City of…Searching for faith, justice, peace, community, and snarky humor from Jerusalem to Washington, DC and beyond.

I haven’t written anything on here for awhile, and I suppose there are a number of reasons for that. I’ve had no sudden flashes of inspiration, for one thing, and for another I’ve been just plain busy. Busy in the sense that I don’t have a whole lot of time for blogging, and also busy in the sense that I have too much going on to know what to write about. I’ve started two jobs, preached, led a Bible study, phonebanked for UM Kairos Response, and been a chaperon at a big United Methodist youth event, so I’ve had a lot going on. And knowing what to grab on to, or maybe knowing what grabs on to me, hasn’t been the easiest thing.

I’m fascinated by why people read this thing. Fascinated, I guess, by what keeps us reading and writing in an age of information glut. I don’t mean to be overly existential here, although there is something about the basic human need to communicate that is powerful and true. I suppose it just gives me a sense of hope that we keep communicating, keep spinning stories and telling tales. It’s funny. In all the conversation about e-books replacing or not replacing paper books, I don’t think I’ve heard much talk about the deeper surprise. People are still reading. There is still a demand for words on a page,  whether a real page or an electronic one. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s a worth to that.

This is all a long way of saying thanks for reading, even rambling posts like this one. And thanks for writing. Thanks for Facebook posts and Tweets and all other manner of communication. I love words. I’m terrified of running out of words–in the hospital, when I was writing more than I had in months, I remember a paralyzing fear that I would run out of words. So sometimes I write just to prove to myself that I still can, that I can still communicate out there into the ether.

Whatever it is that keeps us reading and writing, I’m grateful for it. I think it keeps a lot of people going, when you get right down to it.

Today is the federal holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Democracy Now! dedicated their show to playing speeches of King. I heard his famous Riverside Church speech in which he challenged the war in Vietnam, and his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech the day before he died. It was again so powerful to hear King in his own words, to hear the power of his voice, the keen edge of his thinking, the radical stance that he took against so many of our society’s ills.

But what I want to say today, briefly I hope, is that King was a leader among leaders, and that we often forget, or are allowed to forget, all of those other leaders. The Civil Rights Movement was not a one man movement. It was made up of hundreds, thousands of people, many of whose names we will never now. But there are some that we do, and I wonder why we don’t have a national holiday to celebrate them.

Why don’t we celebrate Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Mississippi, who gave a speech at the 1964 DNC demanding that the integrated delegation from Mississippi, the Mississippi Freedom Party, be allowed to be seated at the convention? “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she thundered. In addition to other attacks on her for her voting rights work, she was beaten all over her body with a blackjack by police officers.

Why don’t we celebrate Septima Clark, who created the literacy and citizenship courses that were used in the drive for voting rights in the deep south? Clark is known as the grandmother of the Civil Rights movement, and for good reason. She taught people, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Highlander Voting Rights School. Many laws in Southern states prevented people–and by people, of course what was meant was poor black sharecroppers, barely treated like people anyway–from voting if they couldn’t pass a literacy and citizenship test. Clark’s schools–and the training she gave to the teachers of those schools–empowered countless people to vote who would not have otherwise made the attempt.

Why don’t we celebrate Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr., a freedom rider, sit-in organizer, and leader in SNCC and SCLC? Why don’t we have a national day of remembrance on Feb 1, the anniversary of the first lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, NC, which was organized by four college students and maintained during the summer month by high school students? High school students. Why don’t we celebrate Diane Nash or James Bevel? Or Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington that is now so famous in our public imagination, but who was pushed aside from movement leadership for being gay? And we could go on and on, but the point is made. So many people fought and struggled and were beaten, and some died, for this still-unfinished struggle.

None of this could possibly take away from the legacy of King. It can only enhance it. As a provider of vision, a voice of the movement, a prophetic voice in the wilderness, King was unsurpassed. And of course he was also a foot soldier in his own nonviolent struggle. But we forget that it was often the students of SNCC that challenged King’s SCLC to take more radical stances, that students were involved in this, and youth, and even children. And we forget the people for whom King spoke and struggle and died, illiterate sharecroppers, sanitation workers, soldiers and Vietcong guerrillas. And we forget that King’s dream is not yet fully realized, that we are not yet in the promised land of racial equality, that we have certainly not defeated poverty and militarism, that we still have so far to go.

