And Also With You

There's an internet meme going around that is a joke about how you can tell Episcopalians, that when someone says "May the Force be with you," they respond, "And also with you".

The congregation gives this response three separate times during an ordinary Sunday service, so it's no wonder it's ingrained in us.  The first time is right before the Collect of the Day (that's the noun, COLL-ect, not the verb, col-LECT), a special prayer for that day.  The celebrant says "The Lord be with you," and the congregation says "And also with you," and the celebrant says "Let us pray," and then reads the Collect.

The second time is to kick off The Peace, which in my Mom's church is known as "Recess," the time when members of the congregation great each other, shake hands or sometimes hug, speak more informally, then, in our church, sit and listen to announcements before the more formal part of the liturgy begins again.  The priest who has been serving at our church this year as we search for a new Rector kicks The Peace off by moving out into the center of the sanctuary at the top of the stairs, not in the pulpit where he has just delivered his Sermon, not at the lectern where he read the Collect before, but right in the center, he raises his two arms up beside him (so his flowing robes, green and gold at this time of year, fall full and luxurious away from his arms), and he says with firm tones, "The Peace of the Lord be always with you," and the congregation replies as once, "And also with you!".  This one I always really feel.  We're greeting him as a man, and our words are to him, to include him as one of us.  Peace be with you, too!  I think this might be the only exchange that is so equal, him to us and us back again to him, and something about that makes it feel like a strong and happy declaration when I say it.

The third time is right at the beginning of the Eucharist service.  The Offertory (and its hymn, which is usually my offering because I am in the choir where the golden plates do not pass by) is over, and the Priest and Deacon and acolytes have moved back to the altar, and they are about to begin the ceremony, and here is how it starts, in a passage known as The Great Thanksgiving:

The people remain standing. The Celebrant, whether bishop or priest,
faces them and sings or says

                The Lord be with you.
People        And also with you.
Celebrant    Lift up your hearts.
People        We lift them to the Lord.
Celebrant    Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People        It is right to give him thanks and praise.

(from the Book of Common Prayer Online)

Our former priest, and in fact most priests of my experience, intone these words forcefully, with joy, and they usually jump to the next line almost before the congration's reply is finished, so this really moves along.  We are a community, coming together to share this meal, but this time he is our leader, cheerleader, coach.  Let us, he says.  We should.  Now is the time to do this.  Everyone, after me!  It's a different "And also with you," than the other two.

After the Eucharist, when everyone is on their knees on the kneeler pads and quite and contemplative, and not really interacting with each other (as I've talked about before), the phrase does not come back again.  The last part of service begins with the Priest saying, "Let us pray", and then we say together, still kneeling, this final prayer:

Almighty and everliving God,we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Bloodof your Son our Savior Jesus Christ;and for assuring us in these holy mysteriesthat we are living members of the Body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.And now, Father, send us outto do the work you have given us to do,to love and serve youas faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit,be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

"Send us out to do the work you have given us to do," I hang out for these words, and I imagine myself spending the rest of my Sunday loving my neighbor and glorifying in the beauty of creation and maintaining my own health and the health and flourishing of the world.  

The very final part of the service, after the final anthem (and the choir recession when choir is in session, so by this time I am at the back of the church), the last words spoken to us come from the Deacon, not the Priest at all, and she reinforces that reminder to take the good we have experienced and received here, and go out to the world to do something good with it.

There are four possible versions, but our Deacon usually chooses this one:

Deacon      Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
People        Thanks be to God.

Go in peace!  Which also sounds like something they would say in Star Wars.

Eucharist vs Blessing

My sister told me about a conversation she had with a coworker when the Priest at my church retired.  The coworker knew the Priest because she had been in a wedding at the church, and she liked him very much.  "He showed me the secret sign," she said, and crossed her arms across her chest.  It was great.

The secret sign is what you do if you go up to the rail during the Eucharist, the ceremony of bread and wine that represents the body and blood of Christ, but you don't want to receive the Eucharist, so you just get a blessing instead.  In my church, all baptised Christians are invited to receive the Eucharist, but that still leaves quite a few people out (when I was growing up, you had to have been Confirmed into that same church, so it was a more rare privilege, but I understand that ideas of membership and inclusion have changed a lot since then, which shouldn't be surprising because the whole Prayer Book was revised in 1982).

What happens when you go up to the rail and cross your arms over your chest, instead of extending them in a cupped form to receive the Host, is that the Priest puts his hand on your head and gives you a blessing.

I love it when the priest puts his hand on my head and gives me a blessing.  It happened to me during a ceremony to welcome new members to my current church, which I still remember vividly.  There were about four of us being welcomed (and I had been contacted the week before so I knew it was happening and that I would be called up).  The head of the welcome committee, a lovely and gentle and wise young woman, stood beside us four and said, "Father, I present with joy these new members."  I still remember the way she said "with joy".  The Priest then put his hands on our heads, one by one, and said a prayer.  I still vividly remember the feeling of his hands on my head.  They were firm, strong, authoritative, comforting, safe, confident.  It was way more than just a guy putting his hands on my head.  Priest's hands feel different, with the whole strength of God and the Church (and the strength from years of doing this kind of blessing) within them.  It really felt like a gesture from a "Father", which of course is what we call him.

Now, I go up to the Eucharist rail every Sunday with the rest of the congregation for Communion, and I have written previously about why, and what all it means to me.  But sometimes I think about crossing my arms across my chest instead, and making him put his hands on my head and getting the blessing that is offered to all, even the unbaptised, even the non-Christian, even the member of the wedding party who has never been to this church before but wants to participate.

