Living in coronaviruswolrd 173: Hope and hot water

 

9/23

Bears on Columbus

“Boil the frog”

Joel tells us that’s the song he’s working on. Referring of course to the old story about how if you turn up the heat a degree at time, the frog won’t jump out of the water until it’s too late. And it feels like that’s where we’re headed.

We're talking today about James Cone and Cornell West. We remember the many Wednesdays we met at Tom’s restaurant and James Cone would be in the back booth waiting for Cornell West and Dr. West would stop on the way back to talk with us awhile. For both of them, blackness is a concept bigger than skin color. Dr. West talks for example about “..brown and white sisters and brothers discovering their inner blackness.”  I remember teaching Dr. Cone’s Black Theology to my theology students in Newark and how hard it was for many white and even some Black students to come to terms with a “Black Jesus.”

Dr. Cone was one of the first to challenge the idea there was anything like a pure  theology. What we were taught was a theology that was always a culture informed Western European white theology. I worked hard to teach  students that all theology is contextual and that they need to be able to identify and understand their own culture (in the broadest sense)  and context to be able to create their own theology. We see theology through our lens of American individualism. The Old Testament prophets, on the other hand, critiqued the religion of  seeing God only within their own group. In scripture, there is alway a tension between the individual and the group.

Joel grew up with what he referred to as “trickle down theology,” that is if you save individual souls,   they’ll do the right thing and all society will benefit.  A spiritual version of Reaganomics. Steve P reminds us of Jesus’ blood trickling down. And then reminds us of Erich Fromm’s concept of social narcissism where the self disappears into the mob which it sees as its greater self. For Dr. Cone, blackness is a mentality. A way of living in an oppressive society. And the essence of Black theology is to  allow the brokenness of the body of the Black Jesus to be our inspiration.  Brokenness can be the pathway to healing for both individual and society.

(As to what is seen, Archbishop Tutu reportedly said “if you were arrested for being a Christian, would  there be enough evidence to convict you?”)

There seems to be a sense that self-hatred plays a role in the attraction of the mob, or authoritarian leaders. How will we behave under dictatorship? Clyde recalls Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and theatre. I think of the role of the church in East Germany during the DDR days. 

(How do you sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Rehearse.)

Joel likes the wheat and tares parable.That we are all both. And that relationship means valuing the relationship over being right. 

Steve P reminds us that the two great commandments go together. Love your neighbor as your self. And that only those who  love themselves can truly love their neighbor. People who love themselves don’t join mobs or follow dictators. We speak of Martha and Mary and Jesus saying that Mary had chosen the better part when Martha complained. Steve P argues that Martha should have come to sit and  study as a student as well. I agree, but Jesus should have said, Let's all do the dishes so Martha can join us.  (All tautologies are useless. By definition, he says.) Then repeats that we need hope, and that if hope has an object, it is not absolute.  He sees the story of the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyoyic speculative fiction novel The Road as dramatic example of the kind of  hope he is talking about.

As the water gets ever hotter, our weekly conversations nurture the hope within us. 

open fridge

As  I walk the Upper West Side, I see another Open Fridge for free food. 

Joel and Carrie’s weekly Wednesday night Gluey Zoomy Show in its own whimsical way brings its own rays of hope as it reminds us that we are the glue that keeps each other together through these times.

Living in coronavirusworld 163: Nothing to fear

9/9

Still marching

Roberto Clemente Night. Tonight Major League baseball honors Roberto Clemente. The first  major Latin star in baseball. My childhood hero. To our group this morning, I wear his last hat, mustard and black. The hat he wore when he led the Pirates to the 1971 World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles.  That he wore when he got his 3000th hit against the New York Mets in his last at bat of hi slast season. New Year’s Day 1973 he would die when his plane went down taking relief supplies to Nicaragua after the earthquake.  He wanted to  go himself to ,make sure Somoza didn’t steal the supplies. Roberto said, “If you have an opportunity to help someone, and you don't, then you're wasting your life.”  

Roberto's teams: Santurce, Puerto Rico (winter), Montreal (minors), Pirates (major leagues)

Tonight al the Pirates will wear 21, the first  time anyone on the team has worn it since 1972. Puerto Rican players throughout the league will wear it as well.  And many of the recipients and nominees for the annual Clemente award. I have on a t-shirt with his 21 on the  back and “I went to bat for the Great One” on the front. It was fundraiser for his statue to be unveiled at the 1994 All-Star game. (For which I was a volunteer.) I mention the shirt is 36 years old. Roberto presente.

Hope is on the agenda today.  Joel talks about a new song they’ve written that Hot Glue & the Gun will premiere on their first show of the fall season tonight. Based in Amos. Noting there’s not a single positive oracle in Amos. Or Hosea for that matter. Both late prophets in the north. Words of doom. And hope?  Well there are some tacked on at the end, Steve P believes they wee added for worship. Words of hope are needed to worship.

