TIME FOR A CHANGE

I went to our church building yesterday to set up some things for “virtual worship” (whatever the hell that means!).  I happened to look at, not just glance at, the bulletin board by the front door.  It still had the Lenten flyer with the schedule and the list of Sunday Gospels.  I had written it in late January, in order to send it out ahead of time, and had forgotten our theme of Lent. It is: “A Big Change Is Coming!”  I guess so!  I was referring to the wonderful stories of liberation: the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Lazarus raised from the dead.  I did NOT anticipate thousands dying, the economy ground to a halt, physical isolation of our flock.

I’ve seen memes on social media that say something like:  “Look out for a bush of babies born nine months from now!”  Maybe.  But maybe, also we need to look out for a rush of divorces in two or three months.  Sharing space all day has it’s blessings; it also uncovers some of our defects of character and lack of real communication gifts.

For me, it has also opened me up to reflecting more on the world view, or cosmovision of how we live together.  Let me start by sharing some reflections on this old, battered book that I’ve been reading during Lent:

If you can see, the book has been with me a long time. The price tag says $1.45, but I think I may even have bought it for less at a used book store, back in the 1970’s.  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was published in 1966. It was written by Thomas Merton, who was a Cistercian monk, part of an order that maintains a strict silence.  And yet, Merton was one of the most astute commentators on social issues of the day, from civil rights to the war in Viet Nam to the environment.

Merton writes about the “disease” of the U.S. involves seeing ourselves through lenses of innocence.  That way of seeing (which is really a way of blindness) imagines our country as being liberated from history: we are the New World.  We’ve started fresh, without the old evil of the places we left (meaning Europe).  Because of that core belief, our ideology refuses to see evil as something in us.  Rather, evil, decay, sin are located “outside of us”.  In other cultures and ways of thinking.  In the sixties, Merton sees how the prevailing ideology locates evil in communism, “outside agitators” and “uncivilized peoples” and how our collective memory celebrates only our unique goodness.  Even the evil we have done—for example, slavery—is celebrated as something we ended.  We took care of it with a terrible war, and then moved on.

Of course, that is not the experience of those who were enslaved—before and after legal slavery. Nor the genocide experience of Native Americans, nor the experience of Vietnamese and Central Americans, where the US “fought for democracy”, and for many other people.  In “seeing for innocence”, we make even the victims of our oppression and violence into the guilty ones.

I can’t find the exact quote from him, but the essence is that when we locate evil as something outside of us, we always end up being violent.

Merton also reflects on the great Myth of the American State, which flows from our supposed Innocence: a fervent belief in Progress.  It is so hard for me not to fall under the spell of that power.  I so want the world to be better, and I have seen advances we have made.  But faith in Progress is a shaky faith.

I’ve heard over and over during these past weeks the phrase: “we will get through this”.  I’ve said it to others, usually adding the word “together” at the end.  On the one hand, it is a message of hope, and hope is so needed right now.

But clinging to the idea that “we will get through this” can keep us from doing the hard work of grieving that this terrible crisis is causing.

The truth of it is that we will not be all right.  Not all of us will be all right.  Our Lt. Governor’s brother has died of Covid-19. A Latino owned  restaurant was destroyed by fire, and four other businesses adjacent were heavily damaged.  Five people living in an apartment above the restaurant are now homeless.  Many of our members work in the service industry and have been laid off.  Those who are undocumented will get nothing from the government programs.

Not all of us will be all right.  And in profound ways, all of us will not be all right.           

We may not get through this as we imagine.  We may never “return to normal”. We don’t know what is coming, but we do know that what is happening now is horrible. 

Hope has an answer for that, but true hope—as opposed to optimism—is born out of suffering (see Romans 5:1-5). In order to get to hope in this time, I think we need to lament first.  So much of what is presented to us by the news—and what we ourselves share on social media—are ways to distract us while we are sequestered.  Read books, do home repair projects, binge watch TV series and movies.

Some of those coping mechanisms may be necessary.  But what if we took time to actually feel our grief, experience our loneliness, accept the fact that we are going to die—not in this epidemic necessarily, but some day—and mourn all the daily losses we suffer.  Grief is hard to bear alone, but we do have means of communicating when we can’t be in person.

