Boxing with Transgender Shadows 18 Mar 5:37 AM (29 days ago)

Fighting against an enemy that doesn't exist. 

If memory serves, and it does less and less these days, it was 1978. Boston. We were in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Boylston Street. It was the Thanksgiving Dinner for the Boston Chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil and political organization founded in 1955 by eight women in four couples, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons.

We had reached out to Sheri Barden and Lois Johnson, the founders of the Boston Chapter, for legal help with our child custody case - the first in Bristol County, MA. They, in turn, had invited us to several small gatherings in their five-story brownstone walkup in the South End. But this - this was our first EVENT. We were about to be in one room with more lesbians than we thought existed in the whole world.

For two Roman Catholic, fairly sheltered young women from the mill towns of Fall River-New Bedford who had no idea but were just finding out what our love for each other had gotten us into, the idea was daunting.

We had come down from Portland, ME where we were living to help set up the room and transform it from a dingy church basement to a welcoming space for women who would not be able to celebrate the holiday with their families or children. Neither would we, which was part of the glue which held us all together.

There were only about half a dozen women who had arrived and most of them were in the kitchen, tending to the turkeys in the oven and hovering over all of “the sides”. Sheri asked if we would help Martha set up tables and chairs. Young and strong and looking for a place to put all our anxious energy, that seemed a good thing to do.

That’s when I saw her. I pegged her immediately as either a teacher or a librarian. Long, pleated wool skirt and wool jacket with patches on the sleeves. White blouse with Peter Pan collar. Knee socks and penny loafers. Straight hair, parted on the side and held with a barrette. Glasses. Horn-rimmed. Teacher or librarian, for sure.

Except, when she went to move a large, oblong table, I almost gasped at the ease with which she lifted it and carried it across the room to place it in the center of the room. She just hoisted that sucker up like it was made of paper. And, all by herself, she steadied it, unfolded the legs, then flipped it over, standing back for a moment to check her work and the position of what was obviously “the serving table”.

Then, she walked - sort of a half-march, with deliberate energy - over to get another table. There was something about her “energy”. I was drawn to it and confused by it at the same time.

Sheri came out of the kitchen, came over to me, and said, “Ah, I see you’ve found Martha.” “That’s Martha?” I asked, maybe just a little too loudly. If Martha heard, and I’m sure she did, it didn’t distract her from her task.

Sheri (Claire) Barden & Lois Johnson

”Yes, my love, that’s Martha. She’s transgender.” “She’s WHAT?” I said, this time more softly. Sheri smiled, “Trans. Gender. You know, like Christine Jorgensen.” “Really?” I said, sounding like a 6th grader at the museum, discovering a new creature I didn’t know existed, except in science books.

”Yes,” laughter Sheri, “We have them here, too. Queer people are everywhere.” I cringed. I mean, it was 1978. I was just getting used to the word ‘lesbian’. “Queer” was still a derogatory term - like the ‘N’ word for a person of color.

”Martha used to be a scientist at MIT. She’s brilliant. Really brilliant. A leader in her field of study. She had her surgery a year or so ago. She decided that since she was no longer he, she would no longer work as a scientist because there were no women scientists in her department. So, she became a secretary. She wanted to stand in solidarity with most of the other women at MIT and take on the same role they did. MIT objected but finally gave her a “transitional” position in the secretarial pool.”

”But wait,” I said. She used to be a man, but now she’s a woman. What is she doing in a lesbian organization? I mean, if she’s now a woman, shouldn’t she be heterosexual?”

I’m sure Sheri wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. “Honey,” she said, “first thing you have to understand is that Martha has ALWAYS been a woman. She was assigned a gender at birth and tried to live into that identity but she realized it was making her sick. So, she got help and now she is who she has always been - the way God made her and not what her parents wanted.”

”Okay,” I said. “I got that part. But, she’s a lesbian . . . .?

Now Sheri chuckled, “Yes. Because gender and sexuality are two different things.”

I repeated it out loud. “Gender and sexuality are two different things. Of course they are. I’ve just never thought about it before. Whoa,” I said, “I’ve got so much to learn.”

”We all do,” Sheri said, “Not every woman here understands Martha either. So, you go over and let Martha know that she is welcome here. And, while you’re at it, get some tables set up. We’ve got about 100 women who’ll be here in about 30 minutes.”

I tell you this story to say that there is a part of me that understands the confusion and anxiety some people feel about transgender people. I’d be lying if I said that I just simply added the “T” to the Alphabet of LGBT, stirred lightly and then drank the Queer Kool-Aid.

Human beings are complex creatures and Nature is a lot more random than we were first taught. There is a delicate interplay of genetics and body chemistry, combined with emotion and physicality, which are influenced by family and culture and religion, which all lead to an individual’s perception and understanding of themselves. Or, confusion about who they know themselves to be.

I understand the confusion. I don’t understand the cruelty.

I live in Delaware. We just elected the first transgender person to Congress, Representative Sarah McBride. Sarah is smart and gentle and kind and dedicated to and laser-focused on serving her constituents. She served first in the State House of Representatives and now serves in in Washington, DC.

She has not been treated well in the Lower Chamber of the Federal government. She hadn’t even been sworn in when Republican Nancy Mace, a Representative from South Carolina with a real hunger for the spotlight, introduced legislation that would bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and other facilities on federal property. The GOP majority proved just how low the Lower Chamber can get and passed that legislation.

What is it with the MAGA-Republicans and their fascination with genitals? I don’t get it. I mean, it’s just pee!

Well, it gets worse. Last month, Rep. Mary Miller, referred to McBride as "the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride," when recognizing the lawmaker for a floor speech last month. Last week, the Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, introduced her as “Mr. McBride.” Sarah, always classy, gently said, “Thank you, Madame Chair.”

"I mean, he is allowed to live his life — in fact, I spent 25 years on active duty defending his right to live his life as he chooses. But I don't have to participate in his fantasy," Self said.

Rep Sarah McBride and Rep. Keith self

I think the only "fantasy" is the one in Self's head. He needs to put down whatever magazine he's been reading and spend some time reading the reports of scientists and doctors who have been studying gender for decades.

Ah, but wait. There’s more. Right here in the land of “Delaware Nice.”

A Delaware lawyer and a state lawmaker have filed a federal complaint that seeks to have the state prevent transgender girls from playing on girls’ middle and high school sports teams.

Yet in Delaware, where students are permitted to play on school teams that match their gender identity, there are no known transgender athletes to ban. Nor have there been in recent years, if ever, state officials said.

That reality, however, hasn’t stopped attorney Thomas S. Neuberger and Sussex County Republican Sen. Bryant Richardson, who have long sought to keep transgender girls off girls’ track, swimming, volleyball, and other teams.

Should the state “illegally refuse” to comply, Neuberger and Richardson want the Trump administration to issue an order “terminating all federal educational funding” to Delaware.

Forfeiting those federal dollars would be a major blow to Delaware. Currently, the state gets about $336 million annually — about 10% of the total cost to run Delaware K-12 public schools — from the feds.

And, what does our Governor, Matt Meyer, a Democrat, have to say about this? His spokesman, Nick Merlino, reported this, “Gov. Meyer doesn’t believe that trans girls should be playing in girls’ sports, but ultimately he defers those decisions to the leagues and localities.”

That’s NOT what Matt Meyer said when he was seeking our endorsement. He said he was supportive of Gender Identity and Affirming Medical Treatment Decisions.

During the campaign, Candidate Matt Meyer repeatedly said, “Every Delawarean deserves the freedom to be healthy, prosperous, and safe,” adding “One of the greatest dangers to our youth today is that they too often are taught not to love their true selves.” He also promised to “promote and support a culture of inclusivity and fairness in our schools.”

Yes, Governor Meyer will be hearing from this constituent who voted for him.

In contrast, here’s what Spenser Cox, the (Republican) governor of Utah (yes, you read that right. Republican. From Utah) wrote:

Gov. Spenser Cox (R) Utah

Finally, there is one more important reason for this veto. I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion. I also try to get proximate and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56.

• 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.

• 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.

• 1 transgender student playing girls sports.

• 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.

• 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide.

Four kids and only one of them playing girls’ sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way. If a veto override occurs, I hope we can work to find ways to show these four kids that we love them and they have a place in our state.

He vetoed the anti-trans bill.

I understand how transgender can be confusing. I don’t understand the cruelty. I have some ideas about the ferocious rise of testosterone - which affects men and women - as well as the rise of racism and misogyny which prevented otherwise intelligent people from voting for a Black woman for POTUS. I think what we’re seeing with transpeople - especially transwomen - is all part of the MachoMale culture that is all part of the new administration.

The MAGA folk seem to be boxing with Transgender shadows, against an evil that is a projection of their own insecurities about gender and sexuality.

I am certainly more than willing to give people the same space to learn and grow as I was afforded, but you’re not allowed to be mean and cruel just because you don’t understand and have a hard time accepting. And, don’t hold an entire state program financially hostage because they are not bending to your perspective.

I am asking for my governor and other elected representatives in government to take a lesson from the Governor of Utah, When in doubt, however, . . . always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.”

That’s some pretty good advice, right there. It’s one I learned in a church basement in Boston MA in 1978 when I was anxious and afraid and in doubt about my own gender and sexuality.

Thanks to a transwoman named Martha who helped to teach this woman how to be a good person.

Your Citizenship is in heaven 16 Mar 10:22 AM (last month)

Betty's Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding

She was, without a doubt, the most genuinely kind, sweet, gentle soul I’ve ever met, so much so that, in my eyes, anyway, she sometimes rounded the corner of reality and almost became a caricature of herself - even to her, which made her giggle despite herself. Her husband, on the other hand, was a rumpled, crumpled, withered shell of a man for whom the adjective ‘cantankerous’ found a new depth of meaning.

Jack was my Hospice patient and like many on the Western side of Sussex County suffered from COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). After years of smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and inhaling farm petrol and Monsanto and God knows what else in the steel mills, his disease process was now classified as “end stage”. He was on continuous oxygen therapy, delivered via nasal cannula, and was now receiving nebulizer treatments - liquid morphine delivered via a supersaturated mist of water - four times a day.

Like my experience with many COPD patients, he, as Hospice professionals like to say, “had a few control issues”. Well, if you aren’t in control of your breathing, you’d have “control issues,” too. But Jack, well now, Jack’s issues with control were Black-belt level. He could bark orders laced with denigrating insults that would make a Drill Sargeant feel like a novice.

After 54 years of marriage, Betty was a pro at deflection. She reminded me of Emma Webster, Tweety Bird’s Granny, who seemed to manage the ongoing war between Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, and Hector the Bulldog with nonplussed charm and delight. Nothing ever dampened her spirit.

Unless you crossed her. And then she could whip out a cast iron skillet from thin air, hold it up like a stop sign until, as she said in her cheeriest voice, you “changed your tune,” and then she’d go right back to dusting counters with the sweetest smile you ever did see, chirping her pleasantries if only to herself, if need be.

She seemed to be holding in her heart a secret interior story that she listened to rather than paying any nevermind to what was going on around her. I suppose, if she did, she’d just crumble and she knew that was simply not going to happen. Could not possibly happen. Not in this life.

 

 

 

Betty and Jack were from “dirt poor” but “land tough” Appalachian stock. The genetics of Scotch-Irish, German, and English people who had fled the hardships and poverty of Europe, combined with the Native American tribal communities who had lived there for centuries, gave them not only the resilience and tough exterior they needed but an internal emotional and spiritual strength that helped them shape their own Appalachian culture through language, music, religion, and agriculture. And, food. More on that in a minute.

”Their people” - both Jack and Betty’s - had settled in Northwestern Pennsylvania where they worked the farms and then migrated to the East to work the coal mines or down to the steel mills in Pittsburgh or the textiles, shipbuilding, and iron production of Philadelphia. Like our biblical ancestors who wandered around wherever there was water and grass for their flock, they moved anywhere there were jobs. 

Jack and Betty had faired pretty well. Jack “lucked out,” Betty said and had gotten a good-paying job in the steel industry. Betty was able to stay home and raise their three girls, although she did work part-time in the school cafeteria when the girls got older. She carefully saved her small salary as the downpayment for their manufactured home in a trailer park outside the city limits.

Eventually, as the girls graduated high school (an accomplishment neither Jack nor Betty had been able to achieve) and left home, they sold their home in PA and moved to another manufactured home in Sussex County, Delaware, where the property taxes were low and the cost of living was more affordable.

The girls were all married and had kids of their own. They had good educations and good jobs and had married well. They had good cars and nice homes and enjoyed wonderful family vacations, living a modest middle-class life that was well beyond even the wildest dreams of their parents.

Jack and Betty were very proud of their family. You’d never know it by Jack, though. He seemed to have been in a perpetual bad mood for most of his life. One day was particularly bad. Betty and I had been talking about a documentary she had seen on television the night before about the slavery of “the Indians and the Blacks,” she said, “in Appalachia. Can you believe that? Slaves? In Appalachia?”

”Why,” she said, “I had no idea. I mean, we were all dirt poor. I didn’t have my own pair of shoes until I was 14 years old. Mama did her best but life was hard. Slaves? How could there be slaves? Who had the money to own them?” she asked in the purest innocent ignorance.

That’s when Jack exploded. “Oh, you feel bad for the Blacks and the Indians, do you? What about the White slaves? Huh? What about us? Do you feel bad for White slaves?”

Betty looked bewildered. “Joseph Arlo Smith, what are you talking about?” she asked.

That’s when Jack told the story that had been eating at his insides since the time he was seven years old and his mother died and his father sent him down to a neighbor’s farm to work his field.

“I was only seven years old but I worked like a grown man, plowing, planting, weeding, harvesting. I slept in the barn on the hay, just like the other work animals, with just a thin blanket to cover me. I ate the leftovers from the farmer’s table. I ate in the barn, just like the other work animals. I remembered some of the letters they taught me in school and I tried to read some, from the newspapers in the trash. I didn’t see my family except for Christmas and Easter Day.”

Jack started to have a bit of difficulty breathing. “Jack! Jack! Now, don’t get yourself all upset. Let me get your rescue inhaler.” Betty said. Jack shook his head. “No! Don’t give me that. I need you to listen to me, Betty. I’ve never told you this part before. You need to know this. You need to listen to this. Ain’t no one heard this before.”

