The Brokenness Before the Beauty

Today, much of Christendom will celebrate Good Friday, the day that remembers the Crucifixion of Christ. This is the day that no bread can be consecrated. Many Christians will fast today. Some will fast until Easter morning.

I have already heard a great Good Friday sermon.  At seminary chapel on Tuesday, we had a Holy Week theme, and our guest preacher preached on the crowds demanding the release of Barabbas, not Jesus.  Our guest preacher cautiously approached the substitutionary atonement theology that rears its ugly head on Good Friday and beyond.  He reminded us that this theology comes to us from Anselm in the 12th century, not from God.

He said that humans required the crucifixion of Jesus, in the way that human brokenness so often does.  God did not require the sacrifice of Jesus.  He talked about Jesus and the ways that Jesus sought to heal the world.  He ended his sermon by saying, "Jesus released Barabbas.  Let us have the strength to release Jesus Christ." 

Tonight I will go to a Good Friday service at another new church of mine, the one near my North Carolina house.  It will involve Stations of the Cross and walking outside.  I'm interested to see what they do with all the potential.  I have not done much with Stations of the Cross in the past, just a Good Friday service here or there, plus a few encounters with art that uses the Stations of the Cross.

from Mary Button's "Stations of the Cross:  Jesus at the Border"

It is good to remember how much of the world is stuck in Good Friday.  It is good to remember, as our guest preacher did, how we are called to stand in solidarity with those who are broken by the world.  It is good today to reflect on God, who can make beauty out of the most profound ugliness, wholeness out of the most shattered brokenness.

Maundy Thursday: Back to the Table

Here we are, Maundy Thursday again.  I am in a house that I didn't own last year.  Last year, Maundy Thursday was the day before I broke my wrist.  This year, I am hearing all the broken body parts of our liturgy differently.

Diana Butler Bass has already written the perfect Maundy Thursday essay, the type of essay where I almost decide I don't need to bother to write anything further.  She writes "Christians mostly think of Maundy Thursday as the run-up to the real show on Friday."  And then she writes a whole essay to address this idea:  "What if we’ve gotten the week’s emphasis wrong?"  She writes a whole essay to expand on the idea that the table, the meal, should be the main point, not the cross.

On this day, I'm thinking of Anselm and his ideas of atonement.  On this day, I'm wondering what would have happened if Christianity had emphasized something different, if the cross could have been a different kind of symbol.  More on that tomorrow.

On this day, I'm thinking of those earliest Christians, sharing all they had, not calling themselves Christians yet, just a group of people who had experienced something shattering.  They gathered to try to understand what had happened and how to move forward.  They expected Christ to come again soon, in their lifetimes.  Reading Paul in that context changes some of his letters for me.  I still wonder if we would be better off without them.

I still wonder what letters are lost to us, letters from other earliest followers of the new way.  I am dreaming of a recipe book from those earliest Christians, a book of recipes and stories about new life.

This week, with its mix of Spring holidays, including Ramadan and Passover this year, along with all the Christian holidays, also reminds me of a poem I wrote long ago now, while all these images swirled in my brain and my quilt group met. We wouldn't have had the meal that the poem describes, but everything else is factual. Well, I wasn't exactly the lapsed Lutheran in the sense that I once was, but like the rest of the poem, it's true, if not factual.

It was first published in Ruminate.


Eucharist

I knead the bread leavened with beer,
stew a lamb shank in a pot of lentils,
prepare a salad of apples, walnuts, and raisins,
sweetened with wine and honey.
No one ever had herbs as bitter as this late season lettuce.

My friends gather at dusk, a motley band
of ragtags, fleeing from the Philistines of academia:
a Marxist, a Hindu, a Wiccan, a Charismatic Catholic,
and me, a lapsed Lutheran longing for liturgy.

Later, having drunk several bottles of wine
with prices that could have paid our grad
school rents, we eat desserts from disparate
cultures and tell our daughters tales from our deviant days.
We agree to meet again.

Gnarled vegetables coaxed from their dark hiding places
transform into a hearty broth.
Fire transubstantiates flour and water into life giving loaves.
Outcasts scavenged from the margins of education
share a meal and memories and begin to mold
a new family, a different covenant.

