Monday, August 29, 2011

"Shocked and Awed" (September 11)

"Shocked and Awed"

Some folks born, and again, to surround
altar-towers of Table and Font?
Help us find Everyday Holiness,
positioned where we least expect?
No matter how cautious, bound to bump into?
Troubling waters, crumbling bread,
sloshing cup, up-and-down, side-to-side,
reaches of cross, extending, embracing,
arms everlasting, everyone's plea for A World:

"Make way for the Image of God!"
With every child born, another world ending.
What world is ending? Is it ours? . . .
Who breaks in upon our normalcy,
the illusion that we are safe, and
steals the ground beneath our feet,
the changed course that marks our fate
We will never be the same.
Going out like children under bright familiar skies,
we return changed, older, shock-eyed, trembling . . .
Whose time of anguish gives birth to new life,
the long sorrow that yields to new worlds . . . .

(Patrick Marrin)


Dare we suspend disbelief, presume a
New Word to be exhumed and uttered,
new "gift of tongues" inflamed and exhaled?
Tongue guiding body, like bit in horse mouth,
small rudder turning whole ship:

Language "most intimately physical of all
artistic means. We have it palpably in
our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue.
Writing it, we shape it with our hands.
Reading aloud what we have written . . .
our language passes in at the eye
out at the mouth, in at the ears;
words are immersed and steeped in
senses of body before they make
any sense in the mind." (Wendell Berry)

Are we even listening, hearing at all?
Wisdom's Spirit-Voice, crying from corners,
busiest streets; counsel, reproof, calamity,
panic, interrupt us, keep us interrupted;
refusing to force herself on us, free wills,
full hearts alone change, her offerings of
life beyond fear -- What else do we long
so to leave with our kids? Fear not!
Be not afraid! You are loved! Your
universe friendly, Listener Eternal!

"Perhaps then, if we listen attentively,
we shall hear amidst the uproar of
empires and nations a faint flutter of
wings, a gentle stirring of life, of hope."
(Albert Camus)

How can we, of this culture, help but be
taken for lost? Strayers from home,
ficklers toward friends, needers of rescue;
found by our losers -- sheep by sheep,
coin by coin -- whose feel for completeness,
wholeness so strong as to know in an instant
when single subtlest particle of us missing --
as Jesus detects any power escaping through
faintly-touched garment -- lost earring,
lost shoe, lost glasses, lost keys -- lost pet
bad enough, not to mention lost child,
even, in these days, searching through
rubble, through ashes, for lost ones,
for pieces of lost ones, pieces of us --
welcomed back, partied over, restored!

Jeremiah: All losing, all wasting away,
none of us, any tradition, acting as if we
"know God!" "Stupid children!" "No
understanding!" "Skilled in doing evil!"
Helpless in "how to do good!" Yet,
Good as News gets these days,
"I will not make a full end!" Like Potter,
reworking, reshaping, repairing, restoring:
Like One Who Never Gives Up!
Resurrecting from our executions:
"I have not relented nor will I turn back."

The human heart is the first home of
democracy. It is where we embrace our
questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be
generous? Can we listen with our
whole beings, not just our minds, and
offer our attention rather than our
opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously,
relentlessly, without giving up -- ever
trusting in our fellow citizens to
join with us in determined pursuit of a
living democracy? (Terry Tempest Williams)

Questionings of a Relentless Asker . . . .
For we are all children of Israel now!
In need of New Exodus now! If waters of
troubling now may, even may, be
waters of Global Warming, why, in God's
name, on this one precious Earth,
would we gamble lives of all children?
Imagine Moses, organizing Exodus!
So accustomed to slavery's nobodiness!
How many never intended leaving at all?
Ready to turn back at slightest excuse?
We who have just changed our minds?
Ten plagues, and you're out!
What number are we up to now?

