First Sunday of Advent (Year B): meditations on the scriptures / sermon excerpts

 The Collect and Revised Common Lectionary readings for this First Sunday of Advent, Year B, are here.

These are two excerpts (beginning and end) from a sermon I preached on the first Sunday of Advent exactly six years ago (i.e. in the same cycle of readings, Year B) at Trinity Episcopal Church in Canton, Massachusetts, a racially mixed (African American and White, with a few West African members) parish, in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri: the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed, young Black man by a police officer and the announcement this week that the Grand Jury did not indict the officer, followed by outcries and demonstrations of protest in Ferguson and around the U.S.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down

so that the mountains would quake at your presence

--as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—

to make your name known to your adversaries,

so that the nations might tremble at your presence!   

[Isaiah 64:1-2]

                                                                                                     

Chaos and anguish.

Lament and longing.

Social unrest.

Scary weather.

This is what we hear in our readings

for the first Sunday of Advent.

Today is the beginning of the season of preparing

for Christmas,

the Nativity of Jesus,

who came to us as a child born in poverty,

and who at a very young age

became a migrant child,

carried by his parents to Egypt

so that he might be safe from the long reach

of violent tyranny.

And speaking of migration:

the part of the book of Isaiah we heard

is a book of exiles

returning home

bewildered, traumatized.

In the middle of finding their bearings.

In a harsh, disoriented time.

                                                                                                                    

In the image given to us by the Psalm,

we drink bowls of our own tears --

bowls of tears! ...

... Jan Richardson,

an artist, Methodist minister, and poet

says of today’s Gospel passage that it

“doesn’t so much beckon us across the threshold” of Advent

“as it throws open a door,

tosses a cup of cold water in our face to wake us,

and shoves us through.”

Not very cheery.

... There’s no getting around it.

This is a difficult and painful season for many of us.

Difficult for those of us who suffer from depression

or who are living with addiction.

Painful for those whose relationship with their families

is challenging

or conflicted

or non existent.

Difficult, even disastrous, for refugees from our own

Long Island Shelter in Boston,

hundreds of people

who now are doubly homeless

because of lack of timely repairs on the bridge to the island.

It is wrenchingly painful for the parents of Black and brown children,

especially Black and brown boys and young men,

who are full of fear every time their child leaves the house.

Is is discouraging and angering in the face of the lack of indictment in Ferguson

for an officer shooting and killing an unarmed young man.

It is discouraging for those law enforcement professionals

who do their jobs with care and honor

and a sense of responsibility.

It is frightening in a season of rising oceans and climate change.

It is enough to make us raise our voices in anguish and say to God,

GOD?

WHERE ARE YOU?

GET OVER HERE!

or

COME ON, JESUS!

SHOW UP!

So it was

for the people

from whom

and for whom 

the Gospel of Mark was written...

 [There followed several paragraphs about staying awake, reading the signs of the times,
mindfulness, vigilance, and faithfulness.]



... We cry, with the Psalmist,

Restore us, O God of hosts;
show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

[Ps. 80:3,7]

This is not the ordinary light,
not that of electricity,
not even that of the moon and stars,
not that of the sun.

It is
a different light:
the radiant darkness of God
the Word that comes to us when the ordinary perceptions have gone.

This may well be why
we have this earth- and heavens-shaking
entry into Advent:
to return us to a different light.

Our opening collect calls us to “cast away the works of darkness.”
I want to offer us an alternative, which is to cease equating darkness with what is evil
and rather, to embrace the dark. To see the dark as the place where God is with us.

A radiant darkness.

So let us pray, in words given to us by Janet Morley,

God our deliverer,
whose approaching birth
still shakes the foundations of our world:
ay we so wait for your coming
with eagerness and hope
that we embrace without terror
the labour pangs of the new age,
through Jesus Christ, Amen.[1]

---

[1]  Janet Morley, Collect for Advent Sunday, in All Desires Known: Inclusive Prayers for Worship and Meditation, expanded edition (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1992), 4.

Barbara Harris, Bishop: Silver Anniversary and Ecumenical Reflection

The following essay appeared in the March 10, 1989 issue of the Catholic lay-edited magazine Commonweal under the title "When the Spirit Leads: Barbara Harris, Bishop." The editors cut out the last sentence without consulting me. They made a few less drastic changes which I note below the text of the essay. This text, with some minor copyediting, is my original version.

