Three days of peace, love and music. And crafts. And art. Days 1 and 2.

12/16

The day begins with an explosion of activity. Ted and Judith and the crafts people are hustling about getting ready for the festival to open. DJ Dan has been hired to work security. Amanda and Teddy are working on a big brown paper sign that says Music and Crafts today. Deacon James is sweeping the steps. Jason and Danielle are in serious negotiation for the ongoing presence of Occupy Wall Street here at West-Park. I call Micah and invite him down.  And Tracy has arrived to go to coffee and talk about strategy for the anti-sweat shop campaign. Meanwhile, discussions with Con Ed continue and there seems to be some kind of breakthrough. They will come Monday, work on the lines, run a pressure test. If all goes well, the heat can come on. 

Berik and Leila

Micah arrives, I introduce him to Jason and they head off together. Nick is feverishly at work trying to finish his installation piece and Leila and Berik are finishing their exhibit in the chapel. The doors to the festival swing open and I show Tracy around. The Christmas lights are sparkling and the music ready to begin. 

Brandon stops by to say hello, checks out the festival. Amazed. 

Mandola Joe

Amanda and Aaron

Amanda and Piano Dan

The music begns with violinist/fiddler Katy Rowell followed by Mandola Joe and his Buskers group. Amanda plays a set accomoanied by Aaron Rito on guitar, who also does his own set. And then Piano Dan.

Jeremy and Bob

Late in the afternoon, RL is not able to perform so Amanda asks me to step in and I set my nerves aside and do a short set. DJ Dan and Teddy and Marc the sound guy seem surprised that this is me, too. Piano Dan arrives for his set. When Jeremy arrives,we go to the Chapel to rehearse. He does his set, asks me to do some harmonies on a couple of his,  and then we do two together: Early on one Christmas Morn, originally recorded by the Cottontop Mountain Sanctified Singers, Frankie (Half-Pint) Jaxon, lead singer, and Go tell It on the Mountain, in the style of the Swan Silvertone Singers (by way of Bruce Cockburn.)

And now its time for the art shows to open. Andrea and Dan and Nate arrive. Micah has gone off to Occupy. The singers are ending, artists arriving. Nick Etre has emptied the session room and installed two portable radios under the floor playing the Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away on loop until the batteries die. This is part of his Wear Your Love Like Heaven installation with surprises in unexpected places, again in dialogue with the building. Oh and Yeah featured sculpture, painting and print by Peggy Chiang, Maude Kasperzak, Joanna Kopczyk, Margo Malter and Bettina Yung.

Teddy and Sarah

I go off for dinner with Andrea and Nate. Then come back to close up. The Mc Alpin gallery is filled with young artists and friends. I share some wine, conversation and then its time for Sarah and I to lock up. We’re almost ready to leave when I hear noise upstairs. We go up to find some occupiers in the attic, the old Boy Scout room. When I see a ladder, I have to climb it, one says. Well no, not exactly. 

So we clear the building. Go outside. All the doorways are filled with sleepers. And to make it perfect, George is there in the south doorway, looking over all. Welcome back, George, I say, good to see you. 

Judith

12/17

Exhausted but another day begins. Mandola Joe opens the day followed by Jeremy. I sit in with some harmonies again, then run off to a play, Hand to God, with the family where I’m surprised to find two Woodshed friends, Kaitlin Binnie, the wardrobe supervisor and the playwright, Robert Askins. 

Neil

Piano Dan and Cindy

RL rocks

When I get back, Neil Howard is doing a set. Judith is concerned that the moody music will hurt sales. Uh...anyways, Piano Dan arrives with his vocalist Cindy Thrall. She’s energetic and lands somewhere between Nashville, lounge, and kick ass wedding singer. My son Dan and his friends are all in the balcony listening. RL arrives, ready to perform. Asks the audience to stay. 

He straps on the guitar and launches into his own Christmas song, Who’s That Fat Man?, complete with Elvis shake and swagger,  which if I had it recorded would go right on my play list. And then does his reading of Red Ryder and the Fat Woman, a wonderful story of a long ago Christmas, his grandmother Mabel and a BB gun. How life goes on, you use what you have. What he came back to  read at the end of the Festival clean up last year. You might say that was the beginning.Pastor K’s family has stayed and is glad they did. Dan and his friends glad they stayed, too.  

Amanda asks me to come on one more time. This time, she joins in with harmonies, which feels good. And playing is gettng easier, more comfortable, all the time. 

A good end to a good day.Time to join my Occupying boys. 

Hanging on by the grace of God

12/15

Marc meets me with someone who’s looking to rent a space for a New Year’s Eve party. We show him Mc Alpin, talk about how beautiful it looked with the cocktail tables, balloons. We name a pirce. We’ll see what happens. 

