Easter 33 and 34: Happy Birthday Bob....hip hop is something you are

5/22/14

Pat O in for his weekly check in with Danielle and I and our to do lists. We haven’t made as much progress a last week, but simply getting it all down is reassuring and cuts through the confusion.

Steven S is in making his rounds and getting everything in shape. It's a relief to finally have someone in this position.

Everyday there are several people who just want to walk in and pray awhile. Karen has been playing her music nearly every day.

Long conversation with Marina. Noche is pressing ahead with Antigone. There will be a staging this summer in Phoenix and then a full production in Seattle in the fall. I can’t wait to see this.

regroup Theatre people in almost every day working on Mc Alpin. Looking forward to their August residency.

Off to some independent film screenings  at Milica’s gallery.

5/23

And today Pat meets with me to work on our 60 day plan. I need to get hold of the congregational development side of this. And we have to keep moving within  our time constraints. The clock is ticking.

Pat leaves with just enough time to rehearse before tonight’s Open Mic. We accept Mandola’s challenge to honor Bob Dylan’s birthday weekend with most of us coming up with at least one Dylan song. As for me, I’m working on Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, which begins When you’re lost  in the rain in Juarez…

RL starts it off with an early Bob Dylan’s Dream, a young man’s song from  this old man’ perspective.

Ed S

From RL’s parody Walk, walk walkin’, out Dylan’s door…endin with at least 6 versions of Dylan’s voice to Ed S’s deconstruction to Pat O’s traditional folk treatment to Mandola’s Robert Service style presentation to my own, it’s a full night. With Joe running it like a competition. We all won.

Gave me a chance to tell my Juarez story. How I was doing a consultation in El Paso. Took a tour with the Presbyterians. Felt completely dissatisfied. Took a cab back to the border. Went to the Kentucky Club. Met a couple of journalists who volunteered to give me a night time tour of Juarez. Una noche felliniesca, they called it. I saw a neighborhood springing up at night out of cardboard and tin and several thousand people. A club with a 1950’s Cleveland strip club vibe and an mc with a pencil mustache. Singing cuando caliente el sol with senoritas de la noche.  And too many wonders to describe. Walking across the bridge, as the sun was rising, I realized the Dylan song was not surrealismo but realismo. The first time I opened Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I got it immediately. Magical realism is every bit as real as it is magical.

Lost in the rain

Of course Nick played his best banjo yet. David L doubled as a photographer, taking pictures all night. Friends of John J turned out to hear the guy who is giving us Austin right here in NYC. Steve B, who Joe caught at his day job doing a wedding in the Park, another solid 3 song set.

Jelani

And Jelani, a young rapper, waited all night long for his set. He lost his words after he got his flow going. But then he just stopped, talked straight from his heart about what he sees in his community. There was clarity and anguish and passion. I recalled our conversation last week in my class in Newark about how some rappers simply fulfill the worst of white imposed stereotypes, as described by womanist theologian  Kelly Brown Douglass. I see what Jelani is trying to do. Am reminded again about the sanctuary role of the Black church in communities. And as KRS1 once said, rap is something you do, hip hop is something you are.

Time to go debrief.

Easter 31: Music. Piano. Conversations

5/21

Nan comes in for her weekly review of bills to pay and just to visit.

A musician walks in looking for the ETHEL rehearsal and the sound of their music quickly reveals their location. They’ve been working on some intense and seriously heavy music this week.

When ETHEL has finished for the day, Karen’s very personal songs and music takes their place in the sanctuary. She gets coffee for the both of us.

A man named Angelo has recently found a job and needs metrocard to get back to Queens. I’ve got just enough to make that happen.

A man from the neighborhood comes in and asks if he can play the piano awhile and I’m happy to oblige.

I take time and talk with my son Micah and Nina in Berlin. Still amazing to see them right there in front of me. We're talking about the devastation in  the Balkans, virtually ignored in the western press. Whole villages destroyed. fear of the potential public health disaster waiting to happen on the heat with rotting carcasses, mosquitos, toxic mud. Nina points out that for the first time since the wars in the wake of the break up of Yugoslavia, there's a sense of cross-border, cross-ethnic pan-balkan solidarity. tennis star Djokovich donates his entire Italian Open winnings. And posts on his website, Long live all the formerYugoslav republics. Serbian soccer hooligans jump on buses to go help their Croatian brothers and sisters. I'll be talking to Beppe about this. I will be helping Milica with her benefit a week from now. 

