Buddha Moon

Pin Oak, Hemlock, Black Walnut: When the great Chaos named these trees The Wind that touches us all carried these names to us. In utero, before I even knew what words were - Before I learned how names could disjoint and categorize, Before I knew Song, there was Wind In the flirtations of mosquitoes, In the graceful applause of flapping birds in flight., Before I knew the hammering of the clock There were acorns dropping through Forest canopies Tapping at the feathery bed of raw umber pine needles That is Forest's floor below. Tree Frog sings of Night to come As Holy Dusk fills space left by vacant leaves And craggy branches as they wave madly about. A Buddha Moon rises to rest its belly Over the closing lids of Sunlight’s eyes And skips Horizon’s rope to wake me wide.

Reasons I Can't Sleep

Two cats squall in the dark trees behind the house. They sound like—what? A pair of alien babies raging at their lazy parents On and on it goes, they must be tearing each other to ragged furry bits I’ll find bloody fluff on the lawn. Beside me you lie listening too. The bills are due. The leaky tub. The mysterious must in the downstairs hall. And a number of nagging phone calls, some we made, some we should have but didn’t, some that come ringing when we’re just about to get out of the house, bringing news from various fronts from the west, reports on the latest tragedy—a double mastectomy, a fractured pelvis (she slipped on an airport floor), a mahogany breakfront that nobody wants or needs (call the salvation army, please!) From the east, it’s the child’s school calling, you didn’t send enough food for his lunch, she refuses to sit at the peanut-free table she used a four-letter word during writing time Shit, who wouldn’t It’s 3:14 The cats have stopped. You’re snoring. I’m spiraling endlessly from worry to memory and back dreams I should have let go everything I should have let go last time I saw him, my father looked so old I remember him driving his convertible GTO, driving us for ice cream with the ragtop down and now there’s only one thing I’d like to know how does it all go so fast when the night is so long so slow Debra Jo Immergut

The Hungry Ghost and the Holy Ghost (Sermon)

