The ashes inside

 “Ashes to go” is tomorrow, in which intrepid clergy and people take their little pots of dust to the streets, stationing themselves on street corners and bus stops offering a prayer and a cross. When you get down to it, whether you do it in a church or on the street corner, all of the ashes we do in church are “to go,” since it’s pretty easy to wipe them off your face as soon as you get tired of people looking at you funny. What’s more interesting to me are the ashes inside—what I think Ash Wednesday is more about.

When I was first ordained, I preached an Ash Wednesday sermon at Emmanuel in Boston with the refrain: Everything is not fine, and it’s fine. I think that “not fine” quality of human life is what I mean about the ashes inside. We may look organized and presentable on the outside, but inside we all have some pretty sorrowful moments. Our relationships with God are not only pleasant and moral add-ons to life as usual; they are the core: bone and sinew of waking up in the morning. And that is hard work.

This fall, when I was on sabbatical, I found myself searingly aware of what a mess I could be; all that dust on the inside. Without having to run a church all day and write a sermon every week what I found in my soul was not so attractive. I was writing, yes, some, and I was singing, yes, some—both the things I set out to do. But I also spent a long time wallowing in professional and maternal angst—too much work, not enough work, too much parenting, not enough parenting. Nevermind any time to crash on the couch and read dark Scandinavian novels.  I love my parish and love parish ministry a lot, but wonder at the end of the day what else I should be doing.  My poems are full of me trying to convince myself to rest—that I have everything I need and that I am everything I need to be—but somehow I never quite buy it. Of course, I also, now back to running a parish, I have guilt over not writing more poems.

After those encounters, particularly in thinking about my role in the church and the church in the world, I find myself needing Ash Wednesday in a different way—kind of more of an evangelical “me and Jesus” kind of way.  I need a deeper sense of my own value—because I’m not going to earn it.  After last fall, I really know I can’t. My in-process chapbook of my poetry from that time is called ashes/what remains—they are the record of what was left when everything else is stripped away.  My spirituality has always been very comfortable with grappling with the suffering and evil in “the world”—consumer capitalism and all the sexism, heterosexism, classism, racism, and that whole birdcage of oppression: as the baptismal covenant puts it, “the powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”  I’ve spent less time in my prayer and parish work thinking about my own need. It feels much safer to focus on the world.

Ash Wednesday is about acknowledging that vulnerability; that however I end up using my gifts with writing, or preaching, or leading, at the end of the day God loves me the same and I am in just as much need of love and forgiveness.   I’m made of dust; holy dust, loving and loved dust, but still dust.  And I can’t work harder to become more loved. So what does this have to do with bringing ashes to the train station? Part of it is what I was writing about when I was thinking through my huge tattoo—that scary as it feels to be so public, there is nothing to lose and we have to be brave. Loving God and loving our neighbors come down as pretty much the same thing, and offering our love of God to our neighbors is just what we’re called to do.  

Plus—if you haven’t noticed?  People aren’t exactly in a hurry for the opinion and approval of the church. The esteem of big institutions and fancy and articulate clergy saying important things while people listen with rapt attention is not the reality of the world—and how freeing that is.  I love this arcane ritual of ashes, dust, and vulnerability—so why not offer it up? My desire to invite others into it doesn’t mean that I harbor any resentment to those for whom it’s not meaningful. If you believe, as Mary Daly pointed out in the 70’s, Christianity is just a necrophiliac religion based on worshipping a dead patriarch, I’m okay with that.  I will be happy to sit down and have coffee with you and talk about how patriarchal so much of it still can be.

Otherwise, this is what stresses me out about it:

            I will seem like a crazy fundamentalist

But I’m not.

            I will seem like I’m judging people

But I’m not.

I will seem like I’m pushing my religion on other people

By practicing it where it can be seen? Really?

It will be awkward. I will have to talk to people I don’t know

No argument there. 

            It will seem like we’re offering “cheap grace”—spirituality without an invitation to deeper transformation.

Honestly? That’s better than no grace. 

Legitimately (I think), I worry most about the theology being misunderstood—we don’t put ashes on our faces because we hate ourselves, or because we think that Jesus is dismissing us as inadequate nothings.  When we do this in church, it’s in the context of confession, forgiveness, and repentance; hopefully the mini-ritual of ashes on the sidewalk will lend itself to people pursuing deeper reflection.  Ashes are about recognizing that we are made of earth—metaphorically as well as literally if you think about where the stuff of the stuff we’re made of comes from.   I love Ash Wednesday because it reminds me of my connection as a creature to the creator, a Creator who always, always wants to return to relationship no matter how idiotically I’ve screwed up.  (Since it’s not technically Lent yet, I can say this):

Alleluia, Amen.