I’m getting ready to meet Esther R and Katie R to talk about a future performance together at Open Mic. I step outside and there is Rudy. Now bearded. Gives him a look of wisdom. Today, as he often does, he talks about communication. How these days he experiences it as disjointed and alienating. No one has normal  phone conversations anymore. It’s all texting and e-mail. I remember the peak days of what the community knew as  Rudy’s gym , sometimes to our Session's consternation, before we closed. The generation of Upper Westside kids who experienced his zenmaster-like gymnastics instruction, especially on the trampoline. His annual gymnastics concerts with members of Big Apple Circus and Cirque de Soleil, who worked out regularly after hours in our gym,  with their acrobatics, anti-balance work, aerial arts and even fire. Our separation over the landmarks struggle. And our mutual connection to Jack. The writing group and after. With his bald head and beard, he’s beginning to resemble Jack. If I had more time, I’d invite him in. I’m glad his work continues at another church in what we used to call Hell’s Kitchen. He’ll always be a part of the spirit of this place.

And finally as I’m leaving, RL is arriving. He’s got a message for me to deliver to Katie.

Easter 30: Don't be the 3rd party in

5/19

Stephen S has come in to see what he can do about the foul smell emanating from the basement. Though it's a nasty part of a paid job, I let him know gently that I’ve done worse even though it’s not in  my job description. I’ve known him since he as a little kid. Now he’s an unemployed adult with a child of his own. And I loved the way his family turned out to help him on Sunday. That’s the best of who they are…a family that stays together. Is there for each other no matter what's going on.  they were the first neoricans, New York born Puerto Ricans to join the church. originally from the projects, now from the outer boroughs, New Jersey and even the Poconos as the Upper Westside has become economically  beyond the reach of working class families. Including me.

Ralph and ETHEL are back and nothing calms my day more than hearing them in the balcony all day long rehearsing.

I’m knee deep in a phone call from one of my closest friends in a family crisis when Eldridge comes shambling in looking for money. I tell him I’m on the middle of something, and have no money. But he persists. Can’t I at least give him my metro card? Promises he won’t ask again. It’s been awhile since he’s been here., he says. Just give me you rmetro card. I look at him incredulous. And say to him, with quiet resolution, no.

My Buddhist friend TK comes in with 2 associates to plan the August commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both were born in America. One lived for six months in Nagasaki after the war. The other was born in what he called a segregation camp during world War II when his parents were rounded up and shipped off. After the defeat of Japan, they were shipped back there even after decades of living in the US as Americans. And in the process had their citizenship stripped away. It was a long and arduous task for him to work  his way back to where he was born and eventually have citizenship restored to his family. Immigrants, regardless of loyalty, are always subject to the random whims of history.

We tour the building. Review program. Talk through details. When his colleagues leave, TK, in his own quasi-deferential way, is every bit as demanding as communists or Nicaragua solidarity workers.

David S is in to get his work projects for the day.

Outside, Jeremy G and Workcenter choir members s are arriving. One has a story of breaking up a fight in the subway. Weren’t you afraid of potential violence to you?, I asked. She looked at me quizzically. More people joined in the conversation. Don’t be the 3^rd party in, seems to be the rule.

5/20

Very tight day. Only enough time to get a flier about our  June 9^th Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner and Freedom Summer commemoration copied before heading to a  Presbytery meeting in the Bronx  an hour away by subway only leaving me only 45 minutes there before heading to Newark to teach.

The 5th Sunday in Easter: It seems the mere presence of this book

5/18

The Zohar

Last night we also had two former students of Katherine’s in a performance project. I meet my friend (and Andrea’s) Ellen on her way out. Ellen’s son is Matt Turk, the musician. (http://www.turktunes.com/)

Stephen S and Samantha are waiting for me as I arrive. Quite a relief to have back up help on Sunday mornings. Especially when I’m running around to find an open copy shop for the bulletins when I find my Bangladeshi place closed. When I get back, Debra and Dion have arrived to help and Jeremy is ready to work on the music.

A lot about rocks and stones today. After reading about the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7: 55-60,  we read Psalm 31: 1-5 and 15-16 and find a prayer that could easily belong to Stephen with its rock of refuge (2) and  ⁵Into your hand I commit my spirit with the same lines spoken by Jesus at his crucifixion.

Could it also be a song for the kidnapped African children? We reflect on the story that has so captured the heats and minds of the world. While we all seem unable to come up with a plan.Is it they are children that captures us so? And we reflect on the role social media played in spreading the story. And how the leader of the kidnappers relishes in the attention.

