Tuesday, August 24, 2010
I Have a New Blog!
Come on over and visit me at my new blog, a woman again.
"I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write." ~ Virginia Woolf
My first post, Back to School, will explain a bit why I'm moving. But in a nutshell: it just felt like time for something new!
Hope to see you soon!
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Summer Reading List
Yes, we're counting the days.
I'm also compiling a summer reading list, and am open to suggestions. The general themes this summer are 1) short stories 2) Virginia Woolf 3) James Joyce 4) books on the craft of fiction writing.
Here's my list so far, a somewhat random collection of books I already own (it's a budget summer reading list, but if you have suggestions that are classics, I can download them to Trixie's Kindle... and when we're at Prairie Lights, I'll probably have to spend a little money, right? Because it's important to support independent bookstores and writers, right?).
Short Stories
[edited to add:] The Mother Garden by Robin Romm
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Welding with Children by Tim Gautreaux
The Best American Short Stories of 2009 edited by Alice Sebold
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Great Short Stories of the Masters edited by Charles Neider
The Paris Review Spring 2010
Tin House Volume 11, Number 3
The Iowa Review Volume 40, Number 1
Canteen Issue Five
New England Review Volume 30, Number 4
Antioch Review Spring 2010
New Yorker -- the past several months
Joyce and Woolf
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (I'm half way through)
Homer's The Odyssey (any suggestions of a good translation for me and Trixie to read together?)
To The Lighthouse or Orlando (what do you think if I only have time for one this summer?)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Fiction Craft
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
You May Be Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today...
Well, anyway, I haven't been blogging much.
When I started this blog, I was mostly looking for a place to publish my essay You Can Always Fry Eggs in Missoula, Montana, about my dad, as well as the book reviews I write for Gordon. It was around when I realized that not only do I really like writing, but I kind of need to write to stay sane. And I thought, I have a pretty interesting life, and some quirky ideas a few other folks might like, so maybe I'll write an essay or two a month, no big deal, and throw them up on a blog. I didn't give much thought to craft, and no thought whatever to getting published; stuff just sort of poured out of me, and I hit "publish."
A year after starting this blog with such modest ambitions, I took a fateful trip to New York to sit on Patrick's couch in Harlem and I wrote for four days non-stop. Okay, not totally non-stop, but I wrote a lot, and when I wasn't writing I was hanging out with other writers. Since then I've been back several times, I've made friends with more writers, I've joined a writing workshop called Rittenhouse Writers Group, and I've gotten this idea in my head that I might be a writer of short fiction (though I haven't given up on the essay; I like the essay a lot, I will admit). And while I still have fairly modest ambitions, I'm less inclined these days to write a draft and hit "publish." Indeed, I'm relearning that the real work of writing is revising. (I say "work," but really? I'm a pig in mud.)
So I'm not publishing much on the blog these days, and what I am writing now I probably won't publish here, at least not until it has been soundly rejected by any number of other venues. But I'm not ready to close up shop. There are still my book reviews, with many, I hope, to come this summer. And I want to finish the Midwestern Marriage piece, even though I don't have time now to give it much revision. That will be going up in parts over the coming months -- and then?
We'll see!
Friday, June 4, 2010
James
It's an awful thing to have so many friends lately suffering the awful, untimely deaths of young men in their families, but it is an honor to stand with them in their grief, and to offer what small comfort I can as it unfolds. As Patrick notes in his current post at his blog Loose Ends, he and I have a mutual friend, Ellen, whose brother Mark also recently died. When I was last in New York, writing on Patrick's couch in Harlem, Ellen asked all of her friends to celebrate her brother's birthday by eating an Entenmann's double chocolate donut. Patrick and his boyfriend Bill and I were only too happy to oblige, and on the theory that where one Entenmann's is good, a dozen is better, we clogged our arteries good and hard that weekend!
The Laceys are now coming up on the first anniversary of James' death, just days after what would have been his 42nd birthday today. Patrick has compiled a joyful, playful list of ways we might honor and remember James -- everything from eating salad to walking a dog to running an errand for a shut-in. And my favorite, kissing friends (you never have to ask me twice, right?!) I didn't know James personally, though I know the rest of the Laceys and feel as though I knew James from the exquisite posts Patrick shared on his blog in the months after James' death. And what I know is that James was one of those souls that lives on a different plane than the rest of us, that he had some things figured out that the rest of us can only hope to understand if we're blessed with a long life. I'm going to be trying to live a little more like James Lacey in the next few days, with Patrick's delightful suggestions as my guide -- as a way to honor James, of course, and to remember him, but mostly because trying to live more like James is probably as sure a path to a good life as any of us is likely to find.
