Laurel Massé

Sermonette, 8/11/2013

From time to time, I am invited to give a talk or to preach. If I do not completely embarrass myself, I'll post the "Sermonette" on the following Wednesday. This one's from last Sunday, 8/11; the reading was Genesis 15:1-6 (the text is in italics about halfway down).

 

I have a cat. Her name is Mrs. Peel. We live alone together, Mrs. Peel and I, and we talk to each other. I talk to her in my human language, and she, who can wake me out of a sound sleep with a silent stare and clearly does not need to use sound, talks to me in the cat language that research suggests is used only and specifically in order to talk with humans. Apparently, feral cats - i.e. cats living wild, without humans, don’t miaow . They vocalize, but not in the miaow tones. Those seem to be something they use on us because we are particularly dim and dense, compared to them. After all, they are of the species that has mastered temporary invisibility, and invented string theory.
 
I have had animals all my life, and so I have always been fond of the talking animals in scripture. Though some religion debunkers use these stories as fuel in their arguments against the Bible - talking animals? have you every heard anything so ridiculous? - they have never swayed me at all. What I really love about the stories is that the humans addressed by creatures show no surprise about it. When the snake says to Eve, “Did God say ‘you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’”, Eve does not say, “Wow! A talking snake!”. No. She simply answers the question, perhaps because a talking snake was no big deal.

Likewise Balaam, in the book of Numbers - when the donkey he’s riding refuses to try to walk through an angel and scrapes Balaam against a wall, this so angers Balaam that he strikes it with his staff.  “Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey” says the text (does this mean that God at some point closed the mouths of the animals? perhaps after the Fall? Perhaps there is an apocryphal text somewhere ) “and it [the donkey] said, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three time?’. And does Balaam say, “Holy Angel-in-the-road! My donkey’s talking!”? No. He just answers the donkey’s question.

Now, God talks to us in and through Scripture, even after the Fall. But between Cain’s plea for protection, and the next time a human addresses God directly, many many generations pass. Though the text abounds with “And God said”, there is no human spoken response.

Hebrew scholar and biblical translater Robert Alter says that repetitions of “And God said” in a passage, “And God said”  followed by another “And God said”, indicate that there was a silence, that the person addressed did not immediately respond. There was a silence, and then God spoke again. There are many “And God said to Noah” in the story of Noah, and not one “And Noah said to God”.

Likewise in the story of Abram. Abram has heard God tell him to get up and go, to leave his home and his birthright, his land, to go - where? To “A land I will show you.” Abram says nothing, gathers his clan, and hits the road. He travels. He goes to Egypt in a time of famine - how often help comes through Egypt in scripture! - and back. He fights battles. We are given three full chapters of Abram’s history before we get to this morning’s reading. Here, for the first time, Abram speaks back to God. This is a big deal. And not only talks back, but asks a question. Abram questions God. And this time, it is God who is at first silent. Listen again to the reading. Here is Alter’s translation:
   

After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield. our reward shall be very great.” And Abram said, “O my master, LORD, what can You give me when I am going to my end childless, and the steward of my household is Dammasek Eliezer?”
 And Abram said, “Look, to me you have given no seed, and here a member of my household is to be my heir.” And now the word of the LORD cam to him, saying, “This one will not be your heir, but he who issues from  your loins will be your heir.” And he took him outside and He said, “Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them.” And He said, “So shall be your seed.” And he trusted in the LORD, and He reckoned it to his merit.

“And he trusted”. Of course, the very next day, he asks, when God says, “I give you this land to inherit ”, How shall I know that I shall inherit?”. At this I picture God rolling her eyes a bit.

Two weeks ago, Mother Jennifer spoke of prayer, and last week Deacon Teri expanded on it by speaking of listening, and I guess I am talking about talking. Few of us these days hear God talking to us in language. Those who do are often swiftly medicated. But I wonder - did the Lord actually stop talking, or did we stop believing that the Lord will talk to us? Were we taught that revelation has closed, and thereby lose the ability to hear?

If we were, and if we did, we have to retrieve it the talent for hearing; we have also to renew the habit of flinging our questions, even our most frightened furious faithless questions, into God’s lap. Perhaps it is like finding a lost pet. You call, "Where are you?" You call and call, you listen, you call again, you listen, you hear something, you follow that little voice, you call again, you are led, you follow, you find, you are found.

 

Milky Way Night Sky Black Rock Desert, Nevada, photo by Steve Jurvetson.

Night Mail

In my new home, I can hear freight trains in the night. The tracks are two or three miles away, far enough so that the sounds of the trains, of wheels on the tracks and whistles at crossings, are both evocative and comforting as I drift toward sleep. I don't know what the trains carry, but in my dreams they are full of the letters we don't write anymore.

