My back hurts this morning, as it did yesterday morning, following a day spent purging books from my library. Connie and I are moving to Portland, Oregon, June 1, and one of the most expensive items you can move is books. We already have more than our shelves will bear. My desk is stacked with books--new ones bought in the last two months that I am still reading, and others I've moved to the desk because I want to refer to them when I'm writing.
The move to Portland is something we have contemplated for a long time but assumed it would be several years before we actually did it. I thought I would continue to work in New York until at least the age of 67 or so and then we would retire to Portland. As those of you who have kept up with this blog know, my work for the church has ended. It is time to be somewhere else, somewhere less intense than New York City. We love New York, to coin a phrase. Connie has lived here over twenty years, I've been here twelve (with two years for both of us in Boston along the way). But Portland offers wonders that New York lacks, particularly access to the natural beauty of the mountains and rivers of the Northwest. The Columbia River Gorge is less than two hours away, as is the Pacific Ocean in the other direction. In twenty minutes from our apartment, we can be in the western hills among cedars in the Japanese Garden (the best, most people think, outside of Japan). From our living room window, we overlook a park in the city that contains stones from Souchow, China.
The cost of living is lower in Portland, which is important to us semi-retired folk. There is great public transportation: it costs nothing to ride buses, streetcar, and rapid transit in downtown Portland. We can walk the length of the city in thirty minutes. Great restaurants, interesting indie movie theaters, the Portland Museum of Art five minutes away, an auditorium that hosts theater and performers right next door, a bistro up the street.....and by the way the rain thing is not as bad as you've heard. This last month has been rainier in NYC than in Portland.
I plan to write for the next year or so, although I am hoping to do some consulting and editorial work for publishers on a project basis. We will see if I can bring in some money writing. Connie will also be writing, finishing her next book and continuing to work on selling her previous manuscripts. We look forward to a creative, stimulating life in our new city.
For me, it feels like a new beginning in so many ways--a chance to return to the creative writing I have always done but seldom been able to focus on. There are two or three projects in the works. Last week I sent some poems to a magazine for the first time in thirty years! My web site, http://webworks.ken-arnold.com will have updates on where publications are expected, as well as work online that I hope will be stimulating and even provocative. I will be posting a new piece there in the next week.
Some of what I'm reading right now--books you might find interesting if you don't know about them:
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, by Ellen Bryant Voight. A writer of clean lines and good sense (and senses--she sees and hears so well).
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, short stories by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is presently my favorite writer. His novels are an adventure, the stories sharp and surprising.
A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine, by John K. Nelson. After my visit to Japan last summer I became more aware of the intricacies of Shinto, which lacks the institutional weight of most religions (never mind the state-sponsored Shinto of the war years--this is different.)
The Art of Setting Stones & Other Writings from the Japanese Garden, by Marc Peter Keane. Lovely prose.
Carried Away: A Selection of Stories, by Alice Munro. The new Everyman's Library collection. As good as anyone can be.
Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang. Novellas and stories by a Chinese writer I'd never heard of. Touching and hard-edged, as was her life.
The Savage Detectives, a novel by Roberto Bolano. An acquired taste. He died young and this novel is a big sprawling legacy, beautiful prose and tough going.
Back on the Fire, essays by Gary Snyder. One of my favorite authors. Essays mostly about nature and the world in peril.
Next week I plan to return to my reflections on Christianity and the body, once my own body is feeling a bit better.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Talking about the Body, 2
We are all aware, I think, of the deep antagonism toward women from the early days of the church, which continues to be enshrined in our church polities, theologies, and habits of mind. Even though most churches now ordain women, with pominent and significant exceptions, there remains a lingering scent of impurity and impropriety in the presence of women on altars and in clerical garb. Women in the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church were not treated well by male colleagues (prior to the elevation of a woman to lead the church--I don't know how women are treated now). One female bishop told me as recently as last summer of outrageous dismissive behavior by her fellow male bishops. I assume that the basic attitudes of patriarchal males have not changed overnight.
Women are not highly regarded by the worldwide church in non-Western societies, and that is especially true of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which objects, along with a number of Episcopal Churches in the US, to the full inclusion of gays in the church and its leadership. I believe that the attitudes toward gays in the church are rooted in attitudes toward women. They share a common origin: an abhorrence of the body and its irrational, sensual ways.