The women wept and I wept. I too
cried for the lost people, their ancestors
and mine. But I was also weeping with
curious joy. Despite murders, rapes,
suicides, we had survived. Middle passage
and auction block had not erased us.
Not humiliations nor lynchings,
individual cruelties nor collective
oppression had been able to eradicate us
from the earth. We had come through
despite our own ignorance and gullibility,
the ignorance and rapacious greed of
our assailants.

There was much to cry for, much to mourn,
but in my heart I felt exalted knowing there was
much to celebrate. Although separated from
our language, our families and customs,
we had dared to continue to live. We had
crossed the unknowable ocean in chains
and had written its mystery into "Deep
River, my home is over Jordan!" Through
centuries of despair and dislocation,
we had been creative because we had
faced down death by daring to hope.
(Maya Angelou)

Horrible as this crime is, we forgive you.
Forgive us as well, that we may make a
way past the ways we always have done
one another.

"Listen, only listen. Do not pursue me
as though you were God. The gift I need
is your hearing and your heart.
(Thomas John Carlisle)

Jesus: "Ephphatha! Be opened!"
Identify self with "others" of every kind!
Who and what are we deaf to? Dumb to?
Who do we need to see, who is not
visible to us now? To hear, who is not
audible to us now? To touch, who is not
tangible to us now? Whom do we need to
encounter -- embrace, engage, endure --
who is not even imaginable to us now?
Have we ourselves never felt unseen?
Unheard? Unspoken to? Unimagined?
Ignored? Irrelevant? Are there not
painfully others learning nothing of us?
Directly? Deeply? Urgently? As we fully are?

How vitally, viscerally, Jesus shares humanness,
attending to deaf man for man's sake, not crowd's,
slipping finger in deaf ear -- yuck! And spitting!!
Where? On whom? For what? Touching man's
tongue -- without rubber gloves! Only then speaking
a whole-making word, earning trust enough to open
a whole man to healing, discouraging any church
growthers, advising to silence about what he's doing,
knowing how well we keep secrets!

For Jesus, healing nothing but trouble? Nothing but
risk? Holding to same lowered profile crossing border --
illegally? -- sneaking to Tyre, to Sidon, never escaping
notice, those who need him, need healing, most;
tempted, attempting to talk mother out of healing her
daughter, preferring to leave her invisible, therefore
dismissible; no such luck, not about to let go,
desperately self-respecting enough to identify self with
dogs eating crumbs from the table, shaming Jesus to act,
catching him "with his compassion down," understandably
human, "like us" in every way, as we are "like him"
more ways than we care to confess. What a difference
made us who still issue from her by this woman, winning
for her child, all children, in Jesus' sight,
healing where there is no healing.

Every war wanted enough to begin? Good idea
seeming to someone at time? Jesus in earliest
glimpses, copious crowds encompassing, looking
like winner, recruitment trending straight up,
start of something big? In "Good Jesus, Bad Jesus"
kind of a way, soon saying what none wants, or can
bear, or knows how, to hear, subverting premises of
own encouragement, accomplishment, establishment,
attainment; masses now melting away, only hardcore
disciples to work with -- or not! Stunning us with
self-doubt, distraction, disappointment, despair:
How could Jesus be so wrong about us? We about him?
What happened to gameship, winners and losers?
Jesus playing deadly-games-only now.

How can Christians, Americans, disciples, citizens,
fixate on myths of winning? Bible all written by losers,
about losers, for losers, underside, underdog history;
America, invaded, occupied, losers, misfits, unable
to make it, or take it, where they had been, fleeing,
indenturing, selling soul to, one last best possible start;
always appearing to need taller tower, bigger
something or other showcasing superiority,
obsessing from Babel through World Trade,
and counting; always appearing to need a more
winnable war, fought "at all costs," we contend,
as we send kids of others, costfree to us, incalculably,
unconscionably, no one but victims left
every side, self-defeating, mass-destroying . . .

"None of you can become my disciples if
you do not give up all your possessions."
In line with Jesus, everything else on the line;
free of possessions, protections, what's left to
war for? Substitute true "Days of Awe,"
root-deep in bare self-reflection, nobody else
can do for us, changing direction, trying new way,
Days of Repentance through Day of At-one-ment,
returned, restored, perfecting arts of imperfection,
essential unfinishedness, we who possess most,
most to give up, winning through losing, finding.