Yes. A day to honor King. Yes. But we forget about the other King, the King who was both radical, and first among a plethora of peers, whose names we easily forget. It is easy to domesticate King by putting him on a pedestal. It’s much harder when the pedestal gets crowded with voices, with faces, and with names.

–

As an addendum, check out this article on Waging Nonviolence about learning nonviolence, which talks about Bayard Rustin and James Lawson and their influence on king: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/how-to-learn-nonviolent-resistance-as-king-did/

This morning I was listening to a recording of one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches on WPFW. The speech, given on May 20, 1965, was on the difference between nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, and the role that nonviolence plays in broadening and deepening democracy, reminded me again that King possessed not only a powerful voice but a powerful mind. Carefully drawing out for his audience the scope and types of nonviolence and what it seeks to achieve, he pondered–to audience applause–the role that nonviolent direct action on behalf of German citizens would have had on Hitler’s ability to rule. Silence, he said, is the real enemy, both then and now.

Today is King’s birthday, although of course we want a day off, so we don’t celebrate it until tomorrow. And I’m struck by the domestication of King’s message that has occurred. I had never heard this speech by King before, even though I’m someone who cares very deeply about nonviolence and what it seeks to achieve. No, around this time of year we hear clip after clip of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s not that this speech isn’t powerful and moving. It’s that it’s one speech out of hundreds of speeches and sermons, many showing a different side of King than the one we are used to hearing.

He was passionate about racial equality, but also about poverty and war, and saw all three of them linked, saying that racism, militarism, and materialism were the three great evils facing American society. Last year one of the churches in DC marked Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by sending letters to U.S. troops in Iraq. King would likely ask, “And what about the Iraqis?” This is a man who once referred to the U.S. as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” who said that “A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’”

There’s so much more, I couldn’t attempt to type enough quotes. My point is only this. There is another King, one much more radical and challenging than we are usually led to believe. This is not a King we can nicely accept in hindsight, but one who continues to challenge and challenge and challenge us today.

This is a King who said:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that  unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

“I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men [sic].

“I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land. ‘And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man [sic] shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.’ I still believe that we shall overcome.”

Why don’t we read that to school children?

I’ve been reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Eric Mataxas. It’s quite a read. I’ve been struck by a lot of different pieces of the book, but there are a couple of things that seem to me to tie together and be worth writing about.  This is longish, so I apologize about that.

Bonhoeffer was a thorn in the side of the Nazi regime and the so-called “German Christians,” the sect that supported National Socialism (as opposed to the Confessing Church, which opposed them) from the moment either came to prominence. But the very first time he was individually targeted, in the form of an official letter from the head of the “German Christians,” it was by saying that he could “be accused of being a pacifist and an enemy of the state.”

Bonhoeffer wasn’t a pacifist. He would eventually be executed for taking part in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler. However, it struck me that being a pacifist was considered as poisonous as, was in fact synonymous with, being an enemy of the state. Those accused of pacifism would be ridiculed, watched, and eventually sent to concentration camps.

As I said, Bonhoeffer wasn’t a pacifist. But he cared deeply for peace, lived a life directed toward peace, and planned to visit Gandhi in order, in his words, to see what a community based on the Sermon on the Mount really looks like. He was once asked at a youth conference he was leading what he would do if war came, and he responded “I pray that God will give me the strength then not to pick up a weapon.” In a letter written to his brother, Bonhoeffer once wrote, “Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.” A relatively conservative theologian, he nevertheless equates peace and social justice with the cause of Christ. Quite a statement from a man who decided to study theology at the age of 14.

