“The First Epiphany Awakened in the Moment”

16 January 2011

The Second Sunday of Epiphany

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

The season of Epiphany is about the light of God shining forth in the world, even moving into the darkness.  We celebrate the moments of breakthrough, where the love of God is glimpsed, living and abiding here in this troubled world.  The idea behind this season is that our own sacred witness even increases the presence of God in the world.  Our words and actions can help to bring more of God into a world that has so many problems, and so much pain and violence.

I encourage people I know to celebrate the entire twelve days of Christmas; that the holiday is not just one day of benevolent commercialism through gift giving.  It is a whole season—nearly two weeks—to make room for God to grow into our hearts and minds; that the Christ child is not something, or someone, that we toss out like our old Christmas trees, but rather something to nurture and raise up in our own lives.  The season of Epiphany takes things even further into the new year, witnessing to the love of God in the arrival of the wise men, and now the first moments of Jesus’s ministry as the messiah.   

This said, these early scenes of Epiphany are kind of ordinary in a way.  From Matthew’s gospel, three wise men—three scholars—take a long journey to visit a baby that they believe will change the world.  But if you actually saw this happening at the time, it might not strike you as extraordinary at all.  You might miss the miracle, even if it were right in front of you.  I think this happens to us all the time.  Matthew makes it known that God is active in these three men’s journey; by communicating with them through their dreams.  God tells them not to cooperate with a powerful ruler, King Herod, so they do not tell the king where the Christ child is.  They go home by a different way.  The last two weeks tell the story of Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist, first from Matthew’s gospel, and now today from John.  Once again, on one level, it is simple event of a ritual bath offered by a great teacher to a new master, the same Jesus once visited by the scholars.  What makes the baptism extraordinary is the presence of God in the scene.  John the Baptist testifies that God was present at the baptism of Jesus: “’I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.’  ‘And I myself have testified that this is the Son of God.’”  In Matthew’s gospel, the voice of God is audible at the ordinary event of Jesus’s baptism.  God’s presence makes the event extraordinary.  But did everyone hear it?  Did everyone see what John saw? 

This season of Epiphany seems to be telling us that it takes hard work, and spiritual concentration, to see the hand of God in the world.  That we have to clean our lens—our vision, our way of seeing the world.  That we should clean out our ears, and our mouths too, if we want to help God’s love move more deeply into the ordinary events of our world, our Earth that we share with each other, with the animals, and with the generations to come.

As I wrote this sermon yesterday afternoon, I was also mentally preparing to coach my basketball team against Trinity Pawling, always a formidable opponent.  For some reason, they don’t seem to like us very much.  Mental preparation, the cultivation of one’s mind, is very important in athletics, and in academics too.  If you can meditate silently for ten minutes—ten minutes of relaxed concentration before you study—you can work, effectively, for hours.  You can release your complete creativity by being in the moment with a task.  My basketball team regularly meditates during our practice time, several times a week (we also have Native American spirit animals and Indian names from our two vision quests, but I leave that for another sermon).  I believe this meditation time is as important as any drill or scrimmage, and Coach Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers agrees with me.  He’s my elder, so it would be more respectful to say that I agree with him, and follow his example as a coach and spiritual leader on the court.  I regularly read from his book Sacred Hoops before meditation time with my team.  Jackson believes that spiritual exploration and basketball are integrally related, as are basketball and life itself.   Coach Phil Jackson consciously blends the fundamentalist Christianity of his youth growing up on the Dakota Plains with the enlightenment traditions of Eastern religion, especially Zen Buddhism; with its spiritual teaching about how to be awake and alert in the moment. 

From Jackson’s book on religion and basketball, Sacred Hoops:

“…To excel, you need to act with a clear mind and be totally focused on what everyone on the floor is doing.  Some athletes describe this quality of mind as a ‘cocoon of concentration.’  But that implies shutting out the world when what you really need to do is become more acutely aware of what’s happening right now, this very moment.

The secret is not thinking.  That doesn’t mean being stupid; it means quieting the endless jabbering of thoughts so that your body can do instinctively what it’s been trained to do without the mind getting in the way.  All of us have had flashes of this sense of oneness--…creating a work of art—when we’re completely immersed in the moment, inseparable from what we’re doing.  This kind of experience happens all the time on the basketball floor; that’s why the game is so intoxicating.  But if you’re really paying attention, it can also occur while you’re performing mundane tasks…

In Zen it is said that all you need to do to reach enlightenment is ‘chop wood, carry water.’  The point is to perform every activity, from playing basketball to taking out the garbage, with precise attention, moment by moment.” 

When my team meditates, I encourage them to aim above basketball—to aim at the mystery of life itself.  I compare this to working very hard on a paper or project or lab, but while letting go of the grade you hope to get: just be in the moment.  Aim at excellence above grades.  There is extraordinary freedom, the freedom of the moment, when you do this.

How can life change if more people are present in the moment? 

First of all, I think there would be less texting and better driving on the roads.  I also believe the love of God can enter the world more directly when we aim above ourselves, above the crass pettiness and cruel violence of our dark world.  Here are some examples.  It was a seventy-four year old man named Bill Badger who tackled the gunman in Tucson after watching him shoot a little girl: “Something had to be done,” the former army colonel said about his intervention in the heat of a moment.  Badger was shot in the head during the action, but his wound was fortunately just a graze.  It was a sixty-one year old woman, Patricia Maisch, who wrestled with the gunman on the ground, and prevented him from reloading a fresh ammunition clip into his Glock.  Without the actions of these two older citizens, many more than twenty people would have been shot.  Yet we might walk past these two and not notice anything special about them. 