So, why don't I?  I was thinking about this last week, and thinking about the different dimension that the Eucharist has.  Sure, it's a blessing too.  A "Father" is not just blessing you, he's feeding you.  But with it comes also a responsibility.  You are not just one person, blessed, you are, by receiving this food and drink, a member of the whole community.  And you take responsibility to carry this meal, to carry God who is now inside you, out the doors and into your next week.  "Now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do," is a line from the post-Eucharist prayer, the very last thing we say together before the final hymn and the dismissal.  I love that line.  The whole service reminds me, every week, to be more mindful and grateful of the beauty of reality and of life, and to appreciate all the good things and the people I love, and to do better to honor those gifts and act in a loving way and be the best person I can be, and be the best steward of this reality in which I live.

So, I still choose to extend my hands for the Host, instead of crossing my arms for a Blessing, even though Blessings are wonderful, and I long for that feeling of the Priests's hands on my head, but Blessings are just one-directional, him (plus God and Church) to me, whereas the shared Eucharist meal is a choice to belong, and an agreement to do your part as a member of the community.

On Dead Lions and Dead Babies

At the risk of further inflaming emotions on both sides, and knowing that there's no real need to spill yet more words out into the internet debate, I'm going to write down here what I think about two recent items in the news that some are linking together (mainly in order to call their opponents hypocrites), based on the admittedly incomplete and biased material that I have read so far by clicking through on friends' posts in social media.

Dead Lions - the story is, a Minnesota dentist paid for the opportunity to hunt and kill and lion and bring back parts of it as a trophy.  However, the people he paid lured a protected lion out of a reserve, and so the lion he ended up killing was a beloved local celebrity, whom researchers had tagged and had been following for many years.  The dentist released a statement that everything about the hunt was legal, but the storm of indignation and protest has made him close his dental office and go into hiding.

Dead Babies - some people posed as medical researchers, and recorded a conversation with a high-ranking person at Planned Parenthood, discussion procurement of fetal tissue from the abortions that Planned Parenthood performs, to use for research.

I think these have flamed up so intensely because the people outraged by the one or the other happen to fall on opposite sides of the political spectrum we have today.

I, though, have the advantage of a Ph.D. in Philosophy, which I remember a professor of mine once referred to as the Philosopher's "license to practice", plus I attended as a student and taught as a TA many ethics courses, so I do have some thoughts about these topics, and although I know I won't untangle them completely, I'm going to write them down.

Okay, so after having extensively broken my own rule of not apologizing for a speech before you give it, here we go.

The abortion topic - in practical terms, I think, as clearly we all think, that life begins at birth.  That's the date and time they put on your birth certificate, that's when you legally get a name and start to exist.  However, everything from the moment of conception is a potential person, and it's no good trying to act like it's not.  When I was studying, and around lots more people who were having sex without intending to start a family with anyone, the phenomenon of unwanted pregnancy was much more top of mind for me, In my own mind, as I tried to sort out my own views on when abortion was permissible, I came to think that if you had not intended to create a baby, then it was up to you to decide whether to continue with the pregnancy or not (however, having seen a number of my male friends' lives devastated, I did think that both parents should have a veto, and continuation should take two yesses).  However, if you had intentionally tried to get pregnant and create a new life, then you had the obligation to take whatever you got.  So I was not a fan of terminations due to a genetic disorder, like Down's Syndrome or Spina Bifida or whatever.  And I had read lots and lots of testimonials of parents of Down's Syndrome children who talked about the deep joy they brought to everyone in their world, and of people who themselves had been born with Spina Bifida and were grown up and living full lives and valued their own birth very much.  Every human life is equally valuable, and the ground of ethical behavior is to preserve and flourish human experience, and so if you meant to have a baby, you should love your disabled baby.

However, this, what I thought was morally sustainable and intuitively comfortable view on abortion fell to pieces when I learned that in the course of in vitro fertilization, often multiple fertilized eggs are implanted, and then the pregnancy is reduced to like one or two, however many babies the woman feels she can handle.  (When the woman gets to this point and morally blinks, and cannot go through with giving up some of those potential babies, then you get John and Kate Plus Eight).  I was appalled at this fact, but no one else seems to mind it at all.  Women who go through in vitro processes in order to be mothers are held up as the most heroic and virtuous people on the planet.  They have invested and gone through lots of trouble to fulfill the ultimate role of being a woman, which is to give birth to a child from your own body, made out of your own parts and those of the one you love (of course there's surrogacy and sperm donation and things, but I feel like those folks are less universally launded and held up as heroes, which is why I'm limiting it to couples using own egg, own sperm).  But getting there, on the very obvious path to intentionally creating a child and bringing it into the world, these very heroes do away with other potential babies.

So, my view fell to pieces, and I stopped thinking you could ever get a morally distinct line you could draw between when it's okay and when it's not okay.  And I have come to the practical view that probably nobody thinks abortion is a good thing, but sometimes having a baby at a particular time can devastate a life, and so the option should be there.

Okay, so from that position of retreat, what do I think about Planned Parenthood's actions?  I did see a piece online that tried to mount a vigorous denial of the claims by the people who posed as researchers and launched the protest, that the claims were not true, Planned Parenthood is not profiting from the sale of baby parts.  I clicked through and read the details and they were that PP was not profiting, because the money they received barely cover their costs.

This seems to miss the point entirely.  The margins that PP is making or not making doesn't weigh in at all.  What people are up in arms about is that baby parts and money are changing hands.  At all.