Barbara Harris was consecrated bishop on February 11, 1989 and served as Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts (1989-2003). She served as Assisting Bishop in the Diocese of Washington (2003-2007). Happily, she is back among us in Massachusetts. We will celebrate the 25th anniversary of her consecration this Sunday, February 16, 2014, with a Gospel Vesper Service.

[February, 1989]

A day or two before the consecration of Barbara Clementine Harris as Suffragan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, Cardinal Bernard Law and Greek Orthodox Bishop Methodios issue written statements of welcome. The statements are cordial. They also speak of the danger Harris’s consecration presents for reconciliation among Christian churches, or what has become commonly known as “Christian unity.”

At the consecration, the gospel music of St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church choir alternates with the delicate melodies of the Chinese Congregation and classical European harmonies of Trinity Church choir. The stately cadence of the Book of Common Prayer moves us forward, but in the musical realm there is a preferential option in the air: clearly, the day belongs less to Mozart and more to the music of the Black church. The celebration flows. This is no Tower of Babel: we each hear God speaking in our own tongue.

As Barbara Harris walks down the center aisle, a tiny woman whose voice and presence can fill a cathedral, over 8,000 people burst into applause. (“Not very characteristic of the Episcopal Church,” says one member of the congregation, Mary Shannon.) Throngs of priests, row upon row of beaming women and men, process down the side aisles of Boston’s Hynes Auditorium. Barbara Clementine Harris, a woman and a priest of African descent, is consecrated a bishop by the laying on of hands, according to the tradition of the apostles, by 55 men, most of them white. All through the celebration, the bishops have been purposeful, solemn, and excited, with the calm certainty that God, through them, is doing a good thing.

In describing the celebration, those who were there speak of unity. Mary Shannon repeatedly uses the term “body” to speak of the church and of her experience of this day –“finally being part of the body...” “... all of us together in one body.” She is wearing a locket with a picture of her 80-year-old mother, a member of St. Andrew’s Parish in Seattle, who “still carries her white gloves with her in church yet has rolled with the changes.” She speaks in the plural: her mother, her daughters, her husband, her women friends, all rush into the conversation. “I cried,” she says. “I just felt so happy for all of us.”

Modene Dawson of Philadelphia speaks of another unity. For her, and for many African-Americans in the assembly, the significance of the event extends beyond the church. “It’s beautiful for the country,” she says. “It shows racial harmony.” The church which conducts this celebration is not apart from the world; it is the body which proclaims to the world that God is alive in history.

Paul Matthews Washington, in his sermon, speaks about God and history. Harris’s friend and mentor, he is Rector Emeritus of the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, which feeds, clothes, and sanctifies the poorest of the city. In this church was held the first ordination of Episcopal women to the priesthood, in the summer of 1974, less than 15 years ago. Harris, a member of the church, led the procession, carrying the cross.

“We cannot,” says Washington, “overlook the fact that this woman being consecrated today is not just an American woman. She is a Black woman... This is a woman... who has had to struggle; she’s been despised, she’s been rejected... God has lifted up one who was at the bottom of society and has exalted her to be one of His chief pastors.”

Washington speaks of Harriet Tubman, who “nineteen times went back into the land of bondage,” thanking God for her freedom by helping to free others. He speaks of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was raised from her lowly estate and sang of God’s power to raise up the humble and put down the mighty from their thrones: “Mary,” he says after quoting the Magnificat, “was an oppressed woman. That’s how Holy Mary Mother of God felt!” He weeps as he recalls the slavery and oppression of Black people in this country. “Only in understanding the past can we fully appreciate God’s action in this event,” he says.

The Episcopal Church, a church of power and privilege, has chosen “a have-not,” says Washington, but also one who “burns when others are offended,” a “disturbing prophet.” Harris has for years –in her public relations and policy work in the corporate world, in her parish, in her work with the Episcopal Church Publishing Company, in her pastoral ministry—advocated racial and economic justice, taken up the cause of women, spoken out against homophobia; she has, says Washington, devoted enough time to prison chaplaincy “to serve a two-year sentence herself.”

The Right Reverend Barbara Harris, newly robed in bright vestments with Ashanti designs and symbols, presides at her first Eucharist as bishop. Among the concelebrants are Carter Heyward, one of the “Philadelphia Eleven” ordained at the Church of the Advocate, and Florence Tim-Oi Li, the first woman ordained a priest in the Anglican Communion, in Hong Kong, one generation ago. At the distribution, Harris slips over to the far side of the auditorium and gives communion to the people in the hearing-impaired section, who have been singing with their hands for three hours.