We need to clean our lens, to open our ears—to wake up to God in the moment.  Along with these actions, by people who still don’t consider themselves heroes, are the decisions and expertise of the medical personnel, from the first paramedics on the scene to the brain surgeons at the hospital, who showed care, intense concentration, intelligence, and deep compassion with the life or death decisions for Congresswoman Giffords, and fourteen other wounded individuals.  The survival of Representative Giffords is a miracle, but it was people like you could be one day who made it happen in reality.  In moments of tragedy and great evil, there is also the corresponding love of God and humankind that is so much stronger. 

From John’s gospel, in its beautiful opening: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

I don’t want to leave you this morning with just a troubled and violent world in mind’s eye, however countered by selfless and loving action by individuals acting in the moment.  I will close this morning with a poem by the playwright Jose Rivera.  The poem is an odd one, as poems go; it’s just a list of the first times that you do something.  These could be ordinary events that you rush past on the way to…where are we going anyway?  Kids want to grow up and be adults, and adults long for their lost youth.  It’s crazy the way we are.  There is another way: to be completely awake in the moment.  Then this poem, this list of firsts, becomes your own witness to the beauty and wonder of your life, and the deep and abiding love of the Creator God, who is really as close to you as the person sitting beside you right now. 

From Jose Rivera:        

The first time a child trusts you to carry them to the next room.

The first time you drive from Westfield, Massachusetts, to San Diego, with someone you’re in love with.

The first time you watch birth.

The first lines of Paradise Lost.

The first time you make a decisive three point shot in a game that really counts.

The first time you get the dog to go outside.

The first time you can read “I love you” in a lover’s eyes.

The first family reunion without homicidal fantasies.

The first love letter.

The first serious talk about love with your child.

The first epiphany.

The first time you hear Lorca in Spanish.

The first real friendship with a person of another race.

The first gray hair.

The first time you see Picasso’s Guernica.

The first time you visit your birthplace.

The first time you hear Lightning Hopkins.

The first visible comet.

The first time you feel attractive and someone calls you “angel.”

The first experience with something remotely like a god.

The first recovery after a serious illness.

The first time therapy makes sense.

The first birthday of your first born.

The first time you can’t walk and your lover carries you to the next room.

The first foul ball you catch in Fenway Park.

The first time you stand alone and you’re scared to death and you don’t change your position.

The first time you’re convinced of your mortality and you laugh.

The first sunrise after the first death of a parent.

The first time you forgive the unforgivable.

The first time you see the Earth from space.

The first time it is truly obvious that it was better that you had lived, at this time, in this world.

The first time you decide every moment of your life should be a work of art.

The first time you die and you breathe again and you speak to the living.

The first time you realize that it all just might have been okay.

Church of Lost Hats Sample of Eire

Chapter 10

Painting Hannah

     The Andrews family was sitting in the sun at the beach.  There were five of us sprawled on two blankets with a navy blue and green tartan.  Duncan Andrews was writing in his journal as he sat up next to his wife Janet.  The waves’ incessant angry and soothing sound filled my ears, and I lay on my back gazing at the deep blue sky.  I was holding hands with my girlfriend Emily, and her hand was smooth and strangely cool.  Behind her sunglasses, she watched her father’s face as he wrote in his journal.  Duncan was agitated and sometimes covered his face as he kept up with his notes in the brown journal he always had with him.  Janet Andrews lay on her stomach with her swimsuit top unsnapped, and her brown back glistened in the late morning sun.  The sides of her breasts were nicely tanned too, and I looked away when she glanced at me.  I had come to Bermuda for three days to visit Emily and her family and take a break from my theological studies in New York, a break I badly needed after my first winter in the Northeast.  We were staying on the eastern part of St. George’s Island, and our beach was near a strip of land called the Achilles Heel.  It was an accurate name for the place where we all were.

     Duncan Andrews was an English professor at the State University of New York in Albany.  His younger daughter Hannah, who was thirteen, had an advanced case of bone cancer, and she was involved in an alternative treatment with a medical clinic in Bermuda.  She had tried a year of chemotherapy in New York, then at Yale Medical, but it wasn’t working. 

I had my own store of memories of cancer and chemotherapy, but Hannah’s was much more serious than mine had ever been.  I had been one of those success stories that the doctors would gather around, both happily and professionally, to watch.  Duncan was on an extended leave from his teaching, and he was working on a new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets and the people who might have inspired the poet.  His own inspiration was a lovely thirteen-year old girl with cancer.  The Andrews hadn’t told me everything about Hannah’s new treatment, but I was catching up in pieces.  Hannah gave herself injections from a small green case with the caduceus on the front, the medical staff of life and the two serpents coiling to the top in sacred battle with horrific disease.  Though no one said anything about my purpose with the Andrews, beyond my desire to be with Emily, I was cast in the role of family priest that everyone could talk to in turn.  The Andrews didn’t go to church, but it felt like all of nature was a church for three days.

     “The beach is practically empty,” I noted absently, and Duncan looked up from his writing. 

     “Some people do work.  Even here,” said Duncan.

