Below is a brief excerpt from the chapter called "The Last Party" from my novel The Passion of Mary Magdalen, one of The Maeve Chronicles. Maeve and I reprint it here (with our own permission) as a seasonal offering. Readers in the region of New York State's Hudson Valley, please join me this Friday, April 22nd, 7:30 at High Valley for a community reading of the four chapters that tell the Passion story. There will also be original music!
“Listen, my beloved companions, and remember,” Jesus said, as we passed the unleavened bread and drank the first cup of wine. “Whenever you break bread together or share a cup of wine, I’ll be with you, in your midst. Haven’t we always feasted together? Hasn’t there always been enough and more than enough? I tell you, whenever two or three gather together to share what they have, there I am. There is life. There is the Kingdom of Heaven. Remember. Remember me then.”
“But why do we have to remember you?” Peter burst out. “Where are you going!”
“Where I am going now, you can’t follow. Not yet. But you will in time.”
“But how will we find you if we don’t know where you’re going?” Tomas fretted. “How will we know the way?”
“I am the way,” Jesus said quietly.
That is all he said. Or that is all I remember. If the Last Party was indeed an evening of esoteric teaching, only those words remain with me. The words and how he looked at each of us in turn, letting us understand him in whatever way we could.
When he turned to me, I saw the path the rising moon makes across the water. I saw paths made by wild goats in mountain passes. I saw how a flower tracks the path of the sun, how waves part for a ship’s prow; I saw myself opening all my ways to him.
After the second cup of wine, we loosened up and began to sing somewhat irreverent ditties about the plagues of Egypt and then more dramatic ones about the parting of the Red Sea. With the third cup of wine, we sang the ecstatic victory song of Moses’s sister, Miriam. Then all the women took up tambourines (we always had those at a feast) and danced. Soon the men got up and danced in their own circle. And we all sang, songs with no words, the women ululating.
At last a hush fell. We stood bright-eyed and flushed, glistening with sweat, wild with love for each other, as we had been that last night at the Wedding of Cana. Jesus went and flung open the door, in case Elijah should be waiting to come in. Still on our feet, we drank the fourth cup of wine. Then Jesus set down the cup and crossed the room to me. He took my hand and kissed it, the kiss of a suppliant to his priestess. When he released my hand, I took his and kissed it, the kiss of a disciple to her teacher. Then we stood facing each other, not touching, as the companions made a circle around us. In one movement, we came together and kissed each other on the lips.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Derivation of Catastrophe
As I write, heroic workers in Japan struggle to prevent what one headline called potential “nuclear catastrophe” in the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and devastating tsunami. I was struck by the use of the word, so I looked up catastrophe in my 1975 hardcover edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.
Catastrophe 1. A great and sudden calamity; disaster 2. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; cataclysm 3. The denouement of a play, especially a classical tragedy. The root derives from the Greek katastrophe from katastreiphen: to turn down, overturn. Kata-, down and strephein-, to turn. From the root Strebh, to wind, to turn, to twist.
At first the root meaning is not obvious to me. Then I think of the earth turning, like its own tides and storms, like the twisted strands of DNA. In a tragedy, literary or literal, there is also a turning. The tragic hero overreaches, underestimates, or both, and the tide turns against him, the people turn against him, the furies, the very elements. He is overturned, overthrown like a corrupt regime, downturned like our economy. We live in catastrophic times. Humans, as a species, share the tragic flaw of the hero, the illusion that we can control what is beyond our control for our own ends. And now we face global catastrophe.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, volcanoes (earth, water, wind, fire) are natural disasters not caused by human agency (though increased storm activity is linked to global warming). They are the earth shaping and re-shaping itself, losing and restoring balance, as it always has, as all life does. This dramatic flux is nothing new on planet earth. A cataclysm (kata, down kluzien, to wash) is catastrophic because we cluster in huge numbers along the coasts or on the slopes of volcanoes or on flood plains where the soil is fertile. And if we must build a power plant on a fault line to meet our needs, we do, hoping for the best, preparing (however inadequately) for the worst—all of us, in every nation that has the capability.
As we appear to be in a period of denouement in our collective drama, we might ponder the meaning of tragedy. The hero in a tragedy is not just flawed but heroic. Our advances in technology, medicine, agriculture that have hugely increased our population and our expectations all began with noble intent. The tragedy, as a form, gives us a chance to identify where the hero (us) lost his way. The survivors of the tragedy (us too) have chance to restore the balance that was lost and begin again.
Catastrophe 1. A great and sudden calamity; disaster 2. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; cataclysm 3. The denouement of a play, especially a classical tragedy. The root derives from the Greek katastrophe from katastreiphen: to turn down, overturn. Kata-, down and strephein-, to turn. From the root Strebh, to wind, to turn, to twist.