Even if you don't know Patrick or James from Adam, I encourage you to read this lovely post, eat some salad, kiss a friend -- and hold the Laceys in the light in the days to come.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Book Review: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black
Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (2010) [*****] In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably tell you right up front that I pretty much think Robin Black hung the moon these days because, after meeting her very briefly in a book signing line at the Free Library where I heard her read from this collection recently, I contacted her (through Twitter, no less -- I have completely drunk the social media kool aid...), and she very, very generously (as though she had nothing else to do while on a busy book tour) put me in touch with the leader of her old writing group, of which I am now a very happy and grateful member. I'm pretty sure, though, that even if I were entirely objective, I would just love this collection of short stories. Black's writing is beautifully unadorned, without flourish; it doesn't show off, and it doesn't need to, because in not getting in the way (as I felt Mary Karr's lush metaphors did a bit in Lit, a memoir I otherwise loved), her language ends up being mesmerizing. It's as easy to get caught up in these stories as in a great novel, which is saying a lot coming from someone who used to hate short stories because I thought of them as "failed novels." I no longer feel that way about short stories in general, but I still think it's a very rare thing for a short story to capture a world as thoroughly, to realize a character as fully, as Black can in ten or twenty pages. She also has an uncanny ability to write about very peculiar characters and circumstances --- a father and his blind, college-aged daughter picking up her first seeing eye dog; a eerie, prim school girl at a hippy Quaker school who was kidnapped for ransom as a young child living in Italy and is now bent on revenge; a woman whose child is almost electrocuted by faulty wiring at almost the same moment that the woman's mentally ill father steps in front of a train -- and yet it all seems completely plausible, quotidian even. I think that is one of the things I like best about these stories, the way they play with the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" -- this is fiction that compellingly and convincingly draws us into the truth of the strangeness of life. What I love most about these stories, though, is the clear-eyed sympathy Black brings to her characters, for the most part unremarkable men and women in middle age or older, experiencing losses or transitions -- there is a lot of death, divorce, infidelity, and illness in the worlds of these stories. In many cases it would have been easy to cast villains or victims -- especially victims -- but Black is both unblinking and kind, and thus creates characters who are nuanced and real. Black helps us know not only them, but ourselves through them. This is the quality I love most in my very favorite writer of all time, George Eliot, and I have often said that if I am to be judged for my own foibles and self-delusions, I hope it will be by someone as clear-eyed and sympathetic as Eliot. I would now gladly add Robin Black to my jury pool.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Aren't We All Immigrants?
This coming Sunday is the twentieth anniversary of the death of my mother, who was an immigrant, and whose story I have been feeling compelled to tell lately (it's a great story!). This coming Sunday is also the first of two Sundays for which there is no plan for adult Sunday school, due to a cancellation of the class that had originally been scheduled (I serve as the Director of Christian Education at my church, Old First Reformed, so filling this void falls to me, lucky me...) These two facts have me thinking about how I could both tell my mother's story and have something to offer at Adult Forum ....
So I have an idea that keeps swirling around in my brain, but won't quite cohere. I'm thinking about how much more likely it is for us to care deeply about an issue if it touches us personally. And as I think about my mom, and her immigration story -- which is also my immigration story -- I keep thinking about the ways that we are all immigrants. Right? Every one of us has a story about how our families came to this land. Some of them are stories of men and women seeking opportunity and hope. Others are stories of people fleeing persecution. Still others are stories of ancestors brought here forcibly as slaves. Some of us know more about our stories than others of us, but every family story ultimately takes on mythic proportions, every family story is both real and imagined. Indeed, it seems to me that if this land has a creation myth, that myth is an immigration story! Even Native Americans have immigration stories, albeit ones that likely must be mostly imagined because they are so ancient. Still, doesn't it highlight even more how much immigration is this land's creation myth, if we think of even Native Americans as having come from some other place? If we see that even peoples who have been here for millennia are immigrants too? Well, this is where it's still sort of vague in my mind, but somehow, it seems to me that by telling our immigrant stories -- all of our immigrant stories -- we highlight the absurdity of singling out the most recent immigrants among us as "illegal."
