Laurel Massé

To the Christians in the House

I once had a manager who thought he was John Galt. Or at least a John Galt. Even though I adored him, I knew he wasn't. And when he went on to embezzle a substantial sum, it bore out my literary instinct.

I knew, though, who he was talking about because I had read Atlas Shrugged as a younger girl. So much younger, in fact, that my mother had taken the book away from me, saying, "You don't need to read that. You're selfish enough already." But I eventually read through to the end.

So when Ayn Rand's writings came back into public notice with the advent of and media attention to the Tea Party and the Libertarians and Paul Ryan's Randian Catholicism (an oxymoron), I did not have to run out to buy the book to understand that there would be trouble ahead for women, immigrants, and the poor from anyone who followed her precepts. Which are horribly, horribly selfish precepts, and idolatrous, and about as far as one can get from the teachings of Jesus.

A group of Christian faith leaders (Faithful Filibuster) gathers every day Congress is in session across the street from the Capitol  building to read scripture out loud, especially the 2000 verses that tell us how to care for the poor. This is both a protest, and a public education service. Obviously there are a few folks in the government who have clean forgotten that the Bible has any use other than as a weapon with which to bludgeon people.

Those same forgetful folks have also forgotten their Ayn Rand. For it is not, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroic capitalists alone who bring down the government, and with it, the entire culture. It is the giddy, greedy, cruel Wesley Mouches, out for themselves.

You have changed the rules in the House so as to prevent any change in direction. You bark about the Constitution. You would edit out the uncomfortable bits of Jesus' words. Show me how you are not a Mouch.

Listen up, House. You dance yourselves into a tunnel of an ever-shrinking width. It is not the narrow path to heaven. It is a death trap. You will soon lose the ability to turn around. You are worshipping power, and money, and individualism. You are throwing other people's children into the fires of Moloch, in the belief that wealth and particular interests will take care of you if you legislate the sacrifice of others. They will not take care of you. They will use you, and devour you, and fail you, and forget you. They are false idols.

Relent. Repent. Come back into the daylight. Help save our country by saving its people. The Lord, which you claim to proclaim, said to love God, and love our neighbor, to heal the sick, and raise the dead. 

It's time to take Him seriously. It is time to turn around. Come back to your senses. We need you. Come back to us.

 

Darkness, darkness

Old Man Grieving by Vincent Van Gogh 

 As we grieve with the families of those killed a few days ago in Washington, DC, I've learned that a man I knew in childhood ended his own life on Tuesday. It was not an accident: he left a note.

His wife had been uncomfortable about having a gun in the house - they had several children, one quite young. But it was still there, and he used it.

Would he have changed his mind, or waited a little longer, if the methods available for self-destruction had been slower-acting - drugs, for instance - or more difficult to arrange or contemplate? Could he have been found before he died? We will never know.

I weep to think that he was in such pain. I mourn for his family and friends, for I know he did love them, and they loved him. But depression overcomes, and then devours; at some point, for some people, the hands that reach out to help are not seen,  the voices crying "I love you" are not heard, and there is no light anywhere.

There is pain all around us. Some we see. Some we mismeasure. Some we don't notice at all. May God give us vision. May we help to ease one another's pain, even if only a little, and may that little somehow be enough.

 

 

 

 

Last night I dreamed of Elvis

I am on a film set, working; there is a catering tent (like Harrod's Food Hall, but smaller) where the tea is plentiful and good. There is also a Cathedral set, and an airstrip. A small turbo-prop lands, a little stairway is wheeled to the door, and out comes Elvis, who sees me, and turns to English actor Bernard Hill. "Look! There's Laurel!", he says, and they smile big bright sunrise smiles, and come down the stairs.

Elvis looks great. He is older, of course, as he should be, and a little stout, but healthy and happy, and full of life and laughter. We've been friends ever since Bernard first introduced us.

Now, my babysitters were Elvis fans. I was a little too young, and then my family moved across the Atlantic to Solihull, England, and it wasn't until the Beatles were on the telly there in 1962 that pop music came into my life. I've dreamed of Paul McCartney many times over the decades since then, but this is Elvis' first appearance. What a great guy he turns out to be!