At first the root meaning is not obvious to me. Then I think of the earth turning, like its own tides and storms, like the twisted strands of DNA. In a tragedy, literary or literal, there is also a turning. The tragic hero overreaches, underestimates, or both, and the tide turns against him, the people turn against him, the furies, the very elements. He is overturned, overthrown like a corrupt regime, downturned like our economy. We live in catastrophic times. Humans, as a species, share the tragic flaw of the hero, the illusion that we can control what is beyond our control for our own ends. And now we face global catastrophe.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, volcanoes (earth, water, wind, fire) are natural disasters not caused by human agency (though increased storm activity is linked to global warming). They are the earth shaping and re-shaping itself, losing and restoring balance, as it always has, as all life does. This dramatic flux is nothing new on planet earth. A cataclysm (kata, down kluzien, to wash) is catastrophic because we cluster in huge numbers along the coasts or on the slopes of volcanoes or on flood plains where the soil is fertile. And if we must build a power plant on a fault line to meet our needs, we do, hoping for the best, preparing (however inadequately) for the worst—all of us, in every nation that has the capability.
As we appear to be in a period of denouement in our collective drama, we might ponder the meaning of tragedy. The hero in a tragedy is not just flawed but heroic. Our advances in technology, medicine, agriculture that have hugely increased our population and our expectations all began with noble intent. The tragedy, as a form, gives us a chance to identify where the hero (us) lost his way. The survivors of the tragedy (us too) have chance to restore the balance that was lost and begin again.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
WDJS: What Did Jesus Say? Individual and Corporate Discernment
There was a time in my life when in prayer and meditation, I would ask questions of Jesus (among other deities) and often feel that I had received answers—usually in the form of another question that made me see everything in a different light. When I learned that George W. Bush also spoke to Jesus in this direct, intimate way and based his political decisions on these conversations, I felt (and feel) uneasy. Was there any difference between me and the man who ordered the invasion of Iraq despite worldwide protest against this action, including the protest of many religious people and institutions?
In her recent article in Huffington Post “God in Wisconsin,” Diana Butler Bass notes that The Roman Catholic Church as well as most mainstream Protestant denominations have endorsed the Unions in their standoff with Governor Walker, but he remains immoveable, obedient to his personal understanding of God’s will.
Reading her article, I felt an appreciation for corporate religious practice, the checks and balances the institutional church can provide to the individual’s interpretation of divine will (which is often his or her own will dressed up as god, a particularly noxious and often dangerous form of spiritual inflation). My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists. Though I am an ordained interfaith minister, I currently have no institutional affiliation.
The daughter of an Episcopal priest, who practiced and preached the social gospel in the 1960s, I left the church to become a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I attended a silent Meeting (as distinct from a pastoral) where each person shared in the Meeting’s ministry and anyone moved by the Spirit could speak from the silence. Quakers temper the individual’s “leadings” with the corporate discernment of the whole Meeting. Their model works as well as any I have ever seen. So why didn’t I remain a Friend?
During my time as a Quaker, there was much controversy among Friends about their positions on Christ-centered as distinct to Universalist worship, abortion, homosexuality, and whether or not Friends could accept the worship of the divine as feminine. Friends often reminded each other that it took one hundred years for Quakers to come to corporate agreement on the abolition of slavery. When it came to my beliefs, I found I was not willing to submit to the discipline of corporate process. I was not, in essence, a Quaker.
For the past sixteen years, my communal (as distinct from corporate) spiritual practice has been hosting earth-centered celebrations at The Center at High Valley. Everyone is welcome, and no one has to believe anything. There is a beauty to these celebrations, which involve lots of singing, dancing, and spontaneous creativity, which many find people healing and even profound. But there is no institutional element, nothing to ensure that our heartfelt, eclectic traditions will survive in any form. Nor can we do something as fine as endorse the stand of the Unions. Our lack of institutional identity is a trade-off, a dance on the horns of a dilemma.
My personal spiritual practice is imaginative and has included re-writing The New Testament in a series of novels called The Maeve Chronicles, featuring the Celtic Mary Magdalen who is no one’s disciple and is even more hopeless at institutional affiliations than I am. In Bright Dark Madonna, Maeve struggles with people’s invocation of the resurrected Jesus’s authority. In a dream, she confronts Jesus. He explains somewhat ruefully:
“You’re going to have to get used to people having visions of me, receiving messages from me. It seems to be a side effect of the god-making death, as you call it. The druids never warned me about it… I can’t help ‘appearing unto’ people when they call on me, when they believe in me. I might even ‘speak unto’ them, but remember what Anna the prophetess used to say about prophecy, how it always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation? It’s like that, and I’m afraid I don’t have much control over translation or interpretation.”
I would like to offer with a few checks and balances for people without institutional ties as well as those whose churches encourage direct, personal communication with the divine:
Is the divine message for you, regarding your own behavior and moral accountability?
Is the divine message directing you to reform others and possibly inflict harm on them?