David Grunberg, Concertmaster of the Riverside Orchestra, and before with Jens Nygard and the Jupiter Symphony, comes in. Still wants to put his own group together, to give back, to help build the space. And I want to see that happen.

Ted is bringing things in for the Crafts Festival. Judith of New York Creates is there as well.  Memories  of last year filling me. Remembering our valiant stand against the cold. At least we’ve got restrooms and a portable heat blower. 

Boxer Mike comes in. Wants to know when we’re going to get around to him. I point out the Crafts Fesitval, shrug my shoulders. Tell him to take care of his Dalmations. 

I take hot chocolate to Pascal across the street with the Christmas trees.  And talk to Marty. He compares my walkabouts to Pope John Paul II, our longest serving Pope, who always had a body guard.   I tell Marty I don’t do so well  keeping track of them, the popes.  And we wish each other good days.

P_____ comes in. Her eviction looming ever closer. Which would be a travesty of justice. We get her hooked up with the Strycker’s Bay eviction prevention project. I wirte a letter to the court. If just once I   could talk to the judge....

My son Micah has come down to see the church. So I give him a tour of the whhole buiding, tell stories. Talk about what has changed since he was here a year ago. Seems like a lifetime. Seems like yesterday.

The Board of the Interfaith Assembly on Housing and Homelessness arrives. We’re meeting  in the chapel. In the cold. Surrounded by Berik’s nudes. Another on the  edge organization. As long as I’ve been President ...and before ...it’s been precarious. Hanging on only by the grace of God. Like us.  But, hanging on still. And so we will try one more time to get it right. To find a way for Marc  to be the prophetic voice he has been for all these years. And somehow move closer to sustainabiliy. Which also I struggle with on a daily basis. I so relate to what Marc goes through every day. It’s my story too.

What we're really looking for is partnership

12/14

Ted has arrived with supplies for the upcoming  New York Creates crafts fair.  Our second annual. As we're unloading, four people walk in. They've seen the sign for the Crafts Fair on the scaffolding  and are ready for the fair. I have to explain that we're not open yet. They want to see the sanctuary. I invite them in, tell of the history. And Ted speaks of the vision of the Center. Invites them to come back when the Fair opens up. But they're on their way home. To Missouri. Turns out they're Presbyterians from Jefferson City. In town for a conference on the Middle Est with our friend Mark Koenig at the UN. I tell them how supportive Mark has been. 

Hope and Mim have arrived for our meeting with Caitlin and Daisy Kahn from the Cordoba Initiative. This is part of our ongoing discussion with the Muslim group that had come to be known as the Ground Zero Mosque even though it was neither to be at Ground Zero nor fully a mosque. Daisy is married to Imam Faisel, but more important, has a long running relationship with Mim. Together, they were part of Same Difference, an interfaith project developed by SPSA, B’Nai Jeshurun and the American Sufi Mislim Association in response to 9-11. (http://www.samedifference.org/About/evolution.htm).

This is Daisy’s first visit to West-Park. So we do the full tour. She sees the chape as a great place for book readings. Mc Alpin Hall would make a great place for jummah, or Friday prayer, the main service of the Muslim week. Caitlin point to the direction where Meccah would be. And Daisy also talks of what a great place it woud be for weddings.  Indeed, what Sarah did for our gala showed what a great event space it coud be. 

But beyond all that, what we’re really looking for is a partnership. Their vision of a community that would bring Jews, Christians and Muslims together as in the years of the golden era of Muslim Spain is directly in line with our vision. Especially when it brings two old friends together. 

The damned boiler issue is standing in the way. So we’ll begin by committing to talk again. And see where we can go programming wise.

It’s time for me to go pay the champagne bill, maybe have a drink with RL, then catch up with Jim Nedelka at the office. 

The man from Con Ed came

12/13

Hope and Danielle are working on thankyous for the gala as I arrive. Seems I just missed the district manager of Con Ed who came for a personal inspection. He checked out the pipes, the boiler room, the trap door. Maybe he has figured out what needs to be done. He said he’ll be back to us. A lot is riding on his ability to get things done. We’ll see.

All day long, Nick is busy creating his art installations in the Session room and in the room above Mc Alpin. One of his works involves removing floorboards and  installing boom boxes under the floor that will play a Beach Boys loop. The opening is Friday night. 

Late in the day, Nate and Dan come down to join us and work with Danielle to hang the signs for Ted’s Crafts Fair. He’s moving ahead, boile ror no boiler. Dan stays on the scaffolding while Nate moves uo and dowh the ladder. He signs get hung.

Hanging a banner

One darkness falls, the homeless people are already settling in for the night. 