Like women, gays are seen as impure (as I said in my previous post), not for reasons related to menstruation and pregnancy, obviously, but for reasons having to do with an upsetting of what is seen as the natural order. Order comes with reason, according to the traditional male way of thinking, and women are inherently irrational. They are unpredictable. They feel before they think. They are soft edged. They tempt men to violate their allegiance to reason and to orderly action. They tempt men to lose control (sexually and other ways).
Gays are regarded by dominant male leaders in the church in the same way. Gays are too much like women. They care more about the sensual body. They violate natural order and therefore encourage chaos. They are unpredictable because they don't think like "normal" men. They can be soft edged. They may be passive receivers of the male organ, just as women are. (Some bisexual men who engage in homosexual acts deny the are gay if they are the "active" partner. It is the receiver who is gay, ie, not male.)
What I have rehearsed, of course, is a list of stereotypes--I want to be sure you understand that I don't hold these stereotypes myself. But the church is a rational institution in its governance if not in its worship or prayer. It is ok for the masses to sing or dance or wear colorful clothes, ok for women to weep and hold one another, ok for worshipers to be "out of control"--so long as their passions are contained by organized liturgy and constrained by the rules of a rational polity. Gays are allowed in the church as part of the worshiping masses so long as they behave themselves (do not sleep with others of the same gender) and do not "act out" in ways that disrupt the natural order.
Women have been allowed more freedom in many of the denominations and are far more visible now. But they are still regarded by most male leaders as annoyances. They are always making demands, pushing against the barriers. If they team up with gays, then the male hierarchy, perhaps even the very concept of hierarchy, will be threatened. What male leaders fear most is an alliance between gays and women in the church.
It will be harder for the male elite to accept gays as they have, grudgingly, accepted women. For one thing, they are threatened by the proximity of gay males, who tempt them as women do to betray the male body, which the conservatives identify wholly with the Body of Christ.
And that's where theology meets the body in this dispute. Woman doesn't look like Christ, and that has been a sticking point for opponents of the ordination of women. But no one is even willing for a moment to make the argument that there cannot be a gay Christ--even to raise the possibility by denying it is anathema. His is the essential male body that has nothing sexually to do with women or men. His body is pure, as all bodies should be. The early church thought that women would be changed into men at the last day. Straight men.
The body we cannot get rid of is the Body of Christ, which is normative for the church.
Women are not highly regarded by the worldwide church in non-Western societies, and that is especially true of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which objects, along with a number of Episcopal Churches in the US, to the full inclusion of gays in the church and its leadership. I believe that the attitudes toward gays in the church are rooted in attitudes toward women. They share a common origin: an abhorrence of the body and its irrational, sensual ways.
Like women, gays are seen as impure (as I said in my previous post), not for reasons related to menstruation and pregnancy, obviously, but for reasons having to do with an upsetting of what is seen as the natural order. Order comes with reason, according to the traditional male way of thinking, and women are inherently irrational. They are unpredictable. They feel before they think. They are soft edged. They tempt men to violate their allegiance to reason and to orderly action. They tempt men to lose control (sexually and other ways).
Gays are regarded by dominant male leaders in the church in the same way. Gays are too much like women. They care more about the sensual body. They violate natural order and therefore encourage chaos. They are unpredictable because they don't think like "normal" men. They can be soft edged. They may be passive receivers of the male organ, just as women are. (Some bisexual men who engage in homosexual acts deny the are gay if they are the "active" partner. It is the receiver who is gay, ie, not male.)
What I have rehearsed, of course, is a list of stereotypes--I want to be sure you understand that I don't hold these stereotypes myself. But the church is a rational institution in its governance if not in its worship or prayer. It is ok for the masses to sing or dance or wear colorful clothes, ok for women to weep and hold one another, ok for worshipers to be "out of control"--so long as their passions are contained by organized liturgy and constrained by the rules of a rational polity. Gays are allowed in the church as part of the worshiping masses so long as they behave themselves (do not sleep with others of the same gender) and do not "act out" in ways that disrupt the natural order.
Women have been allowed more freedom in many of the denominations and are far more visible now. But they are still regarded by most male leaders as annoyances. They are always making demands, pushing against the barriers. If they team up with gays, then the male hierarchy, perhaps even the very concept of hierarchy, will be threatened. What male leaders fear most is an alliance between gays and women in the church.
