Outta here

I managed to wait until the Rector had been back from his Sabbatical for a week before entering his office and telling him I needed to move on. I think I worked here four years. It is finished. In order to allow them time to replace me, I am continuing at 12 hours a week for a while, but I can no longer manage juggling 30 hours a week at St. Jonah's with my online and live adjunct teaching.

The soundtrack for my life now consists of a battle between R.E.Ms "Losing my Religion" and A3's "[Not] Too Sick to Pray." I'm not sure I see the point in going to church anymore. I can receive teaching from books; I can pray alone. I am no longer sure of the validity of the Sacrament in my church, and how can I go to the other church, which has so abused its young, even if their leader does proclaim the truth? So fellowship? But all that seems to be at St. Jonah's and other churches is frantic busyness.

The Rector and I have little time to talk, now that I am on reduced hours, and as this morning was when he would be meeting with the newly convened human resource committee, I wanted to make some suggestions to him, so I kind of grabbed him as he was on his way out to go make good on the service he had sold at the services auction, more chain sawing. I should just accept the fact spoken loudly through the omission of any request on the part of anyone for an exit interview or from any input on me, the fact that no one wants my opinion. The way the vestry minutes read "we want our next Parish Administrator to not be a parishioner and to want to make this job a career goal" makes it sound as if there is no issue of burn out, of the job's forever no-win situation, and that it is all simply because I was not right for the job. Of course, most parishioners who have gotten the news have expressed their regret and their worry of what will happen without me. But the Vestry is, I see now, very complicit in the systemic dysfunction

So I mentioned to The Rector about how the previously tabled question of human support for parish hall rentals had come up again, and should be considered at the meeting. That was okay, that was within bounds. And then I more or less confronted him by saying "It seems like the Vestry got the idea that I was leaving for a better job. People have been congratulating me, but that is really not the case. I may not have any job at all next semester." I did not say how painful it was to be congratulated under false pretenses, with the perpetual uncertainty of being an adjunct hanging over my head. I did not directly say "did you tell them this?" but he did directly say that he told them there was an issue of burnout. I said I was glad, because you wanted whoever took over to be able to do this job and not leave. (How, I wonder, will anyone who is not a believer want to make the sacrifice of submission--do a job that would be better paid in the business world? How would a believer from some other denomination be able to put up with the nonsense? There are really not many people that I can imagine, but perhaps that is merely a sign of my burnout.) I then went on to mention how I had been looking at this book called "Simple Church" which criticized the program model and seemed to suggest that one needed a simple overview focus. And though the book didn't really seem to say anything earth-shattering, I thought its critique was useful: the danger of a program church is focusing on each specific program and losing sight of the simple whole. So I kept saying that what really needs to get fixed was systemic. I don't think I had entirely lost him there, but then I went on to tell him about the woman I met at a yoga class, who actually continues to support us financially, but never comes to church because it is so busy and chaotic. But I think the crushing blow was when I said, "I hear from lots of people who have no part of the whole Creativity thing. They don't know what's going on with it and they don't care."

"Are you done, now?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, and he swept out of my office. It is hard to recall that he was wearing his chain sawing clothes (jeans and a flannel church). There was such a feeling of the wind as he swept away, I can only remember it as a cassock swooping out.

It is true, back when they were writing the grant proposal, I helped them polish it up. By the time it came to me, it was far too gone in the process (a day or two before deadline) for me to challenge the idea itself, so I never said what I thought "this is the opposite of what St. Jonah's needs." It is just another chance to be busy and to shift the focus away from the Lord. Yes, I'm sure for the spiritually and creatively advanced people this effort be a work of spiritual adoration. For most of the parish it's more busyness. For me, it's more work. I knew, when I heard it, I'd commit to seeing them through it to the Rector's return and that would be it. Despite the fact that my only crime was speaking my truth, I of course, feel terrible. It has been my job to support and help the Rector, to maybe help him with small tweaks of the problems, not to ever say "you are on the wrong path." Perhaps the words from this Sunday's passage had influenced me, despite the fact that I hardly notice anymore what I am putting into the bulletin. "In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully." (2 Tim 4) I will have to stand in this pain. I have no priest to turn to now.

The other day I had an inspiration and wrote down the thoughts I would like to write to the parish, in the newsletter, so that I can take control of the announcement of my departure. Now I am not sure I even want to bother, to give it a holy spin. Let it be the inkblot onto which they can project either their defenses or their awareness of the truth.

Here's what I wrote with pen.

I hope to be able to make time to pray, and to rediscover my own creative talents. While the Rector's time of re-entry may seem an unfortunate time for me to launch, it can also be a good time for a fresh start and for reconfiguring the structures which support St. Jonah's. I bid you to continue to tap into the creative energies which have been kindled and apply them to the question of our human structure and use of resources, so that the major burden of holding up the sky does not fall solely on clergy and staff. While it is likely that in a college community, we may have more prophets than helpers and administrators (see 1 Corinthians 13:28), I have to believe that St. Paul's vision of the loving body of Christ can be fulfilled in us. That even here, we have members who have received all the gifts necessary to create a vibrant life together that exalts Christ. I pray that it be so.

Should I bother?

Days of fog

Last night I dreamed that I (a teenager) met a cousin I didn't know I had: a boy about my age, dark haired. Then there was a handsome, slightly older blonde boy who I was speaking to. He asked if we were Jewish and I said yes. To my surprise, he was too. He had written a book that talked about his experiences on a kibbutz. I really liked this guy and got myself into a knot wondering how to tell him I was Jewish but... How could I make him understand I would never try to convert him? I would show him my book, which told my story. I looked and looked on the shelf and then, to my sorrow, realized I had never written it. I cried now, remembering the only book I have written was my dissertation. I remembered that we are in the days of awe: Yom Kippur was just three days away when I could recite the Kol Nidre and renounce my baptism. Entering that prayer would be like entering a cleansing fog, a deep darkness that would erase all the person I had been... I cried, realizing I needed more than three days to decide.

To Thine Own God Self Be True

The Duffer and I used to debate about whether the advice Polonius gives to his son Laertes' in Shakespeare's Hamlet is to be taken at face value or whether S. was a bit tongue in cheeck. My father thought they were simply well articulated bits of wisdom: there was no subtext. End of argument. I believed, from the context of the play and the character of Polonius, that S. viewed the wisdom as many of us view such good advice: that and a token will get you on to the subway. Of course, I could see why this would be disheartening for a father who felt he had so much wisdom to pass on, but here's a post on "Shakespeare 101" that argues my point in case you are interested: http://shakespeareantheatre.suite101.com/article.cfm/polonius_speech_in_hamlet .

It is in this disputed speech that the lines "This above all: to thine own self be true, /And it must follow as the night the day/ Thou canst not then be false to any man" are spoken. And it is from this dubious wisdom that Rabbi Lerner of the Network of Spiritual Progressives derives his variation: "to thine own God self be true" (the phrase appears in an email sent out today, featuring a prayer of forgiveness for the 9/11 terrorist attacks).

There is some wisdom in this new turning of the phrase, thought it is awkward and unattractive. I am not averse to the idea that Christ is within me. (Col. 1:27). But reliance on doctored cliches reveals a sloppiness in thinking that concerns me, and makes me skeptical.

I don't know how I want to pray on this day. When I lay in shavasana at the end of this morning's yoga class and image came to my mind. The Palisades in Fort Lee, N.J.: the rocky stone cliffs just to the north of the George Washington Bridge. I am sitting there with a teenage girl I was friends with in high school. She has a black dog and a car: she is self-sufficient and cool. We walk up there and the bridge sparkles. Maybe that is the day I walk back and forth across the bridge, just for fun, for the airiness of it. This memory dates back to either 1974 or 5. The city for me then was like a geode, sparkling with art and music. I didn't yet know about the filth, the urine and how tired one gets when one is always inside it, and not on this promontory, looking out at its dazzling potential. The World Trade Towers would have been a recent addition to the skyline. We didn't particularly like them: the ornate stylings of the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings were much more attractive. But all of those were distant spires from this northern end where we sat on rocks and thought about our limitless futures. As I came out of corpse pose, I remembered what day it was, and sent my mind downtown, to look at the rubble as it appeared the day I brought the Duffer to see it.

Adjunct Adventures I

It is still technically summer, though the temps are at this moment (7 a.m.) in the 40s. I'm in my fleece robe with a scarf draped around my head. The birches outside the window are speckled with yellow leaves, though this is due more to the lack of rain than to the actual position of the earth and the sun. It is beautiful and at this moment, feels right for school to have begun, though yesterday afternoon, when it was time to teach my first class, it seemed like a better time to lie in the sun and take a dip in the pond! The dazed students apparently agreed. It is an adjustment to get used to teenagers again after having worked in programs geared towards older students. I had forgotten their default attitude of skepticism and boredom. There are a few exceptions, young women who seem to enjoy reading and hope to get something out of the class, but for the most part it is clear that this is just a hoop they have to jump through. (Only 4 read Harry Potter this summer!) That does not mean I don't think I can win them over, and get them to have fun. I am surprised that two of them (in their responses to my freewrite questions about their hopes and fears regarding this class) mentioned that they had had their writing torn apart by "Grear." Hortense Grear, I recall, from the last faculty conference, is one of the fixtures of the department, its grande dame. I guess her methods precede the Elbowian theories I was raised on--get them to enjoy expressing themselves, then worry about tweaking the grammar… so I can see why I have some work to do in winning them over. It is interesting, when you ask them to freewrite, to see that some fill a page and others give up after a few lines, exhausted. Why is it that the three girls who fill in the seats right in front of me are the ones that want to chat amongst themselves? Perhaps because they really do want to engage with me.

