Hope's Mama

before I head for my nice warm bed tonight

2009-12-02T22:27:00.003-05:00

I need to tell you that it is cold here, nearly freezing, and it is raining outside. The dog is refusing to go out in the weather. And there are people sleeping in tents near the highway on the edge of my town because they can't afford to live in a house or an apartment. And they are there illegally, trespassing on public land, so they are cold and homeless and they are always afraid that the police will come and tell them that they have to leave. It is wrong, and it bothers me, and I don't know what to do. But I thought that I should tell you. It is freezing cold and it is raining and people I know are sleeping in tents near the highway. I don't know what to do.

30,000 more troops to Afghanistan

2009-12-01T21:58:00.005-05:00

Shame on you, Barack Obama, and on all the generals who insist that more killing and more dying is going to help Afghanistan and make us all safer . The big fools. Once again, Pete Seeger speaks for me. God bless Pete Seeger. If he were dead, he'd be turning in his grave:

first sunday of advent

2009-11-30T09:27:00.012-05:00

Clear off the table and lay a purple cloth under these words. It is the beginning of our new year. It is our great chance to step into liturgical time and out of this other time that is increasingly ordered by the forces of commerce and delusion. "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light." My knowledge of Isaiah comes not so much from reading the Bible as from hearing and playing those passages in Handel's Messiah. "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,.....make straight in the desert a highway for our God." The words and melodies are part of my biology after all these years of learning them at the piano, rehearsing with singers and choirs. Now the songs are my way in--the entrance to Advent for me. When I encounter the same words in my Bible reading, I greet them as old friends, and they point me deeper into the texts I barely know.

Last night, I pulled the Advent wreath out of storage. It is a plain circle of straw and wire, with four unvarnished wooden candle holders attached to it. I stepped out into the rain and cut a few sprigs of low hanging pine from the tree that towers over our house. I walked over to the old holly bush whose life has been spared for this purpose, the first night of Advent, and I cut a few leaves, not knowing for sure what I was getting in the dark. Inside, I wired the damp greenery to the wreath and added the beeswax candles, thinking of Peter from the Farmer's Market, who rolled the beeswax into candles, and who may have raised the bees, but I'm not sure.

More music in my head, a recording of renaissance music, women's voices in an echoing church: "Gau-de, gau-de, Em--man---u-el, shall come to you o, I---sra-el."

My little family of three gathered at the table and we said the prayers and lit the first candle, light in the darkness.

I love the darkness of Advent-- the anticipation, the preparation, the nothingness. This weekend, visiting my mother-in-law, I picked up one of her National Geographic magazines and opened it to a picture of a group of Orthodox monks holding candles in the dark. The caption said that they regularly rose to pray in the middle of the night because they believe that these are the hours when "the heart is most open." So here we are, at the darkest time of the year, and we too, are offered the gift of open hearts. I am praying to wake up, to not lose this great chance to listen in the darkness, to be open, and quiet, and unafraid.

repatriating Buddha

2009-09-06T17:08:00.009-04:00

The day after my father-in-law died

I saw your familiar head in the grocery store

cast in grey plastic resin and sitting, of all places,

on top of a grass-skirted display labeled "Tiki Bar"

Buddha, they made a joke of you

They put you in a silly, south seas,

tropical-drink-themed

party tableau

Maybe you didn't mind, as you are an awake Buddha,

but I am a groggy Christian,

and my Buddhist husband was grieving his father,

and I couldn't bear to see you like that

I did what any good Samaritan would do

for a Buddha left to languish on the Tiki-Samsara highway

I set you carefully in my shopping cart

between the frozen pot pies and the organic bananas

You cast your compassionate gaze on everything

as we traveled past pool supplies and pet food,

through the land of entertainment centers and leather sectionals

There was no inflatable bodhi tree in the seasonal aisle

but we found an empty sofa table that looked like an altar

I placed you in the center of it and made a quick bow.

The man at the seafood counter pretended not to see us

You looked happier there,

bigger than before and more finely wrought

you seemed at peace, finally

after so many years of infirmity

The sea of impermanence rose up and carried me away from you,

toward the check-out and the parking lot,

the evening meal and the funeral home

Attention Kroger shoppers:

Great is the matter of life and death

Thirteen items or less is sufficient

Do not waste this moment

all glory, laud and honor

2009-08-04T13:41:00.005-04:00

Today's message from the universe comes via Thomas Merton, who writes in Praying the Psalms:

"To praise God! Do we know what it means to praise? To adore? To give glory? Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets which are supposed to make life more comfortable—everything is constantly being "praised" with the official hollow enthusiasm of a radio announcer. It turns out in the end that nothing is praised. Praise has become empty. Nobody really wants to use it. Are there any superlatives left for God?"

I am talking to my husband about Thomas Merton and praise and reflecting on how much praise he (my husband) was required to accumulate in order to get tenure and keep his job as a university professor. The whole place runs on praise and merit and external validation. It's a Buddhist's nightmare (and not such an easy place to be a Christian either). My husband reminds me of the Rilke sonnet that begins, "Praising is what matters!"

