Nike and Rainbow Flags

Though I'd intended to blog daily in the weeks leading up to the making of our 17th CD, June found me in a whirl of end-of-the-year parties, potlucks, celebrations, graduations, baby showers, the World Cup, birthdays and most germanely, songwriting. I wrote three new songs for the CD; songs which may have effectively changed the nature of the album. We are now unsure what the title will be. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, here are some of my musings.

It’s Sunday evening at La Veracruzana, a Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Northampton. My family dragged me here (on a school night!) to watch the US play Portugal in the second round of the World Cup. The restaurant's main TV is broken, so everyone has pulled tables and chairs toward the west side of the room to see the TV on the eastern wall, craning their necks and jockeying for position in order to watch. My back is to the screen. I am watching the watchers.

I did slip around at one point to get our dinners from the counter, and this afforded me a good look at the screen. It was still pre-game, and there was a lovely shot from the stadium of the Rio sky, almost violet, with wisps of clouds floating through in the shape of the Nike logo.

“What a sky,” I murmured to no one.

“Ehhn, it’s OK,” said the young man standing next to me. He was wearing a black tee shirt and looked a little like Jian Ghomeshi. “Better than Massachusetts. New England skies don’t impress me.”

I pulled down the corners of my mouth. “I like them.”

“I’m from Colorado,” he shook his head. “No contest.”

I nodded. “I’ll give you that.”

But, he conceded. “I will say that yesterday I drove back here from Boston. Right into the sunset. Now that was a sky.”

Today in church, Steve preached on two different texts. The first was a parable of the Buddha’s, the one about the guy who comes to a river and builds a raft to cross it. He is so thrilled to have crossed safely that he carries the raft with him wherever he goes. “This is not a skillful use of the raft,” says the Buddha.

Then he preached on the end of Luke 9. Jesus tells a guy to follow him. The guy says, “First let me go and bury my father.”

“Let the dead bury their dead,” says Jesus. “But you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Harsh. But effective. Jesus and the Buddha are essentially saying the same thing: let it go. Move on. Don’t cling. In the Jesus passage, the message is even more direct: get over your parents. Whether they were “good” parents or “bad” parents, get over them. Move on. Live your life.

Jay is obsessed with all things soccer, not necessarily in this order: playing it; watching the World Cup; Messi; and anything that has the Nike logo on it. For those who know my son, it’s just one in a long line of obsessions: The Beatles, cars, birds of prey, guitars, Thomas trains, Ninjago, cheetahs, this band from the 90s called The Nields, Colossal Squid.

The Nike thing started a few weeks ago when we went to Famous Footwear to get Elle some shoes. Jay felt deprived, so I threw him a bone; a pack of socks. I might have noticed they were Nikes, and I might have rolled my eyes and shrugged at my unfortunate choice; the latest in my own long line of eco-transgressions. For many years, Nike has been a target for activists wanting to put an end to sweat shop conditions. Here’s more on why Nike is Bad. I used to do pretty well with my consumer boycotts, but eight long years of motherhood has worn me down.

Besides, the more I oppose him about Nike, the more appealing it surely would be to him. I started on about the sweat shops, but somehow he could not draw a connection between the logo that all his favorite kindergarten pals have on their sneakers and the stories I was telling him about unfairness on the other side of the globe.

And why should I? Recently, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I don’t get to boss everyone around. I’ve been noticing that without my excellent advice and bits of wisdom, other people do just fine. Especially my family members. Sometime in the last month, the mild voice of my beloved uncle Brian keeps popping into my head. “They’ll figure it out.” That’s my new motto. He'll find out about bad Nike on his own. We live in Northampton.

My other new motto is, “Everyone is doing the absolute best they can at any given moment.” Even though I might be mightily disappointed with their behavior (or my own), we really are, most of us, doing the best we can with the resources we have. I don’t know if I am right about this, but I do know that when I adopt this attitude, I relax and stop being a pain in other people’s necks.

On the last day of school, Jay announced, “I am going to wear all things that have Nike on them.” He showed up dressed completely in Nike garb, which meant, on a hot June day, he wore a shiny red nylon swim suit top, a pair of navy blue and orange fleecy sweatpants, his royal blue socks, and his sister’s pink and black sports sandals. He could not have been more pleased with himself. Indeed, all items were branded. I looked at him solemnly and nodded. “You are all in Nike.”

He turned on his heel and started out the door; realized it was too hot for the fleecy pants. He ran upstairs and traded them for his favorite pair of Nike shorts, which happen to be hot pink. Satisfied, he left for the day, racing off in his too-big sandals. His last day of Kindergarten. The day before, his class spent all day painting rainbow pride flags. Someone had stolen the school’s Pride flag earlier that week, ripping it down from where it flew underneath the stars and stripes. No problem. The teachers and students of Jackson Street covered the front of the school with rainbows. In the last issue of the JSS Gazette, and 8 year old wrote an editorial about how she thought it was wrong how some people said men couldn’t marry men, or women couldn’t marry women. “Adults should be able to marry anyone they want,” she opined.

So I let my son go to school in his un-PC Nike wear, not worried about what my friends would say about my logo-worshipping son, nor worried that anyone would tease him for wearing pink sandals. He lives in Northampton. These are some of the blessings. Later in the morning, I joined him and his classmates and some of their parents for a last lunch next to the playground. He was racing around the jungle gym. He saw me, and approached the fence, all big eyes and dirty knees. “Can I keep playing, Mama?”

