tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28270714793144748932024-03-05T11:17:30.242-08:00Anglocat on the Prowl: Confessions of a ContinuatorThe theological and literary jottings of a Deacon and novelist. Writing ersatz Victorian fiction in the age of the e-book, and trying to walk the Way. Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.comBlogger1197125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-86897533722210570672022-04-25T12:00:00.000-07:002022-04-25T12:00:00.214-07:00Moving onDear friends, with Blogger formatting becoming increasingky difficult, I'm moving on to WordPress. Same title, same content. Find the latest entry here: https://anglocatontheprowl.com/2022/04/25/dat-doubt-a-sermon-delivered-at-st-bartholomews-church-nyc-april-24-2022/
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-11583507586356088632022-01-11T17:47:00.000-08:002022-01-11T17:47:11.046-08:00“Law Like Love”: A Poem by W.H. AudenMy predecessor as Chair, Harold Newman was an autodidact. In several of his writings,he quoted this poem, and in reviewing his work, I first read it. It's wonderful, it speaks to me. Here it is:
Law Like Love"
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.
Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severly,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anwhere.
Law is Good-morning and Good-night.
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more.
Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this,
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot saw Law is again
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like Love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep.
Like love we seldom keep.
-- W. H. AudenAnglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-45620373617911159982021-12-24T11:52:00.001-08:002021-12-24T11:52:22.146-08:00“What Right Have You To Be Merry?”: A Sermon on Luke 2: 1-20 Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC, December 24, 2021What Right Have We to be Merry?; A Sermon on Luke 2: 1-20
St. Bartholomew’s Church, December 24, 2021
What right have you to be merry?
What reason have you to be merry?
So asked Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, 178 years ago tonight, and maybe, just maybe, it’s about time we took that question seriously.
After all, the story was published in 1843, and we’ve pretty much just assumed that it was bad-tempered spite on the part of old Ebenezer to ask it.
And maybe that’s true. He is, after all, the villain of the story as well as its protagonist, and his salvation requires some pretty heavy lifting on the part of the three spirits of Christmas.
On the other hand, villains often are the dark mirrors of ourselves, the part of us we reject as unworthy, the parts of our true selves that we repress because we can’t bear to acknowledge them. We all want to be our best selves, kind, brave, generous but prudent.
We act the parts of the people we want to be, and mostly we try to live up to that image. But that image—the “Glittering Image” as Susan Howatch called it—isn’t our real self either, because it’s only a part of the whole that comprises each and every one of us.
This darker half of ourselves, the unacknowledged fears, desires, and thoughts, can have a kind of wisdom that we shut out of our minds.
After all, what reason does Scrooge’s nephew Fred have to be merry? As Scrooge points out, every Christmas for Fred is “but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against” poor Fred.
For that matter, what reason does Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, who applauds Fred’s defense of Christmas have to be merry? What reason do Cratchit’s wife and six children have to be merry? They are desperately poor, living on the slender salary Scrooge provides Bob.
Mrs. Cratchit struggles to provide decent meals, sometimes even with meat, for her husband and her children, who are already becoming introduced to the life of the working poor in early Victorian London. Their lives are dirty, laborious, and their surroundings ramshackle. And her youngest son, Tiny Tim, is visibly failing, and very likely to die.
What right do Fred or the Cratchits have to be merry? What are they celebrating? Isn’t Scrooge right, when he caustically suggests that Fred’s celebration is simply driving him deeper in debt, allowing him to postpone the moment when he is forced to confront his failures and, at long last, set his house in order?
Today’s reading from Luke makes it immediately clear that Joseph’s house is not remotely in order; although he is a descendant of King David, the carpenter hasn’t even been able to find a room at the inn for his wife to give birth to her mysterious child—a child that Joseph knows is not his, and yet, trusting in God, gives his name to.
Mary’s house isn’t in order, either—She’s alive be cause Joseph chose not to seek to enforce the Law against her, shows mercy to her, and, then, later responding to the Spirit, goes even further, and accepts her as his wife.(Matt 1:18-25)
And now Mary places her newborn son in a manger, and the only thing that hasn’t gone wrong with their plans is some kid trying to cheer her up by playing a drum at her, and waking up the newborn son who has just gone to sleep.
Cause that’s just what she needs right now.
No, fortunately, the Little Drummer Boy has no place in our story, and Mary is at least spared that ordeal. But what happens next is an astonishing, sudden shift of perspective. We leave the exhausted couple and the newborn Jesus, only to find shepherds astonished by the sudden appearance of an angel, announcing the birth of the Messiah, good news of great joy for all the people. The shepherds make their way to Bethlehem, and find the little family, just as the Angel told them—even to the detail of the child in the manger.
Our reading ends with Mary, having heard the shepherds’ tale of what they saw and heard, and how it led them to her. She “treasures all these words and ponders them in her heart.”
She knows that the words of the angel Gabriel to her have resounded again, in an even more spectacular form. And so she has confirmation that the world has changed somehow—that the barriers between heaven and earth have thinned, that something extraordinary is happening because of the infant lying in the manger.
But what is the nature of the change? Or as I used to ask at the end of a theological reflection in our EFM group, “So what? Why do we care?”
Rome fell, but here we are in a national landmark that is in fact a sanctuary raised to honor the child borne by Mary, and I am speaking these words under a beautiful painting of her and her child.
Yes, evil still exists. Yes, discord and strife tear at the world. But they are not normative, not what we consider the measure of right conduct. Nobody reveres Herod, Pontius Pilate, Annas or Caiaphas. They are only known at all by most people because of their roles in the story that begins tonight.
The old brutal dreams of might makes right, of tribe and power defining what we call the good has been on the run ever since Jesus showed us a better way, since God so loved the world that She offered her only begotten Son to be with us, not to lead our tribe to supremacy, but to lead us all to the deeper wisdom of love.
Not just a wishy-washy ethic of sentimentality, but a way of life. That Way, as the disciples and their direct successors called what the world terms Christianity, involves a commitment to seeing, every day, the beauty of a Child of God, in every person, even when we are divided from them.
That Way has survived empires, wars, corruption of its so-called leaders, and still is going strong. It doesn’t need an army. It never has. It has you, each and every one of you, who is here, not out of compulsion or social pressure, but because you want to be. Because the Way speaks to your heart.
Scrooge had a kind of wisdom, but it was of the lower kind—pragmatic wisdom, how to survive in a hostile world. Fred and the Cratchits refused to accept that the world was by its nature hostile. Their wisdom was deeper than his.
What right have you be merry?
The best right in the world, that of a child of God, in the world created by God.
What reason have you to merry? Here we are in a dark time of our own, strife, cruelty, and division broadcast throughout the 24 hour news cycle, world without end.
We’re still in the midst of a global pandemic still raging, the numbers mounting in the wrong direction. How does the light of the Christmas star reach us? What reason do we have to be merry?
The best reason in the world: that we are here again together, celebrating the end of those old, dark ways, and to repel the dark with the Light of the World.
Just by being here, we refuse to let cynicism, despair, and disease have the last word. We refuse division, we turn away anger. The Light of the World is coming, and we are ready for it to dawn.
And, if your heart isn't ready, that's all right. We can repurpose those wonderful lines of Hamlet's:
If it be now, ‘tis not to come –
if it be not to come, it will be now –
if it be not now, yet it will come –
the readiness is all.
Let yourself be ready when you can, and embrace the readiness for joy.
In our hearts, let us choose now.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-49537457098703856732021-11-14T12:51:00.007-08:002021-11-14T12:51:42.775-08:00"You Are Not Far From the Kingdom of God” A Sermon on Mark 12:28-34 October 31, 2021Tonight is, of course, All Hallow’s Eve, the beginning of the three principle days of Allhallowtide, for centuries a time in the liturgical year for remembering the dead, especially the saints (known as the hallowed) martyrs, and all the departed. It used to be celebrated for an octave—eight days, prior to the the Roman Catholic Church abolishing it in 1955. However, an Anglican tradition of Allhallowtide has remained, mostly in the United Kingdom. We gain more insight into All Hallow’s Eve Sam Potaro’s Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feats and Fasts (Cowley Press, 1998), p. 199. Potaro views All Hallow’s Eve as traditionally using “the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, the power of humor and ridicule, to confront the power of death.”
Now, the appropriation of the fearful and of dread for pleasure is everywhere present in our society; the unending stream of horror films, books, television shows are all evidence of our appetite for a good scare. And what is a good scare? It’s a safe one. One we know won’t really hurt us. This isn’t a Halloween story, but it makes the point:
When I was a boy of 11, my grammar school had a paperback book fair. I only had a little money, so I bought one book: Dracula by Bram Stoker.
I’d never seem the film, but that’s what I walked out with. And later that very afternoon, my twin sister and I discovered that our beloved grandmother had died. I couldn’t bear it, not right away. I hid, and feverishly read Dracula. Because even at 11, I knew that I was safe from the Count and his three brides. That book kept me from falling apart, the good scare protecting me from my first experience of loss, of death, of separation. Most of all, it protected me from the experience of losing one of the key sources of unconditional love I’d ever known.
The loss of love is perhaps the greatest human tragedy.
Halloween teaches us to laugh at it, ridicule it, play with it. Because Halloween is not about the devil, or the occult, not really. It’s about rejecting the finality of death. It’s about rejecting fear, or, rather, putting it in its place. Ultimately, it’s about refusing to accept the ultimate death of love. By playfully treating death, and fear and all of the ghastly creatures and things associated with death, we cut them down to size, reaffirming that death will not have the last laugh—or even if it does, we will have laughed first, and better. It’s a half-conscious assertion of the Greek Neoplatonist Plotinus’s maxim that “nothing that truly is can ever perish.”
The Gospel appointed for this evening feels on the surface like it’s miles away from this evening’s sermon—it’s a daylight story in which Jesus defeats one set of questioners only to bond with another. It’s another in a series of controversies between Jesus and the established religious authorities. Of these debates, this is my personal favorite. Normally, these things follow a pattern: Religious authority figure—a Pharisee, a scribe, a Saducee—poses a question to Jesus. Of course, it’s not posed in good faith; it’s a trap. The classic of the genre is reported in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In Matthew and Mark, it’s posed by the Pharisees, although Mark adds “some Herodians” to the mix. Luke has the question posed by “spies.”
But the question is an inherently dangerous one: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not?” The idea, of course, is to trip Jesus up—he’ll either hew to the Hebrew law, and qualify as a rebel in the eyes of the Roman authorities, or he will choose submission to Rome, and lose his status as one “teaching the way of God without partiality.” They’ve constructed a perfect lose-lose scenario for Jesus here. Except, of course, that they haven’t; he foils them easily, asking whose head is on the coin, and, seeing the Emperor’s, answering give to the Emperor that which is due to the Emperor, and to God what is God’s.
Sensation! Jesus wins again, as the baddies slink away, gnashing their teeth in frustration.
And there are multiple variations on this theme throughout the Gospels. So tonight’s variant looks like it’s going to be yet another Wile E. Coyote-style failure. Except this one goes off the usual rails. The scribe comes near, and hears the Saducees disputing with one another, largely because Jesus has trounced them in an effort to trap him with a ridiculous hypothetical—If a man marries and dies, and each of his 7 brothers marries his widow, each dying in turn, whose wife will she be in the Resurrection. Jesus takes them down easily, pointing out that in the Resurrection, there will be no marrying, but living as angels in heaven do. And then he pointedly reminds them that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And God, speaking to Moses said I AM the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob—meaning that they are in a very real way, still alive.
Our scribe, having witnessed the trouncing of the Saducees, sees that Jesus answered them well, and asks “Which Commandment is the first of all?” This inquiry doesn’t feel like a trap—the scribe seems to genuinely want to learn from this itinerant prophet who has just reduced the so-called experts
to futile bickering.
Jesus answers without hesitation: “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is
One; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all mind, and with all your strength.” He then adds, “The second is this “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “There is no other commandment greater than these.”
The scribe answers enthusiastically “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and there is no other. He also adds that “to love one’s neighbor as oneself—this is much more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
Jesus sees the sincerity and the wisdom in the answer. He doesn’t just parrot Jesus’s own answer, he goes a step further, placing the love of God and neighbor at the pinnacle of our duty. And so Jesus gives him a rare compliment, telling him “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” He has embraced the core of the Law—the core of Jesus’s own teachings—that love is the indestructible, unending source of our being, and our returning that love toward our Creator and our fellow human beings—that is the sum and substance of our duty to God. Do we love? Do we let that love spread beyond our narrow little hearts to join with the love we have received?
If so, we are not far from the Kingdom of God. It’s right here.
Tonight is All Hallow’s Eve, and the monsters walking outside are children seeking candy, or playing silly tricks. The monsters in our hearts— fear, jealousy, anxiety, hatred—they may try to make a home there, but if we join the generations who mocked their fears, their hatreds, their nightmares—then we are set free to love, like the Souls—our sacred dead, by whom I mean those we ourselves have lost, and long for—and the Saints we celebrate the following day.
And in doing so, we stand with the wise, open-hearted scribe, learning from Jesus the lesson the Saducees couldn’t understand: Death is the human tragedy, but it does not have the last word. The loving Creator has the final word, bringing us home. Nothing that truly is can ever die.
And we—you, me, everyone here and throughout this world. We truly are, and we are called not to death, but to life.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-70295540256016361612021-11-14T12:46:00.002-08:002021-11-14T12:46:59.349-08:00"Only Luke is With Me" A Sermon on Luke 4: 14-21 (Preached at St. Barts, NYC on October 18, 2021)The best doctors are intuitive, with an empathy that enables them to understand how their patients feel—emotionally, as well as physically. This empathy often extends to friends, family, and strangers. My wife’s father was a doctor, in a small town, rural North Carolina, and her experiences as a doctor’s daughter played a major role in forming her identity.
If I’m unwell, Catherine will swoop in, organize a plan to get me well, and make sure that I’m getting the best treatment possible. When I had surgery in 2020, and then again in 2021, she made sure that I was cared for by her, the surgeon, and all and sundry. My wife is the best patient advocate I could ever have.