It will be harder for the male elite to accept gays as they have, grudgingly, accepted women. For one thing, they are threatened by the proximity of gay males, who tempt them as women do to betray the male body, which the conservatives identify wholly with the Body of Christ.
And that's where theology meets the body in this dispute. Woman doesn't look like Christ, and that has been a sticking point for opponents of the ordination of women. But no one is even willing for a moment to make the argument that there cannot be a gay Christ--even to raise the possibility by denying it is anathema. His is the essential male body that has nothing sexually to do with women or men. His body is pure, as all bodies should be. The early church thought that women would be changed into men at the last day. Straight men.
The body we cannot get rid of is the Body of Christ, which is normative for the church.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Talking about the Body, 1
Well, here we are a week after the resurrection. The cold continues in the northeast. Yesterday afternoon Eighth Avenue was a flowing river because rain had been falling for twenty-four hours. It was still falling this morning. I have been thinking about the body, not only because this kind of weather makes the body feel miserable--wet clothes, chill in the bone--but because my left wrist is healing from the bicycle fall and I am feeling like a pudding for lack of excercise. I'm not allowed to ride my bike until the hand surgeon says I can.
The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.
The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.
The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.
The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.
Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.
The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.
During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.
The hand surgeon told me, as he examined my wrist, that a colleague of his, a doctor and a cyclist, had been killed a couple of months ago along the West Side Bicycle path in Manhattan--which I ride regularly, when I can ride. He was a young man who had been cycling with his wife that morning. I could tell that the doctor treating me was responding emotionally to my own accident, thinking about the unnecessary and wasteful death of his colleague. A day or two before I saw the hand surgeon, we had taken a taxi down the west side and had seen a ghostly white bicycle marking the spot where the young doctor had been killed. Beside the bicycle was an artifical wooden flower, colorful. The kind of thing that makes one think of Easter and resurrection.
The doctor's body is gone, as all bodies will go. Jesus' body goes too. In Christian theology we talk about the resurrection of the body. We read in scripture that we will all be changed, and we think of a new body. Thomas touches the wound. The body matters to all of us; it matters particularly in Christian story and ritual. There is a wonderfully weird painting by Caravaggio of Thomas with his finger stuck in the slit in Jesus' side: it is patently sexual, the slit vaginal. Not so long ago, a group of us were looking at it during a meeting, discussing the painting as if it had nothing to do with sexuality, as if the finger were just a finger, ignoring altogether the other message of the work: we are sexual beings, even in our relationship to God. It is a blatently homoerotic work. Take another look at some of the Medieval and Renassiance paintings that emphasize the private parts of the naked Jesus, the suckling babe, images that today might close down a museum.
The church's vexed relationship with the human body, and particularly the female body, is not news. In a recent communication to someone who had read one of my earlier posts here, I said that I thought we need a theology of the body that is up to date, that takes account of how our thinking about what the body signifies has changed. The church is stuck with a very old paradigm in which we celebrate resurrection but deplore the body.
The lack of a coherent theology of the body is part of the problem the church has with homosexuality (or almost any sexuality)--and part of the problem it has with women. Even though the Episcopal Church ordains women, and has for thirty years, the female body is still a problem for the church. So is the male body (hence the problem with homosexuality). At the ordination/consecration of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, a priest spoke against the action and began to detail the (as he was clearly suggesting, "disgusting") things males did with each other, particularly the parts they touched, as if simply saying the parts--anus, penis, testicles--were themselves sufficient evidence of the horror of the acts involving them.
Part of the problem is the somewhat hidden but very strong sense that Christianity remains a purity religion (as all religions are or have been). The purity of the altar is the primary way in which we encounter this ancient strain of Christian sensibility in the liturgical churches. Only the ordained handle the sacred elements or control how the rest will handle them. But in general Christians sense that the doings of the body are and should remain beyond the concern of the church. Nonetheless, what we do with each other sexuality should be governed by the church in order to preserve the purity of the community. You don't know what that hand has touched! Only what is blessed or sanctified (through marriage) may be touched. All else is impure and may not approach the altar. Ditto for the thrice-married priest or bishop.
