I first posted this lament on Facebook about 12 hours ago, Wednesday July 16, 2014.
Photo: Reuters, Gaza, July 16, 2014
Showing posts with label these United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label these United States. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2014
The children
Children,
children, children. Children running away from violence and poverty in
Central America, children sent back to violence and poverty in Central
America, children killed on a beach in Gaza, children hungry and unsafe
on the streets of these United States, children deathly ill with cholera
in South Sudan. Cry out, o stones.
Monday, May 19, 2014
In the sanctuary and on the streets, alleluias and shared bread
Text posted first on Facebook last night.
 |
| Brewer Fountain, Boston Common |
The first in the morning at Emmanuel Church in the City of Boston with Mendelssohn anthem; let's-tackle-this-one sermon with focused biblical analysis by the Rev. Pam Werntz; three baptisms; thanksgiving for 10 years of marriage equality; bread and wine blessed and shared; the final Bach cantata of Emmanuel Music's 2013-14 cantata season, glorious in praise and beauty. Candles and the play of light. Alleluias in hearts and voices.
The second, also with alleluias, a bit later in a very different setting: on Boston Common with Common Cathedral (often spelled common cathedral w/ no caps) in a congregation of mostly homeless men and women with some housed people as well, a dynamic young woman leading worship, and a youth group serving sandwich lunch before the service. A message of God's unconditional love for all and of God's very presence in our midst, a highly participatory service, with a structure but a lot of spontaneity (same structure as the other Sunday Eucharist but much simpler, pared down), and heartfelt Prayers of the People. Ragged at the edges in all the right ways, reverent, raw, with much assurance of forgiveness and comfort. Bread and grape juice blessed and shared. Sunlight, clouds, wind, the play of light.
Communion and contemplation in both places. And welcome. And song. And healing.
Not either/or. Both/and. The Church is a wide, deep, and diverse reality. Alleluia.
 |
| Emmanuel Church before the liturgy, 5th Sunday of Easter |
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Guns, Grief, and Gaudete: Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, after the Newtown Massacre
The Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday), year C
December
16, 2012
St.
Mary’s House, Greensboro
Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9 [from Isaiah 12:2-6]
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18
In the name of God
Who creates us,
Who saves us, and
Who remains with us
always,
Amen.
Charlotte Bacon, 6 years
old
Daniel Barden, 7 years old
Rachel Davino, 29 years old
Daniel Barden, 7 years old
Rachel Davino, 29 years old
Olivia Engel, 6 years old
Josephine Gay, 7 years old
Ana Marquez-Greene, 6 years old
Dylan Hockley, 6 years old
Dawn Hocksprung, 47 years old
Madeline Hsu, 6 years old
Catherine Hubbard, 6 years old
Chase Kowalski, 7 years old
Jesse Lewis, 6 years old
James Mattioli, 6 years old
Grace McDonnell, 7 years old
Anne Marie Murphy, 52 years old
Emilie Parker, 6 years old
Josephine Gay, 7 years old
Ana Marquez-Greene, 6 years old
Dylan Hockley, 6 years old
Dawn Hocksprung, 47 years old
Madeline Hsu, 6 years old
Catherine Hubbard, 6 years old
Chase Kowalski, 7 years old
Jesse Lewis, 6 years old
James Mattioli, 6 years old
Grace McDonnell, 7 years old
Anne Marie Murphy, 52 years old
Emilie Parker, 6 years old
Jack Pinto, 6 years old
Noah Pozner, 6 years old
Caroline Previdi, 6 years old
Jessica Rekos, 6 years old
Avielle Richman, 6 years old
Lauren Russeau, 30 years old
Mary Sherlach, 56 years old
Victoria Soto, 27 years old
Benjamin Wheeler, 6 years old
Allison Wyatt, 6 years old
[short
silence]
Nancy Lanza, age unknown
Adam Lanza, 20 years old
Let us pray.
O God, who came into the world
as a fragile child
and who lived as one of us,
even unto death;
Risen One,
Mysterious One beyond our understanding,
who created and creates us,
who seeks us out,
and whom we seek;
Comforter and advocate,
our shield and our strength,
hold us in our grief;
Oh Holy One,
in Whose name we gather,
Amen
Like most preachers in
this country,
I threw away the first
draft of my sermon on Friday afternoon.
Advent took on starker
colors.
It became more urgent, its
prophetic calls more sharp.
At the same time
it went into slow motion
as our world does after
trauma.
Twenty-six people shot and
killed,
each shot several times,
from the medical examiner’s account,
in an elementary school in
a quiet, privileged community
in Connecticut.
Most of them children.
More than half of them
girls.
Their teachers, all women,
killed trying to protect
them.
A young man
not long out of childhood,
killing others and himself,
and before that, killing
his own mother.
The rose color of Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing,
The rose color of Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing,
this third Sunday of
Advent,
and the words of our first
scripture readings for today,
clash with our reality.
It shouldn’t happen.
The blood,
the guns,
the police,
the media,
the empty children’s rooms
with weeping parents,
the questions.
I threw away my sermon.
And then I asked myself:
why don’t I throw away that
sermon every week?
Where, in our sermons,
in our prayers,
in our community work,
are the names of the
children
who die of gun violence
every day?
In 2008 and 2009
—these figures are from
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— [1]
5,740
children and teens
were killed by guns.
Five thousand
seven hundred
and forty.
In two years.
This number would fill
more than 229 public school classrooms
of 25 students each.
More than 170 of the
children
killed during those two
years
were pre-schoolers.