"How do we celebrate what good we have wrought,
and turn from our misdoings into renewed joy and
dedication?" How do we observe, absorb, with
Cosmic, Comic, Eyes, Ears? Whole Vision, Voice,
Wit, and Wisdom? History "from just outside its
own boundaries?" "Not a closed circle to repeat
the past?" Not locked into vicious cycles: violence,
vengeance; domination, control; nor "a straight
line into the future," no "manifest destinies,"
inexorable progress and growth; but history as
spiral, "always going back, in order to go forward,"
remembered to be forgiven,
letting go without getting lost.

"Living in the midst of a great dance of God" --
"from greater Control to greater Community --
from greater Mastery over our planet and each
other to deeper sense of Mystery that calls us
to live together" -- These are the days to believe
there is hope for us all! Moving from Shock to
Wonder and Awe! Dancing from Warring,
Dancing from Warming! "The world has become
an earthquake!" Who's to win an earthquake?
"There is no way to stand still upon it! For the
earth is leaping! Our only hope is to join in
the dance . . . ." (Arthur Waskow)

Friday, August 26, 2011

"Living Wage" (Labor Sunday)

"Living Wage, Waging Life"

"Our life is more than our work.
And our work is more than our job." (Charlie King)
We are gifted, before anything else about us.
We are called, beyond anything we can be paid.

Do pickers, sorters, salvagers, packers
find Jesus in peaches? Jesus gritty,
under our nails? Jesus sticky,
all over our hands? Jesus shouldering
in on relentless routines on the line?

Job on the line, work on the line,
life on the line? Aching Jesus
invading our biceps? Sinking into
the smalls of our backs? Groaning out
from the balls of our feet? Jesus embodied
in peaches? In very slimmest of pickings?

Two hours' work buys a dozen eggs,
four hours a kilo of beans, eight hours
a kilo of beef, 12 hours a box of 30 diapers.

Work-dirty, wash-worthy, hands that defile?
Jesus' whole days touching, being touched,
open markets glutting, flaunted mortality,
teeming germs, diseases of deathly duration,
lying there waiting for, wailing for, him --
Defile no longer a drawer in the desk!
Desperate hearts trump dirty hands,
Purity Codes.

Moses the Sheep-Worker, Organizer of
Brick-Workers, Mentor, Model to
Prophetic Herd-and-Vine-Workers;

Paul the Tent-Worker, Truth-Worker,
could not be paid to preach, or to lie?

Jesus the Wood-Worker, Organizer of
Farm-Workers, Fish-Workers, the
Occasional Tax-and-Sex-Worker --
Working Class roots seeping deep among
Biblical Peoples -- Cursing of First Couple,
outsourced from Garden to Labor, Field-Work,
Home-Work, immeasurably marking
All Human Being.

Jesus, Rest from all Labors: Sabbath-
Worker? Jubilee-Worker? Curse-Reverser?
Unions, Churches, "Brothers," "Sisters,"
few places, few peoples remaining arenas,
Citizen-Work, Disciple-Work, picnicking,
plate-passing, singing, hearing-and-doing,
imitating of images in whom we're made --
"Those who hear and don't act are like
those who glance in the mirror and walk away,
and two minutes later have no idea
who they are, what they look like."

Equal rights, complete justice for all, in all
stations of life . . . principles of conciliation and
arbitration in industrial dissensions . . .
protection of the worker from dangerous machinery,
occupational diseases, injuries and mortality . . .
abolition of child labor . . . such regulation of labor
for women as shall safeguard the physical and
moral health of the community . . .
suppression of the "sweating system" . . .
gradual, reasonable reduction of hours of
labor to lowest practical point, with work for all;
and degree of leisure for all which is the
condition of highest human life . . . release from
employment one day in seven . . . living wage in
every industry . . . highest wage that each
industry can afford, and most equitable
division of products of industry that can
ultimately be devised . . . recognition of
Golden Rule and mind of Christ as
supreme law of society and sure remedy for
all social life. (First "Social Creed,"
Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908)

A Starting Place waiting to happen . . . .