Diversity in Pixieville

Yes, the students are coming back. The U-Hauls, piled high with mattresses, parade their way into town. In their wake come the derelicts: those few extra winos now sitting on the sidewalks, debating matters of great importance to themselves. But these are to be expected, like the draining out of chlorophyll and the revelation of the leaves' underlying yellows and reds.

But this fall, there is a new element, brought in by our own church, which, in the process of reconstructing its buildings, requires the use of laborers. They are imported from working class towns and they drive huge diesel-fueled pick up trucks with bumper stickers that say, "P.E.T.A.--People Eating Tasty Animals," "Gut deer?" and "Welcome to America: Now Speak English." Fortunately, these trucks aren't here on Sundays or our Prius-driving parishioners would be mightily offended, despite our committment to tolerance and diversity. Who knows, they might even threaten to learn how to jackhammer!

More Reading

I guess it's not coincidence that one comes across books that relate in some way to one's current situation. I mean I was browsing through the bookstore, reading the dust jackets, and I saw The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty. I've never read anything by Welty, except for that one short story that made them name the mail program Eudora after her ("Why I Live at the P.O."). This short novel apparently revolved around the protagonist's father just dying. So it had to be read. Very different from my life, not just in its Southerness, but in the fact that the father had married a new, young wife, and much of the book revolved around the two women's interaction. I am really surprised this hasn't been turned into a play or a movie. The struggle between them is dramatic and compelling, although the widow is almost over the top stupid. But not quite beyond believability. I certainly couldn't understand Laurel's decision to burn what remained of her mother's letter. It was like she wanted to keep them from further desecration, but she could have taken them! Okay, this is the view of someone whose house now contains NUMEROUS boxes of papers and letters her parents have written. Not to mention boxes of my own words. I realized today that I have surely got enough material in my reams of diaries to mine for literature for the rest of my life. But I get tired just thinking about opening those boxes.

Reading

I finished Harry Potter, but I promise, this comment contains no spoilers:

As much as he may deny it, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was heavily influenced by the world situation, the Axis gaining control of more and more of Europe, the darkness spreading. It's easy for us from the perspective of victory to forget what that was like, but I saw a contemporary newsreel once, that showed in black the areas that were under Hitler or Mussolini's control and the picture looked very bleak indeed. It was, I guess, that sense of military dominance, rather than Nazi ideology, that compelled Tolkien's pen. Though we know he did disapprove of their racial theories, when he refused to tell them that he had no Jewish blood in him in order to let them publish the Hobbit in German. It is interesting that, half a century later, it is the racial purification/genocidal ideology of the Nazis that Rowling makes much more explicit in her works, which of course borrow so heavily from the Master (JRRT). I suppose it is an indication of the sad fact that this kind of thinking about racial purification did not die out with the Nazis but continues to rear its head, though it seems to me that religious divides are generally more contentious than ethnic ones, these days. Some might say that racism is simply an easy enemy to illustrate, for the same reason that it is always simpler to use Hitler as an example of evil which cannot be tolerated, than Stalin, who some consider responsible for as many as 10 million deaths.

No, this isn't a happy post. How happy can I be when there's no more Harry Potter to read?

Still dead?

It's been over two weeks, and I've told lots of people about my father's death, but each time, I have to pause a microsecond and ask myself "what am I saying? Aren't you pushing it? This hasn't happened yet (it was always something that was going to happen, in the future). What will he say when he comes back to his senses and hears you've been telling everyone he's dead?" And I have to force myself to picture it: him lying on the bed, in the room, the air conditioner on --he would never have let the room be that cold if he was alive--he had been too cold for weeks. The doctor explained it all. He was very professional. And what do you think is in the brass urn on the buffett, with a neatly folded American flag in front of it? It's a good thing I get to keep that for a while (another week). It helps. Maybe if I'd seen my Dad more often all along, it would seem more believable. As my husband has said, so much of the time the Duffer has existed as an idea--"got to give him a call, see how he's doing"--interspersed with quick visits. But still, he was there. Ruling the world from his assisted living apartment in NJ.

I remember when I spoke to him on New Years' day, he told me he was feeling optimistic. I assume he meant about the future of the world, as well as his health and perhaps his finances (which were always good, as far as I was concerned. He had enough for anything he wanted...). Then, a month or two later, he started talking about what became a growing obsession with the terrorists getting hold of nuclear materials. I didn't ask him, but I wondered, "I thought you were optimistic..." I wonder now, if his unconscious wasn't responding to growth of cancer cells, sending out messages of besiegement, that he interpreted politically. It is all the democrats fault for not taking terrorism seriously, really meant, something is coming and we are ignoring it.

The Duffer's Dead

I went to yoga, finished up with some abs, stopped in at the supermarket to bring some milk to work for my coffee. Had in my bag the copy of US News that had come for him. Yesterday he had taken an interest in looking at the National Review, so I felt hopeful that he might get back to being able to do some reading. I also had a letter announcing his doctor at Sloan-Kettering was leaving, so there'd be no need to wish he could still see him. About this time he had gone down to physical therapy, was practicing using his walker, when he gurgled, went limp, and was rushed back up to his bed. The doctor, who was already in the building, came to see him, but it was too late. Probably even if we hadn't had a DNR, it would have been too late, it happened so fast.

The other day when he was wishing to go home, where he could have his electric blanket, I asked him what he could do there that he couldn't do in the nursing home. Rest, he said. But then he admitted that the problem wasn't the noise, but that he was afraid. He would lie there and not be able to sleep because he was afraid that if he went to sleep he wouldn't wake up. "I don't think that's going to happen," I told him, in honesty. He seemed like he was improving, and the cancer wasn't likely to strike again very soon. Well, he did not die in his sleep, he was apparently up and quite active, having earlier used his tray table as a walker to wander out into the hall at 6 a.m. May his rest be peaceful.

The Duffer's Dreams

He's been having strange dreams, though the trick is figuring out that they are dreams. He began by commenting how much luckier the people who work in the nursing home are than the residents, because they can move around. Some of them, even on prosthetic legs. We have not seen that. He went on that yesterday, just outside, they had a race, and you couldn't even see their feet touch the ground. When we first stopped in he asked if we knew there was a Dr. Weitzman, who was higher than the doctor he had first seen. But he didn't wake me up. He came to see me but didn't bother to wake me up. He was the head of the corporation... oh, wait, I'm getting confused. Later, he brought him up again. I felt really good, good all over. And he was just there, visiting me in the night, and I kept looking for him, but he hasn't come back. "The only Weitzman I can think of, Dad, was one of the founders of Israeli." A father... an angel... But, even when the duffer could barely remember his name, he could state that he was an atheist. It's like what gay people say: they come out of a coma, don't know their name, but know that they're gay. Today, he mentioned how when he grew up, everyone just shrugged off religion as nonsense, and he saw no reason to ever think differently. There's a book I'd like to read, he said, that is against religion. The Hitchens one? No, not that, another. I know there's another, I can't remember what it's called. "Just want to make sure you're not making any mistakes?" I ask. (Now I see it is the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.) I ain't getting it for him. Maybe I'll print out that dialogue between Hitchens and Douglas Wilson that was in Christianity Today.

Conversations with the geezer atheist

Conversations with geezer atheist grow stranger and possibly more interesting since the cancer has gone to his brain and everything is a mystery, a riddle. What is the word that has a U in it, and possibly a C? Had to do with the lungs. Finally I realize, "tuberculosis": Yes, people died in the movies from this in the fifties. But it wasn't from the disease; it was from the shadow. He must have been thinking of that disease, because of the way he hacks violently while eating. Today I tell him I spoke to his sister and he asks if she is all right with him these days. You've been on good terms with her for years now, I remind him. He shakes his head, dubious. How is her relationship with her father? He's your father too. He's been dead for years. He nods. Does that mean you no longer have a relationship? Well, you no longer speak to him, or see him. And you stop praying to his God? Not necessarily. But your father didn't believe in God. We don't know why he wanted them to play Ave Maria at his funeral. He did? For the music, or for spite, or for some reason we cannot fathom. The thing that bothered me about my father…(long pause, loses track, comes back) he was ashamed of being a Jew. I comment on how this fits in with his admiration for Nietzsche who scorned Judaism and Christianity because it was so Jewish. They were the religion of slaves, in his view. I still don't know what you think about God. I believe in God. You know that. There are long silences as we sit at the table where people have been brought to await their dinner trays. Finally, he says, So if they clean part of it, then only the rest are slaves. And that is the part that God takes care of? That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what you mean.

Mystical Paths

I just finished the fifth in Susan Howatch's Church of England series. I love these books! I have never read anything that showed real people grappling with real theological issues as they live out their real lives (and okay, there's a touch of supernatural thrown in, and this last one turns into a bit of a whodunit as well--it's got it all!). I thought this was the last one, but to my delight I discovered there is one more to wrap up the series. The addict's reprieve. Now I must decide whether to get it out of the library TODAY-- NOW-- or to try to wait a month and save it for my vacation in the beginning of June. Of course, on vacation it's easier to read books that are less delectable, and needed for desperate escape from horrible life.

So my question, dear readers, is what next? Is there anything out there comparable to this series?