Black children and teens,
who were 15 percent
of the total child population
in the US
during those two years,
accounted for 45 percent
of all child and teen gun
deaths.
Trayvon Martin.
We remember his name – do we?
But do we know the other names?
We remember his name – do we?
But do we know the other names?
Do our news media publish
them?
Do we pray them?
Do we pray them?
Do we remember them?
Do we weep for them?
Do we weep for them?
This shouldn’t happen
in a quiet suburban
community.
It shouldn’t happen in a
noisy urban community.
It shouldn’t happen to any
mother’s child.
Or to any mother.
Or father.
Or human person of any
kind.
Columbine High School,
Colorado.
Wedgwood Baptist Church,
Texas.
Atlanta day trading, Georgia.
Atlanta day trading, Georgia.
I know you want to put your hands over your ears–
bear
with me and with this list for another minute—
Lockheed Martin, Mississippi.
Living Church of God, Wisconsin.
Red Lake High School and Reservation, Minnesota.
Amish School, Pennsylvania.
Living Church of God, Wisconsin.
Red Lake High School and Reservation, Minnesota.
Amish School, Pennsylvania.
Virginia Tech University,
Virginia
Northern Illinois
University, Illinois.
American Civic Association center, New York state
American Civic Association center, New York state
Fort Hood Army Base, Texas
Tucson congressional
constituent meeting, Arizona
Oikos University,
California
Seattle café, Washington
state
Movie theatre, Colorado
Sikh temple, Wisconsin
I skipped some.
We don’t feel much like
rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday.
And religious platitudes
won’t help us.
The voice and visions from
today’s scriptures from Zephaniah and Isaiah,
words of justice and joy,
speak to some of us
but fail to reach others
among us.
Some of us feel more like
the passage from Jeremiah,
the same passage quoted
in the gospel of Matthew on the massacre of the innocents:
“...a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and
bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”[2]
When children die,
our God dies.
Our faith is shaken.
Our hope begins to faint.
Our visions and dreams
turn to nightmares.
Into this world
this very world
Jesus was born
and is born
and will be born.
In this world,
John the Baptizer
spoke,
and speaks,
to both rich and poor,
to the occupied and the
occupiers,
the conquered and the
empire,
the religious and the not
so religious,
the violent and the
silent.
Last week we encountered John
already,
preaching repentance –
-- repentance and forgiveness.
Repentance first.
And did you notice that the
author of the gospel of Luke
very carefully named the
context, political and economic,
of John’s preaching -- do
you remember?
"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor
Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of
Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea..." and so on –“the
word of God came to John...”
We might well say:
In
the seventh year of the Roberts Court at the Supreme Court of the United
States, the seventeenth year since the founding of the World Trade
Organization,[3] the one hundred and twelfth Congress, the
fourth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Bev Perdue was governor of
North Carolina, the word of God came...
This week,
the gospel’s author, and
John the Baptizer,
get very practical.
What should we DO?
What should we do?
One of the things we tend
to do when a catastrophe happens is to simplify.
We want a cause. We want a
reason. We want a simple answer.
We want it theologically
and we want it socially.
We want it theologically:
You know that saying, “Everything
happens for a reason”?
What a load of theological hogwash that is.
What a load of theological hogwash that is.
As if we could know.
On an emotional and
spiritual and theological level,
we don’t know.
We need to sit, in Advent,
in the night,
in our not-knowing,
the not-knowing in which
faith is forged,
the place where hope will
be born
–in this we trust—
in the faint light of the
rose and purple candles.
But this will not happen
fast
or easily.
And socially, we want a
simple answer too.
That is another kind of
“everything happens for a reason”
which might be rephrased
as
“everything happens for one reason.”
“everything happens for one reason.”
No; I think
that things generally
happen
for several reasons.
In the case of the
Connecticut killings,
and of other killings by
gun violence in this nation,
the lax gun laws, yes.
Yes. Yes.
AND
the fact that it is easier
to get a gun
than to get mental health
care.
The lack of good mental
health care.
The stigma
that those of us who have
suffered from mental illness still bear.
The glorification of
violence in our entertainment industry
and the shaping of our
desires
through this industry.
The images and models of
masculinity in our culture.
Social isolation.
And this country’s
particular sin:
We enslaved each other
through violence.
We are a country enslaved
to violence.
AND
whatever it is
that causes humans to
kill each other,
as the ancient story of
the brothers Abel and Cain recounts.
We are all entangled with
this.
Call it evil, call it sin,
call it the way of the world;
call it what you want.
We are, one way or
another, a part of it –
- some perhaps more than
others, but all of us.
Today’s collect[4]
puts it in old-fashioned
language: “we are sorely hindered by our sins.”
We hear this against the
backdrop of last week’s gospel:
the reality of repentance
and that of forgiveness.
What should we DO?
Say the people
in today’s gospel.
John the Baptizer,
in the Gospel of Luke,
encounters different
audiences
who ask what they should
do
to change.
The crowd asks.
The tax collectors ask.
Even the soldiers ask.
John takes these groups of
people
where they are.
They are not starting from
the same place.
No hoarding, he says to
one group.
No skimming, to the other.
No extortion, to the third;
no abuse.
It’s not everything.
But it’s a place to start.
In Advent,
we live
between God’s patience
and God’s impatience.
Advent is a time to
rediscover
both of these,
God’s patience
and God’s impatience,
and to discern
when and where
to respond to them
by living in them:
Living God’s patience:
in grieving together,
in holding each other’s
hands,
in listening,
in doing the small, daily
things
that assure us, after the
catastrophe,
that we are still alive.