I think about movie reviews and book jacket blurbs and desserts that are "to die for" and singers whose voices are "transcendent, " and I start to wonder if Rilke is right, if praising is what matters, and then I worry that maybe there is a finite amount of praise alloted to each of us, or all of us, and that maybe we are squandering it on all the wrong things. Really, are there any superlatives left for God? Can we take back "awesome" for starters?

truth and beauty

2009-04-22T13:43:00.013-04:00

It appears that I am the last person in North America to hear of Susan Boyle and to watch the youtube video of her performance on Britain's Got Talent, the British version of American Idol. The media loves her story. The words used in the press to describe her are invariably some combination of "frumpy," "spinster," "middle-aged," "never-been-kissed" and "unemployed." The big story they want to tell about her is that this frumpy, middle-aged, unlovable, unemployable, unfashionable person turns out to sing quite beautifully and "astonishes" the judges with her musical talent. We are all supposed to be dutifully chastened by our foolish presumptions and to learn the lesson that you can't judge a book by its cover. We are also supposed to be glad for Susan, who has "risen like a phoenix from the ashes" and been "transformed" by the experience.

Bullshit, and more bullshit, I say. The real story is about our collective ugliness, not hers. And the ugliness is ongoing. The radiant Ms. Boyle, who walked on stage to the derision of the audience and the judges was only redeemed for them by an extraordinary show of talent. Suppose that she hadn't sung very well after all? Then who would she be to us?

A beautiful person. A child of God, that's who. Watch the video again, and see how gorgeous she is before she even opens her mouth. She doesn't need to prove anything to us. Do you get it? A Susan Boyle who can't sing is every bit as miraculous, every bit as deserving of our respect and encouragement as a Susan Boyle who can.

I am fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and I don't sing as well as Susan Boyle. I have God-given gifts just like everyone else, but they don't redeem me, they don't make make me more or less ridiculous than another person, and they are certainly not the price of my admission to the family of humanity. What saves Susan Boyle, what saves you and me, is the simple fact of our place in the universe as children and heirs of the One who is Pure Love.

The degree to which we need a Broadway-level performance to convince us of the beauty and worthiness of a fellow traveler in this world is the degree to which we are small and ugly and mean and desperately in need of the grace of God.

I will tell you this once more (again with thanks to my friend Hysnishah, who told it to me): Our mission in this life is to polish our souls until they shine so much that God's own face is reflected in them. And Susan Boyle, if you look at her, she is shining, even with the sound turned down. She doesn't need anything from Simon Cowell and neither do you.

Fourth and Walnut

2009-03-23T00:03:00.004-04:00

I only came across this passage from Thomas Merton in October and was so struck by it. Maybe you have already read it? In any case, it resonated with me strongly. Today at Mass, our dear visiting Jesuit, Father Norm, mentioned this episode in his homily and it made me want to share it with you too:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. ...

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
-From Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander (1966)

I struggle so much with what I really ought to be doing with my life, with how to be in the world, and the last line of this excerpt really gets me, because that is what I have always wanted to do- to tell people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Maybe that is why I like it so much at St. Leo’s —the people there seem to have some humble inkling that they are shining like the sun, and they are not afraid to tell each other, or to hear it from someone else.

And my dears, let me tell you what Thomas Merton told me and I know in my marrow to be true: You are shining like the sun. Shining.

Christmas letter

2008-12-18T11:26:00.010-05:00

Forgive me, dear friends, for I have sinned. It has been eight years since my last Christmas letter. During that time, I have: become a peace activist, failed to complete my dissertation, become a lapsed peace activist, been a pretty good mother, recognized an incipient internet addiction, started a blog, found a church, lost forty pounds, gained forty pounds, gotten a dog, joined a gospel choir, stayed married, lost friends, and made a few new friends. In my spare time I have been cultivating an awareness of the interconnection of all things, and I recently bought a fixer-upper dollhouse at the Treasure Mart to serve as my meditation space.

2008 was a good year. My husband had two pieces played at Carnegie Hall, one of which he performed himself. I was really proud of him, and it was thrilling, really thrilling. I hesitate to mention this in our Christmas letter, because I don't want it to sound like I'm bragging, but it was a Big Deal for our little family and I'd be lying if I didn't say so. Two trips to New York, and new clothes and everyone applauding for E. and his music getting some attention and parties to celebrate, and snow, and skating at Rockefeller Center and E. feeling good about himself and his work, and that was the best part. We got to meet Terry Riley and he seemed kind and genuine, which you don't get so much from your famous composers, and that was reassuring.

I'm not bragging, because I didn't really do anything, except put out a nice buffet for the performers when they were in town to rehearse, but still, this is what happened to us in February. It was so magical that you could almost forget about all the killing in Iraq and the soldiers coming home dead or worse and how we are all responsible for that, every minute.

The wars have been heavy on my mind, but I know that some of you are embarrassed or confused by that, so I compromised last year and the year before that by writing about the wars in my Christmas letters and then not sending the letters out. When the thought of all the senseless suffering gets to me too much, I eat something and I feel better for a minute.

My daughter is nearly ten now, and she is learning things and she is lovely. Again, not that I'm bragging, really. She has her challenges. Still, she is playing sonatinas and dancing jigs and reels, and she has a healthy sense of the absurd and she can clap on beats 2 and 4 when it is required, so I am grateful. I'm scared about what is ahead for her. I worry all the time if we are doing enough to prepare her for adult life in this weird and desperate world.

I am still teaching piano lessons and I've gotten quite good at it, despite my limitations as a pianist. When I have the house to myself I practice the student repertoire I never learned and I play gospel piano in as many keys as I dare. St. Leo's church in Detroit is my heaven on earth and the people there are my heroes and my role models. They shine like the sun. They are hurting for money there, by the way. I'm just sayin'.