”I always thought Daddy had sent me there because he couldn’t care for us, what with Mama gone. One day, the farmer came in and told me to get my stuff and leave. He couldn’t afford me anymore. And I thought ‘Couldn’t afford me’? What in the heck was he talking about?”

”So I walked home and Daddy was waiting for me in the truck. Drove me right down to another farm on the other side of the county but this time, he said I wouldn’t be coming home anymore. Not for Christmas. Not for Easter. This was going to be my new home and I’d better be good and I’d better work hard and behave.”

”I was 12 years old. I saw the man give my father some money. And that’s when I figured it out. I only had a little bit of education. I could read some, but I was pretty good at reading the writing on the wall. My father had sold me. He had been collecting my salary from the other farmer. This one had just bought me outright.”

”Do you know what that means, woman? White slavery! That’s what it was. White slavery. By my very own father! So, don’t go talking to me about the poor Blacks this and the poor Indians that! What about the poor Whites? We was sold into slavery, too. What about us, huh?”

There was no discussion this time. Betty got up and got his rescue inhaler. “Here now, puff on this, Jack, and calm yourself down.”

Jack took some puffs and then, wiping the tears from his eyes he looked up at her and said, his voice raspy and his breath labored, “And, you wondered all those years why I am the way I am. You always asked me why I couldn’t be more affectionate, especially to the girls. You asked why I never held your hand. You asked why I always had to be in such a bad mood all the time. You wondered why I wouldn’t go to church with you, even on Christmas and Easter, why I didn’t want the chaplain here to come visit.”

”Well, now you know. How can you show love when love’s never been shown to you? Why go to church when God never came to me, not one time in the field when my back was breaking? Not one time of the many times I cried myself to sleep at night, out in the barn, sleeping on the hay, with only the animals to hear me?”

”So, when I was 15 years old, I got up early one morning and walked down to the stream to wash myself. When I came up out of the water it came to me. I could just walk away. I could just walk and keep on walking. And so, I put on my clothes and I did just that and I never looked back.”

”But somehow, I found you, Betty. I want you to know that you are the one miracle I ever prayed for. You were more than any miracle I could have asked for. You gave me three beautiful girls. We have a good life. But, this . . . stuff . . . being so many years a white slave . . . well, it’s just been a cancer eating me up all these years. It’s killing me, Betty. Squeezing the air right out my lungs.”

”So, I had to get this off my chest. I didn’t mean to. But, you know, with all this stuff about the Blacks and the Indians . . . . and with the chaplain here, and all . . .I couldn’t hold it in no more . . . Forgive me, Betty. That’s what I mean to say. Forgive me, Betty. Understand, please. I do love you, Betty. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life. I don’t want to lose you.”

Jack could hardly breathe. His lips were turning blue. He was holding on so hard to the armrest of his chair that his knuckles were white. Betty was comforting him as she set up his nebulizer. Wiping the sweat from his brow. Gently stroking his hair, wet with sweat, back from his face.

“There, now. Easy, now. Rest now, Jack.”

After a few minutes, Jack was breathing easier. He tilted his head back on the headrest of his recliner as Betty lifted the metal arm on the side of the chair which lifted his legs. “You stay right here, Jack, and I’ll fix you something. Okay?”

Jack nodded. Betty looked at me and said, “I’m going to need your help in the kitchen. You, my dear, are going to help me make Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding.”

I followed her into the kitchen as she spoke, her voice lower than normal so as not to disturb Jack, but with that same, sweet, kind, gentle lilt that seemed not to have been disturbed at all by what we had just heard.

As we busied ourselves opening cans of corn and creamed corn and getting the eggs and milk from the fridge and the cornstarch and sugar from the pantry, Betty chatted merrily in her usual chirpy cadence.

I think I was more stunned than I realized. Jack’s story had shaken me to my core. The story and the raw honesty and emotional pain of it all were finally hitting me.

Just as I opened my mouth, Betty turned to me and said, “We are making Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding because that’s the one thing Jack remembered his mother made and it’s the last thing she made before she died. I knew it was special to him for that reason, but I . . . I . . . I had no idea . . . . .”

And, with that, she collapsed into my arms and cried and heaved and sobbed. I whispered softly, “Of course you didn’t know. How would you know? He never told you. I’ve got you, Betty. You go ahead and cry. I’ve got you.”

She cried and cried some more and then, just as suddenly as she started, she stopped, took a deep breath, dried her eyes with a tissue she had retrieved from her pocket, and then shoved it back in, hard. She took another deep breath, and said, “So, we’re going to make my grandmother’s Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding. Because it will make Jack feel better. It will make Jack know that he is loved. And, because it will help you know something about my people, and why we may be poor but we are strong and good and kind.”

”You’ll help me make this,” she said, in the kindest but firmest directive I think I’ve ever been given. “I’ll give you my recipe. You’ll go and see Mrs. Jones down the street and visit with her while the corn pudding cooks. And then, you’ll come back and have a dish with us. And, you’ll know what love tastes like.”

In this morning’s Epistle, St. Paul writes to the beloved people of Phillipi in Northern Greece from his jail cell in Rome - although some scholars say Ephesus or Caesarea - somewhere between 60-62 BCE.

He says something that has always caught me as a most beautiful way to talk about the power of The Resurrection. “But our citizenship is in heaven,” he says, adding, “He (Jesus) will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory . . . ".

I think I understood those words much better after I had tasted the first spoon of Betty’s Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding. Cynics will say that it was probably the sugar but I felt instantly transported to my status as a citizen in heaven.

I also understood why Jack had been so transformed every time Betty made him some sweet corn pudding. For just a few moments, all the years of his humiliation were washed away as the memories of his mother’s love flooded every corner of his being.

“Salvation is of the Lord,” we are taught to say, meaning that salvation is a gift from God, not earned through human effort. In the Black church, you’ll often hear folks repeat the words of Nehemiah, “The joy of the Lord is my strength," meaning that finding strength and resilience in faith and joy in God's presence is crucial for navigating life's challenges.

Sometimes, the gift of salvation comes from unexpected sources. The joy of the Lord can be found in surprising places. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect Jack and Betty were saved, in some small part, by the joy of the memories of love that were cooked into the Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding.

I know I am, every time I eat a spoonful. Here, try some and see for yourself. It’s delicious as a side dish - I often make it at Thanksgiving - but it’s fine all by itself. When no one is looking I even eat spoonfuls of it - cold - right out of the dish in the refrigerator.

It’s my passport that tells me that, while I’m here on this earth, I’m just a resident alien. My Baptismal Certificate is my Green Card. My citizenship is in heaven.

I’m a citizen of heaven. I have tasted love.

Betty’s Appalachian Sweet Corn Pudding

3 eggs

½ cup melted margarine

½ cup white sugar

1 (16-ounce) can whole kernel corn, drained

2 (15-ounce) cans cream-style corn

2 teaspoons cornstarch

½ cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9x13 baking dish; set aside.

Beat eggs until fluffy in a large bowl. Stirring constantly, pour in melted margarine. Stir in sugar, whole-kernel corn, and cream-style corn until well combined. Dissolve the cornstarch in the milk; combine with the corn mixture. Stir in vanilla. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish.

Bake in the preheated oven until the pudding is puffed and golden, and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. It will take about 1 1/2 hours.

#TheIdesOfTrump 15 Mar 9:03 AM (last month)

You know things are serious when the Introverts arrive

Today is known as the Ides of March, which refers to March 15th, famously associated with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, a date that has become synonymous with foreboding and misfortune, popularized by a line in Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March.”

The background story is this: In ancient Rome, the Senate had the real power, and any titles they gave Caesar were intended to be honorary. They had conferred upon Caesar the title of "dictator in perpetuity," but when they went to where he sat in the Temple of Venus Genetrix to give him the news, he remained seated, which was considered a mark of disrespect. Thus offended, the Senate became sensitive to any hints that Julius Caesar viewed himself as a king or — worse — a god.

Many had tried to warn Caesar of a plot to assassinate him, including his wife, Calpurnia, who had begged him not to go to the Theatre of Pompey that morning. According to Plutarch, he passed a seer on his way. The seer had recently told Julius that great harm would come to him on the ides of March.

Julius recognized the seer, and quipped, "The ides of March have come." The seer remarked, "Aye, Caesar; but not gone." When Julius arrived at the Senate, he was set upon by Brutus, Cassius, and the others, who stabbed him dozens of times. He slowly bled to death, and for several hours afterward, his body was left where he fell.

Today, many in this country are noting #TheIdesof Trump in several ways to protest the man who, when he was sworn in as POTUS, did not place his hand on the bible. Many consider this as disrespectful as Caesar sitting when he received his title. But, that’s the least of the long litany of disrespectful acts perpetrated by this one man.

What Franklin’s statement highlights is that a successful representative democracy relies on the active involvement and participation of its citizens. The Constitution is not self-correcting, so it requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens.

My local Indivisible Group is joining with my local ACLU group in a demonstration on Route One/Coastal Highway. From 9-11 every Saturday, they will be carrying signs and singing songs. Last week a few Very Rude MAGA folks (are there any other type?) tried to “counter-protest,” but they didn’t just line up on the other side of the highway with their signs and songs.

I know, right? Go figure.

The police were called and, I am told, the MAGA folks dispersed, but reports are that it got a little tense for a little while. Because, you know, MAGA is so dedicated to Free speech - unless you’re saying something they don’t want to hear.

There is also a Postcard Campaign in effect, #IdesOfTrump, which is an effort to break Hank Aron’s record of having received over 900,000 postcards by sending a million (at least) postcards to the White House on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, DE, addressed to, as Garrison Keillor calls him, The Occupant.

The idea is that while no one thinks he will read any of them (he notoriously doesn’t even read his daily security briefings), he will know if a record has been broken, and that millions of people detest him and his policies so much that they are willing to use their First Amendment Right and tell him so, by whatever means they can.

Yesterday, I sat in my church Parish Hall from 10 AM-12 noon with as many as 15 other people who came and stayed for as long as they could and wrote out postcards. I bought a package of 200 blank postcards from Staples. We all pitched in and bought stamps (they are now $.56 a piece) and sat at round tables, commiserating with each other as we each wrote out our postcards.

Some of us decided to make the return address “SCOTUS Building, One First Street NE, Washington, DC 20543.” That way, if the White House wanted to “return to sender” our message might fall on deaf ears but our postcards wouldn’t be lost.

Some of the folks poured their hearts out into their message, filling the whole back side of the postcard with what they saw happening in their lives and the lives of others, and what they feared would happen to them if Medicare and Medicaid were cut or eliminated or privatized.

I wasn’t going to tell them that their message would never be read. Not by the POTUS or, in fact, anyone in his Cabinet. That didn’t seem to be the point. Their intention was the point. Their energy was the point. Their being in their church building, at table with their fellow church members - people with whom they pray and sing every week - now sharing stories of what they had seen and heard and what made them anxious, and being heard and validated was the point.

Others of us just wrote short, angry sentences, punctuated with exclamation points and marked by certain words being underlined several times for emphasis. Some of my personal favorites were: “You’re FIRED!” “Elon is not my POTUS (but neither are you.)”. “History has its eye on you.” “God is watching, and She’s not pleased.” “You make Jesus do a face-palm six times before breakfast.”

Here’s the thing: We did this quietly. No letters went out. No invitation appeared in the church e-newsletter or Sunday bulletin. There was no announcement posted on the web page. We wanted to be respectful of the members of our congregation who - for some reason that completely escapes our comprehension - voted for and continue to support this administration.

Our efforts were very last minute - less than 72-hour notice. And yet, fifteen (15!!) people came to the parish hall on a Friday morning within a two-hour period of time. We got 200 postcards written and stamped. A few people came by and dropped off their postcards which they had written at home.

One of us elected herself to take the postcards to the local town Post Office this morning to mail them from there. I would LOVE to see the look on the face of that postal worker when that happens in that sleepy little town, wouldn’t you?

Better get used to it. We decided that next time - and there will be a next time, and we’re not going to wait until next year, but we’ll join whatever movement is happening at the time - we will be ready. We will have postcards made up ourselves or we will purchase some that have been professionally made. We will print the addresses - both to the sender and the return address - ahead of time on the computer.

Personally, I think there is a real power to subtly. I loved the fact that the US Army Chorus sang, “Do you hear the people sing” from Les Misérables at the White House Governor’s Ball. Donald and Melania Trump were in attendance. The song, in case you don’t know, is about protesting an oppressive King. This left many wondering if the song was chosen because The Occupant likes show tunes or because it was an intentional troll.

Over three million people have viewed the video on Tik-Tok, which, given the controversy over that social platform, seems totally delicious - not to mention the DEI policies which are still in obvious effect in the military.

What’s that old expression? If you want to make someone listen, whisper. In the musical Hamilton, Aaron Burr advises Alexander Hamilton to "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for".

Well, I’m not for that last part, but in my experience smiling while protesting and resisting confuses the heck out of those who would wish to silence you. This makes the protest even more effective. We learned all of that from Martin, didn’t we?

My favorite story happened with equal subtlety during one of the protest demonstrations of the 1999 killing of an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo who was shot with 41 rounds by four of NYC’s plainclothes police officers. The civil disobedience protest was at City Hall, led by then Bishop Suffragan Catherine Roskam. Many Episcopal priests were in attendance.

Everyone was standing quietly and calmly but did not move when the police told them that they were breaking the law and needed to disperse. A policeman moved forward to face one of the male Episcopal clergy, wearing a fine black suit and white clerical collar, who standing next to Bishop Roskam, wearing the purple shirt of her office.

The police officer said, “Father, I have to inform you that you are breaking the law.” The priest said, “I understand, officer.” The policeman said, “I’m sorry, but I have to arrest you.” The priest said, “I understand, officer.”

As the police officer was placing plastic handcuffs on the priest, he was heard to say, “Well, you Episcopalians sure do put the ‘civil’ in civil disobedience.”

As the White Rabbit said to Alice, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

I am convinced that’s how we’re going to win in two years at the midterms and again, the White House in four years - not by losing our civility or compromising our integrity and values but, rather by protesting and resisting while keeping intact everything that makes us citizens and patriots.