Olly Olly Oxen Free

 while I'm being (perhaps unnecessarily) self-revelatory on the internet, here's one of the poems i wrote last fall

Olly olly oxen free

I am listening for silence,

tired after

a long hour of seeking.

Prayer:

the simplest, most complicated thing.

The Christo negro hangs on the wall,

souvenir of long-ago pilgrimage.

Crutches and eye patches littered the pathways

up to the cross.

If I but touch the hem of his garment

No tattered edges of cloth here.

Only the hum of the boiler,

ticking of slow radiators,

growling stomach.

Noisy critics pour water on the embers

of my desire—

you’ll never get anything done.

What is it that you want,

I ask myself.

Remember the sweet Buddhists:

be gentle on

yourself, on others.

It’s good advice.

Why should it be so difficult?

I write my poems in labyrinthine

circles.

Coming closer to the center, but no—

only to find myself again on the outside.

Not lost, exactly,

neither to end at a new beginning

I once would have said

that hunger is a gift;

the peril  of that old

self-sufficient lie more dangerous

than starvation.
I even wrote a poem about it.

From the bottom of the well it looks different.

Silence only magnifies the echoes.

Come, come and climb down with me—

we will be lonely together.

It will be an adventure,

giggling children in the dark—

hiding from our mother’s call.

Count to ten!

Ready or not, here I come.

Mother Mary sends her son

to share in our cruel games

The sleek winners cry foul

as he changes the rules.

We will all be released

but will we follow?

The ladder hangs down the well

just within reach.

Ashes to Go

Our chaplain in seminary used to say that it was God's cruelest joke that so many clergy are introverts. God gets you into this ministry-you imagine quiet moments of prayer and solitude, mulling over sermons and preparing liturgies. Then you get thrown in front of a church and your inner panicker goes into high gear. Church is great-but there are people everywhere. I love my work but I will say that a quiet room and a book or a blank page are high on my list of favorite things.

It is, then, maybe God also getting a kick out of our discomfort with a new movement in the Episcopal Church: ashes to go. No music, no liturgy, not even a roof: clergy and lay people taking to the streets and standing in prayer with anyone who comes by.   Last year, I remember hearing about churches doing it, and it seemed like a nice, but impractical, idea. We Episcopalians have not often aligned ourselves with people walking around the sidewalks announcing the end of the world-are we slipping into some apocalyptic rabbit hole? Surely we don't want to be unnecessarily confrontational, do we?

Maybe, maybe not. I am inclined to say, though, that we make an awful lot of assumptions in thinking that all that is right and true can be found within our four walls. We may be intellectually open to the strengths of other traditions, but when it comes to participating in church, we expect people to get with our program. I recently read a piece by the Rt Rev Stephen Lane, the Bishop of Maine, in which he asks the question: where is the "frontline" of your church? It got me thinking-most of what we do at my church happens, well, at my church. It's wonderful and grace-filled, but we also tend only to share that with those who come to us, rather than going out to meet people where they are.

That was not exactly Jesus' style. Last night, as the parent helper in my daughter's Godly Play class at Grace Medford, where my husband is the rector, we heard the parable of the Great Banquet. Putting out the familiar pictures and green felt, the storyteller began. Someone wanted to have a party, and invited all of his friends, but they wouldn't come. They had to take care of their property. They had just gotten married. Another had to check on some livestock they were buying. So what does the host do? Get more people to come in. The poor, the blind, the sick, the outcast. And when there's still room, he casts the circle wider. The banquet grows and grows. No longer confined to those they already know-the ones with the right job and the right views-now, absolutely everybody gets in. I realize now also that the story doesn't say anything about the guy being mortified at having to talk with new people.

Too often, the church does not tell the story of a Great Banquet-too often, we are an intimate dinner party, entranced by our own cleverness and style. I don't know what Jesus would have said about taking our ashes to the streets-I don't know what he would have said about ashes in the first place, since he was pretty clear on instructing people not to look dismal about fasting and prayer-but I am confident that whatever the church can do to come near to others is the path that Jesus would have us walk on. Would it be "better" if people came to an hourlong liturgy and had time for music, reflection, and a sermon about the tradition and theology of the day? Quite probably. The liturgy for Ash Wednesday is a great service. And surely, I hope all of you who are reading this go to church...