“Of course,” I said and kissed him before he could get away completely. Kindergarten. Over in a flash. His birthday is at the end of August and he wants to invite Messi. “I know he will come,” he says. “He loves soccer, and I am having a soccer party.” I just nod. Why disappoint him now? That would be just trying to protect him from a later disappointment. If disappointment is inevitable (and it always is, isn’t it?) it’s better to let him have the joy now and the disappointment later. I'm thinking that's the proper use of the raft.

Martha, Mary and Michaelmas (And Cheryl Wheeler and Louis C.K.)

Sept. 29, 2013

Scripture: Luke 10:38-423

8 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things,42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

…and second scripture:

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries—ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?
-Jane Hirshfield


Today is Michaelmas, a lesser Catholic feast that somehow always gets my attention. It makes me think of midlife. Maybe it makes everyone think of midlife. It comes, after all, just a few days after the autumn equinox, and autumn is certainly the season of midlife, what with the balding maples, the falling leaves, the drama before the long quiet.

This year Michaelmas falls also on a waning moon. It seems all of nature is conspiring to force us to think about the brevity of life. The two readings—the Martha/Mary story which Steve has preached about often, and the Jane Hirshfield poem—both touch on this idea of the choices we make, and it seems to me that midlife can be an especially painful time to sit with our choices. (Though I suspect every phase of life has this potential pain…)

When we were kids, we were Marys. My kids are Mary-like. They pay attention to the important stuff. They know that it’s good for them to play, to move their bodies, to climb on things. They know a good story when they hear one, and they also know justice. They have an acute sense of what is fair.

As we age, we become more Martha-like. We don’t pause from our dinner preparations to run outside during one of those summertime micro rain storms, to dance in the rain after a long dry dusty hot spell. We do the never ending laundry—Mount Washmore, my friend calls it. We go to the grocery store. We pick up the kids. We exercise—but on a schedule. And we justify our good, hard disciplined work: in any revolution there is work to be done, and Jesus surely was a revolutionary.

And don’t the ones who do the work get the praise? So why is Jesus saying that Mary’s the one who gets it?

Part of the gift of midlife is that we do get it. We see how painfully brief it all is. Now I know Mary’s got the right idea. And I still can’t stop doing doing doing. Still can’t stop frantically doing the dishes, doing the laundry, telling my kids to hurry up so we won’t be late to school. I do my meditation and my yoga—but I time myself with my iPhone and don’t let myself linger. I tell myself I will go on a meditation retreat when the kids are older.

But I have the usual questions. Is Jesus saying we should always listen to God? Or just when he comes over for dinner? Does Jesus really want us to forgo making the beds in the morning and instead practice piano? Wasn’t Jesus glad that Martha was making preparations? I know I’m not alone in having some feminist annoyance with this passage. Would it have been better if Martha had sat down too? But then there’d be no food for anyone. Maybe they would have just eaten locusts, then. Is Jesus saying “Sorry, babe. You’re just a Martha. Marthas cook and clean. Marys sit and listen. Try again next life, and you might luck out.”

Well, of course not. Jesus’s whole point was to free us from the binary thinking of the old world, teach us non-dualism. No I, no Thou. Jesus said, “I and the Father are one. And so it is with you.” Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Last time I looked, it was hard to tell the difference between vine and branches. We’re always Martha and Mary, just as God is in each of us, beyond all of us, and in the interactions between everything.

Moreover, when I grumbled a version of this to my friend Peter Ives, he pointed out that at the time of Jesus, women were barely considered human. For Jesus to say that Mary should sit and listen to him, and in fact Martha should put down her dishrag and join in too, was completely revolutionary. He was calling them, these two sisters, to be disciples, equals to his male followers. It’s not really news in Bible scholarship that Jesus elevated the role of women to that of equal, though the Nicene Creed and fifteen hundred years of organized religion put the kibosh on much of that. But when I heard this, I had to look at my own internalized sexism. It hadn’t occurred to me on first read-through that in fact Jesus might indeed have been saying, “Dudes, your turn. Go make the dinner while Martha and Mary get their time with me. And if you don’t know how to make the dinner, go find some locusts.” For all we know, that was in the original text, only to be nixed three hundred years later during the Council of Nicea. Three hundred years later, women were back in their historical place.

This came through my email-box this morning from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar:

Did you know the first half of life has to fail you? In fact, if you do not recognize an eventual and necessary dissatisfaction (in the form of sadness, restlessness, or even loss of faith), you will not move on to maturity. You see, faith really is about moving outside your comfort zone, trusting God’s lead, instead of just forever shoring up home base. Too often, early religious conditioning largely substitutes for any real faith.

Usually, without growth being forced on us, few of us go willingly on the spiritual journey. Why would we? The rug has to be pulled out from beneath our game, so we redefine what balance really is. More than anything else, this falling/rising cycle is what moves us into the second half of our own lives. There is a necessary suffering to human life, and if we avoid its cycles we remain immature forever. It can take the form of failed relationships, facing our own shadow self, conflicts and contradictions, disappointments, moral lapses, or depression in any number of forms.

All of these have the potential to either edge us forward in life or to dig in our heels even deeper, producing narcissistic and adolescent responses that everybody can see except ourselves.

And the other wise sage I came across was the comedian Louis CK who went on a rant about iPhones on the Conan O’Brien show. He basically says the same thing as Father Richard:

…you need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...