We do fall into  a discussion of the eviction of the homeless people from the Upper West Side Hotels in response to complaining neighbors. Clyde responds angrily that the Coalition for the Homeless had raised over $100000 for the city to secure the hotel rooms. The mayor had dragged his feet from the start. And now just folds.  Scandalous. 

Wakanda Forever

Someone wonders where the leaders are. Someone remembers when the complaint about Black Lives Matter was no leaders and they responded We are not leaderless, we are leaderful. Norm quotes the name of a book, There is no Messiah and you are it. And the question remains, how do we create a culture of welcoming? Is any moral requirement necessary beyond Love your neighbor?

Steve P has an article coming out in the Yale Divinity School journal on hope. For him, the key passage is Hebrews 11: 1. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. He talks about a time in Paris when he encountered the dark awareness of nothing. A sense of the power of nothingness. We're recall the (semi-) humorous statement There is nothing to fear. All spending on how you take the word nothing.) For Steve, hope is only hope if it is in what is not seen. What you see when you see nothing. It’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Every major Biblical character has a moment to face nothing. It is in the face of nothing that the juiciness of life can emerge. 

There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing is important. Very important, Steve P says. 

Several of us are living outside of the city close enough to enjoy the wilds of Harriman State Park. Hills and mountains have histories too. It is a place where God hears. 

In the face of nothing? Gratitiude. Community. Hope. 

Steve takes us to Job.  A folktale surrounded by poetry. A book of absolute hope. The inability of his “friends” even wife, to get it. 

How Simone Weil said that an atheist who cared for others was closer to God than believers who don’t.

Which leads inevitably to the conversation about God and Satan, or Ha Satan, as he’s always called in Judaism. As in the Satan.  Not so much enemies as frenemies, inextricably tied together.  For writers like Jose Saramago, (in the Gospel According to Jesus Christ) working together.  Ha Satan, the tester, the accuser, the prosecuting attorney. Joel brings up a series on Amazon Prime, Good Omens, that plays out that idea with humor. 

And so there we are .  On the edge with Stephen P. Feeling the power of nothing. And summoning hope.  Like John Lewis on the Pettis Bridge, stepping forward with a vision of what could not (yet) be seen and in his endurance of blows over all the years, making it visible.

Steve H recommends a book White too Long for our reading.

Goodbye Cafeine 

On the Cafeine window, a thank you and goodbye note. Moving vans parked to load out the last remains of our coffee shop. 

Living in coronavirusworld 132: Play ball

8/5

beauty along the way

the Crawfords

Today’s history  lesson for the Underground starts with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Baseball Leagues. Today I wear a shirt and hat from the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and tell the story of Gus Greenlee. Gus made his money in the numbers “racket,” but within the black community, known as one who paid scholarships to send students to colleges and provided money for people to buy homes when denied by banks. He became the owner of the Crawford Grill, Pittsburgh’s equivalent of the Lennox Lounge where the best in black entertainers like Billie Holiday and Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald would perform. (In later years, Martin Luther King,Jr would stop by when he was in town.) Negro league ballplayers would stop by the Crawford as well. Greenlee was incensed to learn that while the famous Homestead Grays could play their games at the Pirates’ Forbes Field, they were not permitted to use the showers. So Greenlee decided to build his own stadium….and his own team. Greenlee Field was the first black built stadium.  It even had lights.  He quickly gathered the best players like Josh Gibson (the Black Babe Ruth), the only man to ever hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium, arguably better than Ruth, the great pitcher Satchel Paige…Soon between the Grays and Crawfords, Pittsburgh was home to the best in baseball of any color. After seven years, a major hit in the numbers business took Greenlee out of baseball.

But there was one more chapter…1n 1954 Branch Rickey took Greenlee on as a partner to create the United Staes Baseball League, essentially a fiction to get a contract with Jackie Robinson and keep him away from anyone else until Rickey could get him into the Dodgers. Greenlee assumed the partnership  would continue after Robinson went to Brooklyn. It did not. For Greenlee, it was back to the Crawford Grill.   Gus Greenlee was but one example of the entrepreneurs who created the Negro League.  People like Effa Manley, first woman to own and direct a team, the Newark Eagles “as important to black Newark as the Dodgers are Brooklyn” she said. Newark would be the team of Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.  As baseball integrated, it meant the end of the Negro Leagues and the dynamic business people who created them.  The best Black ball players would become part of Major League Baseball. But those who built and kept a dynamic and exciting  league together would be lost to baseball.  Integration brought with it loss as well as gain. 

115th street 

We spend some time stalking about conspiracy  theories and how they’re growing on the left as wells right. They seem to be a way to manage a world of pain. 