     He was in his late forties, with grey hair and a grey vacation beard just beginning to sprout.  Duncan cried sometimes in front of me, twice since I had arrived in Bermuda.  My girlfriend Emily adored her father, and I liked his thinking and the sad web of boyish wrinkles around his eyes.  He was smoking a lot of late, and I occasionally bummed a cigarette to smoke with him, a habit Emily did not approve of in her father or her boyfriend.  I could tell Duncan was thinking about Hannah again. 

“Nick, could you pour me a glass of wine?” Duncan asked. 

I reached into the cooler.  There was imported beer, a bottle of chardonnay, grapes, and some turkey sandwiches.  I grabbed the chilled bottle and uncorked it.  I poured the wine into a plastic cup with unnecessary fancy ridges and handed it to Duncan.

“Thanks.”

I selected a St. Pauli Girl for myself.  The buxom German girl on the label always cheered me up.

It was almost noon.  Hannah took her shot at noon, depending on where they were.  Hannah was meticulous and efficient at finding a vein on the back of her hand.  When her left hand became bruised, she would switch to her right hand for a few times, and Duncan would give her the injection.

Janet Andrews turned over in the sun, and I saw the white stretch marks on her thighs.  She was still very pretty, and sometimes people thought she and Emily were sisters, which Janet really enjoyed.  She wasn’t vain—just an attractive woman who truly enjoyed being sensual, with both intellectual ideas and feelings.  I occasionally thought of her when I kissed Emily.  There were tiny beads of sweat and sand on her chest as she adjusted and snapped her bikini top. 

The sea had become calm.  I got up for a swim.

“Want to join me for a dip?”  I asked Emily.

“I think I’ll read.  You go ahead.”

“I’ll come,” Hannah said eagerly.

Her parents looked up and watched Hannah closely.  The bone cancer had weakened her, but she still was a good tough swimmer.  She was wearing a goofy hunting cap that I had given her from my childhood collection of hats; it was kind of hat with the ear flaps that Holden Caulfield wore to cheer himself.  Hair loss is a bitch, I knew from experience, so you need to turn the tables with weird hats.  She untied the silly hat and took it off, and there were only a few wisps of red hair left.  The hairs drifted in the breeze, and Hannah didn’t seem to care about how she looked.  She walked with me over the pinkish sand to the surf, and I took off Emily’s Yale sweatshirt as we walked.  There were more people arriving on the beach now.  Some of them had colorful umbrellas stuck in the sand. 

“It’s twenty to noon,” called Duncan.  “Just so you know.”

Hannah just waved back at her father. She grabbed my hand by reflex when the water hit our legs.  The sun sprayed its blinding reflections on the water, and we walked diagonally into the water, away from the searing brightness.  Light waves tossed whitely at our legs.  Hannah wore a red one-piece suit, and I wore my old black and gold West Point swim trunks.  Even after leaving West Point, I still loved my academy clothing remnants, and I could spend whole afternoons in Army-Navy surplus stores.  We waded beyond the waves to the smoother swells.  The water was calm, so I decided not to worry about Hannah.  I looked back at Emily and her parents, and father and daughter were buried in their books.  Janet read a magazine. 

“I’ve always wanted to be an otter, you know,” Hannah confessed to me.  “They can swim and eat at the same time, which is pretty cool.  The males chew up the females’ noses during mating, which is not so cool.  What kind of animal are you?”

“I’m a hawk.  A red-tailed hawk.  They’re the messenger in the Native American tradition.”

“It’s a bird of prey too.  Is that a conflict for a priest?”

“A man has to eat, and feed his little hawks.  But I did drop out of West Point.”

The water was almost to my waist, and Hannah dove into the approaching wave.  I dove too, got all the way in, and I looked up at the surface from underwater, seeing the cloudy spears of light reaching into the darkness all around me.  I could see Hannah’s dark form kicking ahead of me.  I wanted to grab her thin legs, but that might not be funny under the circumstances.  I came to the surface and stood on my tip toes, facing the beach.  Hannah turned towards me and climbed onto my back.  The playful otter.  I swam out with her hanging on my back.  I could feel her body on mine and the occasional brush of her thin legs, trying to help me with the kicking. 

I thought about painting.  Painting Hannah.  I had left my paints and canvasses back at the Episcopal seminary in Manhattan where I studied theology.  But I had brought my sketch pad and charcoal pencils to work over the weekend.  I had drawn two charcoal sketches of a bald Hannah from recent family photographs.  Emily had no idea I was drawing her sister in a serious vein.  I was trying to find the right shape for a painting that would last forever.  I prayed with all my heart that Hannah wouldn’t die.  Drawing Hannah had felt like a self-portrait in a strange way, a sketching of the feminine half of my own soul that I was now able to see on the outside.  And without her hair, I sometimes had flashes where she was a little boy to me.  A tough little boy.  I didn’t know enough about the new treatment she was doing, and Duncan had such strong opinions.  Perhaps they had given up on the traditional chemotherapy too soon.

“Do you want to marry Emily?” Hannah asked, her breath sweet in my ear as we braced for a wave, floating then together for a moment in the swell, her body still tight on mine. 

“I’m too poor to marry a Yalie.”

“Not now, silly.  After you graduate.”

“I don’t think she would like being a priest’s wife.  As a matter of fact, I’m sure of it.  She would hate it.  I would hate it.”

“She loves you.  You should see her face when you kiss her.  I would certainly be happy to be your wife.  As long as you didn’t chew up my nose.”

