Mishkan T'filah

Yesterday, a friend took me to Shabbat services at a Reform temple. It was my first time. I realize this is long, long overdue: I’ve spent time overseas visiting a wide range of religious sites, but I have never set foot in the houses of worship of my own Jewish neighbors here at home save for a handful of concerts and lunches.

The Reform Jewish congregation I visited yesterday used a recently published prayer book called Mishkan T’filah. Prayers are printed in Hebrew, transliteration, and English translation; additional poems and prayers supplement them. Care and attention has been given to naming important biblical women alongside the customary patriarchs. Images for God range from traditional to inclusive and even expansive in scope and gender expression. No instructions are printed: congregations can sit or stand and adapt the liturgy according to their own evolving customs and needs. I know that it is a challenge to negotiate the politics of liturgical change in any tradition, but to the uninformed eyes of this liturgy geek from a Christian tradition, Mishkan T’filah is a beautiful work of liturgical craftsmanship and artistry.

Two bits of poetry and prayer took my breath away. I’ve recovered them by searching for key phrases, but I cannot attribute them to individual writers or thinkers with any certainty, for which I apologize here.

The first is an exhortation for peace:

Don’t stop after beating the swords
into ploughshares, don’t stop!  Go on beating
and make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again
will have to turn them into ploughshares first.

The second was printed near the Aleinu and Mourners’ Kaddish:

It is a fearful thing to love
what death can touch.

A fearful thing to love,
hope, dream: to be --
to be, and oh! to lose.

A thing for fools, this, and
a holy thing,
a holy thing to love.

For
your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings a painful joy.
'Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing,
to love
what death has touched.

Already/Not Yet

Spring has come early to us here in southern Connecticut. Daffodils were already forcing their way above ground into the open air at the beginning of February, though they have waited until this week to begin their blooming season. I spotted the first brave crocus about three weeks ago. With last week came a rush of warm air, temperatures rising on a restless wind that stirred me to open all the windows and let the clean air sweep all the winter staleness from my apartment. It stirred my heart, too: I grieve the winter that never was, the deep cold nights full of stars I never had, the thick blanket of snow that never drove the rest of the world inside as it bore up my snowshoes, but there is a corner of my spirit that responds to the irresistible current of spring. Something long dormant is awakening.

Having resigned myself to the end of the winter that never came, I went on a long walk today, eager to search for signs of the emerging spring. I wanted to see the haze of green spreading over the trees and emerging from the cold ground. I wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on my back, surrounding me like an embrace. So I stepped out.

And, of course, I was too early. Sure, the air smelled like spring, and the sun was warmer than it has been in months, but aside from the yellowing of the willows and the reddening of the tips of the bushes along the river, no fresh green haze surrounded the path or crowned East Rock. The world remained resolutely brown. In the back of my mind I knew it would be like this all along, but I thought that just maybe I would see leaves unfolding anyway, a defiant sign of hope.

In my branch of the Christian tradition, we talk about the kingdom of God—the promised time of justice, peace, and wholeness—as being here among us already, but also not yet fully here. The kingdom of God is here and now, but it is also yet to arrive. Moved by curiosity and a willingness to explore, I struggle to conceptualize the “already” and the “not yet” dimensions of God’s kingdom. I have faith that the Divine works in and among us here and now, binding up the wounded, comforting the sick, caring for the poor, standing up for justice. At the same time, the world is… well, brown and gray and depressing, if you look around at it with the skeptical and perfectly reasonable eyes of a human being. It’s like the spring I was so sure I’d see everywhere today—blooming in the tiniest details, hidden for now from the bigger picture.

Already and not yet: I don’t quite know what this means except that I am called to wait in hope. And wait I will, until the dormant Alleluias bloom again at the resurrection dawn, even as they blossom now.

Three nights ago I left work at my church around 9:00 pm and stepped into a night alive with sound. St. Paul sits at the edge of a wetland, and the peepers—tiny frogs—were singing. Their overlapping voices filled the air with a sound like bells. Where I grew up in western Massachusetts, peepers are the surest sign of spring. May I remember the promise their silvery voices bring: already and not yet, spring is here.

Ash Wednesday

“This is the time of tension between dying and birth,” writes T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday, and indeed, this is a time of tension for many Christians—a time of facing the realities of one’s own mortality even as the world around us slowly, painfully enters the cycle of spring’s resurrection.