A bishop is, among other things, a maker of unity. Barbara Harris has already begun to make unity; but not in the ways in which unity was previously understood or structured. Her brother bishops, Law and Methodios, fear for the health and welfare of Christian unity. But where are the real rifts in our lives today? Are they doctrinal? Where is the real, urgent need for unity? And when we say “unity,” what do we mean? Whose unity, which unity, and at what cost?

The deeper chasm today is not between Protestants and Catholics, or Greek Orthodox and Episcopalians. It is, much more, between haves and have-nots, between Blacks and whites, between men and women, between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. These are the wounds in need of healing, in church and in society. As for denominationalism, it is no longer the principal intrachurch split. Far deeper is the gap within each of our faith communities between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists.

Early in the service, the Presiding Bishop, Edmond L. Browning, asks if anyone knows of any reason why the consecration ought not to proceed. Two men come to the microphone. The first calls the consecration “a sacrilegious imposture,” the second “an impediment to the realization of the visible unity of the Church for which Christ prayed.” There will be a problem, they argue, with the value of any sacrament celebrated by Harris.

Bernardine Hayes, a computer systems analyst, self-described “dormant Catholic,” and veteran civil rights and peace activist (she is currently Vice President of WAND, Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament), had never before today “seen a woman offer the sacraments. She is so clearly affiliated with the poor,” Hayes adds. “She strikes me as a true minister.” Hayes feels something stir within her during the liturgy –“the realization that the piece of my life which is missing is the spiritual piece.”

This was, she says, "like a Pentecost."

Whose unity?

The intervention of the dissenters highlights the lack of unanimity in the church about the consecration (although Browning is quick to point out, at the post-consecration press conference, that the overwhelming majority of Episcopalians support it). But it is, in its way, a step on the road to greater unity. Perhaps the two men will change their minds; perhaps never. What is hopeful and healthy and makes a body strong is that their pain was not swept under the rug. However token, this part of the ceremony honors difference: and the unity of the Episcopal Church around this celebration –the unity behind the liturgy— is not the easy unity of unreflecting liberals. It has been hard won, tempered by prayer and struggle, and forged through the participatory process of decision-making in the Episcopal Church, a community that gave us two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Elizabeth Pearson Rice-Smith, a United Church of Christ minister who witnessed both the ordination of the “Philadelphia Eleven” and Barbara Harris’s consecration, believes that “if our vision of church unity embraces diversity in God’s ministries and the human experience of faith, there is much less need to split off. I think,” she adds, “that women are willing to say things about the messy stuff that don’t condemn or blame or banish. We want to create spirited change that doesn’t mean war, that doesn’t mean people don’t talk to each other, that doesn’t mean annihilation.”

Which unity, and at what cost?

Christians do still need to speak with one another about Eucharist and ministry, about theological thought and ecclesial practice. But the context of this discussion has changed, and so have the discussion questions themselves. Unable and unwilling to hide her particularity, unlikely to temper her prophetic stance, Barbara Harris –not in spite of this but because of this—is a maker, not a breaker, of unity.

(c) Jane Redmont 1989

A few other changes – skip this if you don’t care about the minutiae: The editors also lower-cased “Black,” which I had in upper case, and made a spelling change that eliminated my metaphor “singing with their hands.” They changed it to “signing with their hands.” Of course the congregation members in question were signing –but adding “with their hands” would in that case have been unnecessary. The celebration was full of song, and part of the beauty of it was that people sang with both voice and hands. I was seated in the section next to the one using American Sign Language. The editors also deleted the paragraph with Rice-Smith’s quote.

I was still a Roman Catholic at the time I wrote this essay.

 A decade later, in 1999, a few years after I moved to California, I was invited to be on the panel of speakers at the 10th anniversary celebration of Bishop Harris’s consecration. The invitation came from the Rev. Canon Edward Rodman, with whom I had often been on the television show “In Good Faith” on WCVB-Channel 5 (then the ABC affiliate in Boston). I served as the Roman Catholic voice on the panel and offered some insights from a Catholic feminist perspective.

A few years later –12 years ago last month— I was received into the Episcopal Church. The discernment leading to this reception –and the lengthy process toward ordination to the priesthood, a vocation dating back to the 1970s– are another story for another time and place.

 

Thanks be to God for Bishop Barbara!

Nossa Senhora Aparecida

A couple of fine friends of mine in Brazil are about to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, in Portuguese Nossa Senhora Aparecida or Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida. Here she is!

She is the patron saint of Brazil.