Living God’s impatience:
in outrage
and action
for justice;
for change.
Dorothee Soelle, the
German theologian,
has always been helpful to
me.
She grew up during the Shoah
[the Holocaust]
and after World War II,
she said,
she didn't have much stomach
for
“the God who so gloriously
reigneth."
For her,
in that period of history,
God was weak
and did not have enough
friends.
The God who is with us
in Advent,
and who will be with us at
Christmas
as a fragile child,
needs us
as friends.
as friends.
Let us pray.
Come, o brother Jesus.
Come, o wounded savior.
Come, weak God who shows us strength where there is
none.
Come, challenger of empires
and of the language of empires
and of the weapons of empires.
Come to us and make us your friends.
Come to us who are charged with protecting
you,
your children,
your life.
Come to us who fail;
come to us who struggle;
come to us who need forgiveness.
Come to us
and teach us to work
patiently
stubbornly
together
for life.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Weep with us.
Hold our hands.
Stay in our hearts.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Anger us.
Be our guide.
Teach us to be your friends.
Teach us your hope.
Amen.
[1] These
figures and others are detailed and analyzed in the Children’s Defense Fund report on children and gun
violence, "Protect Children Not Guns 2012." http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/protect-children-not-guns-2012.pdf
[2] Jeremiah 31:15.
[3] In a shorter, related meditation
for an Advent retreat, I also included in this enumeration “in the sixty-eighth
year since the establishment of the Bretton Woods Institutions.” I include these transnational economic
institutions (the Bretton Woods institutions –the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund— and the World Trade Organization) because
politics and economics, as they were two thousand years ago though in different
ways, are deeply connected, and because our lives are affected by economic as
well as political institutions. You can replace the names and institutions
above at will. Try it.
[4] Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great
might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your
bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ
our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and
for ever. Amen. Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent, the Book of Common
Prayer.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Thirty Years: An AIDS Anniversary
Thirty years ago today, on June 5, 1981,
My friend Wormwood's Doxy, an HIV/AIDS education professional, has written a moving anniversary essay at her blog. Read it here.
Once you have recovered from reading it --it may take you a few hours; it is an intense and beautiful essay-- come back here and read my offering for this day, written 23 years ago, in 1988, when I was in my thirties.
This commentary, minus the three paragraphs in red brackets, was published and distributed by Religious News Service (now called Religion News Service) on July 12, 1988 under the title "The Names Project Quilt Makes Beauty Out of Horror."
At the time I wrote the essay, I was working on my first book, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today (William Morrow, 1992; pbk Triumph/Liguori 1993), and was employed as a program developer raising funds for The Hospice at Mission Hill, the first residential hospice for people with AIDS in Boston.
The AIDS Quilt was on its first major tour around the U.S. and was displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington, DC in fall of that year. I went to see it at what was still called the Boston Armory.
I have altered only a few tiny grammar and style details and have left in the language I used back then, only seven years after the anniversary we commemorate today. (For instance, I never use "minority groups" or "minorities" to mean people of color or minoritized groups these days, but I did then. The Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union in 1988, so I left that in. What is now the U.S. Postal Service had another name.)
The pandemic is still with us, all over the world. This essay is a slice of life.
Many of the students I teach were not even born when I wrote these words.
The Names Project is meant, according to its founder, San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones, to give "a glimpse of the lives behind the statistics" as it travels around the country. Men, women and children sewed for relatives and lovers and for people they had never met. There are crosses and stars of David, hearts and teddy bears and pictures of cats, insignia representing the military and the medical professions, pennants from Yale and Columbia. On one panel is the portrait of a proud, handsome Black man, with a written tribute to his character and commitments. Another, with a child's pink dress sewn onto it, says only "La Hijita de Dios," "the little daughter of God." All over the panel, serving as background design, are small diaper pins.
And then there is the second shock: youth. Over half the panels bear dates of birth and death. I stared and subtracted: twenty-five years old; thirty-nine; twenty-two; two years old. The overwhelming majority of those who have died, who are now ill, who are HIV-positive, are young. Mothers embroider love letters to lost sons on the cloth. Nothing prepares one for this, even the experience (which I share) of having young loved ones among the dead. It is like walking in an old New England cemetery and coming across a child's stone marker among the graves.
We speak a lot these days about the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, among heterosexuals, into minority communities, through mothers to their babies. The Quilt is beginning to show the impact of these facts. But still the names are mostly those of men --young men, gay men. I am reminded of the population charts in the Soviet Union, on which the curve dips at the males who were young adults during World War II. We have not even begun to measure the trauma and devastation which AIDS has brought to an entire generation of an entire community. "I am angry," says a friend, "that at the age of 29 I must deal constantly with multiple deaths, with friends losing their strength and the use of their bodies, with grief and hospitals and burials and loss. " "Many of us are finding it hard to plan for the future," says another: "Is there a future for me? Will my closest friends till be here in five years? Will I?"
I think of the shock after the death of a single loved one, how it leaves one numb and split open all at once, with the feeling of being both wrapped in cotton wool and bled raw. Multiply this by six and twelve and fifty in the life of one person; multiply that by hundreds. Only after doing this can one measure the emotional impact of AIDS, the massive grief of whole communities, spreading around the nation.