The split in the Anglican Communion is to a great extent about purity. One must repent and stop touching impure things to be part of the community. In the United States, the majority of the members of the Episcopal Church are willing to accept gays without imposing purity requirements on them, but at the same time, I suspect that most of those who accept gays and divorce and the routine habits of cohabitation by the unmarried continue in some part of their hearts to suspect that the church is less pure than it used to be. There may even be a lingering suspicion that the impure shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Shifted from the realm of sexuality, this suspicion gets channeled into other aspects of church life. For example, the pure don't move around much or sing songs with rhythm or dance in church. The pure, the clergy, wear clothing that hides their bodies. And so perhaps should the rest of us. Dirty homeless people being are an offense because we can smell them, even after they've gone.
During this Eastern season, when we read of or experience Jesus walking around in his body (or in some body, even ours), it would be helpful to clarify what we mean when we speak of the body we are in, the Body of Christ we ingest, the body we really hate to think of losing to death.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Falling, Not Jumping
I don't remember falling. I remember the moment before, when my bicycle tire caught in the streetcar track on Portland, Oregon's Northrup Street. I was heading up to the hills north of the city along the Willamette River. A fine mist was falling and I was looking forward to the hazy views. When the front tire slid into the track I knew I was going to fall. When I woke up, there were four people hovering over me, one of them holding a cloth to my bleeding forehead. Another assured me I was ok. These were passersby who had removed me from the steetcar tracks and called the fire department, which soon arrived (Engine Company 9, I later learned) with an EMS truck and crew. I could not remember the name of my hotel, nor its address. I think I remembered my name. Fortunately, I had ID, my health insurance card, my wife's cell phone number. The rental bike was not damaged, and the firemen said they'd return it for me. Really? They could hear the New York skepticism in my voice. But I was in no position to argue, strapped tight to a gurney. They were concerned about my neck and a likely concussion.
I did have--do have--a concussion, also a broken bone in my wrist and over my eye. Seven stitches removed yesterday back here in NY. My left arm is in a cast, and my head still hurts. We loved Portland anyway.
Hard to type with a cast. I'll be brief.
This morning, Palm Sunday, I heard sirens, not unusual in NYC, but they were close. I looked out and saw a man standing on the New York Inn sign five floors above 8th Avenue. Two dozen police officers in the street, one on a fire escape trying to talk him down. The man had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the hotel's brick wall, too far from the officer to be touched, but he kept looking over at the policeman talking to him, trying to talk him down. He was listening. Other officers arrived on the roof. One on the next-door building straddled a ledge, held by a safety rope. The avenue full of flashing lights, everyone just watching. Tense. The man stepped out on the sign, balanced above the sidewalk. I thought, he's going and prayed he wouldn't. But he stepped and leaned back, slumped in his clothes as if defeated. Soon, he sat and the officer on the next-door building helped him down.
When the policeman who had been talking to him from the fire escape for an hour came out onto the avenue, the other officers cheered and congratulated him. One of those New York moments.
As I made coffee, I was thinking about how much energy we are willing to dedicate to rescuing, caring for, strangers, myself in Portland, this unknown man who wanted to end his life. What do we do, now that we have been rescued?
I did have--do have--a concussion, also a broken bone in my wrist and over my eye. Seven stitches removed yesterday back here in NY. My left arm is in a cast, and my head still hurts. We loved Portland anyway.
Hard to type with a cast. I'll be brief.
This morning, Palm Sunday, I heard sirens, not unusual in NYC, but they were close. I looked out and saw a man standing on the New York Inn sign five floors above 8th Avenue. Two dozen police officers in the street, one on a fire escape trying to talk him down. The man had his hands in his pockets, leaning against the hotel's brick wall, too far from the officer to be touched, but he kept looking over at the policeman talking to him, trying to talk him down. He was listening. Other officers arrived on the roof. One on the next-door building straddled a ledge, held by a safety rope. The avenue full of flashing lights, everyone just watching. Tense. The man stepped out on the sign, balanced above the sidewalk. I thought, he's going and prayed he wouldn't. But he stepped and leaned back, slumped in his clothes as if defeated. Soon, he sat and the officer on the next-door building helped him down.
When the policeman who had been talking to him from the fire escape for an hour came out onto the avenue, the other officers cheered and congratulated him. One of those New York moments.
As I made coffee, I was thinking about how much energy we are willing to dedicate to rescuing, caring for, strangers, myself in Portland, this unknown man who wanted to end his life. What do we do, now that we have been rescued?