I know. I know. I’m sometimes angry enough to spit. Some people are angry enough to return to the original, root meaning of The Ides of March.

Don’t. Let. Them.

The assassination in Rome in 44 BCE that was meant to save the Republic actually resulted, ultimately, in its downfall. It sparked a series of civil wars and led to Julius' heir, Octavian, becoming Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor.

In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Willing Powel, the wife of Philadelphia's mayor, asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

What Franklin’s statement highlights is that a successful representative democracy relies on the active involvement and participation of its citizens. The Constitution is not self-correcting, so it requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens.

Let’s keep this republic. Let’s keep our democracy. Participate to the extent that you can, in the way that makes the most sense to you. Don’t compromise your values or integrity or what you love about being an American citizen.

As the White Rabbit said to Alice, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Missing the mark . . . 12 Mar 11:16 AM (last month)

 A little story about Hank and Rhoda

Consider the lilies . . . 11 Mar 5:21 PM (last month)

Worry as a lament

One of my grandmother’s favorite Bible stories comes from Luke 12:22-34, sometimes referred to in shorthand as “The Lilies of the Field.” I first heard her recite it from memory when we were on the strike line in front of the factory where she was ladling out soup and I was handing out pieces of bread.

My family was very involved in the Labor Union Organizing Movement, mostly at the textile mills in Fall River, MA, where I grew up. They were part of the founding of the International Lady Garment Worker’s Union (ILGWU), on Third Street. My grandmother would make certain that, as the weeks and months of the strike continued, “the men” had something to eat.

She would make a huge vat of soup and many loaves of bread, load it up on my shiny red Radio Flyer wagon, and we would make the several-mile walk from her house down to the factories to meet the men at the strike line.

The memory that is keenest in my mind is the time we arrived and, not only were the men in line, but there, off to the side, were their wives and children who were also hungry and had come, hoping for something to eat.

There was no mistaking the tension in the air but it became very real when I heard my grandmother suck her breath between her teeth. I also heard her whisper a prayer to Jesus and one to Mary, to make sure her son got the message:

Hey there! We need a little help, here, sir. Remember what you did near Bethsaida near the Sea of Galilee, when you fed four or five thousand from five loaves of bread and two fish? Well, here we are, in Fall River, near the Taunton River. We’re going to need that kind of miracle now. Mary? Please make sure your son hears this. Okay? Amen.

The tension grew thick enough to cut with a knife. Anxiety was written over everyone’s faces, but you could almost hear the pleas from the eyes of the women and see the fear on the faces of the children.

My grandmother’s brow was furrowed. That’s when I started to feel scared.

I don’t know what happened, exactly. There was no bolt of lightning. No thunder. No chorus of angels, singing.

I remember feeling a gnawing in the pit of my stomach. It hurt. And then, it didn’t.

I looked up and saw my grandmother’s face. It was relaxed. She was smiling. I heard her say, “Okay, everybody! Get in line. We’ve got some good Portuguese Kale Soup here, and bread that I made this morning. Lots of people here today, but you know, it’s okay. Don’t worry. We’ll just add some water to the soup and everyone will eat hearty.”

The soft sound of human laughter seemed to reach the men who had been moving determinedly toward us. They suddenly stopped and, like the Red Sea, they parted. One of the men motioned to the women to come first, with the children. They were hesitant at first, but the hunger in their bellies animated and moved their feet and they came forward with a cup they had pulled from a place deep in their pockets.

I stood next to my grandmother, tearing off pieces of bread and handing them to the children and their mothers until they were fed. The men came next for their soup and bread. As she served, my grandmother recited the story from Luke 12:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes.”

It was as quiet as a communion line in church. The soup ladle occasionally clanged against the pot like a sanctus bell. “Consider the lilies, how they grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”

People were quiet but smiling, now, as they came forward in the line. As I struggled to tear off a piece of bread from the loaf, you could hear the “rip” in the silence of the crowds. “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!”

I heard my grandmother’s voice over the scraping of the last ladle of soup was given out. ”And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. ^{. . . . . .} But seek God’s kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well”.

Without logic or reason and despite this being the largest crowd ever, we realized that the last person had been fed.

We took a moment to let that reality sink in. Everyone had been fed.

Not much, to be sure. Just a half a cup or so of soup and a small piece of bread. Just enough to stop the rumbling in their stomachs. Just enough to fuel their body’s energy to keep on. Just enough to restore the hope in their hearts that God, at least, if not the owners of the textile mills, was hearing their prayers.

I realized then, two things. The first was that worry is a form of prayer. It is part of an ancient lament that has been part of the human enterprise for eons. My child’s mind wondered that if we did not lament, if we did not raise our minds and hearts and voices to God in a passionate expression of grief or sorrow or anxiety, how would God know that we need help?

St. Paul assures us that “The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” The Psalmist wrote that even as “a deer longs for a water brook,” so do our deepest longings find their way to the ears of God.

I have come to know that the expression of raw emotion - the most piteous plea, the loudest, wailing cry - is heard in the deepest chambers of the heart of God. I believe that is what happened that day. God heard our worry. God heard our anxiety.

God can say, “Be not afraid.” And, “Do not worry about your life,” and “Consider the lilies,” because God knows that Jesus taught - and some of us listened - that when we feed the hungry and cloth the naked, we are feeding him.

Some of us have come to know the truth of what Teresa of Avila wrote in her poem, "Christ has no body but yours, / No hands, no feet on earth but yours".

So, no, I am not ashamed to worry. I am not ashamed to wring my hands and pace the floor. I am not ashamed of the occasional rising tide of anxiety in my soul. I know that these are forms of lament. I know these to be ancient prayers I share with my ancestors.

I know that God is listening. God’s time is not my time, but God hears.

I also learned something else that day. I learned that, sometimes, communion is not just bread delivered on a silver paten and wine administered from a silver chalice.

Sometimes, the holiest communion is provided from a large vat, administered in a tin cup, and delivered from one small hand to another in a jagged piece of bread.

As the government, which is once again presided over by little men of enormous incompetence and cruelty, runs perilously close to the brink of destruction, the tariff wars rage, and the dark clouds of a recession begin to gather, please consider the lilies of the field, yes, but know that our worries and anxieties are laments that are precious to the very heart of God.

Oh, ye of little faith! Know that God’s time is not our time but God knows the sound of the human cry because God has made it in the suffering and hunger, the cries and laments of Jesus.

Forgiveness: Part I 10 Mar 4:34 PM (last month)

When is it time to say when?

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Right out of the blue, it started appearing in my email inbox: Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. However, they were not recent postings. These were reprinted from, well, from “before the troubles”.

You may remember. It was after the height of the #MeToo Movement. Women were just beginning to feel some sense of power after the humiliation and disempowerment of having been sexually harassed in the workplace. People and organizations, governmental agencies, and even religious organizations were reacting quickly and strongly to the accusations women were making about sexual harassment.

The #MeToo movement began in 2006 as a grassroots effort by activist Tarana Burke to support survivors of sexual assault. The movement gained global attention in 2017 after actress Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo in response to sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein.

A lot of good was done, nationally and internationally. #MeToo has helped to change attitudes towards sexual assault and harassment. It has also led to more people coming forward to share their experiences. The movement is now an international non-profit organization that continues to advocate for survivors and work to end sexual violence.

For the first time, the attitude of “boys will be boys” was no longer tolerated, and the unconscionably inappropriate behavior of grown men who felt neither cultural constraint nor legal accountability for being what could only be described as sexual predators was abruptly called into question.

Suddenly, swiftly, company heads were fired. Public figures were held accountable - most often by exposure of their behavior and public shaming on social and legacy media. Laws were written and passed mandating sexual harassment training in the workplace. Nondisclosure clauses in sexual misconduct settlements were banned in California, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Virginia.

Most importantly, the statute of limitations on sexual harassment and assault charges was lifted in many states and municipalities, and victims were allowed to seek legal remedy in a proper court of law. In New York, over 3,000 lawsuits were filed between November 2022 and November 2023 as a result of the Adults Survivors Act.

Even the Episcopal Church provided an open invitation to victims of sexual harassment and assault, no matter the year of the offense.

In 2018 the Episcopal Church held a "Liturgy of Listening" at General Convention in Austin, TX. to address the #MeToo movement. The liturgy focused on confession, healing, and lamentation and included first-hand accounts from victims of sexual harassment and abuse. Bishops - male bishops, some of whom had had rumors swirling about them for years - read the accounts.

The Bishops adopted a covenant to respond “more forcefully” to sexual exploitation and harassment and created a Task Force on Women, Truth, and Reconciliation. The church also removed references to gender from materials that clergy file with the Office of Transition Ministry.

To my knowledge, no Title IV complaints resulted from that liturgy or covenant.

And then, some stuff happened that seemed to have been engineered by lawyers to provide more “risk management” and “preventative litigation in the court of public opinion” than justice or, in fact, even concern for the victims.

In my opinion, Al Franken was one of those. Mr. Franken was a former entertainer who was the elected Senator from Minnesota. In November 2017, he was charged with forcibly kissing a woman a decade before. Seven other women came forward to say they had experienced unwanted advances from him. Many Democratic senators demanded his resignation, and he complied.

Many asked, then and now, did the punishment fit the crime?

In that same month and year, Minnesota Public Radio cut ties with Garrison Keillor after learning of allegations of inappropriate behavior with someone who worked with Keillor. The decision meant that Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" and "The Best of A Prairie Home Companion" would no longer be broadcast.

I, like many others, was conflicted and yet devastated. On the one hand, I felt personally betrayed by someone who had entertained me and inspired me for decades. His “News from Lake Woebegon,” the weekly monologue laced with homespun stories and humor and often stitched with strong threads of morality and theology, had become my Saturday night sermon before I had to preach the next morning.

How could you not long to visit the fictional town? The original founders of what became Lake Wobegon were described by Keillor as “New England Unitarian missionaries, at least one of whom came to convert the Native American Ojibwe Indians through interpretive dance.

Who didn’t want to shop at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, where the motto was "If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along (pretty good) without it." Or, The Chatterbox Café, "The place to go that's just like home." Or, The Sidetrack Tap, run by Wally and Evelyn; "The dim little place in the dark where the pinball machine never tilts, the clock is a half-hour slow, and love never dies."

How could a man from a town in Minnesota where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average" behave inappropriately with women?

It absolutely goes without saying that the women who had the courage to speak out about inappropriate behavior ought to be believed and supported. Without question.

Keillor defended himself against the allegations. In an email to the Star Tribune, he reported that he meant to pat a woman on her back when she told him she was unhappy. He says her shirt was open and that his hand went up it about six inches. He says he apologized after she recoiled. He writes that he thought they were friends until he got a call from her lawyer.

Keillor was publicly shamed and humiliated and was fired from his job with NPR, the Writer’s Almanac, and The Poetry Foundation in disgrace.

Many asked, then and now, did the punishment fit the crime?

As we enter more deeply into the Season of Lent, my question has to do with forgiveness. When is enough, enough? When is it time to say when?

As a Christian, forgiveness is a central component of the teaching of Jesus. He emphasized that forgiveness should be limitless and not counted. “Seventy times seven,” he answered Peter when asked how many times he should forgive someone’s transgression.

I have always taken that to mean that forgiveness is a process that involves many layers. It often feels like peeling the impossibly thin layers of onion skin, one layer at a time, with all the attendant tears and emotions. “Seventy times seven.”

It is not anyone’s right to impose a timeline of healing on someone who has been hurt, betrayed, or assaulted. Some may need seventy; others only the seven. I’m wondering if the same timeline ought to be imposed on the public.

I will say this, there is something in my heart that was very happy to see the release of previous editions of The Writer’s Almanac in my inbox. I am delighted to find him writing again in a column here on Substack (Garrison Keillor and Friends). I am excited to learn that there is a digital (and CD) copy of the 50th Anniversary tour of A Prarie Home Companion, which features Garrison Keillor and some of the old favorites of that show.

I continue to hold in my prayers the woman who was inappropriately touched. I support her in her healing and recovery. I’m sure she felt even more deeply hurt and betrayed for many of the same reasons I did when I first learned of the incident. I don’t know if she’s found forgiveness. That’s not for me to know or determine. I don’t know if there’s been a reconciliation. That is a private, personal matter.

I only know that for me, forgiveness is now. “When” is now. For me, it is enough.

For this member of the public who felt betrayed by a public figure, the pastoral math assignment has been completed. Seventy times seven.

Custody of the Tongue 8 Mar 7:23 AM (last month)

Sometimes, it comes over me like a blast of hot air from an oven. It usually starts somewhere in the middle of my chest or from the back of my head. Sometimes, it even causes a slight tremble in my hands.

Despite my best efforts, the free-floating anxiety that seems to be in the ether these days begins to feed my anger, and suddenly, my mouth opens and I’m spewing. Except, I like to think of it as ‘venting’.

God knows we need to vent. We need to have safe places and safe people to say the quiet parts out loud. It’s one way to discharge the tension in our bodies. The pressure valve in our heads open and lets off some steam. It helps to relieve some of the heaviness around our hearts.

Except . . . except . . . when we become part of what feeds the anxiety and anger in others. Except when we misplace or displace our anger and hit easy targets like, for example, “The Democrats”. We want SOMEbody to do SOMEthing to make it STOP. And, isn’t that what our elected party leaders are supposed to do?

Except, every time I see Hakeem Jefferies these days, he looks pale and exhausted, like he has been chased by dogs and has been blown around like a rag doll in the face of an open, full-force fire hose. Which is a pretty good description of what’s going on in the Sacred Chambers of Congress these days. 

This is the deliberate practice of guarding one's speech, carefully considering the words they speak to avoid negativity, gossip, or harmful language, essentially exercising control over what comes out of their mouth to maintain a spiritual focus and positive attitude; it is considered a key aspect of living a mindful and dedicated religious life.

One of my dear colleagues, someone I greatly admire, was venting (spewing) the other day about the Democrats during the Joint Session of Congress. She was angry because all they could do was to hold up “wimpy” signs and a few of them walked out.