And we talk about HOPE. Which is truly only HOPE f unseen. I share the Jim Wallis (Sojourners) definition:Hope is continuing to have faith in spite of the evidence and working to make the evidence change. 

A woman is quoted a saying “I would die for Jesus but I would not give up my house!”

after the storm

We also talk about how we are not required to find the solution, but only find that one thing we can do. We talk of mental illness.  Of how “melancholia” was more accepted in the day of Lincoln than depression now. How it was seeing slavery as a call not a political problem that enabled Lincoln to move beyond depression. How Freud said the definite of a good life is non-neurotic love and work.  And we talk of the importance of agency, over transaction. As Freire said, that we might become the subjects of our own history.

The New York City General Assembly commissioners finally meet. I realize how unique my experience of being actively engaged was among us. The rest felt isolated and unsure how to connect. No time to absorb or think.”Just one more ZOOM meeting."We plan our report to Presbytery and continue to recommitted to working on the reconvening of Assembly.

Our Presbyterian Health Educational and Welfare Association will be reaching out to the Black Women and Girls Task Force to seek collaboration. Our Disabilities Concerns network feels that experience of BWaG in the world of disability has not yet  been attended to. We decide to extend an invitation to a new Mental Health Network to join . New stream lined by laws are on their way as the continued rebirth of PHEWA takes place. In the current pandemic and social crisis, the work  has taken on renewed relevance and urgency. It feels good to be part of it, to having helped bring it about. 

Living in coronavirusworld:93 Lamentation into Hope

24

...and light poles.....

Pirates' Pride

Cakes for Pride Week

As our underground gathers, today I share my Pittsburgh Pirates “Pride Hat.”The significance was that in a city that traditionally celebrates Polish night or Italian night or Serbo-Croatian night, the first celebration of “Pride night in a Pittsburgh sports stadium marked a moment of growing acceptance for the lgbtq community in Pittsburgh. 

The conversation began by thinking about what the right has done well, eg, creating a sense of a moral universe. While the left has basically been doing “virtue signaling.” On the other hand, the Poor Peoples Campaign has explicitly sought to create a moral universe.

Sam talks of her research into cults and the prominence of “red diaper babies” in them wondering if a lack of a strong belief system  left people open to manipulation.  The necessity of what a faith demands. Again, on the other hand, there are other faiths. My friend who’s father was the last Yugoslav ambassador always says to this day that her nationality is Yugoslav and her religion communist

After a brief conversation about money and racism, it led to a conversation about how the right offers a sense of belonging. And how objective reality offers a frame of reference. It was noted that a sense of belonging exists on the left as well, eg, then Peoples Music Network and people who show up at the Peoples Voice Cafe to sing movement songs every Saturday. 

After bemoaning the lack of organization on the left, the example of the Poor Peoples Campaign came up again with its recent virtual “march on Washington,.”  Steve P spoke of three great moments in America religious history, including the first and second “Great Awakenings," one  result of which was the abolition movement. And then the post World War II “returns to normalcy” boom. All along, of course, the Black Church offering a counter reality and culture within the larger movement. 

We talked of how the Poor Peoples Campaign has not yet gained traction enough to garner widespread attention, particularly among young people. (Maybe the revolution is not being televised? said Joel.) It was also pointed out that the PPC has been solidly committed to having the most affected speak out. More important than soaring oratory is their voice and testimony.

We concluded one again by talking about the bottom line importance of conversation. (Steve P noted that Athenian democracy lasted 20-30 years and descended into empire. It’s hard to keep going. ) It’s necessary to define terms first . We also talked about how personal experience moves issues forward. Knowing someone creates cognitive dissonance that must be resolved between person and principle. Most of us resolve in terms of person, but there are always those ready to burn the witches. How classic community organizing uses intentional conversation, not intimate friendship, but true relationships. 

I believe it’s Joel who directs us to these words of Paul:

13 Beloved,[h] I do not consider that I have made it my own;[i] but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly[j] call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. 16 Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

Recommenced books: In the Shadow, by Michael Walzer

Henry James, the American

The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship breakfast is virtual this year.  The making of peace is God’s holy mischief, and therefore peacemakers are holy mischief makers. I can only hope so. An old New York friend,Jose Luis Gonzalez, is the speaker. And he makes a connection between racism and the need for Fossil Fuel Divestment. How we treat people is how we treat creation and that has and will open doors for pandemics. The current societal distrust is  ultimately a pastoral challenge. This is our kairos moment, a time of in breaking.

a good plan from the street

walls 

and restaurants

On my long walk, I read the words on the street. And walls. And light poles.  Even businesses. Something is changing. 