 

On set with director Cornelia Moore (wearing headset)

And how interesting it is that we are neither in a recording studio, nor on a concert stage, but on a movie set. A concert takes an evening, a recording, a few weeks or maybe months (for most artists), but movies are long projects. They take time, and require a vast number of people to work at a vast number of specialized tasks, some seen, some only felt. But everyone focuses on a common goal, everyone serves a vision.

 

While with the Transfer, I did a lot of TV, but I've only been on one film set as a performer (rather than a visitor), and only for a day. Cornelia Moore, director of Camilla Dickinson (a screen adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel, Camilla), called me to be a nightclub singer in a scene, and so off I flew to Spokane, WA, for a day of location shooting. As soon as I arrived on set, I felt that "thing", that magic, in cast and crew. Shared purpose, connection, speaking a common language - it was in the air. And at the end of that one day, when I heard "that's a wrap for Laurel Massé", I was knocked over by a wave of sadness. Time to go? Already? Oh. I wanted to stay, to be part of the story, because of that "thing".

I am a sucker for that thing. It is what I loved about doing King Lear with Project Rushmore Theatre Company. It's what I love about Ashokan, and why I would often rather see a band in rehearsal than in performance. It's the shared purpose, the collaboration; it's a participation in the Beloved Community, and it's the story we tell. 

Here's an image that gives the sense of what I am talking about. It's The Quilting Bee, by Grandma Moses. In this painting, every stitch is a story. Elvis has not yet arrived...

 

And here is a link to an article about Cornelia, in which she talks about her film, her writing, and her godmother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's the little things

My local PBS station shows Downton Abbey in a most helpful way. Every Sunday, the preceding week's episode runs an hour before the current episode, so I get to see each one twice. This really works for me, because I can watch once for the story, and once for the craft of of how the story is presented (acting, direction, set dressing, costuming, and most of all, the writing). I often notice small details I missed in my first enthralled swoon.

The same thing sometimes happens with books. You may know that I reread Little Women every year in Christmastide. I am too embarassed to tell how many repetitions it took before I noticed all the homeopathic remedies the March family used, or that Marmee was "a born singer".

I miss things all the time in scripture, even though I've read the Bible more than once over the years, and in different translations. I have a strong sense of the arc of the stories, but bits I could swear were not there the last time I looked keep appearing, little word-bomb epiphanies.

(Which is why I don't have a Kindle. With that kind of inattention to detail, when would I notice that They have changed what Jane Austen wrote?)

And hearing the story is so necessary to me that I have taken to solitary reading aloud, coming full circle 'round to the kids to whom I used to feel so superior in elementary school because they moved their lips and whispered when they read. Mrs. Peel stares at me. My comeuppance is here.

It's when I hear it "for the first time" that I notice what I missed.

For instance: on at least three occasions. recorded in the gospels, Jesus is goes away from or ahead of the crowds and of most of the disciples, taking with him only Peter, James, and John. They were the witnesses when he raised Jairus' little girl from the dead, they were the witnesses to his mountaintop conversation with Moses and Elijah, and they were with him in the garden at Gethsemane, where they gained their reputations as the sleeping guys, because when he said "stay awake," they fell asleep, and not just once.

Last Sunday's gospel reading we Luke's account of the Transfiguration, that meeting of Jesus, Moses and Elijah. I noticed two things. First, the same guys who were later going to sleep through Jesus' deepest despair almost missed his transfiguration because they were "heavy with sleep". I had not caught that before. Second, there is a pretty big difference in translation between the RSV (Revised Standard Version) which is what I read at home, and the NRSV (New RSV), which is used in The Episcopal Church and others.

Here is the RSV: And as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, and when they wakened they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.

Here is what I heard in church: Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.

Well, then! They got sleepy, and either did or did not fall asleep. I rather think they did. Getting sleepy would not be such a big deal, but falling asleep is worthy of mention. Either way, their heavy-liddedness in the garden was clearly not without precedent. I love Luke for including this detail (even if it didn't happen that way) for what it gives to the story.

Putting belief aside, as a writer I am often taken by the stylistic differences between the four gospels. Matthew is almost professorial, Mark is immediately-suddenly-at-once breathless, Luke inserts little details the way Madeleine L'Engle puts the making of peanut butter sandwiches into her stories of interdimensional travel, and John is swept away by light. In fact, one of the reasons I prefer the RSV at the moment is that these differences seem less smoothed-out in translation.