I had grand plans to preach a sermon that would somehow tie up the strands of Christianity and Buddhism and modern day psychological wisdom and allow all of you to leave this building feeling vibrant and renewed and inspired and full of understanding, and incidentally think I was a really great preacher. Instead, all I wanted to write about was my eating disorder. Is that even a sermon? Isn’t that totally narcissistic? Isn’t that completely inappropriate? I don’t know, but I do know this is West Cummington, and if someone’s going to stretch the definition of “sermon” anywhere, this is the right place to do it, though I have cleverly hidden the fact that the protagonist of the sermon is really me. Lately the word “Abundance” has made its new-agey way into my various lines of vision—the books people give me to read, the emails that come across my desk; it’s peppered into sentences from the mouths of some of my best friends. And when I’m face to face with one of these friends, it’s all I can do to keep my mouth from twitching or my eyes from narrowing. And it’s not just that the word is new agey. After all, I’m a life coach. How much more new agey can you get? It’s that the word “Abundance” has to my mind the ring of winning the lottery, or a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth. That and people who use it in a sentence often precede it with the phrase, “manifesting your.” Warning: If you listen closely to this sermon, you will find the word “manifest” in several of its manifestations at least three times. To this descendent of the Calvinists, the word “Abundance” smacks of greed. It makes me nervous. And I happen to have a client—I won’t say she’s my favorite client, but she is definitely the one to whom I pay the most careful attention. This client, you see, when she hears the word Abundance, for some reason it makes her scared she’s going to gain weight. So I said to this client, “really? How strange.” And then I give her the instruction I give all my clients: I tell her to meditate every day, and to notice her habitual thoughts, what Jack Kornfield calls our “top ten hit parade.” You know, the top ten things over which each of us as individuals obsesses. Some of us obsess about our neighbor’s terrible taste in Christmas decorations (and how they are still up, even though it’s mid January) and others will obsess over the big game in high school where the should-have-been winning field goal missed by inches. I have plenty of respectable fears: fear that the world will be destroyed by our greenhouse gasses, fear that humankind will not overcome our prejudice and hatred in my lifetime, fear that my small beloved Northampton will become so yuppified and gentrified and supersized by the time Lila’s a teen-ager that we may as well live in the Washington DC suburbs where I grew up. I suspect, knowing this congregation, that you might share some of these fears. They may even be in your top ten list too. My client, however, believes that if she eats an almond she will instantly gain five pounds. And she’s not alone, either. One morning last week, I picked up the new York Times and read a story about how, in Brazil, their once rather zaftig ideal has been replaced with our insidious anorexic one, and to date, six Brazilian models have died from complications of anorexia. Meanwhile, in our country, we have what the same newspaper commonly refers to as the obesity crisis. So while I’d like to joke about my client’s obsession with weight and body size, I know it’s no laughing matter. Not for her, and not for anyone else who is in pain at the sight or thought of a doctor’s scale. My client, you see, is in recovery from an eating disorder. Sometimes she wants to say, “I have recovered from an eating disorder,” but as anyone who’s been through a 12 step program can tell you, members never really recover; they simply have a daily reprieve from the addiction, compulsion or manifestation (see, that word again!) based on their fit spiritual condition. (By the way, I know people who are addicted to going to 12 step meetings. I have a friend who’s been in recovery for over 30 years and she goes to 21 meetings a week. Her two children barely know her. She’s a wreck. I saw her recently and she told me she’s hit bottom and is now going to Overmeeters Anonymous.) Anyway, as I was saying: some days my client feels completely free from her crazed thoughts about how huge her body is, how in just a few minutes she is surely going to balloon up to twice her size and how even a whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth isn’t anywhere nearly enough to satisfy her boundless appetite. Some days, she might have a shadow of a thought like this, and from her evolved 12 steppy/ Christian/Buddhist/Somatic Experiencing place of Witnessing, she can gently offer compassion to that Jungian shadow self. She breathes in and out and feels her heart expand to twice its normal size, and she knows that she has enough, she does enough and she is enough. She is free. She would no more get on the scale than she would eat a whole pig. And then there are the other days. These are the days when she rushes into Barnes & Noble to buy a friend’s child a copy of Jon Muth’s wonderful “Zen Shorts,” a children’s book based on Buddhist stories, and she passes by the display of the newest diet books. She pauses. Then she keeps walking: Stay away from the book display! Just say no! And then on the way back, she pauses again, thinks, “One little peek won’t hurt me. Well, it might hurt me, but it won’t hurt anyone else.” And so she picks up the latest diet book—this one is about how if you remove all flavor from your food, you will soon lose your appetite and pretty much be able to eat whatever you want and never gain weight, because food now has the appeal of dried old shoes to you. All you have to do is boil your chicken, boil your potatoes, eat a lot of kale and make sure you keep everything separate because it’s in the mixing of foods together that temptation gets its evil foothold. Oh, and take fish oil supplements. She starts to imagine how she will explain to her husband why they are suddenly eating nothing but boiled cabbage for dinner. But before she picks up the book and races to the counter with it, she pauses (see, her life coaching is paying off.) And for some reason, the passage from Mark about the loaves and fishes comes to mind, and along with it, the word “Abundance.” She suddenly has an image of a vast spring meadow, somewhere far up in an alpine setting, Jesus’s lilies of the field, purple and yellow violets everywhere, Grieg’s springtime piece fluting away in the background. She takes one of those famous deep breaths and puts the book down. She begins to talk to herself, gently. Why do I have to do so much all the time? Why do I worry so much about being hungry? Why do I equally worry so much about getting fat? Many people who suffer from addictions or compulsive behaviors get diagnosed with anxiety disorders. This is a fancy way of saying that we’re scared and that taking in the substance or acting out the behavior calms certain regions of our brains, allowing us for awhile to feel less anxious and believe we appear to others as more normal. Addicts are famous for hoarding. The text for Alcoholics Anonymous is full of stories of alcoholics hiding bottles in hampers, the tank of the toilet, in pockets of dressing gowns, etc. Food addicts find clever ways to eat entire pies and cakes from the bottom up, so that when family members remove the lid of the cake tent come across just the frosting, hanging out above a nibbled away skeleton. We do this because we’re afraid there’s never going to be enough. How could there be when this hole inside me is so vast, so bottomless, so…abundant…that no amount of anything could ever fill it? We live in an entire culture based on the Abundance/scarcity spectrum. The people who immigrated here over the past five hundred years were generally escaping terrible circumstances—famine, poverty, crowded living conditions—scarcity. And what they encountered, or at least what they hoped to encounter, what is part of the American Dream, is Abundance. Geographical, financial, psychological and emotional (for what is the guarantee of the Declaration of Independence? We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We do???) And we have ample ways of getting our caloric needs met. We evolved as a species designed to keep from starving at all costs, which is why so many of us lucky survivors inherited our ancestors’ slow metabolisms. Their efficiency led directly to our existence. Up until really midway through the last century, chubbiness was a sign of wealth. The waif-like were poor people; people who used their bodies to make a living; people who couldn’t afford to eat meat or sugar; people who measured out their precious sticks of butter as if they were gold. Now, the cheapest food sources are also some of the most densely caloric; sugar, flour and fat are plentiful, and a large part of our population subsists mainly on these three food groups. It’s meat, fish and vegetables that are dear. In earlier times, we knew instinctively that these were the prizes of the hunters and gatherers, of the farmers and gardeners alike. We worked hard to put these things on the table, knowing that sugar and butter, though equally hard to come by, weren’t the foods that would keep our children strong and healthy. You would think that we would relax now that we have enough to eat. But somehow we don’t. Rather than be grateful for what we have, we remain anxious that we don’t have enough. My client knows this all too well. Some days her anxiety revolves around fear that she won’t get enough cereal in her bowl. Some days it revolves around fear that her jeans will be too tight. It’s the same coin; different sides. But she’s been paying attention recently. She’s been noticing this feeling, this godawful never enoughness, this sudden fury with her body for having such a ridiculously slow metabolism that keeps her 1. fat and 2. hungry, and she’s been watching it. In Buddhism, this constellation of feelings is imagined as a Hungry Ghost, a being with a huge body and a tiny head and mouth. This Hungry Ghost takes over her body at various times with alarming predictability. When she gets on the scale, for example. No matter what the number is, the Hungry Ghost seems to rouse himself and peer down and if the number is low, he says, “Whoopee!! Let’s party!” If the number is high, oddly, his body grows larger and his head and mouth grow smaller. He feels greedy, selfish, like a loser, and this makes him want to overeat. My client notices when she’s gained a pound or two she also gains a fear of being hungry. And furthermore, she notices that this fear of hunger is actually worse than the hunger itself. So she eats a little more at her meals in order not to feel hungry mid-day, or, worst of all, hungry in the wee hours when she wakes up thinking about her daughter’s college education or how terrible she is at keeping house plants alive, or how she’ll never write another coherent word again. The wee hours are when the Hungry Ghost is at his most powerful. My sense from the passages we read is that Jesus probably knew the Hungry Ghost. Jesus surely met him during his forty days and nights in the wilderness. The devil tempted him not dissimilarly to the ways in which our immigrant ancestors were tempted: with food, with land and with power. Jesus was hungry—it said so in the Bible. And yet he was wise—being Jesus—and he knew that the food with which the devil was tempting him was not real sustenance. It was the kind of food that fills with no real nourishment: “Man does not live by bread alone,” he says to Satan. And, when we take our awareness away—when we are asked to play God, as Jesus was when the Devil challenged him to test his powers or promised him omniscience—we believe the Hungry Ghost’s lies—that it’s all up to us, that there’s never enough, that we’re going to have to eat and eat and eat through that tiny little mouth while our belly grows ever bigger. Jesus didn’t eat, didn’t take the bait, so to speak, because Jesus had faith in his God. He had made a commitment to fast for forty days—to be with life on life’s terms, to be with what was-- for his own reasons. I suspect he knew there would be a prize far greater than the present ending of his sufferings if he stayed his course. Similarly, the Buddha sat all night beneath the Bodhi tree to witness all of his fear—the armies of Mara-which came to torment him, and at the end of his suffering he placed his hand upon the ground so that the world would bear witness to his ability to stay present. To stay awake, to remain aware, to be mindful. When my client eats a meal, she has to be mindful. She can’t zone out and grab a handful of nuts. She has to look very carefully at her portions and make sure she’s getting not too much and not too little. To do this, she can count on what the Buddhists and the somatic experiencers call Awareness, what the 12 steppers call Higher Power and what the Christians call Jesus. And after years of hanging around wise people, she is learning that she doesn’t need the Hungry Ghost to go away. She just needs to know he’s there. She still might feel ravenous and fat simultaneously, but she doesn’t have to act on either of those feelings when she has that divine quality called Being Awake. And oddly, the feeling of never enoughness, that hole inside her, seems gently filled when she comes into presence with the breath, with the Hungry Ghost, with the teachings of Jesus. Last week in church, Cherylann talked about rituals, and I realized that my client’s ritual of bowing her head and thanking God for her food and also for her ability to eat the right amounts is a big part of the solution to her previously disordered way of eating. When she takes this time to thank God, she is practicing gratitude: thank you for this food. Thank you for mindfulness. Help me to be awake as I eat; thank you for enough. Help me to see what is enough. I don’t get to know why I am so fortunate to have this beautiful bountiful meal while someone else goes hungry, and I eat it gratefully in the name of that one who doesn’t have enough. And suddenly, I got it about Abundance. When we give thanks from our hearts and souls, we feel richly blessed and right-sized and incredibly grateful. Abundance, after all, is gratitude made manifest, the tangible form of gratitude. Abundance is what we experience as soon as we become grateful. My daughter has learned how to wave. One of her babysitters taught her last weekend while I wasn’t looking, and now she crumples her hand in towards herself, thoughtfully and meditatively watching the collection of fingers pulling in to the hand. And although friends say, “Just you wait; it only gets better,” I can’t imagine anything better than this moment in time, this fleeting milestone of development, this nascent greeting, this early communication. She seems to be in an in-between place currently; in between infancy and the toddler she is threatening to become every time she does her army crawl across the carpet, or almost lifts herself to standing by grabbing onto the neck of my guitar. But then again, she has been on her journey since the moment she came into the world--always in between one stage or another. And anyway, I think my work is to notice that hers is not so much a journey as a constant arrival: now. Now. Now. Now Now. For me, this is the definition of the Holy Ghost: the merging of the sacred and the everyday, recognized in the present moment. When I can be fully present with my daughter and see the holy in her, a third presence manifests. “Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there will I be,” says Jesus, who left his Holy Ghost to remind us of his ever attentive, ever present completely unusual and absolutely ordinary humanity. So when my client comes over for a meal, which she does with uncanny frequency, we’ve been inviting the Hungry Ghost to join us at the table. And we invite Jesus too, since he’s a relaxed kind of guy and always seems both patient and amused by the Hungry Ghost parts of us. We sit down to our meal; the flavor and textures, the way they mingle, we breathe a few times. We imagine that field up in the mountains, the one full of violets and lilies. We eat until we’ve had enough, and to my great surprise, my client has left food on her plate. There’s food in the serving dishes, which we will wrap up for another meal. We give thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Scripture Passages: The Temptation of Jesus 1Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." 4Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" 5Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6"If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: " 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'" 7Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 8Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9"All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me." 10Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'[d]" 11Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. Matthew 6:28-30 28"And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29yet I say to you that not even Soloman in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30"But if God so clothes the (C) grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? (D)You of little faith! Mark 6:39-45 (New American Standard Bible) New American Standard Bible (NASB) 39And He commanded them all to sit down by groups on the green grass. 40They sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. 41And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up toward heaven, He blessed the food and broke the loaves and He kept giving them to the disciples to set before them; and He divided up the two fish among them all. 42They all ate and were satisfied, 43and they picked up twelve full baskets of the broken pieces, and also of the fish. 44There were five thousand men who ate the loaves.