The night General Assembly Session is a Bible Study on Lamentations 5: 20-21. How lament is our moment, but how to find hope? Over 400000 dead in the world and a quarter in our own country. How the racism that began with the arrival of African slaves in 1619 is a form of virus.

Lamentations liken Psalm 137 are written by survivors. (By the rivers of Babylon..)

Be careful with new normals. We need new realities, not new normals. And to begin we must face our past. And create new realities out of that honest facing of the past . Only then does lamentation move  towards  hope. Only then can we  learn to dance in the midst of lament. Like the joy is coming parade down Fredrick Douglas Avenue.  Lamentation into hope, this year's General Assembly. 

Advent 2: Lobsters in the desert

12/8

It’s the second Sunday in Advent. I begin by playing a recording  of Lo How a Rose e’er Blooming. (Es is ein ros)Talk about how the old German song was the framing  device for Bread and Puppet’s Shatterer…This week as we light our candles, we sing  two verses of Barbara Lundblad’s new  version of O Come O come, emmanuel…

O come, o come Immanuel                                                                                                                                        

And bless each place your people dwell

Melt ev’ry weapon crafted for war

Bring peace upon the earth for evermore

Rejoice, rejoice! Take heart and do not fear,

God’s chosen one, Immanuel, draws near.

O come green shoot of Jesse, free

Your people from despair and apathy

Forge justice for the poor and meek

Grant safety for the young ones and the weak.

Rejoice, rejoice! Take heart and do not fear,

God’s chosen one, Immanuel, draws near.

And the theme for this week is hope….

Our first scripture is ISAIAH 11:1-10. We reflect on what’s being said. That the stump is like a cut off tree. A tree taken for dead. And a sprig of new life is bursting forth. (Like breaking through the concrete) I also pass around a copy of one  of Jonathan Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom paintings. Remembering my cousin’s Pennsylvania Quaker meeting house with several of these. How I love the big, dumb, simple animals living in harmony. And beyond the Isaiahan vision imagery, in a Pennsylvania landscape, William Penn and friends meeting with Native Americans. I always wished I could enter into one of those paintings. A world to live in. Or into.

                                         The Peaceable Kingdom

(Although one of our members was particularly attracted to …with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked….5)

For me, it’s  ..They will not hurt or destroy 
on all my holy mountain 8 and that it is a universal vision not just for  a particular people.      

Romans picks up the theme of hope: ¹³May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we talk about how hope is not optimism. Optimism is believing that every day in every way everything is getting better and better. On the other hand, Hope, as Jim Wallis has said, is believing in spite of  the evidence and having the courage to work to make the evidence change.

And so, as it is his week, we end with MATTHEW 3:1-12 and John the Baptist. That child of privilege, who left the tall steeple if the temple and his establishment family for  the wilderness. And that what it was about, the baptizing, was a radical critique of the state of the religious establishment that had gone in to collaboration with the occupying colonial power. That even the temple’s purifying baths, built by Herod were modeled on Roman baths. So the only appropriate action was the act of conversion, re-conversion, by entering into the ever flowing  waters of the Jordan.

His clothing  and dress like an Elijah. And his diet, locusts and wild honey, the simplest. (Although as Arcadia and John R pointed out, the Spanish reads langostas, IE, lobsters…lobsters and wild honey. And we realize that lobsters and locusts are equally non-kosher.)

And that repentance means turning around, going in  a different direction.

So why does he attack the scribes and pharisees?

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸Bear fruit worthy of repentance

Is that any way to build a congregation? Is he questioning why they are there? Are they sincere? Or on a reconnaissance mission out to gather evidence? Like  when Homeland Security told me that they had intel embedded in West-Park’s Occupy contingent?

He is clear that being children of Abraham is nothing to be proud of. (like those who say..I’m proud to be a real American…) and that

God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 

And then he gets seriously radical:

Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

¹¹“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹²His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

John’s expectation of the messiah is clear: It’s easy to see ourselves as the wheat and we know exactly who the chaff are and that they are about to get their just deserts. It’s the French Revolution. Frantz Fanon's  Wretched of the Earth. The Chinese Cultural Revolution.

But here is the truth: we all have wheat and chaff within us. The purpose of this season, this preparation is to find the chaff within ourselves and offer it up. Repentance. Turning around. Dealing with our own chaff.

We end with the canto de esperanza:

Dios de la esperanza danos gozo y paz! Al mundo en crisis habla tu verdad. Dios de la justicia mandanos tu luz,luz y esperanza en la oscuridad. Oremos por la paz, cantemos de tu amor, Luchemos por la paz, fieles a ti, Senor.

….fighting for the peace, faithful to you…

From Isaiah to John the Baptist to this Argentine folk song…fitting words for the Sunday following the death of Nelson Mandela. The work is still unfinished. But we sing a song of hope.