This, as opposed to (for example) Reinhold Krause, the leader of the “German Christians” in Berlin who unsurprisingly wanted to remove the Old Testament from the Bible (ah, old heresies are the most comfortable) but who also wanted to, among other things, take the cross right out of Christianity: “[The New Testament] must no longer present an ‘exaggerated emphasis on the crucified Christ.’ This tenet was defeatist and depressing, which was to say Jewish….[T]hen he mocked the symbol of the cross, ‘a ridiculous, debilitating remnant of Judaism, unacceptable to National Socialists!’”

Forget for a moment that the cross is a ridiculous, debilitating remnant of the Roman Empire and its extra-super-nice way of dealing with its subject peoples. What really catches my attention is that Krause, a supposed Christian leader, has mistakenly stumbled his way into some key truths. The crucifixion is defeatist and, taken seriously, depressing. Jesus was Jewish, so in that sense it was quite Jewish. And the cross is ridiculous, it is debilitating, and it is certainly unacceptable to any form of government based on violence and fascistic-control.

If you don’t believe me, ask Paul, who Krause also dismissed (drat! there goes the whole Bible!). “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” Paul writes, and goes on to say, “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one may boast in the presence of God.” That’s 1 Corinthians, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that Krause would hone in on as defeatist and debilitating. That’s always how it looks from a position of power or violence.

But Bonhoeffer did not stand in that position. He corresponded with Gandhi, and talked about peace and social justice, and so to him the cross which the “German Christians” wanted to expunge from the church made perfect sense. You walk right into the storm of violence and fratricide, even if it means your own death, because to do so means to represent hope and salvation to those being torn apart by that storm. Here he is again, saying that the church must be ready to “aid the victims of state action” and that it “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” At times, according to Bonhoeffer, the church’s role is “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” For Bonhoeffer, I suspect, such a spoke was cruciform.

And all of this, I think, raises the question of violence, and the question of pacifism. It raises the question, to me, of how Christians can honor the cross and the sword equally, when they are opposites. When the cross is meant not as a weapon to be wielded against those people out there but rather as a rod to be jammed into the spokes of the wheel that is crushing those people out there. I could name contemporary examples, but oh how the list would go on. And as we prepare to celebrate the birth of another man who would die for his commitment to peace and justice, it would pay all of us to remember what a commitment to peace can cost. And that, in a government of violence, pacifists and enemies of the state are the same damn thing.

The title my last post was half-internal-reference, which I do sometimes and which I think is cleverer than it actually is. So I figured I sort of wanted to explain the reference. Or something like that.

I wrote a song awhile back, over the summer, before all of this mess started. I was swimming with some friends at a beach on the Bay, on Kent Island. And the sunset was beautiful brush strokes, and I had my guitar with me. And sometimes it happens like that, and lyrics just flow.

“This place ain’t a bay,” the song begins, “it’s an old, old river. It once flooded out its banks, long before we could remember.”

The Chesapeake Bay isn’t, as it turns out, a bay, in any technical sense. Bays are coastal, or something of the sort, and the Chesapeake is actually an estuary, which is an ancient river that overflowed its banks to create a much broader body of water.

The song is about borders, and boundaries, and overflowing them. Transcending them. It’s about this deep hope that we are all more than we seem to be, that we are beyond these limited forms, that are beyonds upon beyonds. And I don’t mean this in some dualistic sense, that there’s body and then there’s spirit and we need to shuffle off of the mortal coil to gain our way into the spiritual side. I mean something different than that, maybe something more like: there is so much that these weak bodies hold, so much strength, so much courage, so much, well, spirit.

The closer I get to saying anything of any substance at all, the less I understand, and the less I write.

Substance. Substance expanding upon substance, becoming and becoming and becoming. That’s something of what I mean, I think. And water, washing us, renewing us, giving us new life and new hope and new identity.

And maybe that’s what I meant to write yesterday, too. I don’t know. It gets so hard to remember.

This past Sunday we marked the baptism of Jesus in church. We read about John the Baptist asking to be baptized instead, and Jesus insisting on his own baptism, and the sky tearing open and the Spirit descending like a dove. And we read the first Genesis creation story, with the Spirit of God sweeping across the waters of chaos.

And we remembered our baptisms.