To be an artist, or a revolutionary, or just a good person trying to feel our way through life with a modicum of consciousness, we need to rest, Mary-style, fill the well. We need to do nothing. We need to look up at the sky, notice what kind of moon it is, breath in the smell of falling leaves and pond scum and compost and fall-bearing raspberries. To love someone, to really love someone, we need to give them years of our attention. Years. Focus and appreciation every single day. That’s the sunlight they need to grow.

Last week, I happened to notice, as I occasionally do, all the people around me who were doing it better than me. By “it” I mean everything from having a music career to gaining spiritual insights. I couldn’t help but notice all my spiritual friends who all seem to be gaining enlightenment at a frightening clip. My friend Julie went on a 10 day silent retreat, and now she has no more anger. My friend Charlotte did this three year long inventory of her greater defects and now she hears God’ voice loud and clear and never has any questions about what she should do. All this makes me want to give up, give in, throw in the towel, text and drive, abandon my highly scheduled meditation practice. Instead I called my mom and asked her what she thought of Sheryl Sandberg, the latest voice in the Mommy wars. Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In, which points out the sexism still rampant in our culture, and how hard it is for career women to be mothers and gives excellent advice to women who want to fight to keep their careers thriving. Sandberg exhorts women to lean in rather than lean back when they even begin to think about having a child. Recently, I’ve heard my peers rumbling with discontent about this message. “The problem is,” said one of my closest friends, a highly successful author, “I really do want to lean back right now. I want to volunteer at my daughter’s school. I want to make her Halloween costume. Is that so wrong?”

“Well there’s just so much to hate about Sheryl Sandberg,” my mother began. “She has nannies raising her children! What are all these people thinking, making $300,000 a year! I am so glad I invested my time in you girls.”

I’m pretty sure my mother hasn’t read the book. She, like me, had a career and also had kids, and tried to balance them as well as she could, which seemed to involve a lot of yelling and tossing of backpacks into the car with a hot cup of coffee sloshing about. It’s true that when push came to shove, she would choose her children every time. But still, my mother worked hard. She sure as hell leaned in. She was always grading papers at the kitchen table, cooking our dinner, making our lunches, or playing extremely competitive tennis during those hours after school and before dinner. She did not get on the floor and play games with us, or engage in imaginative play. But she did sit on my bed at the day’s end and ask me to talk about things. She knew what the better part was. Mostly. Like all of us, she was sometimes Martha, sometimes Mary.

So if Jesus is calling us to be disciples, if Jesus is calling women to be disciples with the same urgency that he calls men, this brings us right back to the question women have been wrestling with since the dawn of the women’s movement. I, for one, certainly can make the dualism about choosing family over career, for instance. Last week, Katryna and I opened for a great singer songwriter Cheryl Wheeler. Cheryl is one of a kind. She looks like what she is: a 62 year old who dresses in LL Bean (onstage and off), loves her dogs and Cathleen, her wife of 10 years, and doesn’t give a whit about what the music business—or anyone else for that matter—thinks of her. She is hilarious, occasionally raunchy, onstage, so funny that my sides often hurt from laughing so hard when I am at one of her shows. She has a song on her latest CD called “Shutchier Piehole”, making the point that it would be really hard if your last name were “Piehole” and your parents named you “Shutchier.” Hard, yes, but funny. A few songs later, she delivered her 1980’s love ballad “Arrow,” a song so achingly beautiful we were all in tears by the end. Her following is as strong today as it ever was. Her fans are loyal; we opened for her in 1992 at the Iron Horse, and a couple from last Friday’s concert came up to us and said, “I remember seeing you at that show, 21 years ago…”

Cheryl has what I always wanted. A career that keeps growing. She sang songs she’d just written, along side songs that were over thirty years old. But what’s most enviable about her show is that she is just…Cheryl. She is totally herself. There is no artifice. She is completely unconcerned about whether or not we like her. She performs sitting down and refuses to leave the stage for the encore. She asked the lighting engineer to turn down the lights because “No one paid to see the visuals. If they did they would be sorely disappointed. They came to listen.”

Though I can try to make this about right and wrong, Martha and Mary, kids versus career, what I really want is that comfort with myself. I want to not care whether or not you notice that my face isn’t airbrushed. I want not to care if you notice that I’ve gained or lost a few pounds. But more than that, I want to not care what you think about how hard I’m working, how much I’m doing, how the fact that I spent the last seven years trying to raise human beings has resulted in flaws, in big gaping holes in my artistic work, not to mention the more painful flaws in my parenting. I want to stop trying to prove my worth by scrubbing the dishes for the revolutionaries. I want instead to sit around, the way Cheryl did, and chew the fat with her old buddies who’d paid $25 a head just to see her. And I want the humility to keep learning, keep growing. I want to laugh. And this is both the gift of an awake, aware midlife passage, and the gift of discipleship.

As Hirshfield seems to be saying, every instant has two gates, but it’s true that we mostly go through neither. We’re just not that awake most of the time. Martha didn’t choose incorrectly just because Mary happened to see the instant and go through the gate of paradise. Martha just missed seeing the gate. We all do, all the time. We get worried and upset—that’s a guarantee if we are human. It’s more than guaranteed if we’re parents. In fact, every single day I vow, on my knees, that I will do better, that I will be patient with my kids, that I will not be short with them, that I will react to frustration with humor (in fact I have “react to frustration with humor” as a reminder on my iPhone, and it pops up regularly, along with “don’t read your iPhone right now—pay attention to the kids instead.” And still, every day, I lose it. I lose it even as I am praying not to. Even as I am thinking, “don’t shame her, let her be herself,” I say, “You’re wearing THAT to school?”

