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.

 

I sing because

...it is in my DNA. Both my parents had fine voices, and though as a teenager I was embarassed in church because they sang so loudly, theirs were the best voices in every choir they were in.

But the singer line runs primarily through my mom. Her father, Leonard Kranendonk, is the man standing on the right in this photo. From him, my mother and my uncle (on the left) inherited their voices; from my mother, my sister and I inherited ours.

Mom was a coloratura soprano of astonishing range. She now sings tenor with her choir. My Uncle Bob, a true musician-singer, has a rich smokey baritone voice, and my sister's is a contralto as sweetly dark as buckwheat honey. But we did not all become professional vocalists; only my grandfather, my uncle, and I followed that path.

My grandad was for many years the lead baritone of Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, an internationally-renowned glee club that started in the late 1930s. My uncle also sang with them for a time. You may not have heard of them, but there would be no Glee TV show without them (and possibly no Robert Shaw Chorale, since that's where Shaw got his start). Waring had a weekly radio and then television show, and they are considered, I learned last year, to have been the original Show Choir. English was my grandfather's second language (he emigrated from The Netherlands), but his own perfectionism and Waring's Tone Syllables, a diction technique, resulted in what you will hear on this opening track from his only solo album.

Leonard Kranendonk The Lord is My Light

My grandfather and I did not agree on the role of improvisation, but I think he was proud of me, and I feel him with me every time I sing in church. And because he sang sunrise Easter services on a mountaintop, and blessings at the Thanksgiving table, I reckoned I could, too. Singing anytime, anywhere, without accompaniment was normal.

It's autumn in upstate NY. As winds tug at the leaves of gold and flame, the trees simply let go, and drop them (you want lessons in attachment and non-attachment? Look to the deciduous trees). It's getting colder. Both my grandparents lived into the 21st century, and I lost them only 11 years ago, my grandmother Elsie (who sang alto) in October 2011, my grandfather the following spring. I feel them, and feel the pull of the old songs that are my my most valuable inheritance, and the voices that carried them. All these years later, I'm the one singing loudly in church. But really, whom then shall I fear, when I never sing alone?

 

Skandalon

My title is a Greek word that turns up fairly often - 44 times - in New Testament. As you can guess, it is the source of the words scandal and scandalize, and it means stumbling block, something one trips over, something that causes one to fall. These things happen in life, but no one should be placing the stones so as to cause a fall, as Jesus said. "Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!" (Matthew 18:7). Paul wrote, in his letter to the Romans, "Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another... Let us then pursue what makes for peace and mutual edification." (Romans 14:13,19)

When two women from the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were tried and sentenced for an activist action in a church (or committing sacrilege in a church, depending on one's point of view), I became involved in an online discussion led by a member of a Christian religious order. I felt that person's position against the women of the band, even in light of the pain and anger the action had caused, was extremely harsh, and I posted a comment questioning that stance. We back and forthed a little bit, chapter-and-versing, but in the end, I was smacked down by Thomas Aquinas. Oof! Serves me right, perhaps, for messing with [a person of unnamed gender who is a member of an unnamed religious order of an unnamed denomination].

About a month has passed, and now a conflagration triggered by insults to the founder of Islam and his followers has caused riots, and killed our ambassador to Libya, along with several members of the embassy staff. These deaths are not justifiable in any way. They are heartbreaking. Information currently suggests that the protests were used by outside agents to cover the murders of the ambassador and embassy personnel. I am trying to separate the killings done by a few from the anger displayed by so many, across several countries.

If Pussy Riot's action was sacrilegious, it seems to me that the film Innocence of Muslims is, too. If we are to accept that churchgoers were hurt and scandalized when the punk band disrupted the sacred service, how can we not see that devout Muslims would be outraged by this film?

Someone - I think it may have been Fran Lebowitz - once wrote, "Your freedom to wear a lime-green polyester pantsuit ends where it meets my eye." There are limits, even for we Americans. I have heard people say that though the film is regrettable, we have freedom of speech. Yes, we do. Here. If we stay within our own borders. But elsewhere, where American law does not apply, we have to abide by the laws and customs of the country we are in. Even at home, we have to be prepared to accept the consequences of that free speech. In Muslim cultures, one does not make a picture of or a joke about the Prophet. I am sorry to have to say this, but really, if a five-year old can figure out that it's unwise to pull the kitty's tail, can't alleged adults predict that riots and violence will be the result of such "free speech"? That may someday change, but we are not the ones to force that change.