Many people around the world—Palestinians in eternal lockdown, Yemenis starving in the midst of war, families separated at our border—have learned how to live in the midst of grief and uncertainty that things will get better.  Maybe they can be our teachers.  What better time to do that but Holy Week.

I encourage you to read Merton.  Another good book I’m reading is “Glimpsing Resurrection” by

Deanna Thompson, who writes about living with the trauma of incurable cancer.

The poem “Lament” I include here is first of all, a call to me to not run away from my sorrow and the sorrow of my family and my flock.  It doesn’t offer answers, but I hope that it can help us to journey through our grief together.

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be lament.

Patrick

LAMENT

God is the straw within the straw.

                                                Edith Sitwell

God is the straw within the straw.

The quota of bricks not lessened.

The lash across the slaves’ backs.

God is the straw within the straw.

The family shamed to give birth with the animals.

The baby barely born laid in a feed trough.

The body hunted like a plague.                      

God is the grass within the grass.

The withering, the scythe,

The roaring oven,

The word that does not end.

God is the flesh within each battered flesh.

Bones ground like wheat,

Wind ripened and let loose,

A goblet of sweet and bitter wine passed around the table.

God is the stone within the stone.

Lapis angularis shattered with iron rods.

The rock struck and then struck again,

The pool stirred by the angel.

God is the water within the water.

Leviathan hung by a hook.

A coin in a carp’s mouth.

Rain that refuses to wash away the blood.

God is the wood within the wood.

The seed dead and sprouting green.

Limbs sheltering birds and their songs.

A box shaped like a no.

God is the night within the night.

Moon full, stars strung like teeth,

Comet slung across the horizon,                    

Silence hounding silence.

God is the cry within the cry.

Nipples cracked and bleeding,

The war child’s mouth rippled with sores.

The storehouse locked, horses ready to ride.

God is the question within the question.

How long?

Why me?

Where are you?

God is the pain within the pain.

God is the prayer within the prayer.

God is the doubt within the doubt.

God is the hope within the …

BREATHE LISTEN NAME

SOUNDS:  I heard my first robin of the spring Monday morning, yesterday morning, and once again today.  Usually it takes a couple days before I see one, but it joys me to know they are there.  Schools are closed, and we can’t do our artistic residency, but yesterday evening, I could hear neighbor children down the block laughing and screaming.  A blessing.

On the other side of sound, my wife Luisa is organizing the thousands of myriads of glass she uses for mosaic.  Yesterday, while I was meditating upstairs, she dropped a box of them on the floor.  It’s happened before, so I wasn’t too alarmed, but it made me think about all that is being broken in our world right now: bodies, families, businesses, our social life.  There will be time and imagination to make beauty out of this brokenness, but first we have to be in the brokenness.

BREATH: Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas Day.  It almost always falls in Lent, the time of pilgrimage leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection.  Angel Gabriel says to young Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”. In Greek (as in Hebrew), the word for spirit and wind are the same.  I imagine Mary breathing in the spirit of those words of Gabriel, and letting the power of the most high overshadow—from inside her, inside her very guts.  Not just her womb, but her entire body, her whole life becomes the shelter of the holy.  Considering the Greek word is δύναμις, from which we get the word “dynamite”, that must have been quite a breath!

I’ve been practicing a meditation technique the past couple of days, where I take deep breaths. I do that often, but in this practice, you hold your breath (which I think is holding yourself) for awhile after you’ve breathed it all in.  And you hold your breath, your self, for awhile after you have left it all out.  I found that when I hold my breath, myself while I am full of breath, I can feel the pulse in my head and I start to get nervous until I let it out.  When I hold my breath, myself when I have emptied my breath, I feel calm.  There is wisdom in this, wisdom that Mary knew.  Emptying ourselves makes our selves be more open to grace.  I did discover that it helped to open my mouth just a little when my lungs were full of breath.  Maybe that made me—literally—a little less full of myself!

NAMING:  Gabriel also says to Mary: “therefore the child to be born will be holy; will be called Son of God.”  I think you could also translate that (my Greek is very rusty, but I have no qualms about making things up) something like: “because of the Spirit coming upon you and the power overshadowing you, the one who is to come will be holy, will be named Child of God.”