I come back, late at night to check something I left behind.  Nick is still there, hammering, sawing, painting....Outside, each doorway is filled. 

Strictly equal opportunity

12/12

Anthony and Gary are on the steps.  We talk about the increasing number of homeless people on the steps. Pastor, I even saw someone trying to break in the door the other night, he says. I tell him that the door hasn’t been the same since.  He shakes his head. You know as it gets colder, you’re gonna get more and more. I tell him that I know, that I lived through last winter.  And that its colder inside. 

And he asks about the boiler. Didn’t that woman, that Gale, Gale Badger? say she was going to do something about that? 

Brewer, I say. She’s trying. Con Ed’s hard to work with. 

You saying they don’t like Christians?

 No, no way Anthony. They’re strictly equal opportunity...they’ll do this to Christian, Muslim, Jew, doesn’t matter. Anthony and Gary get up and start own the street. He looks back over hsi shoulder. You tell that Gale Badger to help you. And they’re gone. 

Jeremy drops by. We’d like to work on some music for the Balcony Music Festival. I have some  Christmas songs in mind. We crank up the sound system, I pull out my ipod and put on Early on one Christmas morn, by Bruce Cockburn, (http://cockburnproject.net/albums/christmas.html), complete with the ricky tick piano and guitar. And try his Mary Had a Baby and finally with his quirky Go Tell it on the Mountain. We decide to settle in and work on Early...

Come on Bob, he says, commit. Take your glasses out of your mouth and commit...And so I do. and I loosen up. And out it comes...Then we dig into Go tell it ...with its quirky resolution, not the way you exect to hear it.  And that begins to feel good too. 


The just for kicks, I play him Spiraling's mash-up of Do You Hear What I Hear and Baba O'Reilly. (http://www.downloads.nl/music/Spiraling+Do+You+Hear+What+I+Hear )

And then Danielle arrives and its back to boiler bureaucratic  hell. Tonight’s Center board meeting will be tough. 

Advent 3: Rejoice always?

12/11

The cold now just makes me angry. After having come this far, it feels almost insulting. But there it is.  I’m getting the place set up as Rachel arrives first, followed by two visitors.There will eventually be three, inclusing two young women and one very tall young man with a shaved head. And Amy is with us today so there will be music. 

As last week, I invite  people to come up close.  When we get to Psalm 126, I tell them it always makes me think of my colleague Pastor K Karpen at SPSA. His way of doing this Psalm, almost people’s mike style. (He did this most recently at our community Thanksgiving service.)... The LORD has done great things for them...The LORD has done great things for us.....with shouts of joy...with shouts of joy...with shouts of JOY

Before my sermon, I tell the  the story of the people from New Jersey who had come to worship then returned for the gala. We were ten percent of your congregation that day, they said, we had to come back. I’m glad that they could see us at our best. And they had brought homemade pimento cheese dip, a bottle of tabasco, triscuits and chocolate chip muffins. The homemade cheese dip, delicious. 

Santas on subway, santacon2011

I focus my sermon Isaiah 61: 1-4 and 8-11. But I start with another example of ritual space.  How yesterday was Santacon day. A day being added to the New York City holiday season liturgy. For several years now on the second Saturday of December, if you wear a Santa Claus (or elf or reindeer or...) suit and bring two items of non-perishable food, you get a card to visit bars all over the city that show a santacon sign. (The con is short for convention...)  Two Asian Santas getting on my subway express stop had caught my eye and  as we approached Penn  Station, there were increasing numbers of Santas everywhere. And outside Madison Square Garden, well, a veritable convention, So I asked one what was up. Coincidence he said. And then he laughed and told me about Santacon. 

Time to take a closer look at Isaiah. What I heard a professor at Union call the fifth gospel, as in Handel’s Messiah. The average person doesn’t usually think of the fact that most of Handel’s text comes from Isaiah. Once you’ve heard Messiah, you never hear Isaiah quite the same again, even though its original audience would never have had that understanding. Certainly  the gospels borrow much of their understanding of the Messiah from Isaiah.  The one who brings a universal Messianic age.