I want to wish you a happy new year, I do wish you a happy new year, but for some of you, I know that this will be a sad new year. I know that some of you have lost family members, some of you are depressed, some of you have cancer. I want you to know that I know; that it makes me cry, and that if you are up to a happy new year, I do wish it for you, along with peace in your heart.

I wish we could have peace on earth. I think we ought to all be working toward peace on earth. I think I ought to be working much, much harder for peace on earth. I am a hopeful person, but so far, Obama's appointments have been a disappointment, so I see that it is up to us, still.

That about sums it up, I guess. If you haven't heard from me in a while, I probably miss you a lot, and love you. I don't write so much, because I don't want to offend anyone, and because I am lazy with some perfectionist tendencies.

Happy winter celebration of your choice, happy coming of light, Happy New Year, deep peace.

Suzanne

Song without words

2008-06-14T09:14:00.008-04:00

"Kosovo's parliament has chosen a national anthem during a special session in Pristina.The new anthem is called Europe. It has no lyrics and was written by the Kosovo composer Mendi Mengjiqi. " -BBC News, June 10th, 2008

A national anthem without words for a new country that might be better imagined first without language.

"Gjuha jonë, sa e mirë! Sa e ëmbël, sa e gjerë!" ["Our language, so good! So sweet! So vast!"]

Say something in Albanian and I am five years old again, the oldest granddaughter, sure of my place in a world of aproned women, and cigar-smoking men. "Q' është e bukur!" they say, and pinch my face. It means that I am beautiful. They say it to all the children. Only the Albanian-speakers say that I am beautiful. Perhaps I am only beautiful in Albanian.

Say something, anything, in that language and I'll start to cry, even if I don't understand it. The people who loved me in Albanian are dead now. In my new family, we love each other in American English, a language that lacks the enthusiastic self-regard and co-extensive patriotism of Albanian. For me, English is our instrumental-only national anthem, a little bit bland, but not without possibility. Gjuha jonë sa e ......?

In Kosova, newly independent, the new anthem is unlanguaged, and the new flag is light blue, like the sky. The old Albanian double eagle is missing, flown away in search of the blood-red ground he has always known. On the new flag, and in the new song, there is room for something else, for a new family, for multi-lingual memories. This is right and hopeful. And more than ever, the old language makes me cry.

New York on five transcendent moments a day

2008-03-05T17:02:00.009-05:00

Chapter 1:
In which a charming shoe shine man outside of the Hotel Newton cons me out of three dollars and I am filled with joy and lightness of a surprisingly long-lasting nature...

Chapter 2:
in which my daughter and I enjoy a walk with a Dear Friend in the North Woods of Central Park and come upon an highly amplified hockey rink....

Chapter 3:
in which the music of my true love makes everyone cry and his face is shining...

Chapter 4:
in which the St. Leo's Gospel Choir mysteriously appears on stage at Carnegie Hall during a performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and floats over the orchestra briefly before transfiguring to dazzling white and disappearing in glorious and sudden surrender to the Spirit, leaving the audience disconsolate, with only the vision of a tortured Viennese composer and his heavily articulated pain to see them through the next fifteen minutes of their bewildering lives, which, ten seconds earlier, had made perfect sense; had made them want to lift up opened hands and shout "Amen!" as their playbills fluttered down from the balconies to the mezzanine below and the performer bios, program notes, and upcoming events were all forgotten and people in neighboring box seats embraced each other tearfully and laughed out loud at the coming of Peace on Earth, at long last...

Chapter 5:
in which my husband, my daughter and I ride the sixty-foot indoor ferris wheel at the Toys R Us store in Times Square and pretend, for the sake of the child, to be Normal People who are not in the least appalled at anything....

lone magi

2007-11-18T17:00:00.000-05:00

Today after church, we were sitting near the front of the sanctuary waiting for the choir rehearsal to begin. Up walks a man I'll call Frank. He is a sweet man, perhaps mentally ill, or maybe developmentally handicapped. At our church what matters is that he is a beloved regular parishioner. He has a habit of asking an odd question and then walking away abruptly as soon as he gets the answer. When he sees me, he usually points at my daughter, and asks in an urgent tone, "How is she doing in school, is she doing okay?" I always answer that she is doing very well, to which he nods gravely before turning quickly away.

So today, Frank approached this young man in our choir, who we'll call Reggie. Reggie is a good-natured, constantly smiling person. He has a had a difficult life sometimes, from what little I know. Frank bent down until his white beard was almost brushing Reggie's smiling face, and in his formal, serious way, announced:

"I'm looking for Jesus of Nazareth, do you know where I might find him?"

I smiled because we had just finished having mass and we were sitting there in our glorious romanesque sanctuary where Jesus is depicted hundreds of times all around us in the statues, stained glass, and ceiling frescos.

Reggie didn't take even a second to think.

"Look in the mirror."

Frank raised his eyebrows and pointed at his heart.

"He's inside of me?"

Reggie nodded. "Yes he is."

Frank thought about it for a moment and then bowed.

"Thank you."

Then he turned around and walked away in a hurry.

Things happen at my church that defy commentary. I am always wanting to make a poem out of what happens there, but so many moments arrive already full of poetry and then there is nothing left to record but the gratitude.

And I am grateful.

holy day of obligation

2007-11-01T07:13:00.000-04:00

I woke up wanting to go to Mass
until I noticed that the church websites were insisting that today is a holy day of obligation
When the church gets all paternal like that, I become a rebellious adolescent.
QUIT TELLING ME WHAT TO DO.
In the next moment, I remember that today,
like every day, is a most holy day of obligation.
I'll go to mass tomorrow, when I am not obligated.
There are a million other ways to make this day holy.