There is another definition of skandalon: the movable stick that triggers a trap, the stick that has to be carefully and deliberately set in order for the trap to function.

Someone made a movie defaming the prophet Muhammed. I have read it was intended to be a Christian evangelization tool. Most people smart enough to make a movie are probably too smart to have made such a colossal misjudgement, but it didn't matter much, because only about ten people ever saw the film prior to now. So who really decided it would be a good idea to release such a film, and to post a trailer on YouTube at this particular time? And who funded it? $5,000,000 went into that film. Instead of criticizing the quality of the production, why are we not asking who put up the money? Because it's not that easy to find that kind of money. If five million dollars grew on every tree, I would have planted an orchard, and be having a very different life right now.

Most Christians agree that it is, at the very least, bad manners to show blatant disrespect to Jesus Christ. Responses vary from person to person. Grief. Rage. A shrug. A prayer. But there is always a reaction. So what, then, makes it OK to similarly disrespect Muhammed?

Nothing. It is not OK. And we misrepresent the God of love we profess to follow when we allow it to happen in His name.

I don't know what the religious I conversed with last month might say about what happened and is happening in Libya, Tunisia, Sudan. And Aquinas? I have not studied his work much, so I don't know that, either. But I do know this: three months before his death, Aquinas, while serving at Mass, had a mystical experience that led him to say, "All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has been revealed to me."

 

Follow the leader, or rename the game

Anyone who grows up in the church has heard the stories. Jesus says "Be well!", and behold, someone is well. Jesus mixes up a poultice from some dirt and spit and applies it. He touches someone and says, "Your sins are forgiven,"  and they are forgiven. And that person is made well. Can see. Can speak. Can hear. Stops bleeding. Stops mutilating himself. Walks. Runs. Is not dead anymore, but living, and whole.

Only once are we told of a "stolen" healing. A woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, works her way through a crowd of people around him, and touches his robe, hoping that will be enough. And it is. She is healed. When he feels it happening, and asks, "Who touched me?", she comes forward in fear, and identifies herself. But he simply says "Your faith has healed you." It is nowhere recorded that he ever said, "You were not authorized."

Or, "No. Sorry. You've had enough relief from your sins, your pain, your grief. That's all you get this quarter."

Today, a dear dear friend, who suffers from chronic debilitating back pain needs to have a prescription fior pain meds refilled. She has injured her fragile back, and is in terrible pain. It should be simple. But it's not. She is told by a receptionist at the medical practice where she is a patient that, because of insurance and state rules, she can't get a refill without seeing the doctor, and the first available time is at the end of the month.

The month of August.

She asks to speak to her physician. "Doctor X is too busy to come to the phone." I am looking at her. She can hardly stand up straight. Pain is carving her face like granite.

I know this woman well, and you know what? She is a warrior. She pushes herself. She keeps going. She endures. She does not complain, or exaggerate, and she is not looking for a high. In fact, she doesn't particularly like how the drugs make her feel, except... they make the pain recede just enough.

She has health insurance, for which she pays a lot. The insurance company will cover a major and costly surgical procedure that has already been shown to be ineffective and sometimes dangerous in cases like hers, with a long recover time including physical therapy the insurance will not fully cover. My friend does not want this surgery. She just wants enough relief for the pain to be manageable.  This is why one sees a pain management doctor in the first place, yes? But her medications are rationed by cost analysis, as are her allowable office visits. There is no thought given to her actual condition, to which I am witness. Nothing I experience in the lasting effects of my car accident comes close to what she deals with almost every day.

So. I think about this week's House vote (the 33rd such vote) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I think about all the proposed cuts to or elimination of WIC, the Food Stamp program, Medicaid/Medicare. And about the man whom so many of our elected officials on both sides of the aisle claim to follow.

If we are so all-fired Christian, how do we dare to draw lines he never drew? I know things can be complicated, and that I am not aware of every problematic issue involved. But really. Once you develop the habit of calling yourself by his name, don't you also have to be going about the business of doing what he said to do?