But then, there is grace, too. Somehow, I can sometimes see the gates and choose the better one. Yesterday, a perfect September afternoon with a cloudless sky, I abandoned my agenda and let the kids stay late at school to play on the playground. Johnny found a pick up game of soccer. I stood and watched him race across the field, galloping after the ball, kicking, falling, getting up again, chasing the bigger kids, leaping from one foot to the other. I breathed in the sweet smell of cut grass, the late blooming sedum, and said Yes. This is the better part. Or maybe it’s just the thick honey of this good life.

God Is in the Numbers:Republican Math and Self-Disclosure

I feel for the Republicans. It's no fun to confront reality after years of believing one's own math. But of course, I am not a Republican, and this time around, the numbers, AKA the Truth, were on my/our side. I had been passionately, nail-bitingly watching Nate Silver's polling data and analysis. Every time Gallup would say Romney was up three points, my friend Liz would say, "Check with Nate Silver. When he gets worried, I'll get worried." For weeks before Nov. 6, I'd run into parents at pickup and say, "I'm just so scared!" "Me too!" and we'd grimace at each other and hurry off to collect our offspring. Elle voted in an election at her school and refused to tell me for whom she'd cast her ballot. "It's a secret ballot," she said firmly. Although that same day she said, "Mama, what's a saint?" I said, "Hmmm. A saint is someone who is very very good, very close to God and who takes care of poor people." "Oh," she nodded. "Like Barack Obama." "Um, no, not exactly," I said, but I did take it as evidence of how she voted.

I am finally home again after a wonderful weekend away in the DC area. Katryna and I did a benefit for Revels at which three of our lifelong music teachers were in attendance.

with Nancy Taylor

with Katherine Nevius


I also brought my kids who had a fabulous time visiting with their grandparents. The weather was wonderful; coats were left unpacked in the suitcase. My mother and I talked books (Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot) and writing (we are each deep in the midst of our novels), and my father squired the kids around on his shoulders even though he was getting over a cold. On Sunday night, when I told Jay we were going to be leaving the next day, he sat at the top of the stairs and very quietly wept. I knew how he felt.There was a sweetness to this landing spot at my parents, where, though I was woefully low on my normal self-care regimes, I was tunneling my vision into watching the Republicans try to figure out why they lost, and soon I'd have to go back to business as usual (Suzuki, cooking, exercise, teaching, etc.). Call it political rubbernecking, but I really am obsessed. When I wasn't reading the New York Times or the Huffington Post, I was talking to my parents and anyone who would listen to me about this particular delusion.

I am not a numbers person. I never have been. I get easily confused, and I like a world in which the margins are nice and soft. Numbers don't have this advantage. Numbers are crisp and permanent. So I have to take some extraordinary measures to be clear on numbers instead of being vague, which I much prefer. I write down everything I buy, and I write down every penny I earn. As a self-employed person, I keep spreadsheets on all my income and expenses. This is an ongoing process, and I have to keep refining, keep finding my errors, keep working to come up with a clearer, better system. I've come (somewhat reluctantly) to see it as a spiritual discipline. I am not just responsible for myself; these numbers have ramifications for my kids and my husband, and how I give to the world. And yet, now that I am working with numbers every day, keeping track of my income and expenses, seeing where I need to work harder, and just as importantly, where I can work less (so as to be available to my kids, my husband, my writing, my spiritual life), I have a real respect for numbers. I have come to love them. "God is in the numbers," says a friend of mine. I get this. This is a side of God I know--the one who loves me no matter what, yes, but who can't save me or my friends from death, cancer, hurricanes or bankruptcy. This is the God called Reality.

We left Northern Virginia in our ridiculous big-ass black Ford mega vehicle (I let the kids choose--oops) and drove to BWI where, I knew from an email from Southwest Airlines, our flight had been delayed. We went through baggage drop off and were told to get our boarding passes at the gate. We had a lovely chat with a family from India relocated to Albany and I tried to get them to come to our show this Saturday in Cohoes. We made it to the gate a half hour before take off, the kids scooting on their little Melissa & Doug Trunkees. And there we discovered that SW had overbooked our flight, boarded it at the old time and that there were no more flights to Hartford until the next morning. "But," I sputtered. "I am in a unique employment situation! No one can do my job tomorrow! I need to get home!" [I was supposed to teach my Parent Guitar Class at 10am Tuesday.] Moreover, I had no car seat anymore since it was in the belly of the plane bound to Hartford--without us--along with my guitar and our suitcase, which incidentally had our coats and basically everything else except the kids' Trunkees which housed some stuffed animals, cars and drawing materials.