There is a lot we don’t know about what is to come with this virus, the economy, our world.  But I believe we can breathe this word that hung from our baptismal fount in church from Advent until almost Lent:  “All children are holy”.  That was the theme of our Posada this past December, that as we come seeking posada, shelter for Mary, Joseph and the little one who is coming, we come bearing this undeniable peace: that all children are holy, that each life is precious, and that we all have within our bodies, our selves, a remarkable inn, a beautiful and cozy sanctuary in which we can shelter the holy breath.

And that holy breath comes with incredible power to love, even when we are kept apart.

The poem below is from my book “The Devouring Land”, which is NOT on Amazon, but you can purchase from me. 20% of my cut goes to ministries with immigrants, who stand the most to suffer from the economic recession,

Be justice, be mercy, be listening, breathing, naming.

Patrick

THE EGYPT OF MARYS WOMB *

A small town.  A back door.

A young woman at her work

chopping, searing, holding.

A flash, not so much of light, as

the chorus of sight that light trails                 

as it passes by.  A strange

word, an aspiration,

a slight bow of the head,

a warm wrapping of wings.

There will be lions, later.

There will be swords.

But tonight, your flesh

is reed and pitch,

bitumen and straw,

floating on the great river,

eyes open, naming,

one by one, all the stars

of the vast, quaking world.

* Title from a poem by Robert Bly

RANDOM AND NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHTS

RANDOM AND NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHTS

-           I rent a studio at the Loft Literary Center, in the Open Book in downtown Minneapolis.  It is a block from Gold Medal Park and a couple blocks from the Mississippi River. I often walk down there when I take a break.  Over the past few weeks, it has been fun watching the ice recede slowly and then—poof!—disappear almost overnight from the main channel.

-           I usually stop at the memorial to the thirteen people killed and the many injured in the August 1, 2007 collapse of the 35W bridge.  Our daughter’s name is on the wall of survivors, and I rub my fingers over her four names (see the poem at the end of this).  Lately, I’ve been rubbing my fingers over two other names, who were on that bus as young people.  One allegedly took the money he got from the settlement when he turned 18, and went to Syria to fight with ISIS, and was killed.  Another, who had worked as a parole and corrections officer, is sitting in jail, awaiting her trial for a kidnapping that ended in a murder.  It has made me think about what happens to the trauma in us years later. I’m not saying that the bridge trauma caused  the choices these two made (or our Talia, for that matter). There were other traumas in their young lives for sure.  But it does make me wonder. And grieve.

-           On a lighter and more happier note, our older daughter has passed her state certification and now will begin selling insurance.  My wife, especially, helped her study for the test many nights, and she (and a little bit of me) learned a lot about insurance.  It happened that during that time, I turned on the radio in the middle of a commercial, which asked me (and I think you, dear reader, as well): “Is 2020 the year you finally get rid of insurance complacency?”   First of all, I didn’t know I suffered from insurance complacency.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing as insurance complacency.  But now, no doubt with help from our daughter, I plan on making this Election-Leap-Olympic Year a Year of Liberation from all forms of insurance complacency, both domestic and foreign.

-           Yesterday, we received a letter from a funeral home, addressed to “The Hansel Family”.  On the outside of the envelope—repeated in BIG LETTERS on the top of the letter inside—read the following words: We Need Your Help.  My first thought was “What, aren’t there enough people dying for them?”  And then I thought, “What actions would they ask us to do to reverse that trend?”  I mean, the coronavirus is doing its deeds across the world, and opioids and hunger and lack of health care are quite active in Minnesota   Turns out that they need help determining “how members of our community plan for one of the hardest things a family has to face.”  Which means they need help getting me and us as pre-paid customers.  Perhaps I will “help” them out, and then change my phone number.

-           In the bathroom at The Loft, there are new signs urging us to wash our hands, in about 20 languages.  I was pleased to see that most of the languages were from Asia or Africa and one indigenous one from here.   I’m hoping to see election signs in many languages up soon, and only one color: blue.  I’m not excited about Joe Biden, but not voting for him means helping the scourge of this man and his dishonorable party.  We have got to win this.