If the latter, best to recall what Jesus already did say: “You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." -Matthew 7:4
In her recent article in Huffington Post “God in Wisconsin,” Diana Butler Bass notes that The Roman Catholic Church as well as most mainstream Protestant denominations have endorsed the Unions in their standoff with Governor Walker, but he remains immoveable, obedient to his personal understanding of God’s will.
Reading her article, I felt an appreciation for corporate religious practice, the checks and balances the institutional church can provide to the individual’s interpretation of divine will (which is often his or her own will dressed up as god, a particularly noxious and often dangerous form of spiritual inflation). My gratitude to mainstream institutional religion is ironic. I have always been on the side of those the church persecuted: mystics, heretics, and other nonconformists. Though I am an ordained interfaith minister, I currently have no institutional affiliation.
The daughter of an Episcopal priest, who practiced and preached the social gospel in the 1960s, I left the church to become a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). I attended a silent Meeting (as distinct from a pastoral) where each person shared in the Meeting’s ministry and anyone moved by the Spirit could speak from the silence. Quakers temper the individual’s “leadings” with the corporate discernment of the whole Meeting. Their model works as well as any I have ever seen. So why didn’t I remain a Friend?
During my time as a Quaker, there was much controversy among Friends about their positions on Christ-centered as distinct to Universalist worship, abortion, homosexuality, and whether or not Friends could accept the worship of the divine as feminine. Friends often reminded each other that it took one hundred years for Quakers to come to corporate agreement on the abolition of slavery. When it came to my beliefs, I found I was not willing to submit to the discipline of corporate process. I was not, in essence, a Quaker.
For the past sixteen years, my communal (as distinct from corporate) spiritual practice has been hosting earth-centered celebrations at The Center at High Valley. Everyone is welcome, and no one has to believe anything. There is a beauty to these celebrations, which involve lots of singing, dancing, and spontaneous creativity, which many find people healing and even profound. But there is no institutional element, nothing to ensure that our heartfelt, eclectic traditions will survive in any form. Nor can we do something as fine as endorse the stand of the Unions. Our lack of institutional identity is a trade-off, a dance on the horns of a dilemma.
My personal spiritual practice is imaginative and has included re-writing The New Testament in a series of novels called The Maeve Chronicles, featuring the Celtic Mary Magdalen who is no one’s disciple and is even more hopeless at institutional affiliations than I am. In Bright Dark Madonna, Maeve struggles with people’s invocation of the resurrected Jesus’s authority. In a dream, she confronts Jesus. He explains somewhat ruefully:
“You’re going to have to get used to people having visions of me, receiving messages from me. It seems to be a side effect of the god-making death, as you call it. The druids never warned me about it… I can’t help ‘appearing unto’ people when they call on me, when they believe in me. I might even ‘speak unto’ them, but remember what Anna the prophetess used to say about prophecy, how it always loses in the translation and gains in the interpretation? It’s like that, and I’m afraid I don’t have much control over translation or interpretation.”
I would like to offer with a few checks and balances for people without institutional ties as well as those whose churches encourage direct, personal communication with the divine:
Is the divine message for you, regarding your own behavior and moral accountability?
Is the divine message directing you to reform others and possibly inflict harm on them?
If the latter, best to recall what Jesus already did say: “You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." -Matthew 7:4
Monday, February 21, 2011
The People, My People: Who Are They?
Friends in Wisconsin have been daily attending the Madison demonstrations for the right of union workers to bargain collectively. They report spirited and witty placards: “The People’s Republic of Curdistan” for Wisconsin’s infamous snack food. People who were activists since the sixties and whose parents and grandparents fought for the right of unions to exist have been hailing each other via email and doubtless more sophisticated social media: All power to the people!
Popular revolution is clearly catching, as people from one Middle Eastern nation after another throng their public squares. The placards in Madison include “Walk like an Egyptian.” And Governor Walker has been called the Mubarak of the Midwest. It is an exciting, scary, encouraging time. Union workers and social activists in other states are taking note of—and maybe notes on—what is happening in Wisconsin.
I can’t help but ponder the differences between our Midwest and the Middle East. In Wisconsin, the tea partiers have jumped into the fray with counter demonstrations. My husband pointed out, they think they are The people, and theirs is the revolution. In most Middle Eastern nations there is no such confusion. A dictator is a dictator. He takes care of his people, a minuscule power elite, and The People en masse suffer, economically and politically. The young especially, with little prospect for employment, have nothing to lose and every reason to spend every day demanding change.
Our political system, born of a revolution, seems designed to prevent another. We have (in theory) free elections and term limits. We have (in theory) a free press and free speech (though we are manipulated by our media in ways far more subtle than government propaganda. We don’t need government censorship when we already have censorship of the marketplace.) We have had a middle and working class that believes in the American Dream of betterment for anyone honest and hardworking. Though in these times many hardworking people are falling into poverty through the gaping holes of a shredded economy and a fast disappearing safety net.