PP says that what they're doing is facilitating the patient's choice to donate fetal tissue from the procedure, which is a good thing.  But if you follow the money, the money is coming from neither the patient, or some sponsor of the patient, or PP itself, it's coming from the research facilities who are taking delivery of the fetal tissue.  That is buying.  That is selling.  That is what is making everyone so upset, because human beings should not be bought and sold, even formerly potential human beings.  However, I wonder what the model is for donation of cadavers for medical research - of former actual human beings - and if it is structured the same way?  Or former parts of still actually living human beings, like amputated limbs or removed tumors?  Everyone thinks medical research is important.  We want to facilitate it, to help actual presently living human beings more and more.  So, as long as body parts for research are traded the same way no matter who the parts came from, no one should object, but we should probably look at it across the board and make sure it feels more like "donation"and not like "buying" and "selling".

Okay, so on to dead lions.  The factors about killing that weigh in to this story are whether it is wrong to kill any animal - as a committed meat eater I can't lean on that principle.  Whether it is wrong to hunt for pleasure - I am a bit more down with that, I am against causing suffering to another creature for one's entertainment, from bullying to torture to murder.  But if you're pro-sport hunting, there's still the principle that you shouldn't hunt protected animals of whom there are very few left.  And it's definitely not sportsmanlike, whether morally right or wrong, to bait an animal to walk right in front of you so you can stand very still and shoot it.  That doesn't seem like hunting to me, that's just target practice.

But the very worst of all, and here we're just in an empirical realm, is that it is always bad to kill a creature that another human being cares about.  Even if you live in a society that eats cows, if a person has a pet cow, with a name and an ongoing relationship and everything, you shouldn't kill that cow, possibly because it's a wrong to the cow, but undeniably because it will hurt the person.

I can't find any independent objective metaphysical difference between the one cow and the other cow, on which we can draw our distinction, and in a society that eats meat you probably have the right to kill any cow you want, but even though it's just as morally permissible as something that happens in a slaughterhouse, you still shouldn't do it.  So, in the same way, if a lion has a name and whole large nation of people have a relationship with it, you shouldn't kill it, because it has really hurt those people.  The dentist's "But it was all done legally!" holds no weight at all.  "I kill lions all the time! It was never a problem before!" will not help his case.  He needs to apologize just as you would if you accidentally ran over your neighbor's dog.  "Oh, my God, I'm so, so sorry, I didn't realize, I didn't mean to."  He needs to apologize just as you would if you just shot your neighbor's dog, for fun.  Although I can't fathom how one could actually apologize for something like that, so maybe there's no helping this dentist.

Love Languages

I recently had reason to take for myself the "5 Love Languages" online quiz: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/

This quiz is based on the theory, developed in the books by Gary Chapman, that there are five main ways that people express love, and thereby recognize love being expressed to them.

Mine came out in this order:

8 Receiving Gifts
8 Words of Affirmation
6 Physical Touch
6 Quality Time
2 Acts of Service

This means two things - that when I express love, I will probably do it by giving you presents or saying nice things about you, and that if you want to express love to me, I will be looking for these same behaviors in turn.

(The low ranking of "Acts of Service" is due to some noise in the system, which I blame on being an oldest child, and is something I already knew about myself - if people offer to help me, I view it as criticism and the expression, not of love, but of the opinion that I am incapable of doing the thing myself.  This causes lots of unpleasant interactions both at work and in interpersonal relationships, but it's something I'm working on separately.)

Some other folks who are close to me also took this quiz, and as ever it's interesting because it acknowledges that not everyone is the same, and even in something that's thought of as so basic and elemental as Love, communication takes place through a framework of assumptions that are different for each individual, and it's important to understand the other's perspective as much as you can.

This got me thinking about how someone might not have learned the same expected expressions as I have.  Mine, to me, seem so elemental, but did I learn them, and if so, from where?

I only had to think about this question for about thirty seconds to realize that my framework was built by a lifetime of saturation in pop love songs, Romantic literature, and Romantic Comedy films.  And if someone hadn't been exposed to any of those things, or had been exposed much less, they might not have learned the same script for how a Lover should act and speak.

The goopy, transcendent, all-consuming, moony, aching longing type of love is not something elemental and essentially true.  It's a cultural construct, from a very specific culture, namely Romantic-period Europe.  Everyone I've talked to about this immediately points out that this tradition arose from a culture of royalty with plenty of means and too much time on their hands.  If you don't have to work, then it's easy to let your whole being be consumed with longing for an idealized Other, and to spend your time in writing paeans to them that say that they are your whole life and eternal soul, they embody all the beauty in the world and beyond, that your life without their regard is without meaning and you would rather die than be separate from them.

Part of me wants to hear these things from someone, but realistically, in today's modern world, if someone where to carry on this way, I would be very concerned.  Words like this, in today's modern society, come usually from someone who has made an ideal person up in their head, and is writing letters and poems to them.  Real, actual, person-to-person relationships in today's real world are not like this.

Still, though.  Cinderella dies hard.

From Depression Baby to Decluttering, in one generation

I was thinking the other day about the Great Depression.  This loomed large in my upbringing.  My Dad was born two days before the Stock Market Crash in 1929, and my Mom was born in 1935.

Mom was always very concerned about waste and not making the most of what you had. The emblamatic story for her is that she used to yell at us if we ate an apple but left an unacceptable amount of white on the core.  "Apples are twenty-five cents apiece!"  It is a long time since apples have been that price, so that probably dates the story exactly during my difficult teenaged years in the late 1970's, when I thought this injunction was ridiculous, but I think it has been very, very rare in my life that I would start eating an apple that I didn't intend to finish as much as possible right down to the core.

Her mother, my Grandmother, was very thrifty and hung onto things just in case they might be useful later.  She was a saver of string and rubber bands, she was a canner who put up food for the winter, she was a buyer of bargains at garage sales. The emblematic story about Grandma is that after she passed away, when my Mom and Dad and Mom's sisters were going through the house and getting things ready for an estate auction, they found several broken chairs in the garage, which hadn't even been in the house, they were broken chairs that Grandma had picked up at a different auction or yard sale, thinking they would be perfectly good once she fixed them (except she never fixed them, and the garage was chalk full of stuff like this).