Morning Meditation (What The Bats Told Me)

“How we long for morning!” is what coffee sings To us with aromatic melodies. How tissue soft it is; how cat-like it stretches, This colorful ribbon that is worn around the Neck of the day. We remember things: like how to throw a curve ball – Toothy seams touching fingers callused by rawhide. Like a curveball, the day spins away from us, Once it is released, once it is pitched. Morning is the empty glass bottle, all angles And curves that sits with the patience of a garden, Wild with the kind of wanting that we do not Usually carry around in our wallets Like pictures of our family. Desirous as a hairpin that needs to control; Searing as dry ice in its stillness; As insistent as a cell phone. Even the bats above, turning in for the day, know That light has a serrated edge like a quarter With which it tries to grip the slippery dark And push it down. We may doubt everything else about our lives But never how the morning is ours – How we belong to it – How right it is to love the felt part of the day Before it turns on us. M C Biegner 9/2004

Daylight

Shade moving freely, as quiet as oil, I thought it was you for one long moment. It held lust and rage just like you did once, Now it holds surrender the way summer Air holds moisture. It seems we would not be Able to save each other like we thought We could. Our new worlds drawn out in crayon, We drew all the fantasies we would need. We made play, like children. Still, as newborns, We sought relief in cool, shifting shadows. Until daylight wore us down with the strength Of Tidal fingers sculpting a beachhead. Until we peered over the water’s edge And recognized who it was that we were, And to whom we ultimately belonged. M C Biegner 6/28/06

dad, carole king and autumn

The girl opens the front door to her house a crack. The toes of her small bare feet are on the colder metal door frame and her heels rest on the warmer wood floor of the house. It is fall. The leaves have started to change from a duller shade of green to sharper shades of yellow and orange. But it is still early enough in the season that the cold bite of the air is surprising to her cheeks warm and flushed from the prancing and leaping and turning, the grande jete-ing and pirouetting that she had been doing throughout the house just moments before. Her dad’s favorite evening-time music—Carole King’s Tapestry album is playing on the stereo in the living room next to where she stood. Some nights he would push the coffee table to the side of the room and take her fairy princess ballerina hands in his big dad hands and pull her onto their dance floor. She liked to stand on his feet and dance to songs like “I Feel the Earth Move” and “Smackwater Jack.” Sometimes her mom would come in with her brother after dinner was in the oven and she had some time for dancing. Then they would all rock their hips and snap their fingers and all sing along. This particular evening the girl’s mom had taken her little brother and sister for a ride in the car while she did some errands. And the dad wasn’t dancing or even sitting and reading the paper in the living room like he liked to do on Sundays. The girl leans forward on tip toes and peeks her messy pig tailed head out the door a little further. She smells something like burning and sweet and sees her dad sitting on a chair on the front porch smoking a pipe, eyes fixed on something out somewhere in the yard in front of him.

“Daddy, Mrs. Jenson said that smoking is bad for you”

The expression on his face softens to something like amused, but his gaze doesn’t change. “She is right.”

“You just don’t care?” By now the girl has stepped out onto the cement porch, which feels warmer on the bottom of her feet than she would have predicted. She walks over to her dad and leans over, placing her elbows on arm of the chair and rests her head in her hands. Her blue denimed bottom with the flower embroidered on the back pocket sticks out behind her. She is staring intently at the big man who almost looks as if he could have tears in his eyes. He doesn’t move his head, but shifts his eyes slantways to look at his daughter.

“I care. What’s it to ya?” He smirks, teasing.

“Then why do you do it?” She stands up, hands on hips.

“Pipes are different. And I don’t smoke them all the time. I just like to sit on my porch when the seasons are changing and smoke a pipe. One of the little joys of my life.” He says that last sentence with an extra dramatic emphasis and then chuckles. The girl chuckles too.

“It does smell nice. Can I try?”

“No, But I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“When you grow up and have a house and a little girl, then you can sit on your front porch and smoke a pipe and undergo interrogation just like me.”

The girl smiles.

“What’s interrogation mean?”

“Questions.”

“Oh.” She giggles.

“Ya know, this pipe belonged to my father. When I was growing up, my father used to like a good pipe once in a while, too.” There is silence. His eyes are full with almost-tears again. The opening notes of “Way Over Yonder” can be heard from inside the house. The little girl looks down, uncomfortably. They don’t ever talk about grandpa because they don’t want to make dad sad. Grandpa died before her mom and dad even met. “Check this out.” He blows out a few smoke rings.

“How did you do that?” ”Very well.” The little girl rolls her eyes. The dad laughs from his belly, pleased with himself.

“Da-ad.”

“What?”

The girl sighs, defeated. The dad returns to looking out into the yard.

Every fall for the rest of her life, after they have spent an afternoon raking piles of leaves, she will observe her dad having at least one evening like this. Every year she’ll peak out the window and he will be sitting there, blowing smoke rings and staring out into the front yard. She will just know that he is thinking about his dad. And every year she won’t go outside and sit next to him and she wont hold his hand and ask about the grandfather she never knew.

But for now the little girl returns to the house and goes into the living room and decides to continue dancing. The perfect ballet song is playing and she moves slowly and gracefully:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue An everlasting vision of the everchanging view A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Her dad remains in solitude and silence on the porch until dark.  

Easy Planting

There are early mornings when Winter has not released its white knuckled Grip on patches of ground just yet. Still, I make a hole and clear out space in you the way A trowel removes the dark chocolate clay of earth. As I dig down further it is striped with strands of coarse Blonde sand that makes a type of coffee blend That is a luminous tint, it shines almost like ceramic. The secrets of living are always aromatic: The scents of new grasses teased out by breezes, Manicured, manured plots bulging with richness, While nearby rowdy and fragrant hyacinths urge me on The whole time. The gritty feel of you under my fingernails, The damp stains on my knees, The way my finger feels as it slides Down the carved wooden trowel: This is foreplay I tell you. The days of easy planting sustain us far beyond The ways that the hard packed snow of our failures betray us. M C Biegner 5/2006

