“The Mountaintop and The Level Place of Wisdom”

Opening Service for Faculty

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

4 September 2012

I, like many of you, experience a profound and unsettling awakening to every new school year.  It’s not very pretty, this personal preparation, and every end of summer is slightly different.  I certainly won’t bore you tonight with some of the more neurotic elements, especially the truly bizarre school dreams that come to me as the days of August peel off the calendar.  It is a strange time of reentry where feelings of inadequacy are normal, even though I’ve been doing this for a while.  It’s just that I really know what I’m getting myself into.  I think it was easier when I didn’t.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope and beauty and idealism in my reentry to my vocation as an educator.  There is.  It’s just all wrapped up together.    

This summer I watched the inner battle as a dialogue, or argument, specifically between idealism and realism.  My inner dialogue is usually not so well-defined, philosophically.  For instance, the founder of Kent School, Father Frederick Herbert Sill, wanted the boys of Kent to experience the monastic ideal of spiritual discipline and contemplation.  For much of its history, Kent had chapel eight times a week, sometimes as early as 6 AM, including on the girls’ campus beginning in 1960.  As chaplain, I am responsible for exposing students to the Transcendent, the Otherness of the holy, ancient mysticism, the Bible and Jesus, ethical teaching and how to choose the good, and, well, let’s call it the existence of God.  Wow, that’s amazing.  The reality is that we are teaching teenage students who are, actually, addicted to their i-phones, who expect instant gratification, and are totally saturated with technology and social media in a culture that is much less religiously defined.  Despite the beauty of St. Joseph’s Chapel, this is not a home field advantage.      

Idealism and realism.  Father Sill wanted the boys of Kent to retreat from the world, in a way that mixed Sparta with the rule of St. Benedict, the result being something called muscular Christianity, if you can imagine that (of course, this condition had nothing to do with girls).  I learned from Jesse Klingebiel’s chapel talk last year that Father Sill purchased the land for his ideal experiment very cheaply here because the iron industry had devastated the environment of Northwest Connecticut.  The ideal and the real do strange dances together.  When I first arrived at Kent eight years ago, the monastic ideal was dramatically more present because there were no cell phones.  The students had them, but they were useless, wonderfully useless.  Kent, Connecticut, did not have a cell tower then.  If I were an anarchist priest, I know the first thing I would do.  If I were Don Quixote, I know where I would find my first windmill.         

            During a Theology class last spring, my students were responding to the themes of realism and idealism in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Terrible people did wonderfully in life, and the idealists were the sore losers in the end, with incomplete philosophies and broken dreams.  Also, the realist got the girl.  Yet the realists of the film were not worthy of emulation; they weren’t remotely heroic.  During our discussion, a student brought up the question of who are the realists, and who are the idealists, among the Kent faculty.  I took a step back and waited for the fascinating discussion that was about to flow.  This was going to be interesting.  Who are the realists among us?  It’s going to be the Math Department, right?  But they’re always in chapel, very idealistic.  Not the Science Department, they’re too ecological.  Maybe someone from the History Department, possibly Mr. Ober, a faculty member with realpolitik foreign policy.  Instead the students were completely stumped.  We had a long but thoughtful silence.  Don’t be afraid of those in class.  They were interested--they understood the terms of the question, but they could not proceed.  Until John Dong explained the problem this way: “Think about it.  You’re all teachers.  That means that you’re all the idealists.  We’re the realists, the students.”  

With John Dong’s explanation in mind, I did something new as I prepared for the new year; as I prepared for tonight.  I did something very idealistic.  I started making trips to the Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York.  The founder of this school was a priest and a monk in the Order of the Holy Cross, where they still pray five times a day.  So I went looking for Father Sill.  I really didn’t need to, realistically, since he’s buried right outside my window—he and I have some interesting talks.  The Holy Cross Monastery is only 42 minutes away by GPS, and I have made cell phone calls from the monastery grounds, so I might be more of a realist than you thought when I began this sermon. 