The poem below is from my book “The Devouring Land” about the 35W bridge memorial. I have a bunch of readings coming up: see my page PatrickPoet on Face Book.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be washing your hands until they are blue.

Patrick

RUBBINGS

A man stops at the wall

to rub his fingers

over four chiseled names.

He has no brass

or paper, only the skin

of his fingertips,

unique in each loop

and whorl, yet genetically

linked to the smallest insect

that crawls across his hand.

He has rubbed these four

names for years,

not expecting a miracle

or some genie to pop

out and grant wishes—

his daughter, after all,

survived the bus

as it fell with the bridge

down to the riverbank—

but to remember

the shocking joy that

unexpected gratitude             

can bestow after

unsought terror

has been banished.

She is near sixteen now,

delighting and defying,

her memories secreted

in chambers she alone stewards,

and so he touches

her four names—

Talia, the morning dew,

Grace, the ground that sustains

when the very ground is shaken,

Cabello, that wonderful hair,

Hansel, the brother of the girl

who fled cruelty for wickedness

and was saved,

not by water, but by fire—

Oh, child of our hope,

joy of our remembering,

I lift your name

from the rock

with my skin.

NO ROOM NO TIME

December 10 was International Human Rights Day, and we brought Mary and Joseph to seek shelter at the immigration detention center.  It is an immigration court as well, but since so very few immigrants win their cases, it amounts to be the last stop, the last holding pen before they are separated from their families and deported.

It was below zero when we started walking, with windchills 10-15 below.  By the time Mary and Joseph got there, the sun rose—gloriously, I might add. Beauty and the call for justice were together, almost dancing.

And then the temperature reached up to zero.

Zero.  A good place to start.  Zero hour.  Zero degrees is due north, and we were walking in the cold north, pleading for posada for others like Maria and Jose to not be sent south—some to certain violence and death, all to pain and separation.

The detention center is located near Fort Snelling.  Fort Snelling was built near the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, where the Dakota believe creation started. It was at Ft. Snelling that hundreds of Dakota women, children and elderly were interned after the 1862 uprising, before they died of hunger and exposure, or were deported from Minnesota.  There was no longer any room for them in this state, and no time to advocate for their freedom and dignity.

The “zero hour” of the  Christmas story is recorded in St. Luke 2:7:

“Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

Why was there no place in the inn? Because Mary and Joseph were foreigners Galileans who were seen as 2^nd class people,? Or because they were poor? Or was it because of the hardness of the Innkeeper's hearts?

Why do today's migrants ask for shelter in this country and can't find it? Because they are foreigners, considered “less than”? Or poor? Or is it because of the hardness of our hearts?

We’re going to walk with these giant puppets of Mary and Joseph through our immigrant neighborhood on Sunday, asking for posada, for shelter.  As our program says, “we will keep walking.  We will keep opening doors.”

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be welcoming.

Patrick

Postscript: when I insert a picture into a Word document, it often gives an unasked for caption suggestion.  This is what came up with the photo above:

A picture containing sky, outdoor, person, ground

I’m just going to leave that hanging there.

PROCESSING FOR PEACE

Last Saturday, September 21, was International Peace Day.  Our church and art center celebrated in many ways: a street fest with bouncy castle, barbecue, live music and games and an outdoor projection on our 114 year old church building.  The projection included photographs our youth took this summer, along with incredible light art and haunting, beautiful music played by a neighbor.

The most meaningful part of the night for me was a lantern procession.  During the summer, we worked with Bart Buch, a neighbor and artist, to make lanterns.  We made lanterns with children and adults and at an Open Streets Festival.  They were illuminated with little electric candles that flicker, and we walked to different places in the neighborhood that have asked for peace.  This summer has been particularly hard on our community, with opioid use and human trafficking spiking.  At the same time, it has been hard especially for our immigrant families—menacing raids threatened, and the chorus of “Send Them Back.”

From the church, we stopped at Bart’s house, and then at the other side of his alley, where the neighbors organized this summer to help create a safe space.  Needles and other drug items were found in an empty lot, garbage was left all over.  The community put up a fence and reclaimed the space with their presence.