Nerissa's Easter Sermon

Call to Worship M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because God cannot be contained M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because Jesus lives in you and me now. M: What will you do now? P: Recognize everyone I meet today as Christ in his many distressing disguises. Scripture: Tom Nields-Duffy: Luke 23: 13-49 Gail Tenney Nields: John 20:1-20; John 21: 15-17 Sermon “If You Want to Live, You Gotta Die.” When considering what I wanted to talk about on this Easter Sunday, it occurred to me that people looking for the answer to the question, “Did Jesus really die for our sins, and if so what exactly does that mean?” might not be the same people who would wander into the West Cummington Congregational church today. This is actually my first Easter here, and when I inquired about Easters past, I heard a rumor that Stephen began a sermon with the statement, “It’s a METAPHOR, people!” With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot, for the past six weeks, about resurrection as a metaphor. I’ve been thinking about life, death and rebirth; I’ve been thinking about the phase which Lent symbolizes so beautifully: the period of being planted, when we are still in the darkness of underground, hidden from the world, churning beneath the soil and metamorphosing into some new form: like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a red bud unfurling into a big green leaf. It might occur to you, looking up here at me in all my girthly splendor, that I have another reason for meditating on this topic, but we’ll leave that alone for now. I volunteered to preach the Easter sermon here, in part as a ruse to get my parents to come up for the weekend. As soon as I heard I’d been given the green light, I freaked out. My preparations for writing this sermon consisted of pondering a sentence I heard recently from an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault: “If you want to live, you’ve got to die.” Also renting all four disks of the Complete Beatles Anthology. What, you might ask, do the Beatles have to do with Easter? Being that this is West Cummington, I’m not that afraid of you coming after me for implying that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. I’m pretty sure that none of you burned your Beatles LPs back in 1966 when John Lennon made this infamous declaration. The Beatles, like Jesus, represented leadership to a group who had previously felt unseen and disenfranchised. The Beatles had a new, fresh message, of peace, love and understanding. They lived their lives-or at least their twenties-- for their music, and as George Harrison said towards the end of his life, they gave their nervous systems in service to the cause. One of them died a martyr and another was proclaimed dead, though he apparently rose again, backwards lyrics and mysterious license plates notwithstanding. But the real reason I bring the Beatles up today is because for me, born in the late sixties, they were a powerful example of humans who seemed larger than life and who lived to the fullest, never holding back, and who simply, finally, self-extinguished, like fast burning candles. And yet, they live on, even though their music is no longer in the top ten, even though half of the group is physically dead. Through the vehicle of fame and artistry, they have achieved a kind of immortality. It was easier for me as a young person to understand the Beatle myth than it was for me to understand the Christ story. They were flesh and blood to me, even though they had long stopped making music by the time I got turned on to them. One of my first spiritual experiences came after I learned that George Harrison had introduced the other Beatles to Transcendental Meditation. I took the practice on, though my version of meditating involved sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed and fantasizing about meeting all the Beatles on a desert island. Jesus, on the other hand, was a disembodied and invisible presence on our Presbyterian cross, a pastel drawing in a Sunday School book, a character in a song I didn’t like called “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” We humans, or at least this one, learn best from stories. That’s how I make sense of the world, and given the myriad stories in the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the many Buddhist parables, not to mention Greek Myths and the folk tales of every tradition on earth, I think I am not alone. Jesus himself taught through parable, or as a previous sermonizer in this pulpit suggested, koans. And as we have discussed, those stories sometimes made a lot of sense: like the story of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. But some of them are real head-scratchers: the one about the master of the vineyard who pays all the workers the same wage even though some of the workers worked from sun down to sun up while others worked for a mere hour. The one about the resourceful brides who wouldn’t share their oil with their sleepier and less on-the-ball sisters. The one from Mark about Jesus killing the fig tree just because it wouldn’t bear fruit out of season. For me, these stories begged the question: who is this Jesus and why should I worship him? And yet, funnily enough, as an adolescent I was happy to forgive the Beatles for experimenting with drugs, cheating on their wives, fighting pettily with each other about songwriting credits. That just proved they were human. Jesus was supposed to be the Son of God; some said he actually was God Himself, or at least one third of God. I wasn’t yet focused on the fact that Jesus, too, was fully human. As I grew older, my faith began to change, though my love for the Beatles did not. I began to read wonderful exegeses of the scriptures, heard sermons from different traditions about who Jesus was and what Jesus meant to do. After a very brief dalliance with Campus Crusade for Christ, I rejected the literal in favor of the literary view of Jesus. I read Elaine Pagels and dove into the Gnostic Gospels. I read Wordsworth and Emerson and wrote papers about William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, founders of the Unitarian Church. I had many arguments with fellow Christians in school about the meaning of the resurrection and whether or not we were supposed to take the Gospel as actual history (their view) or as myth and poetry (mine.) “Jesus is a radical socialist Jew!” I shouted. “Jesus came to right the wrongs of a petty, materialistic society! Jesus would weep if he saw the condition of the church today!” I pointed to the scriptures about the Pharisees, those petty pedants who missed the forest for the trees, who worried about plucking grain on the Sabbath and tried to understand God through their intellect. “God can only be known through the heart, and through direct experience!” said I, paraphrasing Emerson. The truth was, I was as guilty as they were in this respect: I was only experiencing God with my intellect. I could point out that the Bible mentioned the need to care for the poor 2000 times and homosexuality only twice. I could point out, to fans of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that Jesus abhorred it when people prayed in the streets. I could point out that the Gospels contradicted each other many times over, so how, therefore, could we take the Bible to be the literal word of God? And so on. But what I was failing to do was what I said I needed to do: see with the heart and not the mind. And more importantly, that I had to die to something if I wanted to live. I experienced the Beatles with my heart. I could also analyze their music and write scholarly papers on why they were the greatest pop band of all time. I could learn their songs note for note and memorize each of their individual discograpies. But in the end, the reason I loved them was wordless: it had to do with the way the music made me feel, especially when I lay in bed alone in my dorm room with the lights out and just listened to “Across the Universe” and “Hey Jude.” Music, like God, is ultimately an emotional experience. It wasn’t until I had a personal crisis myself that I began to experience God in this way, in the way music could reach my heart and align me, wordlessly and lovingly. I was thirty, immersed in a very ambitious music career, striving to be the next Beatles, and very sick with an eating disorder. I had tried everything to get well. I had a wonderful, gentle therapist, a supportive family, an acupuncturist, a meditation practice, about fifty books on the topic, several good friends who had been through what I was going through and a fierce determination to beat what was clearly a kind of addiction. But nothing worked, and as hard as I tried to get well, I kept getting sicker and sicker, more and more desperate and confused. What finally changed me was a kind of death, also known as surrender. I surrendered to my inability to conquer my problem alone; I surrendered to my limits as a human being, and I asked for help from Whomever was out there. I got on my knees and said a prayer, and with that prayer, a presence came; a wordless, loving, clear presence. A calm came over me, and a relationship began. I felt like Helen Keller in the last scene of the Miracle Worker: what had previously been an academic idea suddenly became direct experience. From that moment on, I could see. And what I could see was a God who loved me no matter what, a God I both recognized from the Bible as the loving father of Jesus, and-to my great surprise—as Jesus himself. And the stories in the Bible fell away at that point, seeming more like the scaffolding intending to hold the building in place as it was being built than the building itself, within which I was now dwelling. Actually, not all of the stories fell away. Some in particular remained and took on a vibrancy I had been missing previously. The many stories of Jesus healing hopelessly deformed and mutilated people began to resonate with me. As I felt myself healed, and around me saw others getting well, too, I saw first-hand the power of faith, the way God could enter a life and transform it from hopeless to joyful. And I learned a new definition of sin. In its original definition, sin meant, simply, that which separates us from God. No judgment, no shame-just separation. The absence of presence. From my meditation practice I was learning how elusive presence could be; that even as I sat diligently hour after hour, day after day, it still was like pulling teeth for me to just stay present with my breath, with myself, with that one-pointed concentration. Presence in and of itself began to feel like God, or at least the bridge between God and me. And I was playing with another definition of God. What if God was Reality? What if God was the river that flowed north to south? What if all God wanted from me was to show up and let the river carry me where it would? How would my life be transformed if I took that as my savior? That surrender to what is, and the simultaneous knowledge that no matter how bad things looked in the moment, what would never change was God’s absolute and perfect love for me? Here’s where things can get a bit soupy—I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable when speakers veer off the road of Biblical text and go cross-country with their “woo woo” experiences of God and Jesus, but I have no other way of telling this story. Like Paul, a writer with whom I have many issues, I found Jesus on my own road to Damascus and experienced him close up. Because of this I am forever changed. I was experiencing Jesus the way I experience music-wordless, timeless and the truest communication I’ve ever had. In this new view of my role and God’s role in the way life went, I grew a new perspective on the crucifixion story. For here was Jesus, someone whom I had come to know, not from the pages of the Bible, but in my own life, as a presence, a brother, a loving example of how to stay present with whatever was. As a healer, as a teacher, as a friend. I had a new perspective about the cross. I saw Jesus’s willingness to surrender to humiliation and torture as the ultimate expression of surrendering to What Is, even when What Is is grisly and inhuman and seems to be, at least to the disciples who fled the scene, the absolute worst ending to the story. But what I also know from my own experience is that if you really stay with What Is, no matter how miserable it may be, it will change, and more importantly, you will be changed. Everything dissolves eventually-everything and everyone dies- and everything-including you-is born anew. You wake up, look around you and blink and say, “how did this happen? I seem to have become transformed.” Elaine Pagel’s discussion of the Gospel Of Thomas had a huge impact on me when I was first coming into this new relationship. One of the ideas she posits is that Jesus can be interpreted as a kind of divine Twin (Thomas means Twin). As so, goes the theory, he really is both the Son of God and the Son of Man—and part of his message is to show us that we, too are sons and daughters of both God and human. To use a term coined by our modern day priests, our friends the psychotherapists, we could say that Jesus was the purest example of the Authentic Self we have yet experienced in a person who walked this earth: Jesus had such a clear understanding of reality and human nature, was always able to be himself, with no apology whatsoever, was always able to look straight ahead and walk where he needed to walk, even if that road took him across a lake near Gennesaret or up the hill to Calvary. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her wonderful analysis of the Passion story, shows how all the characters within it represent aspects of our false selves: Judas and his fear and greed and deceitfulness; Peter and his cowardice; Pilate and his ability to see the truth but unwillingness to go with it; the soldiers with their violence; the mob with its cruel taunts, and finally the thieves on either side of Jesus in the Luke version of the story. One thief says, “If you are the Son of God, get off the cross and save us too!” He joins the voices of the mob. The other thief says, “Shut up! This man is innocent, and we are guilty! Yet he dies with us!” He turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember us in the kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus turns to this thief and says, “In truth I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Today. Right now. You are with What Is and that, when we really accept it, is Paradise. And I believe one of the most crucial lessons Jesus taught us, both before his death and through his post resurrection example, is that he is within each of us and always has been. In Matthew 25:45, he says, “As you do to one of the least of these, you do to me.” After his death, he asks his disciple, “Peter do you love me? Then feed my lambs.” Pardon the Beatles pun, but the Jesus I have come to know really is within and without each of us, and I can no longer look at any individual and not see Jesus somewhere lurking within, in his distressing disguise. I still love the Beatles, although they no longer enter my life on a daily basis and teach me how to live. I tried to follow in their footsteps for years and it didn’t work. When I tried to find heaven through a number one hit and the love of a huge audience, this route made me sick, and then sicker. I guess I was a sinner, meaning I was separated from everyone else, trying to be above everyone. When I walk in the footsteps of Jesus, by which I mean when I walk my own path, understanding God through my own heart and raw experience, letting the light of God shine the way, I am well. More importantly, I have company. This is the kind of life everlasting that I believe in today.