What would you have them do, I asked. SOMEthing, she responded. ANYthing, she practically yelled. Boycott. Walk out. Stand up and turn their backs every time he lied. Yell at him the way they yelled at Biden and Obama.

Really, I asked. And, what would that have accomplished? She gave an exasperated sigh and said, they would have let the American people know that they are fighting for us. You don’t think they are, I said. Not by holding up wimpy signs, no.

Wouldn’t we look like hypocrites, holding them to the rules of decorum when we are in power but not abiding by those same rules ourselves? She shook her head and said, we have to do SOMEthing.

I heard her, loud and clear. Her voice has repeated itself several times over the last few days, especially when the latest outrageous, unconstitutional decision has been made or cruel policy enacted. There’s a part of me that wants to do something, that wants the Democrats to do anything. Whatever it takes to Make. It. Stop.

I didn’t watch the 100-minute Congressional lovefest the POTUS held for himself, which he sprinkled liberally with his usual lies and misinformation, exaggerations and, of course, political venom. In the clips I saw, he sounded more like a Wrestling Character who had won the Championship but couldn’t stop spitting and growling about his opponent.

I understand her anxiety. I share her anger. I just don’t know what good it does to dress down the Democrats for not being able to fight back against a man who has kept his promise to be a “dictator on Day One,” and has filled his cabinet with people who have no education or experience but are intensely loyal to him, while breaking constitutional law left right and center, six times before breakfast.

I, at least, can turn off the news. I, at least, can walk away and lower the volume. Our elected officials can’t. They have to stand there, in front of the blast of an open furnace, and take it, knowing that the POTUS controls both chambers of Congress and the majority of the Supreme Court.

“Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (James 3:5-6)

As I considered all that a thought came to me that I - without a law degree, without having survived a political election and been voted into office, without any practical knowledge or experience of how government actually works, on the ground, in the trenches and back rooms and golf courses and tennis courts and over gourmet meals in a high-priced restaurant in The District - I, even I, have no room to criticize.

It occurred to me that I am no different than the MAGA folks who, without any medical education, suddenly become experts on immunology and the management of a pandemic. Or, without any knowledge of the art and science of education, presume to tell teachers what and how to teach children which includes more children than just my own. Or, participate in the hypocrisy of advocating for First Amendment Rights on the one hand while banning books from libraries on the other.

Or, the hipocrisy that really pulls my poor, last, tired nerve: Refusing to take vaccines during a pandemic or to immunize their children saying "You can't tell me what to do with my body," but cheer when Roe v. Wade was overturned and Dodd passed, denying a woman the very same right.

Yes, it is important - critically important - that I am in communication with my elected officials. They must know that we know that democracy is based on the principle of “participatory representation,” and take our part in the government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

And, it is important that we allow ourselves to find safe people and places where we can vent. And, spew. And, rage, when necessary.

That said, I am also remembering something the nuns of my youth taught me. It’s a spiritual disciple called “custody of the tongue.”

This is the deliberate practice of guarding one's speech, carefully considering the words they speak to avoid negativity, gossip, or harmful language, essentially exercising control over what comes out of their mouth to maintain a spiritual focus and positive attitude; it is considered a key aspect of living a mindful and dedicated religious life.

It’s based on something James said in one of his Epistles, “Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (James 3:5-6)

So, this Lent, one of the spiritual disciplines I am committing to practice is “custody of the tongue”. I commit to being a safe person and creating safe places where my friends can do all the venting and spewing they need, but I commit myself to not participating in that activity with them.

I will listen, actively and compassionately. I will practice custody of the tongue

I commit myself to being gentle and compassionate with and kind to myself so that I can be gentle and compassionate and kind to others. I will practice custody of the tongue.

I commit myself to working out my anger and anxiety and rage with my spiritual director and therapist. I will not hold my tongue there.

I commit to finding ways to channel that righteous anger and understandable anxiety and moments of blind rage into activities that involve my presence and energy in activities of “participatory representation” of government.

To wit: March 15th is the #IdesOfTrump - a postcard campaign to break the record set by Hank Aron of having received over 900,000 postcards. I am quietly inviting friends to a postcard-writing party where, for two hours, we’ll sit and write postcards to the current (for now) POTUS, telling him the things he hates to hear. Like, “You are the most unpopular POTUS in the history of this country.” And, “You are a failure.” And, “You are not a patriot.” And, “You are a disgrace.” And, "You're FIRED".

No, he won’t read them. Of course, he won’t read them. But, he will know if we’ve broken Hank Aron’s record with a million postcards in the White House mail room.

And I can show up for the Indivisible Protests in my area, which are happening every Saturday morning from 9-noon out on Route One in front of the Walmart (Attention, Delmarva Peeps).

And, I can attend Indivisible Meetings and ACLU information sessions to learn what I can do that will begin to make a dent in the movement to rid ourselves of the far right, fascist MAGA White Christian Nationalist curse while sending a strong, loud, and clear message to our elected officials that we’re here, we’re with them, that they are not alone, and that they should keep on keepin’ on and find creative, effective ways to send a strong, loud and clear message to those who control the levers of power in our government that we are here, we are fired up, and we are fighting back.

Will it work? Will it help? Dunno. I suspect it will be far better for my soul my mind and my body than missing 40 pieces of chocolate.

Custody of the tongue. Who knew that something I used to giggle about outside of the hearing range of the nuns would be something that I would consider in my own life?

The Route of Stone and Water 7 Mar 4:12 AM (last month)

Finding the way back to the light

The author at Finisterra - the end of the world - the traditional end of the Camino.

NB This essay recently appeared in The Delaware Communion Magazine, Spring 2025, a quarterly publication of the Episcopal Church in Delaware.

As you read this, we will be in the midst of walking the pilgrim’s way we call Lent. For many of us, the world has never felt darker and more confusing and chaotic. This year, this Lent, we seem to be in the midst of an especially foreboding and disquieting pilgrimage.

How is it that pilgrims can walk through the darkness, feeling confused and lost, and then find their way to the light and back on the path?

I have walked The Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James) as a pilgrim twice. In 2018, I walked from San Sebastian in the Basque Region of Spain, on the border of France. My second pilgrimage was on the Camino Portuguese, from Lisbon to Santiago, Spain, in 2022.

I was on the “Ruta da Pedra e da Agua” (Route of Stone and Water), a few kilometers from Armenteira, in the province of Pontevedra, Spain, in the region of Galicia where we had spent the night. Without a doubt, this is one of the most beautiful parts of the entire Camino. The path from Armenterira to Vilanova de Arousa is referred to as The Spiritual Variant, a path that leads mostly downhill to the sea; a gift for sore feet and aching knees.

I confess that I could never be considered a hiker. I am more of a walker with a definite penchant for strolling. I always smile when I hear about those who have walked 18–20 kilometers of the Camino in one day. I’m that person who literally has to stop and smell the flowers. In that area of God’s realm, it’s more like the small blue, pink, or white buds of rosemary that cover the border walls of farmland and the periwinkle hydrangea that seem to burst into huge, glorious pom-poms just about everywhere. Oh, and the eucalyptus trees in the Souto da Retorta forest and along the coast!

To paraphrase Ms. Shug in The Color Purple, I think it really pisses God off if a pilgrim does not notice (and smell) the rosemary and hydrangea and eucalyptus.

So, typically, I start the day with other pilgrims after breakfast, but then an hour or so later, they have all moved on and I am on my own, which suits me just fine. Indeed, I was often designated The Sweep, i.e. the person at the end who makes sure the folks we started with are in the designated place at the end of the day. This nickname is better than Pokey Little Puppy, the other term of endearment bestowed upon me by my fellow pilgrims.

Never mind. There are lots of pilgrims on the Camino from all over the world. Language? Not a problem when you can point and embellish with a few newly learned words. Also, the ubiquitous yellow Camino arrows or stylized shells are always pointing you to the right path; sometimes they are painted on a stone with the number of kilometers to Santiago.

How is it that pilgrims can walk through the darkness, feeling confused and lost, and then find their way to the light and back on the path?

It is very hard to get lost on The Camino — except on The Route of Stone and Water. This area was more like an enchanted forest, with charming little bridges over babbling brooks under which I fully expected a troll and three Billy Goats Gruff to appear. That morning a light, persistent rain bowed the limbs of some of the saplings that provided playful little splashes as I walked past them. It was early October, so the cold rain landed on the still-warm earth, gaving rise to small puffs of misty clouds, the stuff on which fairies love to perch and flutter their gossamer wings.

It was easy to get lost in all that beauty and magic and imagination. And so, I did. No worries. Someone will be by soon. I stood at the intersection of the path, where one way went down and seemed to follow the river, while the other went up a hill and through the ruins of an ancient water house. I looked all around for a yellow arrow or shell. Perhaps, it was on that fence? No. Ah, here, on this rock, covered with moss? No. On the ground, I wondered, as I moved dirt and dry leaves around with my walking boots. No such luck.

Ah, this must be a message from The Camino, telling me to stop and enjoy. So I did. For about 10 minutes. And then, I began to worry. Just a little. No one was coming by. This was my second Camino. This was unusual. Someone always comes by.

Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty minutes. No one. Trying not to panic, I struggled to swallow my pride and called our guide, Marco, from my cell phone. He would laugh. Silly American. But, he would hug me when he saw me and have something profound to teach me.

I didn’t have to wait that long.

“Marco? It’s Elizabeth. I think I’m lost.”

(Soft laughter) “You are not lost. You are on the Camino. Tell me what you see.”

(Belying my anxiety with some humor) “Stones and water.”

(Not amused) “Very funny. Tell me what you see. Maybe I can tell where you are.”

“One path goes down and follows the river. The other goes up by the ruins of a water house.”

“Yeah, I don’t know where that is. You’re right. You are lost.”

(Full panic now. It didn’t take much). “But, Marco, I have looked everywhere for a yellow arrow. I have looked back where I came. I’ve looked all around me. I have looked ahead on both paths. There’s nothing here. Oh my God. I AM lost. Whatever am I to do?”

“Stop. Elizabeth, stop. Now, take a deep breath and listen to me. Are you listening? Now, when you are lost, do not look back. That will only tell you where you’ve been. Do not look around. That will only tell you where you are. And, don’t look ahead. That is the unknown, yet to be discovered. Elizabeth, when you are lost, look up. When you are lost, always look up. When you look up, you will always find your strength. You will always find your way. For our strength and our help always come from above.”

I had started to cry but I looked up and, through my tears I saw it. There! On the tree! Just above my head. Someone had carved a bit of the bark off the tree, and painted there a yellow arrow. Up. Go up. Walk up by the ruins of the water house. That was The Way. The Camino.

 

 

This Lent, when things feel darkest and you feel lost and alone, know that this is just an illusion. We are not alone. Not really. You just have to swallow your pride and call someone and ask for help.

There will not be a bright yellow arrow, pointing you to the way out, but thre is yet to come, after the darkest Good Friday, a bright light which we call Easter. 

And, don’t forget, as you travel through this Lent, past the stones of our faith and the waters of our baptism, when things seem their worst, to look up. There you will find your strength and your help. At the end of this Lenten Season, we will arrive on Easter Day, having learned anew the deep spiritual lesson that Jesus is The Way and The Truth and The Life.

After two Caminos, following the stars on The Milky Way of the Compostella de Santiago, I have learned this: Sometimes, you have to reach way down in order to touch the stars.

The Temptations of This Lent 6 Mar 9:22 AM (last month)

Considering the right deeds for the wrong reasons

Image: Pacher, Michael. Legend of St. Thomas Becket. 1470/80.

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

That is the last stanza of the poem in T.S. Eliot’s 1935 Murder in the Cathedral.

It’s Lent, so I’ve been thinking a lot about Temptation. In Western Christendom, in those churches that follow the Lectionary, the gospel for the first Sunday in Lent is Luke’s reporting of the Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness.

I’ve been thinking of my own Temptations, especially in these times of chaos and confusion. Especially in these times when our Democracy is being intentionally dismantled, stone by bloody stone, plank by bloody plank, pillar by bloody pillar.

Here is my Great Temptation: I’ve found myself - no, literally ‘found myself’ as the action was not thought out or intentional but ‘found myself’ - standing in front of my library shelves reading Greek myths, studying them, comparing and contrasting them, with this sole purpose: To learn how it was that the ancients killed monsters.

Murder in the Cathedral? Pshaw! Apparently, my subconscious has been searching for ways to do murder at the White House.

I am horrified and ashamed. What have I allowed myself to become? Turns out, the greatest temptation of evil is to repay evil with evil.

In T.S. Eliot’s verse drama, the play portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral during the reign of Henry II in 1170.

As the scene of his Temptation begins, Becket knows that his martyrdom is eminent and has embraced it as inevitable. Three priests are the voices of Temptation, offering a parallel to the Temptation of Christ.

The first tempter offers the prospect of physical safety. The second offers power, riches, and fame in serving the King. The third tempter suggests a coalition with the barons and a chance to resist the King. Finally, the fourth tempter urges him to seek the glory of martyrdom.

When the Tempters have done their work, Beckett’s “mind is clear.” He says,

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Greater minds than mine or yours have considered the weight of those words. ‘To do the right deed for the wrong reason’. To perform an action that appears morally good on the surface (in Beckett’s case, to seek martyrdom), but the underlying motivation behind it is not pure or virtuous (for his glory).

Essentially, it is doing something considered "right" but with a self-serving or ulterior motive, like helping someone only to gain favor in return, not out of genuine kindness.

There seems to be a lot of that goin’ ‘round these days. Congress seems to be a chamber teeming with Temptations. It may be that it was ever thus, but it certainly feels to be at a greater level of intensity and intentionality. That is not, however, to excuse my own soul from considering Temptation, albeit subconsciously.

At the close of the play, the knights address the audience to defend their actions. They maintain that while they understand their actions will be seen as murder, it was necessary and justified so that the power of the church should not undermine the stability of the state.

” . . . . the power of the church should not undermine the stability of the state.”

Talk about the last temptation! Or, perhaps it was that they had it in reverse. Perhaps their confession is that they believed they were doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Nevertheless, it sounds like a prescription for Appeasement. We know where that once got us.

And yet, this particular year, this Lent especially, I feel compelled to do something, to avoid some small temptation as a way to prepare myself for the Temptations I know are coming.