“I would never do that.  To you or your sister.  Not even to your mama.”

Hannah started giggling, and she held on tight as I floated and paddled.  I’m a tugboat, I thought.  Transporting pure gold.  Chemotherapy had been my alchemy, the origin of my call to the priesthood: The craft of the body and the blood.  Now I could see the same breathing, bleeding spirit in a beautiful, bald girl.  The Christ presence could be found in women in the same pattern as in men.  Part of me wondered if I dated Emily just to be with her sister.  Truth be told, I was in love with all three women in the Andrews family.  Emily was the just the one with whom I got to express my love physically.

“Nicky, I’m tired.”

“Ok.

I turned back towards shore and soon we were walking in the white foam, then on the wet sand.  Dry sand stuck to our feet, and Hannah held my hand tightly.  We toweled off by the blue and green blankets, and Hannah sat down with her medical kit.  Duncan, Janet, Emily, and I all watched her.  Hannah spread rubbing alcohol on the back of her hand, and just the alcohol smell took me back fourteen years to Stanford Children’s Hospital. I looked away self-consciously, but then I had to watch, like the rest of the family.  She found the vein with the small needle.  She was thirteen, and she never missed now.  She closed her eyes as she depressed the syringe. 

Chemotherapy was supposed to lower your IQ, and I wondered what this new stuff did.  I thought of her hand like a blooming island flower, brightest in its colors before death, and the shot went through to the sacred center.  The noon bee in the garden.  The beautiful terror of her treatment began to seem natural, normal, like all the little things each person does during the day to keep her world alive. 

There was sorrow even in paradise.

Emily and I took a hike together in the afternoon.  Three days in Bermuda was like heaven to me, and seminary seemed like a half-remembered dream.  I didn’t want to go back.  Hannah was a tough kid, I thought, and I imagined her body ripening as a woman in remission.  It was more than a fleeting image; it was my beautiful prayer before my God.  A God of unspeakable love, and ecstasy. 

I had met Emily at a party at Columbia University, with seminarians from General and Union Seminary mixing with the undergraduates from Columbia, Barnard, and Yale.  Most people think of seminarians as dorks, but I’ve got some sweet moves—I’ve got game with the ladies.  We connected immediately and talked quietly in a corner the entire party, sharing the occasional Dunhill cigarette.  I didn’t even kiss her the first night, which is one of the sweetest moves of all.  Emily was a theater major at Yale, and I enjoyed getting away from the seminary close and hanging out with her friends in New Haven.  Being with Emily also kept me out of trouble at the seminary, and I loved reading on the train to Yale.  Relationships were instantly serious at General Theological Seminary.  It was like living a literary experience in a nineteenth century Victorian novel, so I tried to keep Emily away from the seminary and its instant gossip as much as possible.  It was better to read Trollope, not to live out its perilous Victorian chapters of courtship.

On the hike, Emily was talking about an upcoming play that she was in, written by a fellow Yale student.  Emily was intelligent and artistic in a different way than I was.  She acted in front of crowds.  I preached to congregations, but my real art came to me when I was alone.  Writing and painting were my sacred hobbies.    

Emily the actress had red hair and olive skin like her mother, but she was taller and had her father’s pale blue eyes.  She was wearing khaki Bermuda shorts and a black bikini top.  She had a great tan that she would take back to college.  Emily looked fantastic, and I was once again struck by the spiritual and physical awareness that the divinity who made women was really showing off. 

“I’m so glad you like my family.  They’re crazy about you, especially Hannah.  You probably know that, she has such a big heart.  You can’t miss it.  Everything with her illness scares my other friends.  But you’ve been through this yourself.  That means the world to her.”

“Your family is cool.  Nobody hides anything.”

“Oh, we hide plenty.  Just wait and see.”

“Is this the actress talking to me?” I asked and pulled her close to me. 

Our bodies needed each other with the beauty, and the sorrow, all around us.  Sorrow can awaken desire as well.  We kissed, loosening all of the differences between us, playing her tongue with mine for a long time.  Our bodies pressed together with a growing and wordless urgency.  Remembering Hannah’s words, I opened my eyes to look at Emily as she explored my mouth and teeth.  I felt her hips with my hands, exploring the front of them below her waist, the flat spot that she loved for me to touch, simply, gently, like a polishing a flat rock, or beautiful gem. 

I moved slowly up her ribs, one by one, like Adam with his bride companion, and then to her full breasts.  They felt smooth and strong, the twin blossoming secrets of life itself, out in the open.  Her breasts were resilient under the black surface of her top.  Her cheeks were flushed, and she pulled away, bringing me with her as she held my hand.

There was no one on the path between the dunes and the trees, and the palm trees beckoned us, swaying gently in the light, caressing wind.  We weren’t the first, the trees told us, and we wouldn’t be the last, to unite male and female in paradise.  We were made for this, nature and the her deity told us. 

We found a shady spot, and I spread out the blanket from the picnic basket.  We didn’t need the food her mother had packed.  We kissed again.  I unclasped her bikini top at the front and plunged downward with my kisses.  I slowly unbuttoned her khaki shorts, sliding them off with her bikini bottoms together.  Emily giggled as they got momentarily stuck on her sandals, which she kicked off.  She returned the offering with my West Point trunks, untying the drawstring slowly, sliding them off completely.  I moved into her center as we stared into each other’s eyes, entering and inviting, gliding slowly together with the worlds we knew inside. 

