Platitudinal Preaching

"I found this pamphlet in the bushes
while unlocking the building this morning
and it reminded me of today's gospel."

Do not forget the nasaly, British accent, of my friend Danny.

We have a phrase for this -
"Calling it in."
If you haven't spent at least a little time thinking about
how to connect all this birth
                                      and life
                                           and death
                                                   and vomit
that I live with every day,
is there any reason for you to wonder why I don't listen to you?
Yes, my phone is
in point of fact
providing me with more answers.


"With the gospel in one hand
and the newspaper in the other."

Repeated by Barth,
ad nauseum advise
received since the 20's,
In the birth of narrative journalism.

Not only
does my life not happen in the newspaper;
when it does
I don't need your platitudes.

I need you to stop hitting me with
handbags and hatred
for trying to pee in safety.

It's Always Saturday in Philadelphia

It's Holy Week again.
Damn thing comes around once a year,
      it's more persistent than Christmas,
      takes longer and has less opportunities for joyful inebriation, too.
I think that may be why we have the Easter Bunny and all that candy -
     we really need it,
especially if we've ridden the roller coaster.

I was planning to ride again.

I've no patience for so much bullshit
     that fills the days of the body corporate the rest of the year,
but this finely honed cosmic moment
     is what keeps me a professing Christian.
The universe cares so much it's willing to walk a mile in our shoes,
     and so violates our petty expectations that we try to kill it.

But life persists.
Life sneaks into all the cracks in the pavement we cover ourselves with;
life pushes through persistent,
steady,
gently,
breaking,
always breaking the baked on shell,
and presents us with a tiny
                                            fragile
                                                        bit
                                                              of
                                                                   green.

Now you know why my yard looks like it does.
I am awestruck in the face of weeds,
especially pavement weeds,
especially pavement weeds I've assaulted with Roundup.
Life persists.

I like Holy Week.
It is probably the closest the church year ever comes
to my place in the cosmos,
even though it gets the least attention,
even in Holy Week.

Still,
people are trying.
I appreciate the effort.
I know it's a hard place.
Of course I do, I live there.

Today starts the steady march to Easter.
It's so silly to me -
                               set up, tear down, polish, wax, mop, dust.
Look busy - Jesus is coming.
                                               I am sure this was first said by an altar guild director.
As though Jesus gives a shit.
Jesus is rather too busy to look for dust bunnies under the bishops throne.

Still.
I was going to overlook that.
I always feel that we are trying to hard -
always riding the surface of Holy Week,
always escaping what it really signifies
by hurrying up and scheduling, polishing and planning for the next day.

Maybe it's the difference between a nurse and a doula.
A nurse is cleaning up as we go,
a doula just comes back when it's over and cleans up the mess.
Maybe this is why I could never be a nurse -
in the moment,
                         I just don't care about the mess -
it's not going anywhere but people's souls are in danger.

I think I just found another foil for the Mary and Martha story, but that isn't part of this week's lessons.

As though it matters where we put it as long as we can find it when we need it.

Oh yeah, definitely a doula, definitely that Mary.

I have never been that other Mary.
I have never lost my own child.
But I have walked with Mary twice.
I have been those unnamed companions of Mary.
Twice.
I know why they have no names.
They cannot have names.
When the Holy Spirit borrows your body,
your name doesn't matter, doesn't exist.
And that is the gift the Spirit gives you in exchange.

It's Holy Week again.
Jesus is going to doula the world.
Again.
It seems even more unbearable this year, because we never stop
muttering,
praying,
whispering,
shouting, his name.

Perhaps this is why Holy Saturday is so empty,
so devoid of all the other ritual housework.
Saturday is that doula time,
when the only thing that makes it bearable is that it isn't you.

This namelessness,
I have never before understood.
I never had to.
There are unnamable,
almost unspeakable places in this life,
so many Saturdays in this life.
And the blessing of self immolation,
that makes possible the work of shifting pain from people to it's rightful place in God,
sound like insanity on any given Tuesday.

Religion points.
Priests point.
Church points.
Sunday points.

But a really good Saturday is clear smooth glass.

God in relationship

A lot of people wander about this life talking about their "personal" "realationship" with "Jesus." And they are generally creepy to me, even when they are my family and I love them.

One of the many struggles I have had in my faith has been the struggle of gendered language and breaking through the nonsense I was taught as a child. Getting to the point where "Our Father" did not mean, my bastard of a father, writ large, or some evil patriarchy that was either fearful or envious of my vagina took a long time. And it isn't that there are not other metaphors in the bible for the relational qualities of the God-human experience, there are plenty, but they aren't lifted out in the same way as the Father, Righteous Bastard image.