God's paradise

2007-10-05T09:28:00.000-04:00

From a radio interview with the former doorman of the Plaza Hotel:

"You know, my father told me years ago ... 'Be such a man and live such a life that if everybody lived a life like yours, this would be God's paradise.' And I go by that."

stopping the bombs in Oakridge, Tennessee

2007-09-25T13:36:00.000-04:00

I came home from Oakridge tired from the sun and two days on the bus and the emotions.

Buddhists from a Zen temple in Asheville, North Carolina, led the march. Their leaders wore saffron robes and they all carried small drums which they played as we walked. Two miles later, at the entrance to the weapons plant, it looked like we were making a Spielberg film. Protesters in colorful, rumpled clothing with handmade signs stood on one side of the gate with the chanting Buddhists. On the other side, fifty feet away, their faces made blurry by the waves of heat in the air, police in flak jackets stared us down from behind their mirrored sunglasses as police cars, SUVs and an armored military vehicle made a another barrier behind them.

I am describing the scene to my husband and my daughter. I tell them how the Buddhists were chanting the entire time at the gate, beating their drums in slow time as their leader chanted a call and the others chanted a response. "But why were there so many police?' my little girl wants to know. "That's a good question." I say. "To protect the bomb factory from the Buddhists, I guess." She laughs out loud. Her dad is a Buddhist. She knows that Buddhists do not harm anyone.

I am trying to make it sound ridiculous, because it is. I think that if one of us had suddenly jumped that gate, the police would have killed that person, the protection of the bomb factory being more important than our lives.

As I describe the protestors and the police and the factory officials staring at each other in the 95 degree heat, my husband says, "It makes you wonder who the protest is for." My husband is a composer. He is wondering about the lack of audience.

I know who it is for. It is for those of us whose taxes pay to make nuclear weapons that can destroy all five boroughs of Manhattan in a second. It is for the people of the town of Oakridge, Tennesse, where radioactive waste from this factory of death has poisoned all the water and threatens the health of all the residents. It is for the ones who survived the weapons of mass destruction that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for those who did not. It is for the pilot of the Enola Gay, who didn’t know better until it was too late for everyone. It is for me, in my helplessness and complicity. It is for anyone who needs to stand in front of the place where they manufacture the potential for mass killing and say to no one, “This is not me. This is not me. This is not the way I am. I am some other way. This cannot be me. “

tuesday morning in cross village and schenectady

2007-09-05T08:39:00.000-04:00

(my friend sings in public for the first time
in years and I am not there)

Looking west, the distance from this porch
to the lighthouse is about two miles.
To the north, the fields roll out to forest
and the treetops make a jagged horizon.

The world is big enough here,
framed by great lake and great lake sky,
a space in the center for coyote, cranes,
and the deer who watch us and stamp their feet at the house.

Beyond this place could be anywhere,
any language or way of living.

The gravel drive disappears into trees
and I am thinking now that on the other side
of that stand of oaks
(if I could just see ten yards further)
must be the place where
the driveway becomes a path which becomes the sidewalk
which runs past the front of your house.

A humming bird was hovering uncomfortably close to my head
this morning as I drank coffee.
The pair of cranes in the yard were dancing frantically
to chase away the deer.

After two days here, you start to get some small notion
of what has been missing,
what got lost.

You fantasize about disappearing into the woods,
about planting yourself up to the shoulders
in the field next to the apple tree
and waiting for what comes next.

And yet, like I said,
just past the edge of what the senses know,
there you are, an old friend,
as necessary as an early morning coyote sighting,
or a generous length of blue lake,
and as welcome, as far removed from daily life,
weekly life, monthly life.

Come Sunday, I will be home again,
walking the dog on city streets, checking the mail,
listening to a familiar mix of
cardinal calls, construction, busses on the half-hour.

In northern Michigan,
the cranes will be leaping,
the wind will continue to blow the field grass and birches,
and they will make a sound like waves.

At the far end of the driveway there,
past the tunnel of trees,
my old friend will be singing her songs
to a café of well-wishers in upstate New York.
She will be smiling in that way she has,
where she looks like she has just heard
an especially satisfying joke.

I won’t be there exactly,
but from the place I am obliged to be,
I should be able to glimpse the light from the café window,
and to hear her last notes fold into the dark
as they mingle with the rattle of sandhill cranes
and the howl of coyotes,
the soundtrack of what matters.

long walk

2007-07-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

If you had been outside this morning
you would have seen me walking the little dog
and I would have smiled at you,
but I know you weren’t there.
The porches and sidewalks all empty on this sunny day
in my Midwesternville neighborhood.

Which is why we took the rest of our walk in Harlem.
Women sitting together on the stoops say “Good morning.”
Old men in suits nod a greeting as they pass you,
even in the rain.

If you had stepped outside an hour ago,
you would have seen me and the little dog,
moving lonely past tomato plants and wild roses and summer lawns,
toward the subway station at 125th St. and Lenox
and the noise of car radios and delivery trucks
and mothers with babies and young women with fancy fingernails
and people everywhere, alive, together.

The age of reason

2007-06-16T10:59:00.009-04:00

(for Gerry Sellman)

Two days past her first communion,
the white dress
a puddle of shiny organza on the floor,
she wants to know
why we never see any women priests
at church, not even one.

Because they’re not allowed, baby.
No women allowed.
That’s why.

I watch the truth seep in like slow poison
until she squints up at me,

"WHAT??!!!!"

Her voice is so strong.