Divine Shifts:
Cosmos: Six days on, one day off.
Creation: Six years on, one off.
Communion: Seven times seven years on,
Whatever It Takes off --
Rest, Restoration, Resource Renewal.

Once we were slaves in Egypt,
would have gone nowhere, become no one,
without Help, Who heard us in misery,
organized us, Direct-Action Plagues against
Pharaoh-Work, helped us escape and endure,
brought into land of fruits and good things,
as strangers, sojourners, aliens, exiles!

Who are we not to stay touched by this past?
Subject to visits, Stranger-Angels at any time?

"The stranger who dwells among you
shall be to you as one born among you,
and you shall love her or him as yourself,
for you were strangers in the land . . ."

Jesus simply ignoring distinctions,
who's legal, who's not -- any such
thing as "illegal" human, anyway?

Anything human "alien" to Who Makes Us?
Each in an Image, Images joined, Solidarity!
Walesa, Chavez, Huerta, Debs,
Mendes, Randolph, Ruether, Jones
Perkins, Lewis, Highlander, Hill,
Revs. Williams & Wyatt, Altgeld, Alinsky
Catholic Worker, Almanac Singers --

BeLaborous Legacy Lying on Line?
8-hour day, 40-hour week, fairer
wages, safer workplaces, child protection,
unemployment insurance, consumer boycotts,
pickets, Social Security, right to organize, bargain --
Participatory Democracy,
Practical Citizenship.

By piece, by hour, by job, by career,
every work, worker preciously co-creative --
Do I know who made this product?
Do I know who provided this service?
Do I see them make it or know they are there?
Do I know conditions of their lives and works?
Do I know if they are acknowledged, included?
Compensated in any progressive proportion to CEO pay?
Do they have any say, what they do, how they do it?
Do they feel any pride of achievement, investment of care?

What do I know about seedtime and harvest?
Assemblage and packaging? Transporting and
marketing? Selling and cleaning up safely after?

What do I know of damages products, services
do Common Good -- especially of children?!

Do I stop to consider insidious advertising?
Artificial stimulation, desire severed from need?

One thing to love a person -- even a working one!
But love a workplace? Employer? Huge corporation?

Burning Man meets Burning Bush,
Love on Fire with Justice, encountered, engaged --
Work of Witness: See people's sufferings;
Work of Attentiveness: Hear people's cries;
Work of Compassion: Move to people;
Work of Solidarity: Stand with people;
Works of Salvation, of Liberation:
Show people new-to-them Land,
nonetheless-promised others?

Moses now twice-removed --
rescued at birth, sisterhood of subversivity;
raised in privileged but flickering passion;
banished for exercised option of murder;
traceably glimmering, trackably glowing;
stammering, staggering, from place in
safe country home; from married and staked,
family business, shepherding patience,
persistence, endurance, resilience;
Imaginized improvisations!
Internalized oppressions!

Howard Zinn coaxingly calling us to
"revolt of the palace guard;" minimized,
muddled, middle and management classes,
keeping on track, sometimes on time,
all systems, structures, everyday life --
total cross-section, in towers, on planes:
like Peter, at once, Rock, Stumbling Block;
preaching 3000 to baptism first day;
40 years of it, have I reached 3000 yet?
To Peter, Jesus impossibly unsufferable;
yet, Rank-and-File, Peter, get back in line!
"Follow the Leader," bodies live ammo,
real lives burning, over, and over, not out.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Prophet-Making Moses (August Ordinary)

"Prophet-Making Moses"

No denying his destiny: Born to resisting unjust authority, redeeming unjust suffering, prophetically founding story shaping a people; echoed in Matthew's birth story: warning of parents, disobeying by magi, sneaking of baby past Herod to Egypt; everything else about us mere addition, comment, interpretation, to liberating, Exodusing, becoming archetypally a people; not yet, and never, quite, a nation, though at times we die trying, and even kill?
Are we sure we can handle being most feared? Within the nation, among the nations, we are trying to be and become?