Duncan and I shared a bottle of red table wine from France in the early evening at the rented cottage near the old town of St. George.  Janet was making fish stew and corn bread for dinner, and the sun was sinking as if it were the first day of creation’s golden experiment. 

Emily thought her father was drinking too much because of Hannah.  But he so loved the three women in his life, and Hannah was breaking his heart.  All of our hearts were breaking, and we knew it without knowing how to name our common wound.  Duncan was a published poet as well as a professor.  I’d take Duncan and his drinking any day.  Better to feel too much. 

We talked about what each of us was reading, and it felt good to be near him.  Duncan’s eyes had an animal quickness and a wordless intensity.  I could tell he was thinking about his daughter.  I saw her hand again as the island flower; with an immortal beauty in the center that could never die.  I shuddered and poured more wine.

“It’s different every time you break your heart,” Duncan said without looking at me.

“You wouldn’t want to get bored.”

We both lit a Camel from his pack, and we smoked quietly together.  I could hear the lilting chirp of a distant bird.  Duncan was a Buddhist, but he liked my connections between art and theology.  In truth, he and I were kindred spirits, despite the names and labels of organized religion and orthodoxy.  I could sometimes feel Duncan move far away, and I would stop talking and just be with him silently.

Emily and Hannah drove me to Kindley Field Airport at the end of the weekend.  Time had flown by.  Hannah sat in the front seat with us and sang funny songs that she made up as we drove along.  Emily held my hand when she wasn’t too occupied with her driving, and occasionally she would feel my leg as we listened to her sister sing her wacky spontaneous words.  Hannah was wearing the plaid hunting cap.  She loved that cap, and Hannah said it still smelled like me. 

We drove between the lining trees, and the limbs moved with their waving leaves, like an old friend saying goodbye forever.  Some of the leaves let go in the wind and floated past our windshield.  I wasn’t listening to Hannah anymore.  I reached over and held her left hand, and I slowly turned it over.  A plum colored bruise had risen near her wrist.  Without speaking, I began to softly massage the bruised and tender center of her hand.  Emily held my left hand tighter as she watched what was happening. 

Hannah never stopped singing in her sweet girl’s voice.  I wanted the moment to last, the time with the three of us gliding down the road together.  We weren’t driving; we were flying to heaven.  I could feel the sacred space between the two sisters where I sat.  I knew Hannah’s image would never leave me, and I wouldn’t have to paint from the photographs I had anymore.  I could see her inside of me, like a spiritual tattoo.

I wanted to be completely in the moment with Hannah and Emily, to be fully awake to the life of soul between us three, the third presence that is love in her ghostly essence.  The Holy Spirit, the feminine side of God barely alive in Orthodox Christianity.    

     But the weekend was coming to its close, and I was headed back to New York City alone.  Time was coming to a winged close again; just when the immortal outline of God could be glimpsed and traced by human hands in loving pattern.  The sacred name of God in the stirring sand was again washed out to sea so that another could discover it as if for the very first time.  

A portrait of Hannah would take longer than three days to rise inside of me back in the city; it would take many months to paint her portrait.  Her image would emerge from my hands in her absence, at rest forever and at peace, yet close enough to recognize her smell from another world.    

Human Transformation and Divine Worship

                                                                                                           

                                                            “So,

when I am nothing—then I am a man?”

                                                Oedipus Rex in Oedipus at Colonus

                                                “You do not know.

                        The limits of your strength.  You do not know

                        What you do.  You do not know who you are.”

                                                Dionysus in The Bacchae

            After considering the major issues of the course, it is clear to me that we are not done with the experience, wisdom, and tragedy of 5^th Century Athens, and Athens is not done with us.  The Parthenon is still standing, and we continue to learn new things about how it was built.  Even with our modern technology, it would be an architectural achievement of the highest order.  I would also argue that Athens was a good deal more egalitarian than our democratic experiment in their system of government.  Our democracy is far from perfected, and the dangers of democratic imperialism, along with the hubris of our leaders, are highlighted by the connecting dots from Sicily to Iraq. 

We want democracy in the Middle East as long as it agrees with own foreign policy position.  We want colonial puppets not autonomous partners.  At every turn, we resist the thorny wisdom that suffering augurs; instead we call our most thoughtful critics unpatriotic and play politics with fear and anxiety until September 11^th can mean anything the demagogues want it to mean.  Our use of language, particularly about democracy and freedom, has been bent far past the breaking point.  Lastly, we invoke the help of the gods as long as they agree with our own needs and plans for empire.  The experience of creating and heroically defending the democracy of Athens shaped the ideals of a people, but it also planted the seeds that would lead to empire and eventual destruction.  As we quake in fear with our meaningless color codes for terror, executive power is expanded under the waving banner of freedom by the small government cronies, civil liberties are restricted, and the prophetic voice is ostracized not the tyrant.  Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he has a really crappy body too.  Oedipus had the good sense to put his eyes out after what he did.