I even want to say -- and this is where it's still really fuzzy -- that somehow, if we all document our status as immigrants, doing so somehow compels us in a way that is more immediate and urgent to stand in solidarity with those who are supposedly "undocumented." I say supposedly, because of course, every immigrant has a story that should be heard, that we should care about, that should be -- and can be -- documented. I keep playing in my mind with the word "document"...
As I said, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. But for starters, I was thinking about telling my mom's story -- that is, my story -- at church on Sunday in the Adult Forum, and then trying to figure out ways for everyone else to tell their stories too. And because I'm a writer, I was thinking of trying to get folks to write them down. And because I'm a blogger, I was thinking maybe I would find a way to share them more widely ... I haven't figured it all out yet, but stay tuned.
And let me know what you think....
Friday, April 23, 2010
Gathering Madness
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)[*****]. This seems to be the phase of my life when I read a lot of great books I should have read a long time ago. I've known that Tim O'Brien is a great writer I ought to read, but sort of like my resistance to reading Mary Karr (yesterday's review), reading about Vietnam is just never what's calling me in the moment, and I'm a pretty capricious reader. Again, Julie was the impetus to read The Things They Carried -- she teaches this book (she got a free classroom set when it was the One Book, One Philadelphia selection a couple of years ago) and recently was invited to hear O'Brien speak. Her rave review is not overstated -- I too just loved this book. It's categorized as fiction, and I suppose can best be described as a set of related short stories, but I'm really intrigued by the genre, which is really a blend of memoir and fiction, short story and essay. Many of the characters in the stories are real people, including the men O'Brien served with, and Tim O'Brien himself. O'Brien was a recent college graduate with a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard when he was drafted, and he tells in a very moving story about his decision to serve rather than to flee to Canada, which was his first impulse. He concludes that it was a failure of courage on his part, and simple fear of embarrassment and shame, that drove him to Vietnam rather than Canada. In the title story, he tells, literally, of the things he and his buddies carried -- first the literal things they carried on their backs, how much they weighed, what they were for, what it felt like to carry them -- and then the more metaphorical things they carried, and what that felt like -- and his writing -- the cadence, the images, the pace -- is just exquisite. His experiences in Vietnam have clearly marked him so deeply that he has spent the rest of his career writing about them -- the war is pretty much all he writes about, I think -- and this book is as much about Tim O'Brien the writer as it is about the war and Tim O'Brien the soldier.. As a character in the book, Tim O'Brien the writer very explicitly grapples with what it means to tell the truth about war, and whether there even is such a thing as truth when it comes to war, but at the very least, he concludes that to tell the truth, he has to make stuff up. He tells many compelling stories, and then he retells them, and then he tells you they are true, and then he tells you they are entirely all made up, and then he tells you what really happened, and then he tells you that's all made up too, and then he insists that nonetheless, it's all true. It reminds me a lot of how thoughtful people read Scripture, and I suppose that's not an accident, though O'Brien does not appear to be a person of faith. Nonetheless, he seems to be seeking some sort of redemption through his story-telling and his meta-story-telling; and while I suspect he might argue there is no redemption, this gorgeous and provocative book is perhaps as close as it gets.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Book Review: Lit by Mary Karr
Friday, February 19, 2010
Conversations with Micah: On Food
"What if I started running all the time and got really skinny Micah? What would you think about that?"
He looks up at me, very serious. His cheek is still resting on my belly as he ponders this.
Then, with all the passion of Micah: "Eat! Eat! Eat!"
It's Ash Wednesday, and we've just returned home from services. The quiche and the bread were not done in time -- everything always takes longer than it should -- so we had a snack and the kids are eating their meal now, late. Julia Child's quiche, so much better than Molly Katzen's. Heavy cream and butter are quickly climbing to the top of my list of life's greatest pleasures. Also, white flour. I've made a loaf and two baguettes, all white flour. All of this, I know, goes against every bit of sound nutritional wisdom, but oh my.... I just can't stop. I'm thinking of giving up risk-aversion for Lent.
I'm tidying the kitchen, wiping counters, loading the dish washer. The kids are at the table in the dining room.
"Trixie?" says Micah. "What's your favorite thing about this family?"