As the idealist and the realist in me bickered over the last weeks of August, I came across a book whose title shut up both of them: The Pope Who Quit.  Subtitled, A True Tale of Mystery Death, and Salvation, by Jon M. Sweeney.  In the two thousand year history of the Church, there has been only one pope who quit—just quit, who simply walked away from the job after only fifteen weeks.  The man was Pope Celestine V, formerly Peter Morrone, or Peter the Hermit, and he didn’t want the job in the first place.  The people who knew him found him to be holy, courageous, simple-minded, naïve, physically powerful, spiritual, out of touch, and saintly.  The truth is that Peter was a lot like Jesus, and he found God more in nature rather than in conventional church buildings.  Today we would certainly call him an introvert.  His time as pope is a little like the movie Being There with Peter Sellers.  Or there is the recent Italian movie from 2011 called We Have a Pope, about the election of an unlikely spiritual cardinal as the new pope.  The newly elected pontiff begins to suffer panic attacks, and a full-time therapist is brought in to bring the reluctant pope to his throne despite his fears, anxiety, and overwhelming sense of inadequacy. 

But the story of The Pope Who Quit is an unbelievable true story.  When Peter Morrone was elected pope in 1294, he lived in a cave on the top of a mountain in Italy.  Though he lived as a hermit, Peter was not without administrative experience and ecclesiastical accomplishments.  He had founded dozens of monasteries in his lifetime, but he always retreated to his mountaintop to worship God; to actually be with God in the moment, not just in the afterlife.  His entire existence was about a sacred play with his God, and a pitched spiritual battle with the demonic forces of the world.  Though in perfect physical condition, he was also eighty-five years old when he was elected pope.  It took the Vatican party ten days of hiking and climbing to reach Peter the Hermit.  I like to imagine what was going through the minds of these cardinals, bishops, priests and acolytes, as Peter made them all into Appalachian Trail section hikers, going straight up.  Peter had been notified of the climbing delegation by one of his monks, and he was absolutely horrified with the news they were bringing to his high perch on the top of the planet.  Because of the arduous journey to reach him, Peter had time to think about his options.  So Peter did the only reasonable thing as the ecclesiastical and political leaders of the world were climbing towards his cave.  He hid.  Peter played hide and seek with the world.  Peter not here.  Go home.  For me that was the perfect image of the idealist-realist war in August.  Part of me wants to hide; part of me is still hiding tonight.  When Peter was finally located, he did the next most reasonable thing he could think of.  He turned down the job.  But the Church, the world, was not going to take no for an answer.  They were taking the wild Jesus figure back to St. Peter’s, whether he wanted to go or not.  The man who would not be pope was brought back down to earth by the realists.    

Now Peter had a really big problem.  He was now called Pope Celestine V.  Despite all of his protests that went unheeded, he really was an administrative nightmare.  Peter/Celestine (there’s irony there) absolutely hated the job, and he returned often to his work strategy of hiding.  Though he mystified everyone, especially those who were trying to help him with his duties, we would now say that Peter was depressed.  He was also having what we would call panic attacks.  Someone might diagnose him with Asperger’s Disorder.  After fifteen weeks, as Peter headed towards a full-blown nervous breakdown, a realist came to the idealist’s rescue.  Now the question of whether a pope can actually resign is an extremely complex question of canon law, and most ecclesiastical experts would say no.  It’s impossible.  But the realist on the scene, Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, showed as much finesse as Chief Justice Roberts on national health care.  He found a way for Peter to resign, and the idealist Christ figure was relieved beyond words.  Cardinal Gaetani would also finesse his way to become the next pope, Pope Boniface VIII.  The time of idealism had passed; it always has a short window.                    

            Though I like the static image of realist Cardinal Gaetani helping to find a way out for idealist Peter, I have to share how the story turns out.  The realists in the crowd demand it.  Peter wanted to return to his mountain--to live out his live praying to God on his mountaintop.  Instead Pope Boniface VIII put him in prison, where he eventually died in questionable circumstances. 

While listening to the beautiful Plainsong chanting of the monks at Holy Cross Monastery in 2012, I knew that I needed something more than idealism to begin this year.  That I needed something more than realism has always been patently obvious to me.  I’m a teacher, remember?  What I needed was wisdom.  Wisdom about myself and the world.  The truth was the papacy was a step down for Peter Morrone, the Don Quixote of the papacy, and he knew it at the time.  Wisdom is the dialectic between idealism and realism, the spiritual guide inside you.  It is how you live out your ideals in your daily life.  It is the most important thing that you possess.  When you write a chapel talk, which can be a challenging task for faculty members who talk all day, you impart something more than knowledge.  You convert knowledge into something golden, something meaningful and worthwhile, with a heartbeat.  When you counsel a student in crisis, as every one of you will do this year, maybe even this week, you are the wise woman and wise man for that student, that child of God, in the teachable moment.  When you help a student sort through the madness of the college process, you share your treasure of wisdom.  You give them courage to find their own wisdom despite everything their culture is screaming at them from all sides.  This can be a very difficult time for our students.  High school is still an awkward time for me.  And for Joe McDonough. 