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Retirement
I remember when my father took early retirement from the federal government, for which he had worked since the end of World War II. He had reached the highest civil service level he could. For a man who had no college degree, it was quite an achievement, but he was disappointed that he couldn't go higher. He was frustrated by his situation; his superiors were giving him less and less work to do. He had gone as far as he could go in the office--and now they wanted him to leave altogether. When the opportunity to retire came along--one of those budget-cutting actions--he took the package.
He was a young man--I think he must have been in his early fifties. Fortunately, my mother had begun a career in banking and was by then an officer. He could be a house-husband if he wanted to. For awhile he worked for a hardware store and then hooked up with H&R Block, doing "executive taxes" instead of sitting in a walk-in office. He enjoyed numbers and the job suited him. But he also did the cooking--he always loved to cook.
I think it was unsettling for me, when he retired, because everyone seemed worried he wouldn't do anything, that he would just sit around. He didn't. In our family you didn't just sit around.
I had my first job when I was fifteen, although I had worked previous years mowing lawns and babysitting. I'll be sixty-three this month--so I've been working in some way or another for fifty years. Most men my age would expect to work longer, perhaps until seventy. I'm too young to retire, just as my father was.
But this week I am retiring in one official way: as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. My wife and I will also start looking for a cheaper place than New York City to live. There is no doubt I will continue to work in some sense, as a consultant or in some little enterprise of my own. I don't plan to just sit around. But I don't plan to take another full-time job in a company (unless someone wants to make me an irresistable offer--always possible).
Being a deacon is an odd thing. Most deacons don't get paid. I am unusual in having worked in two jobs for the church in which I was classified and paid as clergy. So I have a clergy pension and can retire. Circumstances that I need not go into here make it necessary I do that.
It is an odd feeling, to retire. I will continue to behave as a deacon, particularly as I see my prophetic role as a writer and speaker--very much part of the diaconal calling. Once we move I may want to work in a parish (as a traditional deacon volunteer in parish life), but the truth is I need to rethink my role in this church. And the action of retirement will help me do that.
I had a letter this week from a deacon who was ordained when I was, nine years ago, reminding me and my fellow ordinands from that ceremony that our tenth anniversary is coming up. I spent almost as much time trying to become ordained as I've spent in a collar. Before ordination, one of the key questions is: Why do you think you need to be ordained? Now that I'm about to retire from active duty, as it were, I wonder if I did need to be ordained. What good did it do me or the church? (Other than the modest pension, which was an accident anyway--and not what I mean by the question.)
We don't become ordained for ourselves, of course. Especially deacons: there are not many personal advantages to being one. And yet ordination changes our lives, alters who we are. And if we are right in thinking we are called to ordination, it ought to change the church in some way.
I have a sense of being freed but I can't articulate what I mean by that yet. I only know that this week I am retiring and I don't plan to sit around and do nothing. I'm too young for that. But what has happened to the deacon, the guy who thought God was calling him, through the community of the church. to a particular service? What becomes of him and his vocation?
He was a young man--I think he must have been in his early fifties. Fortunately, my mother had begun a career in banking and was by then an officer. He could be a house-husband if he wanted to. For awhile he worked for a hardware store and then hooked up with H&R Block, doing "executive taxes" instead of sitting in a walk-in office. He enjoyed numbers and the job suited him. But he also did the cooking--he always loved to cook.
I think it was unsettling for me, when he retired, because everyone seemed worried he wouldn't do anything, that he would just sit around. He didn't. In our family you didn't just sit around.
I had my first job when I was fifteen, although I had worked previous years mowing lawns and babysitting. I'll be sixty-three this month--so I've been working in some way or another for fifty years. Most men my age would expect to work longer, perhaps until seventy. I'm too young to retire, just as my father was.
But this week I am retiring in one official way: as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. My wife and I will also start looking for a cheaper place than New York City to live. There is no doubt I will continue to work in some sense, as a consultant or in some little enterprise of my own. I don't plan to just sit around. But I don't plan to take another full-time job in a company (unless someone wants to make me an irresistable offer--always possible).
Being a deacon is an odd thing. Most deacons don't get paid. I am unusual in having worked in two jobs for the church in which I was classified and paid as clergy. So I have a clergy pension and can retire. Circumstances that I need not go into here make it necessary I do that.