Don't Forget The Sadness

Sadness gets mixed into everything we do, like your one tear that fell into our coffee. I think how it was the perfect miscegenation of spirit and earth for nothing is ever pure in this world, but neither is it puritanical: for we will never abdicate control! It is just the meniscus of egg white dropped into a bowl, touching the flour; it is round globes of oil which resist mixing with the opaqueness of cold milk; the separateness of these ingredients is what we overcome, making batter our mouths know is true and so inclines us to earnestly want one more piece of cake. M C Biegner 02/10/2006

Steps

I can feel the ice under my feet as I make my daily walk down Comm. Ave. I didn’t really expect this weather, just expecting a little colder air as the days wore into December. But now my feet hit hard brick and stretches of thinly crusted snow. The slippery wet leaves seem to be gone, which is rather a blessing. There are always those last few weeks of fall when the piles of leaves become dampened down by late rain, and you simply can’t trust your footing. I prefer the ice, even if the soles of my shoes lose all their softness.

I miss the smell of summer, it is so much more complex. The winter air is bracing, but it is just that; clear and cold. It lacks the subtlety of infinite life, of plants, dogs, and people. It even lacks the sounds of warm weather, the conversations, the open patios, the cars cruising by with radios hopping. In winter, I can barely sense the trees, but I know they are bare, as bare as the earth and the sky. As bare as the car windows rolled up tight. As hidden away as the passers by with their scarves wrapping half their faces. You can hear all that life pulled in tight. The winter air quickens my step, makes me feel sharp and awake, but it separates me from the world. I am on my own now to navigate the way, single steps taken on cold brick.

December 5, 2005

You Begin

This is how it happens: How a dog-eared evening With a long, sad face And wrinkled clothes Reminds us that temporary things Must be temporary. How boulders are turned into stones; How comedy and tragedy become history; How we become strangers all over again. It feels like tiredness; It stretches on and on like insomnia; It is as relentless as absence Yet, oh how it transfigures everything! First: It does so without malice. Second: It does so without conspiracy. Third: It does so without blaming anyone. So rake the leaves back onto the trees If it helps you; Buck up and stiffen the soft horizon; Push back the killing frost And hold the hunter moon at abeyance: The trees and the plants and the farmers Will not mind one bit. But I swear, this is how it happens, This is how it starts And where would I be in you otherwise?

I went to her for a hug and the rosary. Patriarchs carved in wax provided the light as we moved our hands across necklaces of seeds and asked our mother to pray for us. Outside--the moon bulged with light. It would be enough. We reached the end of our strings, touched our minds, our hearts, and our wings and watched the patriarchs dim with one faint exhalation. Cassidy Smith

Being There

The air is filled with the morbidity Of wet orange leaves. There is no way to fake the investment. There is no voice mail to leave. There is no email to send. There is no package to Fedex. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly in In “V” formation, Over a winking sun, In the early morning You know that nothing is ever lost. Like gauze wrapping open sores, These wounds are just passports Into the foreign land of others Who understand the language And who know the terrain. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly out In “V” formation, Over a killing frost, In the early morning.