I was thinking about the Great Depression mostly as a mirror of current economic worries, when more and more people are unemployed and underemployed, and having trouble making ends meet even with a 40 or 60 hour work week.  The Great Depression, economically anyway, was an artifact created by unsustainable behavior by banks and the Stock Market.  Terrible living conditions could arise again, from similar bad institutional actions.  We might have to live through something terrible like that again, but we did get through it the first time.  I'm not saying it was easy, and I'm sure there were many lives lost and destroyed and families ripped apart, but as a species, we did it, we got through it and improved lives again.  So, I hope we don't have to go through another economic crisis of that severity, and I know there are some checks and balances to make sure that it doesn't happen again, but if we do, or even something not quite as severe, I have confidence that we will get through it again.

But having that picture in my mind, of Dust Bowl men and women in battered hats and dust-colored clothes, saving string, it set up a strange echo with the Decluttering theme that is all around me now (see previous post).

My turning point was one time when I was moving out of a house that had a leak in the back wall of the basement.  It was built on a hill, and every time there was a strong rain, a gush of water would pour out of a crack between the bricks in that wall.  Somehow, I had still been storing cardboard boxes in that basement, from when we had moved in.  I had moving boxes, but I also had all the original cardboard boxes of things I had bought, including for a toaster that I didn't have any more because it had stopped working.  I had the box from the new toaster as well.

All at once, I realized that I didn't need to save these boxes.  Sure, cardboard might be useful one day for something, but also, there are boxes freely available in the world all the time, so if you need a box, there will be one there, or you could buy a box, we had enough money at that time to buy a box if we needed one, so there was no reason to keep them.

I got rid of all those boxes, and have bought new ones whenever I needed boxes thereafter, and have been released from the burden of having to house and care for and keep dry all that cardboard, that piles up in one's life.

In that once decision, I pivoted from the Depression Baby of my Mother and Grandmother, to a modern Declutterer, who values a clean, orderly house without too much stuff in it.  Within one generation, these values have shifted entirely.

Finding what's Individual in what's Formal and Traditional

The church I go to is in the midst of a search for a new Rector (Priest in charge), and as part of the process we were all asked to complete a survey whose results will be collated into a Parish Profile. This gets shared with priests who are looking for a new parish, and then we work on selection until we find a good match.

One of the questions was about the Liturgy.  I take this to be a blanket term covering the way we do Church - the choices we make from the official prayer book for the order of services, what is said when, what the readings are for that Sunday (there's a Lectionary with a full set for a three year cycle), whether we say the Mass or sing it and whether we use a contemporary version, or more traditional, or Latin, or a mix of all of them.

If you were brought up Lutheran, you might wonder what I'm talking about, because my understanding is that Lutheran churches are given much less discretion and are instructed to be much more standardized.  But Episcopalian parishes, while sticking pretty strictly to traditional forms, do have some latitude about how various parts of the service are performed.  For example, at my church, the Prayers of the People (those are the prayers in which we remember all who have asked for our prayers, the sick and the troubled, and also those who have recently died, and "all whose lives are closely linked with ours") are read out of the Book of Common Prayer, the only part that changes week to week is the specific names that are read out.  But at my Mom's church, the Prayers of the People were written by the people, the members of that particular congregation, and so they include some prayers for the natural environment and that kind of thing that are more top of mind for people in Colorado.  So, latitude like that is an example of what's possible.

I can't remember the exact wording of the survey question that asked about the Liturgy, but it was about how important it is to keep the Liturgy the same as it is in our church now, that is pretty traditional.

There was a space for comments, and what I wrote there was that keeping to a traditional Liturgy, keeping to an unchanging formal structure, was essential to Episcopalianism, because the essence of our denomination is that the formal structure is there are stays the same, and then every person is free to make whatever meaning of it that they do.  The formal structure is fixed and the same, and the meaning made is individual and specific.  And not just specific to the person, it is specific to what's going on with that person right on that day.  Because the tradition is so rich, and deep and broad and connected to so much else in Western Culture, not to mention to many of our own lives and families and childhoods, that every week you can connect with something different in it, or understand something in a different way.  It enables a vast and rich journey, in and through.  So even in the one person, the meaning you make of the Liturgy can be individual and specific to that particular day and time of your life.

If the outward expression, the Liturgy, were to change, and morph and be updated and rewritten designed to reflect our ideas and our place and time, I'm sure that it would end up a shallower experience.  Because what do we know?  How could we write something better than what we have, out of what we happen to think right now?

This tradition, in which I participate every Sunday, especially when Choir is in session because then you're right up the front, robed and in the midst of all of it, was not invented but it was wrought, over centuries and centuries.  What we do is the same as what the Early Christians did, in each other's houses, and it's the same as what Archbishops have been doing in Cathedrals in English for centuries and centuries, and it's the same as my Grandma and my Mom and Aunts have done all their lives, and it's the same as my Godfather and Godmothers (I have two), and the man who baptised me, all of whom were the best, best friends of my parents during their young marriage, it's the same as what was done that very day of my Baptism, when I was welcomed into the body of the Church, and everyone who was there read out that they would help my parents and my Godparents raise me and protect me and make sure I grew in my spiritual life.  (All of those people are still doing that, and now I have stood and promised to do that for ten or eleven others.)

I've had times in my life where the service felt confronting, or bizarrely ritualistic, or insulting, or boring, or cynical and hypocritical, or meaningless, or too meaningful.  But as I have participated, in the church year that rolls around and around, each time around the circle I find myself going deeper, and finding more to it.