Church is my job, so I know I'll be there. But for the person getting on the train who still needs eighteen more cups of coffee,  for the homeless person as they walk from the shelter to breakfast at the Salvation Army, for the man who stopped going to church after his wife died, for the boss who has to fire someone and the employee who's worried the pink slip is coming, for the mom who is worried that her kid will get sick at school and she'll have to leave work early-for all of those people, I think the payoff for me feeling a little silly will be worth it. So I and a few other intrepid souls will be there on Carter Street. No judgments, no strings, no gimmicks.  Ashes are startling in their simplicity--we'll go out with just the dust we came from and a prayer for God's grace.  An opening of our hands and one deep breath of hope.

 I wrote this initially for our parish email newsletter; the last four years or so of that are on www.ecrier.blogspot.com.

Put a Holy Spirit on it!

Sermon for the Baptism of Jesus: January 13, 2012

Lectionary Readings

Jesus is baptized.

Jesus is baptized, and while we might wonder how or why or, in the Gospel of Luke, even, by whom—Jesus goes for baptism, and his ministry begins. Here, he begins with the Holy Spirit, marking him God’s own beloved child and sending him into the world.  In that moment of prayer, everything changes.

When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

This week  I saw a short clip from the show “Portlandia.” It’s a sketch comedy about Portland, Oregon—it takes the earnest cool and political correctness of Cambridge and turns it up by 100.  “Lisa” and “Bryce” go to a fancy but ho-hum boutique full of cute things. But it’s not cute enough. They bring all their crafting gear to cover everything with birds…cute birds. Tote bags and greeting cards and pillows and candles, everything in the store gets slapped with a bird to bring it to the next level of “cute.” They craft and craft and craft, until the store owner proudly opens the door to let everyone in and  an actual bird comes in.  Everyone ducks and tries to swat it away. Bryce screams, I’M ALLERGIC! Lisa and the shop owner fight over a lamp—presumably the better to whack the bird with. 

 Watch the video here

A lot is lost in my translation, but the point is that “Lisa and Bryce” have no interest in actual birds; it’s an image they’ve created in their minds of saccharine domesticity, a little like the blue eyed Jesus holding lambs and children all at the same time.  It’s compelling, but it’s not real.

But the Spirit alights on a Messiah who will be a very real savior, one who hangs out with prostitutes and scheming tax collectors.  Jesus shows us the Spirit—holiness, awe, and wonder, and justice and truth.  And again and again we try to swat him away and wish it were less embarrassing.  We tend to want something a bit more domestic, not an actual living and breathing savior who comes to sweep away all of our preconceptions and limitations. Scripture is full of these stories. 

Herod, sending John to prison, wanted something more domestic. All that truth and integrity he thought he wanted went too far. This is not what he expected. This is a different kind of savior.   

The women who go to tell the other disciples that Jesus has been raised don’t want to hear it, consumed with their own sorrow. This is not what they expected. This is a different kind of savior.

Hearing Jesus preach for the first time, his community is first fascinated, and then horrified and then literally runs him out of town. This was not what they expected. This is a different kind of savior.

My Son, my beloved.

This is a different bird—this is a different way of being with God, altogether.  This starts with how much God loves us; not who your father was, or how much you can afford to give or whom you are superior to. Then, as now, we need to be reminded that this is a God who blows through all our preconceived notions. Things get complicated. It’s not as tidy as we thought.  We get allergic, too.

Like the crafters in Portlandia encountering a real bird, like the people of Nazareth wanting nothing to do with their hometown prophet, we also have certain expectations. But the Spirit goes where she will and inspires those she will inspire. Even in our allergic anxiety, the Spirit gets through.

In seminary, I had friends who became priests later in life, giving up successful and constructive careers. Yes, God said to them, you make a great teacher, but now I need you to teach in a different way. Yes, you’re a terrific lawyer, but I want you to convince people of something new. Yes, you are a great accountant, but now I need you to stop counting.

I’ve heard your stories about stewardship, about how you felt called into giving new gifts, how you rearranged your commitments to offer absolutely everything you can to the church, first, rather than whatever is left over.  

Jeanne Manford with her son at NYC Pride 1972

This week, I heard the moving story of Jeanne Manford, who died this week at the age of 92.  An ordinary Queens elementary school teacher, she sprung to action in 1972 when her gay son was beaten and the police stood by and watched.  Her whole life was rearranged at age 50, when she couldn’t be silent anymore. “I have a gay son and I love him,” she wrote to the New York Post. A few months later she marched in a Pride parade carrying a sign that said, “Parents unite in support of our gay children” and a worldwide movement was born. No one had spoken out like that. Out of the Spirit empowering her to speak the truth, family after family would no longer be divided by hatred.  In her life, the Holy Spirit came to her as a call to action. In the life of the world, the Spirit came as a mother’s love.   