Longtime covenanting one-by-one, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, sometimes their spouses; now all bound in Moses, Moses in all, assuming stiff-necked insistence, liberation's intentional discontent: Make us nation like any nation! Fraught tautly, with kings, with edicts, with armies, with war upon war!

Working-Class Origins, born into Slavery, only amusement making more love than war, even than bricks, belabored, belaboring, producing, reproducing, oppression breeding to proliferation, proliferation leading to infanticide: "hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor," contextualizing Mosaic beginnings; Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah, Puah, rebelling, refusing Pharaoh's commands, begetting us in disobedience, Hebrew mothers without spoiling, more than ready: "vigorous, giving birth before midwife comes to them."

My parents at first-birth time riffing on ease of Sacagawea, Birdwoman, Lewis and Clark Expedition, allegedly birthing so quickly, almost off-handedly, on open trail; my mother's doctor perplexed, her first words after unspeedy delivery: "To hell with the Birdwoman!"

Pharaoh breaks bodies, God of Moses makes souls? Subversiveness proving contagious? Sacraments of Sisterhood, Solidarity, transcending every conceivable difference; Moses' mother hiding him three months, trusting this god and this river, placing in basket to float amid very same reeds in time parting with first of walked-upon waters; conspiring, godlike example: Moses' sister strategically distanced to watch, to await, very daughter of Pharaoh, acutely surrounded, bathing alertly, spotting basket, summoning it, opening, seeing, embracing wholeheartedly; palace-based princess positioning status, attending, receiving, accepting advice of field-based slave; Moses' sister naming their mother his nurse for another mother, of whom there are never enough?

Raising Moses by cadre, revolutionary women, vesting in one here and now well-being of every child everywhere, hastening day, hosts of co-conspiring nurses and nurturers, refusing to order any one set of children off to harm any other, cooperating, communicating, crossing borders for saving a life, while their men and kings, even gods, play out vicious cycles of vengeance and grief.

"God" learning well from these women? I Will Be Who I Will Be adopting whole Children of Israel? Parenting through Moses, "the one who draws out,"
specializing in organized obstinacy, in whom divine fission, position, action betraying class interests, in spite of First World rank and privilege -- Do we not wonder whatever befalls this renegade daughter of Pharaoh, raising own child to be enemy leader, remaining protected, or extending self-risk? Possibly, "even though she drew child from the water, she could not draw connection between her life of safety and luxury, and his life of poverty and danger?" Probably, with support of her base, seeing in sisterly subterfuge new way of life, "critical moment in her long defection from courts of Pharaoh and Egyptian empire," defections we have yet to make? This "oldest record of civil disobedience in world literature," how does it end? How do we end it?

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Dead Dreams, Dreamers (August Ordinary)

"Dead Dreams, Dreamers, Walking -- on Water?

Caller ID, reducing risk? Softening surprise? Whom we'll find on the other end? Verification exactly who thinks we need speaking to? Suspicion caller might be divine? Pursuant to panic: Who is this? What do you want with me? How did you find my identity? Sure this is not a wrong number? Any way I can ID my way out of this call? Squeamish, Security-obsessed; next to Dictatorship, Police State, never so many means of Identity Check, fears of Identity Theft, Identity much an industry as Reality? Are we really who we say we are? Doing what we appear to be doing? Or are we just making it up to no good? Species ever such mystery to ourselves as today? Creator's last laughs, behalf of Creation? State Trooper to Stopped Driver: "You got any ID?" "'Bout what?"

Or is it Feminized Faces and Features we'd rather not recall? Woman Wisdom! Sophia! "Let us make Humankind in Our Image, according to Our Likeness."
To/Gether! Fe/Male! From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before Earth came into being . . . I was a alongside, a mythical mistress craftsperson, delighting day after day, ever playful everywhere in the world, fulfilled in my being with daughters and sons of the whole human race.