You can't do this mystical spiral-style development if the Liturgy changes all the time.  It has to stay the same, to allow my own individual and specific meaning-making of it to progress and grow.

Themes of Equality and Freedom

NPR reads the Declaration of Independence out in its entirety each year.  I only caught part of it, so I looked the whole thing up online, and spent some time reading it on this day to celebrate my country's birth.  This part spoke to me especially, those beautiful words of Thomas Jefferson, who was such an extraordinary writer:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 Government is by the people, of the people, for the people.


We watched the live stream of Bernie Sanders' address in the capital of our State, so sad that we were unable to be there in person and be counted.  Who knows what distance he can go as a candidate, but it's been a revelation having someone campaigning who is willing to say out loud these things that I agree with but everyone else has been too fearful to say - that it should be possible to earn a living wage by working 40 hours per week; that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few, in this wealthiest nation in the history of Earth; that everyone deserves the same access to health care and to education and that we as a people owe it to all to provide it for everyone who needs it.  I am exciting to watch this bubble rise for as long as it can before it bursts, and I hope it pulls the national political conversion in this direction.  The most exciting thing about the campaign is that it is crowd-sourced, in a way pioneered by President Obama, but now mature enough to work for this unlikely man. Billions of small contributions can now be sourced, efficiently, from the populace at large, giving us a different option from a few billion dollar contributions from a tiny number of donors.  Bernie reminds us that we live in a country that has one vote for one person.  This is still the rule, as tough as politics has been over the last few years/decades.  The government is us.  It was set up this way so that we could ask for the leaders who would represent our interests and work to provide us the best and safest lives (see above).


The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that preventing same-sex couples from marrying denied their Constitutional rights, and so ordered that same-sex marriage be made legal, from sea to shining sea, as I saw in an online post from Melissa Etheridge.  Only a few days later, at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in America, the assembly passed a strong vote to allow Episcopal Priests to perform marriage ceremonies for any same-sex couple who wanted one (the vote included the option to opt out, by an individual Priest or by a Bishop for his or her Diocese, in recognition that some folks might still be having a hard time getting their heads around the fact that someone that used to be wrong is now agreed by nearly everyone to be right).  I was proud of this decision, but not surprised, because my church is known for being welcoming to everyone.  Everyone.  Every last one.  It doesn't matter what you have done (got divorced, danced, drunk alcohol, committed a crime, fallen in love and built a life with someone of your same sex), and it doesn't matter what you think (my own Priest quoted a line from a prayer that is part of the Eucharist, saying of God, "only you know our faith", and he pointed out that human beings are notoriously unreliable about their own mental states, so it doesn't matter what you think you believe, all are welcome).


The New Yorker's front section editorial in its July 6 issue, an issue featuring on its cover a tribute of the nine people killed in Charleston, South Carolina, is headlined, "The Confederacy's Final Retreat."  It says, "The rearguard movement of Republicans in the aftermath of the slaughter in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church marked the relinquishing of the Confederacy’s best-fortified positions: the cultural ones."  And it's true that something seems to have shifted following that tragedy.  A lot of the changes and the impact is around a symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, which is technically just a piece of cloth, and some people are rightly expressing concern that people will feel like the work is done when in fact removing a cloth symbol is just an easy outward symbol of some deeper transformations that still need to happen to eradicate racism and improve lives for African-Americans.  But it does seem that there's agreement that although the flag is just a piece of cloth, it hurts people, and so we shouldn't display it, even though we might have a right to.  I am in full agreement with this application of principles of Free Speech.  Sure, you have the right to say hateful things, but you shouldn't say them, because they hurt people - do actual damage - and you shouldn't do things that hurt others.  (A grad school professor of mine used to use this effective and pithy phrase - "Just because you have the right to believe whatever you want doesn't mean that whatever you believe is right.")("Can" and "ought" are two different things.)


So the challenge that I hope to live up to is to treat everyone equally.  To welcome everyone.  To love everyone, no matter where they are from or what they look like or what they have done or what they think.  That's the ideal of the Democracy, in which I live, and that is the ideal of the church in which I am a member, and that's the ideal of the universe in which I hope to live.

Alone, Together

It's no surprise that the Eucharist is described as the central mystery of the Christian church service.

It didn't used to be something that happened at every service, and some churches still reserve it for special occasions, but in my church, it's something we do together every week.

My sister once told me a story, second or third hand, about a friend who was travelling in some part of the world that was in the opposite hemisphere (Antarcticans often travel to various places in the Pacific that Americans don't usually get to, on their way back home from deploying), and talking, I believe in the local language, to a local person, and they got onto the topic of religion, and the local person said, 'Oh, yes, I've heard of your God.  He has three heads, and you eat him!"

That's the most exotic understanding of the ceremony, and the most mundane also comes from my sister, from a class she was taking while living in DC.  They talked about the history of the Early Church, like, the first few hundred years, when Christians were underground, and small in number, and had to meet very privately in each other's homes.  The structure of the current Liturgy still follows the meetings of those times - first is the teaching section, with readings from the Book, and remarks by the most senior person there, some group singing, some sending of well wishes to those connected to us, then the second part is a dinner party.  The group forms into a body by sharing a meal together.

The whole thing got started at the Last Supper, after all.