It is an odd feeling, to retire. I will continue to behave as a deacon, particularly as I see my prophetic role as a writer and speaker--very much part of the diaconal calling. Once we move I may want to work in a parish (as a traditional deacon volunteer in parish life), but the truth is I need to rethink my role in this church. And the action of retirement will help me do that.
I had a letter this week from a deacon who was ordained when I was, nine years ago, reminding me and my fellow ordinands from that ceremony that our tenth anniversary is coming up. I spent almost as much time trying to become ordained as I've spent in a collar. Before ordination, one of the key questions is: Why do you think you need to be ordained? Now that I'm about to retire from active duty, as it were, I wonder if I did need to be ordained. What good did it do me or the church? (Other than the modest pension, which was an accident anyway--and not what I mean by the question.)
We don't become ordained for ourselves, of course. Especially deacons: there are not many personal advantages to being one. And yet ordination changes our lives, alters who we are. And if we are right in thinking we are called to ordination, it ought to change the church in some way.
I have a sense of being freed but I can't articulate what I mean by that yet. I only know that this week I am retiring and I don't plan to sit around and do nothing. I'm too young for that. But what has happened to the deacon, the guy who thought God was calling him, through the community of the church. to a particular service? What becomes of him and his vocation?
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Sunday Morning
Since I'm fasting from religion during Lent--note, please, that the issue is religion not belief or faith--Sunday mornings remind me of the sixteen years I dropped out of religion between my sophomore year in college and my inexplicable return in 1979. I suppose a primary alternative to church is the New York Times, if you happen to have developed the Times habit over the years, as my wife and I have. So we read the Times. We have brunch. Because I'm not serving on an altar, I don't have to spend most of the day in the church, returning late afternoon with a kind of fatigue that I feel after no other work or activity. It isn't hard to do something different--when the weather's good, take a long bike ride as I did yesterday--although I must say that reading the New York Times is hardly an edifying experience or a ritual that leads to spiritual insight. (My wife says for her it is.)
But then a church service often fails to be edifying or spiritually insightful as well.
Well, this morning I was watching the workmen in the lot across the street from our apartment as they completed the erection of a fifteen-storey crane with an arm that reaches another ten storeys into the air. They began the work yesterday at dawn (the workers arrive at the construction site every day before dawn, even on the coldest days). Building has been going on at the site for a few months now, with interruptions of one sort or another. I know nothing about these things, so I can't say why there are delays. I assume it's about the arrival of materials. Watching the crane go up this weekend, I expect to see flat-bed trucks arrive tomorrow with long steel girders. The workers will then proceed to put the girders in place and erect a condominium skyscraper, the Platinum Tower, that will block a good part of our apartment's southern light. But that's just a fact of life in New York. Light will be blocked by buildings.
Anyway, as I've observed the workmen at the construction site over these few months, and seen them this weekend, I've been struck by how much of their time seems to be spent wandering around somewhat aimlessly. I can see a dozen men walking about in the morning, perhaps carrying something, but seldom do they seem to stop to do anything. Their motions appear random, and then at the end of the day the site has changed. There are walls, platforms rising out of the concrete bathtub in which it all rests. On Friday, there was not a crane, and then on Sunday there is. A few men were on the girders of the crane, some on the ground held ropes (I think). The whole thing balanced on a slim pile of steel seemed improbable. One man crawls out on the extended arm 100 feet up, without a safety belt, his feet balanced on the girders. The height doesn't seem to bother them.
It's a possible answer to the question, Why is there anything at all? Stuff mills around until it comes together and then you have something.
This morning they started up a smokey engine at the back of the platform on which the crane operator sits, enclosed in his glass casing (nice in this cold weather), and try out various moves. The man on the crane arm stays there while it is moved this way and that. Others crawl around on another platform above the operator's cab doing who knows what. Every now and then I look up from the Times to see how they are doing. They are standing or wandering or looking.
I mention to my wife that it's hard to think of these men in their hard hats as typical guys from the Bronx, say, with beer guts, whose views I am unlikely agree with, when I see them in this effortless motion erect a structure that does not look like it can stand. But it does. They're not in church either, of course.