Maybe the difference between our people and the people in more desperate and oppressed nations is dwindling. But we still don’t agree on who the people are or what we need from our more or less freely elected government. The right and left hand of the body politic don’t do much of anything except point fingers. A friend of mine, who doesn’t fit neatly in any category, used to declare, with some frequency, that he would “do anything to defend his people.” I finally asked him: Who are your people? He looked flustered, and then said: “The people who think the way I do.” An honest and telling answer.
The people in the streets and squares of Wisconsin give me hope of another answer. The People don’t need to think alike but we do need to act together when our right to have a voice, to have place at the big messy table of this democracy is threatened. That right is what is at stake in Wisconsin. The outcome of this struggle will affect all the People regardless of what we think.
Popular revolution is clearly catching, as people from one Middle Eastern nation after another throng their public squares. The placards in Madison include “Walk like an Egyptian.” And Governor Walker has been called the Mubarak of the Midwest. It is an exciting, scary, encouraging time. Union workers and social activists in other states are taking note of—and maybe notes on—what is happening in Wisconsin.
I can’t help but ponder the differences between our Midwest and the Middle East. In Wisconsin, the tea partiers have jumped into the fray with counter demonstrations. My husband pointed out, they think they are The people, and theirs is the revolution. In most Middle Eastern nations there is no such confusion. A dictator is a dictator. He takes care of his people, a minuscule power elite, and The People en masse suffer, economically and politically. The young especially, with little prospect for employment, have nothing to lose and every reason to spend every day demanding change.
Our political system, born of a revolution, seems designed to prevent another. We have (in theory) free elections and term limits. We have (in theory) a free press and free speech (though we are manipulated by our media in ways far more subtle than government propaganda. We don’t need government censorship when we already have censorship of the marketplace.) We have had a middle and working class that believes in the American Dream of betterment for anyone honest and hardworking. Though in these times many hardworking people are falling into poverty through the gaping holes of a shredded economy and a fast disappearing safety net.
Maybe the difference between our people and the people in more desperate and oppressed nations is dwindling. But we still don’t agree on who the people are or what we need from our more or less freely elected government. The right and left hand of the body politic don’t do much of anything except point fingers. A friend of mine, who doesn’t fit neatly in any category, used to declare, with some frequency, that he would “do anything to defend his people.” I finally asked him: Who are your people? He looked flustered, and then said: “The people who think the way I do.” An honest and telling answer.
The people in the streets and squares of Wisconsin give me hope of another answer. The People don’t need to think alike but we do need to act together when our right to have a voice, to have place at the big messy table of this democracy is threatened. That right is what is at stake in Wisconsin. The outcome of this struggle will affect all the People regardless of what we think.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The State of Our Stuff--Reposted
I posted the below on 1/25, then discovered my subscription widget had to be reinstalled as the post was not being delivered by email. I hope it reaches you this time. -Elizabeth
While President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, I thought I would spend my time contemplating the state of my various unions. The other night I was cooking dinner and listening to NPR (de rigueur in my marital union) when I heard a sound bite from a speech the president gave at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY. “We’re gonna invent stuff; we’re gonna build stuff.” I was busy sautéing vegetables or I might have run screaming from the room.
I know that American workers need jobs and that the last decades have seen the huge and devastating loss of manufacturing jobs to China and the many other places in the world from which we now purchase most of our stuff. But in my own union, marital—and through marriage with a beautiful, run-down property we are trying to preserve—sorting through stuff has become an overwhelming, sometimes guilt-inducing, all-consuming job.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Trinidad who came of age during the Depression, let nothing daunt her when people laughed at her ambition to work in coffee importing. Instead she became a teacher and convinced her husband to do the same. In 1945 they bought a farm for a song and eventually ran their own small eccentric school. Over the years, they added onto the original farmhouse and outbuildings in a haphazard, do-it-yourself (sometimes downright scary and dangerous fashion) and after his death my mother-in-law continued buying land and speculating in real estate. On vacations they managed to travel the world and wherever they went they brought back lots of stuff, making little distinction between gems and junk and never throwing anything away. As people from the Depression Era knew, you might need it someday.
High Valley School, like the times in which such schools prospered, is no more, but High Valley the land, buildings, and eccentric spirit of the place continue under our direction as an (unendowed) center and an odd assortment of people living in not-quite-intentional community. Until my 98-year-old mother-in-law needed more care and moved to a home nearby (where she is avowedly relieved not to have to be in charge) we lived a mile or so away in a house where we raised our children. Now we are preparing to move into a tenant apartment above where my mother-in-law’s stuff still presents us with challenges. What stays, what goes in order to use the downstairs as adjunct center space? Ok, we don’t need to keep a dried up plastic snow scene encasing a leprechaun, but what about all the books, trashy, moldering, rare? And what about all our own stuff, and the stuff my natal family stored in our attic?