As you can see, she is a Black figure of Mary. She appeared to three fishermen, Domingos Garcia, Filipe Pedroso, and João Alves, in 1717.

Deenie, at rest at last

Deenie died peacefully yesterday, Saturday June 27, in the afternoon, at her home near Boston.

The hospice had adjusted Deenie's medications and she was not in pain in her last days. She went gently, and as she has wished, in a familiar and comfortable environment. She was just two days short of her 70th birthday.

I have limited internet access but wanted to post this quick note, with thanks to all of you who prayed so generously for Deenie in intercessions that encirced the globe and embraced this noble spirit, friend, worker for justice, intellectual, and loving human being.

All is well here. I have slept and rested a lot, attended the joyful Bar Mitzvah of a dear friend's son, and done some work (there is more to come) on a Big Theological Tome. Went to a glorious gospel-music Mass today and sang and clapped and felt and heard the Spirit. Not that She doesn't speak quietly too, She does -- but She must sing out and so must we.

Happy Pride Weekend to friends in New York, San Francisco, Paris, and many other places. Thinking of you with love, pride, hope for a welcoming world, and commitment to making it so.

Happy Juneteenth!

Happy Juneteenth!

Did you know that 31 states now celebrate Juneteenth as a state holiday?

More on Juneteenth at the other blog, with a link to a website entirely devoted to Juneteenth and a somewhat different perspective by a historian from Duke University.

John Hope Franklin, R.I.P.

The great historian John Hope Franklin died yesterday at the age of 94.

The Washington Post has several pieces about him including an obituary and tribute with a slide show here.

Duke University, one of the schools at which Professor Franklin taught, has a biography here.

From the WaPo obituary by Wil Haygood:

Franklin was among the first black scholars to earn prominent posts at America's top -- and predominantly white -- universities. His research and his personal success helped pave the way both for other blacks and for the field of black studies, which began to blossom on American campuses in the '60s.

In time, a second generation of eminent black scholars -- Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Georgetown's Michael Eric Dyson and Princeton's Cornel West -- would follow Franklin to the heights of America's most illustrious schools.

"He gave us a common language," Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said yesterday. "As the author of a seminal textbook, 'From Slavery to Freedom,' Franklin gave us young black scholars a common language to speak to each other. He had invented a genre out of whole cloth."

Gates, a former recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," for years was curious as to who had recommended him. He attended a dinner once with Franklin, and Franklin confided that he had been the one to recommend Gates. "And I cried at the table we were sitting at. A lot of us called John Hope 'the Prince.' He had such a regal bearing. We're all the children of John Hope."

Reminder: "Journey of Reconciliation" commemorations

Just a reminder of this, since the commemorations are upon us.

Even if you can't attend, have a look at the links! A precious piece of memory.

A note on the reactions to the death of John Updike (R.I.P.)

This isn't really about John Updike, may he rest in peace, but about the descriptions of John Updike on the radio.

I found myself yelling at the radio this morning. Yes, me, yelling at my blessed NPR shows in the car on the short drive to work.

Updike was a great writer, no doubt about it, and an art critic and thinker and many other things. So this isn't a dissing of Updike.

What is getting to me is how everyone is speaking of him as a writer about (the United States of) America, American post-war life, the American middle.

Excuse me?!

Updike wrote about white American post-war life.

Of course, he wrote about other things too. I have had his novel about a fictional African country, The Coup, on my shelf for years and have been meaning to read it, and I will read it in memory of him. Updike was, as one critic said, kaleidoscopic.

But Rabbit is not (the U.S. of) America.

Is Rabbit a part of it? Of course. A significant part of it? Of course. The whole story? No. "Representative" (of the whole story)? No.

We are so (as the kids would say) not out of the era of white privilege.

If we're going to name the fact that people are chroniclers of Jewish life or Black life in these United States, then let's name the fact that people are chroniclers of White or White Protestant life in the United States. (Or, for that matter, of the U.S. white middle class, or of middle-class Northern men.)

Either that or I want the obits for Toni Morrison (long may she live and continue to write) to say as much as the obits for Updike that she wrote the Great American Novel.

'Cause if you think that slavery and its aftermath or love and work in Harlem or the U.S. South have not been as American as apple pie and as the life of suburban white businessmen, you are still thinking of white America as normative --as the rule, the standard, the "normal"-- and the rest of these United States as the exception or the other.

White privilege is not just present in what we do or in what happens to us, but in how we think and how we speak. *

Think about it.

*See, for instance, re: the American novel, item 7 in the list on the document at the "white privilege" link above.

