Sit and Eat

On Feet

On Sunday night we had a foot washing. 

A few of us who were planning the service sat around beforehand talking about how things would go.  We weren't sure there would be enough towels for everyone's feet.  "Everyone should have their own towel," someone said.  "It would be gross to have to use someone else's foot towel."  We debated about the pitchers.  Could we take a pitcher that had been on the table and use it at the footwashing?  No, it was decided.  That was weird.  "People get really strange around feet," someone else said.  "I just think that nothing from the table should be connected to the footwashing."  Yet another person contributed: "Did you know that the feet and the genitals are right next to each other in the brain?"  There was a silence as we considered this.  "That makes sense," one of us responded.  "That's why I feel so weird right now."  We all nodded in agreement.

After dinner, we read the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet (John 13:1-17).  A fiddle was struck up, and played a mournful melody as we moved to the entryway of the church, where small lanterns and candles glowed on the floor.  There, chairs were set out with low basins and pitchers of warm water.  Silently, we removed our shoes and socks, and sat down, allowed a stranger or a friend to take our feet in their hands, pour water over them, and dry them firmly with a fresh towel. 

After, we stood together in our bare feet as the service wound to a quiet end.  There was a calm in the room, a steady, even sense of acknowledged humanity.

I'm struck by the anxiety, named and unnamed, that was poured into this act, and the release that came as a result of it.  Our desire to sanitize, to separate, create and maintain boundaries.  Our fears that our feet were repellent or ugly, somehow too much to be touched or held by another.  Perhaps the underlying fear is that we are too repellent or ugly to be touched or held by another. 

So we fuss and worry for a while, and then remove our socks and shoes, and reveal the part of ourselves that is most tender, most bruised and broken, most forgotten and neglected.  It is painful, perhaps terrifying.  But the touch we receive is sure and healing, the water warm and cleansing and fragrant.  And afterward, we somehow feel much better.

Sermon: So it goes

This sermon was preached at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 28.  The text is Matthew 26:31-35.  Read it here.

 

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Briar Rose.  There was a prophesy about this princess, that one day, she would prick her finger on a spindle and die.  Wishing to avoid this fate, her father, the king, ordered all the spinning wheels in the castle to be burned…

 

Once upon a time, there was a King named Oedipus.  There was a prophesy that this King would kill his father and marry his mother.  Wishing to avoid this fate, he fled Corinth and followed the road to Thebes…

 

Once upon a time, there was a man named Peter, who promised he would never betray his teacher…

 

 

It’s funny how we always seem to end up the very place we were trying to avoid.

And it’s funny how we seem to always end up doing the very things we promised ourselves we wouldn’t.

 

Fighter pilots call it “target fixation,” this strange phenomenon when our brain becomes so focused on an object or obstacle that we wish to avoid, that we run right into it.  Peter says he’ll never deny Jesus, and then he does just that.  And his failure has echoed through history, implicating all of us.  We all abandon Jesus, whether we want to or not.

 

I used to read these lines of Christ as a reprimand: Truly I tell you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times. You will all become deserters because of me this night.  But now I read them as a prophesy: Once upon a time, there was a man named Peter, who promised he would never deny his teacher.  But there was a prophesy: for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.

 

Jesus is not giving a warning, not chastising or reprimanding.  He’s simply telling his followers how all of this is going to unfold.  There’s no question mark:

 

You will deny me. 

You will abandon me.

You will crucify me.

 

Just as sure as Briar Rose pricks her finger on that spindle, and Oedipus meets and kills his father on the road to Thebes.

 

So it goes.

 

Author Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden in 1945.  His work, Slaughterhouse Five, was closely related to the experience of being held as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughter house as the city crumbled around him.  After the bombing, he and the other prisoners were forced to collect bodies and deposit them in mass graves.

 

Vonnegut was asked repeatedly through the years if he thought the bombing of Dresden, in which thousands of civilian lives were lost, should have been bombed.  He responded that Dresden had been bombed.  The question was how one behaved after that.

 

So it goes:

 

You will deny me.
You will abandon me.

You will crucify me.

 

Often, Christians get in the habit of approaching sin in a “let’s do better next time” sort of way.  As if, if we learn from each mistake, profit from each shortcoming, we’ll eventually “get it right.”  We’ll eventually be good enough to please God.  As if we can earn some kind of cosmic “A” on our eternal report cards.

 

Wrong.

 

God has no interest in us being good.

God has an interest in dying and rising.

 

God has in interest in the mess of the grave and the brilliance of the resurrection.

God has an interest in the love misplaced that leads to pain, and then to new birth, new life.

God has an interest in the broken places that are bound up and healed.

 

This story we tell, of Jesus’ death and resurrection -- it’s not a story to make us feel bad that we weren’t good enough to keep Jesus from dying on the cross.  It’s a story to allow us to remember that dying and rising is the very fabric of our existence.