"Wrenching" and "healing" --in the same sentence-- are the words I have heard and used most often to describe the Names Project. This witness to multiple deaths is also about the fullness of life. Most of the panels remember people not as they were in their last days, weighting eighty pounds and unable to bathe themselves or walk to the toilet, but as they were in life, designing theatre sets and playing ball, lovers of glitz and glitter or of hikes in the mountains, speaking and singing in Spanish and English, eating and drinking. A panel dedicated to a mail carrier features the arm of his blue uniform with the "U.S. Mail" emblem, cradling a small teddy bear. The rest of the panel is an uproarious burst of color: a golden peacock, a sunflower, cloth letters of a name in rainbow colors, pictures of California life.
Still, for some of the survivors, the colors battle against bleak memories. "I can no longer remember him healthy and live," says a woman I know of the friend for whom she made a panel. "I always remember him the other way."
[The Vietnam Memorial changed forever our experience of monuments to the dead. Like the Vietnam Memorial, the Quilt is a live place, no lonely obelisk in the town square but a place of meeting and community. The Vietnam monument grows bits of life; the first day I went, on a wet December morning, a small flag with a spring of heather tied to it was propped up against the wall almost lost in the mud and brown oak leaves. The rain cause the black wall to shine and reflect my face back to me. There were names on my reflection, some of them familiar last names. The people I knew who bore these names were still alive; but I began to wonder. Was this a relative of the person I knew? Could it have been my friend, given a different lottery number, another set of circumstances? The boundaries crumbled. There was no barrier left between "them" and "us."
The Names Project takes this kind of memorial experience further, deeper. At the Vietnam Memorial, people talk, embrace, weep, ask questions. The dark stone brings forth stories because of the power of the names. The Quilt itself tells the stories, spells out the memories in material that almost seems made of flesh. It is also an organic reality: a whole piece of art, but an unfinished one. The epidemic has not stopped growing. Neither, until it does, will this quilt.
It is impossible to stay passive before the Quilt, even more so than before the Vietnam Memorial. This is because it tells stories directly and because live stories lead us to act and to hope, like the retelling of the Passover or the account of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Memories like these do not mire us in the past; they move us to shape the future. But first we go down, into the grief, into the struggle, through the retelling. Without memory, there is no possibility of hope, nor of bringing about the changes that will stem the tide of death.]
As I walked into the exhibit, the first people I saw were a very pregnant woman, a man, and a child. The mother bent over and spoke to her child about a man who had "died of the bad disease." She asked the child, pointing to a panel with a basketball shirt attached and an embroidered basketball, "What do you think this person really liked?" Five years from now, will I be the woman explaining to her child about the bad disease? Fifteen years from now, will this disease still claim lives? Will the Quilt sit in a museum? How many more stories will we need to tell? "No more names!" read a tee-shirt worn by one of the visitors.
The Quilt is a wondrous work of art --colorful, homespun, soft and resilient, quintessentially American, spiritual and political, beautiful in itself and charged with moral energy. It chronicles a catastrophe, like Picasso' s "Guernica," but is crafted by a community rather than a lone genius. Like "Guernica," it makes beauty out of horror. It leaves the viewer torn: grateful for such beauty, for the redeeming power of names and memory, for the healing; and wishing that this thing of beauty had never had to exist, knowing the names will not go away.
This was, of course, long before the internet. The Quilt is now online here. Nothing, however, replaces having seen it, walked around the panels, bumped into a colleague who wept in my arms, and heard the names of the dead read aloud, as has happened at all public showings of this work of art.
My friend Wormwood's Doxy, an HIV/AIDS education professional, has written a moving anniversary essay at her blog. Read it here.
Once you have recovered from reading it --it may take you a few hours; it is an intense and beautiful essay-- come back here and read my offering for this day, written 23 years ago, in 1988, when I was in my thirties.
This commentary, minus the three paragraphs in red brackets, was published and distributed by Religious News Service (now called Religion News Service) on July 12, 1988 under the title "The Names Project Quilt Makes Beauty Out of Horror."
At the time I wrote the essay, I was working on my first book, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today (William Morrow, 1992; pbk Triumph/Liguori 1993), and was employed as a program developer raising funds for The Hospice at Mission Hill, the first residential hospice for people with AIDS in Boston.
The AIDS Quilt was on its first major tour around the U.S. and was displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington, DC in fall of that year. I went to see it at what was still called the Boston Armory.
I have altered only a few tiny grammar and style details and have left in the language I used back then, only seven years after the anniversary we commemorate today. (For instance, I never use "minority groups" or "minorities" to mean people of color or minoritized groups these days, but I did then. The Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union in 1988, so I left that in. What is now the U.S. Postal Service had another name.)
The pandemic is still with us, all over the world. This essay is a slice of life.
Many of the students I teach were not even born when I wrote these words.
The Quilt
Cambridge, Massachusetts
June 23, 1988
June 23, 1988
In Stockholm last week, medical researchers from around the world tracked the elusive virus and its deadly mysteries. In Boston a massive quilt unfolded for four days, stitched by thousands of Americans as a memorial to people who have died of ADS. The quilt, sponsored by the Names Project, is as different from other memorials to the dead as AIDS is different from the other diseases that have plagued us. It is not made of stone and anchored in the ground, but portable and soft, organic, making its way around the nation, still growing.
More than a week after my visit to the Quilt, its impact will not go away. The first emotional shock, for visitors, is the sheer magnitude and diversity of the project, row upon row of remembered lives, presented in sophisticated patterns and hesitant stitches, in all materials from denim to organza. Some panels show only a name and dates of birth and death. Others literally bear pieces of people's lives: articles of clothing, photographs, locks of hair. One has the ashes of the person it commemorates sewn into a corner.
