off to a celebration of Women’s Equality Day, I thought of Dr. King’s peroration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day fifty years ago, now almost as famous as the Gettysburg Address, and how easy the commerce seemed between the ideal of equality as we understood it then and that great preacher’s evocation of God Almighty in the words of the then familiar spiritual “Free at Last.”

A couple of days before, my beloved and I had watched Lee Daniels’ powerful new film, The Butler, whose evocation of the civil rights movement turned me inside out, pushed hard against whatever barrier it is that prevents me from weeping, so that I was forced to wipe my eyes as we left the theater. It was not nostalgia but something else that film stirred in me. I have been thinking of late about the complexes of memory and present experience that seem to ground my perception of the world and connect my sense of myself and the course of my life with the larger rhythms of history and spirituality. I was privileged to participate directly in some of the large-scale events of the last century. Images of those events, of things I experienced directly, float to the surface of my memory now amongst fragments of poetry and song, but there’s a deeper emotion underneath, a sort of memory aquifer in which part of me remains immersed. More about that later.

In the midst of these reflections I read through an essay posted by Joseph Bottum yesterday at Commonweal. Entitled “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same Sex Marriage.” The piece, which Bottum calls a personal essay, makes a pretty good case for why proponents of same sex marriage seem to be winning the legal argument in today’s world. But when Bottum gets into the area that seems to be most important to him, a discussion of why the “thin” arguments from natural law that are being used to defend Catholic opposition to same sex marriage fail and should fail, some deep loyalty to those same thin arguments seems to dominate in the end. The essay falls into a long digression to the effect that the entire sexual revolution has been anti-Christian, which to Bottum seems to mean anti-Catholic, that serves to obscure the thought (to which Bottum devotes only a few sentences) that the Summa Theologica, while it finds what is sometimes now called traditional marriage to be morally superior to other forms of human cohabitation, does not condemn other such forms. There’s a conclusion to be got from Bottum’s evocation of Thomas, but instead of drawing it, Bottum drifts off into a nostalgic paean to a formerly enchanted world that it seems to be the Church’s present mission to reenchant.

I found this essay offensive in many ways, from its glaring homophobia (linked, I think, to an expressed distaste for the personal that undercuts the essay’s main story thread) to its lavish praise for Robert John Neuhaus and its glib dismissal of mainline Protestantism. I also found its primary argument incoherent. As a supporter of same sex marriage I can’t find anywhere in Bottum’s essay a Catholic case for same sex marriage aside from the claim in its subtitle. Nor can I find any real appreciation for “things we share,” a phrase that alludes to a broken friendship between Bottum and a secular gay friend, with whom Bottum formerly shared “a bit of old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share,” at informal weekend hootenannies. Still, I’ve spent enough good time at informal weekend hootenannies that I liked Bottum’s story about his former friend—indeed it seemed to me the most honest part of the essay—and we do share the stuff of old-timey Americana. All us Americans share that. But it’s a rich, thick mixture of stuff. We constantly get it all over ourselves, like barbecue sauce at a pig picking. And Bottum is after something real when he speaks of the enchantment of the world. We lose something important to us as humans when we lose the ability to apprehend the gods in things.

Bottum’s failure in this essay, it seems to me, is that dogmatism gets in the way of his humanity. An enchanted world doesn’t have to be a Christian world, much less a Catholic one—something Professor Tolkien demonstrated with his stories of Hobbits, devout Catholic that he was. We can read of the enchantment of the world of pagan antiquity in Vergil and Ovid and alike in Hesiod and Homer and the tragedians. When the gods leave, as gods inevitably do, the real work of human being and understanding begins, in the need to save the phenomena, the need that gave rise to Greek philosophy, and perhaps to Christianity (or at least to confessional Christianity) as well. The way of ideological dogmatism sets up orthodoxies and their built embodiments, seeking to maintain by force the authority of past belief and practice. But there is also a way of prophecy. That is the way of Blake in the poem with which I began. It is also the way of Christians who are exploring ways to create marriage liturgies for same sex unions and who believe they are being led by the Holy Spirit in their work.

And it was the way of Dr. King, whose uneasy relationship with Bayard Rustin probably reflects his own homophobia, something he and A. Philip Randolph and others had to rise above as they designed and carried out the events of August 28, 1963. We are now far from that day, further from it spiritually than the fifty years we traverse in remembering it. Dr. King is now a cultural saint, but I can imagine any number of scenarios in which he would make a cheap target for today’s right-wing racist attack machine were he alive today, just as he was a cheap target for J. Edgar Hoover at the time of his assassination. If, like Ivan Karamazov’s Jesus, Dr. King were to return to the streets of Washington, DC, or to Memphis, today—he would likely not be assassinated. Instead, he would be talked to death in the public media, ground to bits by the celebrity industry until nothing was left but a series of tabloid howlers. It would be the vindication of an old friend who stormed into church choir practice on the evening of April 4, 1968, jubilant, with the words: “Hurrah, we’ve killed that son of a bitch!” The only good prophet, or at least the best one, is a dead prophet.