I think what I find most appalling in the personal relationship with Jesus attitude, and it happens in many places that never use that phrase, is that people never seem to step back and listen to what they are saying. Most of these relationships are incredibly rude and abusive and militant. And to question them is to set off all sorts of crazy baggage in people.

Now, I happen to believe that God is good, and that God is engaging in as healthy a relationship as possible. Because I also know, in all the relationships of my whole life, I bring plenty of baggage and my best trick is to project it onto the other party and then make out like they are oppressing me.

And given how complex and subtle a relationship with God is, most of the action - it's actually coming from me. Especially the drama. And I will admit, it is very, very hard to separate God from my drama and all the drama everyone else is projecting all over the place, too.

Here is a bit from Freitham, The Suffering God, on the "organ-ismic" as opposed to the "monarchical" God:

"The world is not only dependent upon God; God is also depended upon the world. The world is not only affected by God; God is affected by the world in both positive and negative ways. God is sovereign over the world, yet not unqualifiedly so, as considerable power and freedom have been given to creatures. God is the transcendent Lord; but God is transcendent not in isolation from the world, but in relationship to the world. God knows all there is to know about the world, yet there is a future which does not yet exist to be known even by God. God is Lord of time and history, yet God has chosen to be bound up in the time and history of the world and to be limited thereby. God is unchangeable with respect to the streadfastness of his love and his salvific will for all creatures, yet God does change in the light of what happens in the interaction between God and the world."

So basically, if you are totally freaked out by all that, you aren't having a personal relationship with Jesus, because you can't even imagine your God as capable of having a human interaction with you. Now to be totally fair, I don't really want to have a personal relationship with Jesus, and I pretty much never want to ponder or enact "what would jesus do" because Jesus generally does all the things that I don't want to. Most especially, Jesus DIED for me, and I have no intention of DYING for you. That is the theoretical that I aim for, but at the end of the day, that is the cold hard truth of the matter. And if you don't answer your bracelet with that, you should just take it off and stop embarrassing yourself.

What do Christians Look Like

(The lovely thing about reading Stringfellow is the huge sigh of relief that I am not the only person to have ever thought this. I am not the only person to have believed the church to work this way. It also means I don't have to think so damn hard - the wheel is already there.)

"For lay folk in the church this means that there is no forbidden work. There is no corner of human existence, however degraded or neglected, into which they may not venture; no person, however beleagured or possessed, whom they may not befriend and represent; no cause, however vain or stupid, in which they may not witness; no risk, however costly or imprudent, that they may not undertake. This intimacy with the world as it is, this particular freedom, this awful innocence toward the world that Christians are given, makes them look like suckers. They look like that to others because they are engaged in the wholesale expediture of life. They look like that because they are without caution or prudence in perserving their own lives. They look like that because they are not threatened by the power of death either over their own lives or over the rest of the world. They look like that because they are free to give their lives - to die - imminently, today, for the sake of anyone or anything at all, thereby celebrating the One who died for all though none be worthy, not even one (cf 1 Cor. 12:19)."

*all the bold and italics mine. And yes, still Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith.

Without quoting, he goes on to say that the priesthood, the ecclesiastical orders, are there to support that work, not to be a substitution to that work. I had felt it a sacrifice to take on the priesthood, to support others doing the work, to make my world smaller so others could see the world as bigger. But that isn't how most laity or most in ecclesiastical orders see what they are doing. So, you know. That is probably the biggest reason no one had my back in all that mess I let go on for way too long.

More importantly, the lack of reinforcing this message is what keeps me out of church on Sundays. It was bad enough when I knew I could preach to myself or I could meet with a bible study group that supported the hard work. But anymore, I just can't stomach the aren't we so special, we Episcopalians, we tolerate and gracious people of God who being mostly of the well to do class, can rest on our paying taxes and who vote to let the state do the supporting of the poor, prisoners, widows and orphans.

And I can't even bear the thought of returning to the "we are the oppressed people of God, whom, if we could just get the poor, prisoners, widows and orphans to just go away, could all receive all the fame and fortune God is just waiting to give us."

