Paths to Trinitarian Life and Prayer

This essay was published nine years ago in the "Proclaiming Gospel  Justice" section of the late lamented magazine The Witness's online version. It remained up on the Web long after the magazine and its A Globe of Witnesses online incarnation ceased publication, until fairly recently.  I found a cached copy of the essay this week and reproduce it here. Thanks again to The Witness and its then Editor, Ethan Vesely-Flad, for offering me the opportunity to reflect on the challenging topic of the Trinity in the light of the scriptures from Year A of the Lectionary.

We are in Year A of the Lectionary again and I am preaching this weekend (in an Episcopal parish south of Boston). I may crib from myself a bit in the sermon... For now, study and prayer!

Andrei Rublev (15th c.), "Trinity"

 Paths to Trinitarian Life and Prayer
 
by Jane Carol Redmont
 
Friday, May 20, 2005

The Witness

Lectionary Reflections for Trinity Sunday (A)

 

Readings for Trinity Sunday, Year A, May 22, 2005

• Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a
• Psalm 8 (or Psalm 150)
• 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
• Matthew 28:16-20

 
Most of the preachers I know think of Trinity Sunday as Preacher's Nightmare Day. How to keep the sermon from degenerating into a doctrinal lecture? How to do justice to such a complex and vital doctrine in twelve minutes -- or even twenty? What is the connection with the scriptures? Why is the doctrine celebrating God's dynamic and relational self so easy to freeze or to ossify? What has the Trinity to do with the sufferings of our world? And where does any of this leave, lead, or involve the people of God, the true celebrants of this feast? (Preachers are only there to help open a few windows.)

Dorothee Soelle, the German theologian, poet, activist and mystic who died just two years ago, often wrote of how difficult she found it to speak about God.

Equally often, she quoted the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart's saying that God is "that which is most communicable."

This day's feast reminds me of both her statements.

It reminds me also that Soelle once wrote "We can only speak about God when we speak to God."

	It matters how we understand the ecology of God. We need the insights of icons and books, of ecofeminist and Orthodox Christians, of scientists in dialogue with theologians and ethicists.

These words are one of our windows for the day: one of the major paths to understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity goes through prayer.

I say this not to avoid doctrinal discussion (well, perhaps just a little) since our understandings and formulations of God do matter. They matter to us as a Christian community, and perhaps more importantly, they matter to the broken world in which we live and to its healing. It is interesting (and, I think, no accident) that in recent ecumenical conversations, in fresh theological reflection in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions, and in the work of ecofeminist theologians from the North and the South (Ivone Gebara of Brazil comes first to mind) a renewed understanding of God as Trinity has gone hand in hand with increased attention to God's creation: attention to the environment, to the interdependence of earth, waters, skies and the sentient creatures who dwell there, attention to the impact upon them of human decisions, institutions, and societies. It matters how we understand the ecology of God.

We need the insights of icons and books, of ecofeminist and Orthodox Christians, of scientists in dialogue with theologians and ethicists. And nothing can replace the time that this kind of reflection requires nor our commitment to this mindful exploration.

But at some point, sooner rather than later, we need to hear and speak the poetry of God's mystery. And we will need, at some point, to do so in the second person, "you," speaking to God.

The feast of the Trinity is the gate through which we pass into the long season of the Spirit-filled year. God is alive. God is present. We have just spent the season of Easter remembering and proclaiming this reality, and at Pentecost last week we prayed it with particular intensity, remembering the multiplicity of human experience. Let not the celebration of Trinity, in its honoring of speech about God, lose its speech to God.

So to God we turn, today, even if we see only fragments, or through a glass darkly.

When God is "you," we can plead, argue, listen, fall silent. We can praise or lament. And we can gaze -- at creation in nature, at icons, at the faces of those we love and those we do not love enough.

This contemplation is not of and for the few. The Holy One who is also Multiplicity, and who remains One, is "that which is most communicable." We are not, with this God into whose life Jesus has invited us, in the domain of the spiritually privileged. "We are all mystics," Soelle reminds us.

Take the risk of speaking to God, of approaching or letting yourself be approached, in the boldness of the Spirit and the terror of these times. Alone, or, as this Sunday, in a praying community. In song, in silence, in poetry, in gesture.

Take the risk of speaking to God, of approaching or letting yourself be approached, in the boldness of the Spirit and the terror of these times. Alone, or, as this Sunday, in a praying community. In song, in silence, in poetry, in gesture.

Amos Wilder, the biblical scholar (brother of Thornton Wilder, the playwright and novelist) wrote nearly thirty years ago:

It is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the unknown and new-name the creatures.
Before the message there must be the visions, before the sermon the hymn, before the prose the poem.

