Lving in coronavirusworld 49: Mothers' Day

5/10

Checkpoint

Mothers Day

One of the week’s pleasures, it's important to create things to look forward to, is my Sunday morning visit to the deli across the street to get a Sunday Times and bring it back to read with coffee.  Six days a week, it’s an online Times “Morning Briefing” but one day a week I want a real paper. Especially for the Magazine Crossword. Am I a crosswords guy? She asked, Not really. But the Sunday one….I’ll work at it all week trying  to find the offbeat random key that will open up the puzzle. They never really tell you, you have to figure it out.  When I get it done, it always feels like one of  life’s small victories.

Our regular Sunday family ZOOM visit has become another time to look forward to. There is the usual sharing of recipes, grumbling about current realities and the general absurdity of life in the US.  My four year old grandson has been watching Charlotte’s Web which led to a question about Charlotte’s death. His father explained that it’s something that happens to all living things. But not us, he replied. Yes, us too, his father said. But no, said my grandson, Das ist verboten. (That is forbidden.). Our mortality is not so easy to contemplate.  I now think about it every day.

We're talking about what we miss.  It's hard not to say everything. My middle son says that  it's what makes  New York New York that enables us to tolerate paying exhorbitant amounts of money for tiny living spaces and put up with all we have to put up with to live here and when that's all gone, what are we left with? What's the point?

This is Mothers' Day. I made cards for the mothers in my life and mailed them. Included for my mom a new mask with a special "nose" design. As friends' parents fall victim to the virus, I'm all the more thankful for my mom, even  more sad that she is sequestered away from us.

I think of all the years at West Park we would read Juliet Ward Howe's dramatic proclamation and the origins of this day in war resistance and its taming into another Hallmark moment.  This year I'd be happy to settle for that. (see below)

My friend Mili hosts her birthday party on ZOOM.  It starts with a dance party which looks  a bit like the old disco dancers on Laugh In.  Or Hollywood (Dancing) Squares. We all share in a toast to her, I even have a little Serbian rakia left.  I bring my friend Zeljko’s Saban statue to the party. 

Saban

(Saban Bajramovic, was a Serbian singer known as the King of Romani music. He's the subject of Zejlko’s new film. I am Saban ). Ever creative, Mili  has brought us together for shared warmth at just the right time. We share stories, memories, laughs and a drink or two. 

                                                               "I am Saban" trailer

I’m concerned about our Wednesday reflection  group’s use of the word tribe, and tribal so I share some thoughts about  that with them. 

Friends:

I have become increasingly uncomfortable with our\use of the words tribe and tribal with an assumption of inherent negative meaning. To respond anecdotally:

1. I have an old friend who was raised on a Native American reservation. When there is an important decision to be made within his circle, he calls for a tribal council. For him this means all who have made a serious commitment, have invested themselves and have a stake in a particular community or project. In the meeting, all voices are of equal value as the group moves towards consensus. 

2.During my time in Oklahoma, one of my elders, a postal clerk in Tulsa, was the former chief of the Pawnee nation. In his tribal life, he was respected and honored as the leader of his nation. On several occasions I was honored, to be a guest at the annual Pawnee National Pow Wow and Reunion, a several day event every July. . All who came contributed to a common pot from which supplies were purchased for the gathering. Regardless of one's socio-economoic status in the white world, here all families shared equally from the same supply of food. Visitors from other tribes were welcomed at the Pow Wow dance with much exchange of gifts, including blankets, as signs of mutual respect and hospitality. That's what tribal means to me, welcome, warmth, generosity, hospitality

We seem to have unintentionaly fallen into what I call a case of privilege and power determining the meaning of  metaphor. (That might be an interesting conversation to have. .). Maybe we can ask Norm about the Tribes of Yahweh. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_K._Gottwald)

And, let us   seek  creatively to find new metaphors for our experience of  the division we are all  living through

It’s a colder night, enough scattered rain drops to discourage outdoor meditation. Harlem Tavern has joined the ranks of the re-opened and finally removed the St. Patrick’s decorations that had become so depressing. The police are running a check point and I’m not sure why. 

And there’s a small group of people waiting  outside Bean & Barely. Time for an end of the day gin and tonic.                        