            In the historical records of Herodotus and Thucydides, it is clear that we must hold tightly to the wisdom of history, both ancient and our own.  Herodotus had the good sense to value the experience of foreigners and the rise and fall of other empires, and the lessons of history are much broader than the experience of any one polis or race of people.  The Lydian Croesus embodies the wisdom of Solon at the end of his life; No man is happy until he is dead.  Herodotus wrote at a time of increasingly imperialistic behavior.  The hubris of Xerxes should have inspired an Athenian humility, but it didn’t.  Xerxes represents the ultimate warning sign that human beings cannot act with the power of a god.  Herodotus presents a rationalistic method of thinking; historical events and decisions require an act of interpretation.  But it is hard to pinpoint exactly where Athens went wrong during the Golden Age.  Thucydides likewise suggests that the history of Athens did not have to turn out the way it did.  Even from the pro-Athenian standpoint of both Herodotus and Thucydides, Sparta comes across as far more reasonable in their willingness to come to terms of peace without Athens being completely destroyed.  Sparta, not Athens, seems to have a better sense of koros.

            Part of the complexity of the history that we have studied is that warfare both enhanced democracy and hastened the demise of the Athenian Empire.  Hoplite warfare helped to create a more classless society, which is part of the legacy of Athens we would do well to remember and emulate.  For those who could not afford hoplite armor, the rising importance of naval warfare offered tremendous opportunity for the lower classes.  New classes of people demanded and received a greater share of the political power, but Athens now had a professional navy with which it had to do something.  Democracy improved at home but became more radical and aggressive abroad.  Power is a pathology that must be checked, and military power needs to be held in the tightest rein of all.  In the process of rising as a hegemonic state, Athens also lost its autonomous vision of colonization.  The Delian League evolved rapidly from a seaborne vision of democratic participation to a coercive arm of Athenian imperialism on the seas.  What is most troubling about the rise and fall of Athens is that Homeric values of heroism seemed to win at the very same time.  Plutarch’s heroic presentation of Themostocles, Pericles, and Alcibiades all embody Homeric values in their living ideals.  Yet, arguably, all were aggressive imperialists who hastened the demise of the polis they loved.  Athenians loved adventure too much, and no bard inspired their sense of heroic virtue more than Homer.     

            Every society and every religion needs its prophets.  The prophet is the one who can inspire, convict, condemn, enlighten, transform, and redeem.  In Ancient Greece, the great tragedians were the prophets of the time, and their prophecy is obviously still relevant.  Any historical method of this period would likely begin with the many questions of where Athens went wrong.  When did they betray their democratic principles?  Did warfare improve democracy and simultaneously destroy it?  Did the rise of Athens as a hegemonic power overcome their fear of tyranny?  Did Athenians forget the importance of filia in their empire?  Did they simply love adventure too much? 

I think Pericles was wrong in his funeral oration.  What makes Athens great is not her government but her gods.  Democracy, however noble and brilliant its conception, is not an object of worship and adoration.  Democracy isn’t everything; no form of government is.  The American playwright Eugene O’Neil once said that no act of democratic legislation can free the human soul.  A sense of koros comes not simply from a humble understanding that everything can be lost in the reversals of life and fortune at home or on the seas.  It comes from the faith that with the gods is anything is possible.  I should be frightened by the figure of Dionysus in the The Bacchae, but instead I find him to be the only ray of hope in the end game of Athenian empire.  The mutilation of Pentheus’s body is scary indeed, but what the Peloponnesian War did to the human body, language, and Athenian values is the most terrifying thing of all.  Civilized humans mutilated the human body on a far greater scale than did Dionysus in the proof of his divinity.  Which military campaign did Dionysus lead?  When did he order the conquest of Sicily?  To follow the Dionysian thrysus is to make love not war.  I don’t believe that Euripides is just trying to highlight that the violence of the gods is to be feared in The Bacchae. Rather, he is showing that human disorder and unbelief is far more dangerous than anything the gods can do to us.  A man or woman who seeks divinity with all of his or her heart is more than a man and more than a woman.  To seek the gods is to seek the spiritual source of all order and infinite ecstasy.  To have everything is to know that you can lose everything, but that’s just the beginning.  The true Athenian virtue is neither to be a democrat nor a hero in the glorious pattern of Homer.  It is to seek the shrine of the god and goddess as a humble pilgrim who has suffered into the truth.        

Church of Lost Hats Sample of Eire

Chapter 2

Stanford Children's Hospital

Writing is like opening a vein, a special teacher once taught me.  He taught American poetry at the University of California.  Professor Duncan McNaughton taught me that teaching is holy, and the alphabet is the most precious of all gifts.  Writing is about finding a vein and drawing forth yourself: the best and darkest part of who you are, the red and lively flow of new truth. 

     To him the poem was part of the human body.  Nature was true to the poem, not the other way around, when a true vein was found by the poet.  Dr. McNaughton was a nut.  He didn't lecture; he went into bloody battle, taking no prisoners.  He walked around the campus with a limp and a cane, and he smoked unfiltered Camels incessantly.  His office reeked of smoke.  He prowled the classroom like a wounded lion with his vague, sometimes disappearing limp; he was a veteran of unspoken battles, scorched landscapes, and beautiful poems.

     "Do you feel like you're fighting for something?"  I once asked him in his office hours.

     "Truth," he told me, with his alcoholic grey eyes twinkling at my question.  "Truth keeps the world alive."

     "The world or your world?"

     "Yes," he said with a smile, as he lit another cigarette.

     You never laughed when Dr. McNaughton uttered the refrains that drove him as a teacher and as a poet.  McNaughton taught me that teaching at its heart is about human presence and love.  Knowledge follows love, which is the presence of origin.  It has been this way since the beginning of time. 