Quick Convention highlights

It's that time of year again, as posts from my neighbor to the north, It's Margaret, attest. Diocesan Convention is this weekend in both her diocese and mine, except that Convention isn't called Convention in her neck of the woods.

But I digress.

Highlights so far in our diocese (North Carolina):

- Bishop Curry's address, as always. He rocks the house.

- Smart move by the diocese: in an effort to encourage the singing of the hymn "All Are Welcome" (by Marty Haugen, a Lutheran hugely popular in Catholic circles whom Episcopalians seem just to be discovering), the diocese bought a year-long permission to reproduce from the GIA copyright people and stuck a form with the precise info and wording on all our Convention packets. (Apparently it's made it over the pond to the Methodists in England, too.)

- This is my 3d Convention here and for the first time, I truly did not have to worry about the table for the diocesan committee I chair, now named the Bishop's Committee for Racial Justice and Reconciliation (we used to be called the Anti-Racism Committee). Two years ago it was I alone at half a table (happily shared with the Hispanic Ministry Committee) doing everything. Last year we had our part-time staff person (who got sick the second day and couldn't be there), one hugely dedicated volunteer, and I. With a makeshift flyer, though it wasn't a bad one. This year our (new) part-time staff person was there along with so many volunteers working in shifts that I didn't even know all of them (some were from a couple of congregations to which committee members belong and which are in the city where the Convention is meeting) and one of our subcommittee chairs and brochures and flyers and plans and invitations. Mostly, I wasn't needed -- a true mark of success. What a wonderful group of people. It's a great committee.

- Once again I'd asked the exhibit people to put us next to the other social justice groups. So our table is between the PFLAG table and the Hispanic Ministry table. That group, by the way, is growing and doing great work with excellent participation and leadership. The Latin@ population is growing in North Carolina and we have a couple of Latin@ Episcopal congregations. There are also immigration-related concerns around the state. We passed a good resolution on immigration at last year's Convention, but there's more action needed. I'm going to learn more about this from one of my committee chair colleagues within the next weeks and months when we meet. We're trying to see where we can do some common work.

(Note: my Latina and Latino friends and colleagues use "Latin@" rather than "Latino/a" as a shorthand.)

- The annual bishop's award --accompanied by a moving video-- went to St. Mark's and Guadalupana, two small congregations --the first African American, the second Latin@-- with a common building, common vision, and common pastor, a retired priest (well, allegedly retired) who is white and Anglo and speaks Spanish and loves his double congregation. In 2007 an arsonist burned down the church building. The community center / church hall whose groundbreaking took place in 2005 was almost completed, so everything, in the midst of tragedy, started up again in that one little building. The congregations have a tutoring program with neighborhood children and the video we saw showed retired African American teachers tutoring young Latin@ children and loving it. The building is also the worship space now. Episcopal Church Women got involved both before and after the fire with contributions. The congregations received their award at the liturgy, but we had seen the video earlier in the convention center. These are tiny congregations, but together they have become (this sounds like a cliché but it's true) a beacon of hope in their neighborhood. I get all weepy at these awards.

- Saw Doxy's Dear Friend and had a nice chat. Eat your hearts out.

- One of my favorite bishops in the entire world who is also one of my role models (though it's possible she is a bit younger than I) and whom I knew when she was a priest in San Francisco, The Right Reverend Nedi Rivera, was our guest preacher tonight and is giving a keynote address tomorrow. That's +Nedi below. She's Bishop Suffragan in the Diocese of Olympia.

-Shoutout to the Quadriped Bishops: at the end of Morning Prayer, after our final petition, which had to do with creation and God's creatures, the screen from which we were reading (this saved paper and we could all see) there was a lovely photo of a wolf and a lamb lying down together. I went home early this afternoon and told +Maya Pavlova.

(Then returned this p.m. for the liturgy. I am not a delegate this year and am stewarding my time carefully given the multiple demands in my life right now, so I had decided to skip the afternoon sessions. No legislation for me. I'll read about it and get the scoop from my friends.)

Stay tuned. I'm headed for the decaf Earl Grey and the church of Our Lady of the Slumbers.

+Maya Pavlova, on the other hand, is playing soccer. She recently rediscovered an old soccer ball of hers --a ball of aluminum foil. Heaven knows where it had been all this time, but it is back in circulation since three days ago and +Maya can't get enough of it when she is awake. +Rowan the Dog's good influence, no doubt. He's Bishop of Playing, you know.

Glory be!