                                                                   ****

Juliet Ward Howe's Mothers' Day  proclamation

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day ! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe                                                                     ¹⁸

1870

The 6th Sunday in Easter: Rising...Mothers' Day

Today is Mothers’ Day. We open with our Easter Alleluias and some good music…Spirit of the Living God and Cantad al Senor  ( I remember when we did it with actual trumoets…) Afterbour scriotures,  1 JOHN 5:1-6 and JOHN 15:9-17, I begin the reflection.

 5/10

Today is Mothers’ Day. I know it can be, well, an ambivalent day at best for many. I sent greetings to many people.

* One whose husband died and who’s alienated from his family

* Another who struggles with her own children, though loves being a grandmother

*Another who lost her only child

There’s also this:

* A friend who posted on Facebook the pain of people sending Mothers’ Day greetings when she is not despite always wanting to be one..

And this:

Some of us did not have happy experiences with our mothers…

This day is more complex than the romantic Hallmark image..

And it’s also time to give thanks for those who were mothers to children not their own….

Let’s go back to look at it’s origins. In the wake of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, Julia Ward Howe wrote this:

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day ! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe                                                                     ¹⁸

1870

(Actually it was Anna May Jarvis who actually  succeeded in getting Mothers’ Day recognized as a national holiday. But she had her issues, too.

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.

—Anna Jarvis.

Our gospel this morning ,you might say in our Resurrection living series ,could be seen as

Rising through Laying down.

As we move towards end of Easter, the time of the risen Christ on earth,we turn to  Jesus’ farewell discourse, to reflect on how to carry on when he’s no longer with us in the flesh.

…so that my joy may be in you and your joy be complete…he says. To be honest, joy is not easy for me…I’ve learned to understand hope as a spiritual/theological reality…but I an still working on joy… the whole ideas is a bit counter-cultural for an old-school Presbyterian.

When I was in church youth camp, a song leader had us sing Slap bang hear we go again, jolly Presbyterians. I brought that home to hear my own Sunday school teach her say, that is not Presbyterian.

Once in Pittsburgh, our Presbytery had a retreat led by someone from the Church of the Savior, the intentional Christian community in Washington, DC. He ended every session with a recording of Don’t worry be happy by Bobby McFerrin… …at first it was OK, but after 5 or 6 times I was ready to shoot myself or someone else. I didn’t yet understand the theological point he was trying to make. (You might want to check out his 23^rd Psalm for Mothers’ Day….)

By reading James Cone, I learned how African-American worship was filled with joy….the creation of liberated space…even in the midst of slavery…and when you think of

Desmond Tutu, what image do you have but that ever present joyous smile, even in the depths of apartheid.  Then there were the More Light worship services at our national general Assemblies, even at the darkest days for our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

Jesus speaks of laying down one’s life for his friends..we read this only in John…why? so that you may love…As someone once said, friends get you through times of no lovers better than lovers get you through times of no friends…

My cousins were Quakers…there official name was the society of friends…

Laying down for Jesus, meant going to the cross. Willingly. Voluntarily. To take away the power and fear of death. To set us free from that fear, that anxiety.

But for us…the question is, what do we lay down? And how? What risks do we take and why?

And can we truly be friends?

That is our question for Mothers’ Day.

For our offertory today, I sing my version of Rock of Ages.

After worship, our session meets again.  To consider our future. There are serious questions to decide. We are due for an annual meeting.

It is a beautiful spring day.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend: Once to Every one and nation

1/18

Pat O, Marsha and I working in a budget. But in looking at expenses, there are too many unknowns. We need to have a conversation with Nan, and our new bookkeeper, Monica.

While we are meeting, a contingent of young Koreans are walking through the building, checking it out. They’re congregants of Pastor An.

AT 2 o’clock, I join my Presbyterian Health Education and Welfare Association friends from around the country in a goto meeting. Always amazes me to see all of our faces on the screen together when we can be as far away as Hawaii. PHEWA, despite all its work among networks in areas like Domestic violence and Disabilities and Mental Illness, Criminal Justice, Health, AIDS, is always right on the edge. Like almost every group I’m involved with. I swear it’s not me!

It takes me hours to work through Martin Luther King, Jr’s Selma to Montgomery How long? Not long…speech. Not nearly as well known as I have a dream or the mountaintop speech. I’m impressed with the word usage, the art of the speech. How it uses the Bible, well known hymns and spirituals. Courageous challenge to the status quo. Comfortable for some, unbearable for most.                                                                

 Not easy, but I manage to turn it into a liturgy. With music. It’s late when I leave.