 

You will deny me.

You will abandon me.

You will crucify me.

 

This is the substance of your very life, the material and matter you are made of.  That your soul is an intermingling of both darkness and light, and thank God we have this story to tell, that allows us to gaze into the depth of ourselves and recognize the darkness that resides there with the knowledge that new life is born out of the chaos and the ashes.

 

So it goes.

 

Truly I tell you, Christ says, this very night, you will deny me.

 

This night, and every night, in a thousand different ways, we deny him, the cycle of life and death spinning in on itself again and again, the holy drama enacted over and over again.

 

The question is not how to avoid it, because we can’t.

The question is now to live in light of it, to respond to it, in all its fullness.

 

 

We share our sermons at St. Lydia’s.  Please share a story from your experience that’s emerged from this text.

Learning to Pray: Gratitude

Here's a good way to pray.  Because gratitude is often much more foundational than I give it credit for:

Find a good way to sit.

Breathe for a while.

Relax that place right behind your eyes.

Remember your whole day, bit by bit.  Start in the morning and go straight through, in time with your breathing.  With each breath, each image, say thank you.

If there are memories that stop you, that need more, pause there and pray for whatever needs praying.

On Jazz and Intimacy

Last night I snuck off to the Jazz Standard to hear Marty Ehrlich and Ray Anderson, two players who I've been listening to for eight years or so.  The two have been musical partners forever.  They start playing and just slide right into one another's sound like they shared one mind and one body. 

One of the guys I used to play with told me once that finding a musical partner, a musical collaborator, is the key to it all.  You can't be who you are musically until you find the right people to play with.  Like finding a lover.  And once you find those players, the relationships are tight, complex, emotional.  Like a marriage, really.

I remember playing with him and the music feeling like it didn't come from either of us, like it was being pulled from us as we made it, chord changes leading us along, melody lines wandering from home and back, harmonies picked up and lined out.  I remember feeling as if my consciousness could retreat to a quieter place in me, and my body would make the music.

It's a sacred thing, to be able to climb into that space with someone.  I miss the act of it: the motions of putting my instrument together, the ritual of warming up slowly, the laughter and small talk that came before we played.  And then the improvisation itself: twining the sounds we made together into something that moved with complexity and beauty.  The music pulled us shockingly close to one another.  It was an intimacy we had no need to speak of or acknowledge.  After we played, the silence was thick and powerful, and no one said anything for a long time.

Sermon: This Needed To Be

This sermon was preached at St. Lydia's as part of our ongoing exploration of the book of Matthew.  The text is Matthew 26:6-13.  You can read it here.

In late November, I spent six days in a hospital room in Memphis as my grandmother died.  There was a six day gap that needed to be filled when neither my aunt nor my father could be there in the hospital, so I flew down to cover that gap.  My grandmother had suffered from a stroke, and during my time there as I ran interference between a team of doctors, nurses, my Aunt in Mississippi and my Dad in Seattle, we made the decision to cease treatment for the pneumonia my grandmother had contracted, and let her die.

 

The sounds and smells and images of death in a hospital are strange.  The whirring of machines mingles with the episodes of daytime television that are constantly running, and the nurses gossip as they move from room to room.  It’s just another day for them.  I decided that the third book in the Twilight saga would keep me distracted.

 

Between the all the visitors and the nurses we had hired to keep an eye on my grandmother 24 hours a day, I was not often alone with her.  It felt awkward to be there, alone with the nurse, like I was being watched, or like I was performing.  I read her the bible, sang old Baptist hymns to her, but in a tone that suggested I was apologizing for interrupting Days of Our Lives.

 

I would give the nurse long lunches, and when she was gone, I would brush my grandmother’s hair, rub lotion into her skin, sing with my full voice, and tell her over and over again, It’s okay, you can let go now.  Everything’s fine.

 

The nurse and I finally settled on a compromise for the television: a station that played looped footage of a rocky ocean shore.  How awful, I thought, to die to prerecorded ocean sounds. 

 

I longed for something that needed to be.

I longed to prepare my grandmother’s body for burial.

I longed to make that room a holy place:

to unplug the beeping machines and droning television

to create a shrine around her of the things that she held dear.

I imagined wrapping her in soft blankets in muted colors,

covering her in cut flowers,

chanting all night and all day over her,

pouring oil over her head.

I longed to prepare her body for burial.

 

But instead I sat curled next to her in a hospital chair holding her hand and stroking her hair, and half heartedly watched old episodes of Friends.

 

The woman who anoints Jesus does something that needed to be.  In a room filled with men talking, laughing, prattling on over her head, she sees a truth that no one else can see: that Jesus is preparing to die.  She has a longing that must be filled.