Questioning stoniest sources, external authorities, oppressive peer pressures; Sophia, Spirit, erasing, writing directly on hearts, assuring of cosmic belonging, relieving by dream of Solomon, born of David, out of and into blood-letting, no matter, "I am only a child!" Always about to be cut short at that! "No one like you has been before you! No one like you shall rise up after you!"

But circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference, I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything. (Albert Camus) I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each day. (Stanley Kunitz)

We conquer, we preside, we secure, we tame, we quench. We are mocked, we are flagged, we are chained, we are imprisoned, we are stoned, we are sawn in two. Disciplines of dysfunction? "Five in one household divided, three against two . . . " Families forever falling, growing, apart -- remnants of lived faith? Pastimes of Patriarchy: Who are the brothers pissed at, really? Jacob, now Israel, nation-tainting, "loved Joseph more than any other of his children;" child of old age, pride of persistent prowess, parental pet, resplendent in "long coat with sleeves," unsuited for manual labor! Plenty of time on pristine hands, lolling, laxly, like royalty, even then dreaming? Committing poetry? Flagrantly, faultfully, feelinglessly, dispatching the favorite: Report on your brothers!

Some honor even among sibling rivals, beset, besaddled by Cain, Abel's blood crying out still, rupturing rest of Cain's restless existence; subservient sons discerning, Joseph's death likely compounded by Jacob's as well, selling, instead, for less than Judas does Jesus? Blood-soaking cloak, good as destroying, life lived as if dead to own brother, now chosen son good as dead to him, too -- How to curb penchants for perpetual, peevishly petulant pain? "There's a pale horse coming and I'm going to ride it, I'll rise in the morning my fate decided, I'm a dead man walking . . . It's just a dead man talking . . . Between our dreams and actions lies this world." (Bruce Springsteen)

Dead dreams, and dreamers, walking again? Crossing to other sides, changing equations? Sobered by blistering bloods of our century -- treading, at last, senseless slaughtering, unuttered dreading, of Hiroshima? ID-immolating?

If we refuse to speak truth to power, says the story, we will end up speaking lies or silence to the powerless -- and doing murder. If we refuse to see clearly, truthfully, the world our parents have bequeathed us, says the story, then we will be unable to make the world we want to make . . . It is almost as if God learns from the mistakes and failures of the earlier saga and starts over to work things out in another way. (Arthur Waskow)

One side of us Jewish, one Gentile? Going over to other side? Isn't that treason? Betraying every good reason to stay in the boat? Wading no waters? Making no waves? Unsuspecting how far our "little faith" carries? Dead dreams, dreamers, walking, talking, parting -- starting somewhere.

There was once a group of believers in nonviolence who gathered along a waterway in the Pacific Northwest. A giant submarine that could destroy all life on Earth was coming. The believers practiced in rowboats how they would blockade the submarine . . .

All the people in the rowboats, whatever our tactics, had the same faith in nonviolence that Peter has initially in walking to Jesus over the water . . .

On the day the submarine finally came, so did 99 Coast Guard boats, which the government had assigned to protect its world-destructive weapon . . . The Coast Guard sank some rowboats with water cannons, crushed others, boarded the mother ship with drawn guns, and tied up the believers in nonviolence like pigs waiting for a roast . . .

When Peter became aware of the wind he got frightened and began to sink. When we were confronted with the Coast Guard, we also experienced fear and got sunk quickly. So, a lack of faith? I remember, too, though, that when Peter began to sink he cried out in faith to the Lord, who reached out and saved him. I think the real alternatives were posed in our case, like Peter's, by the more enduring question of whether to surrender then to fear, or to realize how totally reliant on love we were to continue such experiments in faith. "Lord, save us!" was our way, like Peter's, to continue in future venturing out on the waters in the midst of great winds. (Jim Douglass)