1/19/15

Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday. Two visitors from the Korean congregation are with us today. We begin with the old movement song, Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around…then read 1 Samuel 3: 1-10 where  Samuel hear the word of God calling him to be a prophet and doesn’t understand it at first. God calls him three times before Eli is able to convince him that it is indeed God calling. And recall that Martin didn’t want to be a prophet. That he wanted to be an intellectual, a scholar, an academic. Saw his tradition as something he need to rise above until in his loneliest hour he found its deep spiritual strength to sustain him.

And them we read the entirety of the How long, not long.. speech.( http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/our_god_is_marching_on/) And wherever Dr. King quotes from a hymn or song, we sing it.

We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around

Lift every voice and sing

We have come over a way

That with tears hath been watered.

We have come treading our paths

Through the blood of the slaughtered.

Out of the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam

Of our bright star is cast.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,

Up to the walls of Jericho they marched, spear in hand.

Go blow them ramhorns, Joshua cried,

‘Cause the battle am in my hand.

Once to every man  and nation
Truth forever on the scaffold
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.

And finally, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which gives the speech it’s other name. Our God is marching on. …
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword
His truth is marching on.He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; (Speak, sir)
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat.
O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

The power of those words still ring achingly present and true today.  We feel them as we enter into our prayers. At the end of the service, we sing Ain’t gonna let nobody….one more time,a and then, before a final Amen, We Shall Overcome.

Of everything we sang today, only Lift every voice…and We shall overcome have made it into the new Presbyterian Hymnal.  We shall overcome is a new addition, Lift every voice ….had made it into the 1990 hymnal.

What I’m especially taken by is the absence of  Once to Every Man and Nation and the Battle Hymn, which both had been historic mainstays in the older hymnals. Reflecting on this. Regarding Once…, James Russell Lowell wrote these words in 1854 (the same year one of West Park’s predecessors, Park Church, built its chapel on 84^th street).  The tune we use was written in 1890, one year after the new sanctuary was built. Lowell wrote his passionate, apocalyptic words in protest to the US war against Mexico. And I remember both my college minister Ray Swartzbach and my Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. using the hymn in anti-Vietnam war sermons. This is a kairos moment. You, we, have to decide.

The Battle Hymn, with its words lifted from the apocalyptic vision of Revelation 19, was written by abolitionist and suffragette  Julia Ward Howe in 1861. Once again, Howe viewed the moment as a decisive one with justice and truth hanging in the balance. She set it to an old camp song (also a tribute to radical abolitionist John Brown, who her husband Samuel secretly supported financially). It was intended to bolster the union troops.

O why were these powerful paens to justice banished? I suspect it happened as a misplaced understanding of  what  peacemaking in the church means. That is, militancy was confused  for militarism. Both songs have a martial air and a dramatic, apocalyptic, non-compromising use of language. The modern institutional church peace peacemaking project has often seen confrontation itself as problematic.

It is  hard to remember that the Presbyterian Church once filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of fundamentalist John Brown University. (No relation. At all.) and religious freedom and also provided defense funds for Angela Davis, an open communist. I can’t imagine that happening today. The only echo in a blunted time was last summer’s close vote to divest from 3 companies for their support of Israeli occupation of the West Bank. (Not insignificant.)

The taming of the hymnbook parallels the efforts to tame Dr.King, turn him into, in the word of Russ, a teddy bear. The Selma story shows just the opposite. King’s non-violence was a tactic to heighten tension, not reduce  it, not reduce it; until the basic demands were met. Active non-violence of the  movement drew violent response  to it, part of the tactic, to expose the brutality of those who  administer control and force a nation to face a cognitive dissonance between their stated values and their lived reality. And King’s action forced that dissonance to be resolved in favor of extending greater justice.  His use of non-violence was not only moral but strategic.

Thus we can not allow King’s memorialization to be used to avoid strong, even divisive action in this kairos moment. The young leaders of this movement  call for reclaiming Dr. King.

We people of faith need to play a supportive role. We will not be leaders this time. Our time has  passed. But we can be responsible. And responsive. And  advice when asked and when  it will be taken. We like Dr. King, can be militant without being militaristic. And perhaps sing and exegete some old songs while we’re at it. In this, another kairos moment.

Once to everyone an nation comes a moment to decide…..