It occurred to me that life is a bit like this, random motion or effort, that may or may not feel purposeful, but in the end, who knows. A few guys show up and after a day leave a twenty-storey crane behind. They go to a bar maybe, have a beer. No big deal. The main thing is the crane doesn't fall down. Amazing.
But then a church service often fails to be edifying or spiritually insightful as well.
Well, this morning I was watching the workmen in the lot across the street from our apartment as they completed the erection of a fifteen-storey crane with an arm that reaches another ten storeys into the air. They began the work yesterday at dawn (the workers arrive at the construction site every day before dawn, even on the coldest days). Building has been going on at the site for a few months now, with interruptions of one sort or another. I know nothing about these things, so I can't say why there are delays. I assume it's about the arrival of materials. Watching the crane go up this weekend, I expect to see flat-bed trucks arrive tomorrow with long steel girders. The workers will then proceed to put the girders in place and erect a condominium skyscraper, the Platinum Tower, that will block a good part of our apartment's southern light. But that's just a fact of life in New York. Light will be blocked by buildings.
Anyway, as I've observed the workmen at the construction site over these few months, and seen them this weekend, I've been struck by how much of their time seems to be spent wandering around somewhat aimlessly. I can see a dozen men walking about in the morning, perhaps carrying something, but seldom do they seem to stop to do anything. Their motions appear random, and then at the end of the day the site has changed. There are walls, platforms rising out of the concrete bathtub in which it all rests. On Friday, there was not a crane, and then on Sunday there is. A few men were on the girders of the crane, some on the ground held ropes (I think). The whole thing balanced on a slim pile of steel seemed improbable. One man crawls out on the extended arm 100 feet up, without a safety belt, his feet balanced on the girders. The height doesn't seem to bother them.
It's a possible answer to the question, Why is there anything at all? Stuff mills around until it comes together and then you have something.
This morning they started up a smokey engine at the back of the platform on which the crane operator sits, enclosed in his glass casing (nice in this cold weather), and try out various moves. The man on the crane arm stays there while it is moved this way and that. Others crawl around on another platform above the operator's cab doing who knows what. Every now and then I look up from the Times to see how they are doing. They are standing or wandering or looking.
I mention to my wife that it's hard to think of these men in their hard hats as typical guys from the Bronx, say, with beer guts, whose views I am unlikely agree with, when I see them in this effortless motion erect a structure that does not look like it can stand. But it does. They're not in church either, of course.
It occurred to me that life is a bit like this, random motion or effort, that may or may not feel purposeful, but in the end, who knows. A few guys show up and after a day leave a twenty-storey crane behind. They go to a bar maybe, have a beer. No big deal. The main thing is the crane doesn't fall down. Amazing.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Amazing Grace and A Beaver
I have been ranting lately about the Episcopal Church--and some of you think I'm being extreme about the subject. I admit it. I am. It is probably the only way to be in a community that thrives on accommodation. Look at how our church handled the issue of slavery: we did not split, as other denominations did, but we also simply never addressed the matter honestly. That left us in a position of some awkwardness during the civil rights era. We were simply a segregated church. The same was the case with the ordination of women. It took extreme action to change the dynamics. Someone wrote to say that I am using the divisive tactics of the right. And that is probably accurate. A united church or communion is not the holy grail.
But what I want to write about today is the film, Amazing Grace, which my wife and I saw on Saturday. It is about William Wilberforce and the effort to abolish the slave trade in Britain in the early eighteenth century. Amazing Grace is not a great film, but it is a good film. The acting is fine, the story line is well developed. Good and evil are somewhat less than black and white, although Wilberforce seems to lack all fault. Nonetheless, it is a film we Episcopalians should see and hear carefully. At one point in the story, the House of Commons and the leaders of the church caution that while they agree that slavery is an abomination, it is necessary to go slowly in order to protect business interests. The society runs on the slave trade and there is no easy way to change the order of things without distrupting economic and social comfort. (The same argument is almost always made against social change.) While the British government went carefully, thousands of Africans were sold and died. (What might happen in a forty-day period of reflection on whether gays are human? Gays may die from hate crimes here and around the world, while we pray for guidance.)