So I rented a Prius with car seats and we started to drive back to Massachusetts at 4pm. Like the Republicans, I had not exactly done the math, but somewhere in southern NJ around 7:30pm I realized we were going to hit the Hartford Airport around midnight, if there were no traffic in NYC, and I'd have to, at that point, get sleeping kids from the rental into a van to take to the terminal to collect a big suitcase, guitar and car seat, then another van to our parking lot, put everything plus kids into our Jetta and drive another 45 minutes home. So I called my aunt and uncle in Fairfield and we crashed there, playing with their little red dog and sleeping in a heap on their living room floor. Fairfield was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy; their house had had almost 3 feet of water and sewage in it. They were finally getting back to normal, but they were tired. These superstorms cut a swath through New York and New Jersey that was easily predicted by scientists who study climate change. God is in the numbers, and God is in the science we use to figure out why the weather is becoming so volatile and why the demographics are becoming favorable to the Democrats. Dear Republicans: please wake up. Please come back from your 1950s-era fairy land, put the ball back on the field and play with us. We have real problems to solve, and it's going to take all of us to solve them.

God has no other hands but ours. This is where the soft margins come in. Katryna's sister-in-law reported that after her home in Red Hook was flooded, friends, family, volunteers and complete strangers showed up to help bail her and her family out. The woman at Budget gave me 50% off my rental car and somehow magicked the tolls into the payment, though there was no EZ Pass transducer in sight. (These may show up on my credit card in the future, however. But for the moment, this is my own version of Republican Math). My aunt miraculously lives where she lives, and we were able to find a landing spot.

The last day we were in Virginia, I noticed the picture of God on the floor in my parents' living room. "What is this?" I asked Elle picking it up. "God," she said. We'd gone to church and heard a rousing and inspired sermon on stewardship by our friend Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt, and because Elle's God has a purse, I wondered if she had been somehow able to listen from her Sunday School room. But God is not carrying a purse, she explained. That bag is God's bag of tools. And the headband and long hair is to show that God is both a man and a woman. God's face is the sun ("the actual sun," she emphasized.)

I love the hands most of all. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away--perhaps. Steve Philbrick says, "In Isaiah it says 'I, God, make peace and create evil.' [Elle] shows why. (Or: why you want to be sitting on the right-hand of God...)" There is something comforting about this view of the Divine, too, in its own way: it makes pretty clear our powerlessness.

But what I really believe is that God Him/Herself is happy and sad; God shares with us (if we can listen) God's own grief about our cancer, our election disappointments, our bankruptcy, our missed flights, our climate crisis. And God extends a hand to us no matter what our mood, or God's mood. And this morning, I opened an email from Franciscan Richard Rohr. Here's what he had to say about the hands of the Risen Christ, which I thought was apropos:

Fullness in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no handles, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. It is like trying to attach two inflated balloons to one another. Human vulnerability gives the soul an immense head start on its travels—maybe the only start for any true spiritual journey. Thus the Risen Christ starts us off by revealing the human wounds of God, God’s total solidarity with human suffering. He starts with self-disclosure from the divine side, which ideally leads to self-disclosure from our side. The Bible first opened up for me in the 1960s when the II Vatican Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God, but actually God disclosing “himself” (sic). Quickly Scripture, and religion itself, became not mere doctrines or moralisms for me, but lovemaking, an actual mutual exchange of being and intimacy.

Excerpted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, p. 167

Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita While Climbing Mount Colden

Last weekend, Tom and I took our first ever 2 day weekend away from our kids. We've gone on overnights before, but two nights away? It seemed impossible. Thanks to our most trusted friends and relations, a dream became a reality.

Where to go? The Adirondacks, of course. What to do? Hike for 9 hours, ascending a +4700 foot peak, naturally. What, do you think we'd just sit on our butts reading old copies of the New Yorker? Well, actually, that's exactly what I wanted to do. But Tom has 46r fever, and I am a loving and supportive spouse, so we got up at 7am, made a quick breakfast, packed a gigantic lunch, filled our water bottles and packs and headed off to the Adirondack Loj.

But before we left Northampton, I dropped off my four-year-old at his pre-school and slipped into Yoga Sanctuary for some pre-vacation vacation. Sara, my teacher, preached on my favorite line of the Bhagavad Gita: Better to do your own dharma poorly than another's brilliantly. It was this line, ironically, that led me to abandon my own yoga teacher training two years ago. I had been thinking that becoming a yoga teacher would somehow mold me into the all-knowing, and incidentally gorgeous, guru/life coach I was to morph into now that my music career was in its sunset years. As we worked on opening our shoulders, I pondered this. Instead of feeling sunsetty, I was feeling pretty excited about my music career these days. Over the years, our mission has always been "write and perform songs that kids will one day sing on the back of the schoolbus at the tops of their lungs." We're actually right on track for that. Sure, we once hoped to be the next Beatles, but that ambition faded early on. Fame at that level makes it very difficult to raise a family, deeply know oneself without too many outside opinions, or have a peaceful dinner at one's favorite restaurant.

On the trail to Mt. Colden, there is a 2.2 mile walk in to Marcy Dam. There is a certain pine forest that we both remember well, somewhere on this walk in, but we are too focused on our feet and miss it. It's weird to be on this trail, a trail I have hiked so many times for so many years. Today there are scores of hikers; in fact, we almost didn't get a parking place when we arrived at 8:30am. The trail is also the one for Mount Marcy, New York's State's highest peak, and on this Saturday of Labor Day weekend, everyone seems bound and determined to bag the biggest peak. As we march along, we pass and are passed by hiker after hiker, some with walking sticks, some with oxygen tanks. "Marcy is a highway," said one of my mountain climbing gurus back in the 90s when I was doing the 46r thing. The implication was, real hikers go for the less flashy peaks. Why focus only on Number One?