Salamanders

The salamanders must have made their crossing by now. In fact, they could have gone back and forth a few times, there have been so many rainy nights over forty degrees of late. I sit in my comfy living room thinking: I should get a flashlight and my raincoat and go out and SEE them. I should, I really should. Then it occured to me. I am not an amphibian. I don't want to be amphibious. I will stay in. Despite the fact that right now as I am typing this, my Rhapsody player started playing Ben Folds' version of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"!

Even the handbasket's broken

the handbasket that we're going to hell in, is nowadays no hand woven feat of human creativity but a disintegrating maelstrom. What has thrust me into such a bad mood, first thing in the morning, when I only am just coming from a lovely yoga class? Perhaps it is the fact that something very Important is going on at neighboring Pixieville College (not to be confused with the University of Pixieville). I'm not even that upset that there's nowhere to park, and people were zipping through the four-way stop sign like they were going to win a very big prize for getting ahead by one car. But when two middle-aged white guys, engaged in their very Important conversation, see a lady in a hot pink raincoat, you would think they might condense themselves to their allotted half of the sidewalk. Or at least say "excuse me" when--because she does not move onto the soggy grass--one must brush past her. This is the second time this week that I have not been able to walk on the sidewalk to this church without being pushed off it! This is a small town! I left New York cause I couldn't take this kind of rudeness!!! I could have been working at a well-paying job (at least) if I stayed there. Next time I am just going to stop and yell, "Excuse me for walking on the sidewalk and interrupting your very important conversation. Next time I'll just lie down here so you can tromple all over me!"

Spring Peepers!

We heard them last night--loud! Stay on the salamander alert!

Addiction to busyness

Never is it more apparent than during Holy Week just how addicted to busyness the parishioners of St. Jonah's and other residents of greater Pixieville are. I mean seriously, how can a member of the Vestry no less, think this is a good time to explore new ways to lock cabinets for storage of valuables? How can the fund-raising committee imagine that this is when you ask the Parish Administrator to begin a mass mailing? You'd almost think this parish was filled with a bunch of pagans who didn't realize that the most important week of observances is underway and that this means that the office is completely busy making its fabulous bulletins for all of them! They should all be sentenced to having their eyes pinned open and watching The Passion over and over until they get a clue!

The Two Processions

Palm Sunday at St. Jonah's was energized by the buzz of Borg and Crossan's new take on Jesus' triumphal entry. Those of us who appreciate structuralist criticism find it nice: Jesus rode on a donkey as a counterpoint to Pilate's militaristic procession. Yes, a more graphic illustration of the principle that Jesus clearly stated: God's kingdom is not of this world. Then how do Borg and Crossan use this to disprove the concept of substitutionary atonement and take some digs at Gibson's Passion (are we still talking about that? And not about his latest proclamation of insensitivity in Apocalypto?) ? Quite a feat, I might add. And one in need, I think, of some post-structuralist trashing of binaries (lest we want to hop on the other foot and wonder about those who substitute justice for worship). That is, they see Jesus' driving out of the money changers as reflecting on Jeremiah's criticism of "worshiping God as a substitute for enacting God's justice." Excuse me? Worshiping God a substitute--for anything? Isn't it the chief end of our existence? Perhaps I am just being a pesky English teacher, picking on poor Borg & Crossan for an unfortunate choice of words. They didn't mean actually worshiping the living God, they meant engaging in empty rituals (which is what Jeremiah was criticizing). But I'm afraid this is a telling and egregious error, revealing the murky priorities expressed in this article and by those who are so eager to embrace its view. We don't want to carry our palm leaves down the side street in town to show that we love and adore the Holy One of Israel. No, we need to prove we are standing against Empire. That way we'll prove we're worthy.

Let us begin and begin again

The Parish Administrator was actually able to spend a minute in the church today. She wanted to pray for a suicide whom we have just heard of (though none of us knew him).

I thought, as we embark on Holy Week, that if we do not walk with Christ, in his sufferings, we become trapped and can walk only in our own sufferings.

Sound track for my death bed

How did people ever manage to die without being able to arrange the proper tunes for their exit strategy? Listening on my way in to work this morning to the piece commonly known as (but no more, by me) Albinoni's Adagio, I was caught up in its beauty and realized that this is what I want to hear as I leave this world, to soothe and to serenade and to sweep away my soul in a swirl. Our trusty morning explainer informed his listeners that this was not really a baroque piece at all, but had been finished by a twentieth century composer based on a few fragments of a piece by Albinoni. Rushing in to read more about this, I learned that Remo Giazotto was researching Albinoni, most of whose archival material had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden, when he discovered a manuscript with the bass line and six bars of melody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remo_Giazotto). Apparently this was in 1945, though on Wikipedia's Albinoni page it says it was done in 1958, the year of my birth. But in any case, it is interesting that this work, along with Messiaen's Quartet for the End of the Age, also written out of the devastation of WWII, speaks to me so deeply. I guess I am truly a baby boomer, a child who emerged from the fragments of that broken world. Only to crawl through the rubble of this one.

Prayer

God of the nanosecond

Oh God, you are as present in a nanosecond
as in the great rolling waves of eternity,
as present in cramped closet as in the cathedral.
Help me, during this busy season,
to find you in those nanoseconds
and in those infinitesimal spaces.
Amen.

Saturday post on Saturday the novel

Finally finished Ian McEwan's Saturday which Pru wanted me to read. I didn't want to read it most of the way through since it only seemed to increase my anxiety; he did such a good job of describing that lingering fear that has colored our lives since our awakening to uncertainty on 9/11. This wasn't the kind of reading I wanted to do in my few spare minutes for light reading. Give me Pym, give me Howatch, I yearned, but plowed through . Spoiler warning ahead. I didn't know what to expect, having not read any of his books before and when I started a review that said something about how one knows what to expect when reading some other authors and McEwan, I stopped, because I was enjoying not knowing. (Although I did know, from the character's comments on magic realism--that if anything can happen, nothing matters--that this author would probably not have characters start flying out the window, at least, not unless they fell to gruesome death). I feared the worst, deciding, midway through, that his beloved wife would probably be murdered right before his eyes. But the actual ending turned out, after all, to be cathartic and satisfying. But. The idea that listening to someone recite "Dover Beach" would have a powerful effect on a criminal is absurd. McEwan has clearly not taught English. He was not stood in front of a classroom, reciting it, practically acting it out so that the students (adult working class women returning to college!) can hear it, can visualize it and been met with their blank stares, their disinterest, their "just don't get it" comments. All right, this is America. Maybe it's different in England. Maybe it's more like hearing the pledge of allegiance (and for that matter, Baxter probably would have heard it in school even if he'd quit at 16). Maybe there's something about the disease of Huntington's chorea that is supposed to make one especially sensitive to language (explaining Woody Guthrie's talent?)

But still, it is of course the perfect poem to act as a unifying thread in the novel. It functions much the way the recitation of the Wreck of the Deutschland did in Muriel Spark's, The Girls of Slender Means. That classic explored the nature of good and evil in an England traumatized by World War II, and, I would suggest, reaches the same conclusions about the necessity of a gesture towards the good, despite or perhaps because of the predominance of evil. This one probes similar points in the post 9/11 world. Interesting isn't it, that these two great poems of written by Victorian Englishmen should so shed light on these 20 and 21^st century situations. I did, of course, think from the beginning, when Henry spends so much time staring out his window, of "Dover Beach" (can any literate person see someone standing at a window in literature without making that association?). I remembered how my Victorian studies professor had spoken of the motif of staring out windows as an omnipresent theme in Victorian literature, though I can't think exactly what he said about it. Liminality, perhaps: being neither fully in or out… Questions of consciousness were paramount for Victorians. Who is the perceiver? How does perception change the ultimate reality of the object perceived? And so of course windows, those instruments through which we perceive the world, signify these questions, the questions that haunt our neurosurgeon protagonist. Brains look out through eyes, characters through windows. The sea of faith, in Arnold's poem, recedes, but now we know that such a dramatic recession prefigures a tsunami—the return of faith with a vengeance~

Finally, a ribbon magnet I like

this one says "support the industry that produces ribbon magnets"!!

It gets worse

It's not just St. Jonah's that uses the phrase (see previous post). In fact, the offensive phrase "the real instruments of unity" originates from the Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation. I'm not sure exactly what they think they are reconciling, when they are using such alienating language (and sneakily, since most of the gung-ho let's fix the world folks probably don't even know what its referring to).

"The 'real' instruments of unity

Members of St. Jonah's have greeted the Millenium Development Goals with unprecedented glee. It's quite a shock, really, to see everyone so delighted. At last, they keep saying, the convention has given us "the real instruments of unity." Even their bulletin announcements regarding this endeavour contains this phrase. No one apparently stops to consider that sniffing at the instruments of unity, also known as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates Meeting, the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council, is just in the teensiest bad taste. I wish I could say that what they mean is that we all now agree that Jesus was speaking truth when he said, "the poor you will always have with you," but alas, I don't think that's what the MDG-obsessed are thinking. Instead, I suspect they are feeling that they have been given carte blanche in feeding their frenzy of doing-ness, of earning righteousness, and oh happy day, in thumbing noses at historical traditional and what it offers in terms of connection to the larger body of Christ in the world. To think, some of us at some point in our lives, felt this excited about getting to know Jesus.