What I really want to rant on today is tangentially related to this, so I'll add it anyway. Why is it that all of our laws, all of our structures, are defined by the private sexual relations of two people? The definition of household, what it means to have/be a dependent in the tax and housing codes? What would it look like to bring back economic patriarchy? Would we have more art? Would we all be able to eat better? Would we be healthier and happier? Because it seems to me that the dismantling of the extended household has been a terrible idea, something that has created even more problems for widow, orphan, poor, and prisoner. 'Merica is a terrible overlord. Just sayin.

The definition of failure

(November and December were a bit of Mr. Toad's wild ride around here, in a good way, though. What fell through the cracks was my morning reading, which I decided to take a bit of time and do this morning.)

Stringfellow describing the revival of a local church who had lost the building some 20-30 years ago.

We "...gathered as a house church, reciting the daily office or, occasionally, antecommunion, doing some Bible study, and discussion the news of the island and the world. Once in a while a priest would visit and there would be Holy Communion. Free of the usual parish encumbrances of organization and property, the house church gradually attracted more and more people, and in the summer weeks it seemed appropriate to begin to have weekly services with a visiting priest at the site of the ruins of the building that had been demolished by act of God in 1938."

"That may have been a fatal decision..... We do not do Bible Study any more; we do not seriously consider the mission of the church in the world, including Block Island; we seldom ask any ecumenical question. We are into raising money, which we will likely spend to embellish the social life of Episcopalians and their kindred in the summer colony. Has anyone ever heard this story about the church before?"

William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word, excerpt from Simplicity of Faith, 1982

That, right there, sums up the whole of the problem. And not just with my current local parish, but with the parish I started the whole mess in up in Portland. I don't want to be on the vestry, I just don't give a rat's ass about the building - especially if the building is for the sake of the Episcopal congregation that meets there - even if they are sharing the space in order to keep the lights on. That happens all the time. That drives me insane: Dear God, I am going to follow your itinerant preacher son by erecting an edifice and then working to my last breath to makes sure that it remains standing.

You know, one thing the Mormon's are pretty spot on about is the church building. All the money is raised up front, and various "subchurches," groups we would have pushed to build their own "local" church building, share that building until it literally cannot hold any more. Then, the whole group starts raising money, until it's all paid for, to build another building, when they then rework the boundaries and spread out the people and then when two buildings are full and so on.

It is not about the building. It is not about the stained glass. The stained glass wasn't even about itself - it was about the arts and supporting the arts and recognizing that artists have a special connection and means of sharing about God. We really don't support artists having visions anymore, and when artists do have visions of an overt religious nature, they have to go on and on about how the work is not religious in nature so that they can actually show it. And so the world very carefully has religious experiences that they pretend they are not having, and the church keeps on inviting preschools that are not "churchy" into their buildings in order to keep the lights on for the 12-25 people who show up on Sunday morning at 10am.

I don't dislike those Sunday morning people. They are generally doing so much good in the world, maintaining mission and ministry that was the passion of someone long dead that they can't actually do anything but church with a side of family. For me, to be a 40+ year old woman and a "church lady" keeping up appearances and keeping up the building and the ministry to the Lion's Club that was the passion of Fred whose been dead these past 10 years is to be a failure in my faith.

Failure. The definition of church as I see it almost everywhere is my own definition of failure. And spending my life being judged by people who are failing seems to be a complete rejection of all that metanoia I got from all that therapy that the church insisted I needed and then rejected the fruits of.

I think I'll just keep reading to myself in the morning for now. I think I'll just keep being in the world and being an example of some different way of being present (although I'm pretty bad at it these days) and maybe, just maybe, in the future, some other opportunity for religion in an organized fashion will pop up.

Indignities

The more I read, the longer my perspective becomes. I used to think that things were always getting better and better - or worse and worse - but the thing that strikes me now is that things are getting same and same.

Diligence in the "little" indignities, the things we accept after fighting for so long, is where we must go if we are to stop having a police state, an economy build on black bodies as widgets, work as indentured servitude.

Where in our lives is the safe space, the space we can get big hugs and regroup and know we can come back to after a day in the fray? Why is comfort and dignity so constantly under siege. Where to go when the traditional places - family or church - are the places that are eating you the most?

"with Jesus"

When I die, do not say I am with Jesus now. If I have died in order to be with Jesus, then Jesus totally failed.

You know, I wrote that rant this morning before I even knew that Alice was dying and now, she is dead - she is not with Jesus knitting at the piano.

And I have one week to get all this irritation sorted out - or maybe just find my beta blockers, before the memorial - because Baptists don't have funerals? I don't even know.

But seriously, don't say it.