Or are we just wearing lapel pins, and calling it a day?

 

Heaven? Brigadoon?

East of the sun, west of the moon?

None. All.

Ashokan.

Today I will drive across this bridge...

 

                                ... to get to this bridge...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... which I will walk and trip and undulate across every day for a week while teaching and singing at Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Western and Swing camp. My green heaven. The place of my song dream. The other way into Narnia.

I'll be back in the beginning of July.

Love letters and thank-you notes

A singer friend has been making her journey through a major illness that requires her full attention. To heal from the double assault of the disease and the medical response to the disease, she had to step away from her busy and public life for six months. Everything has worked splendidly, and now, almost done with treatments, she'll soon be picking up her juggling pins, and flinging her flaming torches into the air again. It is amazing, and wonderful, and pure gift.

Throughout her ordeal, people she knows and people she has never met have stayed in touch through email and Facebook posts, sending thoughts and wishes, prayers and video clips the way folks used to send chicken soup and homemade jam. I have been happy to witness the public Facebook part of this, because, years ago, such gentle "tapping on the window" helped call me back toward life. Illness and injury are not solely physical events. They have mental dimensions as well. Doubt and dread proliferate as wildly as out-of-control cancer cells. Loneliness crushes one's spirit as effectively as the metal of a car crushes bones. Friends and family may gather close, or they may not; but fear will wrap round you closer than air. So It helps to know that someone somewhere is paying attention.

On the top shelf of my closet rests a small wicker suitcase filled with letters gathered into packets and tied with silk ribbons. I received many of them during the long recovery period following my car accident in 1978, and they helped me recover. In truth, if not for the letters and my puppy Sonya, I would have faded away, so quiet was the phone, so strong the feeling of being left behind by the world I knew. In my rented house in Burbank, California, I was broken and poor and scared, but I could sit at a small table by a sunny window, and read letters from people who loved me. In my hands were pages their hands had written upon, had folded into an envelope and stamped, and sent to me.  My New York friend Linda wrote on creamy paper, my grandma Elsie on white. They both favored fountain pens and blue-black ink. My sister Babette could make me laugh to the point of helplessness (she still can), and the writer Gilean Douglas suggested I might be a writer too, which made me feel very good when I had been told I might not sing again. Though the journals of those years have been lost, these letters are my archives, and when I hold them in my hands again, I am as grateful as I was when I first received them over three decades ago.

So. Thank you, Linda, now living in a small town on a different island. Grandma Elsie, I miss you every day. Thank you, Gilean Douglas, for answering my fan letter, and beginning a conversation. Thank you, Babette, for the sacred sister silliness. You were all my doctors.

Oh yes, and thank you, puppy Sonya, for eating only two or three letters. If, Gentle Reader, you have been thinking of me for years as "that woman who never wrote back", now you know why.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mirror, mirror

I recently read something arresting in a blog called The Pagan Princesses. The writer, a pagan, wrote:

...the fact remains that we all of us [pagans] find inspiration in pre-Judeo-Christian gods. We all practice a faith focused on life and not on an afterlife.

The remark weighed on my heart because, though it should not be, that second sentence is too often true. Many who follow Christ seem to  ignore what he actually did and said, and focus instead on blame and punishment, and conversion-or-exclusion, all in his name. Some of these folks are in our government, and this grows more frightening every day.

What are non-Christians to think when Christians act this way? How are they to recognize how off-base that behavior is if the rest of us keep silent? Why do we allow harshness and cruelty to supplant Jesus' teachings as if replacing the pages within a book but keeping its well-worn cover?

You'd think everyone's forgotten how to read.

According to the gospels, Christ was very attuned to nature, relished a good feast, loved his friends, healed the physically and psychically sick, sang hymns, and in every way constantly reminded his followers to care for and help each other in this life. On this earth, in these bodies, with these hands. Love your neighbor, he said, and then showed that everyone is a neighbor. Love, to him, was not a theory or a nice idea, or something to be strained to exclude the unworthy. It was an all-embracing action, and not an action to be delayed until the budget was balanced, either. Love, and the economy of love, will always be in the red in human terms, as red as Jesus' words in many editions of the Bible. But in God's accounting - or the balancing of the Universe, if those words ring more true for you - love overflows all measure and always will. That is the nature of God's love.