A Short Story

I am short. I have always been short. It’s never been something I have given a great deal of thought however I am reminded time and time again how taller people seem to have the upper hand in most things. Certainly at concerts and movies I am reminded. I think of how easy it must be for taller people stand and not have to do the “bob-and-weave” like some prizefighter to see a performance. In certain athletic events for sure, height lends an advantage – basketball of course comes to mind. Having played basketball all my young adult life it was an interesting study in psychology to have to play against people who were taller than I was. Psychology suggests being short can lead to “Napolean” complexes where one attempts to overcome one’s physical deficiencies with huge egoistic displays of will and power. Even in the language we are dissed: we “come up short” and possess certain “shortcomings” all terms that conjure up pejorative images. The language itself suggests to us what we all seem to already know: that being short possesses inherent difficulties. So this is why I find the gospel story of Zaccheus so intriguing. Luke provides us with such a great detail about Zaccheus’ height you have to wonder why? What was the point of such an arcane detail? Why did Luke alert us to the fact that he was short? Here’s the reading from Luke: Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." So Zaccheus was a short, rich man. Clearly, his lack of height did not prevent him from becoming a “success”. Of course, no one needs to be reminded that he was a tax collector and they were not the most popular of people – sort of like today’s politicians or CEOs I would imagine. He was interested in this itinerant preacher who socialized with his kind, though frankly, between you and me, I think this postmodern thought of these wealthy Jews that were hated by their own people sort of misrepresents their social status. We almost feel sorry for these tax collectors but wealth back then was the same as wealth today, and most wealthy people I know don’t seem to mind their lives. I’m sure these tax collectors had parties with other lawyers and tax collectors and even invited some of the Roman Senators for the occasional lamb roast. So let’s not feel too sorry for stubby old Zaccheus. He was doing just fine, probably had a timeshare in Palestine, overlooking the Mediterranean. All this, and he was short. Maybe he was one of those with an overcompensating ego. Still Freud was a couple of millennia away so all anyone probably thought of Zaccheus was that he knew how to get the things he wanted. Then Jesus comes along and Zaccheus wanted one more thing. He wanted to see this preacher. He wanted to hear what he had to say but the crowds were crazy. He couldn’t see. So he finds a Sycamore tree. Now the Sycamore is a large tree with small flowers. Legend had it that Persian King Xerxes found this tree so beautiful he actually assigned it a personal bodyguard. Now I don’t know that Luke had this story in mind, but the Sycamore is a large beautiful tree. It’s wood provided shelter for the pilgrims who first came to America. It is almost the antithesis of how we picture Zaccheus. He climbs the tree presumably scrapping with the crowd, throwing the occasional elbow here and there. And there, aloft in the soft breeze of the Sycamore, Jesus sees him. Zaccheus’ ability to overcome obstacles has caused him to seek the goodness that is represented in Jesus’ message. Though the path is crowded with others, nothing, it seems, will get in Zaccheus’ way. In essence his ascent into the tree almost foreshadows Jesus’ “climbing” his tree later on as he dies on the cross. It is this ability to shed his old life and leave his earthly concerns below that makes Jesus look up at Zaccheus and pronounce salvation to his house. Zaccheus almost seems to promise a new life when Jesus implores him to come down, willing to pay him back four times what he may have defrauded others. I love the description of the grumbling people when Jesus announces he is going to stay with Zaccheus. It seems that we humans have not changed one iota since those days. We seem to be a species that is so incapable of allowing another to have one moment of joy without us wanting to step all over it. Zaccheus probably had visitors at his house, but certainly no holy men such as Jesus. No spiritual celebrities ever stopped there – not the Pharisees or Sadducees certainly. It would be, I assume, akin to the Dali Lama or the Pope coming to my house. Better clean the bathrooms for sure! In the end though, it is Zaccheus’ shortness that causes him to find the way. Because of his limitation, he seeks to overcome his inability in that overdeveloped, Napoleanic ego of his, It is our disabilities that help us discover what our limits are: are we too “short” in loving others? Are we too “short” in forgiving others? Are we too “short” in finding the good in people? If we allow these “disabilities”, our lack of stature, to force us into a tree to see the truth, then we become so much more than just what we are not. The measure of who we are as spiritual beings is not made in what we cannot achieve, but in what we have overcome and choose to overcome. So I can really relate to Zaccheus. He probably could never have dunked a basketball either. He was always chosen last in the Hebrew School basketball pickup games; I’m sure it took a toll on his self-esteem. But remember that it was what was most lacking in him – his height – that drove him to leave behind earthbound concerns and offer Jesus a place at his table. M C Biegner 10/19/2005

Ruined (A Poetic Fable)

Poetry has ruined me. More specifically, it has eviscerated the most cynical parts of me and left me split wide open like a wound requiring the most ethereal butterfly bandage one can imagine. It leaves me dangling in the winds of inspiration like a pair of old shoes tossed over telephone wires. It reuses the old junk I have long ago discarded into the emotional landfill that makes up who I am. I traffic in the most lethal kind of poetry too – the kind that bubbles up from truth; the kind that makes me useless for the numerous sacrifices made hourly upon the altars of pop culture. It is a syllogism of the unearthly: truth is beauty and truth is poetry therefore truth and poetry are one. It is an unearthed rarified beauty discovered rather than made, the way wires pull radio waves out of thin air. I sell poetry for food and the occasional cigarette – just the romantic ones – because it seems right to me that I live off romance in a macho, Hemmingway-standing-over-a-big-game-kill-in-Africa sort of way. The romantic sensibility has long become the vestigial organ of the twenty first century. I, for one, would love to change the basis for all commerce the way Richard Nixon in August, 1971 removed the gold backing of money. I would make poetry the basis by which all things are valued. Sometimes I hand roll a couple of fresh fragrant haikus and inhale their warm delicate structure and natural flavor. I hope that a few syllables of haiku will lodge themselves into the wet mucous walls of my lungs to foster great big tumors of metaphor or alliterative coughing that would result in me hacking up a few juicy couplets which I could use somewhere else in my writing. In the mornings I would mix up a batch of sonnets and cover them with sweet refrains of tumbling verse, served with a few sprigs of villanelle poems on the side for breakfast. We would consume them together, drinking coffee then later play the “Howl” version of Boggle where the object is to find anagrams from the letters that start lines or phrases from Ginsberg’s great classic poem. On weekends I head out to do chores around the house so I go down to the hardware store and exchange a haunting blank verse epic for a couple of gallons of paint and the clerk is simply overwhelmed and starts to weep. “This is way too generous for just these two gallons of paint,” he says and provides me change in the form of a few ad hoc limericks. Though this may strike you as odd in today’s world, and since poetry has ruined me, in this new world even hardware store clerks are nourished by poetry. The farmers who grow my food, the doctors who heal me, the teachers who instruct my children – in a ruined world poetry is like oil where people must line up and fill up their big SUVs with rhyme and alliteration and lyrics and meter. Where people line up now to give up hard earned money for random numbers, the quick pick would be changed to randomly select quotes from Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman or Ferlinghetti or Hughes or Chaucer. Poetry can ruin a world in ways that other things can only imagine. A few years back, Death came to take my best friend who was sick and dying from AIDS. I wrote poems to the many hospitals he frequented to pay for all the MRIs and CAT scans; for the blood transfusions and hours in the ICU; for the nurses and doctors and physical therapists who all tried to heal him. I wrote poems to the pharmacies to pay for all the drugs he needed. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until my hand cramped; until I filled dozens of journals trying desperately to save his life. On that last night, when Death came to take my friend, I quickly wrote this and handed it to him: New Day Like the heroic quiet light Of a sun that sets, You looked me straight in the eyes – Someday when our eyes lock again When the brown from your eyes Makes a haughty earth Upon which I will take all my stands; And when the blue from my eyes Gives you gentle and earnest repose; In this brand new place We will talk of many things About How to make everything fresh again. We will carry on important conversations Of what we always thought heaven Would be like That will fill large wheelbarrows. And everything we speak of Will fit inside the wheelbarrows With room to spare: What I love most about you And what you love most about me And what remains lamely behind, Draped over the heavy furniture Of all the living that we did. Poetry has ruined me and it seems to have ruined Death as well. The last I heard of him, he left my friend ashamed and crying and is now working in a garden center somewhere outside of Seattle. She walks in beauty like the night. There are no fewer than one thousand things in this ruined life of mine to which I could apply this single line of Byron’s. I carry it with me with all the jealous verve of a newlywed. I cling to it tightly as I do my credit card or driver’s license. I fiddle with it in my wallet as I head into a local bar for a nightcap. This one line has got to be good for a small glass of sherry for sure. M C Biegner 10/6/2005