Of course, her mother, Mabel, was also in the medical profession. She attended the Baptist Hospital School of Nursing in Winston-Salem, NC and received a BSN and later a MPH from UNC Chapel Hill. After a long career, she retired in 1998 as Director of Psychiatric Services at Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gastonia. In the 1970s, she had been one of the founders of the Albemarle Mental Health Center in Elizabeth City, an example of her life-long commitment to the care and dignity of psychiatric patients.
Her father, Dr. Stephen Pugh, died before I met her, and so I only know him through family stories. He made house calls, sometimes taking his fees in vegetables rather than charging his poorer, often African-American patients money that they didn’t have. In the 1960s, they inculcated a thoroughgoing opposition to racism in their daughters, and were fierce opponents of Jim Crow.
They were carers, first and foremost.
I mention them, because we are in the middle of a crisis that has had an outsize impact on our beloved physicians, and nurses, and other carers. According to the foremost British medical journal The Lancet,
The pandemic has placed substantial demands on already overstretched, understaffed, and under-resourced health systems. COVID-19 has tested doctors and health-care workers to the limits of their professional competence and taken a considerable toll on their health and wellbeing.
Core principles of medical professionalism—ie, primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social justice—have been challenged during the pandemic. Many doctors worldwide have had to change the way they work, having to prioritise patient care and make difficult decisions based on insufficient resources, including withholding and withdrawing potentially life-saving treatments [1]
The effect on nurses was in some ways even graver.
According to a 2021 study, RNs, primary front-line workers in the COVID-19 pandemic, encounter not only the stresses and risk of a serious and potentially fatal health condition, but also the increased risk of a mental health impact. The pandemic has subjected RNs, and other front-line healthcare workers, to situations of unparalleled stress, as routine roles and responsibilities are disrupted and there is a necessity to work outside of their normal routine. [2]
Coping with this changed work environment, one that is now a site for exposure to life threatening infection, presents a challenge the health care work force may be ill-prepared to address. This daunting task is complicated further by concerns not only about personal risk but also worry about infecting family members and others in their social network. These situational factors increase the risk for psychological morbidity and burnout.
But here’s the shocking fact in the study: Applications to nursing programs have gone up, in this time of peril, stress, and uncertainty. More people are looking to learn how to help than were before the pandemic.
Empathy.
The great gift of loving one’s fellow human beings—and by love, I don’t mean an emotion, but rather a promise. A promise to care for and support the fundamental well-being of the other, and to strive for their health and welfare.
That love, that empathy, have not been crushed by the politicization of the virus, of masks, or quack remedies that would be funny if they weren’t so potentially deadly. Nor has it been crushed by the risk of infection, the strains on the medical system, or sheer fatigue and burnout. Doctors, nurses, and other carers are still striving to ameliorate the suffering of humanity, bringing comfort and healing where they can.
St. Luke’s empathy is strong, so strong that his Gospel is the one in which so many of our most dearly loved stories come from.
Luke’s compassion, his interest in people whatever their social status, makes his Gospel warmer and more relationship-based than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or John. Of the two Gospels that describe Jesus’s birth, Matthew’s gives us an account of the Magi, the famous three kings of orient visiting the newly born-Christ, finding him in a house, and giving him treasures.
Luke tells us of Mary and Joseph being turned away from the Inn, surrounding the baby Jesus with lambs and protective shepherds.
He also gives us the story of the blind old man Simeon, whose long wait for the Messiah ends when Jesus is brought to the Temple for circumcision, and the joy of Anna the Prophetess when she sees in the baby Jesus the hope of all who long for redemption. It is Luke who tells us of Jesus at 12 years old staying behind in the Temple and debating the teachers of the Law while his frenzied parents look for him.
Luke also who gives us the story of Martha who serves while Mary listens to Jesus, and when Martha complains Jesus tells her that Mary has chosen the better part and will not lose it. It is a rebuke, but a gentle one, implicitly inviting Martha to stretch her heart and join with her sister in receiving the better part too.
Throughout Luke’s writing, the love, compassion, and joy of God, is demonstrated in the life and ministry Jesus again and again. As Bernard Shaw, that agnostic admirer of Jesus, admits “It is Luke's Jesus who has won our hearts.”
In the closing to his letter to the Colossians, Paul sends greetings from “Luke, the beloved physician.” (Col, 4:14). Despite writing in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles one quarter of the Old Testament, Luke normally keeps to the background other than his use of the word “we” in describing the companionship he provided his difficult patient.
It’s fair to say that St. Paul was not exactly an easy person to impress or, for that matter to sustain a relationship with; his battles against Peter show his combative streak, and his falling out with Barnabas—the very first of the Apostles to accept Paul’s conversion from a bitter foe of the nascent Church and to accept him in the Church in Jerusalem.
Their split resulted from Paul’s anger that Barnabas wanted to have his cousin, Mark (or “John,” or even “John Mark”) who had left them during their first missionary journey, accompany them on their journey to Cyprus. When Barnabas refused to cast aside Mark, Luke writes that “the contention was so sharp between them that they departed asunder” (Acts 15:36-40). Asunder is a heavy word, suggesting a significant degree of alienation.
Luke sets the facts out without judgment. Notably, though, in Colossians, there is also a friendly reference to Barnabas and—yes, to John Mark, his sister’s son. This letter was written during Paul’s imprisonment, probably in 62 AD, and reflects the events of Acts Chapter 27-28.
But then, in today’s Epistle—2 Timothy 4:5-13, which was read at the 11:00 sermon, we find Paul feeling that “the time for my departure has come” and asks Timothy to come to him soon—because Demas, Crescans, and Titus have all left him. He writes simply, “Only Luke is with me.” And, in his loneliness, he asks Timothy to bring Mark with him.
I like to think (and I’m not alone in this ) that near the very end of Paul’s story, the empathy and love that were so characteristic of St. Luke both as a physician and as a writer wore away the old warrior’s grudge and caused him to renew his ties with Barnabas and to long for the presence of his former friend John Mark.
The best doctors and nurses can never stop hoping for a happy ending. That’s why they never give up. And, in that sense, we are all called to be physicians and nurses of the heart.
[1]. Christine Kovner, et al., “The psychosocial impact on frontline nurses of caring for patients with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City,” Nursing outlook, vol. 69, Issue 5, pp 744-754 (Sept. 1, 2021).Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-14302038046864983182021-11-14T12:37:00.004-08:002021-11-14T12:37:55.008-08:00"We Have Met The Enemy, and They is Us: A Sermon on Mark: 13: 1-8Open My lips, O, Lord, and my mouth will speak thy Praise. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:
In 1970, the cartoonist Walt Kelly drew a poster for the very first Earth Day. It was a portrait of Pogo, the opossum protagonist of Kelly’s long-running strip, also named “Pogo,” holding a stick with a spike in it, trying to pick up an enormous amount of litter, only to gaze further and see the degradation of the environment stretching out as far as the eye could see.
Pogo says simply, “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
In today’s Gospel reading, one of the disciples marvels to Jesus about the magnificence of the Temple, and even of the stones used to build the Temple. Jesus immediately casts down the unnamed disciples’ tourist enthusiasm, saying that all of these great buildings will be thrown down, and that not one of these magnificent stones will remain on another.
It’s an image of total devastation that Jesus tosses out to the disciple, and this understandably troubles his closest disciples, Peter, James and his brother John and Andrew. So they join Jesus when he sits down across from the Temple, and they ask when will all of these things happen and how will we know it is coming?
Jesus’s answer is another warning: Do not be fooled; he warns the disciples that there will be not just one, but many who present themselves in his name, and will say “I am he!” These false Christs will lead many astray, he tells these closest disciples.
Then he tells them that worse is to come: wars, and rumors of wars, nations against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famine. Jesus finally tells them that “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”
This passage (and its equivalents in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels) is the beginning of what is called “the Little Apocalypse.” And, let me tell you, it only gets worse from here. The Sun and Moon go dark, stars fall from the sky, the powers of the Heavens are shaken, and life only survives at all because God shortens the days to save the Elect, the chosen ones of God. The Little Apocalypse provides an ending that reaffirms the power and goodness of God—the Son of Man “coming in clouds with great power and glory. .. sending forth his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds.”
So, happy ending for those of the Elect who manage to hold out to the end. For the rest of us—neither the sheepo nor the goats, for us in-betweens—who knows?
So what do we do with this passage?
Back in 1912, Professor Burton Scott Easton published an article on the Little Apocalypse in a scholarly journal called The Biblical World, [Aug.1912, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 130-138, “The Little Apocalypse.” ]
Easton pointed out that the Hebrew tradition was “extremely fond of predictions of the end of the world and a really voluminous literature of such predictions existed.” As an oppressed people, they saw themselves as the Elect, who would be redeemed by God, while the rest of the world would suffer for sinning against God. In the Book of Revelation attributed to John, you see the same disdain for those who are not of the Elect, and who are depicted as oppressing the Church and the world. The sufferings of the once powerful are to be rejoiced at, as they clear the path for the Kingdom of Heaven.
Although many of these apocalypses have been lost, examples can be found in the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Baruch, the Revelation to John, and especially the book known as Fourth Ezra. Fourth Ezra was written at about the same time many estimate the Revelation was. (Easton, p. 131; see also Translations of Early Documents, Series 1: The Apocalypse of Ezra (trans., GH Box, SPCK, 1917, chaps. 3-14.
Mark’s Little Apocalypse and Fourth Ezra both describe wars, kingdom against kingdom, tribulations, and close with the coming of the Son of Man, and the gathering of the chosen few to him. Easton tells us that in Fourth Ezra “before the rule of God begins, hostility to God will reach a climax,” and that “the parallel to the Little Apocalypse is perfect.” (p. 132).
So the Little Apocalypse is a summary version of already-held beliefs about the end times. As Easton wrote “It is very much as if the Apocalypse had said ‘the events of the end will be those you have always expected.’”
In other words, it is nothing new—and we could treat it, as some scholars have, as wishful thinking in. reaction to the sacking of Jerusalem to Rome in 70 AD, or even a prophecy of that event attributed to Jesus only after the event.
But that doesn’t mean that this passage is meaningless to us, or that it has no message for us in 2021, as we blink our eyes and look around the COVID-altered landscape we all are living in.
After all, today’s Gospel provides a warning we can see coming true in the world today, even in our own beloved community.
Human carelessness, greed, pride, and arrogance are endangering us all—whether by refusing to take steps to protect each other from the pandemic that still surrounds us, or by our recklessly continuing to destroy the environment that supports our very lives, even as “extreme climate events,” to use the current euphemism, are increasing in frequency and severity.
Wars and rumors of wars? In a recent book, Our Own Worst Enemy (August 2021) Tom Nichols, a Professor of National Security Affairs, at the United Sates Naval War College, says that the greatest threat to American democracy is “We, the People,” who are bringing about the death of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberalism and authoritarianism, which rests on the nihilism, conspiracies, misinformation, and a type of propaganda that says, “Everything is possible; therefore, nothing is true.” Nichols warns us that such information degradation fuels a “Cold Civil War.” And indeed, at least one poll—the “Edelman trust barometer” for 2021 found a majority of Americans believed that we are locked in just such a cold civil war.
As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy and they is us.”
But there is, in Jesus’s warnings about false messiahs in the Little Apocalypse, an answer to the question of living in dangerous times: Don’t trust the charlatans, the liars who raise absurd expectations. Don’t live in fear. Instead, use your intelligence guided by experience.
That’s a start. But like the friendly little opossum, we have to do more; we have to pick up the trash.
Which means really looking at ourselves—where have we caused division in our families, out workplaces, our network of relationships? Can we repair the harms we have caused—or if we haven’t caused them, can we help repair them anyway, taking the first step, whoever was at fault?
At yesterday’s diocesan convention, the theme was “Your Faith Has Made You Whole” and the image of the Japanese art of Kistugi—that of honoring the broken ceramics of our lives by repairing them with precious metals to bind the broken surfaces—gold, silver, or platinum.
You’re the gold, the platinum, the silver. We all are. We’re all the broken ceramic, too. I can’t fill my own broken places, and neither can you—but we can fill each others’ needs, by reaching out in love. We can all fill the cracks in different ways—simple as calling a friend or relative we love but haven’t kept up with, or reaching out to someone we have dropped for whatever reason, to repair a broken tie.
Every day is a chance to take the steps toward reconciliation, and living in wholeness with those we free ourselves to love, either by forgiving them, or by asking their forgiveness. And we don’t know how many of those chances we get, how many days we have.
None of these nostrums will prevent the end of the earth. And we almost certainly won’t be here to see it. But our own world—this earthly life—will be richer and holier if we live as if our kindness and love to each other would end the world. And who knows? If cynicism and disdain can spread like COVID, maybe love and forgiveness can, too. Now that’s something worth catching.
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-19962130852835961902021-07-14T09:55:00.000-07:002021-07-14T09:55:17.979-07:00Piercing the Veils: A Sermon Delivered at St. Barts, NYC July 12, 2021Nowadays, we all seem to be living in the world foreseen by the old western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It’s one of Jimmy Stewart’s better outings, a story about an honorable United States Senator (I told you it was an old movie) who goes back to the West to attend the funeral of an old friend, played by John Wayne. The Senator’s first claim to fame, and the beginning of his glorious career as a stateman, was that he stood up to the local bad man, Liberty Valance, and ended his career of violence by shooting him. We viewers come to see that the Senator did stand up to Valance, but Valance had already shot him once, when Wayne’s character shoots the villain, firing at the same time as the Senator fires his last round, which goes wide.
Telling the story to the local newspaper editor, the Senator is stunned to see him tear up his notes of the interview. The Senator asks if he isn’t going to use the story, and the editor answers him, “No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Life in 2021.
