reformation sunday

Let our bones be broken,
and re-knit anew.
Will you break our walls and teach us how to fight?
Will you break our genders and classes?

Our hates and habits are calcified:
Sedimented with the weight of race and nation.
Are you strong enough?
Are we strong enough for the breaking,
and for the reforming?

Make our pretty old churches new and ugly,
marked with the dirt of tragedy and fertility.
Mark us with ashes,
make us your own.

We are always in need of re-forming,
and we are always being re-formed.


(words are not enough... we must resort to bread...)

liturgical year meditation

So, today's Ash Wednesday.

And it feels good.

I just wasn't feeling Epiphany this year. Maybe I wasn't sitting with it long enough, but it was just not resonating for me. All this light imagery, and revealedness, when I've been spending so much time with Holy is the Dark, and God the Unrevealed, God the sneaky one around the corner, just barely visible but beautiful because of it.

So: Epiphany did not feel exactly like that.

And moreover, I'm not feeling the light imagery for other reasons. All this light/dark, good/evil, white/black stuff raises some really problematic questions about race. AND, all this sight/blindness stuff raises some other, perhaps-similarly-problematic questions about ability. So there's that, that gets in the way, appropriately, for me.

So: epiphany, not so much.

And today I told someone that I was glad it was Ash Wednesday, and usually that just means that it's time to enter the mourning/difficult/struggle time. But it feels really good this time. Like: Ash Wednesday means Lent is beginning. And Lent means that Easter is coming.

I'm often reassuring people that they don't have to rush into resurrection, or into Christmas or whatever. That's why they're seasons and not days, I say. And maybe this year I didn't really get much epiphany into me.

But, oh, Easter's coming.

And Sunday, I went to Hurlbut (my home church) for probably the last time with Ted (my longest-running pastor) as pastor. And he moved around the front of the sanctuary as he preached, naming all the spots we have seen Jesus. Jesus in the nativity scene, Jesus in the Christ Candle, Jesus in the cross, all the way through... Jesus in the pews. It was pretty beautiful. Seeing Jesus, running into that guy at all kinds of random places, and if you miss him this year, you know he'll just be waiting there again, when we come around once more.

My mom got me a poster of the liturgical year for Christmas. It's just a big round circle, with lots of different colors on it.

Alright.

-d

ps- A couple of posts ago, somefolks had its two hundredth post. Huzzah.

Six Things for Six Days til Pentecost

1. I have finished my first year of seminary. They didn't kick me out.

2. I heard Barbara Kingsolver talk Friday night, about her new book "Animal, Vegeatable, Miracle." Local food is a necessary ecological corollary to the coming anarcho-baptist revolution.

3. This week in Chicago, Pentecost is coming with cicadas. Folks at Grace Baptist Church celebrated Pentecost a week early. I was shocked and appalled by this gross violation of the liturgical year, but I am happy to have two chances to celebrate my favorite day of the year. Chicago's 17 Year Cicadas will emerge from the ground, we think, sometime this week. There's something deeply Pentecostal about this, and there is probably a poem in there somewhere: quietly waiting below ground for seventeen years, sucking on tree roots for nourishment, and then all coming out together, and covering everything, and making the loudest insect noise on earth. Like, really loud. There may also be a revolutionary strategy there.

4. According to NPR, no one knows how cicadas know to all come up from underground together, after seventeen years. I believe that cicadas are impelled from their nests through the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Pentecology.

5. Tomorrow morning I leave for two weeks in Nicaragua. I'll be back June 6th, and on June 11th I start my hospital chaplaincy internship. I expect both of these experiences to be deeply challenging and wonderful.

6. I bought a broad-brimmed hat for my trip. It had a tag on it that proudly trumpeted its ability to float. It also featured a warning label "not to be used as a flotation device."

Me and Jesus Both Got Arrested in Lent: A Draft Article for the Hurlbut Church Newsletter

Me and Jesus Both Got Arrested in Lent: A Draft Article for the Hurlbut Church Newsletter

It felt like Lent. It was Lent, and it felt like it, as I knelt there on the cold stone pavement, praying in front of the White House, after midnight. I knelt there praying for my country, for my friends, for the dead, as I waited to be arrested. It was good to be holding hands with my friends, there on the cold stone pavement, and good to have them behind me in line as the police officer stood me up, had me empty my pockets, and tightened plastic handcuffs around my wrist.