Now Methodists, like many mainline denominations, baptize at any age, with the result that many of us are baptized as infants. And so it’s interesting that each year (at Dumbarton we do it twice a year, once on Baptism Sunday and once at Easter Vigil) we remember something that many of us (though not all of us) can’t remember.

This would seem very strange. Except that in the more commonly celebrated sacrament of communion, we actually say that we remember the night that Jesus gathered with friends for the last time before his crucifixion.

In other words, we say that we remember things long before we could possibly remember them.

The Greek word that’s used in the story of the Last Supper, in what we call the words of institution–”And we remember that on the night he gave himself up for us, he took bread….”–is anamnesis. It doesn’t mean remember in an intellectual sense, not exactly. It means something more like reenact. Fully participate in remembering. There’s a physical element implied, a ritual acting out of the remembrance. And this anamnesis isn’t a static thing, but one that’s passed on from generation to generation. It’s the same principle that’s at work in the Jewish seder meal, remembering the Exodus of centuries upon centuries ago.

We live in a society of amnesia. We forget–I should say one segment of the population forgets–that the Civil Rights Movement was a few short generations ago–my parents lived through that time period. We forget what the fall of Apartheid looked like (or maybe we weren’t paying much attention at all). I wonder how long it will be before we forget Tahrir Square. We certainly seem to have forgotten the horrors of the Vietnam War, in spite of pilgrimages to that intimidating black monument on the Mall in DC.

My point is just that we could use some anamnesis, some ritual acting out of these key points in history. We’re coming up on Martin Luther King Day, one day of the year that we pay lip service to one person who had a key effect in the Civil Rights Movement (there were so many others, so many forgotten names, like Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash and Septima Clark and….well I could go on). And that the church ought to be training us, in baptism and in communion, to remember liberating events long before we can remember them.

“Remember your baptism and be thankful,” the worship leader tells us, and we dip our hands in water or have it sprinkled on our heads. And some of us remember vows that were taken for us that we later claimed for ourselves. “Renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this word, and repent of your sin.” And just as importantly: “Aceept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”

The freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.

There is something that must be remembered, again, and again, and again.

Remember God’s grace at work in your lives. Participate in the story of thousands of years, and the story of only a few years ago. And be thankful.

–

The first image is from Louis Glanzman. The second is an icon, which I can’t find a citation for…sorry. 

Today is Epiphany.

It’s also been a spectacularly bad few days for me (though compared to this summer we’re still peachy keen).

I got into a car accident (everyone is fine, thank God). I lost a notebook that was a gift to me and which contained song lyrics and notes on my CD. I had to deal with my insurance company. Again. And, just to top it all off, Metro is single-tracking on the Red Line today. What joy.

So it would be a fair question to ask why I care so much about Epiphany, one of the less widely known church celebrations and one which mainly seems to mark the end of the Christmas season.

Well, I’ll give it a shot.

First of all, about Epiphany. The word comes from Greek, meaning “manifestation.” In the Eastern churches it’s also called the Feast of Theophany, or “vision/revelation of God.” So that’s fun.

To be brief, Epiphany is the celebration of the “wise men” (no number is given in Matthew’s account, and the story doesn’t appear in any other gospel) discovering Jesus by following a star. That’s the basics.

Why care?

Well, here’s a few reasons why I think it’s worth pondering.

First is the light. The shining light above what must have been a very modest house–maybe no more than a cave–leading the adventurers from far away onward. And the light that shines in each of our lives, leading us onward. And the way that this light is a reflection of that which shines in the darkness and is not overcome. No matter what. Even during stupidly bad days, but even more importantly even during wars and rumors of war, even during famine, even during oppression. The light still shines, for those who will look for it, providing illumination if only for the next step. It’s amazing what those in prison for resisting oppression–Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Adolfo Perez Esquivel–describe about their experiences. The whole thing sounds terrifying to me, and yet these and many like them report what to me is shocking inspiration, renewed commitment, light for the journey. Even in the midst of torture. It’s heartbreaking, and stunning, to consider.

So each of us can see and can follow the light celebrated on Epiphany, and that’s one reason to care.