I am seventy-six years old today. As my memory swims in that deep aquifer that opens when I think seriously of the past fifty years, I find a plurality of enchantments, an ollo podrida of enchantments. Among them rests the idea of catholicity (small c), but it commands no more allegiance in that imaginary than the sound of one hand clapping. I’m glad my country has chosen to honor the memory of August 28, 1963, an innocent time, relatively speaking, before the dreadful march of killing that ensued in its wake. We might remember as we congratulate ourselves for having made progress towards a better world that it took the death of a president to overcome the forces of entrenched catholicity that stood against equality in the world Dr. King addressed in 1963, that our initial attempts to create a more nearly just society in law unleashed an orgy of violence that hardly spent itself for a decade, and that powerful forces demanding reinstatement of all the old injustices have reassembled in the world King’s legacy addresses fifty years later. Indeed I feel more solidarity with Charles Blow than with Dr. King today.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t—or shouldn’t—exist in reality.

At seventy-six I don’t want to live inside anybody’s dogmatic catholic hierarchy, not even that of my own church, but I’m proud to be an inheritor of the revolutionary idealism that gives Dr. King’s rhetoric its profound resonance down through the years, an idealism both spiritual and secular that takes as its exemplars figures as disparate as Gandhi and Bob Dylan, who stole his name from a Welsh poet. I think of the songs we all sang as though they were our property in those days: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We shall Overcome,” “Abraham, Martin, and John,” “Kumbaya,” and the wonderful words of Julia Ward Howe’s that almost became the national anthem of the sixties. What enchantment did we see in the watch fires we imagined as we put our arms around one another on the quads and streets of those years, as we sang in our chains like the sea, to paraphrase that same Welsh poet. Was it a world free at last from bigotry, dogmatism, inequality, and starvation? I hope it was. For that would be the Jerusalem of randipole Billy Blake, as he was sometime known by his best fictional disciple, Gulley Jimson.

Glory, Hallelujah!

Good king sauerkraut

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Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Stephen, on which I for one would rather sing of King Wenceslas than think of the story of the ancient martyr whose suffering is a prelude to the conversion of St. Paul. It was also boxing day, the day when the British aristocracy traditionally gave boxes of gifts and food to their servants and allowed them the day off to celebrate Christmas. British tradesmen, too, sometimes made up Christmas boxes for their employees. Samuel Pepys’ entry for 19 December 1663 notes that he went “by coach to my shoemaker’s and paid all there, and gave something to the boys’ box against Christmas.” Perhaps such boxes carried on the custom of collecting alms for St. Stephen’s day in boxes outside churches.

Today Boxing Day is a secular holiday when Banks are closed in Great Britain; though the holiday is not uniformly observed throughout the former British colonies and doesn’t always fall on 26 December. Still, in general terms Boxing Day is the day after Christmas Day, the second day of Christmastide which ends twelve days later. Christmas and Epiphany sometimes overlap. The day of the Epiphany should fall immediately after Twelfth Night, but it doesn’t at all times and in all places, the Roman, British, and Orthodox calendars being different in some respects. What unites these practices is what the old carol calls ‘blessing the poor,’ something we may have to think about in more complicated ways than our ancestors did.

We live in a time when democracy and citizenship are on the wane. Traditional philanthropies survive, but the popularity of the prosperity gospel is alarming. Moreover, our new olilgarchs are not characterized by the noblesse oblige symbolized by King Wenceslas in the carol. Indeed their setbacks in the recent election seem to have emboldened them to still greedier amour propre. Gil Schwartz, AKA Stanley Bing, has written a best-selling series of books and columns over the past ten years or so that can be read either as satire or as advice on how to succeed in the climate of corporate decadence we seem to be experiencing. What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness may be his catchiest title. The bottom line: love yourself. Schwartz/Bing has so much fun being a cynic that it’s easier to to think of him as Dr. Phil than as Jonathan Swift.

E. M. Forster’s narrator observes at the beginning of chapter six of Howard’s End, that “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.” It does no disrespect to the tragedies we number in our twenty-first century landscape to say that the tragedy of poverty is not among them. Like Forster’s gentlefolk, authentic or pretending, we have lost the ability to empathize with grinding poverty, and our indifference seems to grow in proportion to the growth of economic inequality as more and more former members of the middle class are forced into unthinkability. Indeed, a cursory survey of articles about income inequality over the past three decades suggests that our major concern is not the human tragedy but economic growth, to which the poor in their burgeoning numbers seem irrelevant.

But it isn’t just poverty to which we are indifferent. Many of us are also vehemently opposed to the traditional rights of workers. The State of Michigan, in a lame duck legislative session, has just enacted a right to work law (so called) over the protests of unions. Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio remain sites of conflict over workers’ rights. McDonald’s has just joined a growing network of companies who put profit ahead of decent working conditions for the masses who labor in company and franchise kitchens, as the scandal of worker casualization grows in the food service industry and in big box stores. Who cares about the Fordist bargain when the growth of third-world markets seems open ended and when the market for labor at home seems assured to be a buyer’s market for the indefinite future?

Class warfare, you say? Perhaps we might return to King Wenceslas. The radical, Christian message for Christmastide is the extension of good will to all mortality. The child in the manger grew up to be Jesus who would share a meal with anyone. The prince of peace was also the lover of all souls, especially those of the poor. This is what Nietzsche hated about Christianity, its radical democracy, its ressentiment, its vision of a just and equal world. We celebrate these things at Christmastide, whether we like it or not.