This all seems a far way off from Jesus of Nazareth, but so is the Gospel reading for today—it alludes to Herod’s belief that Jesus is John the Baptist retuned from the dead, and the people’s belief that Jesus is Elijah, or simply a prophet, but a mighty one, like one of the prophets of old. But the balance of today’s Gospel tells the story of the death of John the Baptist. Unusually, we have a non-Christian account of the events that partially tracks the Gospel account.
Flavius Josephus, a Jewish collaborator with Rome, tells us in his Jewish Antiquities that Herod Antipas fell in love with Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Philip’s wife, who was the daughter of Aristobulus, their brother. Antipas proposed to her, and they married. [JA, 18.110]. Herod Antipas’s divorced wife complained to her father, who went to war against Herod, wiping out Herod’s army.
Before this, Herod had killed John the Baptist, who Josephus described as “this good man, who had commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, righteousness towards one another and piety towards God.” Herod, feared that John the Baptist would use his great influence John had over the people to raise a rebellion,” and had him executed. Josephus concludes his account by noting that “the Jews thought that the destruction of his army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure with him.”
No bewitching dance, no cruel request from Herodias and her daughter for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Just a politically expedient killing in a prison.
But, of course, Josephus was presenting an account of his people aimed at protecting himself, and incidentally, them, by showing their great loyalty to virtue and moral government.
We know that there was a Salome. Josephus identifies her as the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, confirming the Gospels on that point. He also tells us that she married twice; first to her uncle Philip the Tetrarch, and then, after his death in 34 CE), she married her cousin Aristobulus of Chalcis, making her queen of Chalcis and of Armenia Minor. So however John the Baptist died, Salome seems to have made out all right.
But the Gospel story of her dance, Herod’s promise, and Salome’s demand of John’s head has been percolating through our culture for two millenia, and has been immortalized not just in our holy scripture, but in art, drama, film, and in just about every kind of media you can think of—if you look hard enough you can even find “Salome’s Dance” as a plot point in Marvel Comics.
Brad Brucknell takes us through a lot of those media representations, especially Oscar Wide’s 1892 play, Salome, and its offshoots. It’s Wilde who created the “Dance of the Seven Veils” that Salome is said to have used to charm Herod, and she chooses, in Wilde’s play, to seek his head not for her mother’s revenge, but for her own desire to own the Baptist. Brucknell points out that Wilde’s play can be boiled down to the classic dichotomy of the virgin and the wanton femme fatale. [1]
More recently, Adeena Karasick has sought to reclaim Salome; in her 2014 article “Salomé: Woman of Valor,” Karasick answers back that “Salomé has been serially exploited by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bryant, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss and Atom Egoyan, forever entrenching her in social consciousness as a dangerous woman, a female praying mantis who both literally and metaphorically cannibalizes the head of her lover.”[2]
And there’s truth in this—the villain in the Gospel story is Herodias, not Salome, who simply obeyed her mother’s command. And Herodias had reason to fear John, as Josephus’s account makes clear. Looking soberly at both stories, John the Baptist was executed for posing a danger to Herod’s rule, whether or not Herod wanted to kill him.
The Gospel portrays John as Jesus’s forerunner or role model in his death as well as in his ministry. Both challenge the Imperial domination system of Rome. Both earn the sympathy of the ruler who ultimately orders his execution—Pilate’s evident reluctance to kill Jesus matches Herod’s desire to keep John alive.
So here’s a different legend: John and Jesus each had an uncanny ability to reach the conscience of those who had been coopted into the imperial domination system, those who had learned to live by its rules.
If Wilde’s fervid play has any poetic truth in it, it is that Salome wanted to find herself in the prophet, to cherish him, and change herself, trapped like a fly in amber by the trappings of the Court of her step-father.
And we know that both Pilate and Herod found within themselves a stirring of conscience, a desire for something other, something better, when confronted by these inconvenient Galilean prophets. These hard-faced, hard-hearted rulers within a corrupt regime briefly found their better selves in engaging with these prophets, and found themselves touched by their innocence, their righteousness.
We live in a world that is wracked with corruption and lies. The most basic facts are turned into partisan battles—do vaccines work? Are our elections rigged—and all of this is done without evidence, just by shameless assertion.
The temptation to tune out, to not care, to withdraw, can become irresistible. But if even hardened tyrants like Pilate and Herod can hear the sweetness and purity of mercy, of kindness, then surely we can too. In a way, we are Pilate, we are Herod—I don’t mean that we are as jaded or cynical as they were. But like them, we have a choice: We can open our hearts to the fundamental truth that the keystone of life is love, and do our best to fan that truth into a flame that will warm our hearts for life, or we can, maybe sadly, reject it.
Neither Pilate nor Herod had the courage to change. But we can. We can take the side of John the Baptist, of Jesus, and we can try to live lives grounded in kindness, in letting go of grudges and resentments. We can try to offer our help to those who need it, and recognize that we are all connected. And if we do, we can dissolve the hard places in our souls that have grown over the years without our realizing it.
And in that small way, we can join Jesus and John, walking in their way of compassion and love.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
[1] ELH , Summer, 1993, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 503-526.
[2] Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues
No. 26 (Spring 2014), pp. 147-157.
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-14696692320564761232021-06-07T15:55:00.003-07:002021-06-07T15:55:48.821-07:00“A House Divided Cannot Stand” A Sermon on Mark 3:20-35 Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC June 6, 2021Sometimes the Lectionary seems to know just what we need and assigns us those readings. Not always, of course—there are weeks when we tumble into the seemingly endless morass of Psalm 119, or, even worse, the vindictive psalms, or a dry stretch of Leviticus, and the preacher struggles to find a way to relate the experience of ancient times to the way we live now.
Today, though, we have a stark warning against submitting to the autocratic rule of a would-be king and a pointed observation by Jesus that the scribes those who accused him casting out demons by Satan’s power misunderstand how power works. If Satan has risen up against himself, then Satan can no longer stand, and his very end has come.
On a hot June day just about 165 years ago, Jesus’s observation was reframed by a man most Americans think of as one of the greatest leaders this nation has ever had. A man who many claim as a prophet and as a martyr.
On June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln stood on a speaker’s platform in Springfield, Illinois and spoke words that, at the time, cost him his chance of election to the United States Senate, but ultimately led him to the Presidency. Four lines into his speech, Lincoln quoted the Gospel, and announced that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and then he added that this meant that a Nation could not be half slave and half free.
Lincoln explained that he did not expect the Union to be dissolved – that he did not expect the house to fall -- but that he did expect it would cease to be divided.
Simply put, the house would become all one thing or all the other.
For Lincoln, that meant that either the opponents of slavery, would arrest its further spread, and place it on the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new--North as well as South. He then described how the political and legal systems could not only easily fail to contain slavery but might instead entrench it even in the free states.
The division in the United States, like that in June 1858, is disquieting, even a little frightening. Views are so at odds that the very concept of the factual has been called into question by an increasing segment of the political world and even the best journalists struggle to keep up with the blended truths and lies that are often indistinguishable.
Laura Marks, my friend and former landlady, is a writer and a producer of the show <a href="https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/the-good-fight/">The Good Fight</a>. During its 4-year run so far, the program has tried to capture the experience of the era of bad feelings we currently live in. Even the opening sequence emphasizes instability, loss of security, and disruption. As the credits roll, we view a series of objects representing normalcy—briefcases, law books flanked by handsome bookends, furniture, computer screens, and office phones, only to watch each explode in front of us, climaxing in a desk, shattered and splintered. Even the backdrop, the spotlight, and the fragments of the desk fall down among the devastation, and we are left to contemplate the wreckage.
That opening sequence leaves us in a landscape in which nothing is stable, nothing is secure. And I think Laura and her colleagues are right: that’s how life in these United States has felt since 2017, and still feels even today.
For those of us who hoped that the election and inauguration of a President who ran on a return to normalcy, and hopefully, toward thawing relations between our warring factions, . But as Goya wrote many years ago, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters,” and dispelling those monsters is not a simple matter. Relationships once sundered are hard to restore. The concept of truth is even harder.
In her 1951 book <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>, Hannah Arendt wrote that the “ideal subject of totalitarianism is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction [that is, the reality of experience] and the distinction between true and false . . .no longer exist.” Michiko Kakutani’s 2018 book <i>The Death of Truth</i> pursues Arendt’s thought, and traces the fraying of the very concept of truth. She warns us that “Without commonly agreed-on facts—not Republican facts and Democratic facts—there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled.”
And our present day shows that the crumbling of the concepts of truth and objective reality feeds the growing division in our house. No sermon can answer Pilate’s question, What is Truth? on the grand scale, but we can start looking at our own truths, the ones we are reluctant to face, let alone to own.
Truth begins with acknowledging that every single one of us is at once a sinner and a saint, both at the same time. That we fail, as well as succeed, in big and little ways. Some of you know that I’m a sober alcoholic, and let me just say that no one decides to go to AA because their lives are going so well. Before I could look the truth in the eye, I caused a lot of hurt, a lot of damage. Only after that could I drag myself down the steps to my first meeting at Trinity Wall Street.
So, I can tell you that in the search for our own truth, we don’t get to assume that we are the heroes of the story and that someone else, someone very different from us is responsible for the brokenness we mourn. We have met the enemy, and he is us, and she is us, too. Except that we, or he, or she, isn’t really the enemy—not if we are willing to try to look the truth head on, own that truth, and try to incorporate that truth into our lives.
But here’s the thing—our own brokenness, the brokenness of the world, can call us to a more full life. Because once we embrace truth, and bring it into our lives, we can see our own failings, our own share in the state of things we deplore, and stop us from only deploring others. And that can begin the healing from division.
“Famous Blue Raincoat,” a Leonard Cohen song, tells a tale of a man betrayed by an affair between the woman he loves and a friend he thought of as a brother. He recounts the affair, and then asks what compelled him to write. To his own shock, he is writing because of his need to forgive and to receive forgiveness. He needs to admit his own failings, adding “Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good, so I never tried.”
Just as we are part of the problem, just as we bear our scars that may make it hard for us to open up to those we fear may turn on us, so too we can surprise by a sudden flash of a smile, an unexpected moment of trust. One of my favorite St. Barts memories took place when Dean was still very new to the parish. After the 11:00 service, a young man, only in town for the day, came up to me and asked if he could be baptized. Like any good deacon would, I sought out our new rector, briefed him, and asked how we should proceed. Dean paused for a long moment. Then he grinned like a schoolboy, and said “It’s like Philip and the Ethiopian—'Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’”
So we joined the young man in the chapel, Dean made sure he knew what he was getting himself into, that he understood the promises he was making, and –well, we baptized him. On the spot. Right then and there.
So we’re not just our flaws. We’re not just our failures of courage or of love. We’re also our moments of generosity, of spontaneous kindness. Our very failures can fuel our becoming our best selves.
We members of the Church, as followers of what the Apostles called “the Way,” owe each other a fundamental commitment to each other’s well-being.
And by well-being, we mean their own flourishing as a unique child of God, and embracing the flesh and blood reality of the human being standing in front of us. That commitment is a choice to embrace each other, as we are, in the light of truth, binding up the wounds of division and hurtfulness.
As long as we continue that work, the binding up of wounds, the reaching out in love, our house will stand.
Because a house built on love will not fall.
It cannot fall.
And it will prevail.
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-62339378268827532812021-01-20T05:15:00.000-08:002021-01-20T05:15:01.104-08:00On Not Being TiredThis blog has withered in these past four years. Watching my country tearing at itself at the behest of a would-be authoritarian engendered a profound disillusionment in me that, I will be frank, gravely diminished my faith in my fellow Americans, and drained much of my creative energy.
I did not like who We, the People were becoming.
The real end of the Trump Era was the January 6, 2020 riot at the U.S. Capitol--nothing less than an attempted coup incited by a defeated leader who sought to extend his time in office. The number of our elected representsatives were prepared to use their positions toward that end, even before the violence broke out, was shocking but not surprising. The recoiling at the breach of the Capitol froze the outgoing Administration in shock--even Mitch McConnell had finally had enough. As he <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/mitch-mcconnell-rioters-provoked/index.html">said yesterday</a>"The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people."
This morning, for the first time in a very long while, I woke up with no fatigue, no anger I had to repress.
I know we are not healed yet. But, after a long dark spell in survival mode--partially pandemic, partially pragmatically blunting my own edges to try to rebuild my own community by encouraging mutual love--I have reached the morning.
There's a light dusting of snow on the ground.
My cats nudge me awake.
I'm not tired.
Not a tiny bit.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-40901823642376900782020-12-31T07:24:00.002-08:002020-12-31T07:24:43.856-08:00The End or the Beginning? A Deficit of Optimism<iframe class="BLOG_video_class" allowfullscreen="" youtube-src-id="0mH23CAV7jE" width="320" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0mH23CAV7jE"></iframe>
Back in 2016, before things went agley, I postulated that we were, at long last, leaving the shadows of the "Long 1980s" and would see, at long last, what followed them.
To say I got that wrong is to put it mildly. Instead, we have lived (at the federal level) through a comic book version of 80s kitsch, disassociated from the problems actually facing the nation and its people. The coronavirus has killed over 330,000 Americans since March, and, well, here we are.
Elizabeth Sandifer <a href="http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/a-chrysalis-case-after-its-spread-its-wings-the-tenth-planet/">put it well</a>:<blockquote>The key thing to know here is that there exists a model of spiritual enlightenment in which enlightenment is a horrifying and bleak thing. The adjective I'm going to use for this sort of enlightenment - Qlippothic - is important. Basically, it suggests that there is a form of enlightenment that can be found by encountering and contemplating the darkest parts of humanity. The Qlippoth refer to the hollowed out, vacant, and rotted shells of spiritual concepts. And the whole radical idea of Kenneth Grant is that there's not actually a difference between those, which are basically the horrible nightmares within humanity, and actual enlightenment.</blockquote>That's a pretty spot-on depiction of 2020 as of this last day of the year; the Senate holding up more than token relief payments, a soft coup attempt picking up steam, one that will fail, but will further divide a polarized populace, as we retreat to our corners until--
What?