I do believe that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his collusion with a plot to assasinate Hitler, was led to the gallows in a German concentration camp because he was Tempted by the defense to do the wrong thing for the right reason. In turn, his executioners were no doubt guilty of doing the wrong thing for the same right reason as Beckett’s soldiers -”the power of the church should not undermine the stability of the state” - even if the state was doing great evil in the name of Jesus.

That was 1945. Shortly before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer reportedly said to a fellow prisoner these last words, “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life”.

Here’s the thing I’ve been wrestling with, thus far this second day in Lent: I don’t think giving up chocolate or wine is going to change one iota of the trajectory of either my salvation or that of the world. And yet, this particular year, this Lent especially, I feel compelled to do something, to avoid some small temptation as a way to prepare myself for the Temptations I know are coming.

Temptations for me. Temptations for my church. Temptations for the church. Tempations for every person who claims to follow some religion or a Great Teacher on the path to being a better human. A moral person. A person who, perhaps, does the wrong thing for the right reason.

Ultimately, the only way I know that ‘the state’ has ever been stabilized. It is a great Temptation facing the church today.

The challenges of this particular Lent seem enormous and occasionally overwhelming to me. If they are to you, as well, then I want to suggest that you consider the importance of being part of a community of people who are also curious and troubled and seeking to navigate their way through the Temptations of Life.

I am hearing a line from the musical, Hamilton: “History has its eyes on you.”

Soon and very soon, we’ll be called to actions that will be questioned by generations to come. I am haunted by these words from Bonhoeffer: “The ultimate responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but how a coming generation is to go on living.”

As I’ve thought and prayed on this, I’m thinking that, while giving up chocolate or wine for 40 days and 40 nights might not save my soul, I’m considering that there might be great wisdom in starting small. With the seemingly insignificant. And, with great intention and purpose and prayer.

Sort of like the Karate Kid thinking “wax on, wax off” was a meaningless task to polish Mr. Miyagi’s cars, only to discover he was practicing an important defensive move.

It occurs to me that the act of giving up chocolate - or something seemingly insignificant that I love, like an entertaining TV program or a particular creature comfort - is not enough to save my soul. Rather, it is the intentionality of using it to prepare myself for the overwhelming task of avoiding the last Temptation: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. Which includes the Temptation of the misguided notion that I can save my soul 40 pieces of chocolate.

It’s the clarity Beckett had that I’m aiming for. (“Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain.”) That’s going to take at least 40 days and nights to figure out.

The hope is that it will redirect the energy I’ve been spending considering how the Greeks killed their monsters. Come to think of it, that might just save my soul.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

 

Ash Wednesday: Freedom Song 5 Mar 4:07 AM (last month)

Art: Flying Edna

Fat Tuesday 4 Mar 6:58 AM (last month)

I live in Sussex County, Delaware. It has a nickname. “LSD”. That stands for “Lower, Slower, Delaware.” The locals think the “slower” part refers to the pace of life of the rural farmers in the west and the resort life in the east, near the ocean. Some of the folks “up North,” and “above the canal,” hear it a little differently.

”Lower” is not just a reference to a geographical location. It has to do with the perception of a social demographic. ”Slower” has to do with a perception of the mental acuity required of farmers. Chicken farmers. Cash crop farmers. People who have lived on the land and from the land for generations. Indeed, many are considered “land poor”. People who may not own a suit, except maybe the one they wore for their wedding or their parent’s funeral. Maybe.

People who talk with a distinctive accent which is an amalgamation of particular inflections spoken in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, for which the Delmarva (Del -Mar-VA) Peninsula also gets its name. The ‘r’s’ are hard but the vowels get swallowed.

The famous “M R Ducks. M R Not. O S A R.” (Translation: “Them are Ducks. Them Are Not. Oh, yes they are.”) is credited generally to “The Eastern Shore” but there are similar variations of it here, “below the canal”.

”Lower”. And, ”slower.” See? At least, that’s how many of the folks “above the canal” and some of the people who have moved here, primarily from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York to escape the high real estate taxes, see their new neighbors.

I’ve been stunned and a bit shocked to see it in the attitude of some of the Kent and New Castle County clergy and how that is reflected in the conversations and discussion concerning some of the resolutions that come up at the annual Diocesan Convention - especially those that would empower small congregations. (There, now I’ve said the quiet part out loud.)

As the “land poor” farmers have been pushed out of their land by The Developers, the difference between people who are “from away” who live in McMansions and those who have lived here in Sussex all their lives in Manufactured Homes is more sharply drawn around lines of class, educational and economic status.

Lower Slower Delaware - LSD - is the polite way to say PWT (“Poor White Trash,”) or TPT (“Trailer Park Trash”). Except, everybody knows that it’s not polite. At. All.

It’s not exactly the stuff of JD Vance’s “Hillybilly Elegy” but then not too many around here have had the opportunity to go to Harvard and then sell their soul for the company store. But, the resentment is real. It smolders just underneath the surface. It’s gotten worse - much worse - in the past decade.

We bought this house in 1998. I moved here in 2008. Ms. Conroy and I commuted for 18 months from a friend’s house in New Jersey until she could transfer to a position here. I have worked as a Hospice Chaplain all over Sussex County since 2008. I (finally) retired in June of 2024.

In those sixteen years, I’ve worked on both sides of Sussex County. I’ve been privileged to have been invited into homes where three and four generations live together in a small, single-wide Manufactured Home, plopped down on a quarter or half-acre piece of land that was left to them when Daddy or Auntie sold off the rest of the farm and the bank (and then) The Developers took the rest.

Treatment for one heart attack or stroke, COPD, or lung cancer (thank you, Monsanto), without health insurance, can wipe out an entire profit margin from the sale of your property.

The thing that has impressed me, over and over, as I’ve had the privilege to be invited into the homes and lives of the families to whom I’ve ministered, is the love and the joy I’ve experienced in those families.

Oh, sure, many of these families put a Capital D in dysfunctional. They are also no strangers to another D word. Drama. Lots of drama and not just for yo Mama.

D also stands for Disease - mostly lung and heart (Thank you, Monsanto.) And, unfortunately, D stands for Drugs. And, Death.

Despite all of these challenges, there is love and joy. Sometimes, you have to listen closely and set aside your assumptions and expectations before you can see them, but love and joy are at the center of their lives.

O S A R. 

 
I’ll never forget one Hospice patient. He was 74 but he looked closer to 90. End-stage COPD and lung cancer. Cash crop farming will do that to a body (See also: Monsanto.). He lived in a pop-up tent camper in the driveway of his daughter’s rented single-wide Manufactured Home where she lived with her husband and their daughter, granddaughter, and her newborn, a great-grandson.

He had his own Manufactured Home but was no longer able to tend to himself, so his son-in-law borrowed a popup tent camper from a friend at the chicken factory. They ran an electric cord from the house to the camper and plugged in a small electric heater which warmed things up nicely.

He also had a small refrigerator which kept some of his medications and some food and drink easily accessible. He had everything he needed, including his oxygen tank and a spare for backup, a bedside commode, and a pill planner that his Hospice nurse would come twice a week and fill for him.

The Hospice Social Worker had arranged for Meals On Wheels to deliver food daily but I quickly learned that he “shared” most of it with two of his grandchildren when they came home from school.

One day, I arrived just as the Meals On Wheels driver was delivering the day’s fare: a cheese sandwich, a bag of potato chips, a small plastic container of mixed fruit, a large, chocolate chip cookie in a plastic baggie, and a small, wax covered cardboard carton of whole milk. There was also a plastic bag with plastic utensils and a small portion of salt and pepper in a paper container.

The kids came in right after me, hugging and kissing Grandpa who lit up like a light bulb as they showered their affection on him with the lavish abandon of childhood. They took the white Styrofoam container which held their grandfather’s only meal for the day and set about to cut the cheese sandwich in half.

Suddenly, the older girl looked at me and then looked at her grandfather. They exchanged a glance and a nod and then she took her half and cut it in half and offered it to me.

“Oh no,” I said, “thank you, honey, but I’m fine. I had a great big lunch not long ago (I lied). You have it.”

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Many of us will go to church and get a smudge of ashes on our forehead and be reminded that we are “dust and to dust we shall return.” And, while that’s true, I think we miss the point if we forget that in between the dust from which we are formed and the dust to which we return, there’s a lot of love and joy.

I think, this year - especially this year - my Lenten discipline will be to concentrate on finding the love and the joy in the midst of the dust and ashes. I suspect I’ll find there the riches of my life amidst what I might see as poverty. I’m betting solid money I’ll find that I’m hungrier than thought I was, but it won't be due to any fasting on my part. I’m hoping that I’ll choose to stop eating the Bread of Anxiety and begin to feast, instead, on the Bread of Love and Joy.

Spiritual Defense Against Bullies. 3 Mar 10:00 AM (last month)

The Turning Point

Tai-Chi Posture

In the ancient Chinese martial art of Tai-Chi, there is a movement that stops and then takes the negative energy and moves it aside. It is highly effective when you understand the nature of the negative energy you are rejecting because it not only moves it away from you but it also comes from a place of the deep understanding of our interconnection and interdependence as well as compassion for the effects of the negative energy on the soul of your adversary.

You do not have to actually do Tai-Chi in order to accomplish deeper spiritual understanding and compassion. It is important to keep this body posture in mind when you listen to the news or scroll through social media posts. Do not take on the negativity. Move it aside. Allow your curiosity to be awakened. Wonder about the cause(s) of this abhorrent behavior. Allow this to engage your creativity and imagination.

Finally, mindfulness is an important spiritual component which is especially critical at this moment in time when there is a veritable firehose of information and misinformation coming at us in a 24/7 news cycle. Mindfulness is a state of an awareness of the present moment that involves paying attention to thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations without judgment. It is about being fully engaged in the present moment, observing one's experiences with acceptance and curiosity.

A word of caution: While these practices are helpful and healthy, they rarely lead to an immediate solution. This is not "spiritual fast food". It does, however, make for a healthier body, mind and soul, capable of resistance and resilience, which are the pathways on which we will find the road to peace.

In this country, whenever there has been a sudden, abrupt cultural change, violence to body, mind and spirit, has always been present. History teaches us that, in those situations, were not able to turn the tide until we found our own spirituality, our own moral core.

What has become crystal clear since the most recent historic debacle in the Oval Office is that we are beyond political rhetoric. We are now deeply engaged in a moral struggle that affects the very soul of our country and every American citizen.

The present occupant of the Oval Office is not the problem. He is a symptom of a moral problem that has been part of the very DNA of this country which was built on the immorality of slavery. That immorality  has surfaced from time to time as Manifest Destiny, McCarthyism, and White Christian Nationalism. And now, it has resurfaced in the movement known as MAGA.

I have become deeply persuaded that we will not find resolution much less peace in this country or the world until we engage our souls along with our minds and our hearts.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

Change. Transform. Transfigure 2 Mar 4:51 AM (last month)

Kelly Latimore Icon

The last pilgrimage I took before the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020 was to Israel-Palestine. There were many places there that deeply affected me, but none so much as visiting the Basilica of the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor.

This morning's gospel for the last Sunday after the Epiphany and the Sunday before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday is the gospel story of the Transfiguration, which takes place on Mt. Tabor, where there was a sweeping view of the beautiful Jezreel Valley, one of the most important travel routes connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe.

In the ancient world, you couldn’t get much of anywhere without passing through it. Whoever controlled the Jezreel Valley controlled intercontinental trade. For 7,000 years, many important, historic battles have played out there.

Jezreel is a feminine Hebrew word that comes from the words zara', which means "to scatter seed", and 'el, which means "God", so "God sews," or "May God scatter seeds." It has become a metaphor for "spreading the word of God." Jezreel is also the name of the first son of Hosea and Gomer, and became symbolic of God's judgment against Israel.

It is also known as the Valley of Megiddo, after the important administrative center in ancient Canaan, in Gallilee, in what was then ancient Palestine but now claimed as part of Northern Israel. Megiddo may be translated to mean "invading" or "instrument/place of exposure". 

The Jezreel Valley was the scene of many important battles – those waged by Egyptians against Canaanites and by Philistines against Israelites. A victory was led by Deborah and Barak against the Canaanites. The city of Jezreel was the site of many murders by Ahab and Jezebel. Jehu, the founder of a dynasty that put Jeroboam II on the throne, massacred all the descendants of Ahab in Jezreel.

Saladin defeated the Crusaders there. Napoleon conquered the Ottomans in that place. The Book of Revelation predicts that Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil would happen in the Jezreel Valley.

The Jezreel Valley is a place not only of war and death, but also of beauty and life. Two million years ago, the Jezreel valley was an underwater channel that connected the Mediterranean Sea to other major bodies of water. As geological forces raised this land upwards out of the water, it became the best farming land in the region, the very “heart” of the Holy Land.

Mt. Tabor

As I stood on Mt. Tabor, overlooking the Jezreel Valley, it was easy to imagine that Jesus must have visited this place as a child as it is only 8 miles from Nazareth.

Jesus changed as a child, growing older to become a young man. As Jezreel Valley grew lush with a wide variety of fruits and crops, Mt. Tabor remained unchanged as it had for the millions of years since the tectonic plates deep in the earth moved and shifted to transform the geography and landscape.

It was from Mt. Tabor, a place that overlooked the change and transformation of the Jezreel Valley, that Jesus chose his transfiguration.

I don't think that is insignificant.

Yes, it is a reflection of the transfiguration of Moses when he stood before God on Mt. Sinai. The face of Moses shone after he came down from the mountain where he had spent 40 days and 40 nights receiving two tablets of instructions from God, known as The Ten Commandments.

Jesus, of course, has spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, having been sorely tempted. He did not emerge with instructions for his disciples, but with clarification about the mission of his life, leading to the transfiguration he would need for his earthly pilgrimage to the final spiritual battle he would endure, which would take him - and us - to the glory of Easter.

As we begin Lent, we are asked to consider what we will change and how that might change us, spiritually. However, if we stop there, just changing the way we eat, giving up wine or alcohol, chocolate or sweets, we'll have missed the opportunity to make the deep spiritual symbolism of the Lenten pilgrimage one that not only changes and transforms us, but transfigures our very souls.