I ask who are  the oppressed, and people mention first the unemployed, then those without housing, the hungry in our midst. We learned from Doreen Wohl from the Westside Campaign Against Hunger that those who rely only on foodstamps to eat get about $4.50 a day to eat. For a family.  And I think of the story of the man in Chelsea who has an elevator to get his Range Rover up to an 11th floor garage outside his apartment. Oppressed....

to bind up the brokenhearted:    and who are they? And a voice from the pews s says, those who are gettign divorced...and we speak of broken relationships and the pain of this season....how my friend Bebb in Skocharie, New York has a Blue Christmas servicee where peope can share their sadness, because for many, this is not a season of joy, but one of a deeper awareness of hurt, of loneliness...

 to proclaim liberty to the captives: and we think of children trapped in school systems that don’t allow them to compete fairly, we think of famiies with children or parents in the military, peope who made choices based on economics, and find themselves fighting wars they didn’t want to be part of...and I remember  the family in my friend John’s church with 4 children in the service...

and release to the prisoners;  and we wonder how it is that there are more African-America males between 18 and 21 in prison than in college and how it is that our country can incarcerate a higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation..a rate six times higher than the rest of the planet, with less than 5% of the world’s pipilation we have 25% of the world’s prisoners...a number quadruled since 1980...(see http://www.isreview.org/issues/52/gasper_prisons.shtml)

 to comfort all who mourn; for whatever reason they mourn, for those who have lost a love, a job, a friend, or dream...

for this we wait..this is the work of the messiah to come, the age to come...

They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.  And as I read that, the congregation laughs. That is what we are seeking to do day by day, our church building a symbol of what we seek to do in people’s lives...

 For I the LORD love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing: when  I heard Michael Moore at Zucotti Park he said All we are asking for is what is already ours. We want our money back. Justice is in the end restorative...

I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

 Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom the LORD has blessed. Like we talked about at our celebration Monday, this is about all who have come before, all who are here, and as I look at little Ashley, all who are to come...

 For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

It was important that so many of these responses came from the congregation, not from me. Less preaching, more discerning, more discovering what is already known. 

I did say that for Walter Brueggeman, the Isaiah prophecy is about the primary agency of humanity. And that another translation for the phrase applied to Jesus, the Son of Man, is simply the Human One.  The age we wait for we must begin to live in even now as we say here, to see the image of God in the face of every person, in every person assembled here.  

As we sing Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary, we seek to find space in our own hearts that the Messiah can be born, can live there.....

We finish with Soon and very soon and then I read 1 Thessalonians 5: 16-24 as a benediction:

Rejoice always: (Really?How do we do that?)                     pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; All? Again, really? In the African- American church there is a call and response: God is good....All the time. All the time...God is good. Which means in all circumstances, seen or unseen, we affirm God’s presence with us, that God’s will will be done. That as Martin Luther  King, Jr.  said, the arc of history bends towards justice....

for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.(Anyone’s spirit, not even your own, for the spirit of God is upon you...) Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.

May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

That’s the way it was, this third Sunday in Advent. It is cold, but I am walking home in the sun. 

Somedays, just nothing works

12/9

Early to the church. The electrician needs his tools. He’s annoyed because he wants to finish the job and Chris his boss is calling him off to another  emegency. He’s got no more idea than I do as to how we get through the bureaucratic morass with the boiler or what the strategy is. 

While I’m watching the electrician’s car, David Grunberg, the Concertmaster  of the Riverside Orchestra comes up. Helps me watch the car as we talk. He’d been to the gala Monday night. Had played in Riverside’s performance here in November. And back in the day had played with Jens Nygard of the Juoiter Symphony. 

He wants to get his own chamber  group back together. Give something back. Would like to do a benefit for us. Wants to know the full currrent situation, so I leave him with the electrician’s car and go get him a copy of the Westside Spirit article, which pretty much says it all. And then the electrician comes and we all three talk together and then the leave.  

Most of the day is spent trying to get traction on the boiler situation.  We seem to be dependent on Councilmember Brewer again.  Although Ted, too has a connection. But, the lack of heat is slowing Jane’s efforts to build momentum. Even her warm and cozy office on gala night, her sense of presence, won’t hold a crowd in a cold place. And Ted is frustrated. (Almost) Ready to pull the plug on the Crafts Fair which would kill the Second Annual Balcony music festival as well. And stop us in our tracks. Ted’s got baners to hang. Cards to get out.  The frustration is wearing. To say the least.

Luli is back again for Noche Flamenca. We’ve already agreed to one proposal but now she is focused on the session room and chapel which no way cold we give up access. And she seems frustrated to not get what she wants and we so want this to work.  So you wirte something up, she says. Well, ok, but....we already did that. 

I’m trying to get away to do planning with Jane when P_____ comes through the door. Yes, I have called the court.But no, they won’t let me talk to the judge. They said to me, we have told Ms. P_______ over and over and over...And so? Does anyone get that she may not understand wha theyAnd  are sayng, even if over and over? Ironically, she makes too much money to get a legal aid atorney. And I need the judge to know that if theyeict her, she’s done. On the street. Which is great fpr the landlord, butn no one else. She follows me all the way up the street to Starbucks.  Laura (WSSFSH) has recommended her to an eviction protection program. If only it’s not too late.  

Somedays nothing, just nothing works.