     Long after I became a divinity student and then an Episcopal priest and writer, McNaughton’s words would stay with me as I searched my own veins for the truth of who I was and what it really means to be a man.  With his help and presence, I found the lost memories I could never bear before his class.  Before Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and H.D all had their private tutorials with me.  McNaughton gave me the alphabet, the sacred tools of the scribe and priest.  I had survived childhood cancer nine years before I met my professor, though you would never hear a whisper of this from me.  My cancer began in the bone marrow and moved outward from there.  I would find out that my American Poetry teacher was a cancer survivor as well.  We even had tumors in the same places, the familiar patterns of an ancient sorrow.

     Theologians say original sin is bigger than any one of us; the deep stain of being human in a fallen world.  I don't know if this is true—and I’ve never been a fan of Augustine, but I do know that the boy I was found his own pain to be much older than his years.  It was like the problem in my marrow began long before I was born.  Mine was a new discovery of a very old pain.  A poetry class unearthed my forgotten memories of chemotherapy, and I first wrote the golden notes of remembrance in my journal for the class.  For my teacher of American Poetry, I wrote of my chemotherapy memories from Stanford Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, California.  I would pour before him a tour of duty through a lost childhood.  The place to start, as I found while studying American poets, is always the beginning. 

     I sat on the examining table wearing a white hospital robe tied in the back. My right leg was in a cast that went up to my knee, so I could still bend it while I sat there.  Both of the bones had broken in a soccer game.  It had been the fourth grade boys against the fifth, but the ambulance had stopped the game for good because of me.  My head was bandaged where the first bump had been found.  The tumor had been removed by my family doctor, but I had been sent to Stanford Children's Hospital.  I remembered how quiet the doctor became when he opened the bump.  I had cancer.  The word dug into my body when I said it to myself.  It stung like an evil insect, its stinger working deep beneath my skin, seeking my bloodstream.

     There was a doctor at Stanford who was going to help me.  That's what everyone said.  The doctor was talking to the nurse as my mother tried to give me her smile.  My mother's eyes were red, and I had pretended not to notice that she was crying as we drove to Stanford.  I could tell my mother wanted to have a cigarette.  Later on she said we were going to see the football stadium at Stanford University.  She promised we would go to the stadium after my first treatment. 

     The treatment was called chemotherapy, a word I would hate more than any other in my life.  I was surrounded by women: the nurse, my mother, and Dr. Ellis.  The doctor was short and pretty with red hair and freckles everywhere--some of them so small that they seemed to just grow together in a smooth gold surface on her arms.  I have lots of freckles too; my mother calls them angel kisses.  Some angel, I thought to myself: more like a demon.  Why me?  I had asked myself that question a hundred times since I found the bump on the back of my head.  I didn't have an answer.

     "How are you, Nicholas?" the doctor asked as she sat down next to me on the examining table.  “Or would you like me to call you Nick?”

     I nodded.

     “How are you feeling?”

     “Ok,” I said.  My throat was dry, and I coughed.  I sounded like a wimp, and I imagined what boys at school would say about me in my gown.  I felt like a girl. 

The doctor put her hand on my knee, and I felt her fingers through the thin paper robe.

     "Nick, if you stand up for me, I'll give you your first shot."

I looked down at my skinny legs because I couldn’t look at any of the women in the room directly.  The nurse started to arrange a needle on a small steel table, and I started to swing my legs under the table for the hop to the floor.  I looked at my mother who was starting to cry again.  Go have your cigarette and leave me alone.  Jesus, I'm the one getting the shot.  Not you. 

     I wanted to yell at everyone, but I knew I couldn’t.  If I did that, I would get in trouble on my first day at Stanford.   I'm not going to do this, I thought to myself.  I don't have to do anything.  I felt kind of crazy--lightheaded like when I’m going to get in trouble for something that I can’t stop myself from doing.  My mother says that I make bad choices sometimes.   

I jumped to the cold floor, and then I got down on the floor and crawled under the table.  I turned and put my back against the wall with the cast on my leg out in front of me.

     "Shit, Nicky," I heard my mother say, and I was happy I couldn’t see their faces anymore.  I stared at the three sets of legs.  My mother had a run in her stockings, and the nurse had the fattest ankles by far.  The doctor's were skinny and freckled like mine.  I could see the angel kisses under her nylon stockings.   

     "Mrs. Geary, she doesn't have time for this," the nurse said.  I could tell that the nurse was irritated with me.  I sat very still and pretended not to hear anything. 

     "Nicholas, come out," I heard my mother say.  The run in her stockings seemed to be getting longer.  I turned my head sideways to look at how long it was. 

     "It's ok," Dr. Ellis told them both. 

     The doctor bent down to the floor and looked at me under the table.  I was glad to see that she was smiling.  The doctor sighed and got down on all fours like I had been.  Her white doctor's jacket fell open, and I could see her white skin, like milk, and all the freckles on her chest.  Like me she could fit under the table without hitting her head.  She was small, and I liked her smell.  There wasn’t any perfume like my mother used to cover up her smoking.  Her smell was fresh and clean, and I wanted her smell to stay with me.  I’m pretty sure smell is just as important to humans as it is to animals.  

     "Mrs. Geary, let's get some coffee," the nurse said to my mother.  They walked out of the room, and Dr. Ellis and I were alone. 

     "Nick, are you afraid of your treatment?"

     I nodded.  I looked at her eyes, deep into them, and she didn’t look away.  I can usually make people nervous that way, but she seemed totally calm and peaceful.  I wanted what she had.    