Image: Mike Moyers

God knows, as a nation and as the world, we are walking into a time of chaos and confusion, a time when all of what we believed to be right and good, noble and true, is being challenged.

It feels to many as if we are brinked on a dangerous precipice of an epic spiritual battle of good and evil. If the heated, vulgar exchange between two bullies and the actual Leader of the Free World that took place in the Oval Office last Friday didn't convince us of that, I don't know what will.

There is no doubt in my mind that we will emerge from this time changed and transformed and we may never again be the same. And, that might not be a bad thing, as an ultimate result.

I am more concerned, for myself and for my country and the world, that we take this time - Ramadan for Muslims (Feb 28, 2025 – Sat, Mar 29, 2025), Lent for Christians (Wed, Mar 5, 2025 – Thu, Apr 17, 2025), and Passover for Jews (Apr 12, 2025 at sundown; ends at nightfall on Apr 20, 2025) - as an opportunity for the change, transformation and transfiguration of our lives, our hearts and our very souls.

Change. Transformation. Transfiguration. It's an amazing, dangerous pilgrimage. The tectonic plates in the earth are shifting again. The earth is rising. Mountains are appearing. Epic spiritual wars are being waged and moral battles are being fought. The threat of Armageddon looms large in the minds of many. 

The Transfiguration of Paul? 1 Mar 6:57 AM (last month)

Saint Paul by Pompeo Batoni

Good Saturday morning, good citizens of the cosmos. We are in a time of transition – not only in our own chaotic world but on the church’s calendar. The last Sunday in the season after The Epiphany was traditionally known as Quinquagesima (from the Latin for ‘fifty’) Sunday, being the last Sunday before Lent begins and 50days before Easter –if you count Easter itself. 

 

It had been traditional to begin fasting on “Septuagesima” – or 70 days before Easter – and to put away the Alleluias. However, in almost all of Western Christianity, fasting begins on Ash Wednesday and the Alleluias are put away or “buried” on the Last Sunday after The Epiphany.

Tomorrow, we will finish up the season after The Epiphany and this time of transition into the Season of Lent with the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. It’s a wonderful story, reflecting the transfiguration of Moses on Mt. Sinai which we will also hear on Sunday.

It's a significant story because, in the days of Jesus, many thought of Elijah as an important “candidate” from their Holy Scriptures (what Christians often refer to as the “Old Testament”) to replace Moses. It is important, in Luke’s telling, that Elijah and Moses stand with Jesus in the vision and that the voice of God says, “This is my Son, my chosen. Listen to him.”

I should also note that this passage is so important that it is thought by many scholars to be an important precursor to what Muslims believe was the single most important event of Muhammad’s life, the Mi’raj (“night vision”. 

Ramadan Mubarak to all my Muslim friends who observe! May this holy month bring you peace, prosperity and endless blessings. May Allah accept your prayers and forgive your sins. Ramadan Kareem!

The Mi‘raj – the moment when Muhammad is purified in his sleep begins the sequence when he is then transported in a single night from Mecca to Jerusalem by Jibril (Gabriel) a winged mythical creature.  From Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock now stands, he is accompanied by Gabriel (Jibrīl) to heaven, ascending possibly by ladder or staircase (an allusion to Jacob?). This story is claimed by several prominent Christian and Muslim scholars as having been inspired by the story of the transfiguration of Moses and Jesus.

Muhammad's Night Journey

Which is fine. I mean, clearly the story of the transfiguration of Jesus was inspired by the story of the transfiguration of Moses – right down to the change in the appearance of their faces.

I suppose it is important, in the liturgical cycle, to have Jesus clearly transfigured and identified as the Son of God before we begin our journey into the wilderness of Lent, taking us to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter Day.

 

None of that concerns me. It’s tidy and neat and the "tidy and neat"  “systematic” nature of this particular theology always bothers me.  Logic and order and tidiness have its place, I suppose, in the faith journey. That’s important to the very souls of some.

Me? I like my religion disorganized, tending ever so slightly to the chaotic which, I think, acknowledges the presence of the sacred in our lives of faith in the midst of that which cannot be controlled and contained, which is challenging and scary and unpredictable.

Personally? I think that makes our stories part of the ever unfolding story of God’s unconditional and eternal love for all of God’s creatures and creation, as it was in the beginning when the Spirit was sent to brood over the chaos and call new creations into being.

Which is precisely why I have a problem – Big. Huge. – with the selection of the Epistle for Transfiguration Sunday.

The passage chosen by the brilliant, logical minds of the Lectionary wizards is from 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2. Listen to the first few sentences.

“Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”

Oy, gevault! The violence done to our Jewish sisters, brothers and siblings simply takes my breath away. I mean, it is beyond the kind of ‘cringy’ feeling I get when I hear John’s gospel blaming “the Jews” for the crucifixion of Jesus. We all know that this was a state execution which was supported by the Religious Leaders – not “all the Jews” – for their own purposes.

 

“Not like Moses”??? The one who inspired the story not only of Jesus but of Muhammad?? Moses??? Who apparently intentionally put the veil over his face to “keep the people of Israel” from being able to see the eventual glory of Jesus? The “people of Israel” whose “minds were hardened – indeed, to this very day?” To this very day?? “Christ is set aside”??? And, only “when one turns to the Lord (Jesus), the veil is removed”????

Seriously??? 

Paul Preaching on the Ruins Giovanni Paolo Pannini

What is a preacher to do? I mean, the ending of this passage is comforting but this particular pericope of scripture is way too loaded to have to unpack in even a 15 minute (God forbid) sermon.

I think it is best handled not in a sermon but in a Bible Study or an Adult Forum or in a seminary or EFM class on the writings of Paul in general and the context of this pericope in particular.

But, how many people today are going to stay an extra few hours on Sunday after church, or schlep back into church midweek for an Adult Forum or Bible Study?

The problem of Bible Illiteracy in the church is real.

 

My impulse is to skip to verse 17 where the beautiful, comforting part begins and to focus on how we are transformed by moments of encountering God. However, to read that whole passage while ignoring the tough parts of this text, especially in these days of rising Christian Nationalism and its attendant anti-Semitism, is not only dangerous, it is akin to pastoral malpractice.

Indeed, if I were still rector, my bishop and I would be having a serious conversation about eliminating that first pericope entirely and not reading it in church at all. But, I’m not still a rector and I won’t be having that conversation with the bishop here.

So, I’m taking this question to some of the smartest, compassionate, loving people I know. You. What say you, dear ones who are faithful readers of my Blog?

Many of you have taken EFM. Many of you have studied scripture in general and St. Paul in particular. We know that the “old covenant” or “Old Testament” has not been revoked or superseded. God’s word is everlasting and God’s promise can be trusted.

We understand that Paul’s rhetoric in this passage is part of a debate around whether Gentile converts to Christianity needed to observe Torah. It’s important to be clear that Paul’s contrast of freedom or grace with the law does not mean the denigration of Jewish Torah observance.

We understand that Paul is speaking to Gentiles new to the biblical faith. In Corinth - known then as "Sin City". Corinth is a place where the Jews were a tiny part of the population holding on by their fingernails against the prevailing pressures of the presence of and devotion to Greek gods on the one hand and pagan worship on the other. And then, there were the Romans and their gods, which carried additional political weight and consequences.

 Then, here comes Paul, challenging not only centuries of Greek myth, pagan gods, and Roman rule, but also the very foundations of Torah with the teachings of this new Rabbi.

I have come to understand and develop a greater appreciation of the complexities of Paul, as a devout, practicing Jew who was Roman citizen, preaching the new biblical faith of a radical Rabbi who had been crucified for his teachings.

Artist Unknown (taken from RC source)

Indeed, after my pilgrimage to Greece and after walking in the footsteps of Paul, I have come to understand that Paul was proud of his own Jewishness, and responded pragmatically to problem situations but continued to observe the Torah himself.

That’s a whole lot to include in a 15 or even 20 minute (God forbid!) sermon. Too much, I think.

And yet, given the perilous times in which we live, the responsibility to challenge the rising waves of anti-Semitism and Christian Nationalism has never been greater. 

The Epiphany Light of Southern Black Washerwomen 28 Feb 5:26 AM (last month)

"On June 16, 1866, laundry workers in Jackson, Miss., called for a citywide meeting. The women — for they were all women, and all were Black — were tired of being paid next to nothing to spend their days hunched over steaming tubs of other (White) people’s laundry, scrubbing out stains, smoothing the wrinkles with red-hot irons, and hauling the baskets of heavy cloth through the streets. At the time, nearly all Black female workers were employed as domestics by White families, to handle the cooking, cleaning and child care, hauling water, emptying chamber pots, and performing various and sundry other tasks that the lady of the house preferred to avoid."

“The Washerwomen’s strike is assuming vast proportions and despite the apparent independence of the white people, is causing quite an inconvenience among our citizens,” the Atlanta Constitution reported on July 26, a week into the strike. “There are some families in Atlanta who have been unable to have any washing done for more than two weeks. Not only the washerwomen, but the cooks, house servants and nurses are asking increases.”

“Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council on Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.”

Atlanta’s City Council backed down, and while history is murky on the resolution, it appears that the workers had successfully shifted the balance of power not only for themselves as Washerwomen but all Black women and men. Atlanta’s Black female workers had prevailed in making their collective power felt. The city’s white-supremacist employer class had come face-to-face with the reality of Emancipation: Black workers would tolerate injustice no more.

From cotton to clouds: The Epiphany of Ms. Bessie Coleman 27 Feb 5:43 AM (last month)

She went from the drudgery of working in fields filled with white fluffy clouds of cotton to the thrilling, exhilarating work of an airshow pilot in the white, fluffy clouds of the sky.

Known as "Queen Bessie," she was born Elizabeth Coleman in 1892  in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of 13 children of George Coleman, an African American who may have had Cherokee or Choctaw grandparents, and Susan Coleman, who was African American. The Coleman family were sharecroppers. Ms. Bessie worked as a child in the cotton fields, vowing to one day to "amount to something."

At the age of six, Ms. Bessie began attending school in Waxahachie, Texas in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse where she completed all eight grades. At age 12, Ms. Bessie was accepted into the Missionary Baptist Church School on a scholarship. Yearning to further her education she worked and saved her money and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma where she completed one term before running out of funds and returning home to Texas.

Climbing the ladder of success always begins with stepping on the first rung. Often, it means keeping one hand on the rung in front of you while raising the other to take the hand of one who has gone before you.

One day Ms. Bessie’s brother John, who had served in France during the war said, “I know something that French women do that you’ll never do…fly!” That remark prompted her to travel to France, after teaching herself to speak French.

On June 15, 1921, at the age of 29 and fifty-eight years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman graduated the Federation Aeronautique Internationale becoming the first African American woman to achieve a pilot’s license.

Still, Ms. Bessie continued to dream. She remembered her first step on the ladder of success and that her brother's hand had been there to help her up. Her dream was to establish a flying school for African Americans in the United States. She knew it was a risky dream, filled with challenges and obstacles, but she was willing to work hard to achieve her goal.

"The air is the only place free from prejudice, " she said, and throughout her career, she would only perform at air exhibitions if the crowd was desegregated and permitted to enter through the same gates.

Tragically, although she saved her money and came close to her goal of opening a flight school for Blacks in the United States, Bessie Coleman was tragically killed on April 30, 1926. 

During a rehearsal for an aerial show, the airplane she was in unexpectedly went into a dive and then a spin, subsequently throwing her from the airplane at 2,000 feet. She was not wearing her seat belt because she was of small stature and needed to lift herself up so she could see over the side of the plane.

Funeral services were held in Florida, before her body was sent back to Chicago. While there was little mention in most media, news of her death was widely carried in the African-American press. Ten thousand mourners attended her ceremonies in Chicago, which were led by activist Ida B. Wells.

Despite this tragic fate, Ms. Elizabeth Coleman's legacy of flight endures and she is credited with inspiring generations of African-American aviators, male and female, including the Tuskegee Airmen and NASA astronaut, Dr. Mae Jemison, who carried Bessie Coleman’s picture with her on her first mission in the Space Shuttle when she became the first African American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in September 1992.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

The Light of Deep Wisdom: Maya Angelou 26 Feb 4:23 AM (last month)

I think of all the wonderful and wise quotes attributed to Maya Angelou, this one has impacted me most. I first read it written on the wall of a college classroom where I was doing a presentation on Reproductive Justice and Abortion.

I realized, in that moment, that while the information I was about to give them was important, my attitude, the way in which I presented the information so that it would have an impact and be retained, was even more important.

Indeed, I think I understood more clearly than I had ever before that this was one of the key components of leadership. This one sentence has changed the way I see myself, the way I present myself to others and the way I have taught and mentored future leaders in my care.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and card dealer.

For the first three years of her life, her family lived in her maternal grandparents home. Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".

Ms. Maya's life story has been documented in a series of seven autobiographies, primarily focusing on her childhood and early adult experiences, The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception" to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic and needed commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".

Four years later, when Angelou was seven and her brother eight, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family.

Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing she was to blame for his death; as she stated: "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone."

It was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her. Her wisdom, she maintains, was born of suffering.

Ms. Maya was an accomplished person in a variety of ways. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.

She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership Conference coordinator, and correspondent in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

Ms. Maya  was also an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her ninth decade of life. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.

Here are some of the things she has said which have personally guided me:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

"The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise."

"Hate, it has caused a lot a problems in the world, but has not solved one yet."

“In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings, we are more alike than we are unalike.”

“Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for.”

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014, at age 86.

Although Angelou had been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.

During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension."

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia!

The Sound of Light: Bernice Johnson Reagon 25 Feb 6:18 AM (last month)

If light could make a sound, I am convinced that one of the sounds it would make would be like the music of Sweet Honey in The Rock, the all Black women a cappella singing group founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

That's because while light is an electromagnetic wave, sound is created by vibrations in the air. When there is as strong a force of Spiritual Light as Bernice Johnson Reagon, you know there ain't nothin' going to happen but that Light wave will vibrate. And, make the incredible sounds of harmony and justice and freedom that become Light for all the senses.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942 in Dougherty County, southwest Georgia, the daughter of Beatrice and J.J. Johnson, a Baptist minister. Church and school were an integrated part of her life, with music heavily intertwined in both of those settings.