Using your cell phone for centering prayer

Well that sounds like a joke doesn't it? Isn't the cell phone the symbol of all that so completely distracts us from our life of prayer? Well, I figured out a way to use it so that it helps me! I'm not one of those people, like my husband, who wears wrist watches with all kinds of doodads. As far as watches go, I'm strictly analog. But that means I never have any kind of alarm handy, and so that means that one sneaks looks at the time, when one has set oneself 15 or 20 minutes for centering. Then I realized that my cell phone has an alarm that is easy to use. So now, I can just sit patiently and not worry that I will "overpray." (Not likely!) Of course, this wouldn't work so well if you get frequent calls (I'm not sure if you can turn off the rings and still have the alarm) but since I don't, it's good!

strange days

Father Burt is rummaging around through the cabinets in the kitchen. He says he's looking for something to put holy water in. I almost joke "doing an exorcism?" then stop myself. Why is he looking for something to put holy water in, if not for a purpose along those lines? We find an old pepper jar, and put the pepper in the salt shaker. (If we used the salt shaker, it would be more of an aspergeres!). He wipes it out, gets some holy water from the font, gives it to the woman who is waiting then leaves. He sits down by my desk. "Whew." She is from Venezuela, and her ex-husband has joined a Santeria cult. She said that she and her daughter are "seeing things" around their house. "Things? Like tokens or dead animals?" "No," he says, "like Spirits." "Oooh, cool." Of course, the Holy Water was rather an afterthought: she had originally signed up to speak to a priest for financial help, and seeing as we had no grocery gift cards, asked for this instead. Pray for her!

Still Dualistic

Perhaps the two sides in America (liberal/conservative) can better be framed in terms of whether one finds it more compelling to draw one's identity from a sense of battling power, or from a sense of being a part of a positive force.

Those who see themselves as battling power tend to automatically respond to claims of victimization, and to see governments as necessarily evil, and all oppositional groups as necessarily justified. This view can be supported from the Christian perspective by reference to Jesus' identification with the poor, and his victimization on the cross, and it is a corrective to earlier views which used Christ's missionary mandate as an excuse for imperialistic conquest. However, it tends to idealize the position of victim to the point of neglecting the concept of Christ's ultimate triumph.

Those who see themselves as aligned with a positive force for good tend to belittle claims of victimization, and see the government as deserving unwavering support, thus leaning towards blind patriotism.

What is the solution? How can we draw our understanding of who we are from a balanced perspective of Christians who follow an Almighty God who was willing to become weak? Can we recognize that not all claims of victimhood are equally legitimate? That some, are in fact, simply grabs for power? Can we live in paradox?

When it changed

I snagged the Rector's copy of Theology Today when it came in, and glanced through it before passing it on. I came across this interesting and timely statement by William Cavanaugh:

“This is not an exceptional nation and we do not live in exceptional times, at least as the world describes it. Everything did not change on 9/11; for Christians, everything changed on 12/25. When the Word of God became incarnate in human history, when he was tortured to death by the powers of this world, and when he rose to give us new life—it was then that everything changed. Christ is the exception that becomes the rule of history. We are made capable of loving our enemies, of treating the other as a member of our own body, the body of Christ.”

Cavanaugh, William. “Making Enemies.” Theology Today. Vol. 63, no. 3, October 2006. 307-323.

It caught my attention because I had read something else recently (in Christian Century?) that spoke of the concept of American exceptionalism and I thought that this might be an interesting concept to work with in the American Literature course, which I'll be teaching later in the fall. I think Cavanaugh makes an excellent point that helps us put into perspective the feeling that Americans between the ages of 20-60 felt about the terrorist attacks. Unlike older Americans who remembered Pearl Harbor, we had never experienced an assault on our own land before. (I discount younger people because, as far as I can tell from the kids I know, they were not particularly affected by the images of the towers falling, not being able to distinguish between them and the familiar images of destruction they see in their favorite games and movies). When I read this statement at first I thought it was a shame that Cavanaugh had to use the artificial construct of 12/25 to build the symmetry to make his point. After all, we smart Christians know that Christ wasn't born on that specific day. We could pinpoint an actual date for the Resurrection, why didn't he use that? But then I got to thinking, well, whether or not it was 12/25 (and it certainly wouldn't have been called that then) it was a specific day. And that number symbolizes that. And contemplating how numeric symbol functions, and letting its meaning sink in, in the same way that the numbers 9/11 have sunk in, helps make his statement even stronger and makes me find a source of hope.

Sister Helen

I admire Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, and an advocate for life in all its pathetic manifestations. She did err, however, in signing a political statement, which she has been forced to retract. I think we see here another example of the dangers when we seek political solutions for spiritual problems.

the Gospel according to clipart

Since I am going on vacation, I'm working on the next two weeks' bulletins, so this thought applies to the readings for Sunday, September 3.

The only part of the lection reading that had room for clipart was the Ephesians passage about the armor of God. You'd think there'd be tons of images there: at least these are tangible objects! But I couldn't find anything except little boys dressed up as roman soldiers. I knew I had to be careful with this: anything too militaristic would raise people's hackles here at St. Jonah's. But as I was searching, and re-reading the passage, it made me aware of how Paul is transforming the traditional images of warfare. Essentially, he's looking at the real soldier of his day and saying, yes, you need a helmet, but not one made out of --whatever metal they made them out of them--you need one of salvation. He's seeing equivalents, metaphors and the point is that soldiers of the Lord are not violent warriors. They are peaceful warriors, as yoga and tai chi would have it. It's a term that's been taken over a bit by the New Age folks, but if you engage in a martial arts practice, or yoga which has its warrior pose, you can get a sense for what this means....

Lectionary Thoughts

I haven't been reading along in the Judges passages of the Daily Office lectionary lately: just getting through the Epistle and Gospel, and mostly as always, dwelling on the psalm. But today, since I just had a couple minutes, I only looked at the Judges passage. Coming to it without context, out of the blue, it struck me as very strange. I'm reading along, and somebody's recovered some money and his mother is happy, and she wants to celebrate and express her gratitude towards the Lord and everything seems fine and dandy but hey, wait a minute. She wants him to do what?! Thank the Lord by making an idol? How did this happen? Well, verse six explains it: "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes." Not a happy verse for those of us born and trained in democratic ideology but a sound enough explanation, for those times, as well as for ours. What strikes me about the passage is how normal everything, except for the bit about the idols, sounds. They remembered most of what they are supposed to do, there are supposed to be ephods and teraphim and Levites should be priests, there's this longing to worship, but they have missed or mislaid this huge important part of what the monotheistic religion proclaimed. Aren't we just like that? Full of our process theology and our oh so sophisticated ways of reading Scripture, and grasping on to as much of the rituals as we care to remember, but are not we often missing the reality--the connection with God, and instead creating idols of our own creation?

Little do they know

A glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes here at St. Jonah's.

There are a few clergy persons associated with the church of St. Jonah's. Just for fun we'll call the main two Burt and Ernie. 'Scuse me, that's Father Burt and Father Ernie. Father Ernie, the Rector, leaves on vacation after constructing elaborate calendars showing his time off and the other clergy and staffs' vacation times, etc. Only then at the last minute he realizes he's not really going to come back on the day the calendar says he is, and he asks Father Burt to take the services on Sunday the 27th. (This part is a plausible reconstruction of events, based on the fact that Fr. Burt seemed to know that Fr. Ernie wasn't going to be around before the 29th in an earlier conversation.) Then the trusty Parish Administrator (me, Doc Bubbles), trying to get a jump start on the next week's bulletins since she is going on a long awaited vacation, discovers--horrors--that the second lesson for the 27th, according to our still-in-use lectionary, contains the dreaded passage: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as you are to the Lord." The only choices given are in the psalms, and of course any priest in his right mind would at least want to pray the psalm that begins "Protect me, O God"! She then checks to see if our female clergy might be preaching that day, which might have a palliative effect on the situation, but no, she's out of town. Her chart shows Fr. Ernie's name in red, which means he told her he wasn't going to be back, so she runs to Fr. Burt to see what he wants to do, and he says "Why ask me, I'm not even going to be here that day?"

Too bad Doc Bubbles is going on vacation, 'cause she might well have come up with a lively sermon--maybe she would focus on the really difficult first sentence of the passage: "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." But not even she can jump in so will there be some bewildered people milling about the church on Sunday morning a week from today?

Doc Bubbles makes calls, sorts things out and it seems that things will proceed in accordance with the rubrics after all. Now, stayed tuned to find out whether Fr. Burt decides to make the leap over to the Revised Common Lectionary, which happily omits this nasty bit.

Preposterousness

I swear, I was only googling to find the exact words of a quote I remembered, attributed to George Orwell: "there are some ideas so preposterous only an intellectual will believe them." Don't ask why this came back to mind and why I wanted to verify it. But google only discovered a couple references to the quote. One brought me to Shrinkwrapped's blog which offers some interesting material (by the way, he has been UNable to verify the authenticity of the quote) including the following: Pity the Poor Anti-Semite. Worth reading.

Different viewpoint on Lebanon

I was browsing our local Newman Center's website and found a link to what appears to be a national Catholic online newspaper. This article presents the point of view that Lebanese Catholics and other Christians do not hate the Israelis and they do fear Hezbollah, a point of view that I have not heard around St. Jonah's!