I wish I could offer some inspiring, inspiriting words this morning. But I'd be faking it.
Don't get me wrong; We the People have elected a good, decent man and a strong, determined woman who will together try to bind up the wounds of division.
As in the film, after the mourning comes the morning, letting the sunshine in.
Let us hope, dafka--despite all the bitterness, loss, and hatred--that the next Act of the drama will take us beyond these futile worn-out arguments and measures, and that we have at least one more second Act after all.
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-17441149397272965012020-08-11T20:46:00.004-07:002020-08-11T20:49:45.119-07:00The Hero's Welcome<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Supreme_Court_Justice_William_Brennan_-_1976_official_portrait.jpg#/media/File:US_Supreme_Court_Justice_William_Brennan_-_1976_official_portrait.jpg"><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/US_Supreme_Court_Justice_William_Brennan_-_1976_official_portrait.jpg" alt="US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan - 1976 official portrait.jpg"></a><br>By Robert S. Oakes - Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. DIGITAL ID: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b07877">cph 3b07877</a>, Public Domain, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=374961">Link</a></p>
Aye, the hour grows late, and we've time fair nay mair tales...what's that? I promised one? Aye, so I did.
The year was 1987, and Uncle John was a law student, at Columbia Law School, a lowly first year student at the time. The Law School was convening a celebration of the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, and then-Chief Justice Rehnquist was there, but he was not the focus of the event. No, CLS had decided to honor the contribution to constitutional law of Associate Justice, William J. Brennan.
The event was divided, like Gallia, into three parts. First, a relatively brief gathering, open to all, where Dean Black, Rehnquist (and, if I remember aright, Justice Thurgood Marshall) spoke about Brennan, and his jurisprudence. Brennan himself said a few words, and the event recessed. The second part was a formal dinner, the tickets for which were prohibitively expensive. When I told my then-significant other, Holly, about it, she was fiercely determined we should attend. She insisted on buying the tickets (she was working, I was not; at the time CLS discouraged first years from working during term.) When we bought the tickets, the woman behind the counter raised an eyebrow that we should be attending.
It was a very generous gift on her part, and we went in our best.
True fact: As far as I could tell, I was the only student there except for one 2L I recognized who was working the event as a waiter.
Another True Fact (tm): Other than my professors, most of whom were socializing with each other, the judges and scholars from other places who were gathered,I didn't know any of the people there. I was seated--as happened several times in my first year--next to Visiting Professor Arthur Chaskalson, an anti-apartheid lawyer from South Africa, (praise to Jack Greenberg for inviting him!) who was one of the bravest people I've ever met, and was courtly and gracious as always (he had to be sick of me turning u at all these dinners, and invariably being his companion, but he never showed it.) As Arthur (what? He told me to call him Arthur. He was a mensch, ok?) was caught up in the social whirl.
Holly and I were pretty much deserted, until my Torts professor, Kendall Thomas, came over to keep us company a bit. Always one to look after the underdog, and for this one night I was that, Professor Thomas visited with us a bit, made Holly laugh, and went on his way. Dinner ensued, and then--well, this:
The desserts and liqueurs were wheeled out, and the large cluster of academics, judges and Illustrious Alumni and Visitors swooped down on them with a remorseless efficiency. Justice Brennan stood all alone, for just a moment. Holly, God bless her, pushed me in the lower back, and hissed "Go SAY something to him." So I did. I have no idea what undergraduate gabble I spewed, but he took my hand, and as I was about to stagger off, having failed to communicate to this great man in my chosen profession, he wouldn't let me go. He insisted on talking to me, and asked me questions about what I hoped to do and be.
Somehow he closed the gap of age and eminence, and I relaxed, and it was a lovely conversation. He caught eye of Holly, who was a very pretty woman, and beckoned her over. And he charmed us both. Not with facile charm, but by being interested in us as people. He teased us--"you're headed to Legal Aid," he said to me (and years later Vivian Bergerwould make that happen), and he praised Holly's acting ambitions, and brilliance was in the air. We left, awed, but warmed and excited about the potential in our young lives.
After graduation, when I published my first law review article, on the First Amendment, the subject on which the now-retired Justice was the greatest living expert, I sent him an offprint, thanking him for his kindness that night.
To my shock, I received a reply--Justice Brennan thanked me for the article, saying he was sure he would read it "with pleasure and profit" and thanking me for thinking of him. His signature was spidery but clear. I framed that letter, and it hangs in my office to this day. One is not often blessed by one's heroes.
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-57590411986761721132020-08-10T20:29:00.002-07:002020-08-10T20:29:55.569-07:00What They Did in the Shadows: Dark Shadows, The Beginning: Episodes 1-5<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darkshadows.jpg#/media/File:Darkshadows.jpg"><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/70/Darkshadows.jpg" alt="Darkshadows.jpg"></a><br>By Uploaded by <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheCustomOfLife" class="mw-redirect" title="User:TheCustomOfLife">TheCustomOfLife</a>; from <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.wost.org">World of Soap Themes</a> (Webmaster: Brian Puckett)., <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darkshadows.jpg" title="Fair use">Fair use</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1827186">Link</a></p>
Before the pandemic, I had a minor surgery, but one that laid me up for a month, to my astonishment. Confined to laying on my side, I couldn't easily read and so I was stick with the pleasures of streaming video, which led me to the old Gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows. I watched it throughout my recovery, and, outsode of work hours, followed it through the next few months. Then, I was lured by Amazon into buying the complete series on DVD. Yes, the infamous "Coffin Set." Now, this may seem daft, but that's just because it is.
But when the series came, I fired up the first episode, to see the new introduction by Alexandra Moltke, and to test the quality of my purchase. In doing so, I found that the quality was very high, and found myself drawn into theses first episodes all over again.
So a few thoughts. First, the series uses its paltry budget extremely well; the main Collinwood sets are handsome and convincing, and the stratgic use of location filming at Seaview Terrace in these first epsiodes really cements Collinwood in the viewer's mind--it's as much a presence as is Shirley Jackson's Hill House. It also looks lived in, a place that has been inhabited for centuries in a way that the locales for the 1991 revival and the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows don't measure up to, beautiful as they are.
The first episode introduces Victoria Winters, a foundling seeking her identity, traveling to Collinsport Maine to take a job with the Collins family as a companion/governess. A fellow traveler on the train from New York, Burke Devlin (Mitchell Ryan who gives her a ride in his chauffered car to the hotel where she can get a taxi. We also meet Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), the tough-talking hardboiled blonde, Eve Arden-type waitress at the coffee shop. She's kind to Victoria, still waiting for her taxi,but urges her to get back to NY. The episode ends with Victoria's arrival at Collinwood, and Elizabeth letting her in.
In the second episode, we meet Elizabeth's daughter, Carolyn (Nancy Barrett) who humiliates her nice guy boyfriend Joe Haskell (Joel Crothers) to dance with the local skels (to use NYC-talk). Carolyn is presented as seeking distraction, recklessly dancing with anyone, until Joe throws a punch, and Devlin orders him to take her home. Devlin tries to use their spat as a chance to bribe Joe to spy on the Collins family for him. Joe demurs. Episodes 3 and 4 focus on the rest of this night, especially Roger's increasingly edgy efforts to pump Victoria for information regarding Burke Devlin. He's hiding his terror of the man well, but it's costing him. He vacillates between charm and panicked frustration. Edmonds is awfully good. As is Bennett, quietly playing the piano in the gloomy sitting room, her head quietly drooping as the notes fade.
When we first see Victoria and Elizabeth togther, the similarity is striking--Victoria's hunt for her identity, and the fact that the checks that paid the Foundling Home in which she was raised are postmarked from only 50 miles away from Collinsport raises the thought that they are mother and daughter. (We so often think of Victoria as a governess that we forget that her time with Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (a regal Joan Bennett) is as much a part of her job as educating the appalling brat David. (Roger Collins has his issues, but his snide exhortations to Victoria to "give him a good kick" have considerable justification (albeit not good child-rearing even in 1966).
Despite David's nasty efforts to scare her off (much smaller, and thus more credible, than the Grand Guignol he attempts in the revival or HODS) Roger's apology, Carolyn's friendship, and Elizabeth's quiet need, plus her own desire to know, impel her to stay.
The show is an extraordinary achievement thus far, and in this slowly unfolding plot the actors have a chance to make their marks. The core cast is extremely good--Bennett brings all her years of film acting to the small scree, Edmonds is a superb general utility player, finding character notes and comic moments in the blandest lines, and Barrett makes a strong impression. Moltke is more gentle, more tentative--with a strong backbone when challenged. Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-74139759961827997502020-08-10T16:04:00.000-07:002020-08-10T16:04:34.040-07:00Coming Home<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZDt7xO-tygc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It has been a long fallow period in the world, and on this blog. Not so in life--work continues, co-writing with a good friend a project regarding Anthony Trollpe (more to come!), and other events have made the plague time pass.
But yesterday, fter six months away (one and a half due to healing from an operation, the rest due to the Coronavirus), I returned home to St. Bartholomew's Church, whre I have been a regular attendee since 2007 (occasional attendee even earler--mid 1990s), where I became an acolyte, from where my wife and I were married, where I discerned a call to the vocational diaconate, and where I returned as deacon in 2014, and have served since.
In the video above, the Church is mostly empty. The Rev. Susan Anderson-Smith and teh Rev. Deborah Lee preside and preach respectively, and I have the honor, forthe first time since early in this bizarre, calmitous year, of reading the lessons, leading the psalm, proclaining the Gospel, and dismissing the people. Fittingly enough, the prescribed dismissal was that used by J.D. Clarke, my beloved predecessor and mentor as St. Barts's deacon: "Let go into the World, rejoicing in the Power of the Spirit!"
After a long adventitious exile, I had come home.
And tonight, I remember the beautiful words of Be Jonson's "A Farewell to the World":
But what we're born for, we must bear:
Our frail condition it is such
That what to all may happen here,
If 't chance to me, I must not grutch.
Else I my state should much mistake
To harbour a divided thought
From all my kind—that, for my sake,
There should a miracle be wrought.
No, I do know that I was born
To age, misfortune, sickness, grief:
But I will bear these with that scorn
As shall not need thy false relief.