Dr. Reagon grew up in a church without a piano, so her early music was a cappella, and her first instruments were her hands and feet. When she spoke about her upbringing in this musical culture, she explained that even her early schooling was heavily involved with music, not just the church. She said that her teacher would lead the students outside to play games that entailed singing with their hands and feet, as well as their voices.

She once said, "Singing with my hands and feet and my whole body is the only way I can deal comfortably with creating music." No wonder she causes light waves to vibrate.

A precocious child, she started attending school at age 4 and by the time she was in 4th grade, she started tutoring the children in the 1st grade. At the age of 16, she was accepted at Albany College to study music. While there, she was very active in the NAACP and SNCC. She was expelled from Albany for her involvement in a protest and then briefly attended Spelman College.

Later, she returned to Spelman to complete her undergraduate degree in 1970. She received a Ford Foundation fellowship to do graduate study at Howard University, where she was awarded a PhD in 1975. In in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

Albany, Ga., would become an important center of the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, causing the media to descend on the town. Dr. Reagon, however, wasn't there to see it. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she recalled, "But what they began to write about ... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."

The singing that so fascinated the media were freedom songs — often revamped versions of spirituals familiar to anyone who'd grown up in African American churches. Dr. Reagon would later say that, in many cases, she simply replaced the word "Jesus" with "freedom," as in the rousing "Woke Up This Morning."

After Albany State kicked her out due to her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave") and a visit from a Kenyan dignitary brought in by the State Department to demonstrate America's strides toward racial integration ("Oginga Odinga").

When they were being arrested and loaded into the paddy wagons, when they were in jail, when they were having mass meetings in African American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang all of the songs of their faith in all of those settings.

Dr. Reagon said, "When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den. And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you."

Gospel music, the music of the Freedom Singers, the music of the Civil Rights Movement, became the sound of The Light of Christ.

Sweet Honey in the Rock

In 1963, Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon, a co-founder of The Freedom Singers, married. A year later, Reagon left the Freedom Singers to give birth to their first child, Toshi Reagon. The couple had one more child together in 1965, Kwan Tauna Reagon. Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell Reagon then split in 1967. Toshi has continued her mother's legacy. Kwan is a successful chef.

I first heard Sweet Honey in The Rock in the early 80s when they performed at a UCC Church in Portland, ME where we were living at the time. I knew nothing about them but the excitement of some of our friends convinced us that we really needed to cough up the $10 per ticket and go.

That experience changed something in me. Yes, it was the music but it was more how the music changed the feeling in the room. I know it's overused and will sound trite, but it really was electric. I knew that the sound and the harmonies that came from their voices arose from another place - an ancient place - a place which Audre Lorde described as " our deepest and nonrational knowledge."

Lorde named that place "the erotic," which, she said, "is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

Later, after I read Dr. Lorde's work, I came to know that Lord's understanding of the erotic is exactly the place from which the sounds of Sweet Honey in The Rock arose, and transported us all in the time and place to be back with the ancestors as well as in the midst of the chaos of our strongest feelings about gender and race, age and class. 

I was transformed by the Light of their Sound. I don't think I've ever been the same.

In 2003, upon receiving the prestigious Heinz Award, Dr. Reagon spoke in her acceptance speech of the decision she and her long-time partner, Adisa Douglas, made that their "different and related work and struggle would move better were we joined in life partnership--and so it has been--joined and better." The two women remained together as life partners up until Dr. Reagon's death.

Bernice Johnson Reagon died in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2024, at the age of 81.

In her song, "They Are Falling All Around Me," Dr. Reagon sings

Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I’ll never see no more

But you’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air that I breathe
It’s the record you set
That makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really
You’re not really going to leave me

And I have tried to sing my song right
I have tried to sing my song right
I will try to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

An Epiphany Light under a bushel of racism: Ms. Ann Lowe 24 Feb 7:19 AM (last month)

Anybody who is anybody in America (or, whom others think is somebody wealthy) is listed in a little something called "The Blue Book." Interestingly enough, that is not the color of the book - it is actually black with pumpkin lettering - but the "blue" stands for the elite color of the blood that was understood to belong to those registered therein.

Also known as The Social Register, it is a semi-annual publication (present annual subscription rate: $75) in the United States that indexes the members of American high society, mostly elite New Yorkers but also California Forty-Niners (who became rich in the Gold Rush of 1848/9) and Texas Wildcatters (descendants of the people who settled Texas) as well as a White House crony or two.

If you were in The Blue Book, you probably had your own private list of people who could get you things or make you things that were rare or costly or at least supported the allure of status. Wine stewards and other Alcohol products, Art Dealers, Interior Decorators, Hair Designers, Millners, Chefs, Pastry makers, Seamstresses and Fashion Designers all worked primarily for the then tight circle of the Social elite. 

And because they were privileged and elite, they kept that list to themselves, so if you were good enough to work for the elite, you were perhaps ... maybe... paid well but relative anonymity in your trade was the trade off. Wasn't it enough simply to work for people who lived at this high level of the social stratosphere?

And so it was with the women of the Lowe Family in Clayton, Alabama who were skilled dressmakers who had sewed for wealthy white families in that state for generations.

Ms. Ann Lowe in Manhattan

Ann Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, around 1898 and grew up in Montgomery, the youngest daughter of Jane and Jack Lowe. Her older sister was Sallie. She was the great-granddaughter of an enslaved woman and an Alabama plantation owner.

Her mother, Janie Cole Lowe, and her grandmother, Georgia Thompkins, were skilled dressmakers who taught Ms. Ann to sew as early as age five.

By the time Ms. Ann was six, she had developed a fondness for using scraps of fabric to make small decorative flowers patterned after the flowers she saw in the family’s garden. This childhood pastime would later become the signature feature on many of her dresses and gowns. By age 10, she made her own dress patterns. After her mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly when Ms. Ann was 16 or 17, she took over the family business.

That much is known, but the particulars of her life contain conflicting information, including the actual date of her birth, perhaps not unusual for a "Negro" girl born in the Deep South. For example, Ms. Ann indicated that she dropped out of school at 14 to marry; however U. S. Census records indicate that Lowe was “living in Dothan, Alabama, with her first husband, Lee Cone, in 1910.”

Based on the 1898 date of birth, she would have been 12 years old at the time of her marriage. In a 1964 Saturday Evening Post article, the reporter noted that Ms. Ann married a man 10 years her senior shortly after her mother died in 1914, when she would have been 16 or 17 years old. Her son and later business partner, Arthur Lee Cone, was born a year after she married. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident in New York in 1958.

Ann Lowe is probably best known for designing the wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy but never given credit for it until years after the wedding. Jackie's mother, Janet Lee Acuhincloss, commissioned Ms. Ann to design the wedding gown as well as all of the gowns of the bridal attendants, having used her to design her daughter's debutante gowns.

Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress

Ms Ann was known as "the best kept secret" in fashion design. That status, perhaps repeated as a compliment, was a thin, gauze applique to distract from the racism that kept her from being at least as as well known as The Houses of Dior or or Chanel admitted that her design and the quality of her workmanship often exceeded their own.

Throughout her career, Lowe was a celebrated designer of one-of-a-kind dresses for her powerful and wealthy clients, although some of them did not pay her for the costs of the labor and materials, or they asked her for prices that they knew were substantially below what they would have paid a white designer. Those circumstances left Lowe with a minimum amount of funds after paying her staff.

Some of her clientele remained loyal to her, helping her through difficult times. For example, in 1962, the U.S. Department of Revenue closed Lowe’s New York shop due to $12,800 owed in back taxes. She also owed $10, 000 to suppliers. The debt was later quietly and generously paid by Jacqueline Kennedy.

After the foreclosure of her salon, Lowe began working for Madeleine Couture. The small, custom salon, located on Madison Ave., belonged to Benjamin and Ione Stoddard. The Stoddards were instrumental in helping Ms. Ann obtain the risky operation to remove cataracts in her left eye, even as she was experiencing glaucoma in her right eye.

In addition, they organized a major fashion show, which included runway models who were former clients wearing the designs Lowe created for them. The Stoddards also arranged two television interviews of Lowe on The Mike Douglas Show in 1964.

Ms. Ann continuously invented and reinvented herself, even though she encountered many devastating obstacles—discrimination, financial challenges, loss of close family members, health problems, and people who took advantage of her kindness and lack of business acumen.

Through it all, she maintained her ambitions to manifest her choices—to work for families on America’s Social Registry and to establish salons that bore her name as the creative director of Ann Lowe fashions.

A collection of five of Ann Lowe's designs are held at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

A personal note about prestigious Blue Books

General Convention "Blue Books"

At one time, there was an actual book which contained the reports of and the names of all of the deputies to General Convention. It was called "The Green Book". That was until the early 2000 when it became "The Blue Book". It was referred to in the same reverential tones as The Social Register.

One year, when it was announced that the color of the book would change - perhaps (Gasp!) to salmon or crimson - it became front page news on all of The Episcopal Publications at the time. Bloggers (who were all the rage at the time and a real threat to 'legacy media' like ENS) blogged about it and wrung their hands in distress. People were outraged - OUTRAGED, I tell you - as it was seen as a harbinger of the final decline of The Episcopal Church.

The similarly printed, bound book which contained all the names of The Episcopal Clergy was known as "The Red Book." It was also known as "The Stud Book," even a decade after the ordination of women.

To my knowledge, the color controversy died a quiet, dignified death with the coming of the Age of Technology and is now available online. It was buried alongside the very large three-ring binders which deputies used to lug around from hearing to hearing to legislative session. Deputies of a certain age will remember reams of paper being distributed with the latest updated version of changes to resolutions and the loud "click, click, click" of deputies adding pages to their three-ring binders.

It will also be remembered that Pam Chinnis, the first woman to be President of the House of Deputies and a force with which to be reckoned, would occasionally raise her voice from the podium, rap her gavel, and scold, "Silence. Stop. That. Clicking."

I hope something good happens to you today.

A Eulogy for Perren 23 Feb 3:24 PM (last month)

A Eulogy for Fr. E. Perren Hayes

Gospel John 14:1-6

The Rev Dr. Elizabeth Kaeton

“How can we know the way?” 'Doubting' Thomas asked Jesus.

You know, as I think of it, Perren could have subbed in for Thomas as one of the disciples. That’s not because Thomas is “doubting”. No, Thomas wasn’t doubting. Thomas was curious. And E. Perren Hays was nothing if not curious. Indeed, he was one of the most intellectually curious Episcopal priests I’ve known. And, he would never deny you the opportunity – God forbid it! – to learn all about the things his curiosity had just discovered or uncovered.

Perren was curious about curious things. Things that have captured the curiosity of artists from the time cave-dwellers tried to capture a moment in time and draw that in pictures on the inside of caves or trace them on pieces of stretched, dried animal hide.

He was curious about the light. I remember spending an extra 30 minutes with him one afternoon, because he wanted me to see how the sun shifted on the lawn and the trees from his window in his room at Atlantic Shores.

Now, Perren was also highly skilled at convincing people that they had more time to spend with him than they thought they had – indeed, he could be maddening in that way – but that’s another story for another time. The fact of the matter is that he was right: It was, indeed, fascinating to watch the shadow move slowly across the lawn, and to watch the leaves of the trees take on a variety of the shade of green. And we ought to “make time” to watch it.

Perren was very, very curious about time. He understood that linear time was the invention and preoccupation of the human mind but he often quoted to me the line from the psalmist which has been captured in one of our hymns: "A thousand ages in thy sight are like and evening gone".

Perren’s mind was intensely curious about the mind of God – how God might conceive of time and light and how, in the human mind, at least, one informed the other. There would be no understanding of evening without the absence of light and no morning without its presence.

When speaking of Steven Hawking, Perren once pondered aloud that as the human mind of Hawking was so incredibly brilliant, and if humans are made in the likeness and image of God, how glorious must be the mind of God! “In some ways,” he said, “I can’t wait to find out.”

Hubble Star Nursery

The Epiphany of Unwilling Immortality: Henrietta Lacks 23 Feb 6:58 AM (last month)

Good Sunday morning, good pilgrims on the way of the remains of The Epiphany Season. Today is (was) known as Sexagesima, the second Sunday before Lent, which makes it 58 days (not 60) and the 8th Sunday before Easter.

Back in the day, the focus of the meditation for this week was on the story of Noah and how, after the destruction of the flood, God set a rainbow in the sky to remind all of God's creatures (and, I suspect, God's self) of God's promise of a kind of immortality. God promised never again to destroy the earth, its creatures or creation, that we would live on through each other. 

I don't know that God had to make that promise. I suspect we needed to make that promise to God. We seem to be testing God at God's word every single day.

Today is also the 23rd day of Black History Month and I want to lift up, celebrate, and call out the name of the one who shines as an Epiphany, a manifestation of God. It's a tragic story, as many of the stories in this part of American history often are, but it is one that proves that Dr. King was right: The moral arc of history is long, but it always bends toward justice.

Today I want to talk about Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells, harvested without her permission, saved countless millions of people with cancer.

Her story begins on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, where she was born to Eliza Pleasant (nee Lacks) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant.  Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie.

Ms. "Hennie"

When Ms. Henrietta was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Ms. Henrietta's father moved the family to Clover, VA, where the children were distributed among relatives.

She ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Ms. Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin and future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002).

Lacks Family - Congressional Medal of Honor

Perhaps it was because Hopkins Hospital was only one of a few hospitals to treat poor Black people that they felt a sense of "ownership". But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, Black and uneducated, never consented to her cells being studied. For 62 years, her family had been left out of the decision-making about that research.

Hopkins Hospital also stated that, after reflection on their 50 year relationship with the Lacks family, "we found that Johns Hopkins could have – and should have – done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests."

Finally, in 2013, the National Institutes of Health came to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used. In the history of the NIH, that had never before happened .

In fairness, it should be noted that, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, as Johns Hopkins itself reports, they "offered HeLa cells (named for the first two letters of her first and last name) freely and widely for scientific research."

Officials at the National Institutes of Health ultimately acknowledge that they should have contacted the Lacks family when researchers first applied for a grant to sequence the HeLa genome. They belatedly addressed the problem after the family raised its objections.