The Spirit is not the domesticated parakeet who politely comes to sit on our fingers. She may be a dove, but I also imagine her as a heron, swooping in over enormous wings and enfolding us in love, then pushing us out to do share that love in the streets. Giving us voices to speak.  She knocks things over and delights in watching us put the pieces back together, reveling in our ingenuity and creativity and weeping with us at our frustration.

The people were “questioning in their hearts,” whether John was the Messiah. This moment may have settled for them that it was Jesus, not John, but the questions about what this really meant for them wouldn’t have stopped. What Jesus wanted for them to do in their lives, where that Spirit would bring them into the world, filled with that same love.  We may take our whole lives to figure out what it means. We may take our whole lives to allow our hardened outer shells to be softened by that love.  But it starts here, with baptism.  For Jesus as well as for us.  I want to share the prayer we offer for the newly baptized, but I share it now for all of us.

 Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon us your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised us to the new life of grace. Sustain us, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give us an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.

The finished piece

Re Entry: Becoming a (more) tattooed lady

In all the literature about sabbaticals, there is a good deal of angst spilled around the dreaded Re-Entry—coming back to work with all the same problems and all the same personalities. You feel that you’ve traveled so far, and here you are, back where you started. Surprise! You’re the same person! And treacherous icicles still hang down from the gutters. “Re-Entry” after international travel is another category as well, so I get two.

Still, the point of pilgrimage is to come to see the place you started from for the first time, as the TS Eliot poem goes. You are you, but you can see better. And I’ve been entering the water pretty slowly, with one Sunday visit the day I left for Africa, then back to the office for a week to do the pageant, Advent 4, and Christmas Eve, and then on to family vacation for a week before coming back to a one-day workweek before Sunday (clergy weekend being Friday-Saturday).

So I was back working—really working—for not very many hours before trekking over a week ago to Watertown, for a long-planned tattoo appointment.  I have four other tattoos, mostly simple line drawings—a tree, a tiny snake, a female symbol, and a labyrinth (my most recent one, gotten 8 years ago for my priesthood ordination). I had thought I was finished with that one, but after my kids were born, I still wanted another, and they seemed like a good excuse.

I started thinking of having their names—both Hebrew—incorporated into some kind of design. And maybe some flowers. And I don’t remember when it occurred to me to desire a swallow tattoo—and suddenly it started to get pretty big. Swallows are an old sailor image, when (Wikipedia tells us) they’d get a swallow for each 5000 nautical miles of travel.  My only claim to sailing is that I tend not to get seasick, but I do like birds an awful lot. There’s something compelling about how they manage to be wild but also have a certain domesticity about them. 

Still, names and birds—doesn’t a suburban mom with sailor tattoos kind of scream “desperately aging hipster?” Sure.  But swallows of all kinds are also everywhere—canoeing down the Mystic River to the Boston Harbor last August, my husband Noah and I saw bank swallows swirling around the water on this side of the locks. Earlier, in Sweden while visiting the old megaliths at Alestenar when I was there when my aunt died, swallows.  And they have those adorable crossed tail feathers. 

So I put my reservations aside and thought a little bigger, and a little bigger.  My favorite color is purple, and I love the wild pansies that creep up everywhere and all over.  It’s the flower for Angermanland, where my Swedish grandmother’s family is from, and I thought of linnea flowers, another Swedish one (and her middle name).   Finally I decided it was time when I was on sabbatical. I met with Holly from Always and Forever tattoo shop in Watertown and was talked out of both Hebrew for the names and incorporating my existing tattoo into a new design, and staked out my right arm. I’d thought of sort of a little cap sleeve design. Birds, flowers, names. Compact.

When I met Holly to talk about the tattoo, she had other ideas. I came in last week and saw something that goes almost down to my elbow, including the names which I finally decided to have in English.  The whole process has led to more introspection than I’d ever expected. First, the images I wanted, of course. But the questions along the way as well. Holly first suggested we just cover up my old female symbol tattoo. It’s done with very fine lines which have blurred over the years (it’s 15 years old, almost to the day), and it slants in kind of a funny way. But it’s still my tattoo. You could see it in the pictures from Noah’s and my wedding, when I am holding each of my children for the first time—it’s not perfect, but it’s mine. It reminds me of when I got it, when I was as radical a feminist as anyone at my crazy hippie college was, and reminds me of those radical commitments—always to go to the root, look deeper. So, no, I wasn’t covering it up, dilapidated as it was. Plus my mother drew it for me.