Katrina Plays the Race Card

Katrina Plays The Race Card The race card has come up again. Katrina has landed like a ton of bricks and heaped third-world type devastation upon New Orleans and Mississippi. The faces we are seeing on TV without water and food, without homes or clothes, seem to be mostly black, so now the race card has come out. “Why did it take so long for help to arrive?” everyone wants to know, and was this simply a coincidence that the people most affected were black and elderly and poor? A discussion of this is not a bad thing, of course. I believe any occasion is a good one in which to discuss race relations because we so want to put this behind us we can almost taste it. People are angry because things should have been different. First, if a mandatory evacuation was in effect prior to the storm, why didn’t the state of Louisiana and Mississippi and the city of New Orleans provide the means with which to forcibly remove people who stayed in harm’s way? Why weren’t there busses supplied earlier on to help those who wanted to leave but simply couldn’t afford it? Why weren’t other places established to temporarily house those who had no place else to go before the storm? Then, why did it take so long for the guard to get in there and prevent some of the violence? More disturbing than the scenes of the storm’s wreckage were the stories of the violence and the increase of lawlessness when civil society truly broke down. Why wasn’t the National Guard in sooner? The explanation was given that it was still dangerous and they didn’t want any guardsmen to end up as part of the problem, but it seemed like we didn’t see the guard in there for days after the event. If it was safe enough for people to commit violence against each other, then why was it not safe enough for the guardsmen to come in and re-establish order? It’s clear that many things did not go right. But was race really the issue? Many people compared this to 9/11 but that was a different sort of tragedy. The size of this storm and the physics of the levees breaking causing the kind of flooding and wreckage it did was many times greater in area alone than the wreckage of the fall of the Twin Towers. The storm was very large and while the Towers collapse was a very big logistics headache, it doesn’t even compare in the scope of what happened in the gulf. People underestimated Katrina when it was a Category 5 storm, and they underestimated her damage potential as well. Here’s the thing with race: I don’t believe for a second that someone consciously said, “Well, it’s only New Orleans and Mississippi and there are just black people and poor there, so no rush getting in there to secure the area.” That is ludicrous. Still, the people affected were poor and black. Race was an issue in this case in the same way that race is most often an issue nowadays. Race was responsible in the way that the emergency planning for this event did not adequately consider these people who did not have the means to leave New Orleans or the Mississippi coast. Mississippi and Louisiana rank in the top 10 states for poverty. There is a case that can be made that poverty and race are related. If the poor are the ones bearing the brunt of any storm damage and loss of life then clearly there is some sort of link between poverty/race and survival. The same way that a black male has a life expectancy of 69 years compared to 75 years for a white male in this country (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/05facts/lifeexpectancy.htm) can be linked to things like access to better health care and better incomes, so too, being poor now provides a clear disadvantage when being considered in civil disaster plans. The apparent lack of response after the hurricane was just that: an apparent lack of response. In dealing with so many agencies bureaucratic mix-ups are inevitable, though should not be tolerated. The logistics of this rescue effort in such a large area are paralyzing. I don’t believe people watching understand this, and I certainly do not believe you can believe this if you are sitting on top of a roof for days wondering where in the hell the government is. I’m willing to give this administration and the state governors the benefit of the doubt in this regard. I guess I don’t want to believe that people would be this cynical. Clearly things could have been done better and clearly lots of people made lots of mistakes that cost lives. This should be investigated and other states should pay heed to these failings for possible problems in their own disaster planning. But did someone willfully fail because of race? I don’t think so. Such a notion belittles the heroic efforts of all people black and white, rich and poor, struggling right now to save people they don’t even know. The humanity of this event has not been lost on anyone. Afghanistan and Sri Lanka – two of the poorest nations on the face of the earth – are offering money for the victims. Fidel Castro has offered doctors. No one wants to see those people suffer. As time passes, I believe that there will be such a global outpouring of genuine, apolitical support not seen since after 9/11. Sometimes the worst of things can bring out the best of us too – the looting and violence notwithstanding. I believe that the lack of preparation for what should have been done with the poorest and blackest and oldest of citizens in these states was the effect of an institutional racismand classism that plagues all of us. This lack of awareness of or thought about these people in all things: poverty, jobs, civil rights and now it seems in emergency preparedness – are all the effects of the insidious racism which we refuse to believe exists in this country. This is twenty first century racism - the worst kind. This is the kind of racism that sits in the back of our minds and lets us pretend that in the event of a disaster each of us has an even chance of being saved. Katrina has shown us all that it doesn’t work this way. To paraphrase George Orwell, some of us are just more equal than others, it seems. This is the type of racism that is hard to nail down; for which it’s hard to hold someone accountable. We must force our eyes open to the marginalized and poor and black and elderly. They should never be made invisible - within the context of Hurricane Katrina or without. We owe it to the promise of what America is all about. We owe to ourselves since any one of us could be in that same situation. But mostly, we owe it to those who died at Katrina’s harsh lesson yielding hands.

Things Passed Down

faith yellow cotton dresses with impossibly tiny stitches golden bands with engravings inside the tendency to pick up river rocks laughter tears at the happy as well as the sad dark hair merry eyes the curve of a jaw dimples in the cheeks a face tipped to the wind flat feet child-bearing hips a string of pearls battenberg lace a roll top desk faded photos and a smile worth its weight in inherited platinum

Reflection (after attending a mass in mexico)

Today, more than ever before, it seems like a travesty to me: Light skinned man Robed in fine white linens with gold trim, Raising the glittering chalice, Lifting his youthful face towards the heavens, saying Take this, all of you… In the pew in front of me a dark skinned woman Wrapped in a threadbare shawl Holds a baby close to her. Another one beside her, A girl with a ragged dress but careful braids and a fistful of her mom’s skirt. Tired eyes, Rough skin, The woman whispers extra prayers as she gazes at the priest. Back home I’d start discussions over dinner about feminism and theology and women’s ordination, and we’d talk ourselves in circles until someone would pull the privilege card: Why waste your energy on this? Women in other parts of the world are worrying about much more urgent matters. And they’d be right. And it’d seem trivial. Until today When the priest’s proud voice echoes This is my body. In front of me she sits, Weakened bones, child at her breast. Her body knows sacrifice. Outside there are others waiting, Frail hands outstretched, hoping To find Christ’s love In just one While each hour Around the world Institutionally advantaged men Play the role of martyr Before congregations of poor mothers.

Evolution

If you kill a spider it will rain for seven years or at least that’s the way I think it works. This rain could come in very handy in many parts of the world and perhaps Oxfam should look into it. Of course, you would need another bug to stop the deluge from taking over. And then the insect-rights people might get concerned, sacrificing all those bugs when really they were here first. Who are we to impose our species onto the rest of the world, and why do we really think we are the sign of intelligent life? Seems almost the opposite if you look at it closely. How can a species get rid of its own piece of sky when clearly it needs it to breath? Sounds to me like we are definitely making room for someone smarter.

Maybe it really is the cockroaches. After all, they have figured out how to live in all those Manhattan high rises rent free, snacking on brioche crumbs and organic veggie shreds. You can’t get much smarter than that. Darwin probably overlooked this when he was figuring out survival of the fittest. Might have spent too much time with the birds on tropical islands.

A few days ago I watched a heavy set woman walking down the sidewalk with her young daughter. The bright-eyed girl looked to be about eight years old. Just before we passed each other, the young girl skipped excitedly towards a pigeon, exclaiming about the bird. Her mother caught her in her tracks, “That’s not a bird, honey, that’s a pigeon.” And so in goes. In the survival of the fittest, the pigeon is no longer considered a member of the bird family. Probably not elegant enough, or clean enough. Certainly not like a red cardinal or a swift hummingbird. The little girl is learning that some things are just not quite as good as others. Many people might agree with this when they are not speaking in public. Some of us are pigeons and some of us are hummingbirds. The trick is to find a niche that allows you to survive.

But quite honestly, I suspect the hummingbird would actually go down first, the way it needs to flap its wings like it is completely mad, and find those nice little red plastic feeders with the sugar water in them. Pigeons could hang on a lot longer than that. They’d be tussling with the cockroaches long after the last flowers were gone, after the feeders had all been left empty. Their proud chests would stay plump for years after the last trash bag had been put out on the curb. And there would probably be enough air left behind to keep them going for awhile even with that big hole we made in the atmosphere. They don’t need sun block and they don’t mind their own crowd. They would finally be left alone to sit together in the park or perch above all the fancy gargoyles and cornices we tried so hard to protect. And the cockroaches, they can get by with the crumbs, ruling the underworld away from the birds. Or make that the pigeons.