She has a fork-full of of cheddar-sausage quiche in one hand, a hunk of baguette in the other. "The food," she says, between bites.
"Yeah, me too."
Micah doesn't like the gratin, because he doesn't like potatoes, so he's eating another piece of quiche.
"Nial and Zach and I are the only ones in my class who eat healthy food," he says.
"Is that so?" This is an interesting development. Until very recently, he's been mostly horrified by his homemade lunches. "The kids will laugh at me," he would moan, "if I bring that to school." But when I relent, and buy him some awful yogurt in a squeeze tube or something, he doesn't actually eat it. It's just about street cred.
When Trixie was Micah's age, she began a boycott of MacDonalds after I told her about industrial beef production. It was an ethical boycott, though she didn't really like the food much either. A couple of times on our road trip last summer we stopped at MacDonalds in desperation, and because Micah begged, but eventually even Micah declared he wouldn't eat there anymore. "I just like the toys in the Happy Meals. But that's not real food."
Apparently he has embraced being the kid with the healthy lunch. "I'm teaching my friend Nassir to eat more healthy though."
"That's great Micah. Has your teacher been talking to your class about eating healthy?"
"No, I just decided to teach Nassir."
"What did you tell him about eating healthy?"
"Like, he should eat his sandwich before his chips and snacks. And his fruit, he should eat fruit. Like that."
"That's great advice, Micah," I say. "Maybe you should take your own advice, though."
He looks at me.
"You didn't eat your sandwich today. And only part of your fruit."
He looks away, shrugs, the sly smile. He is his own boy. He will be a good man.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Welfare of the City: Scenes from a Neighorhood
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Guest Post: Julie's Director of Music Report for the Annual Meeting at Church (in its entirety)
Sunday, February 7, 2010
writing retreat, the haiku version (with apologies to vw)
Thursday, January 28, 2010
pardon our appearance
I'm being impulsive and fiddling with the layout. I'm also supposed to be cooking supper. And I'm a total luddite. This might take awhile!
The iTampon Jokes Yesterday Were Inevitable
But it just keeps getting better and better. I will admit that I am totally intrigued by this new gadget ... but really, doesn't Apple have any women on its design and marketing teams?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Slippery Slope from Same-Sex Marriage to Bigamy
(edited to add: read the rest of this essay after the jump by clicking "read more" below)
Thursday, January 21, 2010
On Resurrection, Redemption and Grace (for Neville)
When I was in college, it took me almost three years to hold onto the concept of “hegemony,” which now seems silly, because it’s not really a difficult concept. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept; at any given moment, if I looked it up, or someone explained it to me, I understood it perfectly. But an hour later, it was gone. I just couldn’t hold onto it, and I certainly couldn’t pull it up at will to use it or explain it. I had at best an impressionistic understanding, one that only occasionally came into focus. “Hermeneutics” is another one; I still have no idea what it means. And it won’t help for you to leave an explanation in the comments, because then I will understand it … but only until I turn off my computer. Then it will be gone.
Big theological concepts often feel a bit like that for me. But if I feel a little dumb when I can’t hold onto concepts like “hegemony” or “hermeneutics,” I feel like a downright fraud for having only a tangential grasp on concepts like “grace” and “redemption” and “resurrection.” This is one of the many reasons I love Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. I come back to these lovely essays about the “scary words” of the Christian faith over and over, not so much to set difficult ideas firmly in my mind, but rather precisely because what Norris gives me is permission to claim them even in the fleeting, “hope is a thing with feathers” sort of way they dwell with me.
Mostly I don’t so much understand big theological concepts as I experience them. And the thing is, whether you understand it or not, sometimes grace can just wash over you. Sometimes redemption can grab hold of you in an instant and deliver you from a captivity you didn’t even know you were dwelling in. Sometimes resurrection looks you right in the eye in the form of a teen-age boy, now a grown man, who revisits you across the decades through the magic of social networking.
Last night I got a Facebook friend request from Neville Stephens (that’s not really his last name, btw), a name that rang a bell, but which I couldn’t immediately place. Julie said, “Didn’t you have a student named Neville Stephens?” Right. Our mutual friends were two other former students, so of course I immediately accepted.