Not your mama's VBS

Churches around the country have gatherings for kiddies in the summer called Vacation Bible Schools. Not St. Jonah's. We have Going Medieval Arts Camp. Children get to craft gargoyles, cut their fingers on pieces of stained glass, and enjoy other features of life in the Middle Ages without being bothered with pesky notions raised by Biblical stories. My stepdaughters even enjoy it, and the 16-year-old has decided she doesn't believe in God. (My approach to managing teenagers is borrowed from the wisdom of appreciating the weather in New England. If you don't like it, wait five minutes. So I say nothing.) She was, to all appearances, a fine and friendly counselor during Going Medieval, even to the obnoxious five-year-old who everyday he insisted he could do something better than the teenagers. But when it was all over she was going to reward herself by making a purchase at the neighborhood comic store. She wanted a button that asked, "I'm sorry. Was it my job to fill your life with joy today?"

Why doesn't audio daily office work for me?

I like podcasts and books on tape. I like reading the Daily Office. I would have thought, when coming across an Episcopal church that offers a daily podcast of the Office that it would be something I could use but I can't. There are maybe two reasons. One, this guy's voice and style. I don't mind the new agey music in the background, that works a bit to counteract the cheesy Christian radio sound that he gives to it, but there's something about his slick delivery that reminds me of the lite Christian radio station back in New Jersey that I listened to in a bygone time. (It's out of Maryland, but there's no hint of the South in his voice.) I tried to get past that. After all, we are supposed to be "saying" the office, not just reading it, my tendency, when I read it alone, and wander off in trains of thoughts on various passages, or dwell overlong on some verses from psalms, shouldn't be what defines it for me as prayer. I can't control the speed when gathered with others to say an Office. And yet, and yet... when I read the words myself, I am praying them. When someone else reads it, I am listening to him pray. It's just different.

Items we gotta have

The Episcopal Media catalog arrived on my desk featuring a page of Community Builder and gift items. Of course the usual caps and t-shirts. The Episco-bear is kinda cute, and hey, what dog wouldn't be proud to bear the shield on his collar (and what about kitty collars, people?!). But Episcopal flip flops? Surely there is a saboteur in their midst, who came up with this one! Not that the idea of leaving a little trail of shields behind one in the sand (from the shape cut into the bottom of the sandal) isn't a dynamic evanglical tool (at least until the tide comes in) but isn't the whole concept of flip-flop, as in changing one's mind on critical issues, not exactly something with which we want to be closely associated? Just thinking...

Zapped!

So lightning struck the church. What I mean by that is, um, lightning struck the church, or near enough to us to knock out the power sometime after I left yesterday. Today we still have no phones. We put in a battery back up for the phone system, but since the outage happened right after everyone left, the battery didn't last long enough. At least that's the theory. The phone folks haven't come yet. But naturally, I am enjoying the peace. And yes, naturally I am experiencing a sense of God's presence in this. Not that I think God is up there hurtling thunderbolts on us, but hey, it is kind of funny that right after someone defiles the space with propaganda calling Israelis "predators" that the church is struck by lightning. Kind of does make Doc Bubbles think of Genesis: "12 Now Yahweh said to Abram, "Get out of your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you.2 I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing.3 I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you. All of the families of the earth will be blessed in you."

tempted!

Just after yesterday's post someone parked a car right in front of the church with a big blue swirlygig "ribbon magnet": this one supposed to make me aware of Down's Syndrome! They are trying my saintly patience!

What is my price?

It was almost a bar of chocolate, no, not just any bar, but a bar of Equal Exchange, Organic Dark Chocolate with Almonds, bestowed upon me by a true believer--in the destruction of Israel. Ah, but how deeply and with what passion she believes she is on the side of the light. She had asked to insert a notice in the bulletin, announcing the distribution of a letter from the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem. She had heard that last Sunday a plea was made for contributions to go to Episcopal Relief and Development's Middle East Crisis emergency fund, which seems relatively neutral in its mission to provide humanitarian aid (though, apparently, not to any Israeli Jews) http://www.er-d.org/newsroom_76926_ENG_HTM.htm . In her mind this meant that we were supporting the Bishop Riah, and it gave her a perfect opportunity to distribute one of his anti-Israeli screeds.

And, so, in preparation for this I was searching the web for some kind of article that would provide another perspective, something that would point out that it is in fact Hebollah that is using the children and innocent civilians of Lebanon as cannon fodder. That you can't broker a cease-fire with a terrorist group. Here's one that expresses it well: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23628. Or how about an article that exposes Riah as supporting the Muslim suicide bombers? http://www.comeandsee.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=415 . Nah, that probably would seem reasonable around here. If only recovering terrorist Walid Shoebat had some good articles www.shoebat.com, but he only seems to be available for speeches. Besides, these are a bit obvious. Perhaps the article by a good liberal like Rabbi Lerner, that I found on Tikkun's website: http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/asktherabbi might be snuck in to the pile without causing a witch hunt...

I was exploring these options when she came in to drop off her batch of propaganda and started regaling the virtues of her new favorite chocolate bar: "here, have this one!" she gave it to me and I accepted. She is a kind person, just very deluded, having brainwashed herself with nonstop reading of one sided views of a situation half a world away. I always wondered what makes people take up a particular cause. I look around and see thousands of them. Every car's bumper sticker here asks you to save another ethnic group or animal species. And please, if I see yet another disease taking over the sideways squiggle that's supposed to represent a tied ribbon to get me to be aware of autism or diabetes or schizophrenia, I may have to tear it from the car! But people find one to latch onto. The Tibetans. The Palestinians. The Sudanese. How do they decide?

I think we need a new 12 step program for parishioners of St. Jonah's. World-savers Anonymous. Its first step: "Just for today, I will let God save the world instead of me. Just for today, I will be Christ to one person whom I encounter." Imagine that, church!

Anyway, munching on the yummy candy bar, I thought about giving up my stealth counter campaign. Let me just read Bishop Riah's statement. And there in the first sentence, I read the Israelis described as "predators"! We don't even need the article about his earlier statements. It is clear enough where he stands. And there are people in this church who do not think this is partisan and inflammatory, but belongs on a table promoting Christ's peace!!!! I am going to go nuts here. And no, I won't be bought off by the candy bar. Friends, let me know which article I should print out.

P.S. Do all brit folk refer to paper cutters as guillotines? She does!

Cool Bumper Sticker of the Day

Republicans for Voldemort!

One good thing

Dimly seen through the dissipating clouds of hot air now clearing over Columbus was one good decision, one which will matter to us in our pews. On November 22, we will be able to celebrate the life and witness of Clive Staples Lewis.

A094: Church Year Calendar Inclusions. Proposes
these commemorations for inclusion in the
Church Year Calendar and authorizes trial use
for the triennium 2004-2006: Janani Luwum,
Archbishop of Uganda and Martyr, 1977 -
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury,
1944 - Clive Staples Lewis, Apologist and
Spiritual Writer, 1963.

Of course, it doesn't take too much speculation to imagine that Lewis is sitting in his favorite heavenly pub, shaking his head in disbelief... or chuckling...

the body

There's a body in the church right now. Yeah, a dead one. You wouldn't think that's unusual enough to remark on, especially if you are among those people that think of church as the place you go to name your baby, get married, and get a good send-off into the next world. But nowadays most of what we see are cremations. I suppose I should think of those little boxes of ashes as bodies too, but it's awfully hard to relate them to a formerly living person. I've had the ashes of former friends sitting on my desk. (I also have the ashes of a beloved cat on my dresser at home, come to think of it.) I've carried people's ashes in a shopping bag to the sacristy. No big deal. But when the hearse arrives, and the men in suits (the funeral director now wears grey!--perhaps that's his gesture to summer) navigate the awkward ramp and all the next of kin stand around, wondering what to do or think, you know. The men must exert themselves to carry this large wooden box. You know there is a body in there. You know someone has passed from this life and it is real. I find it much more moving and solemn tha cremation. And that (in addition to not wanting to add to global warming with more smoke) is why I want to come to rest in earth.

My bit on the Convention

Thanks be to God: it's done.

Some are rejoicing and some are grieving. Danforth's advice for us Episcopos not to follow the example of Congress was too little, too late, I'm afraid. I stand ambivalent, realizing, for the most part, that my church's relationship with the Anglican churches round the world will not really matter to my life of worship here in Pixieville. I may praise or I may stand dumb, as always.

I wonder though, why, when it seems that planet earth has become so small, and our ability to interconnect so much deeper than ever before, that we become further apart in these theological matters, rather than closer.

But as I went running, with my Zen on shuffle, I listened as k.d. lang sang Leonard Cohen's "Hallelulah." And I knew: all shall be well.

Lectionary inspired rant

The lesson of the creation and the garden and the fall is not about the tangible world but about how truth got in. It is telling us the thing that is most unbelievable, that truth started with one tiny seed. One person and one God. The basic one on one relational nature of monotheism. First with God and Adam, then on to God and the nation of Israel, a relationship which by its uniqueness has caused anger and jealousy ever since, even though the point was that others are invited in. Paul/Saul recognized this when he said in Romans 11 “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them, and became partaker with them of the root and of the richness of the olive tree; don't boast over the branches. But if you boast, it is not you who support the root, but the root supports you.” The mistake of gloating was made by many Christians, and by Mohammed, who passed it on to all Muslims. All these thoughts emerged from reading today’s Psalm, which is highly critical of the Hebrew peoples. But it’s like how a person from one ethnicity is allowed to make ethnic jokes about their own group, or use certain terms that, in the mouth of someone not of that group, would be considered a deadly insult. It’s fine for a Jewish prophet to denounce the Jewish people. But when Mohammed comes along, and reads that, and internalizes it and sends it back out into the world as “the Jews screwed up, now we’re the ones with an in to God” then we got a problem. (Now that I am teaching an online World Lit class, I am reading parts of the Koran for the first time and basically feeling insulted by it, both as a person of Jewish heritage, Christian faith, and as a woman. Hmm, not too many other ways you can insult me.)