The scriptures today do not offer us a formula. They offer us vision, imagination, paths into Trinitarian life and prayer.

"Hallelujah! Praise God with timbrel and dance and strings and pipe." Hear and read and sing the Psalm. Hear it anew. ["Praise God and Dance" from Duke Ellington's Second Sacred Concert, which premiered at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1968, is a setting of Psalm 150.] Engage in that praise, directly, with cymbals and trumpet and and voice.

Today's Epistle is doubtless in the lectionary because it is one of the few places in which an explicitly Trinitarian greeting appears. But notice other words from this letter to the church at Corinth. "Do you not realize that Christ is in you?" "Do what is right." "Live in peace." What invitations come with the Trinitarian blessing?

Read and hear the words from Genesis both dramatically and reverently: stars, sky, earth, swarms of living creatures, waters of the sea, fish and human creatures, and -- hear, O busy, overscheduled ones -- God's sabbath rest, and the earth's, and ours. What response will we give to this when we go forth into all the nations?

Pray the feast. Let the feast live in the people of God.

This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

There's still room!

This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home:

An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

a weekend retreat-conference

led by Jane Carol Redmont

at Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center

Byfield, Massachusetts

Friday, August 5 - Sunday, August 7, 2011

Spirituality is not only prayer, but practice. It is the way we walk on the earth, work together, build community, honor our bodies and those of others, celebrate and struggle, and listen to the promptings of the Spirit.

Today’s environmental realities call us to examine anew how we live on this fragile planet as people of faith.

In addition to short lectures, our conference will include time for meditation, prayer, sharing of resources, and personal and group reflection.

We will focus especially on the themes of lament and hope, which will be woven throughout our times of prayer.

We will leave nourished by the insights of theologians –mostly women— from several continents and more deeply aware of Earth’s body, our bodies, and the Body of Christ.

The theologians include Dorothee Soelle, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Ivone Gebara.

Registration information here. Some scholarships are available.

Good Friday: A Meditation on the Eleventh Station of the Cross

I am always moved and inspired by the Stations of the Cross at St. Mary's House. (Yes, Episcopalians have Stations of the Cross, though not everywhere.) A different person offers a meditation for each of the 14 stations, many spoken, some sung, one or two visual. So much wisdom, talent, heart, and faith for one small congregation.

Here is my meditation on the eleventh station, "Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross."

Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross

Were you there?

Are you there?

Will you be there?

Were you there ******** [italics indicate Jane singing a cappella]
when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, oh…
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?

These stories come from the witness of Kelsey McNicholas,
a student at Guilford College and a volunteer
with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths
which seeks out migrants in the desert
to give them water, food, medical care,
and presence.

When undocumented immigrants are caught
by the U.S. border patrol,
they are
detained.
Manuel González told Kelsey
that while in detention
on the U.S. side of the border,
our side,
he'd only been given peanut butter to eat.

Ricardo Emilio Sánchez,
walking beside Manuel and Kelsey,
chimed in
that he had been given a tiny cold hamburger
and a small juice
for the whole day.

During Kelsey’s time in Nogales, Mexico,
across the border from Tucson, Arizona,
other people who had recently been detained
on the other side,
our side,
and then deported back to the Mexican side,
told her
that they weren't allowed to sleep.
Guards would come in and blare music
to keep them from sleeping.

Women described being stripped
to their last layer of clothing
in a highly air conditioned room.

Men described
having seventy people crammed into one room,
so packed that three had to sleep in the bathroom,
preventing anyone from using the facilities for three days.

Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?

During the dangerous crossing
from Mexico to the U.S.
and on occasion
in the other direction,
women, children, and men
driven by economic necessity,
risk their lives
there, in the heat and the rocks.

Some die.

The bodies of those who died in the desert,
if they are not found soon enough,
disappear.
The desert heat and dryness
eat them away
and they are gone.
Flesh, bones.
Clothes.

Sometimes
after they die
or
if they are lucky,
after they are caught, arrested, and detained,
in the desert
a child’s shoe remains,
or a backpack,
or a small shrine to La Virgen de Guadalupe
in a hole in a rock.

The volunteers find them:
the shoe,
the backpack,
the shrine.

Sometimes, too, the border patrol discovers
these traces of human lives,
of faith,
fear,
the drive to survive.

Far away
from the hot desert
in which the migrants
walk in the
in-between place
between there and here
we are busy
making laws.

Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?

Far away
from the hot desert of Arizona,
in the deserts of Australia
and Sudan
the droughts worsen.

In Alaska,
the caribou have changed their migration patterns
because the ice melts too soon.

In Japan,
some survivors of Hiroshima are still alive
while neighbors of Fukushima power plant wonder
whether they will become ill
next week
next month
or next year.