Marcy Dam used to be a lake: here's Tom and our dog Cody in 2005:

But Hurricane Irene destroyed the dam, and now it's more like a swamp.(Mt. Colden is in the background).

Tom and I talk about the article in the New York Times by Firmin DeBrabender a few weeks back; in it he write about the myth of individualism, much discussed in this presidential election. I am thinking about the many many reasons that right now I am motivated to climb this peak, why I made the choice to exert myself this way instead of resting. There's no right or wrong; it's just curious. Am I climbing instead of resting because I want to be with Tom? Yes. Am I climbing instead of resting because I am driven? Yes. Not to become a 46r (I became one of those in 1993, in a kind of lemming-esque way; my whole family and group of friends were doing it, so I tagged along). Am I like Hillary, climbing "because it's there"? Definitely. And I like hiking. I love the expanse of time, part of it in silence and part in conversation with the one I love best. It's time with God. My mind needs days like this, where I am so focused on a task that it can't wander too much--especially on the steep or tricky parts. As we ascend through the woods, over rocks and soft pine, I feel myself relax, even as I exert. I feel my legs strengthen, my lungs work. I breathe in the smell of balsam, that seminal scent from my childhood, my own madeleine.

What is my dharma? Is it to make music in exactly the way I always have? Is it to encourage others to see the bonds music forges? Am I supposed to go to Divinity school? If so, why? Do people really have a dharma that is so specific, like "be a doctor" or "be a poet"? What if my dharma is just to be Nerissa?

My mission today was to be as present as I could be; to witness the journey, appreciate the birches (which have a relatively short life-span, Tom tells me, and they are my favorites.) I make a point of looking up every few minutes so that I don't get caught in my thoughts. Still, I get pretty caught up in my thoughts.

We come to many false peaks and one stinky stagnant lake (Lake Arnold). We run into a couple of young friendly Cornell students who are happy to just recline at this lake. "Don't you want to get to the top?" I say, bewildered. "We're thinking about it," they say.

At the summit, we sit and gaze at Algonquin and Iroguois, my favorite peaks. Then we pick up our lunches and move to the other side to stare at Marcy and her neighbors. A couple of very professional looking hikers come up behind us. "Is that Redfield over there?" I ask them, pointing.

"Yup, I'll give you that," says the man.

"And is that Grey?" I continue, pointing to a peak in the foreground.

"Sure is, at least I think it is," he says. I continue asking this stranger who surely must know. Then his wife says, "Congratulate him! He is a 46r today!" So we do; and then I realize that he has no better sense of which peaks are which than I do. I wish my dad were with us.

On the way down, my legs are like spaghetti. We pass the Cornell kids who decided to summit the peak after all. We are descending on a dry very rocky creek bed, with rocks the size of basketballs and watermelons for footing. My ankles wobble, and I keep tripping. "God, please strengthen my ankles," I pray. For good measure, I add, "Jesus, please strengthen my ankles," just in case. Then my mind goes off on matters of the trinity, the deity of Jesus, are they really one, etc. And the next moment, I am in midair. My hands go out to catch my fall, and my left knee scrapes on a rock. "God!" I think furiously. "What gives?"

"Are you OK?" Tom calls back.
"Yes," I say right away. But I stay where I am, even though there are a couple of older women behind us, and part of the reason I tripped was that I was hurrying to keep them from passing us, as we'd just passed them. I assessed. Scraped palms, a tiny bit of blood. Everything in working order. I got back to my feet and continued, gingerly down. "I just prayed for exactly this not to happen," I thought grumpily. "So much for prayer."

That's not exactly the point, I heard. Do you think you get whatever you pray for? What else could this mean?


And it came right back: that I will fall, even when my entire will is behind the hope that I won't. But that I will be OK. And even if I am not OK, I will not be alone. We are not guaranteed a life of ease, or to dodge every bullet when we chose a spiritual life, or to be the next Beatles, or even the next cranberries. But we are promised some company for the journey.

We staggered back to Marcy Dam a few hours later. This time I was determined to see what Tom was now calling "The pole forest," because these pines are so straight up and down that they look like they will soon be harvested as telephone poles. We look and look. Everywhere there are deciduous trees, ancient ones, new ones, mixed with all sorts of evergreens. And then finally, about a half mile from the parking lot we come to it. It's just a few hundred yards of forest, but the trees are uncannily uniform. And even with the occasional hiker passing us, it's eerily still, with that trademark whistling the wind makes in tall pine trees. We both stop and let the hikers pass.

"This is my church," whispers Tom.

Sermon on Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon at West Cummington Church
May 20, 2012

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby--
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
-Jane Hirshfield, "Late Prayer."

“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. And so I created the worlds visible and invisible.” -Islamic saying (c/o Cynthia Bourgeault

)

Matthew 15:21-28

Jesus left that place and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And suddenly out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, 'Lord, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.'23
But he said not a word in answer to her. And his disciples went and pleaded with him, saying, 'Give her what she wants, because she keeps shouting after us.'24
He said in reply, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.'25
But the woman had come up and was bowing low before him. 'Lord,' she said, 'help me.'26
He replied, 'It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to little dogs.'27
She retorted, 'Ah yes, Lord; but even little dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters' table.'28
Then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted.' And from that moment her daughter was well again.
***************************************************
Guitar playing is a lot like textual analysis—we each have a different signature, and we each bring to the task our own peculiar point of view. When approaching the text, we see what we want to see. We see what we need to see. There are so many ways of seeing this story. Jung said in our dreams, we are all the characters. Most novelists I know would agree. So with scripture. We are the Canaanite woman asking for what she needs for her daughter, we are the disciples wanting the problem to be solved and we are Jesus, breaking through our own cultural boxes and conceptual barriers.