 

The oil pours down Jesus’ hair, runs over his face, seeps through his clothes and onto his chest.  The room is filled with a loaded, stunned silence.  Her action is astonishing, overwhelming, inappropriate, teeters on the edge of chaos, points toward darkness and the grave.  It is all too much, and Jesus’ disciples respond in indignation.  Flustered, insulted, they rush to fill the awed silence as she commits this act.

 

We’ve all been in a room just after something phenomenal has occurred, and someone speaks to soon.  They speak because they’re afraid of the power of the moment.  The disciples rush to fill the space, because they’re afraid of the power of the moment this woman has created, afraid of the truth she’s seen that they couldn’t bear to see, afraid of the authority with which she has performed this act, this thing that needed to be.

 

Curled next to my grandmother, my head was filled with the voices of these disciples.

My heart longed to sing without ceasing; the nurse might come in and hear you, they warned.

 

You are filled with a great longing, a longing that someone, at some point, encouraged you to suppress or ignore.  The part of you that yearns for a calling that is deep and rich, can be lost in the din of the disciples voices.  Unrealistic, they say.  Inappropriate.  Too much.

 

But what happens when ignore those voices, listen to our own sense of longing, loose our own sense of authority, the part of us that knows, this needs to be.  Inside each of you lurks a power and authority that you have learned to apologize for, because you figured out somewhere along the line that it scared people.

 

Of course it does.  And it scares you, too.

 

Each of you holds a jar of oil above your head, ready to let its contents spill messily out.

Allow the jar tip in your hands and the oil to spill, uncontained.

We share our sermons at St. Lydia's.  What stories have been brought up in you by the text and my words?

Dear New York,

Dear New York,

Thanks for being so friggin incredible all the time.

Here are some pictures of the pure joy you have afforded me today.

Love,

Emily

ps: those daffodils blooming in Central Park when I went on my run this morning?  Made my day.

Sun through my window, breeze blowing the curtains around.  Total bliss.

The map the St. Lydia's planning team for our Palm Sunday and Easter Services made as we planned the services together, and which I find inexplicably wonderful.

The sun sinking over the Lower East Side just before I had a really lovely meal with a really lovely friend.

Learning to Pray: Humming

My friend Ana Hernandez wrote this excellent piece on humming as spiritual practice in her blog, which I recommend.  Enjoy.

The Great Calm: Humming Your Way to a Peaceful Silence

Ana Hernandez

It may seem paradoxical that one of the most direct routes to silence and a peaceful state of mind is by making sound, but humming is the fastest way I know to achieve a deep meditative state. At the beginning of my prayer time, I sit on my cushion looking for silence and a little peace. Humming helps me to quiet my mind, so I can enter the realm of contemplation. Listening for the silence beyond the sound has helped me to be a little more mindful, and to keep my heart open in difficult situations. More important, the silence created by humming has allowed me to dive deeper than I thought I was capable of, and helps manage my emotions in a healthy, congruent way, through some painful storms.

Some people can practice sitting meditation for hours on end. Some of us have a hard time sitting still for five minutes, much less sitting for an extended period, and some find it difficult to clear enough interior space to be able to listen deeply when we do manage to sit. The first five minutes of sitting are always the hardest for me, and some days trying to calm down feels almost impossible.

In the Bible, there’s a story in Mark’s Gospel about a miracle in which Jesus stills a great storm. The disciples are out in a boat when a great windstorm arises,

“and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.” They wake the sleeping Jesus, and say “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

In his book The Dharma of Jesus, George Soares-Prabhu reminds us that "The great calm is not simply a return to a pre-storm quiet, but the attainment of a new depth of stillness, immeasurably greater than that obtaining during the anxious bustle that preceded the storm… We are suddenly made aware of the fact that the stilling of the storm… is a rescue operation in which the men are saved from the forces of destruction that continually threaten the world we live in. We experience vividly the precariousness of human existence lived out in a world teetering on the edge of chaos. The fragile boat of man’s existence can at any moment be overwhelmed by the sea.”

The fragile boat of my existence can be overwhelmed by any number of things. What I have been able to find through my humming practice is the depth of stillness of which Soares-Prabhu speaks. Humming 10-20 minutes every day has helped me to manifest a more open and reflective state. I can sometimes hear that still, small voice, and the amount of time I can sit quietly (without squirming) has increased. I feel more grounded, relaxed, and better able to cope.

Humming supports our spiritual and emotional health by helping us to be more in tune with what’s actually going on in us, here and now. To get started, just put your lips together and begin. Push your lips out lightly while humming softly, until you feel the vibrations nasally. That’s all there is to it. Try humming softly in the shower; on public transportation (no one will even hear you); while walking, or doing dishes. Hum loudly, softly, high and low, slide around; don’t be afraid to make sound. It’s important to play with your voice and see what it feels like. What you put into it is what you’ll get out of it, so don’t just hum from the neck up. Gently ride your breath. Have fun with it.