In Harlem and San Francisco.
Black and brown children,
God’s youngest
children,
are disproportionately represented
among children with asthma
wheezing and coughing in emergency rooms
with anxious parents at their side.

In fields and factories
on this continent north and south
workers labor amid chemicals
not fit for human consumption
so that we can have
our strawberries
and our t-shirts.

We have nailed the earth God made
to a cross of
heat and waste.

Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?

By the cross of Jesus the Christ
the soldiers of the Empire
mock
and taunt
and violate
the precious body
of God.

They leave.

And behind them,
at the place of shame and death,
in the open torture chamber in the hot sun
only a few, few friends remain,
witnessing.

Mary of Magdala.
Mary the mother of Jesus.
One or two other women.
The beloved disciple,
whose name
we may or may not know.

Only their presence protests.

But they are present.

It is dangerous in the Roman Empire
even to stay and watch
the crucified.
Even more dangerous
to take the body down
and bury it with care
rather than letting birds, animals,
the hot sun,
destroy it
and its remains.

Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?


Were you there?

Are you there?

If we do not cry out
The stones will cry out.

But must we leave it to the stones?

Jane Carol Redmont
Good Friday 2011
St. Mary's House, Greensboro

The tender green of spring

March 29.

Blooms in black and white, March 27

For the new year

One of my favorite Pete Seeger songs, written by David Mallett:

The Garden Song

Photo: Sugar Creek Township, Greene County, Ohio

Yellow butterfly with brown, blue, and orange

The butterflies are plentiful -- four in one small patch of phlox this afternoon.

There is also at least one local hummingbird (I keep wanting to use the French colibri) which is less than half the size of the butterflies! I can't capture it on camera because, well, it hums. It is beautiful, with bright green and red among its colors. I've never seen such a small one; the California ones were larger.

The first figs

Saturday was also the day of the first figs. The house I rent has a biblical back yard: a vine and two fig trees! The figs are now ripe, more of them each day, and the first harvest was Saturday. I'm going to be giving away figs a lot. Greensboro friends take note. They are delicious. In the photo some of them were still wet from the recent rain.

In other news, we've had rain, grey skies, and lower temperatures. Climbing back up today, but with a bit of rain. It's been heavenly keeping the windows open. And yesterday it was cool enough for me to talk a walk. The birds were happy too and singing loudly in the trees.

Still life with ginger and chiles in china-red bowl

 

The bowl was made by a local potter who is a former Guilford English professor.  I remember his saying that the glaze is a Chinese red. I got the bowl a couple of years ago.

The red jalapeños and slim green hot hot hot peppers (I forget their name, they are too big to be serranos, I think) are from yesterday's farmers' market. 40 cents for the lot.

Still life with peaches and ginger

And rolled oats and garlic and regular lentils and French lentil - and phlox and hydrangea.

Farmers' market postscript, Part II

 Photos taken at home today, again with the BlackBerry.

 

 
 

Took several of the tomatoes and even without artificial light they had that shiny reflection - some from the window light, some from the flash. Will photograph with another camera without flash tomorrow to see if I can get a better picture.  The Cherokee Purple tomatoes are delicious.   These are all heirloom tomatoes. 

Farmers' market postscript, Part I

The goat milk camembert from Goat Lady Dairy was to die for.  Is to die for.  I had some yesterday but there is plenty left. I took this photo yesterday a few hours after returning from the farmers' market.

Sisters and brothers!  Do NOT serve cheese straight out of the refrigerator! Take it out ahead of your meal and serve it at room temperature.  For a camembert, don't start storing the cheese in the fridge till you are sure it is ripe.  Then you can start storing it in the fridge, taking it out at least an hour before you plan to eat some of it or serve it to your guests.  Even a hard cheddar will taste better with time to lose its chill and remember its original taste and texture.

This camembert is perfect.  It is runny but still a little firm in the middle.

Have this as a cheese course (after the main course -- I even sometimes have it as the main course, after a big salad), not at the beginning of the meal. Camembert is best with a crusty bread, like a baguette or ciabatta (it needs a good crumb on it as well as a good crust) but a non-crusty one will do.  I tried it with a dense whole-wheat bread from a new bakery I discovered at the farmers' market and it was very good.

Below is a photo (taken from Goat Lady Dairy's website) of the original Goat Lady, Ginnie, who died last year.  Members of the Tate family continue to run the farm and dairy.

Farmers' market bounty, July 3

Tomatoes from Peterson Farm.

The photos are selective, as I tend to buy from the smaller farms that do sustainable agriculture.  (At this market, those farms are mostly not certified organic but they use no pesticides and watch their farming methods in a variety of other ways.  It costs $ to get certified.  One of the best such farms is Peterson Farm, and it has a blog! There are some great photos of the farm there.)  