Nor for my peace will I go far,
As wanderers do, that still do roam;
But make my strengths, such as they are,
Here in my bosom, and at home.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-13087941892695671602020-05-02T07:49:00.001-07:002020-05-02T07:49:14.026-07:00Where’s The Override?The classic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4pcIuo6Kbw&feature=share">moment</a> In <i>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan</i> where Khan, flustered as his commandeered ship’s shields are dropping, looks helplessly around the unfamiliar console asking “Where’s the override? The override?!”is a meme at Anglocat Central. Where la Caterina is very keyed in to physical reality, a crowded field of vision bewilders me, and I can (or should I say “Khan”) unconsciously reproduce that sequence in real time while the object I seek is literally right in front of me.<br />
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This came to my mind this morning when I was seeking the smaller baking sheet to heat up a frozen breakfast. It took me 10 minutes to see the bloody thing, and it’s a weird experience when I finally can lock on to it.<br />
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I dont know if this is just some weird fluke of my own mind, or if others can, in this one aspect at least spare a drop of sympathy for the beleaguered Khan Noonien Singh (C’mon, I grew up on Trek. Of course I know his full name.) <br />
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But I can. Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-12290455158404255512020-04-11T09:03:00.002-07:002020-04-11T09:03:17.243-07:00Thoughts from the Plague Year: A Good Friday Meditation on Mark 15:33-37 <br />
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[Delivered in Video Format at St. Bartholomew’s Church, April 10, 2020]<br />
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Author’s Note: The video at the link and text below were created as part the annual <a href="https://stbarts.org/event/1793314-2020-04-10-the-seven-last-words/">Seven Last Words service at St. Bartholomew’s Church</a>. Because of the need for social distancing in what Daniel Defoe would call this “Plague Year”, the service was streamed and recorded on video at the link. I commend the words, prayers and music created by my friends and colleagues at my beloved St. Barts to your attention. This little reflection is only a small piece of a mosaic created by the people of the parish in what very well may prove to be our Finest Hour—separated physically, but united in love and prayer for the people of God and the World.<br />
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**** <br />
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The last time I drove from our apartment in Brooklyn back to Albany was only a few weeks ago. I couldn’t help notice how empty the City’s streets were. The BQE, which is always choked with traffic was wide open. No traffic in Queens of the Bronx. The silence, the lack of people in every neighborhood I drove through, were eerie. <br />
It was an arrest of life, to steal a phrase from C.P. Snow’s 1970 novel Last Things. <br />
Our Diocese, like many others, of all denominations, has eliminated in-person group worship services, livestreaming services to feed the spiritual needs of the people of God in a time of famine. Our bishops have announced that, as long as the people of God cannot receive the Eucharist, they will fast from it, in solidarity with us.<br />
After months of false optimism, the White House has accepted the necessity of social distancing, school closure, and staying at home. Even with those measures, the coronavirus task force “predict[s] a best case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 fatalities in the United States.”<br />
That’s their best case scenario, though there is some dispute about the numbers.<br />
The emptiness of the streets, the closing of theaters, restaurants and bars, the lack of human contact are the markers of that arrest of life. A life on pause, waiting to see what happens next.<br />
In my lifetime, our nation has been brash, sure of itself, and increasingly hubristic. Since the end of the war in Viet Nam, the fall of then-President Richard Nixon, and the end of the “malaise” described by then-President Jimmy Carter, we have seen American exceptionalism become an article of faith, one nobody could question. The last superpower. <br />
Today, like every other nation on this small blue globe circling an indifferent Sun, we wait. We wait for the “all clear” sign, or for the descent into something worse. We wait for symptoms to manifest in ourselves, or in those we love. We watch and we wait.<br />
For the first time in my life, America is afraid.<br />
We weren’t after 9-11. We were angry, we were hurt, but our City was NOT afraid after the Towers fell, and the Nation as a whole didn’t quail. <br />
But in this time of fear, those of us who have no active role can be tempted to despair—to glibly invoke Stephen King’s pandemic novel The Stand, or The Walking Dead, and to think of this virus as a\the scourge of an angry, Jonathan Edwards version of God punishing His people.<br />
We are hard-wired to feel fear; it can be, as Steven Moffat has written, a “superpower”—as Moffat wrote, “So much blood and oxygen pumping though your brain, it’s like rocket fuel. Right now, you can run faster and you can fight harder, you can jump higher than ever in your life. And you are so alert, it’s like you can slow down time.” <br />
But that superpower is a liability when there is nothing tangible to grapple with. We are trapped with our fear, and it can lead to despair.<br />
Jesus said to his disciples, over and over, Be. Not. Afraid.<br />
And He knew despair. <br />
As death came for Him, he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” <br />
What a desolating fall from the spontaneous pomp and pageantry of Palm Sunday.<br />
Of course, Jesus had warned the disciples that he would be put to death, but this cry of abandonment, of despair, coming from Jesus after His courage throughout His long ordeal is especially heart wrenching. <br />
There are some who try to take some of the harsh edge off this moment. Professor Michael Guinan, of the Fransiscan School of Theology in Berkeley points these words come from Psalm 22—they are the very first words of the psalm, and, although the psalm may begin with a cry of despair, it ends with praise and thanksgiving. The psalm is, ultimately, “the prayer of a just one who suffers innocently, of one who is surrounded by enemies and mocked precisely because of his fidelity to God. When God hears []his cry and delivers [him] , the just one offers praise and thanksgiving.” For Guinan, “these are not words of despair but an expression of faith.” <br />
Perhaps.<br />
But the knowledge that he would put to death wouldn’t necessarily protect Jesus from the horror of actually going through the ordeal that culminated in his death. Betrayed, by his own disciples, arrested on false charges, denounced by his own people and handed over to the Roman occupiers. <br />
Crucifixion was a protracted death, one that was meant to break the spirit of the condemned and terrify the rest of the populace into submission to the unquestioned might of Rome. It’s a lower class version of the Roman practice of the damnatio memoriae, which eliminates every trace of the discredited victim’s accomplishments and life.<br />
All of the humiliations inflicted on Jesus at each step of the way are meant to deprive him of his dignity, reduce him from the charismatic teacher and prophet who rode into Jerusalem a scant five days before to a pariah. An outcast. By destroying the condemned man’s honor, the degradation ritual which ends with his death as a public spectacle doesn’t just destroy the body of the man—it is intended to erase Him as ever having been a member of the community, and to erase His impact on the lives of all who saw Him.<br />
And through it all, Jesus maintained a stoical front. His words are laced with the comfort he provided to those he loved—his mother, and St. John, the beloved disciple who becomes her son. Even the repentant thief, a complete stranger, finds comfort in Jesus’s promise that they would be together in Paradise that very day.<br />
That Jesus, like any person, would shrink from the physical horror of death we all fear doesn’t make this cry an act of despair. But his quoting Psalm 22 isn’t serene. It isn’t a final scoring of an academic point on a debate. Jesus is, as Guinan says, making a statement, but not an academic one.<br />
Herman Wouk in his novel War and Remembrance explains the Yiddish word “dafka” as meaning “perversely, ironically, despite everything.” It carries a wry bit of humor whenever it is used. And that’s how it seems to me Jesus is invoking Psalm 22. He cries out the opening line, articulating the agony of abandonment, implying the rest of the psalm—the Lord’s rescue of the just man, the reinstatement of all that has been lost, and, ultimately, the reconciliation of a fractured sin-stained world.<br />
Jesus believes, dafka,that all this will happen, that he will be restored, despite all the evidence of his senses. Far from being the obliterated, His name will live on, and His legacy will be a movement that stands against the brutal strength of Rome, and for the reconciliation of all humanity. The reign of love—God’s love—will prevail, and the gates of hell itself will not prevail against it.<br />
We believe, dafka, that all this is true, more true than the news on television that can be so wearying and depressing. You all believe it, or you wouldn’t be spending three hours with us today, mourning the death of an itinerant Jewish preacher two thousand years ago, and, even in our mourning celebrating dafka the transforming power of love to convert our hearts, and the hearts of those who we hate, and who hate us.<br />
Albert Einstein said that in the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity. Here in our fractured nation, can we really continue viewing our fellow Americans, our sisters and brothers who are as weighted down by this crisis as we are, as enemies? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, in his daily press conferences on March 31, 2020, rejected the idea, saying “There are no red states, there are no blue states. The virus doesn’t attack and kill red Americans or blue Americans, it kills all Americans,” and added “Keep that in mind.” <br />
Keep that in mind. We are all equally vulnerable, all fearfully looking to our loved ones, hoping that they will not get sick, or if they do, that they will be part of the 80% who recover. The “Other” we dislike or even hate—well, they’re in the same boat with us. And so our belief in love, the only engine of survival, is no longer a belief we cling to, dafka, but a necessity. We need the Other; the Other needs us. Because at the end of things, we are the squabbling, annoying family of humanity, not different tribes. And in this moment, when we are all winded and bruising and vulnerable, we can see in the weary humanity of those whom we have struggled maybe too fiercely, too sure of our own righteousness, we can see not a stranger, but a brother. A sister, a mother, a father, an aunt, an uncle. <br />
And come together, as all families do, in times of trouble, and learn to love one another all over again.<br />
In the Name of God, Father Son, and Holy Spirit.<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-32066916063431406802020-03-28T11:55:00.001-07:002020-03-28T14:34:05.296-07:00A Faint-Hearted Universalist’s ViewI recently received a splendid comment from a reader, who asked me a very knotty question indeed. So of course your Anglocat, merrily rushing in where angels fear to tread, finds himself treading some fairly deep theological waters. Here is the essence of the question: Describing (fairly) my views on the afterlife as “universalist”, how do I reconcile these views with the fact that the majority of church teaching has not held to this position.<br />
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I know, bit of a yorker, right?<br />
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I am a universalist, but in (to steal a phrase from constitutional law), a faint-hearted one. That is to say, my belief in the Grace and mercy of God outweighs my knowledge of the sinfulness not just of the world, but of myself. I believe in the forgiveness of God because I need God’s mercy, and because the nature of God offers love and deep compassion. That is not to say that I don’t believe that sin harms us; it clearly does, and it hurts the soul. I just don’t believe that God ever gives up on us. <br />
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So here’s my response, lightly edited, as Lent slowly draws toward a close, and Holy Week approaches:<br />
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Before I give my own thoughts, let me refer you to two of my favorite theologians: C.S. Lewis, and specifically his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083QNYY94/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">The Great Divorce</a>, which addresses this very topic (as does his more famous <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085HGJ9Z3/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">The Screwtape Letters</a>, hinting that God bends the rules for us). Lewis's point boils down to the contention that we can reject God’s love, and refuse to enter into joy; God will not force us into relationship with Him. (The book suggests that the door from Hell to Heaven is always ajar, but it is well worth a read.)<br />
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It occurs to me that Christopher Marlowe in his <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/779/779-h/779-h.htm">The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus</a> is heading in the same direction when he has Mephistopheles, on Earth, say that: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it./Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God/And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,/Am not tormented with ten thousand hells/In being deprived of everlasting bliss?” In other words, Hell is a state of mind, not a place.<br />
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The second is Nadia Bolz-Weber, in her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BAXFZQA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint</a>, describing Grace: “God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn't about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace - like saying, ‘Oh, it's OK, I'll be the good guy and forgive you.’ It's God saying, ‘I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.’” For Bolz-Weber, we are all sinners and all saints, and both at the same time.<br />
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So now my own thoughts, understanding that I fully agree with Lewis and Bolz-Weber. The first response I’d make is to refer you to the Gospels: Matthew 7:11 (“If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”). See Luke 11:13 for the parallel passage. Also, John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”<br />
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These passages are a reminder to me of two things: First, that God’s mercy is far greater than that of humanity. Second, that God loves everything He has created, and longs to put things right between sinful humanity and Himself. The first point, the mercy of God excelling ours, is important because in every criminal justice system, there is a concept of proportionality, that means that, for any crime, however horrific, there comes a point where the punishment outweighs the crime, and becomes itself unjust. God’s Justice is not that—think of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where the early morning workers are paid the same as those who only work an hour. That’s mercy to the latecomers, but not injustice to the earlier arrived workers. (Matt. 20: 1-16).<br />
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If Hell is in fact a state of mind, and not a place, it is self-inflicted by our inability to accept Grace. Lewis’s suggestion that the opportunity to accept Grace doesn’t end with death is hopeful, but not, of course, verifiable. But I cannot accept that the God who calls us ever hardens His heart against us.<br />
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As to traditional readings of Hell and damnation, I think we, as did our ancestors, sometimes look for what lawyers call “bright lines,” rules that are clear and unbending, guaranteeing clarity of outcomes. Life isn’t that way, in my 54 years on this planet, and I suspect that Jesus Christ wasn’t laying down inflexible rules, but speaking fortissimo to His followers to help them reevaluate their own lives and beliefs.<br />
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I hope you find this helpful and really do read Lewis and Bolz-Weber, who are each far more eloquent and learned than am I.<br />
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Peace and welcome.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-57392566629232123632020-02-25T18:18:00.002-08:002020-02-25T20:18:41.256-08:00Context is Everything: A Lesson from “Dark Shadows”I have been out of work for two weeks after a minor surgery (still recovering, but on the mend), and have been forced for most of that time to lie on my side. So I’ve been binge-watching the old Gothic oater “Dark Shadows” from the beginning (thanks, Amazon Prime!)<br />
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Here’s the lesson: Context is everything.<br />
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When I was a kid, and watched it in reruns after school, they started with Willie Loomis’s discovery of the vampire Barnabas Collins, who pretty savagely turns him into his Renfield. From that beginning, you kind of pity Loomis.<br />
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Watching it with all the episodes leading up to the discovery, in which we see Loomis as a violent thug, who tries to sexually assault (in order) Maggie Evans, Victoria Winters (twice), and Carolyn Stoddard (three times), well, not so much.<br />
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After watching those episodes, when Willie opens the vault, I can only say, sucks to be you, vamp chow.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-7258160617697059432020-02-02T19:03:00.002-08:002020-02-02T19:06:58.884-08:00“The Old Order Changeth:” A Sermon on Luke 2: 22-40[Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, February 2, 2020]<br />