We were out for a couple hours before we even crossed the police line; it took them a long time to process the first hundred. We were all there as part of a Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, organized by Sojourners and dozens of other Christian Peace organizations. The director of Sojourners and the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches were both in the first hundred. My friends and I stood quietly, for a while, watching the park police handcuff each one, take their photo, put them on the waiting bus. It was very cold. We sang peace songs, we sang hymns, we prayed. We wept and raged at the White House as a symbol of American imperialism and brashness. I started preaching to keep warm. I preached the parable of the leaven; the subversive pollution hidden in measures of flour, hoping that our small action would spread and grow in unexpected ways, helping in some small way to bring about peace. I don’t know if it did.

It was an initial rush, crossing the police line. An officer announced the consequences of stepping over the line, and a hundred of us and more swarmed over immediately, singing ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ and ‘Down By the Riverside’ and ‘Amazing Grace.’ They handcuffed the older folks first, so they wouldn’t have to stand outside in the cold. Some folks kept singing, or huddled together for warmth, laughing. I knelt and prayed. What a country. What a season. What a world. I prayed my anger and my cold exhaustion (both physical and emotional.) It felt like Lent.

Someone suggested, earlier, that we keep silence in the time between being handcuffed and being released. We knew it would likely only be a matter of hours, and a solemn silence would put us in solidarity with those who have been so finally silenced by this war. Moreover, it was an opportunity to reflect on Holy Saturday, someone said, that cold, mute, hopeless day between the shock of crucifixion and the shock of resurrection.

But when I got on the bus, people were talking. The woman next to me told me about her years of activism with the radical Catholic community in DC. Someone else had everyone on the bus say their name, state, and denomination. (Dozens of states and denominations, on my bus alone!) This was something different- not the sorrow of Holy Saturday, but the tenuous beginnings of hope as Saturday stretches into Sunday. In our handcuffs, we shared signs and words of peace. When the bus filled up, and began to finally pull away from the White House, well after midnight, someone called for “an Our Father.” Together, we all prayed the Lord’s Prayer. The debtors waited for the trespassers, and the non-denominational's prayed with the Episcopalians. It was the most striking Lord’s Prayer I have ever prayed; I suspect the Lord’s Prayer was written for those under arrest.

The woman arrested right after me was my friend Emily Jones. The last time we rode a bus together was when we met on the Mission of Peace to China, in 2001. Years later, under much different circumstances, it struck me that it was the same project. A lot of the same songs, even.

So we drove out to a distant police station, and waited for a long time more, presumably while they processed the first few buses. 220 people were arrested that night; it took them perhaps seven hours to process us all. I stayed on the bus and chatted with my new and old friends, sat in silence, and prayed more. There was something about this slowly-forming community on the bus- sharing songs and strategies and jokes. In a way, it was community breaking out under a situation specifically designed to deter it; or if not that, at least a non-traditional way of meeting folks. It was a crazy kind of church, united exclusively by our faith and our opposition to Empire. It felt like Easter enough to me.

Then they let us go. A couple days later, I went to the police station, paid my hundred bucks, and that was that. Doesn’t even affect my record any more than a traffic ticket. Huh. It strikes me that the whole time I was so much safer, so much more comfortable than folks in Iraq. Hardly any media even reported much on the Vigil, and the Washington Post underreported the number of arrests. I pretty much kept my vast privilege the whole time. I told my second cousin, an Egyptian, about it a few days after. He said, “You can’t do that in Egypt. Well, you can do it once.” My arrest seems not that risky, and not that useful.

And it didn’t stop the war. Here’s where I feel like I should end with an uplifting note. “It didn’t stop the war, but hopefully some people changed their minds…” “It didn’t stop the war, but it let me use my very body to register my outrage and faith…” Maybe.

It’s holy week, as I write this. Once again, it feels like Lent. Lots of fear. Lots of anger. Lots of feeling like whatever I do doesn’t matter much, lots of feeling like I don’t have the courage to really make a difference. And Holy Saturday’s coming, a day that will speak to the desperation that so much of the world feels every day.

But then comes Sunday, and the stone will be rolled away. And we’ll see what resurrection can come to this world of death. We’ll see whether the attempts of Empire to vanquish its divine/human foe were successful. Vamos a ver, as Rachael says. We’re going to see.