And translation is always the rub, isn't it? Events translated into memory, memory into words, words into different languages, languages altered by time. Add cultural differences and editorial slant, and wow, it's amazing any two people sitting next to each other on a church pew can agree on anything about scripture. We don't even need non-believers in order to get into arguments and have schisms. I once lived in a small country town that had a First Baptist Church on the main drag, and an Independent Baptist Church up the hill.

It doesn't take a historian to figure out what happened. Some little thing, I'm sure, that hadn't been noticed before.

 

 

 

 

A different epidemiology

On December 16th, two days after the horror of the Sandy Hook shooting, I took a fall while away from home. Some very kind folks picked me up from the pavement, and the good monks at the monastery put me up for the night. I drove back north the following day, jaw set in determination against the pain of what turned out to be a broken arm.

In the following days of forced inactivity, I noticed on Facebook that a friend had broken her collarbone. Another, his ankle. Another, her wrists. Suddenly there seem to be gravity vortices everywhere.  A bronchial thing is going around, too, a virulent strain that lasts for weeks. Many of the people I know are sick, coughing, sniffling, wheezing. Others have been felled by a stomach bug. And I read last night that there are already a record number of flu cases reported.

I am not a doctor, and I'm not a scientist and I can't prove what I am about to say. But I have a feeling about all this. I believe that, because of that happened to those children, our collective heart broke, is broken, and with God-given wisdom, our bodies have refused to continue with "business as usual".

Sometimes the show cannot, must not, go on.

Many religious and cultural traditions allow (or even require) the mourner to step away from chronological time for a set period. The Jewish custom of sitting shiva comes to mind, as does the true Irish wake. Both practices - and I know there are countless others - surround the mourners with community, helping hands, and memory keepers.

I pray that those who lost their loved ones, their precious jewels, the light of their lives, had such rituals and help. I am sure they did, at least in the immediate days and weeks. But the rest of us, gut-punched yet not killed, may not have taken full stock of the personal damage. Loosed from traditions of faith or ethnic origin, as many now are, we try to go on as if, like Shane, we can handle everything on our own. I think the lone hero is a particularly American vision and ideal. We feel empathy with and sympathy for the parents, the teachers, the children of those who were killed, without recognizing the magnitude of our own wounding. Falling down or being taken ill can be explained by ice on a step, germs in the air. And yet, I am certain there is more: the contagion of grief, inhaled. The heart so heavy that trying to lift it alone makes you stumble.

There have been several shootings and other large tragedies since then, and small ones beyond counting, as there always are. "Blows upon a bruise", as Evelyn Waugh once wrote. There is nothing we can do to prevent all such events. But we need to consider, thoughtfully, prayerfully (if we are of that mind) what we can do. And to truly accept the notion that no one of us can carry these burdens alone.

Circling, circling

No matter how many wings we have, if and when one breaks, we circle.  My own broken wing, my arm in a sling, has reminded me that Advent is neither a journey from here to there, nor a path from this day back to then. It's a spiral, toward the center. Now is then, there is also here. And here is everywhere.

All we, in the darkness, circle what light we can find. That's where we tell stories, and listen to stories, big ones, because each of us needs a bigger story than the story of self.

A lion roars creation into being, a rat looks on a god, a hobbit saves the world, the boy who lived defeats that which could not live. All of these draw from deep myth, and so do many elements of the story of the birth of Christ. As people feel they must remind me, every year. As if myth means untruth.

Any writer, mystic, or mathematician will tell you that what is true sometimes does not fit into what is known to be factual. We must not forget that music was being made long before there was music theory to dictate how one could or could not make it. Languages were spoken long before there were systems of grammar, and I am pretty confident that theos preceded theology. We start so big, and then, in the process of categorizing things, we get small.

I remember being taught, in primary school, that we humans were different and special because we used tools. But as it turns out, so do ravens. Or because we made songs. So do whales. Or have dreams. Ha! Ever had a sleeping, twitching cat on your lap? Or because we just knew stuff. Homo sapiens. Please. We don't even know how to be polite half the time, much less be fully human.