In the film there are clergy active on behalf of abolition. They are perceived by those in the mainstream as being "nuts." And indeed they seem to be somewhat off the rails. They are driven by one idea and one wonders if that is such a healthy way to live. But at the same time, it is obvious that Wilberforce is unable to let go of what he hears as a calling from God to take action against an obvious evil. In that, of course, he was absolutely right. As were those who took action against segregation in the US and died in defense of those who could not change the system on their own. The Episcopal Church has a martyr or two among the dead, Jonathan Daniels, to name one. He was vilified by his church and his bishop attempted to rein him in.
Amazing Grace reminds us that social change does not just come about on its own, as our Presiding Bishop intimated in her recent remarks to the staff at the Episcopal Church Center. Progress, she said, is being made. I think the underlying message is: be patient. But left alone, physics tells us, things decay, including the pursuit of justice--although it is interesting to note, that left alone injustice seems to flourish, contrary to the laws of physics. Perhaps evil is above such things. It appears that we need to be instruments of grace in order to counteract the ordinary course of evil. That's what Christians are meant to be.
Bishop John Chane of Washington, DC, has also spoken out on the subject. He says that he will not roll back the clock to appease the Anglican Communion. Take a look at the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and read what he has to say: www. edow.org.
On the good news front, a beaver has returned to the Bronx River, setting up a house where no beavers have been seen in two centuries. Somehow this beaver came to learn that it is ok to be in the Bronx River again, that the right kind of tree is there for him, that there is good clean food. It is not clear whether he is alone. He may be bringing a mate. We can hope. I like to think of this lonely beaver, taking off on his own. Back among his beaver relatives and friends I imagine their is a lot of talk. "Imagine, going off like that on his own. Why does he think he knows more than the rest of us? You watch, he'll be back. Beavers were never meant to be in the Bronx. Am I right? Huh?"
But what I want to write about today is the film, Amazing Grace, which my wife and I saw on Saturday. It is about William Wilberforce and the effort to abolish the slave trade in Britain in the early eighteenth century. Amazing Grace is not a great film, but it is a good film. The acting is fine, the story line is well developed. Good and evil are somewhat less than black and white, although Wilberforce seems to lack all fault. Nonetheless, it is a film we Episcopalians should see and hear carefully. At one point in the story, the House of Commons and the leaders of the church caution that while they agree that slavery is an abomination, it is necessary to go slowly in order to protect business interests. The society runs on the slave trade and there is no easy way to change the order of things without distrupting economic and social comfort. (The same argument is almost always made against social change.) While the British government went carefully, thousands of Africans were sold and died. (What might happen in a forty-day period of reflection on whether gays are human? Gays may die from hate crimes here and around the world, while we pray for guidance.)
In the film there are clergy active on behalf of abolition. They are perceived by those in the mainstream as being "nuts." And indeed they seem to be somewhat off the rails. They are driven by one idea and one wonders if that is such a healthy way to live. But at the same time, it is obvious that Wilberforce is unable to let go of what he hears as a calling from God to take action against an obvious evil. In that, of course, he was absolutely right. As were those who took action against segregation in the US and died in defense of those who could not change the system on their own. The Episcopal Church has a martyr or two among the dead, Jonathan Daniels, to name one. He was vilified by his church and his bishop attempted to rein him in.
Amazing Grace reminds us that social change does not just come about on its own, as our Presiding Bishop intimated in her recent remarks to the staff at the Episcopal Church Center. Progress, she said, is being made. I think the underlying message is: be patient. But left alone, physics tells us, things decay, including the pursuit of justice--although it is interesting to note, that left alone injustice seems to flourish, contrary to the laws of physics. Perhaps evil is above such things. It appears that we need to be instruments of grace in order to counteract the ordinary course of evil. That's what Christians are meant to be.
Bishop John Chane of Washington, DC, has also spoken out on the subject. He says that he will not roll back the clock to appease the Anglican Communion. Take a look at the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and read what he has to say: www. edow.org.
On the good news front, a beaver has returned to the Bronx River, setting up a house where no beavers have been seen in two centuries. Somehow this beaver came to learn that it is ok to be in the Bronx River again, that the right kind of tree is there for him, that there is good clean food. It is not clear whether he is alone. He may be bringing a mate. We can hope. I like to think of this lonely beaver, taking off on his own. Back among his beaver relatives and friends I imagine their is a lot of talk. "Imagine, going off like that on his own. Why does he think he knows more than the rest of us? You watch, he'll be back. Beavers were never meant to be in the Bronx. Am I right? Huh?"
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