More than a week after my visit to the Quilt, its impact will not go away. The first emotional shock, for visitors, is the sheer magnitude and diversity of the project, row upon row of remembered lives, presented in sophisticated patterns and hesitant stitches, in all materials from denim to organza. Some panels show only a name and dates of birth and death. Others literally bear pieces of people's lives: articles of clothing, photographs, locks of hair. One has the ashes of the person it commemorates sewn into a corner.
The Names Project is meant, according to its founder, San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones, to give "a glimpse of the lives behind the statistics" as it travels around the country. Men, women and children sewed for relatives and lovers and for people they had never met. There are crosses and stars of David, hearts and teddy bears and pictures of cats, insignia representing the military and the medical professions, pennants from Yale and Columbia. On one panel is the portrait of a proud, handsome Black man, with a written tribute to his character and commitments. Another, with a child's pink dress sewn onto it, says only "La Hijita de Dios," "the little daughter of God." All over the panel, serving as background design, are small diaper pins.
And then there is the second shock: youth. Over half the panels bear dates of birth and death. I stared and subtracted: twenty-five years old; thirty-nine; twenty-two; two years old. The overwhelming majority of those who have died, who are now ill, who are HIV-positive, are young. Mothers embroider love letters to lost sons on the cloth. Nothing prepares one for this, even the experience (which I share) of having young loved ones among the dead. It is like walking in an old New England cemetery and coming across a child's stone marker among the graves.
We speak a lot these days about the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, among heterosexuals, into minority communities, through mothers to their babies. The Quilt is beginning to show the impact of these facts. But still the names are mostly those of men --young men, gay men. I am reminded of the population charts in the Soviet Union, on which the curve dips at the males who were young adults during World War II. We have not even begun to measure the trauma and devastation which AIDS has brought to an entire generation of an entire community. "I am angry," says a friend, "that at the age of 29 I must deal constantly with multiple deaths, with friends losing their strength and the use of their bodies, with grief and hospitals and burials and loss. " "Many of us are finding it hard to plan for the future," says another: "Is there a future for me? Will my closest friends till be here in five years? Will I?"
I think of the shock after the death of a single loved one, how it leaves one numb and split open all at once, with the feeling of being both wrapped in cotton wool and bled raw. Multiply this by six and twelve and fifty in the life of one person; multiply that by hundreds. Only after doing this can one measure the emotional impact of AIDS, the massive grief of whole communities, spreading around the nation.
"Wrenching" and "healing" --in the same sentence-- are the words I have heard and used most often to describe the Names Project. This witness to multiple deaths is also about the fullness of life. Most of the panels remember people not as they were in their last days, weighting eighty pounds and unable to bathe themselves or walk to the toilet, but as they were in life, designing theatre sets and playing ball, lovers of glitz and glitter or of hikes in the mountains, speaking and singing in Spanish and English, eating and drinking. A panel dedicated to a mail carrier features the arm of his blue uniform with the "U.S. Mail" emblem, cradling a small teddy bear. The rest of the panel is an uproarious burst of color: a golden peacock, a sunflower, cloth letters of a name in rainbow colors, pictures of California life.
Still, for some of the survivors, the colors battle against bleak memories. "I can no longer remember him healthy and live," says a woman I know of the friend for whom she made a panel. "I always remember him the other way."
All the panels tug at the heart. But for each visitor there were a few that hit the core and that linger, triggering floods of anger, grief, or tenderness. For me one of these was the pink "Hijita de Dios." Another featured two men's shirts sewn on with their arms entwined. "Though lovers shall be lost love shall not," Dylan Thomas wrote in "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." The first verse of this poem is printed on the third Quilt panel that lives on inside me. Long before AIDS, before the wasted bodies and lost minds, before the dementia, Thomas wrote:
"Death shall have no dominion." I cannot shake this phrase from my mind, trying to summon the stubbornness of life against the slow creep of death."Though they go mad they shall be sane
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again."
[The Vietnam Memorial changed forever our experience of monuments to the dead. Like the Vietnam Memorial, the Quilt is a live place, no lonely obelisk in the town square but a place of meeting and community. The Vietnam monument grows bits of life; the first day I went, on a wet December morning, a small flag with a spring of heather tied to it was propped up against the wall almost lost in the mud and brown oak leaves. The rain cause the black wall to shine and reflect my face back to me. There were names on my reflection, some of them familiar last names. The people I knew who bore these names were still alive; but I began to wonder. Was this a relative of the person I knew? Could it have been my friend, given a different lottery number, another set of circumstances? The boundaries crumbled. There was no barrier left between "them" and "us."
The Names Project takes this kind of memorial experience further, deeper. At the Vietnam Memorial, people talk, embrace, weep, ask questions. The dark stone brings forth stories because of the power of the names. The Quilt itself tells the stories, spells out the memories in material that almost seems made of flesh. It is also an organic reality: a whole piece of art, but an unfinished one. The epidemic has not stopped growing. Neither, until it does, will this quilt.
It is impossible to stay passive before the Quilt, even more so than before the Vietnam Memorial. This is because it tells stories directly and because live stories lead us to act and to hope, like the retelling of the Passover or the account of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Memories like these do not mire us in the past; they move us to shape the future. But first we go down, into the grief, into the struggle, through the retelling. Without memory, there is no possibility of hope, nor of bringing about the changes that will stem the tide of death.]
As I walked into the exhibit, the first people I saw were a very pregnant woman, a man, and a child. The mother bent over and spoke to her child about a man who had "died of the bad disease." She asked the child, pointing to a panel with a basketball shirt attached and an embroidered basketball, "What do you think this person really liked?" Five years from now, will I be the woman explaining to her child about the bad disease? Fifteen years from now, will this disease still claim lives? Will the Quilt sit in a museum? How many more stories will we need to tell? "No more names!" read a tee-shirt worn by one of the visitors.