I love this quiet, sacred day—not for the burden of repentance and sinfulness but for the way it encourages us to face our createdness—the dust of our substance—with grace. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend the day walking around with a cross of ash on my forehead, looking at the world through the lens of someone who wears her death as naturally and as visibly as her own living skin. It reminds me of a section of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials in which the characters Lyra and Will must enter the world of the dead. There, the people are as alive as they are in any other world, but they spend every day of their lives with their “deaths,” shadowy people who are their humans’ best friends, who accompany them with faithfulness through every single day, and who, at the right moment, will tap their humans on the shoulder, gently take their hands, and say, It’s time. In a death-defying culture, Ash Wednesday is an opportunity to face the mortal reality of our created selves and to accept it as a gift that will one day become part of a larger whole again. This is death-as-companion, not death-as-adversary.

On this holy day, the tiny rough texture of ash on my forehead instead of the slick slide of baptismal water reminds me that I am wondrously made. The atoms that form the molecules of my body were forged in the hearts of long-dead stars. One day, they will return to this bright and terrible universe, full of the breath of God, where they will swirl like dust motes in sunlight long after the sun has burnt itself out. My life is not my own: living or dying, I am held in a divine Love greater than I can ever understand, and I am linked intimately to all of creation.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” Christians in my tradition say to one another as they mark each other’s foreheads with ashes. To some, they are a warning; to others, they are a call to repentance; to me, they are a comfort that death is not the end of the journey.

My advisor, the homiletician and hymnologist Thomas Troeger, wrote this hymn text, which we used in community worship at Yale Divinity School today. I leave you with it today.

All things of dust to dust return on earth and in the sky.

The hottest, brightest suns that burn in time grow dim and die.

The fish that leap, the birds that soar, the newborn young that play,

the leaves that fill the forest floor revert to dust and clay.

Lord, mark with dust and ash my brow so I may comprehend

that every moment here and now links me to that same end

I share with all that breathe and burn, that flare and fade and tire

yet by their waning light discern your own undying fire.

Lord, mark upon my brow this sign: a stark and barren cross

reminding me that though divine you know my pain and loss,

and at the touch of dust and ash awake my heart to view

how death itself is but a flash that dies away in you.

A poem for Epiphany

Today, the first day of the liturgical season of Epiphany, I am reading this poem by T.S. Eliot, as I do every year:

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Solstice

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. To me, this is a beautiful time, a deep rich Advent blue pierced through with stars. Resting in the pregnant potential of the night and trusting in the light’s return, it feels right to take stock of the past semester.

I learned to say goodbye to a beloved church community and hello to another, and I learned to return again to that first community I still love so much with humility and trust. I now see more clearly that when bread and wine are shared, all communities gather around the same table.

I helped to lead twenty-two services at my internship parish, preaching at four of them. I anointed a good eighty people and prayed for healing. I taught a confirmation class composed largely of seventh-grade boys about the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and Martin Luther’s theology of grace, rediscovering it all afresh in the process. I walked on the beach a mile from my church each Sunday morning at 8:00, and I loved the way the light was completely different each morning.

I purchased a djembe and named it Florence.

I watched all of Doctor Who since 2005, and I’ve rewatched a sizeable portion of it, too. Strangely enough, I found that it resonated with my own life as I moved between class and parish and hospital/hospice. No, I will never forget Nine, my first Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), but yes, my true loyalty belongs to Ten (David Tennant).

I got into—and out of—my first minor car accident.

I wrote sermons and papers, survived dull lectures and was inspired by excellent ones, and perfected the art of napping happily, comfortably, and efficiently in the library. I'm halfway done with my degree and am therefore one-half divine (or so I'm telling myself).

I continued to unfold the strange and difficult beauty of working with hospice and palliative care inpatients and their families. I accompanied gatherings large and small as they struggled to reconcile, to remember, and to say goodbye. I met the Divine at bedsides and at deaths more times than I can count, and I understand it no more now than I did at first. So I keep returning, drawn by something holy I can only name as Love in all its sharpness and danger and gentleness.

I led a memorial service alone for the first time and met holiness in sage smoke and candlelight and smooth white stones and the smell of a woodstove heating a tiny chapel, and yes, even in grief.

I have been so grateful for dear and loyal friends.

As the planet turns toward winter, I give thanks for this solstice night and the vision it brings.