Here's today's lesson, which reinforces that sense which, for reasons unknown, even the psalm evoked in me, of the very uniqueness of God and of God's relationship with each one of us.

1 Timothy 2: 1- 6 (NRSV)
1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. 3 This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, 6 who gave himself a ransom for all -this was attested at the right time.

It's also a good passage for those of us who don't want to see our church prayer time taken over by prayers that have political agenda. I do feel pain that there are people being tortured and will gladly pray for them, and for the torturers. But let's delete the emphasis on how much better we know how to run the world than do the people running it. As if we would not all become monsters given the power.

Underbellies

Recently, the Dean of the Cathedral stopped into the Church office. He caught up briefly on my life, when I reminded him that he was Curate at the church were I first became an Episcopalian back in the 1980s. "And now you're the church secretary!" Then seeing my expression, commiserated: "You really do see the underbelly of the church, in this job." It is true, for some reason, I am witness to, and often the recipient of, some of the Episcopalian's worst behaviors. But why, I wondered, was this compared to an underbelly? When my kitty lies on his back, stretching out all four paws in relaxation, I exclaim with delight: "such a cute belly--I wants to touch it!" (Not allowed.) When my friend's dog squiggles his back into the dirt, wriggling with pleasure, again, I laugh and enjoy the sight. Underbellies, in our "emotional support animals" are beautiful. Ah, if only I could find such beauty in the parishioner who called a meeting with me and all available clergy, presenting us with a manifesto claiming that removing a few names from the parish phone directory was "unethical" "unconscionable" and "damaging to our community." Excuse me for touching the database without calling an all-Parish meeting! Turned out the problem could be solved by me giving her the addresses of 10 people. Wow. Does that deserve the name of underbelly? Gracious readers, you tell me.

May Day

The periodic cheers rising from a cluster of people gathered on the Common finally draws Doc Bubbles out of her chilly office. She is fortunate to arrive just as poet Martin Espada begins reading his poem "Alabanza." He is a powerful reader, his voice riding the rhythmic swells, emerging from his own rolling deeps, the crowd joining in on the refrain "Alabanza" (bless them, the workers killed in the World Trade Center) and drums beat time as well. Even the hard-hearted Doc Bubbles feels moved, as she strolls through the crowd, with its signs, in various languages, proclaiming that a person cannot be illegal, a point with which it would, admittedly, be hard to disagree. Surely this chanting, this mustering of emotions, is the true descendent of Ginsberg's Howl. Surely this is poetry that can make something happen... if any poetry can, if anything can happen....

A familiar face in the crowd speaks to her, smiling, saying what a great turn out. Ever optimistic, working on every cause, serving on the select board, this individual is truly admirable. Doc Bubbles had been, after all, thinking it was a rather paltry crowd, a pitiful turnout for a town like Pixieville. She can remember when she was young, in the days of the protests against Nixon, against the Vietnam War, how it seemed like the bodies out there on the fields were hugely significant, changing the very structure of reality, sending reverberations of love and peace that shook even the White House. Apparently, those protests did have some actual, not just cosmic, effect, so why does Doc Bubbles tend to relegate those perceptions to the realm of childhood, of stoner fantasy? Why can she do nothing but shake her head at those who place their bodies in town squares now, and think, you innocents, aren't you cute, but, can you really believe any of this matters?

Plagiarism scandal du jour

We learn to speak by mimicking the sounds we hear: when we get the response we like, we make that sound again. We learn to write the same way. Good, precocious writers easily glom on to the trendy expressions and attitudes, mimicking them and putting them together in variations that appeal to the public. When a writer takes those standard, trendy modes of expression and pushes them just a teeny bit forward, we are astonished and pleased. We call that genius. Writers who push them more than a teeny step forward, are generally called Gertrude Stein. And no one reads her.

So did Kaavya Viswanathan borrow from Megan F. McCafferty? Yes. Did she intend to or know she did it? Very likely, not. Frankly, once again, my disdain falls largely upon the greed driven publishers, who latch hungrily onto a hot commodity like a Harvard-going young woman of color hailing from foreign shores (so much more appealing than a Jersey girl with an Irish name…) and rush to press, with zero quality control.

Doc Bubbles is trying to restrain her snarky laughter. Really.

Cool Bumper Sticker of the Day

Immortality or bust.

the forest for the trees

Spring has come full force to Pixieville. Every day, new trees are blossoming. Even in the unkempt churchyard of St. Jonah's (motto: "yes, Lord, angry enough to die" (Jonah 4:9)) the magnolia tree is in magnificent pink array. Those of us who toil here are uplifted as we walk to and fro, and see it from the window. In honor of next Sunday's being Earth Day, excuse me, Creation Sunday, the group of those dedicated to the environment here at St. Jonah's have set up a big triptych display--right in front of the window.

Do I even have to add any commentary?

Update on Heretic v. Heretic

As I'm sure you know by now, Dan Brown was exonerated of the charges that he unfairly reworked a single source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, to create the Da Vinci Code. I should join in with all the free speech crowd who thinks this is a key victory: after all, what Dan Brown did, they argue, is what scholars do, transform and rework the ideas of others. Do I only want to see him fall because he totally relied on the work of one book and didn't do his own research, and instead, promulgated these half-baked theories to a gullible public? Not really... Do I want the world to learn the lesson I try to teach my students about BOTH citing sources, and checking on their reliability? Well, yes. And, I guess, it seems a little different from a free speech issue, when person 2 gets rich off the ideas that person 1 published first, but wasn't such a marketing whiz. But that, as we say, is capitalism.

Christ Among the Partisans

Garry Wills writes: "THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. "---this piece articulates just what I have been brooding over lately. Read it!

Driving While Elderly

Sorry, but it should be the one allowable case for profiling: geezers behind the wheel. I just stepped out on this lovely spring morning, to run a few errands, and as I am crossing (with the flashing pedestrian beeping that it is safe) first, a women in a smallish car makes a left turn, pulling into, not a parking space, but onto the sidewalk in front of me. She is looking over her shoulder at the car close behind her, a blue station wagon, I guess trying to guide it to park as well? Not sure, really, but moments later BANG, this second car succeeds, not in pulling into the parking space, but into the tree beside it. Lady in first car (containing two kids in back seat) goes to see the old man who sits in car. The tree, for some reason, only let loose one branch, and that branch is now swinging overhead, attached by either a wire or some leftover decoration (I have been noticing that the trees seem to have some unnatural sparkle in the sunlight). Willie the parking meter man happens to be across the street, and he calls it in. Moments later, there is a firetruck, an ambulance, and a police car. All because, as a passerby says, "he forget which one was the brake and which was the gas." Seems to be likely: he was confused by unfamiliar surroundings. The woman, who was speaking Spanish, had either a DC or a diplomat license plate. Why do old people insist on driving? My Dad, the other day, referred to the fact that "until recently" he had a car (and thus, had trouble finding his way from the Visitor's parking lot, where I parked to the front door of his residence). It has been at least 3 years since he totalled it and I basically forbade him to get a new one which he (then a mere 84) wanted to do. More on his other sensible choices (like ignoring some evil looking black spots on his skin and not seeing the oncologist whom he was supposed to see for regular check ups until they had been there over three months -- at least if you can believe his sense of time, which how can you? I can't trust my own!) And now the blue station wagon is being carted off by a tow truck. Let us pray the geezer learns that the time is upon him for dispensing with driving.

Can it be?

Is the state of the world not as bleak and hopeless as I tend to think? Discovery of the website Arabs for Israel does seem to offer a crack in the dark picture that I hold, a slight chink of light. Of course, one cannot tell how many people are behind this site, and share its ideals, or have visited it, but I would like to believe that there are more Arabs and Muslims who have the reasoning powers to realize that the Jews are not behind all of their problems, than than the louder, angrier voices would have us believe.

Heretic v. Heretic

As most of my learned readers already know, Dan Brown did not originate the ideas that he spun into a best seller with The Da Vinci Code; he merely packaged them perfectly so that they had maximum appeal for a world eager to believe the worst about organized Christianity and devoid of the minimum critical skills needed to discern the difference between fantastic speculation and verifiable fact. But I have to say, I find it rather humorous to read about their expensive little squak fest over who deserves credit for originating these ideas. Haven't they even read that book they are so eager to dismiss, the part where it said: "There is nothing new under the sun..."

Good DaVinci Code debunking article.
This one isn't even from a Christian perspective, but it traces the history of the fraud from which BOTH writers borrow.

What they bleep do they bleeping know?

I had heard the film, “What the Bleep do we know” was a mind-blowing experience, tho’ I wasn’t clear on whether it was a dramatic film or a documentary. It turns out to be the worst of both worlds: a sort of simplistic-story, poorl- acted, interspersed-with-silly-animations dramatic film, intercut with unidentified scientists spouting, not so much any kind of scientific information, but rather their opinions about the implications of their scientific theories, and what they suggest to them about the falseness of Christian religious ideas, about which they have at best a rudimentary knowledge. Should a theologian with no scientific training approach them to pontificate on quantum theory, they would be just as disgusted as I am at their dismissals of the God of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. It appears they have never heard the proposition God is Love but instead have based their perceptions of Christianity on the spoutings of television preachers. And so they can assure us in good authority that God (understood in some new, quantum way) cannot possibly concern himself with the “sins” (the word is uttered with contempt) of individuals or of the entire planet. As if it never occurred to the Jews or the Christians that the universe was vast, and that God was vaster still and that what we believe is therefore all the more paradoxical than, it seems, some minds can imagine. The opening seconds of the film set the scene “In the beginning was the Void” (we enjoy appropriating religious ideas) “and it was teeming with possibility” (I’m sorry, did you say “Void” and “teeming” in the same sentence?! Once a Void teems with anything it is not a Void!---sloppy, sloppy, sloppy!)