The Quilt is a wondrous work of art --colorful, homespun, soft and resilient, quintessentially American, spiritual and political, beautiful in itself and charged with moral energy. It chronicles a catastrophe, like Picasso' s "Guernica," but is crafted by a community rather than a lone genius. Like "Guernica," it makes beauty out of horror. It leaves the viewer torn: grateful for such beauty, for the redeeming power of names and memory, for the healing; and wishing that this thing of beauty had never had to exist, knowing the names will not go away.
* * * * * * * *
This was, of course, long before the internet. The Quilt is now online here. Nothing, however, replaces having seen it, walked around the panels, bumped into a colleague who wept in my arms, and heard the names of the dead read aloud, as has happened at all public showings of this work of art.
Friday, April 22, 2011
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."
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?
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
Good Friday 2011
St. Mary's House, Greensboro
Friday, January 7, 2011
Moi?
My Liberal Identity
You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.
Take the quiz at
About.com Political Humor
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Pledging Allegiance: a reflection on Christian commitment and community on Independence Day weekend
Ann Fontaine of Episcopal Café fame asked on Facebook what we were planning to do for our churches tomorrow when Sunday falls on July 4.
When I was writing lectionary reflections (meditations to help people who are either preaching or reflecting on the readings assigned for the Sunday in question) a few years back for the late lamented magazine The Witness, I wrote this --and later preached a related sermon-- for the feast of All Saints.
Though this was an All Saints' Day meditation, it may be apt for July 4 with its "Pledging Allegiance" theme and its reminder of the "Where do we place our security?" question of the 1980s religiously based disarmament movement and the question about who, what, is our primary community.
Not to take away from love of country (for the record, I get misty-eyed at "America the Beautiful" -- and at "This Land Is Your Land" :-)) and struggle for independence -- just to put patriotism in perspective.
Cross-posted on Facebook
Friday, March 26, 2010
What doesn't make the top of the news
I find it quite extraordinary that this item, which leads the BBC headlines, does not lead in the U.S. We are so distracted by our internal battles (which are, admittedly, nasty and getting nastier --and frightening) that we have not noticed this major step in foreign policy. Fifteen years ago this would have been major news.
I know. It's far from enough. But this administration is moving the previously frozen. I don't think most of us realize how significant this is.
All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.
Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.
Additional comments on map here.
I know. It's far from enough. But this administration is moving the previously frozen. I don't think most of us realize how significant this is.
All numbers are estimates because exact numbers are top secret.Strategic nuclear warheads are designed to target cities, missile locations and military headquarters as part of a strategic plan.
Additional comments on map here.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Yesterday's presidential speech to the Democrats - health insurance reform (a first step)
President Obama spoke at length to the Democratic Caucus yesterday. This is Part III. You can find Parts I and II when you get to YouTube via the link.
Or you can watch the White House video here.
G'wan. Call your Rep one more time.
All right, I'm pulling out all the stops. BO WANTS YOU TO CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS ONE MORE TIME. Seriously. Help the humans.
P.S. I say "a first step" because this plan is far from what many of us want, but politics, my purist friends, is the art of compromise, and we have to start somewhere. I'm with Rep. Dennis Kucinich on this.
Or you can watch the White House video here.
G'wan. Call your Rep one more time.
All right, I'm pulling out all the stops. BO WANTS YOU TO CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS ONE MORE TIME. Seriously. Help the humans.
P.S. I say "a first step" because this plan is far from what many of us want, but politics, my purist friends, is the art of compromise, and we have to start somewhere. I'm with Rep. Dennis Kucinich on this.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Why Mexico City
Someone on Facebook asked why my parents got married in Mexico City.
Since it's too long an answer for Facebook, here goes.
My father got his master's degree at the Columbia University Journalism School. He was not yet 21 years old. He graduated at the top of his class (1939) and was one of three recipients of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. This gave him the opportunity to travel and write for a year.
He headed for Europe in June. He knew by then that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. He traveled through Western Europe, then Eastern Europe and the USSR and back to Western Europe. Well, if you remember your world history, you remember what started happening on September 1, 1939. World War II broke out.
My father had hoped to stay and find work as a war correspondent, but despite his letters of recommendation, he couldn't find a job, and he went home, not on a Cunard liner as he had on the way over, but on a freighter taking refugees back to the U.S. Among the passengers was my father's cabin-mate --not by choice-- who turned out to be, so he said and my father had no reason to doubt him, Prince Felix Yussupov. You may remember him as the man who killed Rasputin. My father notes in his memoir that he "had never before met anybody who had killed a man, let alone boasted about it. Sharing a cabin with him was fun on an otherwise tense voyage, but I didn't sleep too well thinking about my new friend, the murderer." (p.23)
FoAoH decided to finish up his fellowship in Mexico City, so off he went. There were many estadounidenses there at the time: Mexico was warm, welcoming, and inexpensive. It was also, as my father discovered, desperately poor, and the Mexico City metropolitan area was already crowded then with a population over five million. He started freelancing and stringing (working part-time) for several newspapers and news services.