W.H. Auden wrote the poem Night Mail for a 1936 British documentary film about the mail trains. The music was composed by Benjamin Britten. How swiftly and efficiently the post offices in Britain and here in the States used to work before both countries turned away from the rails and took to the trucks and highways!

This clip from the film is actually part 3; the poem starts at the 2:40 mark. I have included links to parts 1 and 2 below. Thanks be to David Bromage, who has uploaded such a high-quality version to YouTube.

  

Night Mail Part 1

Night Mail Part 2

 And finally, you can read the poem here.

 

 

 

Letters in the mail

Thank-you, Wiki Gallery, for this drawing by William Mulready

One winter day decades ago, I walked east on slushy sidewalks from my freezing New York apartment, and ended up at the Morgan Library. I had never been there before, hadn't planned on going there, and yet, there I was. I spent the next several hours in a sort of trance, gazing at original manuscripts of books I'd read. For the first time, I could see the handwriting of authors who had held me though a sometimes-rough childhood and on into my adult life. Austen. Dickens. Mark Twain. Thoreau. Beatrix Potter, with drawings! I had loved the books, but seeing the hands - as in "she writes a fine hand" - moved me to tears.

This evening, I found a wonderful site, Archives of American Art that reminds me of the Morgan. This collection from the Smithsonian features letters and postcards from American artists, and it's worth looking at, especially if, like me, you still approach your mailbox every day in the hope that someone will have written something by hand, and sent it to you, as two of my friends still do. So, the future of the United States Postal Service matters a lot to me. I know there are huge money problems. I hear talk of closing branches, and limiting delivery days. But both those ideas seem problematic to me, and not enough anyway.

I wonder if any of these ideas might be more helpful.

1. Repeal the 2006 law requiring the postal service to pay roughly $5.5 billion a year into a retiree health benefit fund. Did I say pay? I meant pre-pay. This is to protect retirees who have not even entered the work force yet, for heaven's sake. Is there any other corporation that has to do this? Or governmental agency?

2. Take away congressional franking privileges. The same people who voted the above-mentioned law into existence don't pay postage on their promo. They don't call it promo, but it is. People who don't pay for postage shouldn't be deciding whether or not to pass a law so dramatically affecting the post office, a law that they would never pass if it applied to their own (or their donors') corporations. Buy your own stamps, congressfolks.

3. Write letters, put stamps on them and drop them in the mailbox. Too slow? Perhaps. Yet, how much of what we have to say really has to be read right now? Have you ever finished a steamed (or steamy) email and hit "send" and only then realized what a very bad idea that was? That same note in an as-yet-unmailed envelope still sitting on your desk would have been such a relief. Believe me. I know.

 

 

 

While I was away, and why

 

 

Moving is always tiring, but this time... wow. It took a long, long time to settle in and to recover. So many boxes, so many trips. Scorching heat and monsoon rains. A failing computer. A severe bout of bronchitis - phew! Falling, exhausted, into a hitherto unimagined lassitude, I tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrowed. I could neither put pen to paper nor fingers to keys. Instead, I rested, and reread the first book in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. And then I reread the second book. And then I had to reread them all. Because, as Duane writes in So You Want to Be a Wizard, "Reading one book is like eating one potato chip."

(Eating just one chip is both impossible and improbable, and so is reading just one of her books).

So, now I am restored. And there are no more boxes in my apartment. And if that ain't wizardry, I'll eat my hat potato chip.

 

 

 

 

Dances with boxes

I am moving, box by box, up a narrow stair and round a tight corner, into my new home. Though my back be achy, my heart is singing. And Mrs. Peel likes the new digs.

When my muddy bootprints have been cleaned from the floor, and the kettle's on, and I can think in complete paragraphs, I'll have stories to tell, about cabbages and kings, and the kindness of strangers. And about light.

New nest for a songbird

Painting by Jeanne Illenye

As I have mentioned before, my life has been somewhat nomadic. My family moved many times during my childhood, and as an adult I continued that tradition. This Saturday, having found a little apartment in a small town, I'm doing it again.

With every move comes a challenge. Stairs, narrow halls, remote locations at the end of mud-pit "driveways", crowded city blocks with no place to park the moving truck, heat, rain, snow, and the occasional moving crew that has to be gently taught how to do its job. The challenge this time: space.

I am about to take up residence in what I think is the smallest space I have ever lived in with my own things (which leaves out several months in a Hollywood furnished studio memorable for its window blocked by a living wall of bamboo plants). According to my calculations, my new nest is about 342 square feet. And there are stairs. Narrow stairs. Only one flight, but still, narrow.