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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.<br />
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Today’s gospel reading—as well as the reading from Malachi—have a wintry feel to them. They seem designed for a dark night, a cold night. You might expect the presentation of our Lord at the Temple—the ritual purification of the child Jesus and his acceptance as a member of the people of Israel—to be a joyous event. And, in a way, it is. But there are undercurrents throughout the story that hint at a tragic dimension to the occasion. <br />
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In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s, finale to his epic poem cycle “The Idylls of the King,” the last poem is titled, simply, “The Passing of Arthur.” In that poem, Sir Bedivere brings the dying king to the river, and places him in a barge in which four Queens sit, ready to take Arthur to Avilon for healing. And, seeing his king resting in the boat, Bedivere comes to a realization: It’s over. The story in which Bedivere was a character has ended. He exclaims “For now I see the true old times are dead/… Such times have been not since the light that led <br />
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.” And now, Sir Bedivere, the last survivor, must “go forth companionless, <br />
And the days darken round me, and the years, <br />
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."<br />
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Arthur’s answer brings Bedivere no comfort. He simply replies, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”<br />
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And that is what is happening in the Temple. Jesus’s presentation is the culmination of Simeon’s life—and the end of it. The righteous and devout old man had learned from the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. But now that the day has come, the old servant of the Lord knows that his time has ended—he has been dismissed in peace, and his part in the story of God and the people of God is almost at an end. <br />
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But first he has some news to deliver. That Jesus is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” So far, so good, but then he adds to Mary that “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The uncomprehending parents are amazed. Even more when the prophet Anna approaches and begins to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.<br />
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The news is profoundly mixed, that it is hard to imagine how Joseph and Mary could respond to it. Joseph can’t help but be aware that his own presence in the crowning moments of the story is not alluded to—this good, gentle man who was willing to spare Mary shame and disgrace even before the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream—well, indications are that he won’t see the redemption of Israel through the child who is, by his mercy—and yes, his obedience to God’s call, his son at least in the eyes of the Lord.<br />
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Joseph knows only that the story will go on, and that, like Simeon himself, that he has played his part thus far.<br />
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But Mary—Mary is promised nothing but that a “sword will pierce her soul too.”<br />
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We know, because we know how the story turns out, that the sword will not be literal; it will be the mother’s agony of seeing her beloved son rise to great heights, only to be disgraced and executed by the tortuous methods of the Roman Empire, a death reserved only for rebels and traitors.<br />
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What are the parents to make of this prophecy, glorious and dire, terrifying and yet hopeful, culminating in the redemption of Israel?<br />
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So we look to the reading from Malachi for comfort, or at least illumination.<br />
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We do not get comfort. But possibly some light.<br />
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The unknown prophet named by tradition as Malachi starts off on a joyful note--the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom we delight—he is coming. But then the prophet asks us, darkly, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”<br />
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He tells us that the Lord will refine us like silver—which involves a lot of fire—and the experience will be like cleansing garments with fuller’s soap. Now, fuller's soap is not Ivory Snow, or some nice gentle cleanser that softens your hands while you do the dishes. It’s made of alkali, urine and chalk. It’s like taking a bath in bleach, only it smells worse. A lot worse.<br />
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What on earth is going on with these readings? How can the day of the Lord be joyous, if we must ask if we can stand in it? How can the redemption of Israel be welcomed if it comes with so much loss?<br />
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What does it mean to welcome the new if we are of the old order?<br />
Susan Howatch in her final Starbridge novel, Absolute Truths depicts an aging bishop, Charles Ashworth, recently widowed, who sees himself, as, in his own words, “living out those terrifying lines from Tennyson, “the old order changeth, yielding place to new.” <br />
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His own son, also a priest in the Church of England, dances with the lovely young daughter of a colleague, while the father grieves his losses, the passing away of the comfortable, secure world in which he flourished.<br />
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And he nearly loses himself his disdain for the cheap, vulgar, flashy era in which he is condemned to live, a traditionalist bishop in a radical time, a staunch believer in an age in which the absolute truths by which he has always set such store are rejected by the culture around him, and the church itself seems increasingly less relevant and less able to communicate to a people that horde, and sleep and feed, and know not me, as Tennyson writes in “Ulysses.”<br />
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And then, young Rachel breaks away from Ashworth’s son, and holds out her hands to the bishop, inviting him to dance. He accepts Rachel’s invitation, and, as they waltz, he recognizes the generosity, the kindness of the younger set—Charley happily admiring his father’s dancing skill, and Rachel reaching out to the formidable old bishop whose bereavement is common knowledge. As Ashworth, our narrator tells us, “I danced, and I danced, and I danced”—all the while grieving for that precious old order, but also realizing that if the new order can reach out in sympathetic love to the old, than the old order, in yielding place to new, must do so in love—with grace if it can mange it.<br />
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Historians have written of decades that throw a shadow into the decades that follow them—the “long 1960s”, which continued into the 1970s. <br />
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And now we are living in what they are beginning to call the “Long 1980s.” Not the real 1980s, you understand, but a sclerotic as-remembered version of them, with macho preening, culture wars, and a divide between left and right, city and rural, that seems to go on and on, with ferocious heat, but oh, so very little light.<br />
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We keep fighting, over and over, the battles of yesteryear, trying to ignore the fraying of our national fabric, and the threats of the 2020s that are, increasingly looming over us—the catastrophic harms threatened by climate change will not be put off by rallies and slogans, as we waste what time there is left to mitigate the harm.<br />
<br />
But nothing lasts forever. Somewhere under the ice, whether for weal or woe, is stirring a new Era to replace the long 1980s.<br />
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And, eventually, the ice will crack, and the new era will come. <br />
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The old order changeth, yielding to new.<br />
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That change won’t be easy. Like Sir Bedivere, we look for safe ground on which to stand, and find none. Change can be painful—it can be like the refining of silver, like being washed in fullers soap.<br />
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The comfortable world of consensus that I can remember as a young man was only comfortable because it excluded voices who questioned injustices and inequities that papered over divides. The structures and social codes that many of us assume as a given are being tested and failing. Much that we are used to will be lost, or altered out of recognition. Much needs to be, as we are seeing the trust in the legitimacy of our national political branches erode ever further. <br />
<br />
What will never change, what will never alter, is this: Jesus’s message that only by reaching out in love, however hard that is to live up to, is how we break the logjam. Reaching out in love doesn’t mean we don’t feel anger, or that we just surrender to those whose vision of the world appalls us. It means that we remember their humanity. That they are as much the beloved children of God as we are. That, like us, they are 100 % sinner and 100% saint. Because love is not an emotion; it’s a promise.<br />
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How do we stand up to the day of the Lord?<br />
<br />
Love. <br />
<br />
Don’t ever give up on love. <br />
<br />
Because, as I’ve told you before, hate is always foolish, but love, love is always wise.<br />
<br />
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-68692199060519227382020-01-19T18:20:00.000-08:002020-01-19T18:21:18.819-08:00What Will Become of His Dreams? A Sermon for the Feast Day of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC]<br />
<br />
In the Name of God, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.<br />
<br />
We don’t often use the term “saint” in the Episcopal Church; we are, after all, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, not the Roman Catholic Church. But the term “saint” is used often by St. Paul, and is used to describe all followers of Jesus Christ. All of us. Our Lutheran brothers and sisters still use the term in this way.<br />
<br />
But we tend to reserve it, in the old Catholic meaning, for followers of Jesus Christ who have demonstrated heroic virtue in the living of their lives in Christ.<br />
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Today we honor the life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And I don’t think we will go far wrong if we think of him as St. Martin, in either definition.<br />
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You have to remember what a young man he was. Thirty-nine, when he was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support African American sanitary public works employees, members of AFSCME Local 1733.<br />
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Thirty-nine.<br />
<br />
St. Martin was only six years older than Jesus was when the Romans executed him as a troublemaker. In Dr. King’s last speech, on April 3, 1968, he talked about the bomb threats and other threats that had been made on his life. He said:<blockquote>We've got some difficult days ahead, but that it didn’t matter with [him] now. Because [he’d] been to the mountaintop. . . Like anybody, he said, he would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But [he wasn’t] concerned about that now. [he] just want[ed] to do God's will. And, St. Martin said, [God allowed him ] to go up to the mountain. And that [he had ] looked over. And …seen the promised land. He warned that he may not get there with [us], [and added that he wanted] those with him that night, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So he was happy that last night, not worried about anything. He affirmed that he was not fearing any man. And ended, quoting, that Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.</blockquote>The next day, April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray, shot him dead. According to his biographer, Taylor Branch, the autopsy revealed that Dr. King had the heart of a 60 year old. Branch suggests that the stress of his 13 years leading the civil rights movement accounted for the condition of his heart.<br />
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They were perilous years, years in which he was arrested twenty-nine times, confronted by angry and often violent white supremacists. Spied on by the FBI, targeted by its all-powerful Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who hoped to strip away his legitimacy by probing into his personal life. Branch’s three volume biography, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074CG8XP3/?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0">America in the King Years</a>, portrays King in his times, and captures in a way no short list of dangers faced, of successful protests, of standing up for equality, can <br />
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They couldn’t intimidate him, or silence him, or coopt him. But they were wearing him, and that great heart, out.<br />
<br />
I can’t help but think of Byron’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43845/so-well-go-no-more-a-roving">lines</a>:<br />
<br />
For the sword outwears its sheath, <br />
And the soul wears out the breast, <br />
And the heart must pause to breathe, <br />
And love itself have rest. <br />
<br />
But despite the wear, Dr. King kept on keeping on.<br />
<br />
Until the bullets found him.<br />
<br />
Like Joseph’s brothers in today’s reading from Genesis, his brothers—his “sick white brothers” heard their brother Martin’s dream, and decided to kill him. “Here comes this dreamer,” they said, “come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. . . and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”<br />
<br />
They thought that by killing the man, they could kill the dream.<br />
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They were wrong.<br />
<br />
The dreamer had caught the soul of the Nation, had stirred what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our natures,” and a Nation felt a stirring of shame. <br />
<br />
Dr. King’s campaigns were permeated by the teachings of Jesus. His strategy of non-violent protest was sparked by Ghandi’s, but in fact was centered on the Gospel. You can hear it in Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel reading: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. . . . Do to others as you would have them do to you.”<br />
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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was committed to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and under Dr. King’s leadership pursued justice, peace, and love.<br />
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That’s why, despite all the hostility and violence he faced—even in Harlem, he was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener by a woman and was hospitalized for weeks—he could, on that last day in Memphis, sincerely refer to those who were threatening his life as his “sick white brothers.” Just as Joseph never stopped loving his brothers despite their betrayal of him, Dr. King never gave up on love. Like Moses, he didn’t get to the promised land, but he got to the mountaintop.<br />
<br />
I’ll be 54 this year, which means I only lived in a world with Dr. King for two years. He will have been gone for 52 years in April.<br />
<br />
“We shall see what will become of his dreams.”<br />
<br />
That dreamer, America’s own Joseph, African-Americans’ Moses, was one of those who brought about a wholesale change in this country, still trying to shed the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation. Not alone—and he’d be the first to agree—but with his colleagues in the SCLC, brave individuals like Rosa Parks, courtroom warriors like Thurgood Marshall—we began as a Nation to slowly, partially, start trying to do better. <br />
<br />
Far from unanimously—massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional continued well into the 1980s, and sometimes still flares up. Even here in New York City, we have heavily segregated schools and massive disparities between resources for schools. Only now, two decades into the Twenty-first Century, are we in New York beginning to try to effectively grapple with these problems by making school funding uniform throughout the State and by eliminating programs that tend to exclude African American and Hispanic students.<br />
<br />
Labor rights in New York State have been extended to farmworkers, predominantly people of color, for the first time. Those rights were extended to most other employees in 1937.<br />
<br />
But if New York is straggling, but trying to change, much of the country is falling back into the bad old ways.<br />
<br />
Since the Supreme Court’s decision in <i>Shelby County v. Holder</i>[1], which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Court has turned a blind eye to the 14th and 15th Amendment’s guarantees of racial equality and of equal voting. The Court upheld gerrymandering and allowed states to pass laws aimed at making voting harder, especially in African American districts. <br />
<br />
According to a 2018 report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights—an independent panel made up of Democrats, Republicans, and independents—“at least 23 states have enacted newly restrictive statewide voter laws" since the <i>Shelby County v. Holder</i> decision, with moves like closing polling places, cutting early voting, purging voter rolls and imposing voter ID laws.[2] <br />
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Things have not improved since.<br />
<br />
What has become of his dreams, indeed?<br />
<br />