To Pack Again

In a bit, I will put the last load in the car and head back to North Carolina for Easter break and for the Create in Me retreat next week.  One of the beauties of being a student these days is that I can do the work from anywhere I can find electricity for my laptop and an internet connection.  And so I will head back to my Lutheridge house.  It's one of four trips that I'll make between now and May 15, when I have to vacate this seminary apartment.  

Can I get everything home?  We shall see.  The trick is that I will need much of it until the very end of my time here.  Or maybe not.  I've got the unnecessary stuff in the car right now, the food processor, the pots and pans that are too big for this very small stove with its very small burners, a lot of clothes, the extra quilts and blankets.  The next load at the end of April will be the books that I'm not using.

But first, this trip.  I had planned to go to North Carolina later this week, because we thought there would be window and sliding glass door installation happening today.  Alas, the windows were not on the truck.  So we will wait, and I will go down a bit earlier.

As I've packed, I've thought about what a strange year it's been.  We're approaching the one year anniversary of the fall that shattered my wrist.  When I first packed these boxes in the early summer, I had my arm in a cast.  When I moved these boxes into seminary housing in August, I couldn't lift the very heavy ones--my wrist wasn't strong enough for my hand to hold much of a load.  When I put the empty, flattened boxes into my storage unit downstairs, I thought they'd stay there for the next 2-3 years while I lived here.

Pivot, pivot, pivot again.  It's the story of the last several years.

Erasure Poetry as Lectio Divina and/or Teaching Tool

Last night in my Luke class for seminary, we arrived at the Palm Sunday text--a happy coincidence, not a planned collision.  My professor wanted to try something interesting.

One of the dangers/problems with a familiar text is that we think we've heard it all already.  How can we approach it with fresh ears?  The Palm Sunday text is one of those familiar stories, yet it is so different from Gospel to Gospel.

My teacher gave us the text of Luke 19:  29-40 as a Word doc.  We had five minutes to see what words spoke to us.  We changed the text of those words to a different color, then we blacked out the rest of the text, using the highlight feature of Word as a black highlight. 

I had never done this in Word before; I've always just used a marker, the few times I've done it.  And I've never done erasure poetry, which my professor called blackout poetry, as part of a religious practice.

At first I thought it was a blah effort--and then I wrote the words in my notebook:

Untying

Path down

Loud voice

Stones shout

Very interesting! Several other students read their poems and they were all so different.  Mine was the shortest and sparest.  But the long and winding ones intrigued us too.

This exercise seemed to have a lot of applications, which is why I'm recording it here.  It could work well as part of lectio divina, where we look at a text (often reading it out loud) several times to see what is speaking to us.  It could work well as part of a Bible study.  And I'm interested to think of its applications in the English classroom, applications beyond a poetry writing session.  Hmmm.

There are so many delights to being a seminary student, and last night's class reminded me of them. Once again, I feel so lucky.  And I'm happy to think about the ways I'll apply some of these possibilities to the English classroom, where I will be teaching in person again for the first time since the pandemic.

Field Trip to a Buddhist Meditation Center

To get the MDiv degree, Wesley Seminary requires a World Religions class.  In theory, I approve.  In practice, many of the options haven't appealed to me.  I want the knowledge that might come after spending a term studying another religion, but I don't really want to immerse myself that way.  So when I heard about the World Religions as Resource for Theology and Mission class, I thought this approach would be my best option.  Even though it would mean a heavy load, I decided that I had time and money, and so I signed up.

I'm glad that I did.  It's been a remarkable experience.  The field trips were the most attractive part of the class, when I heard about it in advance.  It's probably the main reason I signed up; I knew that we would have this opportunity primarily because the professors had connections to area religious leaders, and that if someone else taught the class, we might not have the same opportunities.

On Saturday, we went to the last of the experiential parts of the class.  On Saturday, we went to a Buddhist meditation center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

We had an initial talk about Buddhism, as we sat in one of the meditation spaces.  Then, because that space was booked for a different group, we walked to the house across the street to do our meditation together.

I wish I could report that doing meditation led by a Buddhist was easier than the meditation that I do at the end of yoga classes, but this is not the case.  Still, it was a valuable experience.  