To the politicians and pundits who describe themselves as Christian, yet are now insisting on holding back disaster relief because it's "too expensive", I ask this: did our Lord Jesus Christ bill the people he healed? Did he check his funds, polls, or vacation plans before he got on that donkey to ride into Jerusalem?

It's time, and long past time, to take "love your neighbor" seriously. Until we all do, I don't see how we can face what we see in the mirror every day, because if I am indeed created in God's image along with everybody else, then I should be seeing God in the mirror, and in every face I see.

To the woman who wrote the passage I quoted at the beginning of this post, and to all my readers, I am deeply sorry for the havoc wrought in Jesus' name, and for the meanness.

 

 

To Sir, with love

A rose is a rose, even when it's a McCartney rose. It was many years ago today (or some other day) that not-yet-Sir Paul McCartney pulled a perfect rose from a table centerpiece and tossed it into my hands as I was singing Heart's Desire with my Manhattan Transfer colleagues at the Brit Awards. At least, I think the event was the Brits. I was completely focused on Sir P. I confess that I was singing right to (or perhaps even at) him, and he... well, the story is going into my memoir, which I had hoped to write this morning, but it's too darn hot.

On Sir's birthday, June 18th, I am going to be singing a few of his tunes in Beacon, NY. Not too many, though. I don't want to hurt Johnny Mercer or Willie Nelson's feelings. Cole Porter can be pretty touchy, too. With me will be Tex Arnold on the piano, and because we had such a good time in Washington CT last month, my sister Babette will again be joining me in a few songs, along with guitarist (and nephew) Alex Brown.

The Howland Cultural Center is a very interesting venue. Built in the "Norwegian" style in 1872 as a library, and placed on the National Historic Register one hundred years later, it is now a performance space and art gallery. It's geothermally cooled (which cannot be said of my apartment, alas). I hope to see some of you there. If you are planning on coming, please do make your reservation right away, so as to be sure to have a seat.

By the way, the McCartney Rose, shown above, is a hybrid tea rose, introduced in 1995. It is described as a hardy repeating bloomer (like me and my career!) with a strong and intoxicating fragrance. This pleases me. Though a rose by any other name would smell as sweet in Shakespeare's time, most of the cut roses one can buy these days have no perfume at all. One sniffs a bouquet, and there's nothing.

Heavy the heart that, via the nose, encounters the unscented rose.

Open your eyes - you can fly

My little robins have flown! None of them are in the nest anymore. Two of them now occupy branches of a shrub under my living room window. I haven't yet located the third. The big move happened yesterday, while I was at a JaLaLa rehearsal. When I'd left, they were taking turns sitting on each others' heads in the increasingly crowded nest; when I returned several hours later, the nest was empty. At first I was worried, and when I had spotted them, I wondered if they needed rescuing. So, I did some research, and learned that, if the birds have fledged (i.e., developed the feathers necessary for flight), one must not assume they have been abandoned. Before rescuing them, it's imperative to wait and watch. The parents are probably still around, caring for their babes. And that is what is happening here. The parents are nearby, keeping watch, bringing food. Everything is happening as it should. The younguns are supposed to leave the nest, supposed to light out for the territories, and supposed to be at risk.

I am not all that pleased with the risk part. These birds have been in my consciousness for, what, four days? and I would have attacked the gardener if he bumped that tree with the lawn mower. But geez Louise, as the saying goes. How else can they (or anyone else) grow up?

Mrs. Peel also is still keeping vigil, moving from windowsill to windowsill. She and one of the adult robins have had several staredowns through the glass, with dialogue. "Cheep! Cheep!" shouts the bird. "Ack ack ack", replies the cat.  Their eye contact rivals that of any cabaret singer I know. And that's some serious eye contact.

Just outside my bathroom window, the abandoned nest looks very small now. But it really should be a pilgrimage site, because so many miracles  - blue eggs! hatching! feathers! flight! - happened there.

 

Speaking truth to power

Father Cletus J. Kiley, my spiritual director when I lived in Chicago, is a man of great passion and intellect, with a mimic's ear, and a keen sense of the absurd. Here, he offers an invocation at the 2011 gathering of the National Building and Construction Trades Conference. I admire him, and am fiercely proud of him. Please watch.