The more I go along my spiritual journey, the more I read about Jesus, or Krishna or the Buddha for that matter, the more I am convinced that Jesus is a portal to the Point, which is love, which is presence, which is power for the powerless. And as much as I have learned from my many years of studying Buddhism and practicing meditation, from decades of yoga and close reading of the Bhagavhad Gita, Jesus is my portal. At the end of the day, I am a Christian for four reasons.

First of all, I believe in the radical social justice Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry advocating for. Second, Jesus is a healer. I have spoken in the past about the particular healing I’ve witnessed and experienced, and for me this wholeness, this power to make one well now matters more to me than any promises of eternal life.

Third, and woven into and everything warp and weft that Jesus teaches is the concept of the Kingdom of God, which I take to mean a state of consciousness open and welcoming to all. I’ll talk about this more in a moment. But the fourth reason I love Jesus is not that he died for my sins. Patti Smith said, "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine." Well, that’s one of the many things I don’t know about. I respectfully leave questions about eternal life on the altar, along with many other questions I have. Like Iris DeMent, I prefer to let the mystery be. But that particular calculus about original sin and redemption, Jesus as sacrificial lamb never rang true for me. I am much more interested in how Jesus directed us to live today.

I had the good fortune to be raised in a Presbyterian church where it was a matter of course for the minister to work out his doubts up in the pulpit with all of us as witnesses. Jesus’s gospel took us into the inner city where we worked side by side with members of an African American church to learn how to create more possibilities for the young people there. Eternal life versus hellfire and damnation weren’t mentioned.

No, the fourth reason I love Jesus is because I agree with King Missile. Jesus is way cool. I just love the man. Jesus is uniquely and eternally Jesus, just as Johnny is Johnny, Lila is Lila, Tom is Tom and Katryna is Katryna. He is a person and a personality, and I love him, just the way I love those intimate members of my family. I don’t expect this reason to win over any converts, but that’s not really my business. And yet, I do feel passionate these days more than ever, that it’s imperative for Christians like me to make our voices heard loudly and clearly that Jesus called us to love so hugely, so persistently that love can overcome our own prejudices. All of our prejudices.

This passage from Matthew has it all: social justice, healing, Jesus’s huge insight into the meaning of the Kingdom of God, and most of all because in this story of the Canaanite mama, we see Jesus himself change, learn and grow beyond his own prejudices. He evolves! As with Siddartha Gautama, as with our own president, we get to see Jesus’s own spiritual journey.

I was going to talk about how mad I am about the North Carolina vote, but you all are mad about that too, and for us all to be mad together is really no different than what happens in a Bible Belt church where the preacher bashes Obama and cites Leviticus and everyone agrees that abortion and homosexuality are abominations. We’ve had Steve already teach us that the book of Leviticus might be well understood as a documentary explaining animal and agricultural policy in the 5th C BCE. You all know that other references to homosexuality are from the letters of Paul, a passionate, possibly closeted homosexual who was clearly struggling with all sorts of questions about how to create a church in the 1st c.
And yet, my friend Peter Ives, the retired long-time pastor at First Churches in Northampton, a congregational church like this one, says that the world needs people who will take the ancients texts we know as the Bible and rescue them from the hands of the religious right. And as much as I want to rise above the fray and not engage in the dialectic/perpetuate an us/them mentality, I also feel that this is a fight worth having, just as the Canaanite woman thinks it’s worth it to persuade Jesus to heal her daughter.
In researching this text, The traditional Bible Belt interpretation of this passage says that Jesus was cool and noncommittal to the Canaanite mother because he was testing her faith. In this view, Jesus is omniscient, knowing exactly who and what he is, eternal; a judge, watching us to see what we will do. Will we make the right choice? Excellent! Go on and be healed then!

But I think what’s really going on is more interesting than that. I was fortunate to be in the old church one Sunday several years ago, when I got to hear Steve preach on a similar passage in Mark. In the Mark version, she is a Syro-Phoenician mama; either way, these were tribes who were enemies of the Jews in the same way Native American Indians were enemies of the American settlers of the 1800’s. In other words, oppressed people who were at best marginalized and at worst victims of genocide. And Jesus may be blind to this. As the passage begins, he sees this woman as outside the purview of his ministry. IF he sees her at all. And yet, she is willing to reach across a great divide to engage him, and after she succeeds in getting his attention by saying, Yes, you might see me as a dog, but make a place for dogs in your Kingdom of God. Jesus hears this. He grants her request. In the Marcan gospel, he goes further, saying "For that retort, be on your way, the demon has come out of your daughter." She returned home and found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.” (Mk. 7:25-30).

So Jesus is changed, by a radical act of listening and engaging, and doing his own share of reaching across a great cultural divide of class, race, gender and religion. This was way out there for a first century rabbi.