And I wasn’t going to go to a different artist. I’d been internet stalking Holly for months, since she opened her shop. I found her by just looking at bird tattoos online; I loved the way her designs worked with the body, over curves and bones and soft lines.  So this tattoo is my project, but it’s also hers. It’s her artistic vision that gave me the beautifully variegated blue and purple in the flowers and not the almost-black purple I’d thought I wanted. It’s her vision that got the linnea flowers the perfect shade of slate blue instead of the pink that’s actually found in nature. And it will be her vision, combined with mine, when I go back in 7 weeks and finish the shading and coloring. So walking into Always and Forever last Thursday, I knew that I was trusting her a lot, and trusting myself, too, in getting another tattoo that wouldn’t be quite so easily hidden.

I've been going back and forth in my mind: what is the line between what you do to be “you” and what you do to conform.  When I was younger, it was an easy choice: all "me" and no conforming at all (or so it seemed to me...a sixteen year old girl with a shaved head conforms to a certain image of something, for sure). In seminary I remember when I took out some of my earrings (at that time I always wore six on one side and three on the other) and it felt like a cataclysmic shift in identity. Of course it wasn’t, but it was a shift.  Maybe I’m a little behind the curve in still thinking about these things at age 34.  Even being part of an entire book about the reconciliation of feminism to Christian faith (My Red Couch—I wrote the title essay in 2004), I can say that while it doesn’t bother my own conscience to generally be part of the institution of the ur-patriarchs, I still have moments where I wonder about how to walk the line between the counter-cultural impulses I’ve always had and the social conformity that “church” has implied pretty much since the Emperor Constantine. Too political? not political enough?  In any given sermon I could feel like entirely betraying my radical view of the Christian faith or entirely alienating those who come to church just wanting to feel a little better about their already-hard lives, whom I am loath to blame for that desire.  I've met elderly church ladies who are more on fire for the radical  Gospel than any self-styled activist with a nosering.

And then there’s my faith and vocation; as a priest, I’m called to preach the really hard and radical truth of the Gospel. Love everybody, all the time, forgiving them and yourself, and look relentlessly for the presence of Jesus in everyone. Bring greed and corruption to its knees and fight for the peace and justice and wholeness for every person. It’s one thing to fall down and ask for help to do the right thing the next time.  But if I’m silent because I worry about people getting mad and leaving (as has, actually, now happened more than once, mostly about GLBT inclusivity) I might as well get a job selling expensive lawn pesticides.

So here is my tattoo.  It is enormous.  It is a radical change. It is a shift, a before-and-after, of how I get dressed every morning and whether I decide to wear short or long sleeves.  It’s going to be visible. Not like my little labyrinth poking out the bottom of a long skirt once in a while, but really, really all the time, unless I plan to be very hot all summer.  When I saw the huge design Holly had made, and saw her trace out “Isaiah” in huge letters just above my elbow and “Adah” over my shoulder, I felt like I was daring myself to misbehave, daring myself to stop worrying about being so offensive at the same time as I want to rebel so badly.   A month after my Africa trip, it seems like an awfully superficial thing to worry about.  When you live in a village in a mountain-top in Tanzania with no health care, you have much bigger fish to fry. If there are fish at all.  

But here we are.

Having a big tattoo doesn’t make me more or less faithful to the radicalism that Jesus asks of us. Sitting for 3 ½ hours while someone pokes you with needles does not have to be a moral experience (it may be a moral question that the money I spend on it could send two kids to primary school for a year in Uganda).   Still, I hope that it will be a reminder not to be so worried.  As the rector of Christ Church, it’s not my job to please people, it’s my job to love them.  It’s our job together to show each other how God loves.   Now let’s get on with it.

The icicles are still treacherous. I’m still going to space out during announcement time and forget to invite people to coffee hour.   The next time I get up into the pulpit and pray for an end to gun violence or war or any constellation of difficult topics, my palms will still sweat. But we’re here together, and God will be too, no matter what. And you definitely can’t see my tattoo with my chasuble on. 

 The stencil before we put the names on

before the color went in--facebook status: "More is more, friends. More is more."

Baltic Wheel Labyrinth, Ankle

Snake, Monica Irwin, Right foot (1997)

Tree of Life (after G Klimt--also drawn by my mom!)