I’m now Facebook friends with several of my former students from my brief foray as a high school English teacher in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Hancock County, Indiana. First was Radley; I found him at the Cato Institute when I was doing background on a potential donor to my kids’ school. I shot him an email; awhile later he wrote back, apologetic about the delay. I was actually in Indiana when I received his email, in a Holiday Inn Express, at Julie’s Nanna’s funeral. I was just miles away from Eastern Hancock High School, and his kind words about my influence on his intellectual life were most certainly a sort of grace, a totally unexpected affirmation from the least likely of sources. I’ve been a huge fan of Radley’s ever since, and will always be grateful for his thoughtfulness that began to redeem what was mostly a painful and difficult time in my life. I may have been miserable, but apparently it was not all for naught.
But miserable I was, for so many reasons. In no particular order, there was the fact that my introverted, anxiety-prone, bookish self was exquisitely ill-suited to a career teaching adolescents; there was the war, about which I held a distinctly minority opinion among my colleagues; there was my mother’s death at the end of my first year, the great trauma in my life, still; and then there was that toxic closet, which permeated everything. All around a bad combination. When I look back on those three years, my misery seems almost unremitting.
So I was happy to hear from Radley that something good had come of all that misery. And when I became Facebook friends with Shawn and Amy and Webb and Todd, I had a similar experience. “Miss Rose! [“Marta” I have to correct them every time] It’s so nice to be in touch! Thank you so much for trying to open our minds there at Eastern Hancock, you really did make a difference!” Nothing begins to redeem misery like this sort of unexpected and undeserved kindness and generosity. Especially since not one of them seems particularly freaked out by my life (not my lifestyle, Todd … it’s just a life, and so is yours! Though yours probably has more style, come to think of it… ;-)
Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting on Facebook with my boy Cory, whom I sit with at church, while Julie is conducting the choir (Michael, my friend and pastor, says new folks probably think we’re married, ha!). He’s a new friend, and very dear, a Hoosier no less. I adore him. While we were chatting, he told me that Autumn, one of his childhood chums with whom he is Facebook friends, recognized my name on his page because she had also seen it on Amy’s page.
“Autumn?” It took me a minute. “As in Asha’s older sister? Really, you knew Asha?” What a small world, huh? Asha isn’t on Facebook, but I immediately chatted up Amy and caught up on Asha’s life.
Redemption all over the place. I may have been miserable, but these kids? Well, they’re not kids any more, for starters, and what’s more, they appear to have grown up to be fabulous human beings. Very rewarding and heartwarming, let me tell you.
So I was happy to get Neville’s friend request, in much the same way I was happy to hear from all of them. Neville was a great kid. They were all great kids. His photo, though, it didn’t look all that familiar. People change, as it turns out, quite a bit between their mid-teens and their mid-thirties. Someone else commenting on his wall thought so too: “Neville, what happened to your long hair?”
And then it all came back to me: resurrection, redemption, grace, all in one fell swoop. Because suddenly I really remembered Neville. I really saw him, his fifteen-year-old self, with his long blond hair and the fabulous smile and a certain open-yet-shy sort of head-ducking, looking-out-from-under-his-eye-lids gesture that was so, well, Neville. Like his young self was standing right there in front of me.
Michael recently preached a beautiful sermon about bodies (one of my favorite topics) and resurrection, which threw me for a bit of a loop at the end, because he proposed that resurrection is not really a metaphor, that our resurrections will be bodily and unique, right down to the expressions on our faces and our quirky personalities and the very gestures that make us unique. I loved this sermon right up until that point, when I fell right into fretting about being a fraud. Because resurrection as not-a-metaphor and not-a-symbol is not-so-much something I can easily wrap my mind around. A couple of days after that sermon, I made Michael go for a walk with me and quizzed him about it. We walked around the block in the sunshine, my first limping excursion of any distance since my last bout with plantar facsiitis. I was in a funk, and a walk in the sunshine and my new fancy running shoes with my pal Michael was certainly a resurrection of sorts. His further explanation of his sermon was helpful, too, but still I was left mostly scratching my head.
I still don’t really understand the end of Michael’s sermon, but this morning, when a flood of Nevilleness washed over me, I certainly experienced resurrection in just the way Michael proposed: specific, quirky, bodily, right down to the very gestures and expressions that make Neville himself. I have experienced this before: fifteen-year-old Radley is pretty easy to recall too, but here’s the thing (and I trust that Radley would take no offense): there’s not so much redemption or grace in recalling a fifteen-year-old Radley in all his smirky particularity. The redemption of Radley is in knowing he turned out to be a fine human being, a good man, someone who does important work in the world.