Wherever we look at High Valley, paint is peeling; wiring is questionable, plumbing, dysfunctional; energy use, disastrously inefficient. In the last week we have had one instance of power outage; one building ran out of fuel; in two others the pipes froze even with the heat on. Thanks to the sale (at a loss) of a house my mother-in-law built on speculation during a distant and fleeting real estate boom, we have some short-term cash. You better believe we are investing in infrastructure and energy efficiency. We are providing some jobs this winter. We won’t be building any new stuff, though. The land is in conservation easements, and our common purpose is to preserve it. We will be recycling some stuff, moving the fence of a long defunct tennis court to make a deer-proof vegetable garden. We will go on hosting house concerts, singing and poetry circles, seasonal rites. We will rent the facilities to groups who want a day among overgrown gardens and venerable trees. We will strive to pay the taxes and restore the place. Our dream is not growth but sustainability.
I hope the president will address that topic tonight. Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status? What if we said (as my husband I have been forced to on a smaller scale): This place is falling apart, it’s a mess, but it has some beauty, some spirit. How can we tend our country, so that we can afford to keep it?
While President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, I thought I would spend my time contemplating the state of my various unions. The other night I was cooking dinner and listening to NPR (de rigueur in my marital union) when I heard a sound bite from a speech the president gave at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY. “We’re gonna invent stuff; we’re gonna build stuff.” I was busy sautéing vegetables or I might have run screaming from the room.
I know that American workers need jobs and that the last decades have seen the huge and devastating loss of manufacturing jobs to China and the many other places in the world from which we now purchase most of our stuff. But in my own union, marital—and through marriage with a beautiful, run-down property we are trying to preserve—sorting through stuff has become an overwhelming, sometimes guilt-inducing, all-consuming job.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Trinidad who came of age during the Depression, let nothing daunt her when people laughed at her ambition to work in coffee importing. Instead she became a teacher and convinced her husband to do the same. In 1945 they bought a farm for a song and eventually ran their own small eccentric school. Over the years, they added onto the original farmhouse and outbuildings in a haphazard, do-it-yourself (sometimes downright scary and dangerous fashion) and after his death my mother-in-law continued buying land and speculating in real estate. On vacations they managed to travel the world and wherever they went they brought back lots of stuff, making little distinction between gems and junk and never throwing anything away. As people from the Depression Era knew, you might need it someday.
High Valley School, like the times in which such schools prospered, is no more, but High Valley the land, buildings, and eccentric spirit of the place continue under our direction as an (unendowed) center and an odd assortment of people living in not-quite-intentional community. Until my 98-year-old mother-in-law needed more care and moved to a home nearby (where she is avowedly relieved not to have to be in charge) we lived a mile or so away in a house where we raised our children. Now we are preparing to move into a tenant apartment above where my mother-in-law’s stuff still presents us with challenges. What stays, what goes in order to use the downstairs as adjunct center space? Ok, we don’t need to keep a dried up plastic snow scene encasing a leprechaun, but what about all the books, trashy, moldering, rare? And what about all our own stuff, and the stuff my natal family stored in our attic?
Wherever we look at High Valley, paint is peeling; wiring is questionable, plumbing, dysfunctional; energy use, disastrously inefficient. In the last week we have had one instance of power outage; one building ran out of fuel; in two others the pipes froze even with the heat on. Thanks to the sale (at a loss) of a house my mother-in-law built on speculation during a distant and fleeting real estate boom, we have some short-term cash. You better believe we are investing in infrastructure and energy efficiency. We are providing some jobs this winter. We won’t be building any new stuff, though. The land is in conservation easements, and our common purpose is to preserve it. We will be recycling some stuff, moving the fence of a long defunct tennis court to make a deer-proof vegetable garden. We will go on hosting house concerts, singing and poetry circles, seasonal rites. We will rent the facilities to groups who want a day among overgrown gardens and venerable trees. We will strive to pay the taxes and restore the place. Our dream is not growth but sustainability.
I hope the president will address that topic tonight. Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status? What if we said (as my husband I have been forced to on a smaller scale): This place is falling apart, it’s a mess, but it has some beauty, some spirit. How can we tend our country, so that we can afford to keep it?
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The State of Our Stuff
While President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, I thought I would spend my time contemplating the state of my various unions. The other night I was cooking dinner and listening to NPR (de rigueur in my marital union) when I heard a sound bite from a speech the president gave at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY. “We’re gonna invent stuff; we’re gonna build stuff.” I was busy sautéing vegetables or I might have run screaming from the room.