After he'd been there for a while, MoAoH got sick of waiting up in Brooklyn. She'd finished college by then, so, as I like to tell it, she said to her parents "Bye-bye, I'm going to marry FoAoH!" Okay, it wasn't entirely like that. My parents had both turned 21 by then, it was now early 1940, and my father saw that they could live quite well on under $15 a week, so they decided that they would get married sooner rather than later. My father wrote a letter to my mother's father, as one did in those days, and promised he would take good care of her. They had known each other for years so my mother's parents knew my father was a trustworthy sort, and they knew my parents wanted to get married. People didn't "get engaged" in those days, at least in my parents' circles. It was the Depression and nobody was buying or showing off diamonds on their left ring fingers, and my mother's family was never terribly conventional anyway, though they certainly believed in marriage.
My parents met at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York. They didn't become sweethearts till college but were in the same group of friends in high school. Like many in their high school --mostly children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants-- they attended public colleges: she went to Hunter College, which was all women at the time; he went to City College, which was all men. Both of those schools were way uptown in Manhattan, of course, and my family's version of "In my day we had to walk five miles to school in the snow, uphill in both directions!" was "It was the Depression, we lived at home, and we took the subway to school an hour and a half in each direction." Three hours of commuting a day to get an education. My mother is the one who talks about this.
My father was editor of the college newspaper and helped get a corrupt college president on the road to resignation, but that is another story and you can read it in FoAoH's memoir. He went on to a private university (Columbia) for professional journalism study. My brother also went there, years later, and I contemplated doing the same but didn't.
Back to the Mexico story. My mother took the bus down to Mexico City from New York. Yes, the bus. More like buses. I think her first stop was Indianapolis because she had an uncle there. Not sure whether or where she stopped after that, but it was a five-day trip. At any rate, she got to Mexico City safe and sound on a Friday, and the following Tuesday she and my father were married.
They married at the American Embassy because they were patriotic young people and wanted to be married on American soil. But the Ambassador wasn't empowered to officiate at weddings (unlike some other foreign diplomats) so they got a Mexican Justice of the Peace. Only civil marriages were valid in Mexico. A wedding at the JP's Registry office would cost two pesos, but they decided to splurge and go for the 32-peso wedding, which is what it cost to get married outside the Registry. 32 pesos in those days was about 8 dollars.
Foreign Service officers couldn't officiate at marriages but they could witness them (in the church that's the same thing, so I don't quite get the distinction, but there you have it) and issue a certificate of marriage so in addition to the Mexican wedding certificate, my parents got a U.S. certificate (for one dollar extra). I'm not sure whether the Consul General or the Ambassador signed the piece of paper, but they were both there. The Ambassador at the time was Josephus Daniels, a former Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson who was a former newsman -- how appropriate. I remembered he was a Southerner, but what I had forgotten and just re-read in the Mexico chapter of the memoir is that he was the founder-editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. That's Raleigh, North Carolina.
Meanwhile, my paternal grandparents had expressed the desire for my parents to have a Jewish wedding ceremony, so several days later PoAoH located a rabbi, which in Mexico City was not so easy, and he witnessed and officiated at a religious ceremony. It was in Spanish and Hebrew and they had a sheet or a tablecloth for a chuppah (the traditional wedding canopy) and my father didn't have a kippah (yarmulke) so he used a handkerchief tied at four corners. The part of this story I love is that the rabbi lived on Jesus Maria Street. Now there's a title for a novel: The Rabbi on Jesus Maria Street.
Parents of Acts of Hope did have a little reception with a wedding cake. The cake was the work of two Greek-American pastry cooks from Manhattan who after fighting in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (i.e. against Franco's forces) had settled in Mexico and opened a restaurant and bakery.
My father's memoir doesn't say and I haven't asked my parents, but it occurred to me a few years ago upon re-reading my father's description that these guys, Nick and Mike, were probably a couple. But maybe they weren't.
The cake had two white doves on top.
The big story in 1940 in Mexico was, of course, Trostsky's assassination, and my father, as a freshly minted journalist, got to cover it. There was a substantial cast of characters in the background shenanigans leading up to the assassination, including an American woman who had been one of Trotsky's aides. My father was stringing for the Jack Starr-Hunt News Service and among their clients was the N.Y. Daily News tabloid, which could care less about the politics of the story. Who cared if Stalin's arch-enemy had just been killed? The Daily News fired off to my father a cable that read "RUSH 1,500 WORDS GIRLIE ANGLE." Welcome to highfalutin foreign correspondent work.
After a few months in Mexico, with the fellowship year over, my parents returned to the U.S. and Brooklyn, where both their families lived. My father got a stop-gap editing job at the Brooklyn Academy of Music while hunting for a real job in journalism. At last, after six months, a real job materialized, and off my parents went to Herkimer, New York (for those of you who don't know, that's in the boonies, at least from a New York City perspective) where my father worked on the Evening Telegram newspaper for the magnificent sum of $35 per week.
The following year Pearl Harbor happened and my parents moved to Washington.
But that is another story.
Since it's too long an answer for Facebook, here goes.
My father got his master's degree at the Columbia University Journalism School. He was not yet 21 years old. He graduated at the top of his class (1939) and was one of three recipients of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. This gave him the opportunity to travel and write for a year.
He headed for Europe in June. He knew by then that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. He traveled through Western Europe, then Eastern Europe and the USSR and back to Western Europe. Well, if you remember your world history, you remember what started happening on September 1, 1939. World War II broke out.