Here’s another. The much-romanticized narrative of “We Three Kings” is actually intensely political. Foreign travelers, not fully understanding the power dynamic occurring in first century Palestine, follow the star as much as they can until they eventually try going to the capital city and asking the person in charge. Problematically, the person in charge is Herod, a petty king and puppet of the Roman Empire. Herod sends them on their way but is threatened by any talk of a “King of the Jews” or “Messiah,” and he secretly plots to kill the kid–by killing any kid Jesus’ age. The kings find the toddler but are warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, while Miriam and Yusef and little baby Yeshua become political refugees, fleeing to Egypt under cover of darkness. (The Eastern church, as an aside, takes this flight narrative very seriously, and has shrines and monasteries scattered across the Sinai Peninsula). And so this story aligns the traditions and celebrations of the church with political refugees, with victims of mass violence, and with threats to earthly power. Pretty intense stuff.

And then finally there’s the wise men themselves, who were astrologers, probably from Persia, maybe Zoroastrian. Definitely not Jewish, definitely not the “home team” for those reading the narrative. It would be like….well, it would be exactly like that, like Iranians with a different language and religion showing up to our Christmas services. (This, by the way, happens at Dumbarton, and we’re sort of excited about it). Epiphany is a universalist celebration, a proclamation that people from anywhere on the planet can see the light and follow it. There are no entrance requirements. The wise men don’t get baptized (although something very much like communion, with expensive gifts given to an impoverished family taking the place of bread and wine). We would be wise to consider this message when we are designing our outreach strategies, when we are pondering who should be in and who should be out.

So I care about Epiphany, in the middle of all this anxiety, exactly because I need it in the middle of all this anxiety. I need its light. I need its message of hope in a world seemingly run by forces of violence and greed. And I need its universal message, because days like these I feel like maybe I’m an outsider, and this story declares that everyone’s in.

Epiphany. It’s the end of Christmas. But it ain’t so bad.

–

The wonderful artwork is from Zaki Baboun, a Palestinian artist who is also famous for his paintings of the Wall around Bethlehem:

There was an interaction on Sunday that I forgot to write about yesterday, a short conversation with a man at McPherson Square, our last stop of the night. McPherson Square is also the site of the Occupy DC protests, and this was actually the first time I’d been there, given what the past 5-6 months have been like.

As the van stopped and we honked to let folks know we were there, an older gentlemen walking with a cane approached the van. After collecting a sandwich and hot cocoa, my hot cocoa-distribution-partner, David, struck up a conversation with him.

“Lots of people still here,” David said.

“Yup. That’s right. Sure are,” said the man.

“Guess folks aren’t leaving like people said they would,” I said.

“Oh no,” said the man, “we’re gonna be here all winter.”

Now, I will openly confess my ignorance here. I’ve been in and out off hospitals–and in and out of various mental and emotional hells–for the past 6 months or so, and so I really am not up to date on the Occupy movement (which I originally took to be referring to an Occupation of a far different sort), on what’s been going on around the country, on whether or not I can be of any use to such a movement.

But I am struck by this. I am struck by a group of people willing to set up camp on K Street–definitely “Starbucks Zone,” if you read my post yesterday–and pledge to be there all winter. It’s not just a man without a house saying this, either. WAMU (the local NPR affiliate) is reporting on the preparations Occupy K Streeters are taking to make it through the brutal cold of the next few nights.

I don’t know that much about the movement–although to be blunt the fact that Veterans for Peace is in support tends to put me in their camp, if not yet literally. But I definitely am learning lessons from them about perseverance, a kind of perseverance I haven’t seen since…well, since checkpoints and M-16s were a regular part of my life.

So I’ll be doing some research over the coming days. Maybe I’ll spend time here at the public library (or get a darned new computer).

But then again, maybe I’ll just wander down to McPherson Square. Because after all, the Occupiers are going to be there all winter.

They told me so themselves.