I’ve often preached of the polarization and the division that are tearing our body politic, but is It’s a mistake to view our own St. Martin—as someone who stood for unity above all else. In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he wrote that:<blockquote>[he had] almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.” [3] </blockquote>Nearly three years ago, Bishop Dietsche reminded us that “we have been given two parallel charges by which to make our Christian witness: On the one hand, to never flag in our advocacy for the little ones of God, to make no peace with injustice, and to never fail to face down the unjust policy of uncaring power, and on the other hand to cultivate by the Spirit within us a more expansive generosity toward those whose convictions we hold reprehensible than we ever imagined ourselves capable.[4] <br />
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He also reminded us that it can be done, and it has been done. He quoted St. Martin, who “was that generous.” Who “after the beatings and firehoses and spitting and humiliations and martyrdoms, and just one year after Bloody Sunday, preached from [our cathedral pulpit] and said to the Diocese of New York, “Love is the greatest of all the virtues. This is the meaning of the cross, . . . It is an eternal reminder of the power of love over hate.”[4] <br />
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He never gave up, did St. Martin. And neither can we. I know, it’s winter, you’re cold, the division and anger have been going on too long.<blockquote>And the sword outwears its sheath, <br />
And the soul wears out the breast, <br />
And the heart must pause to breathe, <br />
And love itself have rest.</blockquote>But not today.<br />
<br />
And not tomorrow.<br />
<br />
Not until we can look ourselves in the mirror, meet our reflected eyes, and say that we have not flagged in our advocacy for the little ones of God, have not made peace with injustice, and have done it all in the spirit of love, for friend and adversary alike.<br />
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Not til we have made it to our own mountaintop, and seen the Promised Land.<br />
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In the Name of God, Creator Redeemer, Sustainer. <br />
<br />
[1] 570 U.S. 529 (2013).<br />
[2]U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States (2018), https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/Minority_Voting_Access_2018.pdf (visited on January 18, 2020).<br />
[3] M. L. King, “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, archived at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail (visited on January 18, 2010). <br />
[5] “Bishop Dietsche’s Holy Tuesday Sermon,” April 11, 2017, archived at https://www.dioceseny.org/bishop-dietsches-holy-tuesday-sermon/ (visited January 18, 2019).Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-64506461715046841612019-12-12T18:49:00.000-08:002019-12-12T18:49:43.477-08:00MASH Revisited: S 1, eps 10 & 11: “I Hate a Mystery”/Germ WarfareRemember back in “Requiem for a Lightweight” how Trapper John ended a surprisingly nice conversation between Maj. Houlihan and Hawkeye by calling her “Frank’s bag?” Well, that slightly nasty streak comes out again in “I Hate a Mystery,” and Trapper turns it on—surprisingly—Hawkeye. <br />
<br />
Ok, a little plot recap, for those who aren’t watching with me. There’s a crime wave at the 4077th, with small personal valuable items disappearing. We first find this out during a poker game, where Captain Jones and Trapper are grousing about Hawkeye’s run of good luck at the table, his having won over $300 (he claims it’s because his “heart is pure”; the other Swampmen aren’t buying). As they wrangle, Frank notices his mother’s picture is where he keeps it—but without its silver frame. Then Margaret discovers her hairbrushes, a gift from her father, are gone. As is Trapper’s watch. <br />
<br />
Henry tries to stage a camp wide meeting in the mess tent, dims the light to allow the culprit to return the stolen items, and, when the lights come up<i>more</i> Items have been stolen.<br />
<br />
So Henry does a bunk-to-bunk inspection (welcome, Radar’s teddy bear!), getting drenched in the shower, and—oh, hell, this sequence is one of the funniest scenes the show ever shot, and just go watch it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKEg8TA24pE">here</a>.<br />
<br />
I have to say, Rogers and Alda are perfect in their reaction to Henry’s misfortune in searching the Swamp. (Rogers is laughing so hard you can actually count his fillings.). But Alda—that hyena-like laugh that keeps taking him over, and laying him out flat—I don’t know if it was direction, Alda’s ability as an actor, or genuine—or a combination of the three—but it is utterly contagious and totally in character. <br />
<br />
As is his sobering up when Henry opens his footlocker and finds all the missing items.<br />
<br />
Mark the sequel: Trapper goes utterly cold toward Hawkeye, convinced that his erstwhile friend is guilty. He doesn’t speak to him, only to Radar or Jones. There’s a bit of a mean streak in John McIntyre, and Rogers delivers it.<br />
<br />
With Radar stalking him, Hawkeye dodges into Father Mulcahy’s tent, and, with Mulcahy thinking he’s there to make a confession, the two men try to take seats. Both folding chairs keep snapping at the hands of the man who is trying to unfold them, so after a bit of comic choreography, Pierce flees. He gets Henry to reveal where the recovered items, evidence for the court martial the Majors have been pushing for, are hidden, over the company loudspeaker.<br />
<br />
Later, he calls everyone into the mess tent, and, sweeping in with a hat and what our friends at TV Tropes would call a “<a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassLongcoat">”Badass Longcoat”</a>, does a nifty little Ellery Queen/Nero Wolfe pastiche, identifying his colleagues as suspects. He announces that the chemical he has smeared on the re-stolen items will turn the fingers of the culprit blue, and watches as Ho-Jon, the Swamp houseboy, fearfully checks his hands, only to breathe a sigh of relief, and hold them out, saying—“look, no blue!”<br />
<br />
Proving himself the culprit. It was, of course, a bluff. Ho-Jon confesses that he stole the items and Hawkeye’s winnings to bring his family down out of the combat zone to Seoul. <br />
<br />
Burns, Margaret, Leslie, all agree to let Ho-Jon sell the money. Margaret even gently murmurs, “they’re just brushes. I have others.”<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
“The only reason I'm paranoid is because everyone's against me.”—Frank Burns<br />
<br />
“Germ Warfare” is a light little episode. It doesn’t start that way; Pierce and Burns are at war over a POW who is taking up room that an American soldier could use, and so the Majors push for his transfer to another camp, even though his wounds might reopen on the way. Burns has the regulation son his side, so Henry can’t back Hawkeye up. <br />
<br />
So they move him to the Swamp, but, because he needs a transfusion of AB-, which they are low on, they need a donor. A sleeping Burns is AB-, as Radar confirms, so Hawkeye (“Excellent, Igor!” Pierce intones as the blood flows) and Trapper (“Yes, my Count! But be quiet!” He replies, in character as Igor—NOT the mess hall Igor) get the pint they need. They give the North Korean (named Pai) Franck’s blood, and he shows signs of hepatitis. the rest of the episode is a MASH farce—Feydeau in khaki, with Hawkeye and Trapper tricking Frank into giving them another type of sample (beer. It’s not Frank’s friend.), the two Swampmen keeping Burns away from patients, and Houlihan and Burns away from each other. (Both Pierce and McIntyre seem to genuinely care about protecting Burns and Houlihan from getting sick.)<br />
<br />
Finally, as Burns is about to go into OR, they handcuff him to Houlihan, to the confusion of Col. Blake. Trapped, they confess. When the analysis of Frank’s sample is brought in, he’s clear. <br />
<br />
We return to the Swamp for the stinger—Burns is amicably playing checkers with Pai (!), and McIntryre and Pierce bring Frank some flowers as an apology—which he accepts, visibly touched, only to throw them back when the boys ask if he’d be interested in serving as the donor for a heart transplant.<br />
<br />
***<br />
There’s not a lot to unpack in these two episodes—they are quite funny and stand up pretty well. In fighting to keep Pai in a bed, Hawkeye uses a line from the film, calling Henry “a Regular Army clown.” (In the movie, that line is disdainfully tossed at Major O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) by Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye. It’s pretty withering, but Alda says it in exasperation, not dismissal, as Sutherland does).<br />
<br />
The draining of Frank’s blood is based on a similar incident in the novel, but again the series is kinder and lighter here. <br />
<br />
There are some nice grace notes in the two episodes—Houlihan softening when she learns why Ho-Jon was stealing, Burns playing checkers with Pai, and his willingness to accept the amends of Hawkeye and Trapper.<br />
<br />
Only 11 episodes in, and the Majors are growing, and the Swampmen are showing some darker streaks. This is some fine comedy, in a highly unlikely setting, with sharp writing—sharper every episode, as it emerges from the shadow of the film—and character development is beginning to complicate things.Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-10518156123670970952019-12-02T07:58:00.000-08:002019-12-02T07:58:15.718-08:00MASH Revisited: S. 1, Ep 9: “Henry, Please Come Home.”This episode gets its own entry because it’s at once a throwback to the film, and a step forward in the development of the characters. The premise is simple: Henry Blake has impressed General Hammond by the efficiency and good results achieved by the 4077th, the highest in all Korea. As a result, General Hammond offers Henry a sinecure position in Tokyo, where he advises on how to get similar results. At the mercy of the gunger-ho than usual Frank Burns, the Swampmen realize that they are no longer in control, and that Frank’s willingness to enforce discipline will make their lives a misery. (Frank even confiscates the still. Just because he can.)<br />
<br />
So Hawkeye and Trapper (thanks to a defy little maneuver by Radar) get a furlough to Tokyo, where they visit a relaxed, comfortable Henry. He’s genuinely glad to see them, but in no way interested in returning to the 4077th. Not even the charms of Lt. Leslie Scorch, his mistress at the 4077th, are enough to entice him back. Hawkeye and Trapper, anticipating this reaction, have arranged for Radar to feign a serious illness, and, when Trapper and Hawkeye prepare to depart, Henry insists on going with them. Henry, in his concern, decides to do an exploratory surgery (Gary Burghoff’s appalled terror is pitch-perfect), and the whole thing falls apart. Blake is about to return to Tokyo, but when he hears Burns announce that he intends to court-martial Pierce and McIntryre, Henry realizes that Burns (though technically correct) doesn’t consider the consequences. Not just the 40787th’s efficiency rating, but the lives that will be lost at the removal of the men he described (just before his departure) as “two of the best cutters I’ve ever worked with.”<br />
<br />
So, beings Henry, he stays. <br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
So, the throwback to the film is in the Tokyo frivolity—the Japanese singers doing adaptations of Wesytern songs, the hinted at availability of sex For hire as routine, and the tacit acceptance of this. The Tokyo scenes, to that extent, partake of some of the worst aspects of the film—though not historically inaccurate. <br />
<br />
What we see here, though, is some deepening of the characters—Henry’s deep concern for Radar leads him to not just return to see what is up, but to one of his very few medical misjudgments in the series. He takes Radar’s suffering at face value and acts to investigate it, though Burns, correctly, sees it as the sham it is quite quickly. <br />
<br />
Henry also gives up his release from the hellish (albeit with good company) 4077th to save Pierce and McIntyre from punishment, not just for their sake (he’s pretty angry at being fooled at the moment), but because he immediately sees the consequences: more dead soldiers. Unnecessary deaths. Because he gets it, he sacrifices his own comfort and stays. Earlier in the episode, Henry refers to “my right hand, Cpl. Radar O'Reilly, who incidentally is in command of this unit, and just uses me as a front.” <br />
<br />
This is also the episode that proves that statement false; Henry is a terrible administrator. But he’s the right CO for this time and place. He just doesn’t know it. <br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-17067471802088840362019-11-10T18:45:00.001-08:002019-11-10T18:45:39.300-08:00The Problem of Non-Parables: A Sermon on Luke 20: 27-38[Delivered at St. Bartholomew;s Church, NYC, November 10, 2019]<br />
<br />
Sometimes the Gospel readings are so self-evident that it’s almost impossible to miss the point, that the difficulty in writing a sermon on it is not just re-stating the obvious lesson. <br />
<br />
Sure, we sometimes want to hide from the implications of those Gospel readings for our own lives, but shutting out the Gospel to maintain our own comfortable existence is a struggle against out desire to not want to know where we are going wrong. Think of Jesus’s telling us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.<br />
<br />
That’s hard. <br />
<br />
We struggle with it. <br />
<br />
And one way of struggling with that is to domesticate it, paper over the chasm between what Jesus teaches us and the lessons of the culture in which we live. Of course, to do that, we have to deceive ourselves as to what Jesus is telling us. Or, as Susan Howatch so memorably paraphrased Jesus, “High and wide is the gate which leads to self-deception and illusion, but for those seeking truth, strait is the gate and narrow the way—and brave is the woman or man who can journey there.” [Glittering Images, 190].<br />
<br />
With parables, of course, we have to look for the meaning—<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Parables-Kingdom-C-H-Dodd/dp/002330460X">C.H. Dodd</a> in the 1930s and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Parables-Jesus-Joachim-Jeremias/dp/0334029171">Joachim Jeremias</a> in the 1950s and 60s pioneered the art of stripping away the centuries of allegory and theology that well-meaning preachers like me have added to the parables, and tried to recover them as Jesus’s audience would have experienced them and heard them. And then they had to deal with Gospel warnings that the disciples outside the Twelve were told parables so that they could hear, but not understand, and be lost.<br />
<br />
And today’s discussion between Jesus and the Saducees has been the source of reams of speculation on the nature of the afterlife, from the Church Fathers to our own day. Will we really be pure souls, loving only God, and no longer those who have enriched our journeys below?<br />
<br />
Are we really hoping and aspiring to enter the kind of afterlife that led Mark Twain to recommend heaven for climate, but hell for company?<br />
<br />
But, hold on—aren’t we missing something here?<br />
<br />
We aren’t dealing with a parable today. No, this is part of a test of Jesus’s acumen.<br />
<br />
Specifically, of his legal acumen.<br />
<br />
Which means we are, at long last, playing on my home turf.<br />
<br />
The legal test comes in two prongs. The first question, posed by the scribes and Pharisees, involves them showing Jesus a coin, and asking if it is lawful to pay the Emperor tax. This question is an effort to put him into a Hobson’s Choice, a question where there is no safe or good answer. It’s as much a test of Jesus’s political savvy as of his legal ability—will he slight the Emperor or the Torah? <br />
<br />
Jesus brushes this one away easily. He asks whose name and image is on the coin, and, being told that the name and image are Caesar’s, he simply answers, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s—and to God the things that are God’s.<br />
<br />
Now that is a good answer. Succinct and to the point, but, best of all, avoiding the political pitfall of advocating denying the legal authorities their due, without slighting the legal responsibilities under Jewish law. Clever, unanswerable, unassailable. Advantage, Jesus.<br />
<br />
The next question, though, is like something out of torts class. A tort is a civil wrong—an accident, or act of negligence that harms someone in their person and their property. And torts professors are famous for their a long, detailed hypothetical stories, in which an improbable series of events are posited to make you question the legal fundamentals. <br />
<br />
The classic torts class hypothetical used when I was in law school was based on a real case: <a href="http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/archives/palsgraf_lirr.htm">Palsgraf v. Long Island Rail Road</a>. So a woman named Helen Palsgraf decided to take her two girls to the beach in 1924. This was her big mistake. While she was waiting to board the Long Island Rail Road train, an earlier train pulls in, and, as she’s waiting, two men start getting on the train. One of them is lugging a package along with the help of sme LIRR employees. They drop the package, it explodes, a piece of shrapnel hit a large coin-operated scale on the platform, which teeters over and hits Mrs. Palsgraf. After this incident she develops a stutter, and sues the LIRR. <br />
<br />
So how about it?<br />
<br />
Is the LIRR liable?<br />
<br />
Or to use an actual Talmudic legal question summarized by Herman Wouk in his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QIYHPIW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Inside, Outside</a> a cow is tethered in a market. It kicks a stone, which flies into a market stall shattering a vase. Is the cow’s owner liable?<br />
<br />
By the way, that one is so well known in the Talmud, that it’s just summarized as “Stone in market—so what?”<br />
<br />
Here, instead of the ricocheting shrapnel, or the bovine launched rock, we have the legal hypothetical of the perennial widow. Seven bridegrooms for one wife, they all fall down.<br />
<br />
So, say these Sadducees, who don’t believe in the Resurrection of the Dead, in the next life, whose wife is she, anyway?<br />
<br />
They’re trying, of course, to make the Resurrection look silly, and to make Jesus look silly for defending it. Their regular opponents, the priests and the scribes, can’t be happy—they don’t like Jesus any better than the Sadducees do, but this is not just Jesus under attack, but their own special belief is being made to look ridiculous, along with Jesus.<br />
<br />
