Sit and Eat

Movement between Moments

I bought a bike on craigslist and am now completely obsessed with it.  I refuse to get on the subway.  Every time I get on the bike instead of the subway, I have this little thrill of freedom.  No, I will not go underground and stand, deflated, among detritus and rat droppings.  Rather, I will don a helmet and take my life in my own hands as I dodge taxis trying to cross 14th street. 

I know I'm prone to using this statement, but it really is pretty much the best thing ever. 

Tonight I was pedaling home along the Hudson River just as the sun was dipping down over the horizon, and as I rounded the corner before the Boat Basin at 79th, I was overwhelmed.  Whatever those flowering trees that are blooming right now, were this riotous shower of pink and white and green, and the sun was hitting the water and shining through the haze in a way that seemed to make everything glow golden.  There was this big old barge motoring along toward the George Washington Bridge in the distance, and it seemed for a moment as I creaked along on my bike that the whole world had found some uncommon moment of joy and wonder.  Just a moment.

I wanted to take a picture so I could show all of you here.  To say, "Look, do you see how gorgeous the world is?"  But I didn't want to stop riding, because I didn't want the feeling to end, and most of all, I knew that the beauty I had felt would be strangely absent from any photograph I could take.  Moments like these don't like to be captured.

Our lives are made up of so many fleeting moments of joy or misery or grief or comfort, strung along something, a thread, a cord.  Whatever it is that holds them, suspended, that finds cohesion and grace in the movement between moments, I call it God.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

On Algebra

I wrote this piece for a project called "Visible Witness," a ministry of St. Peter's Church in Manhattan "reflecting the spectrum of gender and sexuality through the love of Christ."

*    *    *

[Jesus] asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? ...Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them — do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."

-Luke 13:4-5

 

 

As a high schooler growing up in the suburbs outside of Seattle, friends were often surprised when they found out I was a Christian.  “But Emily,” I remember one girl saying to me, incredulous, “I thought you were a democrat.”  My Christian peers were the “love the sinner, hate the sin” type.  Perpetually cheerful and wholesome, they approached the world with a measured logic, as if employing some kind algebraic equation of salvation: if x, then y.

 

At the Episcopal Cathedral I attended in Seattle, the homeless kid with the mohawk and the dog tied to a rope hung out in the back pew while grey-haired-ladies warbled antiphonal psalms.  Queer couples wandered up the aisle to receive communion holding hands and no one commented on whatever bizarre assortment of clothing I had assembled that morning.  As a fourteen year old I watched as our congregation fought to marry Jim Black and Thom Monnahan.  What I learned in that place was that God doesn’t work by equation.  No one in my congregation could be pinpointed, or even placed, on a map.  We were nomads and radicals, addicts and bewildered teenagers, overeducated and underemployed.  What I saw was the way we loved each other, fiercely, and, eventually, taught each other to love ourselves.

 

I was lucky enough to learn early to be wary of false prophets who claim to know the mind of God.  Epidemics as a punishment for sin?  Wrong.  Earthquakes as a punishment for sin?  Wrong.  I knew that God’s love was broader, bigger, wider, messier, then that.  I had seen it pass between the eyes of Thom and Jim as they took hands and walked forward to receive communion. 

On Complete and Total Failure

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t complete and total.  In fact, maybe no one noticed it but me.

I teach choir at First Presbyterian Church in New York.  Last Sunday our Youth Choir sang for the first time – an arrangement of an Early American hymn tune that I had set to a modern text.  I was pretty proud of it.  They sounded incredible.  Everybody was robed up.  We stood, we sat, we confessed, I lined them up on the stairs.  My fifth graders were actually behaving themselves.  All was well.

I had asked the organist to give me a D.  You know, so I could start the kids singing on the right pitch?  Well, something happened.  The organist improvised around a bit, I somehow got disoriented, and I lost the pitch we were meant to start on.  Instead, I was on a higher pitch.  And I knew it was too high.  And for whatever reason, I completely froze.  I couldn’t hear the D.  I couldn’t even find myself a note to start on that would have been close to a D.  I stopped hearing, thinking, listening.

The thing is, this has actually never happened to me.  I don’t freeze in performance.  But I did on Sunday.

Then a strange thing: I hummed the note (the one that was to high) to the kids.  They hummed it back to me.  I thought, Oh God, that’s way too high.  And I started the piece. 

And the kids came in on a D. 

How it happened, I will never know, but I know that I had nothing to do with it.  Those kids made a unspoken, unconscious decision, together, without me, and honestly, without a heck of a lot of training, about the pitch they wanted to start on.  And they did it.  The piece faltered, shifted, and then settled in.  Half way through the first verse, we were fine.  