But all is not lost, because we still tell stories. Perhaps someday, if we ever learn to be still and listen, we will hear all the stories around us. Day to day pours forth speech, says the Psalmist, and night to night declares knowledge. Trees might talk to us about community, rocks might teach us to take the long view. Cats have things to say about attention; ravens, about rollicking. Then, maybe, when something impossible and unfactual is nevertheless true, we won't need angels scaring us half to death by shrieking "FEAR NOT!" just to get our attention.

 

About manners

My stepmother has the loveliest manners of anyone I know. She is thoughtful, compassionate, and unfailingly kind, she engages people in conversation and listens to what they say. In the years I have known her, I have watched the effect she has on people. They feel happier when she is near. They feel acknowledged.

I think such courtesy is a profound indicator of character. Manners matter. I am not talking about the unthinking mouthing of meaningless politenesses, I don't mean which fork one should use for the salad course, and I am not espousing rules for rules' sake. What I am talking about is perfectly captured by Alexander McCall Smith, in his book The Sunday Philosophy Club. In this passage, the primary character, Isabel, a philosopher by profession, muses about Toby, whom she has just met:

Jamie had good manners. Paul Hogg had good manners. Her mechanic, the proprietor of the small backstreet garage where she took her rarely used car for servicing, had perfect manners. Toby, by contrast, had bad manners; not on the surface, where he thought, quite wrongly, that it counted, but underneath, in his attitude to others. Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs. Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this, and it always showed. They were impatient with those whom they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged. The person with good manners, however, would always listen to such people and treat them with respect.

This was not the best book I have ever read, but that passage is the best I've ever come across on true courtesy. Once we start "paying moral attention to others", we cannot escape our connectedness; that we are our brother's and sister's keepers becomes obvious. Then life gets very interesting indeed. I am trying to do a better job of embodying this quality. And in this election season, I'm watching for it in the candidates. It's easy to see, so far, that some have it in their bones.

And others don't even have it on the teleprompter.

Baby, who do you love?

Now that presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, people are talking more intensely about the religious aspects of the race. We are starting to hear not-Christian/ too-Christian accusations, and they are being met with a lot of "it's nobody's business", which, to a certain extent, is true. It is very difficult to live an always-conscious life of faith. Everyone who is trying to do it is stumbles, falls, and gets back up again on a daily basis. Nobody gets it right all the time. And yet, I believe there is good reason to consider Mr. Ryan's religion when weighing his merits or lack thereof (he is Catholic); he is the one who brings it into the conversation, as he has also done with his admiration of Ayn Rand's philosophy.

As I understand it, Catholic teaching stresses the importance of caring for the sick, the poor, tthe hungry, he immigrant, the prisoner, the oppressed, and the aged as a primary way one expresses one's love of God. Ayn Rand's philosophy says that the poor are poor by their own doing, and do not deserve assistance or care, that we are all on our own, and that the successful business person has more intrinsic value that the less successful one. Mr. Ryan is guided by Rand, yet claims his religion, too. Can one follow both these ways of thinking and being? Jesus said no: "No one can serve two masters... you cannot serve God and wealth". And so did Rand: "Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society". Jesus said "Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself." Ayn Rand wrote, "This God, this one word: I."

I picture Mr. Ryan, with The Bible in one hand and Atlas Shrugged in the other, as a matter/anti-matter event about to happen.

Which is his deeper allegiance? I would say, discerning from his recent statements, his political history, and the budget that bears his name, that he is more Randian in every issue except abortion (which she supported). So, it matters to me that he professes to be Catholic while seeming to not honor most of the tenets of the faith. That dissonance is important.

Same with Mr. Romney. I don't care that he is a Mormon. But, since he has brought it into the discussion, is he a good Mormon? Mormons place a very high value on community and on compassionate service. Does he personally serve in the network of mutual support and assistance that is a defining feature of that church, and that helps the community to prosper? Or does he simply have his accountant send a check? Do his proposals square with what he professes to believe, not one day, but every day?

Asking this kind of question does not constitute faith-bashing. It is looking for a standard upheld, a target at least aimed at, for more rather than less harmony between words and actions. Yes, one's religion is no one else's business. But if it's offered up as a reason one is the the better candidate for high office, it merits investigation. Ya gotta walk it like ya talk it, especially when you decide to walk in front of cameras, and talk into the microphone.