So, there's quite a bit you can make of the Eucharist, on the spectrum from spooky to mundane, and in our church it tends to be a somewhat somber, serious, and extremely private thing.  We have all greeted each other earlier in the service, during the Passing of the Peace (which the rector of my Mom's church calls "Recess", with some disdain I think), but after the hymn that takes place during the Offertory (during which time my offering is usually the singing of the hymn itself, since the collection plate doesn't come past up in the choir stalls, and I tend to bundle my giving and do it once annually), suddenly the Priest, the Celebrant, has moved from the lectern that is up at the front of the sanctuary all the way to the back behind the altar, and the acolytes and the Deacon are beside him, hands clasped.  The words are from a different part of the Prayer Book, and more ritualized (echoing more strongly back to the childhoods of the Cradle Episcopalians in the room, not to mention all the former Catholics of which there are many, many), and the gestured also more ritualized and more grand.

If a Priest is there, and not just a Deacon, then the deal is that the host wafers and the wine are turned, right then, transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ (capitalization for effect).  His words and gestured make them into sacred substance.

The congregation then goes up, row by row, and kneels at the altar rail, and accepts the host and wine, and then walks back, and those who know to do it will kneel in prayer, and there's always music because our Organist is always first, closest to the rightmost part of the rail, and often the Choir will do our big bang-up Anthem during this time but he usually waits until everyone is sitting back down again, so there's that time for prayerful contemplation afterward, except when you're in the Choir and then it's a bit more brief because you need to get your music out and look over that one tricky interval just the one last time.  After the Choir sings, the Priest and Deacon and acolytes sometimes have more work to do, cleaning the altar and putting things away, and I believe the Priest drinks the remainder of the consecrated wine, and then there's a prayer of Thanksgiving that we all say together on our knees, I rather love this prayer, because...well, here it is in its entirety:

Eternal God, heavenly Father,
you have graciously accepted us as living members
of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ,
and you have fed us with spiritual food 
in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.
Send us now into the world in peace,
and grant us strength and courage
to love and serve you
with gladness and singleness of heart;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.
(from The Online Book of Common Prayer, http://www.bcponline.org/)

Thanks for feeding us, and now send me out with a reminder to be better, and do better.  I love that part of the service.

But back to the Eucharist ritual itself.  If we trace things back to the early church, this is basically a dinner party, right?  We are bonding by eating together.  And in fact, the Body of Christ is a name for the collection of people who make up the whole Christian Church, worldwide.

However, it is also a spooky Holy Mystery, and bread and wine are being turned into human flesh and human blood, of a man who died more than 2000 years ago, yet here he is, right in our presence.  And the first time this happened, it was very very sad, because it was his last dinner with his close and beloved followers, before he died, the next afternoon.

So that probably explains the somberness of the members of my church congretation, as they go up to receive Communion, and even more so as they walk back to their places, where they will kneel and contemplate and pray for a bit.  

I'm so used to catching people's eye and smiling and saying their name in greeting - our church contains quite a few long hallways so this is often how you meet people.  I want to smile and meet their eye, because, I realize, it makes me feel connected, it helps knit us together as an Us, a We.

But no one meets my gaze, when they're walking back from the Eucharistic rail.  They don't flinch, or avert, or frown in chastisement, but they just walk calmly on, with gaze forward and expressions impassive.

It's a dinner party, right? That is the signature thing that binds us all together in this one community, and the man told us to do it for that very reason, too, right?  But in the moment itself, everyone is very solitary, and doesn't connect through regular human mechanisms like smiling and connecting with eyes.

We are Together, but each one of us is also Alone,  We do this Alone thing, Together.

My Cosmology

I believe that the only things that exist are the entities that make up physical reality.  I believe that reality consists of the things that are studied by the physical sciences.

So, although I obviously attend church, and call myself a member of a denomination (Episcopalian), and find myself going deeper into the liturgy and traditions and exploring what they mean and what they can bring to me, strictly speaking, I don't believe in God.

At all.  Really don't.  Really, really don't, at all.

Or souls, or Heaven, or a spiritual plane that is separate from physical reality.

I even have trouble with the existence of abstract realms.  I've had some fierce arguments with both Mathematicians and Physicists, because they think they are explorers, mapping out things that actually exist, independently of them, and I know that they are just constructing formal systems, human inventions, games that have certain rules that humans invented and humans can change.  Which is why paradoxes have never bothered me at all.  Just because your formal system breaks down when you think about the barber who shaves everyone but himself, that doesn't mean someone both is and is not out there in reality, it just means your formal system is broken.  And just because an equation tells you something is both a wave and a particle, that doesn't mean that something out there in reality actually is both a wave and a particle, you just need to go back to your drawing board and see where your theory went wrong.

I read recently somewhere that people who are bad at Math also have a more informal attitude about money.  Yep.  Money seems unreal and invented to me, just like numbers do.

So, the project for me is, how do I explain all the things I need to explain about the universe, with only physical building blocks to build them from, or else dismiss them and accept living without them?

That's what this blog is here to explore, as I work out more and more answers to the questions.  But I wanted to make this formal statement about the ground rules, just to get it down in black and white.

On Clutter and Decluttering

Last week I got into a Facebook argument with a Buddhist about our attachment to material things.

What started it, if you go back a few steps, is a trendy popular discussion about "Decluttering".  I have certainly been involved in it as a pop phenomenon.  I Facebook-friended a page called "Decluttering 101" as a New Year's resolution in January, and actually did a few of the daily 15 minute exercises, before the rest of my life rushed back in to my free time like the walls of the Red Sea.  I have been in long conversations at work with co-workers who are trying to clear out their basements, scan all their old photos so they don't have to keep them around, get rid of their kid's stuff.  In most of these conversations, I just stare blankly, because I am a notorious "Keeper", from a long like of Keepers, famous for never deleting any emails (I just move them to something called "Inbox - Old"), needing a new filing cabinet because I just move piles of paper into the empty drawers, buying a big house so that I have room for all of my belongings.