I get that I have to reach across a great divide too, that somehow I have to communicate with people I basically have no dealings with—the religious right. And it’s sad that I have no dealings with them. Like the Jews and the Canaanites, we share a land. We even theoretically share a faith, though at times it’s hard for me to recognize my Jesus in their idea of Christ. If you put a Bible between us, we’d rip it apart; me taking the synoptic gospels, the psalms and the prophets, while they take John, Revelations and the letters of Paul. I'd point out that there are 7 dubious mentions of homosexuality in the Bible while the directive to take care of the poor is mentioned over 300 times. If you removed all the times the Bible mentioned the poor the book would fall apart.

But back to the Canaanite woman. She reminds me of Akhilandeshvari. Akhilandeshvari is a Hindu goddess whose long name means, in typical Sanskrit fashion, “Never Not Broken.” She is the goddess we find when we are in a heap on the floor after a breakup, after a bad diagnosis, after bad news about our child. She comes to us in that place where everything we once knew is lost and we somehow have to scramble to make sense of it all. In some traditions, she rides a crocodile; in others she actually is a crocodile, carrying her children in what my yoga teacher Sara Rose calls the “safest and most dangerous place—her mouth.” And like a crocodile, who destroys its prey not by biting but by whirling it around in the water until it passes out from disorientation, she wants us confused. She wants us so confused that we surrender our tightly held beliefs and have the willingness to try something else. Ironically, the teaching is that in this broken state, we are the most powerful that we’ll ever be. Why? For the same reason Jesus tells us that the rich man will have so much trouble entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Or to quote Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” It is when we are at our most powerless that we have to rely on the power of God. Either that, or shake our fist at God, which might be the same thing. (That’s how my 3 year old functions, at any rate.)

I see Akhilandeshvari in the Canaanite mama, at her wits' end with worry about her little daughter, chasing after this Nazarene, this amazing faith healer and just throwing her ALL into her request. And when Jesus basically likens her to a dog, she retorts right back, Yes I am a dog. And dogs need to be fed too. This is an amazing combination of self-esteem, assertiveness and humility.

I think in this moment, Jesus really gets that his call is to everyone, even the people he had regarded as outsiders or even enemies. Because after this passage, in the Marcan gospel, the very next story is the one about Jesus healing a deaf and dumb person, by spitting on his tongue. Then Jesus sighs, looks up to heaven and says, “ephphatha,” which means, “be opened.” And is he talking to himself here? Hasn’t he been opened by the Canaanite woman? Hasn’t he been whirled around like Akhilandeshvari? And don’t I need to be whirled around and opened up in order to hear you? Don’t I need to be opened in order to speak to you? Don’t I need to be open to love you, all of you? It’s no hardship to love my gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual brothers and sisters. They are my friends, neighbors, employers, fans, family. They are me. I love them as myself, easily, fluidly, with no translation necessary. But how about Rush Limbaugh? How about Cardinal Dolan? How about the voters in North Carolina?

I know that what Jesus keeps pointing me towards is love and forgiveness. Forgive your brother 70 times 7. “You will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love…This is my commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you…” (John 15:10, 12). And it is true, in the same way that any law of nature or physics is true: when we love, we are dwelling in the kingdom of heaven, which as I said before I believe Jesus understands to be a state of mind, and not a physical destination or utopia. In the Kingdom of heaven, there is no distinction between God and human, no distinction between human and human. We experience that state every spiritual tradition talks about: Unity. Oneness. Non-dual consciousness. (“The Kingdom of God is within,” Luke 17:21).

I know that when I drop the fight—really truly drop it and let it go and am glad to see it go--I am at peace. Or to borrow from a teaching of my husband Tom: when I can look deeply into your eyes and know, really know, that you are completely fine and well just as you are, I am automatically going to approach you, be with you, communicate with you differently—and better—than if I look at you to see how I can fix what’s wrong, going over you with a fine tooth comb for nits (I know about nits this week.)

But what about the fighting? What about advocating for change? Doesn’t there sometimes need to be struggle—a duel/dual-- in order to get to that place of peace? Is there peace without strife? Can one see white against a white background? That is what I want to get back to. Is there such a thing as holy anger? Does it rattle in my heart like the ruby and the nail and make the same sound? I think the better question is: Do I, like the Canaanite woman, persist (with love) to my enemies? What do I do when I have a friend with whom I respectfully disagree? Usually, I smile and nod and let her go on her way. Who am I to annoy her with my different opinion? The Buddha says, “Opinions just go around bothering other people.” But Jesus overturned the money tables. He came to overturn the societal apple cart for sure. He spoke truth to power, over and over again. And yet he went without a fight to the cross. Do I lean too heavily on my passivity when I live and let live? i am so glad that when the church burned down, we didn't passively shrug and go, "Oh well, we still have the parish house." And I have to admit, that's where I was on January 17 2010. This is good enough for me.

It’s not static. None of this is. With God, we don’t get to nail anything to the floor. It’s always a whole new ballgame. Again, this is why I am drawn to Jesus, my human brother who learns from human beings, who witnesses the Canaanite mama model this amazing balancing act of self-esteem and humility. Yes, there’s anger. Yes, there’s struggle. And over and over again, we get shaken by the struggle, rattled to our core, whirled around in the water, twirled around like a dervish. And if we are lucky, if we are open, if we are brave enough to shake our fists at God and demand God’s attention, it breaks open. We break open. Our hearts break and the love comes pouring out, connecting us to each other. The visible world crumbles like the illusion it always was and something shiny catches our inner eye. We see ourselves in the other. We see the other as ourselves. Not "as much as" ourselves, but AS ourselves. Today, to me, that’s worth it all. That’s the God I worship and follow.