Then, we stopped across the street from the corner store which many people frequent day and night. Their sidewalk is a place where other folks congregate, mostly at night.  We decided to stop at the opposite corner, where there was more space to gather.  I realized that the owner of that corner is a friend from Iran, and there we stood in solidarity with our two peoples.

Then we went to a corner where a couple dozen children catch the school buses early in the morning.  6:30 to 7:00 am is a busy time at the corner, as people from outside the neighborhood buy drugs or sex on their way to work.  It’s actually busy all night long, as those who sell have made it their home away from home.  As we stood and sang our peace prayers, they were watching.  I did not feel afraid Saturday night, mostly because there were quite a few people processing for peace.  And because we had committed ourselves to practice peace whatever we encountered.

There is nothing like walking in the night in silence.  Or as much silence as you can get.  We had children with us on the walk (but to be honest, the adults talked more!).  A police car with its sirens blaring went by, as did a car proud of not having much of a muffler.  And there were the sounds of daily—or nightly—life in the community:  a TV set, people sitting around a table in the backyard, music playing softly.

This morning, I went to the bus stop again, to stand with the parents and children. We are trying to work with neighbors to create a safe space there, and there is a meeting tonight about that.  I have to admit that I was afraid when I got out of my car.  The people who sell were there, but there were no parents or children yet.  I reminded myself that I was still surrounded by the cloud of witnesses who walked Saturday night and many others, which helped.  It was cold this morning, and if I stand in place very long, my knees and back hurt.  So I did a little procession in place, walking back and forth on those sidewalk spaces.

I don’t know what will come out of the meeting tonight, or actions further down the line.  I talked with a parent at the bus stop this morning, and we both shared how we were thinking about winter, as harsh as it can be in Minnesota.  The sellers of the street aren’t that hardy, and there is respite for the community.

But I also think that as a community, we need to be our respite.  We need to walk, even process with each other in more profound ways, in order to build our community into a place where the kind of violence we face cannot easily take route.  That will take a lot of walking, a lot of processing, but we are not walking alone.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be a procession of hope.

Patrick

BACK TO SCHOOL

BACK TO SCHOOL

I’m on Face Book too often, for sure.  But today it felt right.  It was the first day back at school, and so many of my friends are posting photographs of their children going off to school.  Often with photos of said children from years back.  Even my most political friends are doing that.  It’s a pleasant break from posts on the idiocies of our President and the tragedies of the world.

I must admit that I miss the first day back at school ritual.  Last year was the first fall in at least 25 years in which we didn’t have to arrange our morning schedules around getting one or both of our daughters off to day care or school.  But last fall, we were in the south of France on sabbatical when school started, so it didn’t hit me as much.  This year it has.

To be clear, I don’t miss the grind of getting an obstreperous, recalcitrant child off to school when they don’t want to!  But I do miss the communities that form at school, and I do miss checking my calendar to make sure I can get to Natasha’s volleyball game or Talia’s soccer game.  I miss running into parents that I saw weekly at games, at school meetings or just dropping off or picking up our daughters.

There are no grandchildren on the horizon, so I will have to be content with smiling at the parents with their children on my morning walks.  And with my memories of those mornings.

This is an old poem that was written about one of those morning a decade and a half ago:

GETTING UP

The person who had insomnia bad

Shuffles to the room of the person

Who got up four times to ask for water,

While the person who snores

Stumbles past the door of the person

Who can’t stop talking on the phone

All night long.