The difference was that my experience of Neville, resurrected, recalled for me that my time at Eastern Hancock was not all misery. Neville appears to have turned out to be a fine human being, like most of my former students I’m sure, one that I will be happy to know and be friends with, on Facebook and perhaps even in real life. But the gift that has redeemed those years like no other is in recalling – so specifically, so particularly, so vividly – how much I adored him, then, and how happy it made me, then, to know him.
In the two pages Kathleen Norris devotes to “Grace” in Amazing Grace, she recalls the story of Jacob, who, as Norris tells us, “has just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. But,” says Norris, “God’s response to finding Jacob vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, is not to strike him down for his sins but to give him a blessing.” Upon waking from his dream, Jacob responds, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Grace, suggests Norris, is in realizing that God is with us even when we don’t know it. “Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us and bless us….” (pp. 150-151)
Indeed.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
What's for Dinner? Curried Apple-Butternut Squash Soup and Cabbage-Carrot-Beet Salad
The Lexicon of Social Networking (by my boy Patrick)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Book Review: The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Monday, January 11, 2010
Guest Post: Appreciating Others' Religions As Well As Your Own
NOTE: This sermon was delivered by the Rev Dr Donna Schaper, Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church, on Sunday, January 10, 2010. Like Old First Reformed UCC, Judson Memorial is an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. Donna Schaper was one of the clergy arrested along with Michael in protest of Jean Montrevil's detention and threatened deportation. I am still praying and fasting for and with Jean. You can also help by signing this petition demanding his release. If you would like any more information, leave me a comment, and I will get right back to you.
This sermon is posted here with Donna's permission.
When we woke up in our several beds on the morning of December 30, 2009, we were one people. Now we are a different people. One of our members, Jean Montrevil was detained at his regular check in and first put in a detention center on Varick Street, right down the street from our solemn assembly. He was later moved to the detention center in York, Pennsylvania where he now resides, precariously perched on the tip of deportation from his country, my country and your country. For the details of this captivity, please come this afternoon for the gathering at 2 or refer to the web site. There will be several people at the welcome table who can give you a thumbnail sketch of this injustice, which is a dam in the river of justice and blocking the flow of the everlasting streams.
I have a problem this morning because all of you are on different learning curves on this egregious manner. Some of you know how these things can be, how a father of four and husband of one can be summarily and unjustly uprooted by the state. Others are just figuring it out. My own husband, who is intimate with me and with this matter, asked me in a quiet moment yesterday, can you explain to me how this could be happening? I heard his plea and while I can explain it legally, I cannot explain it morally What is happening is just plain wrong, in addition to being stupid. Like the government’s current intention to not even allow some immigrants to BUY health insurance, Jean’s captivity by the state is stupid, impractical, uneconomical and risks putting a whole family on welfare, which welfare the same punitive tax payers who want to be safe above all, will end up paying for. Immorality joins stupidity in this potential deportation.
Still others of you are here for the first time, hoping for some kind of spiritual experience to get you through your week, which is filled with its own detentions and captivities. And others of you are remembering that you joined 17 others in being arrested this week; outside of Varick Street, and that you have a court date on March 8. We are necessarily in different places of involvement in something, which at one level is just another oppression of another good person. You may care more about the homeless woman who shivered on your step last night or the fact that you can’t yet get health insurance. You may be more involved with your own addiction or the early failure of your New Year’s resolutions. Forgive me if I overdo one matter on behalf of creating a spiritual floor for us.
Today I want to stick to my topic, which is about appreciating our own religion in the midst of many competitors for our spiritual attention. Jean is one doorway to all the rest, including the doorway to things, which you may think are small, compared to his grievance.
Today we need to connect the dots. Yes, that is what the President said; we must connect the dots in order to be secure. One of the dots is Jean and the thousands like him, already detained. Another of the dots is the way our own religions are too pathetic to stop injustice. Another of the dots is the way we are overwhelmed with clusters of injustice. There is a good word for this cluster, and some of you know what I mean. It is like cluster freight or a cluster of fears or a cluster you fill in the blanks. The American people are experiencing a tsunami of trouble; so fierce are its waters that we can barely gather our forces to focus on one. But, and here starts the good news. We have gathered with hundreds of others this week to face what has happened to Jean and to say no to it. For a brief update on the situation, just let me say that we have a legal, political and spiritual glimmer of hope right now that Jean will not be deported. It is only a glimmer. But it is a glimmer. Again, I don’t want to get into the details of that glimmer so much as to announce that there is a glimmer. You may clap now.
