Gratitude I: Feeling Led to Standing Rock

Richard Hooker - Priest (1600)

The situation at Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota is heartbreaking. Much has been said about it, and I don't know enough to add anything useful to the conversation other than what it feels like to watch it from a safe and privileged distance. Knowing it was probably a hoax, I still participated in the "great check in" on Facebook of over a million people as an act of solidarity, and I was glad to hear it was appreciated by the tribe's leaders even if the real effect was negligible.

I have friends who visited the reservation this week, and heeded the call on Thursday from the Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, to pray for the situation at noon local time.

This was my prayer:

”Spirit of God, be for us joy.

I ask your blessing upon the people on both sides of the Standing Rock dispute, that they summon the wisdom and courage to forge an equitable and just solution to the pipeline standoff, respecting the gifts of earth, fuel and water that you made.

Be with (redacted) and all your faithful who heeded the call to stand witness, listen, and comfort the people of Standing Rock, as well as with (redacted) and all who did so from their pulpits, desks, beds and computers.

Make us, I pray, mindful of the impacts of our habits and appetites on all living things now and in the future. Give us insight to discover solutions that are kinder to these fragile systems and beings.

Bestow your blessing upon the Sioux people and all of the first nations of this land, that they know your love through the challenges of these days, and the wounds of our indifference and neglect, for which I repent.

All this I ask in the name of your son, whose love transcends division, assuages pain, comforts grief and shelters joy. Amen.”

Despite my present "statelessness" in the church, I am tremendously grateful for Bishop Curry's leadership and the way the Gospel is being taken where it needs to go and be heard. I hope the Standing Rock Sioux took comfort from the visit this week of hundreds of people of faith. Because of how social media connects us, the story has led people from around the world to go there, including members of over 200 native American tribes. People with no obvious motive to participate are nonetheless feeling compelled to do so. It is not practical for all of us to go there, however. It may not be safe, and it may not even be wanted or helpful.

We are not helpless in this situation, though, even from this distance. The President has said that the Army Corps of Engineers is exploring an alternative route for this pipeline which would (hopefully) avoid land sacred to the Sioux people and honor the treaty with them when so many have been broken before. You can add your voice, as I did, to ask him to do everything in his power to make sure that happens. You can also donate to the tribe if you feel willing or able to do so.

A Crazy Christian for Crazy Times

Jonathan Myrick Daniels - Seminarian, Freedom Rider (1965)

On this day, the church remembers an idealistic young seminarian who lost his life defending a friend from shotgun fire during anti-racism demonstrations in Alabama in 1965.  You can read a biography of him by clicking his name above.

His home church in New Hampshire, St. James: Keene, honored him this past Sunday with a transferred feast.  The Gospel and a sermon, by the Rev. Canon Ed Rodman, can be heard here.

I'm struck by how little we seem to have learned in the years since.  Even as we seem to be making glacial, grudging progress on sexuality issues, there seems to be a tension around race that bubbles much closer beneath the surface than I think I realized even a few years ago.  Sometimes it shows itself in subtle ways, like how people who largely support his policies still won't cut the President a break.  And then there are weeks like this one, where I'm sure -- for those who lived through it --  it feels like Selma all over again.

The nominating committee for the 27th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church released its candidate profile this week and invited members to present their nominees.

Having read the profile, my choice, made quite a while ago, was only more apparent. We have many deeply spiritual and talented people leading us, but yet we continue to be bogged down with apathy and fatalism, and many of our people and congregations have seemingly not overcome their squeamishness about evangelism and offering unabashed welcome. Visiting many churches feels like wandering into a private club whose signs and symbols are presented in a way that makes you feel as if not knowing them means you don't belong.

Meanwhile, outside the walls, the American public continues to equate Christianity with (at best) insipid platitudes and (at worst) attempting to erode their civil rights, fueled largely by the media power of the far-right machine and the politicians it controls. We continue to regard people of color as a threat, mock or disregard those who don't adhere to our expectations of gender and attraction, vilify the poor, and remain largely indifferent to the violence and exploitation going on both here and abroad.

In my admittedly limited experience, there is one person who has spoken truth to these things in a voice powerful enough to be heard over the din. He has, in my mind, the credibility and the charisma to wake this church up and inspire it for true mission, and he does so with grace and self-effacing humor.

For this reason I have informed the Committee that I nominate the Right Rev. Michael Curry, sitting bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina, to lead us forward.

If you are not familiar with Bishop Curry, and haven't seen it the last 4,962 times I have shared it, please screen his sermon from our last General Convention, "We Need Some Crazy Christians". It is, I promise you, well worth your time, and I trust you will understand my enthusiasm.  

And if you've seen that one, watch this one, which was given at the annual Convention of the Diocese of Connecticut.  He addresses the very squeamishness I speak of above and the effect it is having on our ability to reach people.  Oh, and baseball.

If he wins, I believe we need to devote considerable resources to get Curry's message beyond our own membership and to the world at large. We need to support him in this as if our very future depends on it, because it very well might.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

William Temple - Archbishop of Canterbury (1944)

I admitted on Facebook last week, not without some trepidation, that I am not, nor have I ever been, a Halloween person.  Don't get me wrong; I like candy as much as the next person, and don't mind a clever, cute or sexy costume (my co-worker and her husband outdo themselves each year with a punny. costume-for-two (think "the fork in the road" or "deer in the headlights") that is an institution in their lake community.  It's the creepy-crawly-undead stuff I can do without.  I know I am squarely in the minority in this, considering that Americans reportedly spent $6.9 billion on candy, costumes and giant inflatable spiders this year.