As the issues of your life drift by, notice how you feel, what’s comfortable and what isn’t, and revisit those places every couple of days to see what’s different. Pay attention to the changes in your breathing, the way it deepens, the space between your breaths, the energy within and around you. If you’re anything like me, and even if you’re not, my guess is that after a while, you’ll find you are very, very quiet, and you’ll have reached the place where it’s possible to just sit. The vibrations from your humming practice will keep working in you even after you cease making the sound, and you’ll be right where you need to be.

Enough

I’ve learned enough to know that sometimes you must wait.  Wait patiently or not so patiently for the small movement somewhere in your body to consolidate, find momentum, and swim gently or suddenly into words or action.

 

I’ve learned enough to know the emptiness and fullness of a room as death waits close by, the way the air is thick and ripe, and leans toward the next breath, the next breath, with slow eagerness or desperation.

 

I’ve learned enough to know that honesty is harder than we think.  That averting our eyes from tender places can become routine, then invisible.  Humble moments are hard earned: a swift and exhilerating sensation of falling open and away.  We anticipate pain, but find, instead, release.

 

Sermon: Peril and Desire

This sermon was preached at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 14 as part of our exploration of the book of Matthew.  The text is Matthew 20:1-16; read it here.

I spent this weekend with two very wise priests, Donald Schell and Rick Fabian, and this sermon leans heavily on their wisdom.

I spent the weekend singing, teaching people to lead singing the way we do here at St. Lydia’s, by lining out a song, bit by bit, until everyone can sing together, and then beginning to harmonize.  Singing for three days opens you up, leaves you raw.

It reminds us that there are things that we do, not because we have to, or we must, or we should, but simply because they feel…good.  They make our entire bodies vibrate, resonate.  They give us an experience of beauty, they draw us close to the divine.

Gregory of Nyssa writes that the thing that makes us most like God is our desire.  God makes a world because she longs to embrace it, longs for it with a desire that cannot be quenched.

Our desire, also, cannot be quenched.  We long for connection, for closeness, for touch, for revelation, for beauty. 

One of my wise priest friends said that the parables, these funny stories Jesus keeps telling that seem to turn our expectations on their heads, are always about two things:

reckless abandon: throwing everything else in the world away in pursuit of one thing,

and over abundance: an overflow that has nothing to do with need, and everything to do with desire.

The landowner in our story has a single minded focus on bringing in the harvest on this day.  He will do anything to bring in that harvest.  And so he hires laborers, but it’s not enough.  So he hires more, and more, throughout the day, so that everyone who’s idle might work.  And at the end of the day, he gives, and gives, the same to everyone.  Gives in a way that confuses all of our expectations, our sensibilities of what’s right, what’s fair, what makes sense.  He just gives.  He is not interested in what is necessary, or what is enough.  He’s compelled by desire, compelled toward abundance.

This is Christ’s picture of God’s realm.  A place that is governed not by fractions and decimals, mandates or procedures, but by the pouring out of goodness on those who haven’t even earned it.

My other wise priest friend said to me, there’s peril in this parable.  Look at how the landowner calls all the workers together and pays the last ones first, right in front of the ones who had worked from the earliest hours of the day.  He's intentional about it, and there’s danger in his generosity.  You can see the sinister looks, the crossed arms and grumblings of the workers  who put in a full day.  You can feel the head of simmering of violence.  This disruption, this idea that there really is enough for all, upsets something dangerous in us.

I learned a song this weekend from my wise friend Ana.  The text is, Kosi R'vaya, Hebrew for, my cup overflows.  Ana said to me, this tune has so much space in it, so much room and ambiguity, because of the text around it.  It’s drawn from Psalm 23, God sets a table before me in the presence of my foes.  She anoints my head with oil, and my cup overflows.

 The table is set, set by God herself, and the whole world is seated here, broken and hungry and lonely.  Our cup overflows, our feast is abundant, and we sit down to eat with those who might harm us.  This is the confusion and ambiguity, the wonder and the danger of the Gospel.  This is the good news of the Gospel.

We share our sermons at St. Lydia’s, and so I invite you to speak from your experience.  What stories does the text we’ve read and the worlds I’ve shared bring up for you?

On Crooked Hearts

A few weeks ago I sent this picture of worship at St. Lydia's to my friend Steve, who's a Episcopal priest in the Bay Area.

He wrote back,

"We love our crooked neighbors with our crooked little hearts,
and eat dinner by the light of our crooked little tea lights."

I love this.  He's riffing off Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening, a gorgeous little piece that begins with bold promises and proclamations and concludes in fatigue, disruption, honest and tempered wisdom. 

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

We may have crooked little hearts, but still, we love.