I know that American workers need jobs and that the last decades have seen the huge and devastating loss of manufacturing jobs to China and the many other places in the world from which we now purchase most of our stuff. But in my own union, marital—and through marriage with a beautiful, run-down property we are trying to preserve—sorting through stuff has become an overwhelming, sometimes guilt-inducing, all-consuming job.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Trinidad who came of age during the Depression, let nothing daunt her when people laughed at her ambition to work in coffee importing. Instead she became a teacher and convinced her husband to do the same. In 1945 they bought a farm for a song and eventually ran their own small eccentric school. Over the years, they added onto the original farmhouse and outbuildings in a haphazard, do-it-yourself (sometimes downright scary and dangerous fashion) and after his death my mother-in-law continued buying land and speculating in real estate. On vacations they managed to travel the world and wherever they went they brought back lots of stuff, making little distinction between gems and junk and never throwing anything away. As people from the Depression Era knew, you might need it someday.
High Valley School, like the times in which such schools prospered, is no more, but High Valley the land, buildings, and eccentric spirit of the place continue under our direction as an (unendowed) center and an odd assortment of people living in not-quite-intentional community. Until my 98-year-old mother-in-law needed more care and moved to a home nearby (where she is avowedly relieved not to have to be in charge) we lived a mile or so away in a house where we raised our children. Now we are preparing to move into a tenant apartment above where my mother-in-law’s stuff still presents us with challenges. What stays, what goes in order to use the downstairs as adjunct center space? Ok, we don’t need to keep a dried up plastic snow scene encasing a leprechaun, but what about all the books, trashy, moldering, rare? And what about all our own stuff, and the stuff my natal family stored in our attic?
Wherever we look at High Valley, paint is peeling; wiring is questionable, plumbing, dysfunctional; energy use, disastrously inefficient. In the last week we have had one instance of power outage; one building ran out of fuel; in two others the pipes froze even with the heat on. Thanks to the sale (at a loss) of a house my mother-in-law built on speculation during a distant and fleeting real estate boom, we have some short-term cash. You better believe we are investing in infrastructure and energy efficiency. We are providing some jobs this winter. We won’t be building any new stuff, though. The land is in conservation easements, and our common purpose is to preserve it. We will be recycling some stuff, moving the fence of a long defunct tennis court to make a deer-proof vegetable garden. We will go on hosting house concerts, singing and poetry circles, seasonal rites. We will rent the facilities to groups who want a day among overgrown gardens and venerable trees. We will strive to pay the taxes and restore the place. Our dream is not growth but sustainability.
I hope the president will address that topic tonight. Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status? What if we said (as my husband I have been forced to on a smaller scale): This place is falling apart, it’s a mess, but it has some beauty, some spirit. How can we tend our country, so that we can afford to keep it?
I know that American workers need jobs and that the last decades have seen the huge and devastating loss of manufacturing jobs to China and the many other places in the world from which we now purchase most of our stuff. But in my own union, marital—and through marriage with a beautiful, run-down property we are trying to preserve—sorting through stuff has become an overwhelming, sometimes guilt-inducing, all-consuming job.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Trinidad who came of age during the Depression, let nothing daunt her when people laughed at her ambition to work in coffee importing. Instead she became a teacher and convinced her husband to do the same. In 1945 they bought a farm for a song and eventually ran their own small eccentric school. Over the years, they added onto the original farmhouse and outbuildings in a haphazard, do-it-yourself (sometimes downright scary and dangerous fashion) and after his death my mother-in-law continued buying land and speculating in real estate. On vacations they managed to travel the world and wherever they went they brought back lots of stuff, making little distinction between gems and junk and never throwing anything away. As people from the Depression Era knew, you might need it someday.
High Valley School, like the times in which such schools prospered, is no more, but High Valley the land, buildings, and eccentric spirit of the place continue under our direction as an (unendowed) center and an odd assortment of people living in not-quite-intentional community. Until my 98-year-old mother-in-law needed more care and moved to a home nearby (where she is avowedly relieved not to have to be in charge) we lived a mile or so away in a house where we raised our children. Now we are preparing to move into a tenant apartment above where my mother-in-law’s stuff still presents us with challenges. What stays, what goes in order to use the downstairs as adjunct center space? Ok, we don’t need to keep a dried up plastic snow scene encasing a leprechaun, but what about all the books, trashy, moldering, rare? And what about all our own stuff, and the stuff my natal family stored in our attic?
Wherever we look at High Valley, paint is peeling; wiring is questionable, plumbing, dysfunctional; energy use, disastrously inefficient. In the last week we have had one instance of power outage; one building ran out of fuel; in two others the pipes froze even with the heat on. Thanks to the sale (at a loss) of a house my mother-in-law built on speculation during a distant and fleeting real estate boom, we have some short-term cash. You better believe we are investing in infrastructure and energy efficiency. We are providing some jobs this winter. We won’t be building any new stuff, though. The land is in conservation easements, and our common purpose is to preserve it. We will be recycling some stuff, moving the fence of a long defunct tennis court to make a deer-proof vegetable garden. We will go on hosting house concerts, singing and poetry circles, seasonal rites. We will rent the facilities to groups who want a day among overgrown gardens and venerable trees. We will strive to pay the taxes and restore the place. Our dream is not growth but sustainability.