                   The person with dust mite

Allergies and the sore back lifts up

The person with pajama fuzzies

And fuzzy hair, and holds her upright,

A kind of morning prayer of the unresponsive flesh,

While the person with the surgery

Still holding her flesh with her tired hand

Wanders to the basement to pick out

Fresh clothes for the person

Who puts sand in each shoe each day, and to

Drop the same pair of jeans

Into the drying machine for the person

Who is terminally bored, and perpetually

Can’t stop talking to her friends

All day long,

                    while the person with eczema

Demands her TV show with aardvarks

From the person who is packing her lunch

And making her toast, and trying to listen

To the news from Iraq, while the person

Arising from the basement makes coffee

And gathers the book bag and the gloves and the boots

And rubs this morning’s skin cream

Into the person whose chief delight

In life is candy (and then gum and then candy

And then gum and then can I have some

Candy please), while the person

Who hides her candy and wants

A boyfriend is sleeping peacefully

In her bed with her cell phone, CD

Player, hoop earrings, two teddy bears

And a note from a friend who might

Have got pregnant,

                          while the person

Who immigrated 17 years ago,

Picks up the paper with the still strange

Language and reads, and the person

With the temper can’t find the car keys

And asks the person with her cup of coffee

To please put them in the place we always

Keep them, and yells at the person

With her pajamas still on to eat her breakfast,

And goes back to the kitchen to look

At the weather, and decides to eat

A banana with peanut butter, while

The person who has a test in algebra

Is dreaming of a day at the beach with friends.

                             Then,

The person with the sore back and

The person with the surgery take

The person with no clothes on still

And forcibly put on socks and shirt

And sweater and pants, and jacket

And boots and mittens, and “Yes, you

Can put your horsey in your book bag”

And “No you cannot take your tapping 

Shoes to school,” and “Please drink your juice” and

“Come on, let’s get to the car”, and the person

With tears but no remorse finds one more toy to touch,

One crayon or picture, or one thing

Of the person SHE KNOWS NOT TO TOUCH

BUT SHE DOES IT ANYWAY

BECAUSE YOU LET HER GET AWAY WITH IT,

And the three persons in one

Are out the door, to the garage,

To the car, to school, to work

To worries and to whomever it may concern,

While the person with the ponytail

And the braces and the bright eyes finally

Gets up and wonders why

It is always so quiet around here in the morning.

Apparently, this poem is so old, I can’t even format it correctly after copying it here!

Be a loving parent.  Be beauty.  Be justice.

Patrick

A GOOD DAY

Today started off with prayer with friends.  Then breakfast with my wife, at a new place.  Pulling weeds in the garden, transplanting a poblano pepper, and the last starts of parsley, cilantro and two plants unknown. It felt good to sweat in the hot sun.  It felt better to take a shower and then a nap, with ice on my back.  Stretching, reading. Wishing friends “Feliz Cumpleaños” on Face Book.

Then we went to the Riverview Theater—the best in Minneapolis.  Best popcorn and cheapest.  Art Deco style.  We didn’t go to see a movie, but the World Cup match between the US and France.  I was one of the few Viva la France fans there, amidst legions of Los Americanos.  It was a good game, too loud at times.  But the US fans did smile when I stood up and cheered the French goal.

On the way out, I stopped in a long line for the bathroom.  Two boys struck up a conversation with me. The first asked me “Were you for France?”!  Did it show somehow?  He said that he was for France too.  His friend liked both sides (can’t lose then).  We talked about the U11 league they played in, what kind of strategy worked best in the game, how far they had to travel.

Then home.  Cleaned my room. Read a couple things in The New Yorker.  Took my afternoon nap.  I wanted to sit on a folding chair under our little gingko tree to work on some poems, but the neighbor’s mowing his lawn, and my allergies are screaming.  So here I am, on the porch, smelling the grass and trying not to sneeze.

I often write—when I write!—about challenging and poignant themes.  But today, I just want to thank God for this day—maybe not the greatest day (Quel dommage les Bleus ont perdu!) but a good day. A blessed day.

Here’s a poem from my book that I read at the No Mic Open Mic last night, about a good day a ways back:

KASHAPIWI

On a split rock lies a split fish,

coaxed out of the deep by the dancing

of Stephen’s finger.  He scrapes her scales

with his teeth as he prays to her spirit.

The sun splits a whisper of birch,

speaks the season to their hearts.

They bleed a wordless yes.  The wind

pulls a thin dance of breath along the silent lake.

Thomas folds the tent like he’s making

a paper airplane, floats it into the canoe.

I stir the coffee in its aluminum prison,

wait with the hot butter for the fish.

The fog of our breath is all we speak.

It is morning, September,

and there is nothing left unopened.

We have slept deep, deep in the earth,

and now we rise to eat and to journey on.

As the fish grows into our flesh,

we glide onto water in our sea-going soul,

and head for home, for parts unknown.

Be beauty.  Be justice.  Have a good day (seriously!)

Patrick