My computer’s been on the fritz, so I haven’t been able to post these past couple of days. I’m posting this from the library in Tenleytown, yet another reason to support the return of funding for safety net programs to our budget…

On Sunday night I went with a couple of members of Crossroads to do “grate patrol” with the Salvation Army. If you’re not familiar with grate patrol, the concept is relatively simple–a church or organization makes about 180 brown bag meals with a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a bottle of water, and drives around the city, stopping at about 6 places to pass out food, hot cocoa and/or juice, hats and scarves, and the ever-useful mult-purpose trash bags to unhoused residents of DC.

Confronting the astronomical level of homelessness in DC is always a bit shocking–on a warm, almost autumnish night, with very low numbers of people, we still passed out all of our hot cocoa and all of our bagged meals. A few things in particular stood out to me this time around. The young age of some of the people we served. The people in shirts and ties, obviously coming from their jobs but unable to afford housing. All that we weren’t able to provide.

My job was serving hot chocolate. At one point, though, one gentlemen asked me whether we had any garbage bags. “I don’t think so, no.”

I turned to my partner in drink-distribution, also named David, and asked him. “Yeah, yeah we do!” he called out quickly after the man, who had turned around and headed away. “Oh, oh good. I understand though. More convenient to say no,” he said.

And of course, he’s right. It was more convenient for me to say no. Easier on me. Lesson learned, for the who-knows-how-many time.

More convenient for us to say no. To say no to more truly affordable housing in DC. To say no to funding for homeless outreach programs, job placement programs, social safety net programs. Easier to slash these programs than to ask people to pay a little more, to give a little more of themselves.

It’s more convenient to say no.

–

For me, nothing defined the evening, nothing offered a symbol for the persistence of poverty in DC, than our second to last stop at 14th and New York NW. See, we stopped at a Starbucks, and there served our longest line of customers yet.

In line, at the Starbucks, waiting for a meal. In the shadow of rich Washington, the poor wait for a truck to pass out sandwiches.

My mom likes to divide DC into “Starbucks zone” and “McDonalds zone,” and it’s an acute observation. The zone’s roughly correspond to what I call “Washington” and what I call “DC.” Most people who come in from out of town only see Washington, Starbucks Zone.

But not even Starbucks Zone can hide the face of the poor in Washington, DC. Because outside of that Starbucks is one of the most popular places for our unhoused neighbors to gather when the Grate Patrol truck comes around.

I wish Starbucks Zone Washington would get the message, and maybe many are starting to–our last stop was the Occupy DC encampment at McPherson Square. That if they have a problem with the homeless folks at the Starbucks, they should consider supporting a full continuum of affordable housing in DC. That as we continue to slash funding for safety net programs we continue to perpetuate the problem of poverty in this city, and even to worsen it. That if we don’t do something, there will be more and more people trying to get into shelters for the night, more and more people in line at the food van. And as we try to provide stop gap measures, the problem gets worse and worse.

It’s more convenient to say “no.” But say no all you want–the line outside of Starbucks isn’t getting any shorter. And part of the Incarnation, which we completely celebrate this week–maybe, just maybe, the most important part–is seeing Jesus in every single one of these people we serve, every single one of these people who we fail when, in our nations capital, we still think funding street sweeping in Georgetown is more important than figuring out how to keep people in housing and out of the cold.

–

The artwork is again from my friend Ben, from his Series on Judgment. Check out his website here.

It was junior year of college, the end of an intensely stressful semester, and I was where I probably should have predicted I’d be–face down on the floor in the hallway, around 4am.

Now, before you jump to any conclusions here, there was no alcohol and no drugs involved–unless you count dehydration and fatigue and over-activity as drugs, which you might have good grounds to do. They certainly are addictive enough.

My friend Mali, who says she does not read this blog because there are too many big words (this from someone looking to start her residency for medical school….), went with me to the hospital. It turns out that what I had was something ridiculously common. Vasovagal syncope, a tendency for the vegas nerve to misfire, slow the heart down, drop the blood pressure, and cause fainting. In fact, the difficult to pronounce word (which, oddly enough, rhymes with pericope…..syncopepericope, pericopesyncope), is the most common cause of fainting.