I hope the president will address that topic tonight. Our union’s present way of life is not sustainable: the miles of cavernous malls full of stuff (made elsewhere) staffed by underpaid workers who can’t afford to buy much stuff. Why then is our goal to make more stuff, so that we can cling to our slipping superpower status? What if we said (as my husband I have been forced to on a smaller scale): This place is falling apart, it’s a mess, but it has some beauty, some spirit. How can we tend our country, so that we can afford to keep it?
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Where have I been? On discovering the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church
Perhaps I have been hiding under a rock—maybe a good strategy, considering—but until today I was blissfully ignorant of the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church and its history of picketing rock concerts and a wide variety of funerals. Upcoming events include the funerals of the Arizona shooting victims and of Elizabeth Edwards. They are also infamous for picketing at the funerals of soldiers whose deaths they consider evidence of god’s wrath. Although the name of their website is http://www.godhatesfags.com/ it seems their god hates just about unconditionally, and hell is either overcapacity or infinitely expandable. Dante’s nine circles could never suffice for all the people the WBC believe the almighty has consigned to eternal damnation.
I tried to go to their website, just as I recently tried to visit Sarah Palin’s, to read for myself contents reported by the media. In both cases, my computer could not connect, although connection to other sites was no problem. I wondered at first (in paranoid Luddite fashion) if somehow those websites can screen people like me who want to spy on their activities or at any rate decry them. Then it occurred to me that maybe those sites are so trafficked that there is an impassible jam. Either explanation disturbs me.
My husband, who is a news junkie, just walked in and told me he had never heard of The Westboro Baptist Church, either. Unaffiliated with any recognized Baptist conference or association, the WBC was founded by Fred Phelps in 1955. According to the Wikipedia entry, its modest membership (71 in 2007) consists mostly of Phelps’ family. Since 1991 the church has been actively involved in the anti-gay rights movement. Now clearly they have become experts at exploiting the media and attaching themselves to anyone with celebrity, including Lady Gaga whom they likened to “The Beast Obama.”
Lady Gaga counseled her fans not to engage with the picketers. In Arizona people will assemble not as counter-protesters exactly but as human shields for the mourners. Meanwhile Arizona lawmakers are drafting emergency legislation to prohibit protests at or near funeral sites.
How to respond to unabashed hate speech is a more and more pressing question in a culture that is driven by headlines, sound bites, and spin. Sometimes I feel as though all of us, reluctantly or not, are slowing down and rubber-necking the wreck of our civilization, ashamed of our horrified fascination, moved by compassion or outrage, unsure of how to act. Do we stop and offer volunteer emergency services, do we move on and let the professionals handle it? I am caught in the crux of this dilemma even as I read and write about The Westboro Baptist Church. Would the Phelps be harmless if they had remained obscure?
It is the mission of those who hate, righteously they believe, to spread their hatred or at least make their voices heard. So must the lovers of the world. Their mission may be more challenging. They have to love the haters, too, or at least not hate them. After her picketed concert, Lady Gaga posted on twitter: "Tonight love and hate met in St. Louis. And love outnumbered the hate, in poetic thousands. Hate left. But love stayed. + Together, we sang." Lady Gaga (whom I confess I heard of only a few months before I discovered the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church) surely knows something about grabbing headlines herself. We non-celebrities may not have the same knack, but we can sing, just the same. We can sing.
It seems appropriate to close with this line from a hymn written by Robert Wadsworth Lowry, an American Baptist Minister: “Since love abounds in heaven and on earth, how can I keep from singing?”
I tried to go to their website, just as I recently tried to visit Sarah Palin’s, to read for myself contents reported by the media. In both cases, my computer could not connect, although connection to other sites was no problem. I wondered at first (in paranoid Luddite fashion) if somehow those websites can screen people like me who want to spy on their activities or at any rate decry them. Then it occurred to me that maybe those sites are so trafficked that there is an impassible jam. Either explanation disturbs me.
My husband, who is a news junkie, just walked in and told me he had never heard of The Westboro Baptist Church, either. Unaffiliated with any recognized Baptist conference or association, the WBC was founded by Fred Phelps in 1955. According to the Wikipedia entry, its modest membership (71 in 2007) consists mostly of Phelps’ family. Since 1991 the church has been actively involved in the anti-gay rights movement. Now clearly they have become experts at exploiting the media and attaching themselves to anyone with celebrity, including Lady Gaga whom they likened to “The Beast Obama.”
Lady Gaga counseled her fans not to engage with the picketers. In Arizona people will assemble not as counter-protesters exactly but as human shields for the mourners. Meanwhile Arizona lawmakers are drafting emergency legislation to prohibit protests at or near funeral sites.
How to respond to unabashed hate speech is a more and more pressing question in a culture that is driven by headlines, sound bites, and spin. Sometimes I feel as though all of us, reluctantly or not, are slowing down and rubber-necking the wreck of our civilization, ashamed of our horrified fascination, moved by compassion or outrage, unsure of how to act. Do we stop and offer volunteer emergency services, do we move on and let the professionals handle it? I am caught in the crux of this dilemma even as I read and write about The Westboro Baptist Church. Would the Phelps be harmless if they had remained obscure?