The Lacks family and the N.I.H. settled on an agreement: the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes’ database of genotypes and phenotypes. Researchers who want to use the data can apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members.

The agreement does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome.

The Lack Grand & Great Grand Daughters

As one who has benefited from cancer research, I feel a special debt of gratitude to Ms. Henrietta Lacks, unwitting and unwilling as she might have been to be a recipient of my deep thanks.

I am especially grateful that the research on her cells has made it possible to test my DNA as well as the unique DNA of my particular cancer tumor which provides information for me to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

They now know that the DNA that was passed down to them from me does not contain the DNA of either breast nor bowel cancer.

Ms. Henrietta is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. She will also be remembered with her name on a building at Johns Hopkins, a Congressional Medal of Honor, and in various other ways.

Ms. Henrietta Lacks will live on in immortality - without her understanding or permission - with deep gratitude that, despite her tragedy and poverty and oppression, and through the persistent efforts of her children and grandchildren, something good has come.

There are many ways God's promise to Noah is lived out. A rainbow in the sky is but one.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

We Who Believe in Freedom: Ella Baker 22 Feb 6:21 AM (last month)

Ms. Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker. In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard where her father worked. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven years old when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.

She grew up there, in North Carolina, the middle of three surviving siblings, listening to her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, and her stories about life under slavery. It was from her grandmother that she learned the full meaning - and the dangers - of resistance and resilience.

As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. She was punished for her insubordination with hard labor plowing fallow fields. Despite the work, she nevertheless attended every celebration on the plantation, dancing until the early hours of the morning to show that her spirit remained unbowed.

Her grandmother’s pride and resilience in the face of racism and injustice continued to inspire Ms. Ella throughout her life. Her particular talent was assisting people to empower themselves, giving them a context for understanding the injustices Black people continue to face, as her grandmother had provided for her. People in her town knew Ms. Ella Jo as "the whirlwind". Seems she inherited her grandmother's energy level, as well.

Ella's Song contains the words: "That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people, passing on to others that which was passed on to me."

Sweet Honey in the Rock

Ms. Ella attended Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.

During this time, Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, many women in the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance  about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals in the movement.

It occurs to me that many of the Black women I've known who are leaders in The Episcopal Church, have also adopted this practice of dissemblance, which often raises questions about their sexual orientation. I'm thinking here, especially, of Bishop Barbara Clementine Harris.

Just a few weeks ago, a woman who had graduated from CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific) remarked, as if it were true, that the resistance to Bishop Barbara's election was that not only was she a woman and an African-American, but that she was a lesbian.

I laughed right out loud. There is, of course, nothing in the world wrong with being a lesbian. That said, Barbara Clementine Harris was not a lesbian. Strong? Feisty? Opinionated? Black Feminist/Womanist Liberation Theologian? Check. Check. Check. And, check. Lesbian? Well, we want the best for our leaders, of course, but that was not true of Bishop Barbara. She made up for it by being one of the strongest advocates for LGBTQ+ people in the House of Bishops.

Ella's Song was written as a tribute to Ms. Ella by her friend Bernice Reagon. It contains the words
"I'm a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard.
At times I can be quite difficult, I'll bow to no man's word."

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer; and others who became lifelong friends. The Harlem Renaissance influenced her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

From Ella's Song: "Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize,
that teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives."

Historical highway marker in NC

In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

Ms. Ella began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Ms. Ella co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  she organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held at her alma mater, Shaw University, during the Easter weekend of 1960.

She had immediately recognized the potential of the students involved in the Sit-in Movement and wanted to bring leaders of the Movement together to meet one another and to consider future work. Miss Baker, as the students usually called her, persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King to put up the $800 needed to hold the conference. Rev. King hoped they would become an SCLC student wing. Ms Baker, however, encouraged the students to think about forming their own organization.

Addressing the conference, Rev. King asked the students to commit to nonviolence as a way of life, but for most in attendance, nonviolence was simply an effective tactic. Speaking to the conference Ms. Baker told the students that their struggle was “much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke.”

In presenting this bigger picture and encouraging them to form their own organization, Ms. Baker displayed the talents she learned from her grandmother: resistance, resilience and assisting people to empower themselves.  The students decided to form their own organization: SNCC. And with the formation of SNCC, she encouraged the new organization to organize from the bottom up.

From Ella's Song: To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail.
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale.

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm

Committed to achieving racial equality

I think, of all the things I've learned about Ms. Ella Jo Baker, this one fact is the most impressive. I mean, imagine standing up to a giant like MLK, Jr. Imagine being so committed to the principles of resistance, resilience and empowerment, that you stand up for them, even in the face of the sexism known to exist in the Movement, and to the very face of the Leadership of the Civil Rights Movement.

Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.  In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism and to register black voters.

She is often referred to as "the unsung hero of the Civil Right's Movement." Ms. Ella's influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.

The very first verse of Ella's Song "Until the killing of Black men, Black mother's sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mother's sons," calls us to remember the systemic nature of racism. Racism not only hurts the people it oppresses, but it causes serious damage to the souls of the oppressor.

Which is why it is so important to remember that Black History is American History. It is critically important that we take at least these 28 days every year to remember and recall and celebrate the contributions of Black people to our history and heritage and culture.

Every year. Every single year.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

A Bright Epiphany Light Phillis Wheatley 21 Feb 8:07 AM (last month)

Statue of Phillis Wheatley on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail

"On being brought from Africa to America":

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

That was one of the first poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet. 

The internalized oppression makes me weep every time I read it.

Born in West Africa - either in present day Gambia or Senegal - in 1753, Ms. Phillis was was sold by a local chief to a visiting trader, who took her to Boston in the then British Colony of Massachusetts on July 11, 1761,^[on a slave ship called The Phillis. She was seven or eight years old.

After she arrived in Boston, Ms. Phillis was bought by the wealthy Boston merchant and tailor, John Wheatley, as a slave for his wife Susanna. She was named after the slave ship that took her from her homeland, and was given their surname. Her birth name is not recorded in history.

It was common in those days for people to know the birth date, place and pedigree of their cattle and horses and even their house pets, but not of the humans they held in bondage. 

The Wheatleys' 18-year-old daughter, Mary, was Ms. Phillis's first tutor in reading and writing. Their son, Nathaniel, also tutored her. John Wheatley was known as a progressive throughout New England; his family afforded Ms. Phillis an unprecedented education for an enslaved person, and one unusual for a woman of any race at the time.

When she was 11, she began corresponding with preachers and friends. By the age of 12, Ms. Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics in their original languages, as well as difficult passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, "To the University of Cambridge [Harvard], in New England," complete with classical Greek references.

In that poem, she encourages Harvard students to be grateful for their privileges and to live virtuously. The poem wasn't published until 1773. Ms. Phillis would encounter great difficulty in getting her work published, even though the Wheatleys promoted her enthusiastically.

At first, publishers in Boston had declined to publish her poetry, doubting that an African slave was capable of writing such excellent poetry.

Ms. Phillis was forced to defend herself and her integrity in court in 1772. Indeed, she was defended in court by several prominent people, including John Hancock, as well as the Mayor of Boston and the Lt. Governor and Governor of Massachusetts, who all had read her work, examined Ms. Phillis, and verified its authenticity.

They even signed a statement which exonerated her.

In 1773, Susannah Wheatley sent Ms. Phillis to England. Even though Phillis’s fame was growing, Susannah felt she would have a better chance of publishing her poems in England. 

 She sent Ms. Phillis, escorted by Susannah’s son, Nathaniel, to London where she met many important figures of the day.

Influential people in London were very interested in her poetry and many became her patrons. Her collected works, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' was published in London in 1773. This publication brought Ms. Phillis fame in both England and in the American colonies. She included the signed statement from her case in court in the preface of that book.

Unfortunately, shortly after her arrival in London Ms. Phillis learned that Susanna Wheatley had become gravely ill. Phillis returned immediately to Boston and in 1774 Susanna died.

Ms. Phillis was freed but stayed on with John Wheatley until he died in 1778. Her freedom meant she had lost her patrons and even though she had written a second volume of poems in 1779, she could not get them published. Fortunately, some of her poems from the second volume were later published in pamphlets and newspapers.

While none other than George Washington praised her work, Thomas Jefferson, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was unwilling to acknowledge the value of her work or the work of any black poet. He wrote:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.

Jefferson was not the only noted, Enlightenment figure who held racist views. Such luminaries as David Hume and Emmanuel Kant likewise believed Africans were not fully human.

Unfortunately, her poetry has earned her controversy and criticism from Black scholars as well, seeing her work as a prime example of "Uncle Tom Syndrome," and believing that this furthers this syndrome among descendants of Africans in the Americas.

Others have argued on her behalf, citing that her work was used successfully by abolitionists as evidence of the intellectual and creative capacities of African descendants. Henry Louis Gates asked "What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft?"

Shortly after the death of John Wheatley and her emancipation, Ms. Phillis met and married John Peters, an impoverished free black grocer. They lived in poor conditions and two of their babies died.

John was imprisoned for debt in 1784. With a sickly infant son to provide for, Ms. Phillis became a a scullery maid at a boarding house, doing work she had never done before. She developed pneumonia and died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31, after giving birth to a daughter, who died the same day as her.

It is never easy to be "the first" in any category but it certainly helps when one is to the position born. That would seem to be so for Ms. Phillis Wheatley. In her very short life with its tragic ending - too soon! - she was able to open minds and hearts to her full humanity and so, the possibility of the full humanity of others - including that of her oppressors.

Her life and her work demonstrated that art in all of its forms - poetry, literature, music, sculpture, pottery, fabric - is able to cross boundaries and cultures and languages and weaken the stronghold of prejudice and bigotry, even while bearing its unbearable burdens. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia. 

Three Black Women of Literacy: Harriet Jacobs, Susie King & Septima Clark 20 Feb 5:24 AM (last month)

* 54% of adults read below a 6th grade level. 

* 20% of adults read below a 5th grade level  

* 34% of adults who lack literacy proficiency were born outside the US

20% of high school seniors can be classified as functionally illiterate at graduation

70% of prisoners in state and federal systems are illiterate
85% of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate
43% of those with the lowest literacy skill live in poverty.

Let me also add this: According to recent data compiled by Pew Research, approximately 56% of people incarcerated in the US are people of color, with Black Americans being disproportionately represented in the prison population, making up around 32% of the incarcerated population despite representing a smaller percentage of the overall US population.

If you hear alarm bells going off as you consider of present administrations' fervent, passionate goal to dismantle the US Department of Education, you may, in fact, be "woke".

Harriet A. Jacobs

You may also understand why literacy has been a passionate goal of the Black Community. I want to lift up and celebrate and call the names of three women who have been heroes of this movement. These women fought against incredible odds to teach themselves how to read and write and then, became fiercely committed to making sure others were literate. They understood that literacy was one of the keys to liberation. Their clue was that their slave owners were fiercely committed to keeping them illiterate.

This is taken from the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation:

In 2020, three Black women of literacy

Susie King Taylor

‣ Susie King Taylor was born a slave in Georgia in 1848. She was taught to read and write by a freed woman, going to school each day “with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them.” (King, 1902, p.5). She was the first African American teacher in Georgia and taught children and adults at a Freedmen’s school. A published author, she related her stories of the Civil War and teaching adults in her book, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers: “I had about forty children to teach, beside a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” (King,1902, p.11).

‣ Lastly, born in 1898 in South Carolina, Septima Poinsette Clark was a teacher and Civil Rights activist. Known as an innovative teacher, she used “real world” materials in her
teaching and tied her teaching to voting rights. She helped start Citizenship Schools for Black adults and led the Voter Registration Project from 1962-1966. She retired in 1970, after having an enormous impact on voter registration in the south—over a million African Americans had registered to vote. In 1979, she received the Living Legacy Awardfrom President Jimmy Carter. Her published works include Echo in My Soul and Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement.

Septima Poinsette Clark

Years ago, at a General Convention in some city, a long, long ago, it was my privilege to serve on the Urban and Social Justice Committee (I think it was, then, Committee 25). One of the hearings of that committee was on the Industrial Prison Complex.

I remember with a kind of intense clarity the testimony of a woman, an Episcopal Priest, who had served as a Prison Chaplain, on Death Row as part of the Texas Prison System, which has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of executions in America. (Note: Alabama has a high death sentencing rate due to judges overriding jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment. Since 1976, Alabama judges have overridden jury verdicts 112 times.)

She said that, as she heard the confessions of the inmates before their executions, they expressed three consistent "wishes":

"I wish I had been able to read."
"I wish I had never started drugs."
"I wish I had a family."

The Women of Black History Month: Paging Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler 19 Feb 4:26 AM (last month)

"It may be well to state here that, having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others. Later in life I devoted my time, when best I could, to nursing as a business, serving under different doctors for a period of eight years (from 1852 to 1860); most of the time at my adopted home in Charlestown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. From these doctors I received letters commending me to the faculty of the New England Female Medical College, whence, four years afterward, I received the degree of doctress of medicine."

Dr. Crumpler practiced in Boston for a short while before moving to Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War ended in 1865. Richmond, she felt, would be

"a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children. During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled . . . to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored."

"At the close of my services in that city," she explained, "I returned to my former home, Boston, where I entered into the work with renewed vigor, practicing outside, and receiving children in the house for treatment; regardless, in a measure, of remuneration."

I am delighted to learn even this little bit about Dr. Crumpler and feel pleased to know of her Delaware and Massachusetts connections. I can't tell you how often I walked on Joy Street in Boston, having been the former home of the Diocesan Offices, which moved in 1988 after 100 years to Tremont Street, adjacent to the Cathedral. 

It feels a privilege to have walked the same neighborhood where Dr. Crumpler lived and tended to those who were sick and had no other means of care. Next time I'm in Boston, I plan to visit her former residence and say a prayer of thanksgiving for her life.

I pray today that her spirit hovers over and informs the other former resident of Massachusetts, that the decisions he makes for the millions of people in his care will be wise, founded on good science and ethics, and devoid of political influence.

Not a dream. It's actually what all of his predecessors have done.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.