Shout it again, wise child.
Shout it until the force of your disbelief
makes deaf men hear.

Shout it out loud, bright girl
until they let you whisper
in the center of the sanctuary,
arms upraised and face upturned,

Behold the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sins of the world.

Behold, lambie mine,
he will take away this sin.

Where justice begins
there is a word,
and the word is from God,
and the word is

"WHAT???!!"

Come Jesus,
free your eight-year-old girls.
Only say the word and we shall be healed,
we shall all be healed.

What would you do

2007-05-21T12:33:00.000-04:00

if someone you barely know
someone nice
walked right up to you
and gave you a present
a book about writing
because you needed a book about writing
and so this person
who is a poet, ( a good poet)
whose name you've only recently learned
went to the bookstore just before she knew that she would be seeing you
at the Buddhist poetry reading
and she paid $13.00 plus tax for this brand new book,
(and you know that is a lot of money for a poet)
and she presented it to you with a big warm smile
What would you do?
Would you write a mushy thank you note
(and worry a little about the quality of your writing)?
Yes, you would.
Would you feel good all day, and the next day because now there seems to be one more person in the world who cares about you and your writing?
Yes, you would.
Would you read that book and let the good counsel work on you until you couldn't wait to sit down and write?
Yes, you would do that.
Would you feel a little more hopeful in general, because some people can be surprisingly nice and generous?
Would you vow to become the kind of person who might want to buy a brand-new book for a near-stranger?
yes. You would.
Would you sit down and write and write and write and feel unafraid?
Yes, you would.
But
you might not post the best stuff on your blog
right away.
or ever.
You might be a little more patient and careful about what you write and when you share it.
You might start to wonder about blogging.
and other kinds of writing.
And what's what.
You might need to wonder a little bit.

every one of us is every one of us

2007-04-18T09:47:00.000-04:00

33 people shot to death on a university campus in Virgina.

The BBC news is reporting that every South Korean is feeling
great shame because the gunman was born in Korea. The reporter says that Koreans in the United States are bracing for a "backlash."

When a Korean kills 33 Americans, Koreans are ashamed.

If a Korean kills 33 Koreans, are Koreans just as ashamed?

If an American kills 33 Americans, are Americans ashamed?

What if an American kills 33 Iraqis? Are Americans ashamed?

What if an American drops a bomb on an Iraqi city and the bomb kills 33 Iraqis, or maybe 33,000 Iraqis? Are Koreans ashamed?

What if an American kills everyone at a wedding in Afghanistan?

What if a young man from Michigan kills all the children at a day care center in Oklahoma City? Are Michiganders ashamed?

What if a dozen or more men from Saudi Arabia kill 3000 people in New York City? Are Iraqis ashamed?

What if a man from Texas orders teenagers from Ohio, West Virgina, Mississipi, North Dakota and Florida to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who is ashamed? Are Texans the most ashamed? Should the Dixie Chicks be ashamed?

What if the law did not permit an unbalanced college student to buy a gun that was made to kill human beings in great quantities and at great speed? Would there be any shame in that?

At my daughter's school, the public address system quietly broadcasts the special code words that every adult and child in the school has memorized. At the sound of those words (I can't tell you what they are) the teachers pull down the shades and lock the classroom doors. Then every 5-year-old, every 12-year-old, every Korean-American child, every African-American child, every Christian child, every Muslim child, every soft-cheeked, giggling, fidgeting little boy and girl hides under the trapezoid-shaped tables for the "lock-down" drill. They are learning that they must be prepared for the day that an angry man with a store-bought gun and store-bought ammunition comes into their school to try to kill them, their classmates and their teachers until the gunman himself is shot to death as the surviving children watch.

My God, I am so ashamed.

fair trade first communion

2007-04-09T16:49:00.001-04:00

If I were a visual artist (instead of a "Draw Binky" drop-out) this essay would be a photographic collage. There would be sepia-toned shots of earnest, pretty girls in their fussy white first communion dresses. Maybe I would sneak in a self-indulgent picture of my own daughter, dressed like a little bride of Christ. All around those angelic girls would be photographs of the over-worked Chinese women who sew first communion dresses in factories a thousand miles away from the department stores where mothers like me go to buy them for our daughters who will wear them the first time that they are permitted to hold God in their outstretched hands.

It would probably be too much to try to depict the women who risk their health to bleach the fabrics to that unearthly white that my daughter and every other Catholic girl I know have come to associate with the "princess for a day" style of dress that is now a prerequisite for an American first communion.

I would want the piece to be subtle, not preachy. I would need to obscure in some artful way the bald reality that a lot of misery gets sewn into the clothes we wear. People suffer and get sick and live away from their families so that American children can have closets full of cheap, flashy clothes. You just can't hit your viewers over the head with that information. They will turn you right off. You've got to dance around the truth, have some compassion for your audience.

So, a collage. Well-fed, laughing girls in tiaras and shiny white satin, posing with well-fed priests, and well-fed aunts and uncles and bewildered, well-fed parents, who seem saddened by how very natural their daughters look dressed as brides, even at eight years old. Add a few bits of lace; we'll call it mixed media. And then the garment workers. Thousands of them, no, millions of them (maybe I need to re-think the dimensions of this piece). Grainy photographs of thin, dark-haired women and teenagers crammed into small rooms. Let them stare down the camera. How to show that they work seven days a week and cannot sleep or use the bathroom when they need to? Maybe a picture of the cots in the dormitories where they live and bathe and rest during the few hours when they are not sewing sequins on my daughter's clothing? Can I say that they make less per month than I spend on my daughter’s piano lessons? Or that some of them are living as indentured servants? This is asking a lot from a collage.