It is the mission of those who hate, righteously they believe, to spread their hatred or at least make their voices heard. So must the lovers of the world. Their mission may be more challenging. They have to love the haters, too, or at least not hate them. After her picketed concert, Lady Gaga posted on twitter: "Tonight love and hate met in St. Louis. And love outnumbered the hate, in poetic thousands. Hate left. But love stayed. + Together, we sang." Lady Gaga (whom I confess I heard of only a few months before I discovered the existence of The Westboro Baptist Church) surely knows something about grabbing headlines herself. We non-celebrities may not have the same knack, but we can sing, just the same. We can sing.
It seems appropriate to close with this line from a hymn written by Robert Wadsworth Lowry, an American Baptist Minister: “Since love abounds in heaven and on earth, how can I keep from singing?”
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Maeve's Winter Solstice
Below is a brief excerpt from Red-Robed Priestess. Maeve is back on Mona inside Bryn Celli Ddu with the druids. Copyright 2010 by Elizabeth Cunningham. All rights Reserved.
It was pitch dark inside. I moved carefully to avoid stepping on anyone, and found a place to sit nestled between warm bodies on all sides. If the chamber had been lit, I might have felt claustrophobic. Jesus’s tomb had been palatial compared to this. But as it was, all of us pressed together, it seemed like children playing a game in the dark. I am not the only one who felt that, for among that august body, with no one much under forty, there were quite a few giggles and even now and then a guffaw as we all got settled.
Then the archdruid’s voice rang out, calling the quarters and proclaiming at last:
“Here now is the center of world.”
Instead of his planted staff, the center was a stone standing in the middle of the chamber, a stone I sensed rather than saw. I felt us all quieting, deepening, taking on the qualities of the stone. The only sound was our breath, almost inaudible as we caught each other’s rhythm, so that soon we were breathing as if we were one body.
“We know the danger that is almost certainly coming to our shores,” the archdruid said at length. “There is no need to debate it. The question before us is how shall we face it? Let us listen for answers in the silence. In the holy darkness, let our inward sight be clear. When words come, let them be words of wisdom and power.”
The silence spread over us again: fallen leaves over the earth, snow over leaves, stars over stone. Time got lost in the darkness; the confines of space that held us close together dissolved. We were sitting inside the vast womb of night, waiting for words to be born.
(A debate follows, which Maeve resolves. I won’t include it here as I don’t want to give away the plot. Below is the conclusion of the scene at sunrise on Solstice.)
Eventually the sobs subsided and the silence settled again. We moved even closer to each other, arms wrapped around whoever sat in front of us, head resting against the breast of the one behind. The pounding in my head eased. It would be over soon. I had no doubt of my task. I knew exactly where I would stand. I think I dozed off then. We all did, till the sun, reborn, shot its first ray down the passage grave and we rubbed our eyes and rose, stiffly, again.
It was pitch dark inside. I moved carefully to avoid stepping on anyone, and found a place to sit nestled between warm bodies on all sides. If the chamber had been lit, I might have felt claustrophobic. Jesus’s tomb had been palatial compared to this. But as it was, all of us pressed together, it seemed like children playing a game in the dark. I am not the only one who felt that, for among that august body, with no one much under forty, there were quite a few giggles and even now and then a guffaw as we all got settled.
Then the archdruid’s voice rang out, calling the quarters and proclaiming at last:
“Here now is the center of world.”
Instead of his planted staff, the center was a stone standing in the middle of the chamber, a stone I sensed rather than saw. I felt us all quieting, deepening, taking on the qualities of the stone. The only sound was our breath, almost inaudible as we caught each other’s rhythm, so that soon we were breathing as if we were one body.
“We know the danger that is almost certainly coming to our shores,” the archdruid said at length. “There is no need to debate it. The question before us is how shall we face it? Let us listen for answers in the silence. In the holy darkness, let our inward sight be clear. When words come, let them be words of wisdom and power.”
The silence spread over us again: fallen leaves over the earth, snow over leaves, stars over stone. Time got lost in the darkness; the confines of space that held us close together dissolved. We were sitting inside the vast womb of night, waiting for words to be born.
(A debate follows, which Maeve resolves. I won’t include it here as I don’t want to give away the plot. Below is the conclusion of the scene at sunrise on Solstice.)
Eventually the sobs subsided and the silence settled again. We moved even closer to each other, arms wrapped around whoever sat in front of us, head resting against the breast of the one behind. The pounding in my head eased. It would be over soon. I had no doubt of my task. I knew exactly where I would stand. I think I dozed off then. We all did, till the sun, reborn, shot its first ray down the passage grave and we rubbed our eyes and rose, stiffly, again.
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