It's part of a pattern: I don't like horror movies, I follow a proud family tradition of steering clear of the biology lab on dissection day (well, except for mom, who earned a nursing degree!), and I try to avoid "dressing up as" anything that involves makeup or a wig.  Hell, my "dressed up" look tends to skip right to the end of the wedding, with collar open and tie askew, but that's a shortcoming for another day.

I struck gold with the Archwarden in this regard, because every year he amasses a lot of candy and then no kids come to the door, which may be because he has all the lights off and the shutters closed, but we're not sure.  He's even less inclined to make a spectacle of himself than I am, so I don't have to worry about him asking me to fill out the back half of a horse costume anytime soon.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

This year was typical in our non-observance: I uncharacteristically declined an invitation to spend a beautiful Saturday on the Asbury Park boardwalk, mostly because I would have been sharing it with 9,252 zombies.  They were able to break the Guinness Book record for such events without my assistance, thank you very much.  I went to the beach the next day instead when all the ghoulies were cleaned up and attending brunch.

I did, however, take advantage of the fact that the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, was the celebrant and preacher for All Saints Sunday at the beautiful and historic Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York's West Village. In her sermon, which you can read here, she touches on the origins of Halloween, which was once called All Hallows' (saints') Eve.  All Saints' Day is officially November 1st (the next day) and she explained how the two events fit together:

"Lots of people have forgotten, or maybe never knew, that All Hallows Eve, the night before the Feast of All Saints, is a deeply Christian observance.  It’s not only about celebrating all the saints and [All Souls] those who’ve died in the last year, but it’s about what we do with scary things, including the bad dreams that wake us in the middle of the night or the reality that confronts us outside our front doors.  That what the ancient prayer is about, 'and from ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord, deliver us.'"

I suppose that -- by making light of death, decay and all things possessed -- we could be coping with our anxieties about the things that keep us up at night.  For me, I don't need such additional stimuli: the real world and the stuff I churn up in my head is plenty. 

Add to this that I have not been able to lift weights, my normal means of tiring myself out enough to sleep soundly, since prior to my recent surgery.  That restriction was lifted Monday, to my great relief, and I was in the gym when I head the news of the latest gun-related incident to dominate the national news, and this one was right nearby.  A lone (or was it two? or five? the eyewitness reports varied widely) gunman walked into the Garden State Plaza, New Jersey's largest shopping mall, and fired several shots before disappearing somewhere inside (or outside... it was hours before anybody knew).

So much for sleeping! The mall is about 20 minutes from us and someone we know lives right on its perimeter in a ground floor apartment. Did she have her windows open?  We recently got a security system, but of course I could still speculate about how someone could defeat it and get in our house... and so it goes.

The mayhem that followed continued long into the night.  Police escorted terrified shoppers and employees outside while searching the giant facility room-by-room.  Some people were trapped in stockrooms and kitchens until early the next morning.

“Your fears they grew into a mountain Where you're freezing alone at the top Still I'll wait everyday at the bottom Just to catch you the second you drop” AM TAXI - "Tanner Boyle vs. the Seventh Grade"

It was 3:30 a.m. before the shooter was found dead by his own hand in a darkened storage area. As it turned out, he was not an Al-Qaeda wannabe or disgruntled ex-Abercrombie greeter dismissed because his waist size went up.  Instead, he was a 20-year-old pizza driver and aspiring model from a nearby town named Richard Shoop, who left no clear indication why he chose to take his own life, or why he chose to do it in such a dramatic way.  The gun belonged to his brother Kevin, who looked for it after discovering a note from Richard entitled "my will" and hearing reports of a shooting on the news.  When he confirmed the gun was missing, Kevin connected the dots and headed to the mall to warn police.

After the initial relief that we were not, in fact, under some kind of siege, my meant went back to Richard who - although I quite possibly bought a slice from him at some point in the past - would have probably never crossed my radar had he not seized the headlines. Despite being no stranger to post-adolescent angst, I could not help but wonder what inner demons would have driven him to such a desperate act.  As his friends gathered with candles and photos last night on Cedar Lane (Teaneck's Main Street) to remember him, I recalled Sunday's reading from Daniel and what the Presiding Bishop said about the monsters that inhabited his world, and ours:

"When Jesus says, “blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” he’s talking about that kind of home.  That irrevocable condition, that God-given birthright, is open to all, but we only find it by embracing and yearning for it.  Daniel’s demanding and destroying monsters aren’t likely to find it.  All the blessings Jesus spells out are about the road that takes us homeward, and the woes are about choosing paths that lead only to isolation and self-exclusion, and cutting ourselves off from that blessing.  Those blessings and woes are the story of the prodigal, who leaves home and discovers only mere existence."

May God rest Richard's troubled soul and bring comfort to those affected by his actions: his family and friends, the people caught in the mall, and all the public safety officials who walked unflinchingly into a very unclear situation to assist them.