The scientific terms and theories are presented as mantras and never elucidated or explained in any way. They seem to think that just repeating the terms, showing pictures of people who may be scientists, and having funny little animated characters impersonate quarks will convince people of all the lovely propositions they learned once upon a time in their EST weekends. “You create your own reality.” The movie can be reduced to a bumper sticker: "because of quantum theory, we create reality.” There is not a single proposition –scientific or philosophical--that is argued or illustrated in any way. One of the scientists (uh, since they are never identified, or credentialed, I cannot say more than, one of the younger, unbearded male scientists) stated that when he began his day by “creating it” “strange things” happened. He neither clarified what this “creating” of his day entailed (thinking about it? planning it? some kind of chanting it into existence that we poor bleeps can’t be entrusted to know?) nor what any of the startling occurrences might be: did red lights turn green for him, as I have heard happens to many evangelicals who like to pray while driving?

Instead of going into any detail about Quantum Theory or even subatomic particles, they content themselves with animations and illustrations. I have read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, so I have some ideas about these things, and enjoy hearing them described in the simplified terms I can understand (no math! please!). The NOVA episode “The Elegant Universe” did an excellent job of presenting string theory in all its strange inexplicability. And all these ideas make my jaw drop in wonder and awe and make me no less sure that there is an intelligence underlying and infusing all that we think of as matter, whether it be dark matter, or the infinite reaches of empty space. Advice: watch this episode of NOVA and skip the facile gnosticism cloaked as scientific discovery of What the Bleep Do We Know.

Another translation of namaste

"I see some good in you, you broken piece of turd!"
--my very wise yoga teacher's gloss on the familiar greeting.

Who was that man?

The other day a man stopped in to the church office while I was eating my lunch.

"You look like you're enjoying that sandwich."

"I am."

"You are lucky to have it."

"Yes, I am grateful for it."

He asked to use the phone and I said yes. I am oftentimes wary of people who come in asking for such favors. Sometimes, they can overstay their welcomes, or make me feel uncomfortable. But this man gave off a very calm, friendly feeling. He was a middle-aged African-American, wearing a knit cap over grayish white dreadlocks. He said he needed to use the phone, to help a friend of his get a phone installed, which seemed like an effort in keeping with our ministry. As he called the phone company, I could not help overhearing as he spoke in reasonable tones, gathering information for his friend, an older woman in Amherst. I realized that part of the reason I trusted him was because he spoke with an educated accent.

He told me afterwards that he was passing through. He always visited this lady on his way from Nantucket, where he lived, to Montpelier, where he had been invited to design a solar powered library. "How interesting," I said, and then he told me that the last time he was in our church, he had been visiting James Baldwin, who had been a visiting professor at the University at Pixieville. Having once been a denizen of the halls of the Englishland, I vaguely remembered having seen some posters dating to that era and knew he had spent some time here. He went on about how some other famous person found him and Baldwin talking and he said "oh, of course you know each other." I knew this to be shameless name dropping, but interesting nevertheless. I'm a sucker for famous writer stories. The man went on his way, and I expected not to see him again.

A day or two later, out of the corner of my eye, while driving through the grocery parking lot, I saw a homeless man moving large boxes towards some undeveloped land. I couldn't really see who it was, since I was in motion.

But then, the next day, I saw him again. Hard to miss him: he was wearing bright yellow pants, and that knit cap. It was the same man. How strange. Is he just a crazy homeless person? Is this how he travels from Nantucket to Montpelier? Is he really a solar architect? Whose reality is this?

Paradox

While driving through the orange tunnel that is tree-lined Dulcet Street at this time of year (actually, the autumn colors seem preternaturally prolonged this year: warmth and color so late into the season must be going to my head) I had a thought. The paradox of being alive in this world is that we are simultaneously healing and dying. Because we are always dying, at least once we've stopped growing up. We are not necessarily always healing, but we can be, if we seek to be. So healing is not opposed to dying. Hmmm.

This must be what happens when you make it to Centering Prayer group the previous day.

Be the Seaweed

My yoga teacher likes to use the image of kelp, floating in the waves, to describe how she wants us to flow through the sun salutation vinyasa, carried on our breath, moving into and letting go of each posture. I have gone snorkeling a couple times (never scuba diving, I don’t like any activity that involves dependence on devices for sustenance of life—yeah, ask me sometime to describe my one experience rock-climbing—and no, I do not like planes) and I have seen the motion of the oceanic plant life. Actually, the time near Puerta Vallarta, the waves were pretty strong, and the sight of all that vegetable motion rather frightened me: it was like an eerie hurricane. But I do invoke those visual images when my teacher instructs us to be like kelp. So perhaps that is why she asked me, last class, if I would mind the rest of the class looking at me as I went through a sun salutation. Apparently, I was doing a good job of being kelp. (Amazing the things the ego can take pride in: gold star kelp girl!). I was able to stay focused on being kelp while they watched me and the reason I bring this up is not to boast, but because I think my bodily connection to flow connected with a recent spiritual release. My prayer life has not been terribly active since I’ve been teaching two courses on weekends, in addition to my “day” job, but they just ended, and now I only have one online course to teach so time has just opened up for me and I’ve been able to try to return to my prayer life. And there was another thing. An email not sent. Strange liberating thing, that was. Someone had sent a church related email that irritated me, and I wrote a rather lengthy response to it, but sent it first to my co-worker to ask if she thought it was okay. She never got back to me, and I had gotten my annoyance out of my system, and the whole thing seemed pointless and petty and it was so easy to say presto its gone poof. No anger, no assertion, no self. Instead, I prayed blessings upon Mr. Functional Alcoholic, go-getter head of the social hobnobbing committee. And that, in turn, blessed me. And so, you see, it was easy to be seaweed!

And then, as I was walking to work after yoga, I saw a car parked, with a Be the Rain bumper sticker on it. I had seen those in the past, but not recently. The best I could get to with google is that it refers to a Neil Young lyric, which is about saving the planet. If you know more about this motto, please tell me.

A beautiful day in Pixieville, U.S.A.

Doc Bubbles: It’s such a beautiful afternoon in Pixieville. I went for a walk at lunch, and had a lovely meditation.
Questioner: you call it meditation. Did you close your eyes?
Doc Bubbles: no, I couldn’t bear to, the day was so stunning. I sat by the Rotary Fountain that, in all its decrepit glory, set out four streams of water from four furry mouths. Sparrows came and splashed and drank from the top, then flew down and warmed their bellies on the hot concrete. I thanked God for them.
Questioner: Did you sit still?
Doc Bubbles: I shifted my position a few times, and moved to get out of the sun. It is still that warm, in October! And the sky brilliant blue! But I did focus on my breathing, I noticed my lungs filling with air and letting it go, while the water droplets splashed in the fountain.
Questioner: Did you find silence, at least?
Doc Bubbles: I heard it all and thought:
Little boy with fighter jets in each hand, zooming in on the fountain, Praise ye the Lord!
Backup-warning-beeps of great delivery truck, Praise ye the Lord!
Maple tree starting to turn, only letting one careful leaf drop with each breeze, Praise ye the Lord!
Old Tercel, with bumper stickers proclaiming an opinion on every issue arisen in the last 10 years, Praise ye the Lord!
Questioner: yet you call this meditation? This is just a kind of fair weather practice, that depends on the, well, fair weather.
Doc Bubbles: maybe it’s centering prayer
Questioner: maybe not
Doc Bubbles: It felt so good.
Questioner: meditation rises above feelings, does not get entangled in them, or dependent. What will you do on a gray day?
Doc Bubbles: so I shouldn’t rejoice in this most glorious day?
Questioner: rejoice if you want to, but don’t call it meditation or centering prayer.
Bubbles: just prayer?
Questioner: Doc Bubbles prayer, I’d say.
Doc Bubbles: Oh well.

Another thing cats are good for:

is a morning laugh. I am standing by the fridge getting out the milk for my coffee. It's 5:30 a.m. (when I get up to go to my morning yoga class--aren't I amazing?!) Silly Wigglestein walks in meowing for brekkers with a yellow post-it note flapping at the end of his bushy tail. I'm sorry, it's early, this just cracks me up. I stand there holding my belly (which hurts when I laugh because of this "core" class I took on Monday) and laughing and Silly W. stares at me for a couple minutes, his post-it flag gently waving and turns away to go the living room until I have learned to control myself. Apparently kitties do not like being laughed at when they are not doing something funny ON PURPOSE and don't even know what it is so they can't pretend it is ON PURPOSE.

I'm St. Francis

You are Saint Francis of Assisi! You don't care
what you look like (or smell like) as long as
you can live simply and help the poor. You
should be receiving your stigmata any day now.


Which Saint Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmmm, so that's what that itching on my palms has been. Thought it was just poison ivy.