     "It's going to make you better, but we won't do it if you don't want to.  It's up to you, Nick.  It has to be your choice.  Nobody is going to make you do anything."

     I could hear my mother talking to someone in the hall.

     "Does chemotherapy hurt?" I asked.  I could tell she was smart.  I liked how pretty she was and smart too.

     "I will give you a shot right here," she touched the back of my hand lightly with her fingers.  "It will sting, but it will help you get better.  You will get sick afterwards.  The bump on your head is still very serious.  You have three other bumps like that one, they’re called tumors, but they're on the inside.  It’s very good that you found the bump on your head."

     Earlier that day Dr. Ellis and two other doctors had asked me to take off my stupid gown that barely covered anything anyway.  She had talked to them quietly as she felt my neck and under my arms and my privates.  I had a feeling that she would have to do that.  Her hands were soft, and I was embarrassed.

     "Will the shots get rid of the bumps?"

     "Yes, but I'll only do it when you’re ready for me to help you."

     She had been holding my hand after explaining the shots and where they went in.  I pretended not to notice.  I liked her touch, and she didn't seem like a doctor anymore.  She was like no one I had ever met, and none of my teachers would have crawled under the table with me.  They would have started yelling right away.       

     "Are you ready to try?  We can come back here whenever you want to."

     I nodded.

     "Let's go."

     We both crawled out from under the examining table.  The nurse with the fat ankles still looked mad in the doorway, but my mother was happy to see me come out with the doctor.

     As I leaned against the examining table, Dr. Ellis rubbed the alcohol stuff on the back of my hand with a small, white cloth.  The nurse handed her a long needle, the longest I had ever seen.  I had never gotten a shot in the hand before.  Dr. Ellis smiled as she held my hand and found the vein under the skin.  Her red hair was a little messed up from crawling around, and I imagined smoothing her hair out as she arranged all of the equipment.    

     She held my hand with her left and pushed the needle down with her right.  A clear liquid went into the back of my hand, and I shuddered at the weird feeling.  There was a funny taste in my mouth, like metal, which I’ve never tasted before.  The nurse had put a rubber band around my head; so I would keep my hair longer, she said. 

Chemotherapy, I said to myself slowly, touching each syllable with hatred.  Some words invade you.  The pretty doctor with the red hair was going to help me, and I tried to smile at her as the room began to turn and swim like I was underwater.  I tried to be strong.  For her.  I was underwater, and the three faces of the women seemed longer than before.  The three women weaved together as I looked at them through the waves. 

     The doctor pulled the needle out of my hand.  As I watched the needle, I thought of my bad dream with the bees on my hands in the garden.  I wanted to leave that garden forever, but my nightmare was for real.  I threw up my breakfast, and I couldn’t stop puking, even when my breakfast was gone.  Some of it hit the floor until the nurse put a plastic bowl with a curve underneath my mouth. 

     I did not see the football stadium at Stanford University that day, and I didn’t even ask.  My mother explained that it was too far away from the Children's Hospital to visit, and I didn’t argue with her.

It's strange how going back to the beginning takes no time at all, once you go back to the beginning for the first time.  The same way retracing a hiking trail goes so much faster coming back than first going out into the unknown.  You're back where you started in no time.  I have gotten better at going back to my two years of chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Stanford Children’s Hospital, but retracing those steps backward is never easy. 

     I didn't talk about my cancer for nine years until I enrolled in American Poetry with a professor I had never heard of.  Teachers can be doctors of the soul, and doctors can be teachers of the body.  I ran as far from these memories as I could.  I ran as far as West Point to escape the skinny boy at Stanford Children's Hospital.  Dr. Ellis let me play baseball, but I could never play football.  It was too dangerous.  Baseball was perfect because I hid my hair loss under my team hat.  Nobody on my team ever took it off to tease me.  It's good to have a hat at tough times.

     I went into remission, a word I will always love, when I was eleven after two years of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.  My boy's body would become a man's with the years.  And one spring day, with the smell of cut grass in the air and the sound of sprinklers moving in their dreamy arcs, I would slip into the office of my family doctor.  He was the man who had sent me to Stanford and Dr. Ellis, the woman who changed my life by sitting with a frightened boy under the table.  And I would give the family doctor a medical history for admission to West Point with a significant two year omission in my history.  He would sign it in the busy hallway without looking at the vital omission, and I would walk into the afternoon sunshine of my hometown in the Central Valley feeling like a new person.  Like I could be anyone I wanted. 

Death had not chosen me, but something, or someone, had. 

     My high school girlfriend Annie would drive me away from the doctor’s office with my memories closed like a book.  I would cover up those memories until the day I could find a vein on my own.  Even though I was in love with Annie, I never told her or anyone else about the changes I had made in my permanent medical record.  I was not then initiated in the rites of sacred poetry and the divine liturgies of the human soul.  Annie Taylor’s beauty was enough that spring day in feminine reflection, the spell of first love and the charm of spring upon us.  I was beginning my life for the second time.     

A special teacher would stir me with the words I had always known, one by one a golden remembrance would come to me.  But on that spring day in the Central Valley of California, I was on my way to the United States Military Academy with a clean slate.  A second chance to live was before me.  I was ready to begin my life as a man.  In the fields of memory, no stone was left to mark the burial of my childhood, that chest of fear and weakness.  I thought I was free.