In other words, unlike a torts hypothetical, it’s not a question posed in good faith to test the limits of doctrine.<br />
<br />
So Jesus does what’s called in fencing a “disengage.” That’s when a fencer tries to block her opponent’s sword, and then lunge, but the other fencer—well, the other fencer moves her sword under the first fencer’s sword, and now controls the bout. <br />
<br />
Jesus disengages with the question by denying its premise; rather than talk about whose wife she is, he tells us, “those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” <br />
<br />
So, she’s nobody’s wife. Indeed, she “cannot die anymore, because she, [and all they who are resurrected], are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”<br />
<br />
Then Jesus knocks out the Sadducee with a simple appeal to the Torah; the story of the burning bush, where Moses “speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and adds that “he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”<br />
<br />
Game, set and match. <br />
<br />
It’s a wonderful example of how the itinerant preacher from Nazareth keeps besting the sharpest minds of his own tradition when they try to trip him up.<br />
<br />
But is there more to it?<br />
<br />
Well, let me suggest two implications of Jesus’s words. First, Jesus tells us straightforwardly that the long-dead patriarchs were alive to God in Moses’s day, and in Jesus’s own day. Jesus teaches us that he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."<br />
<br />
Second, terrible use has been made in Christian teaching of hell, as a place of eternal punishment and suffering. Yet when Jesus speaks to the Sadducee about the resurrection of the dead, he makes very clear that only those who are worthy of resurrection will see it. <br />
<br />
How do these two statements match up—how is that all are alive to God, and yet only the worthy will see the resurrection of the dead?<br />
<br />
And, I think back of the Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, who <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BAXFZQA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">reminds</a> us that:<blockquote>God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word .... Grace is God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word.</blockquote>Or, as she also says, “We’re all sinners, we’re all saints, 100 % of the time.”<br />
<br />
In other words, we are here to come to the table of a God who loves us in all our brokenness, who is always working to redeem us. And who is always trying to coax us into playing our own part in the redemptive process—forgiving others as we have been forgiven, and freeing them to go on, doing the same. <br />
<br />
Passing the redemptive love around—like we pass around communion bread, but more intentionally. Understanding, as out bishop told us in his address at Diocesan Convention yesterday, that we need to redeem our time, because our time is evil, and the accelerating disdain among our conflicting tribes is bringing that evil into ever greater potency. <br />
<br />
When Bishop Dietsche finished his address, I couldn’t help but think of Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Future,” where Cohen tells us us: <blockquote>You don't know me from the wind/ You never will, you never did<br />
I'm the little Jew/ Who wrote the Bible <br />
<br />
I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all<br />
<br />
But love's the only engine of survival.</blockquote>And, in essence, that’s what our bishop told us yesterday, that only reaching out across our divides in love, dropping our hostility, and meeting people where they are, and as who they are, can create the Beloved Community we all yearn to belong to.<br />
<br />
To do our part in that cycle of redemption, we have to accept that we are all broken, all sinners, all saints, and that it’s from our brokenness that—to steal another Cohen line—that’s how the light gets in.<br />
<br />
And that light is the light of God.<br />
<br />
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-77473029076900241692019-11-04T17:27:00.004-08:002019-11-04T17:28:04.741-08:00Elspeth P. Kitten, a Memorial<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5fJLmptumynG5YorfrJbns7X8o4D5IBJQtg7a5MkQ7qhG7HoeXgfb8RXQ6xgBAi7CZnz8yLbIxAMla98CCZCBgTSBpIfbl2cZqMPgYxBsG-SHX34jHOtJnq34oXM5FsK4KBWeICA5YrQ/s1600/elpers+at+rest.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5fJLmptumynG5YorfrJbns7X8o4D5IBJQtg7a5MkQ7qhG7HoeXgfb8RXQ6xgBAi7CZnz8yLbIxAMla98CCZCBgTSBpIfbl2cZqMPgYxBsG-SHX34jHOtJnq34oXM5FsK4KBWeICA5YrQ/s320/elpers+at+rest.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="720" /></a><br />
<br />
"“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.” --Richard Adams, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down">Watership Down</a><br />
<br />
The little devils came to my door. I know it sounds like a setup for a joke. But it's true, mind you, and how I became a cat fancier on the epic scale. A group of kittens led by <a href="http://anglocatontheprowl.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-cat-who-came-in-from-cold-memorial.html">Giles, the Cat Who Came in From the Cold</a> came to my door, and I kept two, and found homes for the rest. But a week or so later, I found two very small kittens outside, on a the stump of a tree. Then my three cats and la Caterina's three (Elspeth, Betty, and Buster) became a pride with mine. Elvis and Giles kept the peace until such time as the cats all saw each others as siblings and friends. <br />
<br />
Over the tears, we have lost them, all but one of them, Elspeth P. Kitten. She has been with me nearly 19 years. Nearly 8 years ago, she survived a bout of hepatic lipidosis (la C was excellent at frae-feeding her, and even I could do it, having been her person since kitten hood). She made a full recovery, and resumed her ornery, lovable ways.<br />
<br />
In some ways she was always a kitten--she used to curl up against me, jam her tail into her mouth and nurse while kneading me. <br />
<br />
Elspeth was our mouser, once excelling herself by launching herself through the air on a moonlit night, and bringing down a bat on the wing--and was widely rumored to be a witch. (Just ask my sister in law!)<br />
<br />
You know where this is going; we lost Elspeth today. She'd become a little thin--but not dangerously so. She had trouble with her eye, and her third eyelid, more precisely called her "nictitating membrane." But she seemed, mostly herself. But I was worried, and la C brought her up for a vet visit. I brought her in this afternoon, to the good vets of <a href="https://sandcreekanimalhospital.com">Sand Creek Animal Hospital</a> and was informed that her third eyelid was inflamed because she couldn't blink. And she couldn't blink because she had a facial nerve paralysis. The result of either a stroke or of a brain tumor. <br />
<br />
Once again, I had to say goodbye.<br />
<br />
I stayed with her till the end, holding her and petting her. I had been the first person to care for her, and I was the last. La Caterina, who was such a good kitten mama to her, couldn't be with us, and it couldn't wait. So I held my dear friend, that soft, soft fur against my cheek one last time.<br />
<br />
<i>Vogue la Galère</i>, lttle Elspeth, cat of magic and mischief. Let your ship sail free.<br />
<br />
<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-32090999965829283872019-11-01T20:59:00.000-07:002019-11-01T20:59:13.343-07:00MASH Revisited: The Matter of Mulcahy<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vvLH22RSpaY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
(Not Season 1's Mulcahy)<br />
<br />
Many years ago, when I was in high school in the 1980s, the Catholic League riled me. You see, my primary memory of the Catholic League in high school was its consistent denunciations of the television version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_(TV_series)">MASH</a>, based on its portrayal of Father Mulcahy, the Catholic chaplain of the 4077th MASH unit as "weak" and "indecisive". <br />
<br />
As a fan of the show even as a student, this seemed to me an absurd misreading of the character portrayed in the series. And, even though we are only in season 1 in this rewatch--and not even halfway through season 1--I want to challenge that reading of the series. Because I think that the critics were wrong from as early on our rewatch as season 1.<br />
<br />
But let's begin where the critics have a point.<br />
<br />
In the original film, <a href="https://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/mash-1970-robert-altman/">religion takes something of a beating</a>, including through Robert Duvall's Frank Burns,and (to a lesser extent) Rene Auberjonois's Father Mulcahy. In the film, Mulcahy is affable good natured, but, yes, a little weak, and a little easily imposed on (watch Donald Sutherland fast-talk him into presiding over a "Last Supper" for the suicidal dentist.)<br />
<br />
The problem is, none of this really carries over into <a href="https://mashwiki.fandom.com/wiki/William_Christopher">William Christopher's</a> portrayal of the priest. Take this first shank of Season 1. We have met Father Mulcahy three times: In the pilot, played by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0604680/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t333">George Morgan</a> (the celibate priest wins the trip to Tokyo with Lt. Maria "Dish" Schneider); we see Christopher's Mulcahy in "Requiem for a Lightweight" in which he s sensibly skeptical of Trapper John's winning a fair fight; and we see him in "Cowboy," demonstrating a respect for faiths other than his own.<br />
<br />
Let's dwell on it a moment. On seeing that a wounded soldier on the operating table is named "Goldstein," Mulcahy asks "Think he'd mind?"<br />
<br />
Now, I had forgotten this moment entirely--I haven't seen the show in 30 years. So I expected Mulcahy to offer a Catholic prayer, almost certainly (for the period) in Latin. Instead, he recites, gently, and with meaning: <blockquote><i>Mi Shebeirach avoteinu v’imoteinu,<br />
Avraham, Yitzchak v’Yaakov, Sarah, Rivkah,<br />
Rachel v’Lei-ah, hu y’vareich et hacholim<br />
[names]. HaKadosh Baruch Hu yimalei<br />
rachamim aleihem, l’hachalimam ul’rapotam<br />
ul’hachazikam, v’yishlach lahem m’heirah<br />
r’fuah, r’fuah shleimah min hashamayim,<br />
r’fuat hanefesh ur’fuat haguf, hashta<br />
baagala uviz’man kariv. V’nomar: Amen.</i></blockquote>It's a lovely moment, because it's so understated. Mulcahy doesn't just refuse to impose his faith tradition on the wounded Jewish soldier--he knows how to pray for Goldstein in his own tradition. This means Mulcahy cared enough for non-Catholic--indeed, non-Christian wounded, to learn to care for them by having studied and memorized prayers outside his own tradition. In "Cowboy," we see Mulcahy drawing on that preparation, caring for the patient by meeting him where he is--the first rule of good pastoral care, as I was taught in my diaconal training. <br />
<br />
Yes, Mulcahy isn't quite the character we'll get to know much better in later seasons. But even now, he is not the easily led figure from the film. He's a wry, ex-CYO boxing coach with enough scholarly chops to have looked beyond his own perspective, and one who knows that he is called to be a chaplain for all, not just his own co-religionists. <br />
<br />
Not bad for a first draft.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2827071479314474893.post-38372300631902118992019-10-29T19:50:00.001-07:002019-10-29T19:50:15.986-07:00MASH Revisited: S 1, Eps 7-8: "Bananas, Crackers & Nuts"/"Cowboy"<br />
<br />
This idea of pairing up episodes has (so far) been fortuitously effective. <br />
<br />
In the Beginning, there was the Deluge. <br />
<br />
No, I don't mean the biblical one, but rather a portion of "Richard Hooker's" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASH:_A_Novel_About_Three_Army_Doctors">MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors</a> that depicts the 4077th MASH under siege, a two week push pushing the doctors to their breaking points. <br />
<br />
Episode 7, "Banana, Crackers & Nuts," gives us a taste of such a period, and despite the limits on 1970s television, manages to get across the fatigue, irritability, and sheer frustration of watching patients die quite well. (It also makes clear that Chief Surgeon Pierce and Chief Nurse Houlihan are extremely good working together. Swit and Alda do a marvelous job of conveying their characters rapport in the OR, however at odds they are outside of it. Houlihan is quietly supportive of Pierce in surgery, and seems solicitous of Pierce's well-being as the strain increases.) Burns is fractious, and Margaret flashes an impatient glare his way.<br />
<br />
But when the Deluge is over, at least for now, Hawkeye needs a change, as does McIntyre. They try to get a pass for R & R in Tokyo--but Henry takes his own break, leaving Frank Burns in charge (to be fair, Henry tries to warn Frank not to push his authority too far, but Burns, of course, is sure he knows better.)<br />
<br />
So Pierce decides to convince Burns that he's cracking up, and needs R & R. In full scrubs, Pierce enters the mess hall with liver on a surgical tray--and liver is not on the menu. Burns and Houlihan are at first perturbed (Alda is hilarious as the allegedly cracking Hawkeye, but he manages it by deftly underplaying the scene--he's dark, and a bit macabre, and he's far more convincing than the benign Corporal Klinger ever will be). If that's not enough, Pierce picks a fight with Lt. Margie Cutler--whom he'd just successfully wooed away from Trapper in the last episode. <br />
<br />
Margaret, with her nose for fraud, calls in Cpt. Philip Sherman, a psychiatrist who is infatuated with her, and he quickly works out that Pierce's alleged infatuation with Burns (yeah, he's desperate) is fake. <br />
<br />
All might be well, if Blake didn't describe some of Pierce's crueler pranks on Burns, trying to get the Majors to laugh with him, and reassure Capt. Sherman that it's all just fun and games. Sherman, who has not experienced a war zone, thinks these "exculpatory" stories evince real mental illness, and not releases of intolerable stress, and margaret and Frank play the moment perfectly. (Linville's sad face, and Swit's murmur of "poor, poor, Hawkeye" are classic--without breaking character, their eyes are gleeful.) Sherman resolves to take Pierce to Tokyo for further testing the next morning.<br />
<br />
Pierce and McIntyre come up with a plan, having radar lead Sherman to the "visiting officers tent" as night falls, and, in the absence of a light bulb, the psychiatrist goes to sleep in hat is (of course) Margaret's bed. When she comes in, cursing the "burned out" bulb, and undresses, Sherman awakes and--<br />
<br />
--OK, this part doesn't hold up well. Sherman basically tries to sexually assault Margaret. The show wants us to find it funny, and the fact that within seconds Swit is pummeling Stuart Margolin quite mercilessly helps, but her cries for help and Pierce's and McIntyre's insouciant air until Henry arrives are pretty disturbing. <br />
<br />
So it's Sherman who is despatched from the 4077th, and Henry gives Hawkeye and Trapper passes for leave, and as they get ready to go--the next Deluge is upon them.<br />
<br />
The episode is a mixed bag; the "liver" scene is classic, the OR sequences really convey the exhaustion and frustration of the doctors and nurses--but that scene in Margaret's tent, though a reworking of many French farces, is a bit too true to be good.<br />
<br />
****<br />
"Cowboy" is a very different type of episode. A heroic chopper pilot, known only as "Cowboy" is bringing in wounded--including himself. Not for the first time He is fuming at being helpless to get back home, because he's afraid his wife is cheating on him. Pierce and McIntyre try to get Henry to send Cowboy stateside, but Henry, who is himself in an incredibly tetchy mood, just doesn't think his condition is serious enough.<br />
<br />
A series of highly comic attempts on Blake's life ensue, a jeep running through his quarters (A shocked Henry: "Jeep. Tent. Boom"). The latrine detonates with him in it, and he stumbles trgoug the wreckage wearing the toilet seat as if it were a ceremonial collar. (Henry, blankly: "Boom.)<br />
<br />
Radar goes to absurd lengths to avoid being near Blake, as does the mess tent server (not Igor yet, folks). Finally, Blake agrees to go to Tokyo--and accepts a ride from Cowboy.<br />
<br />
Too late, the Swampmen realize that Cowboy is the one trying to kill Henry (this is good example of what TV Tropes calls <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall">grabbing the idiot ball</a>, because it's pretty obvious from the midpoint of the episode.) But by the Hoary Hand of Hoggoth, the long awaited letter from Cowboy's wife arrives just as Cowboy is pushing Henry out of the chopper. When he hears that his wife still loves him, despite being tempted to stray, Cowboy relaxes, and Henry, suddenly calm again, simply says "Let's go home, Cowboy." He doesn't press charges, but makes sure Cowboy gets the care he needs--stateside, with his wife.<br />
<br />
For all of its farcical elements, "Cowboy" has some very serious character beats. Unlike Hawkeye's feigned madness in the last episode, Cowboy is really falling apart. His anxiety is turning him into a killer, and Blake escapes with his wife due to simple good luck. Cowboy's increasing mania works because <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0124100/?ref_=tt_cl_t7">Billy Green Bush</a> plays the character straight--laconically heroic when we first meet him, unraveling as the episode progresses. <br />
<br />
McLean Stevenson's Blake is just the sort of man who would turn his attempted murderer into a patient, and his "let's go home" is reassuring to the man who just tried to kill him. What makes henry different from anyone in the show is that for all of his incompetence as a commander, he is a first rate doctor--and that's how he treats Cowboy the minute he understands the sutuation. He's not heroically brave--Stevenson projects real fear--but he's concerned not just for himself, but for the pilot whose symptoms he'd misjudged. <br />
<br />
***<br />
Theres a little moment in "Cowboy" I want to mention, because it'll come up in the next post. Father Mulcahy, as he goes from wounded man to wounded man, sees that the next patient is named Goldstein. Without missing a beat he says from memory the M<i>i Shebeirach</i>, a Jewish prayer for healing.<br />
<br />
Anglocathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218740053628978255noreply@blogger.com0