Good Samaritanitis

A terrible side effect of Hurricane Katrina is affecting Western Massachusetts: a disease of Good Samaritinitis. Also called ineffectual helper’s syndrome, it is a result of two factors: one is the basically good desire to reach out to one’s neighbor and in this regard, its sufferers are to be commended (and are definitely healthier than those who imagine that God’s wrath is in some way evident in this catastrophe. How did their Bibles manage not to include Luke 13?) What some people don’t recognize however is the insidious secondary cause of this disease which has to do with our innate fascination with horror: the same thing that makes us slow down and stare at accidents, read obituaries etc. we want to be close, to see, to understand how it would feel because deep down we are very very glad that it didn’t happen to us, and we are very very afraid that someday it will. It is this secondary factor that causes the victims of Good Samaritinitis to start tripping over one another in their desire to be helpful. One of the worst symptoms is the sudden need to run around frantically forming committees. They collect objects and pile them up (New Englanders love to have something to do with the stuff they don't need, other than throw it out.) Now the simple, obvious thing to do if you want to help is to send money to the relief organizations that have experience and infrastructure to help: The Red Cross and Episcopal Relief and Development are my top picks. Even if it’s a five dollar check, that is $5 more they will have to distribute supplies that they are getting at wholesale rates. But no, people would rather go to the store, buy $5 worth of supplies at retail rates, drop them off at the church where we will have to package them and then spend money to have them shipped out to the Diocese of Mississippi. One woman spoke of the joy she felt buying diapers. Might this possibly have more to do with wishing her children were not grown than with really helping people in need? Have they suddenly forgotten that it takes fuel to ship materials 2000 miles, fuel that is now three times more expensive than it has been?

Funny thing is, I’m usually so cynical about the local folks that come around to the church asking for handouts, but suddenly I’m their advocate. “Hey, remember, we got homeless people here too.” You can help them without shipping stuff 2000 miles. They’re still just as destitute as ever. Just not as glamorous.

Processing Brother Roger's death

I had been composing a Lectionary Meditation the other day, when I came across the news about Brother Roger's martyrdom. I had to delete my lame little draft and dwell on this horror awhile. I've never been to Taize, nor did I know him personally, so I should be like the rest of those around me here at Church, not terribly affected by yet another piece of bad news. Perhaps it's because I had recently read the book he co-wrote with Mother Theresa, Prayer: Seeking the Heart of God. and I love to sing the Taize chants we use at one of the services at our church that I have an awareness of Brother Roger's presence that had been in the world, a presence that brought some of Christ's love to so many. And he was slaughtered, like a lamb before the altar... there is always something more shocking about a murder in a church, like Romero, like Thomas a Becket, the real blood spilt upon the altar... And I see in this act the underlying reality that the demonic recoils from the face of love and seeks to extinguish it, love revealing our own unworthiness too sharply. Unlike many other progressive Christians, I think there are evil beings, and I think they are growing very active. Check out Pat Robertson's latest. Claiming to be a Christian and promulgating assassination!!?? God help us.

Lectionary Meditation: meek and what?

http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/1Proper15.htm

I know a lot of people who want to do what they can to make the earth a more peaceful, loving place. They believe that is what they are called, as Christians, to do, and I can't argue with that. But I wonder sometimes about the image of Jesus they evoke. These people want to ignore all the parables and actions of Jesus (like the one yesterday, in which he cursed a fig tree and whipped some people he didn't approve of, or today, where he mentions that the vineyard is going to be destroyed) that don't fit in with their image of Jesus, which seems to come from that Victorian ideal, Jesus "meek and mild." The right-wing Christians go too far in the opposite direction, and are all too eager to point out all the judgmental prophecies of destruction and damnation to those who don't understand God in the same way as they do. But I don't actually know too many people like that in real life (Thanks Be to God) and I do know the other kind, so it's their idolatry I want to talk about. It's idolatry when you create a God you're comfortable with, instead of opening yourself to a God who can't be narrowly defined. I just wonder how they've come up with this meek and mild ideal: it isn't a God after their own image, since none of them, that I know, are quite so sweet and passive. And the Jesus that's coming out of these readings from Mark, seems to be growing aware of his mission, an awareness that is concurrent with a growing anger at the way things are, anger that they aren't listening to him, anger that the vineyard is not operating the way it was intended.

Watermelons rock!

Doc Bubbles has a new diet: the watermelon diet! Now that you can buy truly seedless watermelons, they have become the perfect fruit. Juicy, cooling and filling. The best part, for me, is that they are high in potassium, (http://www.news-medical.net/?id=12199) and since I am trying to control my high blood pressure without all those icky drugs, that is important. I am sorry that stereotypical associations have made some people afraid to chomp into those juicy watermelons (especially since African-Americans are prone to high-blood pressure and like me can benefit from eating them). Eat watermelons freely everyone! Yum!

Lectionary Meditation: random act of defoliation?

http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/1Proper15.htm

Cursing the curse

Jesus sounds like he was in a bad mood that day, cursing a poor fig tree that was only doing what came naturally to it (not bearing fruit out of season), then going in and laying on the moneylenders, who were only doing what came naturally to them (as human beings)--commodifying--fracturing a living relationship with God into objects for consumption.

I always thought it a bit unfair, cursing the fig tree, since it was not its time to bear fruit, after all. But it starts to seem less like a hunger-based temper tantrum (something I am not unfamiliar with) if you start to see trees as fellow subjects of God’s kingdom rather than as simple mindless objects. To figure out what God might be thinking about trees, let's consider other important fruit trees: the ones in the Garden of Eden.

First, God established plant life, saying, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” (Gen. 1:11) then God created Adam and “put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). So picture this as a place of continual growth and fruition, as Milton saw it, when he had Adam say, “Each Tree / Load'n with fairest Fruit, that hung to the Eye / Tempting, stirr'd in me sudden appetite /To pluck and eate; whereat I wak'd, and found / Before mine Eyes all real, as the dream [Paradise Lost Bk VIII, v. 306- 310]. From the beginning we were meant to eat, and be nourished by the Creation. Growing stuff and eating it: that’s Life 101. That’s the world that God blessed as good. The world God desired and loved. But that’s not the world that ensued after the Fall, when Adam and Eve ate the one fruit they were not supposed to eat. Not the world that Jesus entered and worked in, as a carpenter, a man who works with trees that are no longer living (wood), shaping dead objects from that which was meant to be living. And it is this fallen world of sweat and hunger, where plants do not feed us whenever we want, that Jesus is saying is wrong, is not the way it was meant to be… It is this cursing of the curse that we see when we view the withered fig tree, not a random act of defoliation.

Discovery

"Hey, that's a beautiful steam shovel. I never noticed that before!"

--words that can only be spoken by a guy, recently presecribed an SSRI.

More proof that cars are sentient beings

Why do we flash our headlights to warn oncoming drivers that there's a speed trap ahead? The rest of the time we are cursing them into the farthest reaches of hell. We are angry they are tailgating, passing over double yellow lines and nearly colliding head-on with us, almost mowing us down as pedestrians or cyclists, but we see a police car tucked neatly beside an underpass, waiting to teach an important lesson to a malevolent speeding maniac and what do we do? automatically, without, it seems, even thinking: warn them with our headlights! (By the way, you can get busted for this.) I am telling you--it isn't us. It's the cars. They are communicating with each other. They invaded this planet because it seemed like a good place to drive too fast. (See post from August 6 2005 for further details of this important new theory. )

So the next time you see a speed trap, try, control your fingers. Don't warn the oncoming speeders with your headlights. Instead, let the cars know we still rule this planet. And we say "slow is beautiful."

The Sanity of Trees

When I first saw how the beavers had turned the part of the trail up by the Brook trail into a lake, where it had been a flowing stream, I was sorry. The trees stand in water, dying, and the tops of the pines are orange-red. The water is murky. But today, when I arrived, a great blue heron arose and flew off, as did a couple other waterfowls. When I approached the water there was a squeak and a splash, and then another, as various frogs jumped from utter invisibility into the water, where they were even more hidden. I stood still, then moved again, trying to see them. Only occasionally could my eyes actually see one of the frogs as it went leaping through the water, like a skipping stone. My vision of this place was transformed. Instead of the nasty result of the too busy beavers like a bunch of manic engineers, I saw a paradise that wasn’t meant for me, but for these others; they delighted in their new home. All was well in the woods.

After a week in which there were two road rage shootings in the east of the state, and I cannot drive five miles from the house without encountering a car honking and trying to jut in and out of cars so it can go 80 in a 45 mph zone, I hear the sound of the train whistle, though I cannot see it from deep inside the late summer woods. How different a train whistle is from a car horn. Though it is announcing that it is coming--fast--and not stopping and get out of the way, all things which would be construed as hostile, and it seems a cry of kindness, of glorying in its own, harmless, energy. How different this country would be if the trains had won out over cars. I know there were many factors, mainly having to do with who could pay off the politicians more handsomely, that made our nation be developed along highways rather than rails, in the 20th century. It seems inevitable in retrospect: a society that values the individual above all, naturally should have gone with the most individualistic means of transportation. But perhaps it wasn’t inevitable, perhaps it is the cars’ fault. Think of it: cars are an alien species and they wanted to talk over the earth so they knew just how to play off on our individualistic tendencies, to cater to them, encourage and stoke them until they were utterly out of control and the cars are really in control. We drive killing machines, we become killing machines, what's the difference, we crash and kill or get out with guns and kill. The cars are happy either way, they win. (OK: I have just finished reading VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Check out www. philipkdickfans.com.)