The we move to 1 Peter 2: 2-10

Again, a stone,

⁴Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and ⁵like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. ⁶For it stands in scripture: 

6 See, I am laying in Zion a stone, 
          a cornerstone chosen and precious; 
          and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame and…

 The stone that the builders rejected 
          has become the very head of the corner,
⁸and 
      A stone that makes them stumble, 
          and a rock that makes them fall.

And after we read it, I respond by playing my own version of Rock of ages, cleft for me,let me hide myself in thee. And as we talk,  I recall the stumble stones in an old Jewish neighborhood of Berlin placed there so that the uneven walk will constantly remind us  of those who lived there and were taken away and murdered.  And I recall those who visit the Holy Land just to see rocks and stones and never see the living stones, as the Palestinian Christians see themselves.

Finally, Arcadia reads John 14: 1-14 in Spanish and then Don in English and then Jeremy cranks up the piano and we do Rainy Day Women #12 and 35, you know, as in….everybody must get stoned…I explain that Dylan once said he had never written and never would write a song about drugs. Have you never read the book of Acts? He asked. If you listen close, it’s clear it’s about persecution. No matter what you do, they’ll still come after you. To make it (overly) obvious, I add my own verse:

They’ll stone you and say they’re just getting even

They’ll stone you just like they did to Stephen

They’ll stone you and lay their coats before Saul

You know the guy who later called himself Paul?

Well, I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned…..

And I asked if anyone had ever felt like that. We don’t set out to be sign up to be martyrs. We seek to be faithful. We seek to be obedient. And if this leads to the cross, well all right. But no one wants to  go there. Not even Jesus.

We find in the gospel another farewell discourse. We take this story from earlier  and place it in the context of Jesus preparing  his disciples for his eventual not being here. In the flesh. He says he’s going to prepare for us a home.Like  where? What does that mean?

In our clergy lectionary study, someone quoted a commentator as saying that with all this talk of a Christian nation, we are not so much into that that  as we are  a  moralistic therapeutic deism, almost Christian,  Christianish. John’s gospel is so much about  incarnation, but this is about the  departure of incarnation.

And then we come to that quote:

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.  That can so easily be misread. But, our concern here, as always,is about living, not laying theological traps for others. It is about access. Promise, not discrimination.

The first Pastor I worked with was a a Scottish Canadian in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Bill Wiseman.  He told me that  when he was a young pastor, he always heard this like Jesus holding his hand up, like a traffic cop, saying STOP, unless you say the right words. And as he reached the end of his time, he saw it different. Jesus with open arms, saying, I’ve got this covered. You're in. Assurance of access. It’s never about words. Or doctrine or giving assent to theological propositions. It’s about, as they say in Spanish, el camino, the way, a pathway, a journey. A lived life in which we see truth. The big T truth. And by following that way, life.

Our biggest task is to equip people not for church projects, but for living  faithful, abundant lives, where we are, at work, at home, day in, day out. That is the way.

It’s a good discussion. Our circle has expanded out into the pews today. Some old friends back. And we close with everyone in the circle.

Leila made flowers

Leila has made beautiful paper flowers for those who will visit the church on our second day of open house tours. And it’s also Amsterdam Avenue Street Festival day. Although the festival is not what it used to be. How many mozzarepa stands, fruit shake stands, gyro stands can you have? You have to walk aways to find the stand with a whole pigs’ head and pulled pork. Or the craft beer stand. I hold out for the Korean tacos. And when  you ask what the festival’s good for, Don’s answer is on the mark, socks.

I give a few tours. And as I’m getting ready to leave, two earnest young women come to visit. One German, the other eastern European. Quite young. Turns out they’re with the Kabbalah society. (They’ve got the red thread around the wrist. Just like Madonna.) An ancient Jewish mystical practice of numerology, cosmogony, etc. they have brought with them a copy of the Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, lit. Splendor or Radiance ), written in a trippy Aramaic from 13^th century Spain. They’re on a  mission  to place Zohars everywhere they can. It seems a circle of Zoharim are currently protecting the Florida coast from extreme storms. (The ultimate solution to climate change?) It seems that the mere presence of this book is sufficient to ward off evil. I gladly accept one. And a carry along personal size as well. It all helps. And in return I give them two of Angelo’s angelitos. To protect them on their journey. Before I leave, I place the Zohar on the communion table. Open. Beneath Debra’s flowers and the Dos Pueblos flowers. I’ll take help from wherever it comes.

One of Leila's flowers