So, no big deal.

Still, the sensation of having your body spectacularly NOT work, even for just a minute or so, makes you very aware of all the wondrous ways that it DOES work. This is true of lithium side effects. It’s true when I see paraplegic athletes performing incredible feats. Even when the body really isn’t working like it’s supposed to, it’s an amazing thing. (I bet Mali would agree, but she didn’t read this far. She’s got better things to do).

The reason I’m thinking about all this gets back to that whole incarnation business, and also to a quote from Ephesians that was cited in a book that I’m reading. It’s a familiar quote, but one that I read with new eyes:

“But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into the One who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

Joined and knitted together. As each part is working properly.

The Incarnation–enflehsment–is a miracle, in part, because plain ol’…uh…fleshment?…is a miracle. The Pauline letters use body imagery so often because bodies are such impressive things. That’s something I’m not used to appreciating. But the lithium side effects and the frequent trips to the gym are doing their slow work, reminding me again and again–”you have a body. you have a body. you have a body.”

These bodies are a miracle, however they work. Thank God that there are people who know a lot more about how they work than I do. But that leaves me with the miracle.

And that’s an awful lot of fun.

My friend Wendy–who did her pastoral internship at the church where I grew up–has been reading my blog, which is very kind of her.

When I put my last post up on Facebook, I asked people what home means to them, and have been getting wonderful responses both there and here on my blog. But Wendy added something which I thought was worth sharing:

Wendy writes: “Re: being alone – 5 yr old Megan says that her blanket speaks to her and make her feel safe when she is alone. When I asked her what her blanket says, she said that blanket talks in very tiny whispers which are hard to hear but make you feel good.”

So, this might be adorable, but I think it’s pretty profound too, which I guess is why even people like me who aren’t so good with kids can be absolutely amazed by them. A lot of us can share the experience of having a safe object, a talisman, that we held onto as a child. We felt oddly comforted by it, whether it was a blanket or a stuffed animal (my favorite) or something else.

But I am so drawn to the phrase, “very tiny whispers which are hard to hear but make you feel good.”

I am doing a lot of discerning right now. The whole ordeal of this last 6 months has really knocked me back on my heels, or more appropriately on my butt, and I am now starting figure out what to do with all the dust, or as my pastor says, how to be in relationship with confusion.

And so I have been doing a lot of praying, and in particular a lot of praying about call and vocation, about what it is exactly that I am supposed to be doing with my life. No answers yet, just more questions. But God doesn’t always offer us answers to tough questions. The disciples didn’t submit resumes, and they weren’t really informed about what exactly they would be doing when they were called. (“Fishers of people”? What in the world does that mean?).

God does promise, though, to be with us, to surround us and fill us with God’s love. And I think it would be accurate to say that the Spirit often speaks to us “in very tiny whispers which are hard to hear but make you feel good.”

See, I want comfort like the world wants comfort. I want to have the answer. And I want to have right answer. But often, instead, I am offered the comfort of a child holding onto a blanket, wanting to feel safe. The sort of comfort that allows one, in the words of Oswald Chambers, to “trust God and do the next thing.”

So I’m not sure what it is that I’m supposed to be doing, and certainly don’t know what it is that anyone else is supposed to be doing. It’s all quite messy. Jan Richardson writes, in a reflection from her Advent Door, “God came to get tangled up with us, to become entwined with us, to be knitted and knotted into our lives. The knots are not always tidy. I can admire the wondrous and beautiful patterns that the Celtic artists accomplished, but the patterns and entanglements of my own life, and my own art, tend to be far less orderly. Yet amid the complexities and complications and conundrums that life offers us, God twists and turns, walking the labyrinth with us and helping us find our way through.”

God came to get tangled up with us, and with our blankets that we clutch or hide under for comfort. And as Paul writes, when we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit prays for us in cries too deep for words. In “very tiny whispers which are hard to hear but make you feel good.”

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The image is again from Jan Richardson’s wonderful Advent Door, entitled “Tangled Up in You“–with a corresponding reflection on ancient Celtic Gospel books that is absolutely worth reading.