Also on "Talk of the Nation:" MLK's challenging words

If anyone still lives under the delusion that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only spoke of holding hands and singing Kumbaya, that person would do well to listen to the final segment (twenty minutes before the hour, mas o menos) of "Talk of the Nation." The show mentioned below offers to us one of Dr. King's most eloquent speeches.

It is the "I Have a Dream" speech, but in full, with the criticism and prophecy -- not just the final few sentences everyone knows and quotes.

Listen. Listen.

The speech is also available here. It will be up at NPR via the link above (the green words) this evening.

Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: my friend Deidre Crumbley's new book

I am just back from the book party for my friend Deidre's new book, held at St. Ambrose, Raleigh, a historically African American Episcopal church. The publisher (a university press) priced the book high and it's a hardback, but I am happy to say that Deidre's friends showed up and bought a lot of books -- and the founder of the church's Jazz Mass Quartet came and played the saxophone! There was food, particularly some excellent spinach balls. And a big cake saying "Congratulations." Here's a reproduction of the book cover.


It's a fascinating book and Dr. Crumbley (that's Deidre) has worked on it for something like 20 years. Four years of field work in Nigeria, countless rewrites, and the search for a publisher, plus illness and search for funding and all manner of obstacles. I gather there was also a cat involved at some point. Of course.

Rejoice with Deidre in her great achievement!

By the way, there are now members of African Initiated Churches, including the Aladura churches in this book, here in the U.S. -- including here in North Carolina. As Deidre noted in her short talk at the party, the African Diaspora did not end with slavery; indeed, our President-Elect is a child of this diaspora. So the African Initiated Churches, which began in the 20th century as indigenous African forms of Christianity, have migrated to other continents and are undergoing changes there.

More on the book on the publisher's website here. The full name of the book is Spirit, Structure, And Flesh: Gendered Experiences in African Instituted Churches among the Yoruba of Nigeria.

First day of school / African American religion course / Holy Angels mural

I guess blog break is over, de facto, though I will still be absent-minded and not all there till February, mas or menos.

Classes began today and despite all the grumpiness, lack of sleep, and hours in the office of this past weekend, I have first-day-of-school excitement after the first class of the semester. A nice group of students, racially mixed and also mixed in types of students ("traditional-age" i.e. 18-22 and adult students called "CCE" at our college, stands for "Center for Continuing Education") and I like the subject. This is a course I created for the college three and a half years ago when I arrived, African American Religion and Theology.

Below is the illustration from the cover of the syllabus, and below that is the explanation of the illustration on page two of the syllabus, before all the blabla about requirements and office hours and percentages and accommodations and outcomes and the course calendar with detailed list of assignments. As you will see, this is from Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago, an African American congregation. Note the Nativity scene in the middle and the heavenly host, who are all Black - as are all the angels from the biblical scenes depicted in the mural.

I may have already posted this a long while back, because as I was saving the photo to my "blog photos" file, the computer told me I already had it in there. I'm going to assume most readers either haven't yet seen this, though. It's worth gazing at again, for those of you who already know it.

Click to enlarge and see detail!

The Holy Angels Church Mural

The mural whose reproduction is on the front page of your syllabus is from an African American Roman Catholic parish church named Holy Angels in Chicago. The parish (which started as a largely Irish-American congregation) and its school have a long and proud history full of struggle and triumph. They continue to serve as centers of worship, education, and community for African Americans.

The mural was painted by the late Rev. Engelbert Mveng, S.J. The letters S.J. after someone’s name mean that person is a member of the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic religious order of men. Father Mveng was a Catholic priest, theologian, and artist from Cameroon. He was murdered a dozen years ago in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His writings and art live on.The mural is a testimony to the bonds of art, spirit, and faith between Africans and African Americans

This is the home page of Holy Angels Church:

Here is a reproduction of the mural, the same one as on your syllabus; it is a little larger here, so you may be able to see the detail better.

And here is an explanation of the illustrations and symbolism.

There is a small mistake – the last book of the Christian Testament (“New” Testament, the second half of the Christian Bible) is Revelation, with no “s” at the end, not “Revelations.” This is such a frequent mistake that few people notice it, but if you look at a Bible, you’ll see that there is no “s” there. Of course, the original is in Greek so that’s not the book’s original name anyway…

Enjoy the art.

You’ll be hearing some African American Catholic music a little later in the course, from a gospel music Mass by the composer and musician Rawn Harbor, now Director of Liturgy at St. Columba, an African American Catholic church in Oakland.