The spiritual floor for this glimmer of hope in the face of the cluster of fears starts now. It begins with the text from the prophet Amos which has God announcing how sick God is of pathetic religion. Pathetic religion is a bunch of rituals which are empty. Pathetic religion is a bunch of symbols without any relationship to human reality. Pathetic religion is frequently the victim of nationalism or state security. Many of us are triple agents in these terms. We say we are Christians but we are more pantheistic than not, more nationalistic than not. When the president, whichever president, it matters not, implies that the purpose of the state is to protect us from dangerous others and we bow down in compliance, we are singing noisy songs or banging out music on bad harps. We have burnt offerings and grain offerings but no resistance to the lie. Let’s start with the big lie that is the basis for Jean’s captivity. The big lie is that we can fight off terrorism by deporting people or having more wars or better-organized national security agents. Terrorism will not be fought off by torture or war or deportation. Justice rolling down like waters, internationally and not just domestically, will tame terrorism. When righteousness comes, people will stop bombing us Religion that lets itself be lied to by the state is not religion at all. It is triple agent religion, saying it believes in the power of an almighty God who is our only security and whose laws is our delight but actually doing whatever the state tells it to do. At the heart of Jean’s situation is the absurdity of our foreign and domestic policy regarding terrorism. Of course it is scary when people get bombs on airplanes or penetrate the security systems we idolize. Very scary. If we really wanted to stop that kind of terrorism, we would not house potential terrorists together for years in Guantanamo so they could cook up better plots and more hates. We would not torture, hoard, or kill.
We are in a religious fight here at the deepest of levels. We hear a God who is international, and not just American; tell us that there is no delight in our solemn assemblies, bunt offerings, grain offerings, and fatted animals. Instead this God wants one thing and that is for justice to roll down like mighty water. When that justice rolls down, we will be safe, saved, secure, and know salvation. Until that justice rolls down, there will be fights over security. At the deepest level of religion, we are not interested in our own petty safety. We are interested in it, of course, but we are more interested in justice for all and to just for ourselves. Some people have decided they need to be afraid of Jean, who did two crimes, as a youth, paid for them in prison, and now is paying again for them. Why be afraid of Jean? Because we are so deep in a cluster of fear that we don’t know how to get out. This cluster of fear will soon keep immigrants from getting health insurance. It has already drained the national treasury in undeclared and immoral and ineffective wars. If we want to connect the dots, we need to connect the dot of Jean’s oppression ot the national insecurity state.
The great sociologist, C. Wright Mills said, “The biographies of men and women, the kinds of individuals they variously become, cannot be understood without reference to the historical structures in which the milieu of every day life are organized.” Jean is right now the victim of historical structures, which now organize every day life, which structures are at their base petty. By petty I mean self-serving, selfish, and deeply nationalistic. Americans were attacked, Americans need to protect themselves, we are deserving of any kind or level of protection because we are the best of all people. God is laughing at this. Just laughing but in that painful kind of laugh which goes to tears of shame. There is nothing mighty about a river that flows only for one kind of people. It is actually terribly weak and invites others to attack it.
I said that Jean has a glimmer of hope right now. This congregation has worked tirelessly for over two years to work the system to make sure this captivity did not happen. It has happened. We are deeply sad when not just plain apoplectic. Because of this grave emergency, our efforts have quadrupled in size. We have been joined by a national movement that has said enough, enough, and enough. We have corralled and lassoed every political person in New York City who we could find. We have sat in on the street. W e have put up an enormous web site. 78 organizations have joined our efforts officially. We have talked to dozens of people in the press. Riverside Church has called an emergency council meeting for today to decide about whether they want to offer physical sanctuary to some of our other families who are equally endangered. Our glimmer is lighting up the hearts and faces of thousands of Americans who like us are tired of triple agent religion. Triple agent religion is pathetic and just keeps shifting its loyalties in a kind of espionage of spirituality. Something different is happening here. We are getting focused, not just on one man but also on how the injustice done to him is the link to the cluster of injustices our nation faces.