Where is Darwin when we really need him, when we need to figure out how to get more fit? When we need to know how to save ourselves from ourselves? I suppose spending all that time defending himself in court did not make him prone to sympathy for his fellow kind, trying to convince us that we were just animals. How could we, the ones with intelligence, be just another evolved mammal creature? After all, we invented The Gap! Certainly some greater power deliberately chose to place us here, the icing on the cake. The big Day Seven bonus. We get to rule because HE said so. If you popped into this world as a spider, well, we just might squish you. And if it rains, well, we’ve got umbrellas, that’s how smart we are. Too bad about the Garden of Eden, though. I think it only rains there when you want it to. Now look what we’ve got, hurricanes and droughts everywhere you turn, although I have to say, they seem to be more regular events in the places where God is particularly big news, where He has been carefully interpreted and decided upon. In places where Darwin was shown to the door.

Maybe the Garden of Eden is just a made up story, put there to show us what a good life could be like. If we weren’t all so smart, changing the world to try to make it more comfortable. Maybe it was just fine the way it was, with the spiders and cockroaches, the birds and the pigeons. Maybe extra intelligence is not so much the gift as the challenge. Can we figure out how to stop flapping our wings like we are completely mad? Goodness knows, those little plastic feeders will not be there forever. We’ll be looking for the scraps soon enough, trying to find cover. Hoping not to get squished.

Written August 6, 2005

WIUG

Four Funerals and a Wedding

This past spring and summer has been an inverse of the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” – it’s been more like “Four Funerals and a Wedding”. It always seems to me that funerals tend to happen in clusters. The old adage that bad news always comes in “threes” seems to have some sort of basis in fact. But I know that the truth is that given a planetary population of over six billion people, a goodly number of them will be leaving this plane to find life elsewhere on any given day. I often tell people who find themselves attending many funerals in a given time span that their problem is not that everyone is dying, but in fact that they simply know too many people. There are some things about funerals that I have noticed. First, no one really likes funerals, not even those who do it as their livelihood. Funeral directors see themselves as offering a consolation service and find satisfaction in that. People fall on one of two sides of funerals either rising to the occasion for person bereft or avoiding them altogether. There never seems to be a middle ground. Second, I’ve noticed that some people – many people in fact – think of another’s death as the last great social hurrah for a loved one; one last chance to “strut their stuff” – or at least the “stuff” of the departed who is no longer with us to tell us what their wishes are. Finally, the trappings of death are as numerous as the stars - the style of coffin, the type of wake, open or closed, flowers or donations to various causes, getting the obituary information out, organizing the sympathy cards, who sits in the limousine with Aunt Betty? Who will cater the after wake meal? The logistics of a funeral are every bit as overwhelming as those surrounding a wedding. The oddest thing of all though is that these details are all carried out while the subject has ostensibly moved along to other things. Personally, I am discovering that as I get older that I find great resonance in the line from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral spoken by the character Gareth who was a gay bon vivant sort of fellow when he said that he much preferred funerals to weddings because he always preferred social events the likes of which he at least had an outside chance of taking part in. It is an club to which we all will be admitted for certain. At a funeral I attended recently for the relative of a dear friend, I had the feeling that funerals provide a sense of closure which seemed to comfort me. Then I began to wonder if I was becoming like Maude in the movie Harold and Maude: would I soon start to wander in on the funerals of strangers just so I could be part of an event that celebrates a person’s life. I’d be standing there as a professional funeral celebrant with my bright red umbrella amid the sea of black umbrellas amidst the falling rain in the grayness of a cemetery. I’d move easily among the mourners and offer very generic types of kindnesses, and mean them even though I didn’t know the subject in the coffin. “And how did you know poor so-and-so?” they would ask me with kind eyes, looking ato me for one more connection to their dearly departed, to which I would respond, “Well, I didn’t in fact know your brother-husband-son-daughter-wife-sister, but I saw the funeral procession and I am never one to pass up a chance to say goodbye to anyone. And besides as the poet John Donne wrote, ‘Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in all mankind.’ Don’t you feel that is true?” And thus the dialogue would begin. I don’t know if one can make a living as a professional mourner but there are some advantages if one could. For one thing, selecting clothing as I go off to work each morning would be simple. Black on black with a white shirt with black dress shoes, maybe a black rain coat or overcoat for the winter months. For another thing, as a sincere mourner, I would be providing a service for those people who may not have many mourners. It would not be as some sort of scam but as an extension of the fact that I do believe that each man’s death diminishes me, so why shouldn’t I act on that impulse? And if I truly feel this way, why shouldn’t I celebrate the deaths of countless strangers as I go through this life? Still, even if no one would pay for such a service, I might consider it as a sort of avocation, a hobby if you will, with the design of bringing importance to each life that leaves this world. It’s odd, but no one seems to think twice about strangers sharing in one’s joy when a new baby is brought home from the hospital. People – strangers even – would feel compelled to touch my wife’s belly when she was carrying each of our children. We received the best wishes from people we hardly knew when they were born. Why does this idea of wishing others consolation when a loved one leaves seem so odd to us? “Tell me about Henry,” I would say to the grieving widow, and the storytelling could begin in earnest. “Why I remember when Henry was…” and on and on. Maybe as a bartender or psychoanalyst offers the comfort of a stranger’s objective ear, I would offer the fresh meat of an audience who never knew Henry and was ripe for all those stories that seemed so worn among familiar ears. Then Henry would be every bit as much alive at his funeral as he was when he really was alive. I in turn would come away richer for knowing Henry, at least in the abstract and in the most distilled form. Oh, I know that the conditions surrounding one’s death affects the type of funeral one has. The toughest funerals I have ever attended have been for children for example. Drunk driving deaths, murders, SIDS deaths: how does one make sense of death in light of these sorts of circumstances? But you know there never seems to be a shortage of grief in this world, and as a professional funeral attendant I would grieve. Shared grief is shared pain and shared pain makes the load seem lighter if even for a moment. Some people might find it offensive that a stranger would want to share in their grief. Here in America and especially in New England where good fences make good neighbors, one does the most personal things in private and death is the most personal thing for many. Still most funerals are open to the public. I mean the reason one has a funeral is so that it can be open to outsiders. There is a concept among some Native Americans of this idea of “sitting with” the grieving person when a person dies. It is sort of similar to the Judaic tradition of sitting shiva without the formality. It is not the same as the typical Anlgo-American’s idea of baking or making a casserole for a friend when they lose someone. This is wrapped up in the great American work ethic of being busy to make the grief go by almost unnoticed. With some Native Americans the idea is that one is simply present at this time of grief. Our presence shows no great purpose or intent. It’s an idea that conveys the dizzying belief that we are not alone no matter how much we think we are. It is almost zen-like in its approach to grief and I have witnessed it first hand. Just being present to another in life or in death is the greatest gift we can offer another short of offering our own lives. It is a gift to be a witness to another; it is affirming that they mattered, that they counted. This is a sign that we are social creatures and that we need each other to live and die properly. So I am considering business cards with a title that reads, “PROFESSIONAL FUNERAL ATTENDANT” which I would hand out to people at funerals, with a web site and everything. That might seem a bit too corporate and profit driven though. Perhaps advertising should happen by word of mouth, or better yet, word of heart since people always relate to things that come from the heart in earnest. None of us gets out of this world alive, it’s true but we can at least make the process a bit more humane for funerals are nothing if not a platform for the most important type of storytelling that we do. No one likes to deal with the grief and the loss. But the stories told at funerals remind us that all of our lives are comprised of one story after another. Why shouldn’t every person have witnesses to these stories in death, just as in life? Besides, who is to say that these stories don’t continue to grow after we have moved on? Let’s make a gentleman’s agreement right now, shall we? I will come to your funeral and tell the crowded room about what a great blessing you were to this world, if you will come to mine and say the same about me. Is it a deal?