Downstate an hour or so, my belongings fill a 10'x10' storage unit almost to the ceiling. Clearly, everything there will not fit in the apartment. 

It would be nice to sell lots of things. But that's neither simple as posting a picture, nor as swift as setting up a table in the yard (no yard!) and raking in the cash. The real need is this: something's gotta give. Which means someone's gotta give it up, and give it away.

So much of what I have accumulated is for a life I don't have, and have not had for decades. What I mean by give it up is release the attachment to an old dream, and to other peoples' dreams, of what and how my life should be. That's hard, almost. But I am going to out myself: it's only logistically hard. The thought of having less, fewer, one or two rather than many - that thought makes my soul sing. Why have twelve stem-glasses for red wine, when I drink my wine from a little Arco glass one step removed from a jam jar (and don't snort at me. I learned it in France)? Do I need six or seven fat books on jazz history, and eight books on dog training when I know there is only one I might use again? Or boxes of sheet music in the classical vocal repertoire that I will most assuredly never sing? Even when I keep the pieces my grand dad and my mom studied, that leaves a big pile to release. Can you say "church rummage sale"? Can I?

The hard part is the sorting, because of time limitations and of the degree to which the enchantments of sentiment and fear cut into that limited time. Oh, but so and so gave me that. And uh-oh, what if I need this someday and can't afford to get another one, or they don't even make it anymore? Lord, spare me from myself.

So, please lift a glass to my new home, to my 342 square feet of light-filled, cross-ventilating, clean and quiet apartment sweetness. If you need a glass to lift, let me know. I have many.

And if you feel like lifting a box on Saturday, hello and thank you.

And please go here to see more of Jeanne Illenye's lovely work.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

'Tis a puzzlement

Vermeer "Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid" (detail)

The sky is slate grey, and trees are bending and flailing in the wind. Some may fall, as did a big old white pine a week or so ago, with a crack and a whoosh and a ground-shaking thud. Every day is a little apocalypse in the country. Every day, everywhere, really, but here it's easier for me to notice. Life is change, and because we are pattern-seekers, we ask questions both sublime and ridiculous, to try to find rhyme and reason to it all.

Lately, I have been wondering:

What would happen - or not happen -  if I closed my Facebook pages? Would I stay in touch with people? Would they, with me?

Why is it assumed that proving and having a scientific basis for various phenomena therefore proves that there is no God?

Why do we get our knickers in a twist about whether or not Beyonce lip-synchs, and passively accept school music program budget cuts that will guarantee that the next generation won't even be able to record their own vocal track to lip-synch to?

Why is the conversation sound quality of cell phones so poor?

When driving is so damaging to the environment (gas and oil) and to our pocketbooks (gas, oil, tolls, insurance, registration fees), and we are being urged to use public transportation more, why are trains almost always more expensive (Amtrak, I'm looking at you) than driving?

Why does it matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, when the amazing thing is that they were written at all?

Since when does "preaching to the choir" mean that you're talking to people who already agree with you? Has no one ever listened to choir room conversations?

And is there anyone who really, truly, honestly can't believe it's not butter?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A song in my heart, and a cold in my nose

Gustave Doré, Angelic Host (because, sometimes, singing with a choir feels like this).

One might think that, living in a more isolated area as I do, and staying in a lot while my arm heals, as I have done, that I might not catch (or be caught by) any of the foul cold contagion that has been swooping through grocery stores and malls. But alas, whatever little I did out there in the populated world was the wrong thing to do, and I have spent this day with chills and sniffles and sneezes. Tired of hearing all that, I have been listening to music of all kinds. Here is today's favorite.

In February two years ago, I flew to Chicago to be part of one of the most deeply moving projects of my career, a live recording session for Roman Hurko's choral Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. This Ukranian Catholic work is the first in that tradition to be written in English (rather than translated into English). The work was premiered in New York two months later, and again I was privileged to be in the choir.

I cried a lot over this music, and still do, though not because of its complexity. In fact, it is disarmingly simple to sing. Any congregation with the habit of singing in parts could manage the choral pieces. But it touches something very profound in me, deep in the bright dark place from which I say, "Lord, I believe!" and then right after that, "and... help my unbelief." The rising, swirling Alleluia is particularly beautiful. The whole liturgy is sung without accompaniment, and, as one reviewer said, "From the very first “Amen,” one knows that the Kingdom has come in power (see Mark 9: 1)."  

This is one of several recordings I turn to when I need to feel stronger, more hale, hearty, and human; even when the music soars,  it has the unique earthy quality of mortal voices, and it reminds me I am not alone.

You can read more about this music and the rest of Roman's work, listen to some tracks, and order the CD, here.

While you do that, I'm going to make tea.

 

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.