So let me summarize here with my little scaffolding about religion and its imposters. Religion that does not demand justice is not religion. It is triple agent religion. It is spiritual espionage and pathetic in its loyalties. Religion that does demand justice has deep action at its heart. By deep action I mean action that connects the dots between one man’s captivity and that of a nation’s heart and soul. Deep action reveals the apostasy of solemn assemblies that don’t do justice. Deep action shifts power, and we are experiencing the ever so slight shift of the tectonic plate. Ever so slight it is but it is shifting. And we are the shifters. We are shifting because we have been shifted, shifted to see how wrong our efforts at national security are. Once we have seen that, we can’t not see the rest. We will not be safe till others are safe. Deportation will not make people safe. Welcoming immigrants and growing a great openhearted nation will make us safe.
There is now a national movement for Jean, and you are at the heart of it. I almost want to do a roll of honor but that would sound too much like the noise of a solemn assembly. But I must give a few images of the shifting. Our offices were so full of humming computers and people all week that we got a message from our internet people. We are only paying for ten on line experiences at a time and had gone over our band width limit. When we explained why to the person with the concern, he said, “wow, that’s great.” Lenny Fox made sure we got the microphones for the rallies, which was no small thing. Many of you shivered through them.
I have always wanted to be like Leo Lionni’s Frederick. You do know Frederick, don’t you? He is one of the great children’s book’s characters. Frederick saves colors for the other mice so that in the winter they don’t get to grey. There is a ton of color happening in and around us right now. Watching Clover Vail be put into the police paddy wagon, I just wanted to paint the contrast of her white plastic hand cuffs and grey coat. One of the police officers took a good look at Lulu Fogarty and said he was thinking about coming to Sunday School himself. My assigned cop realized I had come out of my cuff links with ease and said, just put them back on when you get out of the paddy wagon. It’s all for the show, you know.
In DC on Friday, with one of our board members, Father Mark Hallinan, Janay Montrevil and her three kids. At one point, when Janay told her story to a congressional aid, she started crying. Then Father Hallinan started crying. Then the children started crying. Then the aid started crying. This is what we mean by spiritual transformation. We have begun to shed tears over the stupidity. The tears are the mighty rolling river of justice.
At another point, on what seemed to be our sixteenth security check, going from house office building to house office building, and Craig was carrying one of the kids, whose jackets and scarves we had to keep taking off, and we were all getting bored with the “who gets to push the elevator button” game, Jamiah said, “Where’s Daddy?” I knew Jean was with us in spirit and if anything just shocked and awed that we have put together so much energy for him this week. I think we are a little shocked too. Articles in CNN, Sunday School teachers in jail because how could she face her children, knowing that their father had been detained? Sequential arrests by people who didn’t know each other at all but now do. Money raised to keep our staff going..yes you may contribute.
Amusing things happened in each congressional office. At one point, Jamiah was wearing one of Charlie Rangel’s African masks in his office, as our legal back up team in New York was sending us non stop messages on our several blackberries. At the last hour on Friday, by the work of 7 of us in DC and literally dozens behind us on the net in New York, the same dozens who had been working all day and all night all week, we were told that Jean would not be deported on Monday. New information and new legal efforts are at work. That is our glimmer.
On the way home on the train Josiah totally took apart in the large ball of rubber bands someone had given him to play with. They were all over the train, amusing our entire car. This ball of rubber bands gave me the image of community with which I want to end. Somebody added one of those rubber bands at a time to the large circled web that it was. That was our action all week.
If you don’t want to be a triple agent in your religion, feigning commitment to a justice oriented God but living by the state’s self-protecting rules, all the while telling people you are spiritually drained and that you need a shift, stretch yourself now and join our ball of energy. Wrap yourself around it. We won’t let Josiah pull you off…. and some day maybe we’ll have the joy of taking all our parts off the center of this activity and putting them back together in a different way. For now, please stretch. Stretch to see one glimmer of justice that might grow into a flame. For now do us the favor of not snapping or popping or stretching yourself too far. There is a cluster freight of stuff trying to keep you down, trying to break your spirit, trying to sell you lies, lies that are actually very dangerous to you as well as being dangerous to others. For now every time you go through one more security check, ask yourself where your true security lies.
Amen