My father had hoped to stay and find work as a war correspondent, but despite his letters of recommendation, he couldn't find a job, and he went home, not on a Cunard liner as he had on the way over, but on a freighter taking refugees back to the U.S. Among the passengers was my father's cabin-mate --not by choice-- who turned out to be, so he said and my father had no reason to doubt him, Prince Felix Yussupov. You may remember him as the man who killed Rasputin. My father notes in his memoir that he "had never before met anybody who had killed a man, let alone boasted about it. Sharing a cabin with him was fun on an otherwise tense voyage, but I didn't sleep too well thinking about my new friend, the murderer." (p.23)
FoAoH decided to finish up his fellowship in Mexico City, so off he went. There were many estadounidenses there at the time: Mexico was warm, welcoming, and inexpensive. It was also, as my father discovered, desperately poor, and the Mexico City metropolitan area was already crowded then with a population over five million. He started freelancing and stringing (working part-time) for several newspapers and news services.
After he'd been there for a while, MoAoH got sick of waiting up in Brooklyn. She'd finished college by then, so, as I like to tell it, she said to her parents "Bye-bye, I'm going to marry FoAoH!" Okay, it wasn't entirely like that. My parents had both turned 21 by then, it was now early 1940, and my father saw that they could live quite well on under $15 a week, so they decided that they would get married sooner rather than later. My father wrote a letter to my mother's father, as one did in those days, and promised he would take good care of her. They had known each other for years so my mother's parents knew my father was a trustworthy sort, and they knew my parents wanted to get married. People didn't "get engaged" in those days, at least in my parents' circles. It was the Depression and nobody was buying or showing off diamonds on their left ring fingers, and my mother's family was never terribly conventional anyway, though they certainly believed in marriage.
My parents met at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York. They didn't become sweethearts till college but were in the same group of friends in high school. Like many in their high school --mostly children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants-- they attended public colleges: she went to Hunter College, which was all women at the time; he went to City College, which was all men. Both of those schools were way uptown in Manhattan, of course, and my family's version of "In my day we had to walk five miles to school in the snow, uphill in both directions!" was "It was the Depression, we lived at home, and we took the subway to school an hour and a half in each direction." Three hours of commuting a day to get an education. My mother is the one who talks about this.
My father was editor of the college newspaper and helped get a corrupt college president on the road to resignation, but that is another story and you can read it in FoAoH's memoir. He went on to a private university (Columbia) for professional journalism study. My brother also went there, years later, and I contemplated doing the same but didn't.
Back to the Mexico story. My mother took the bus down to Mexico City from New York. Yes, the bus. More like buses. I think her first stop was Indianapolis because she had an uncle there. Not sure whether or where she stopped after that, but it was a five-day trip. At any rate, she got to Mexico City safe and sound on a Friday, and the following Tuesday she and my father were married.
They married at the American Embassy because they were patriotic young people and wanted to be married on American soil. But the Ambassador wasn't empowered to officiate at weddings (unlike some other foreign diplomats) so they got a Mexican Justice of the Peace. Only civil marriages were valid in Mexico. A wedding at the JP's Registry office would cost two pesos, but they decided to splurge and go for the 32-peso wedding, which is what it cost to get married outside the Registry. 32 pesos in those days was about 8 dollars.
Foreign Service officers couldn't officiate at marriages but they could witness them (in the church that's the same thing, so I don't quite get the distinction, but there you have it) and issue a certificate of marriage so in addition to the Mexican wedding certificate, my parents got a U.S. certificate (for one dollar extra). I'm not sure whether the Consul General or the Ambassador signed the piece of paper, but they were both there. The Ambassador at the time was Josephus Daniels, a former Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson who was a former newsman -- how appropriate. I remembered he was a Southerner, but what I had forgotten and just re-read in the Mexico chapter of the memoir is that he was the founder-editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. That's Raleigh, North Carolina.
Meanwhile, my paternal grandparents had expressed the desire for my parents to have a Jewish wedding ceremony, so several days later PoAoH located a rabbi, which in Mexico City was not so easy, and he witnessed and officiated at a religious ceremony. It was in Spanish and Hebrew and they had a sheet or a tablecloth for a chuppah (the traditional wedding canopy) and my father didn't have a kippah (yarmulke) so he used a handkerchief tied at four corners. The part of this story I love is that the rabbi lived on Jesus Maria Street. Now there's a title for a novel: The Rabbi on Jesus Maria Street.
Parents of Acts of Hope did have a little reception with a wedding cake. The cake was the work of two Greek-American pastry cooks from Manhattan who after fighting in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (i.e. against Franco's forces) had settled in Mexico and opened a restaurant and bakery.
My father's memoir doesn't say and I haven't asked my parents, but it occurred to me a few years ago upon re-reading my father's description that these guys, Nick and Mike, were probably a couple. But maybe they weren't.
The cake had two white doves on top.
The big story in 1940 in Mexico was, of course, Trostsky's assassination, and my father, as a freshly minted journalist, got to cover it. There was a substantial cast of characters in the background shenanigans leading up to the assassination, including an American woman who had been one of Trotsky's aides. My father was stringing for the Jack Starr-Hunt News Service and among their clients was the N.Y. Daily News tabloid, which could care less about the politics of the story. Who cared if Stalin's arch-enemy had just been killed? The Daily News fired off to my father a cable that read "RUSH 1,500 WORDS GIRLIE ANGLE." Welcome to highfalutin foreign correspondent work.
After a few months in Mexico, with the fellowship year over, my parents returned to the U.S. and Brooklyn, where both their families lived. My father got a stop-gap editing job at the Brooklyn Academy of Music while hunting for a real job in journalism. At last, after six months, a real job materialized, and off my parents went to Herkimer, New York (for those of you who don't know, that's in the boonies, at least from a New York City perspective) where my father worked on the Evening Telegram newspaper for the magnificent sum of $35 per week.
The following year Pearl Harbor happened and my parents moved to Washington.
But that is another story.
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