I was impressed by all the flowers--and these flowers are brought as offerings by local Buddhists.  They also bring food, so much food that the monks who live in the meditation center never have to cook.  We also got to see a tree that is the kind of tree that the Buddha sat under centuries ago when he had his first revelations:

To close our day, we did a meditation with a woven cord that connected us all.  And at the end, if we wanted a blessing, we came forward to receive it, along with strings from the cord tied around our wrist by the monk.

My wrist, in front of my seminary apartment window sill

This trip to the Buddhist meditation center was a great way to end our time together as a class.  If I'm ever lucky enough to get to lead this kind of class, I hope that I can orchestrate some similar experiential trips.  I learned much more from them than I ever can from a book.

Like a Scene Out of Voltaire

I have had music from Duran Duran's album Rio in my head since Friday.  You might ask why.  In my Church History II class on Thursday night, my teacher talked about Voltaire, which took me back to high school, to the Duran Duran song "Last Chance on the Stairway," and this lyric: "Funny it’s just like a scene out of Voltaire, twisting out of sight.”  I thought about the book by Voltaire that I found on a remainder table at a B. Dalton's.  I bought it because of that lyric.  I don't remember Voltaire, but I can sing almost every song on Rio.

I went down several music internet rabbit holes on Friday as I was writing my paper for my Queer Theology class.  I made this Facebook post:  "Listening to Violent Femmes songs, editing my Queer Theology paper on Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic," as one does on the last Friday of March."  And later, I made this Facebook post:  "And now I'm listening to Darius Rucker and missing Columbia (South Carolina) and the apartment on Heidt Street that was close enough to Rockafellas that we could hear Hootie and the Blowfish for free--Darius Rucker's version of "Straight to Hell" and "Wagon Wheel" may be my favorites of each song."

Along the way, someone asked me what Queer Theology is--a good question.  I will confess that the Queer Theology class has spent more time on Queer Theory than I expected.  Happily, if it had been a class in Queer Theory, I'd have happily signed up for that too.  I'm happy with the response I wrote to the question, and I want to capture it here, where it will be easier to find in the future, if I need it:

"It can be many things. At it's most basic level, Queer Theology could look at the Bible and see what the Bible says about non-heterosexual existence. But my seminary class started with the understanding that we didn't need to do that, that we are all created as good by God and loved by God, regardless of gender or sexual desire, that we don't need to prove that God loves us all. So the class that I'm in is looking at Queer Theory and seeing what it can tell us about Queer Theology--in other words, what Queer Theory can tell us about God and what it means to follow God and what it means to live in the systems of empire that we do. There's lots of Queer Theory around gender and how we experience gender and how we perform gender. There's lots of Queer Theory that looks at how we are shaped (in all ways, not just gender and sex) by the societies and cultures we live in--does that research affect the way we see ourselves and God? I would say that it does, but this answer is already getting quite long, so I'll stop here. I will say that it's been a fascinating class, and I'm really glad to be part of it--it shows me that there are so many ways of approaching the question of how to be the best human/believer possible."

Even at the end of an intense week, I'm happy to say that I'm still so thrilled with the classes that I'm taking this term.  Most of them are classes that are rarely offered from a distance, so I'm so glad to have had this opportunity.

A Busy Day, an Intense Week

Today is an unusually busy Saturday for me.  My World Religions class has two week-ends where we meet on campus for class/experiential learning on Friday evening and Saturday from 9-5.  Today is the last of those in-person meetings.  We will end by going to a Buddhist meditation center.

It's a busy day at the end of a busy week--last week-end I was at my mom's women's retreat at St. Stephens Lutheran Church, and each day this week, I've been doing a lot of seminary writing.  I had something due in every class this week, sometimes several assignments, so it's been more intense than usual.  I'm worn out, and this today's heavy schedule has yet to get started.

Happily tomorrow and Monday are much less intense, so I'll have time to recover and to plot how to finish the term.  In the next five weeks, I have lots of work for seminary due, plus the four classes that I'm teaching online will be ending.  But tomorrow, I will rest.

Today is forecast to be windy and rainy--very windy.  I thought about going for a walk before class, but the skies look threatening.  Plus, it's good to be gentle with myself this morning.

The winds may finish off the cherry blossoms.  Happily, I have some pictures.  Here is one from my walk earlier this week:

The tree trimmers had just been by when I walked a few days ago.  I picked up some twigs with blossoms on them, and now they're in a glass of water on my window sill.  They bring me joy.