My daughter will make her first communion next month. She will hold Jesus in her hand. Body of Christ, the priest will say to her. Amen, she will say, just like they told her to in rehearsal. My father will take a picture of it, even if they tell us no pictures.

My mother wanted to buy her a first communion dress. She wanted to give my daughter a special shopping trip where they tried on a dozen dresses and my daughter chose The One, the very best One and whirled around admiring herself in it and said, oh thank you Nana, it's beautiful. I wanted that too, I suppose. But the collage wouldn’t stop taking shape, and my innocent, dewy daughter's face kept getting juxtaposed onto other, less innocent, less hopeful, but still beautiful faces.

I said to my girl, "Sweetie, you know the first communion dresses that you see at the store, well, a lot of them are made by people who don't get paid enough money to live, and who don't have a safe place to work, and have to work way too much, and..."

and she interrupted me and said,

"..and if we buy those dresses, it's like we're supporting it. "

That made me proud, I won't lie. I guess she's been paying attention. I started looking for a first communion dress that was not fashioned from the mistreatment of poor people--people who, Jesus says in the Bible, are really just him in disguise. The irony of it is about as subtle as a hit in the head, no?

I found a nun in Cleveland who trains women from poor parts of the city to sew organic clothing and to participate in a worker-run cooperative called Esperanza Threads. She said they used to make fair trade first communion dresses that didn't hurt anybody, but nobody wanted them because they were not dazzling white and shiny and poufy like every girl's Barbie fantasy first communion (okay, I added the Barbie part, but that's what she meant).

Then I called my brother, who works at a Catholic church and I said let's find a source for fair trade first communion dresses and we'll get all the churches on board because who wants their kid to receive the body of Christ while she's wearing sweatshop clothes and,.... and he said that no congregation he knew would be willing to make that kind of shift in their thinking, even if they understood about the sweatshops and the bad karma in the dresses, and how the workers can't go to the bathroom and maybe I should think about more practical kinds of clothing.

And so I found myself staring at a website that specialized in first communion dresses--dozens of shiny, poufy, sparkly, shimmering, lacy, dreamy dresses and it said that some of them were made in the USA. I wrote to the company and asked about how they treated their workers and where in the USA did they make their dresses? They wrote back assured me that their non-imported dresses are sewn in their well-lit facility in Idaho, and it is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer and the workers make above minimum wage and the family of owners works right there too and everybody is happy happy happy. I don't know if this is true, but I wanted it to be true, and my daughter needed a dress.

Of all the fancy dresses pictured on this website, my daughter was only allowed to choose from the ones that were manufactured in the United States. That reduced the pool considerably, but she found one she liked. It had a name. It was called Shaylee. Shaylee cost twice as much as the same kind of dress from J.C. Penney. My mother is going to pay for it. As best as I can tell, the women who worked on Shaylee were paid an hourly wage that is probably not great, but not shameful. I am assuming that they were able to use the bathroom when they needed to and to return home at night to their families. That's what I think, but I'm not sure. Someday I’ll visit them in Idaho and see for myself, and I’ll say thank you for your fine work on these lovely dresses and I’m wondering, can you tell me, which way is the bathroom?

Tabhair dom do lámh

2007-03-08T00:08:00.001-05:00

In the ‘hand-winding’ system of the Irish sean-nós, a sympathetic listener grasps the singer’s hand; or, indeed, the singer may initiate first contact and reach out for a listener. The singer then might close his eyes, if they are open (sometimes he might grope for someone, like a blind man) and appear to go into a trance; or his eyes, if open, might focus on some remote corner of the room, as if his gaze could penetrate the fabric, and take him to some antique, far-off happening among the stars.
- Ciaran Carson from Last Night’s Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music

I won't pretend to understand how Irish sean-nos (old style) singing works, but I saw it once, the real thing, I think, in a pub on an island in the west of Ireland. This pub was full of tourists and regulars, all settled in for the afternoon with their pints and sandwiches and nowhere better to go. I remember songs being sung, and perhaps some dance tunes being played. Maybe two couples got up and danced a set to the tune of Sally Gardens. One particularly extroverted singer was holding court in the center of the room. He wore a sequined baseball cap and an expectant grin. He sang a short, silly song about never counting your chickens "when you're dealing with the women." I think a lot of us were singing along on the chorus, but I can't be sure now.

When he stopped singing, the pub quieted down and attention began to focus on a shy-looking woman seated in a nearby chair. She looked uncomfortable and mildly distressed, as if she were suffering from some temporary affliction. She closed her eyes and stretched one arm into the air behind her head, reaching out for comfort, or courage (it seemed to me). The hand of another woman found hers and the winding began. The woman standing behind the singer began to turn the singer's hand slowly, the way I imagine you used to have to turn the crank on a victrola to make the music happen. Slowly, slowly, the turning brought the singer around to the song, or the song around to the singer--a song that would not be released until a sympathetic hand helped to wind it out and around us fortunate listeners. Fifteen years later I am still grateful to that singer for her song, and to the woman standing behind her, the owner of the turning hand.