There were larger displays like the one in the photo immediately below and there was also a lot of good people-photography opportunity, but I didn't have the portrait camera with me, only the BlackBerry in my pocket and my several shopping bags, which rapidly grew heavy with vegetables, fruits, and goat cheeses.

Not sure of the name of this farm.

I went to the market out on Stony Ridge Road in Colfax, off Route 40, not the downtown one near the old stadium.  I prefer this one in the summer most of the time.  Initially I only went to the downtown market when I first lived here. This market one is more basic-NC-folks and much less hippie-lefty and not so connected with the Slow Food Movement, though the Goat Lady Dairy people are at both markets.  Happily for me.  When I became a finalist for my current job at Guilford College, I googled "goat cheese Greensboro" to see what I could find, and sure enough, Goat Lady Dairy popped up; that's when I knew I could manage living here.  Seriously.

Interesting-looking squash from Peterson Farm.
 

Peterson Farm again. Yum.

Okra from Peterson Farm too.  I just bought one box.

This was a small family farm stand. 

Berries are among the higher-in pesticides fruit but I couldn't resist, and since this isn't an industrial-sized farm, the berries may be less toxic than the ones in the supermarket. I decided to take my chances, and I'll rinse the berries well.  I went for the "3 for $6" deal and got one pint of each of the berries: two kinds of blueberries --they really do taste different-- and big juicy blackberries.

Can't remember name of farm here.  
It's not one I remember from other times I've been at this market. 
Those onions look fabulous! 
They are going to go into one dish with squash 
and another made with okra and tomatoes. 
And I'll still have some left over.  

Four or five of these onions go a long way in the flavor department.

The first corn of the year is out in full glory.  More later in the weekend (when I add more text here) on the white vs. yellow corn disputes in my family.  This is a white corn variety called "Avalon," very sweet, and it turns pale yellow when cooked. I had these two ears for lunch. Here they are post-steaming and pre-seasoning.

And here they are mid-lunch. Olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. Nice alternative to butter if you are watching your butterfat intake or if you are a vegan.

I thought to myself, "Well, we are in North Carolina" when I saw these, but that was my bad and my nasty stereotyping.  I am an ignoramus. The true origins of whoopie pies are Pennsylvania Amish and New England.  I looked this up after I got home.  But anyway, there they were. I didn't buy any.

These are all BlackBerry photos. I'll take at least the Nikon digital camera with me next time.  It will fit into a big pocket and I can pull it out easily. 

Lily season

The first lilies bloomed a while back, but now they are here in full force, just as the hydrangeas are fading.  You can see the Humongous Lawn, as I refer to it on Facebook, in the first picture.  I spend my time mowing. Then again, it burns calories and it beats going to the gym, except for the heat and the bugs.  Speaking of the bugs, who just love me, I think the proper order of things is 1) apply sunscreen, 2) apply bug spray.  For a while I wasn't sure.  But I digress.

I took the three photos above in the bright sun on Sunday after returning from church, sometime after 1:00 p.m.

Yesterday, La Virgencita got some day lilies.  (The first photo is a bit fuzzy.)

Same lilies, close up.  They look Van Gogh-ish in this photo.  They are a much brighter orange in reality.

 

 Here endeth the tour of the day lilies.

More purple

Consider the lilies

The lilies are out early.

The lilies are actually much more orange than this.  I don't know why the BlackBerry camera lens turns them to peach. It did that when I looked through it, too, so it's not the transmission through the intertubes, it's something lens-ish.

The purple minority

The smallest of the three hydrangea bushes is producing purple blooms this year; the soil composition must have changed.  The blue hydrangeas are more plentiful and bloomed earlier and have now turned from pale blue with cream centers to periwinkle. These purple ones are few, but they are beautiful.  I have a vase of them in the kitchen.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

The state of the hydrangeas

Hydrangeas after the rain, when I got home from long workshop at school.

And now, the big white magnolias

We (journalistic we) covered the earlier magnolias, which I think are called tulip magnolias and are pink. Nearly two months later, we have the big white fragrant magnolias whose scent hangs heavy in the air on hot spring evenings. The evenings have been cool, though, so you have to bend down toward the flower to smell it. The buds have just started opening up. These are the magnolias you think of when you think of the South (Southeast, really), with the big waxy green leaves. Paul the BB took a photo of me smelling them in Davidson, NC last Memorial Day Weekend before Doxy and Dear Friend's wedding.

Here are some blooms from the Guilford College campus. Like the earlier magnolias, they are from trees in front of my office and classroom building.