Merry Christmas to blog friends and strangers, and a little note of welcome and consolation

Dear blogging friends,

A joyous Christmas to you! I'm grateful for your presence in my life, for your visits with and without comments, and for your blogging, wherever you are on Earth. Thank you for your friendship, for inspiring me, for keeping me informed, for making me laugh. Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, I hope this day has been a happy and peaceful one for you.

If you are a new visitor to this blog and just stopping by, remember that you are a precious human being, no matter who you are. Nobody can take away your fundamental dignity and worth, even on those days when it feels as if this has happened.

If the holidays are difficult for you, remember that you are not alone. Seek out others, formally or informally, whether they have two legs or four.

If you cannot pray or meditate and are in despair or emptiness, know that this has happened to the best and most holy of people, and that absence can turn to presence. Find the words of others (the ones below are only examples; there are others) and let them accompany you. Or stand near a tree and touch it, breathing, remembering that you are a creature of earth and that somewhere, another part of creation has remembered you.

We Did Not Want It Easy, God

We did not want it easy, God,
But we did not contemplate
That it would be quite this hard,
This long, this lonely.
So, if we are to be turned inside out,
and upside down,
With even our pockets shaken
Just to check what's rattling
And left behind,
We pray that you will keep faith with us,
And we with you,
Holding our hands as we weep,
Giving us strength to continue,
And showing us beacons
Along the way
To becoming new.

*****-Anna McKenzie

Peace Is Every Step

Peace is every step.
The shining red sun is my heart.
Each flower smiles with me.
How green, how fresh all that grows.
How cool the wind blows.
Peace is every step.
It turns the endless path to joy.

*****- -Thich Nhat Hanh

Jesus,
receive our love and worship.
Show us how to give you what we have,
for nothing is too big or too small
for us to offer, or for you to use.

*****- A New Zealand Prayer Book

All of these are quoted in When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life.


Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, ca. 1970s, "Black Nativity," National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston.

Barbara Lee elected chair of Congressional Black Caucus

My former Member of Congress, Barbara Lee, has been elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Here is a link to the story. I am still on Representative Lee's mailing list even though I moved out of her district over three years ago because I like her so much.

Lee was the only person in the entire Congress to vote against authorizing the use of military force following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and did so at great political risk, even in her liberal district. Indeed, she did so at personal risk and received death threats after her vote in Congress. She has been a consistent critic of the war in Iraq.

Her official website is here. Long may she represent.

Toni Morrison's new book: A Mercy

A good book for Thanksgiving. I won't have money to buy it or time to read it till heaven knows when, but I really want to. The New York Times Book Review for this weekend has a front-page essay about it.

... In “A Mercy,” a 17th-­century American farmer — who lives near a town wink-and-nudgingly called Milton — enriches himself by dabbling in the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin copper serpents: when the gate is closed, their heads meet to form a blossom. The farmer, Jacob Vaark, thinks he’s creating an earthly paradise, but Lina, his Native American slave, whose forced exposure to Presbyterianism has conveniently provided her with a Judeo-­Christian metaphor, feels as if she’s “entering the world of the damned.”

In this American Eden, you get two original sins for the price of one — the near extermination of the native population and the importation of slaves from Africa — and it’s not hard to spot the real serpents: those creatures Lina calls “Europes,” men whose “whitened” skins make them appear on first sight to be “ill or dead,” and whose great gifts to the heathens seem to be smallpox and a harsh version of Christianity with “a dull, unimaginative god.” Jacob is as close as we get to a benevolent European. Although three bondswomen (one Native American, one African and one “a bit mongrelized”) help run his farm, he refuses to traffic in slaves; the mother of the African girl, in fact, has forced her daughter on him because the girl is in danger of falling into worse hands and he seems “human.” Yet Jacob’s money is no less tainted than if he’d wielded a whip himself: it simply comes from slaves he doesn’t have to see in person, working sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And the preposterous house he builds with this money comes to no good. It costs the lives of 50 trees (cut down, as Lina notes, “without asking their permission”), his own daughter dies in an accident during the construction, and he never lives to finish it.

True, some of the white settlers are escapees from hell: Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, whom he imported sight unseen from London, retains too-vivid memories of public hangings and drawings-and-quarterings. ...