But I have experienced some joy from decluttering, as well. Informally, since I abandoned the strict calendar of the 101 site, still I have culled and given away some clothes, about 20 old purses, two boxes of books, lots of kitchen items, some expired cans of food (did you know that cans of food can expire?), some bottles of hair products that I tried once and will never use more of.  It is a good feeling, decluttering.  Getting things out of your house that you have no use for.

Still, I usually end up on the Keeper side of most conversations with other women, and don't share their values.  I was in a group of older member of my Mom's church, and all of them were talking about trying to downsize their "stuff", which they pronounced with a spitting vitriol.  Get rid of your "stuff"! Why do we have so much "stuff"?  And you'd better get rid of it, one woman pronounced, because your kids sure as heck aren't going to want any of it.  I looked at my own Mom ruefully, because I have informed her that she and Dad are to get rid of nothing, nothing, without consulting me, and I know in my heart that what I really want is to preserve their house, exactly as it is, forever, with everything in exactly the place that I remember it being, so that I can always go back there, to that place that has been the anchor of my wandering heart for so, so many years.

So, when I was this article called "Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0> going around on Facebook, I was delighted to see someone beautifully and articulately express the Keeper's point of view.  Who was this woman?  Dominique Browning, published in the New York Times.  No wonder it was so thoughtfully well written. 

I posted it on my own Facebook page, because it seemed to speak for me.  I did include my dual response to clutter in my comment on the post: "As someone who has derived joy recently both from sending a pile of clothes to Goodwill and also from installing a new bookcase, I can see both sides, so here's something from the under-represented anti-decluttering, pro-stuff point of view."  And I extracted this quote:

"I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display."

I'm not sure if it was my post or someone else's or the cumulative effect of many people sharing the article, but the Buddhist on his own Facebook page posted an angry diatribe.  His take on the popularity of the article, if I am summarizing him accurately, was that it was just the bourgeoisie making a self-congratulatory defense of the status quo.  That the persecution the New York Times writer had described was just the first tiny inklings of an alternative point of view raising its head, and that her article was a disingenuous squashing of consideration.  Acquisition is not going anywhere in America, he said, so there's no reason to "defend" it.  And he accused the author and all of us of completely missing the point.  He had posted a post of his own, a week or so earlier, reporting that he was exploring simplicity, and clearing his home and life out of clutter, which I had completely forgotten, and certainly was not thinking of when I posted my own link.

I was rattled by being called "bourgie", and felt that I was being misunderstood in turn, because the people from whom I felt the strongest attack were themselves extremely bourgie women.  In fact, one could argue that their love of de-cluttering and of being "Throwers" was bound up in Capitalist waste and planned obsolesense, that they bought things only to throw them away to make room for buying more things to throw away.

There is one way in which we're all saying the same thing.  The Decluttering expert on Facebook and the woman who wrote the celebration of clutter both say we should have things around us that we love and treasure.  Everyone is saying that it's bad to surround yourself with piles of useless garbage.  The woman celebrating clutter is saying it's good to have things around you that you love, and an article I saw in a whole different Facebook post about the Japanese approach to decluttering said that you should only keep things around you that you love, so it's a junk-drawer-in-the-kitchen is half-empty or half-full type situation.

But what I appreciated about the article was that it presented acquisition as a type of autobiography, which really resonated with me.  Since I think that human life has no intrinsic meaning, the only way we can give our lives meaning is by our acts, our choices of action, one action into the next moment by moment, with nothing predetermined and everything free for us to choose, and by choosing and acting on our choices we define ourselves - when we look back at the end of a life, it has meaning because it has been defined by all those series of choices moment by moment along the way.  So, the stuff one accumulates by the time one gets into adulthood is a physical manifestation of living our human lives.  Which gives the stuff meaning, in the same way that a narrative gives a life meaning. 

Plus, the only way we can live on after we die is to leave some physical impression on others.  The stories about us (narratives) that live on in others' memories can give us life beyond our death, but the stuff that we have accumulated, as long as the stories are still associated with it, can make our existence have a lasting impact on the world as well.

So I think this is why the responses were so emotional, on both sides.  If someone, whether a bourgie lady co-worker or a Buddhist neighbor, attacks my attachment to my stuff, they are attacking the relationship that gives my life not just meaning but a chance at an afterlife.

It then occurred to me, later, after thinking about this exchange some more, that of course I seem to have a materialistic point of view, the point of view criticized as being crass and base.  Materialistic, because I am a Materialist.  I believe that nothing exists besides material reality.  Everything that exists is made up of physical stuff, the stuff that sciences can study.  Atoms, cells, rocks, plants, planets, solar systems, but nothing beyond, nothing on any kind of higher plane.  Human lives have value as physically lived actions, in a community of other physical things, the greater human community.  We don't have souls, we won't go to any kind of heaven after we leave our bodies, there is no other higher plane of perfection or spirit or spirituality.

Does he think there is, my interlocutor?  I don't know; the higher plane figures in Greek philosophy, and Christianity of course, but I don't know which other of the world's religions.  But if he does, this would explain something foundational about our dispute.  I value my things and my attachment to them because they are physical traces of my physically lived life, which will persist beyond me to help tell my story and keep it alive in memory.  He believes, if I'm interpreting correctly, which I'm probably not, but I believe that he believes that being attached to physical things keeps us rooted in this lower plane, when our focus and concentration should be on a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment and possible perfection.  Does he?  Well, Plato did, anyway.

But I am connected to my stuff and therefore open to the accusation of being Materialistic because I am a Materialist.

Postscript: The next time I saw the Buddhist in person was at the opening of an art exhibit by another mutual friend, which was entitled "Shtuff".

Love Everyone

What would Jesus do?

It's a phrase you hear often, and I admit I haven't studied the New Testament well enough to be able to extrapolate confidently and answer.