Sometimes our songs won't come out. Maybe we get wound up too tightly and we need a gentle hand to unwind us. Or perhaps it is that every creative act, every song sung, every poem set down is a collaboration among the turned and the turning. We grope blindly for the hand that will pull us of out of ourselves, reconnect us with a community, give us a reason to sing the song we carry in our innermost core and to believe that it is sufficient for something. And we are all turners of hands, bearing the responsibility for the safe passage of one another's songs.

intermission, with red sauce

2007-02-25T08:07:00.001-05:00

(gentle readers: the events surrounding the exile of my pastor last month have apparently been traumatic enough to knock the creative wind out of me, temporarily. While I am getting my groove back and unmixing my metaphors, here is something I wrote last year. It was a response to the wonderful Recipe Narratives of A. Massey, and in that way it is really about interdependence as much as it is about spaghetti sauce.)

Red Sauce Stories (for Massey)

Waiting for the red sauce recipe that is the Meaning of Life, I remind myself of my own little stories:

Story No. 1: The story of how quickly the feudalism, Italian words, Albanian words, poverty, separation, loss, struggle, war, humiliation, alienation are erased and forgotten by the very next generations until all that remains is the food and memories of food. And a very few songs.

Story No. 2: Once upon a time there were no recipes. There was The Way We Do It. And there were many wrong ways, all of them outrageous and deliberately provocative and shameless in their wrongness.

Story No. 3: By your sauce shall you be known. What kind of people are we? We are Not the kind of people who: Put sugar in their sauce. Put carrots in the sauce. Put wine in the sauce. Put anything less than two kinds of meat in the sauce. Sicilians put sugar in their sauce. We are not Sicilians. But we liked the Godfather. But we're not like the Corleones. They probably put sugar in their sauce.

Story No. 4: The story of the gallons of sauce in my grandmother's freezer that my parents rationed out for a year after she died, so that on any given Sunday at their house you might find yourself still being fed and loved and fussed over by my beautiful dead grandma. Bonus story: On the day we buried her, a hundred or so people gathered afterwards for lunch and on every table there were baskets of sweet bread that my grandmother had baked and kept in her freezer to give to people she loved.

on losing more than Bishop Gumbleton

2007-02-08T08:54:00.000-05:00

First they came for the homosexuals, and they threw them out of the seminaries. No gays need apply. Got a complaint? Go get in line over there with all those women who want to become priests. And I wondered how I could remain Catholic in the face of such bigotry.

Then they came for the heterosexuals, but just the ones using birth control, which would be most of them under the age of 50, including me. And they said, stay out of the communion line. Just sit quietly in the pew with your gay friends, because Jesus’ body and blood is only for people having unprotected straight sex or no sex at all. It says so in the Bible, or at least in some document we recently made up.

And by the way, they said, if you disagree with us on any of the big doctrinal stuff, you know, like ordaining women, or homosexuals in the priesthood, or how to reduce the abortion rate, then once again, the communion table is closed to you. We invite you to shut up and go sit down with the gays and the selfish birth control users and re-think your position. Don't make us come back there and excommunicate you.

And as bad as I felt, as mad as I felt, I also felt relieved because at MY dear little open-hearted Catholic parish, I knew that my homosexual brothers and sisters felt welcome. I knew that no one there would be checking my purse for Trojans or worrying that I had been thinking for myself again. What I knew I would find at the front of the communion line was my pastor, Bishop Gumbleton, smiling at me as if he were seeing Jesus himself, and calling me by name: “Suzanne, the body of Christ.“ Amen. I knew that I would hear from my pastor the same message that he preached every week: that we are called by Jesus to transform our lives in order to bring about God’s kingdom on earth,--a kingdom where all of God's children live through peace and in peace, where all are treated justly and with dignity, and where no one wants for the basic necessities of life. That kind of vision can keep a person in the Catholic Church.

And then they came for my pastor. The official Church told him to get out of our parish. They kicked him out of the little room he lived in at the church too. Problem? They said? What problem? Just normal procedure. You’re just too old, nearly as old as the pope. Thanks for your fifty years of service. Good luck finding an apartment, and, uh, we’ll certainly call you if we ever need a priest who talks about serving the poor and stopping war and healing the victims of sexual abuse. It’s a good shtick, really, but it’s so, um, Vatican II, so forty years ago, so Oscar Romero, so expensive.

And now there is nowhere left to go, nowhere to hide from the reality of what the Catholic Church is becoming. Bishop Gumbleton says that we (including we homosexuals, we married people using birth control, we victims of sexual abuse, we women who want full participation), WE are the living body of Christ. He says that we need to remember this now more than ever. He doesn’t say to leave the Church. He doesn’t say, get a clue, can’t you see how unwelcome you are, how they keep trying to push you out? He says that the hierarchy is not the Church. He says that all of us are the Church. At least that’s what he said the last time he was allowed to stand in front of us and preach the good news of Jesus.

We lost so much when we lost Bishop Gumbleton at St. Leo’s Parish in Detroit. We lost any remaining trust we had in the compassion of the church hierarchy. We may lose the beloved community that has formed over the years around Bishop’s message of peace and justice. We lost a wise and caring guide on the path of Jesus. I pray that we do not lose the soup kitchen we run in our poor neighborhood. Like Bishop Gumbleton, we have lost our home. For some of us, St. Leo’s was the only place left to go, the only place where we could worship and grow as progressive Catholics, where we felt accepted the way that God made us, where we could pray for an end to all war and be challenged to stand with the poor as Jesus did. There may be other places like St. Leo’s, and there may be other pastors like Bishop Gumbleton, but the message from the official Church is clear: They do not want our kind.