... This novel isn’t a polemic — does anybody really need to be persuaded that exploitation is evil? — but a tragedy in which “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

Except for a slimy Portuguese slave trader, no character in the novel is wholly evil, and even he’s more weak and contemptible than mustache-twirlingly villainous. Nor are the characters we root for particularly saintly. While Lina laments the nonconsensual deaths of trees, she deftly drowns a newborn baby, not, as in “Beloved,” to save it from a life of slavery, but simply because she thinks the child’s mother (the “mongrelized” girl who goes by the Morrisonian name of Sorrow) has already brought enough bum luck to Jacob’s farmstead. Everyone in “A Mercy” is damaged; a few, once in a while, find strength to act out of love, or at least out of mercy — that is, when those who have the power to do harm decide not to exercise it. A negative virtue, but perhaps more lasting than love. ...

Read the rest here.

Essay: David Gates.
Photo: Damon Winter, The New York Times.

Yes, we can

Another stay of execution for Troy Davis

I meant to post this before the weekend. Troy Davis has received another stay of execution.

There were rallies around the world last week in support of Mr. Davis and in protest of the scheduled execution.

Stay informed.

Act.

A little prayer wouldn't hurt, either.

A midnight postscriptum: My friend Ethan at the Fellowship of Reconciliation has a fine post on Troy Davis and the death penalty here.

Hope and discipline

I voted today. North Carolina is one of the early-voting states. I arrived at the polling place sometime after 2 p.m. and the parking lot was nearly full. Inside, there was a long line. I have never since I moved here seen so many people at the polls. I thanked the poll workers who helped me and so many others and commented to one of them about the numbers. "It's been this way every day this week," he said. (I had thought to myself that the high numbers might have something to do with its being a Friday afternoon.) "We've had about 900 people a day."

Everyone was serious and purposeful. There was a tiny bit of joking. No one said anything partisan. People waited their turn patiently and no one complained about the queue.

The comparison is not really apt, because for so many decades there was no vote for the people of South Africa, but still, the only event to which I can compare this is the first free democratic vote in South Africa, when the new photos showed us lines of people, patiently waiting, focused on their purpose, with a kind of buzz in the air that was in some ways more sober than jubilant. Government by, of, and for the people is serious business.

Like FranIAm and Grandmère Mimi, I have been obsessing about the election. For two hours before I voted and at least an hour after, I could not concentrate. I ran errands after going to vote, and at the bank I commented to the woman behind me on line (young, African American) how many folks I had just seen at the polls. "Everyone wants to get out there and make history," she said calmly.

I long for a president who will call us to service and sacrifice. We are a bloated and lazy nation in many ways --I count myself in the lot-- and it has been years, decades, since anyone has taken the lead in telling us that the energy crisis, the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, all of those and more, will require effort and self-denial on all our parts and collective work for the common good. It's our work our country needs and we need, not just "the government over there" or the corporations, though I long and call for their engagement and structural change and all the rest.

I pray that this will come to pass. I pray and I will defend to the end the rights of those who do not pray and do not wish to pray. I think Barack Obama has the potential to lead us in both hope and discipline --we need one as much as the other-- and I think it is hope that helps us to engage in discipline, and sometimes, if the discipline is healthy (a big if, I know, as abuses of political and religious power have forever shown) discipline that can lead to hope.

I pray also, in this nation whose religious liberty I will forever honor and whose establishment clause I firmly support, I pray for our nation and I pray for the safety of our candidates, of "that one" especially.

I am still stunned by the experience of voting this year. I have not seen an election like this since 1984. (Reagan's re-election and Mondale-Ferraro and the nuclear buildup.) In other ways I have never seen an election like this, and yes, race has something to do with it. I never dreamed that I would be involved in this kind of election, much less in the American South. (I am also remembering Jesse Jackson's candidacy, with all its flaws, and other predecessor events to this year's election.)

Perhaps I need not say, but I will say it anyway: the sacrifice and discipline of which I am speaking do not involve military violence.

The polar ice cap is melting, the economy is imploding, the poor are getting poorer, our soldiers die abroad, mothers clutch bone-thin children in Darfur and fathers weep for their daughters and sons in Israel and Palestine, and doggedly, with hope in our guts, we stand in line and vote.

Hope is not born in optimistic times. Hope is born in times of fear and dread and oppression and threat.


Hope and vote. Vote and hope.

Daily comic relief: Chocolate News on the first Black president

You may have to bear with a short commercial first (sometimes it comes on before the comedy segment, sometimes not) but it's worth it.

What? You don't watch Chocolate News? Another Comedy Central winner. With David Alan Grier.

So think about it: America's first Black president?

Warning: Irreverent, with strong language.

14 days.

Brought to you by your daily ¡Sí, se puede!

Activated till the polls close on November 4.