I think I’m the only person in that church who knew exactly how lost I was in that moment.  But for some reason, that didn’t make my own sense of failure after the performance any less final or complete.  The experience seemed to pull me back to a time in my life when music making was more high-stakes: less about drawing people together in community, and more about perfect and polished performance. 

In rehearsal that morning, the beginning of that piece had sounded so spare and hollow and beautiful, and I was so eager to share that lovely sound with the congregation.  And then I lost it, and with it, that moment was lost as well.  It was the kids that found me.  We made our way back to the melody together.  It didn’t erase the profound sense of disappointment I felt in myself.  It’s amazing how easily a single failure can translate into being a failure.  I was so eager to write myself off that morning, so unwilling to allow the grace that God had offered me through that group of children carry me. 

Donald Schell, my mentor and the co-founder of St. Gregory's, is always talking about failure as necessary for creativity, and I’ve always nodded blithely and agreed with him, preached about failure to my congregation, extolled its virtues in conferences.  I had forgotten how terrible it can feel, especially when one has been so rigorously trained to be perfect.  I would never expect perfection of my fifth graders.  I’m not sure why I would think that God would expect it of me.

On Kidneys

All day yesterday I was nervous.  In an operating room in Seattle, a man named Dr. Bathka made two small incisions in my best friend’s abdomen.  Three hours later he removed Heather’s kidney and placed it in her stepmother’s body.  It flushed pink immediately, and went to work. 

 

I talked to Heather this morning.  She’s sleepy and bored and in pain and a little doped up on meds.  I, on the other hand was all teary.  A day of contemplating someone’s hands literally inside the body of my friend was surreal, and now that it’s over, I find myself overwhelmed by the magnitude of what she has accomplished.

 

My friend gave part of her body away.  She gave away a living piece of herself, a piece that will bring life, literal years of life, to her stepmother. 

 

Every Sunday at St. Lydia’s, we break a loaf of bread and turn to one another, press it into the hands of the person next to us and say, This is my body.

 

What is most spiritual always takes place in the most corporeal, Chauvet writes.  Faith is not made by thinking, reading, writing, even speaking, but held in our very flesh and bones, in our bodies.  The stories we tell are of a God who was born in blood, mixed dirt with his spit and was slathered in oil, who laid his hands on bodies to mend them, then allowed his own to be broken.

 

This is my body.

 

We give pieces of ourselves to one another; the pieces make us whole. 

On Control

Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, a bad dream clinging to me.  Outside my window, there's a truck idling, and I can't seem to lure sleep back. 

A lecture I attended earlier this week has me thinking about control.  "Doubt," Dr, Wengert told us, "is not the enemy of Christian life.  Control is.  Our desire to fix the problem is where the devil gets us."

It's the darkness that usually pushes us to terror, the nothing, the void that makes us want to grab something and hold it, cling to it, control it.

A few summers ago my friend Michael and I made our way by flashlight down a narrow path in the wilderness of Vermont, until we reached the sand of a lake.  It was late -- we had left our friends huddled around the fire, sipping beer and watching the sparks go up.  Michael sat on the shore and lit a cigarette; I shed my clothes and waded, then swam, into the dark of the water.

Floating on my back, the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.  The night was clear,  the stars above me reflected in the water.  It was dark.  The horizon was invisible, and the red glow of Michael's cigarette, now distant, was the only way to identify the shore. 

I floated between water and night, suspended between the beginning and the end.  It took my breath away, to know the darkness would hold me, to trust it to balance me on the fulcrum between the womb and the grave.

We make our lives on that fulcrum, daily dyings and risings that keep us oscillating sometimes gently, sometimes violently, between death and life.  I spend a lot of time fighting it.  Trying to control it.  Trying to push my life toward something or find something that somehow, in my mind, is linked to happiness.  Only that happiness was never the goal.  The seam between death and life, that's where transformation occurs.  Happiness is static.  Transformation is painful, joyful, dynamic. 

The thing is, when I can manage to trust, manage to give up enough to let that in-between place hold me, the fear vanishes.  The terror dissipates and I'm left held between the night and the water, trying to tell the difference between them.

 

Today Lydians and New York Sacred Harp Singers collaborated to hold an Ash Wednesday Service in Union Square.  There's something wild and powerful about marking a stranger's head with ashes and reminding them they're going to die.  Doing it in 30 degree weather on a New York City street is even wilder and stranger. 

Highlights of today included:

-the woman who received ashes without getting off her cell phone

-the New York Parks Department worker who rolled up for ashes with her trash can on wheels

-the dude who was wearing one of those big advertisements on a pole that extends from a back pack.  He received ashes, all the while brandishing his "Luxury High Rise Apartments" sign.

-And finally, the hipster who took our picture with his hipster-y Super 8 type camera, and then said quietly to Joseph, "Ash Wednesday is so cool."