They didn't even give us a replacement pastor. They gave us a part-time administrator priest with another full-time job. The whole thing was probably an ugly surprise to him too. For the next two months, we will have a parade of visiting priests to say Mass. I thought that the church leaders would be content to crush Bishop Gumbleton, but it appears that the archdiocese wants to quietly destroy our parish as well. Those of us in the pews may indeed be the real Church, but at St. Leo’s, we are a hurting, broken church with an uncertain future. For some of us, it got a lot harder to be Catholic last week, to be the Church we feel called to be, and it was already pretty hard.

on losing my pastor

2007-01-26T11:07:00.001-05:00

Jesus says in the gospel of Luke that " A prophet is not welcome among his own people." I always wondered about that passage. It used to feel to me like Jesus was indulging in some uncharacteristic whining. Today, I am thinking that Jesus was giving us some pointers on how to identify the real prophets among us.

On Sunday, my parish, St. Leo's in Detroit, found out how very unwelcome our beloved pastor, Bishop Gumbleton, is among his own in the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Cardinal of our archdiocese, apparently acting on orders from the Vatican, has forced Bishop Gumbleton to leave St. Leo's against his will and against the will of his parishioners. You can read about it in the New York Times today or in the National Catholic Reporter. The bishop is apparently being punished for his advocacy for sexual abuse victims, although the official line from the Church hierarchy is that Bishop's forced removal is just the way they normally treat healthy, dedicated inner-city pastors who reach retirement age and want to keep serving their parishes.

St. Leo's is a poor, but spirit-filled parish. We operate a soup kitchen that serves nearly two-hundred people a day. (You may want to pause at this point and reflect on the fact that there are two hundred people in the neighborhood of my church who need to come to a soup kitchen.)

The decision to remove Bishop Gumbleton from St. Leo's puts the very existence of our church and the services we provide in jeopardy. St. Leo's is an unusual place. There are parishioners from the surrounding neighborhood; there are families who have a long history with St. Leo's and return from the nearby suburbs to maintain those ties, and then there are many of us who were initially drawn to St. Leo's by the strong message and example of Bishop Gumbleton, but who ended up staying for the extraordinary community and spirit-filled liturgy we found there as much as for Bishop's challenging and timely teaching.

We are a wonderful anomaly among Catholic parishes--we are economically, geographically, and racially diverse. We have chosen to be together. We learn from each other. We eat meals together. We sing loudly at Mass. At the sign of peace, we move through our beautiful sanctuary and we greet each other like the family that we are. It takes a long time. Our mutual obligation, as Bishop has given us to understand it, is to work for peace and justice in order to bring about the reality of God's kingdom on earth--the kingdom where God's children live through peace and in peace and where no one wants for the basic necessities of life.

Today is Bishop Gumbleton's birthday. He is 77 years old and in excellent health. We have known, of course, that we could not keep him forever. We are also aware of the priest shortage. (Apparently it is hard to get enough priests from that narrow pool of straight, conservative, Catholic men who are willing to take a vow of celibacy). But this wasn't the way my Bishop's relationship with St. Leo's needed to end. We wanted to get old with him, to keep learning from him for as long as we could, to care for him as he cares for us and then to find our own way to keep the parish alive. Maybe we would have found a priest from another parish who was willing to pastor us as well and to continue Bishop's work with us. Maybe the parishioners could have taken more responsibility for running the church and the liturgies. Maybe, maybe, maybe.... but for some reason that no one will tell us, there was an urgent need for Bishop to leave us, to leave the cold little room where he has lived for 23 years and to get out immediately.

Here are the two things that hurt the most: First are the official lies and half-truths from the archdiocese (the archdiocese I support with my tithes, the one that represents my Church) that suggest that this is all very normal and that every bishop is forced to retire and give up his parish, even when there is no new pastor available (we are getting a new "administrator" who apparently will not be saying Mass for us regularly.) The second is the feeling that none of us at St. Leo's are really welcome in the Catholic Church anymore, that this trauma we are experiencing is inconsequential to our leaders. They were willing to hurt us to hurt our pastor. Some of us are still reeling from that realization. What kind of Christianity is this?

My Catholic Church has impoverished herself needlessly by rejecting Bishop Gumbleton and his message. I don't know how to respond right now except for this: I will continue to make the long drive into Detroit on Sundays with my daughter to pray and to worship with my beautiful St. Leo's community, (see the love letter to my church choir below to read how gaga I am for their contribution to our celebration) and I will try harder to be the follower of Jesus that Bishop asks each one of us to be. In the absence of my Bishop, I will do more to imitate his example.

Bishop Gumbleton is still my teacher. Canon law has no jurisdiction over my heart or conscience. Happy Birthday, dear Bishop. Thank you for everything you have given me and my family. God bless you and keep you close as you continue to show us all how to live like Jesus.

when the power went out

2007-01-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

the house got very cold, and I got sad, and I couldn't sleep,
and I worried about the coldness of my daughter's head and the lack of fat and fur on our little dog
and about how we would all get through the second night when the warmest room in the house was at 41 degrees and falling
and eventually, we took the dog and the child and got the hell out.
But that isn't what I want to write about.
I want to write about before that,
about how our house, which in another century
had been comprised of one large room with a fireplace,
returned to its origins and we moved everything important
(not very much)
into that one room and we settled on the floor in front of a smoky fire
and huddled under blankets
and the dark came early and candles burned on the mantle
and three people and a dog kept each other warm
and my child's face became even dewier and curvier and much too beautiful in the firelight and the world narrowed agreeably down to that makeshift bed, my three beloved beings, and a lukewarm cup of tea made in a thirty-two-year old fondue pot.
For a few hours, it was enough. It was a feast.