But one message I know is in there is that all human beings are equally valuable, and deserving of love.  All.

One Easter, a few years ago, I did the Stations of the Cross with a group at my church.  A parishoner had created drawings, one for each Station, and she had prepared a short lecture discussion on each one.  We walked around the perimeter of the church, and at each drawing we stopped, she read out her description of the story depicted and her artistic choices to depict it, and then the parish Priest read the prayer that went with that Station, and we read out our response.

It was only during that experience that I finally "got" what it means that Christ died for our sins.  Looking very closely at the belittlement and degradation that he experienced on his way to his crucifixion, and the crucifixion itself, it finally made sense to me what that was.  Here is how I understand it:

Imagine lowest, most despised human being you can think of.  Someone a mob would round up and torture while running out of town and then stringing up to die.  Not just a lowly downcast person - a homeless person, someone with addiction problems or mental illness.  Someone depicable, that the mob has written off, and feels fully justified in degrading - the worst criminal, the worst terrorist.  What Jesus did was take that human state and make it divine.  He went through that experience so that God went through that experience.  That experience now has not just worth but divinity.

If that lowest, most degraded, most despised human experience is now sanctified, then your life, as a human being, is definitely sanctified.  Human experience was made divine, and of supreme, ultimate, universe-ruling value.

All human lives are equally and ultimately valuable.  Even me, even you.  Equal.

But that means, even that newest version of the most despicable, lowest, worst person on earth.  Even them.

Examples I've observed recently of people falling short of this example:

I was in a class, run by the Episcopal Church and designed for lay people to go through something like the training one would get in a theological seminary.  There are four years of readings - Old Testament, New Testament, Church history, Theology.  At any given time there are students in a group that are in each of the years.  Then, for each year there is a common theme that all students read and respond to, and during my year the theme was Multiculturalism, understanding the church in a world where people of different cultures exist, and interact.  There was one student who had a lifelong disdain for this whole topic, and the point of view that one should be tolerant of other cultures.  I think the whole reason she was part of a Christian church was that she could have a reliable, absolute moral code, by which she could confidently judge other people.  She gave some very polished, moving speeches defending her point of view, but I know she was wrong.  She would cite the most horrifying, torturous practices, mainly affecting young women and babies, and would intone, "I'm sorry, but if this 'Multiculturalism' (said with a sneer) requires that I be tolerant of a culture that does these things, then I'm sorry."  The more often she grabbed the floor of the discussion and delivered these indignant speeches, the more clearly I saw it - chick, you can abhor the behavior, but your obligation is to love the individuals who behave, even more so because you abhor what they do.  Lady, you clearly need to go talk at length to someone who committed one of those acts, and really try to see the world from inside their point of view, and develop compassion and a connection and communication with them, and from there you can try to show them why you think what they did was wrong, and thereby do something about it and try to help their victims, and yourself develop some loving compassion and a deeper connection to these, who are also God's creatures, and are also beloved by God just exactly to the same degree that you are.  But I could tell she would never even entertain that option.

I eventually stopped going to this group because of these exchanges, and another participant who could not possibly be racist because she grew up in the South with household staff who were black, and then also is of a European ancestry who was brought to that area to work in one particular industry and were marginalized.  She also would intone strong speeches, and after several whole evenings I realized these people were not really here to learn, to challenge their existing ideas and grow and improve them, but just to say what they already thought, which is not why I take a class, and so I stopped going.  However, in doing so, I feel short of the ideal as well, I should have gone in and got closer and learned how to see the world from inside their point of view so that I could communicate and explain my alternative way, but I just wrote them off as a waste of time.

Second example - just last week I was at a musical event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death (murder? wrongful execution) of Joe Hill, the Labor activist and organizer and songwriter.  Four musicians presented a program of Joe Hill songs, plus their own compositions or other important songs from the Labor movement.  It was a warm, joyful gathering of like-minded folks, and we also sang "Solidarity Forever" together at the end.  But I did flinch when one of the musicians, in introducing one of his songs, referred to the "syphilitic morons" running our state government.  And in fact there was a poster available for sale with a photo of the moron in chief, with the word "Tool" printed in large red letters on it.  I flinched because I don't think it's ever a good idea to dehumanize your rivals.  Forming into tribes and demonizing the members of the other tribe is not the path to a productive reconciliation.  Lefties hate it when people on the Right do it, but Lefties do it maybe even more.  Don't you only have to just say the name of the rival leader, for people to hiss and sneer in this types of groups?  "Nixon." "Reagan." "George W. Bush."  "Scott Walker."  Can't you hear the sneering reaction in your head, just reading these names?  But they are human beings.  We might disagree with their points of view, to the core of our bone marrow, and abhor their behavior with everything that's right and true in the universe, but they are human beings, and the call is to love them, just as you love your loved ones.  Go in there and love them, not form tribes and demonize and dehumanize them and call them names.  I'm starting to develop a sensitivity to this behavior, this assumption that it's okay, even in a room full of like-minded people.  Tribalism and demonization does not help anything.

Third example - there was a shooting in our community, three completely innocent bystanders died when a troubled young man took some guns to a public place and started shooting.  One of the people killed was a husband and father.  His wife was shot but survived, and in the day following the event, around the internet went a story that his last words to her before he passed was, "Forgive the shooter."  This is an example of the lowest, most despicable person who has committed the very lowest, most despicable act.  Sadly, there are too many examples of exactly the same.  One was just sentenced to death in Boston, only yesterday.  The call is to recognize the divine valuable humanity inside even these people.  Christ died to redeem them, especially them.  The husband and father knew what it meant.  Can we be the same?  Can we do it?

To me, that's really what the question at the top means.