So I don’t want to leave you hiding with Peter Morrone on the mountaintop.  It’s time to come down to a level place, a wise landing, to work for the common good.  Welcome back to Kent.  My God bless you in your teaching and wisdom ministry this year.    

My colleague Tom Hunt and I came up with an interesting baseball exercise on the way to the first no-hitter in Mets history last night. The task: field a team of the best players whom you saw play in their prime (or thereabouts) at least once. When boyish sentiment went up against cold statistics, I generally went with the former, and the players I had seen the most in my life.

First Base: Willie McCovey, San Francisco Giants (Keith Hernandez was a close second.)
Second Base: Joe Morgan, Reds and Giants (Ryne Sandberg as well, but I only saw him once.)
Shortstop: Ozzie Smith, St. Louis Cardinals (I should go with Jeter, but I always loved the movie The Wizard of Oz, and back flips.)
Third Base: George Brett, Kansas City Royals (My heart says Matt Williams...)
Catcher: Johnny Bench, Cincinnati Reds
Left Field: Rickey Henderson, Modesto and Oakland A's and nearly every professional baseball team in North America (Sorry, Barry Bonds, I work for the church...I would choose Joe Rudi before you. I would also pick Kevin Mitchell before you, and he was insane.)
Center Field: Ken Griffey, Jr., Mariners and Reds
Right Field: Andre Dawson, Expos and Cubs

Pitchers: Vida Blue, A's and Giants
Ron Guidry, New York Yankees
Bob Welch, Dodgers and A's
Tim Lincecum, San Francisco Giants
Catfish Hunter, A's and Yankees

(If I had to choose the best lefty of the era, I would choose Steve Carlton, but I can't recall seeing him pitch live.)

Relievers: Mariano Rivera, New York Yankees
Dennis Eckersley, Red Sox, Cubs, A's

Postscript, for the fun of it:
Manager: Billy Martin, Twins, Tigers, Rangers, Yankees, Yankees, A's, Yankees
Radio Commentator: Hank Greenwald, San Francisco Giants
Third Base Coach: Wendell Kim, San Francisco Giants
Mascot: Mr Met
Sportswriters: Roger Angell and Roger Kahn

Best Food: Garlic Fries, San Francisco Giants

That's it. Let's play two!

“Being the Love of God in the World”

20 May 2012

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel

Kent School

The Seventh Sunday after Easter

Well, here we are, with the end in sight, but we’re not quite there.  With just a week left of classes, I am tired.  But I’m not prepared for final exams.  There is a fatigue that is deep at this time of year; it is physical, emotional, and spiritual.  We, like the seniors in the class of 2012, are ready for the year to be over, but we’re not ready to say goodbye.  You have to dig deep for inspiration at this time of year.  This sermon is about just that kind of digging.  

This has also been a very challenging two weeks for the Kent community, and Canterbury School, with the Memorial Service for Donny Gowan last Monday.  Donny grew up in this community, and he coached here before becoming head basketball coach at Canterbury.  Donny is one of the most positive people I have ever met in my life.  For those affected by his untimely death, there are no easy answers.  But the outpouring of love and support for his family since last week has been extraordinary; it has made a difference.  It has lifted them up at a heartbreaking time, creating the vision for healing that will come in the future.  But now there is pain and loss. 

Even in the midst of sorrow, ordinary people around you have been digging deep, looking for hope in hard times.  Being with Donny’s basketball team on Monday, I could sense the transformation he had brought to those players’ lives, however incomplete it feels right now.  Like many others, I saw Donny’s own vocation and success as a coach as deeply connected to his late father’s example and legacy.  Donny’s work at Canterbury emerged from grief transformed, and it was beautiful to watch him grow.  Faith in God is about continued transformation, and I have no doubt that the hope and transformation of God comes to those in need by the people around them, doing ordinary acts of love, digging deep, and finding hope.  God comes into the world, however imperfectly, by our own actions and words.      

As I thought about Donny and Don his father, I was reminded of the book Hunting For Hope, subtitled “A Father’s Journeys,” by Scott Russel Sanders.  The memoir is an intent examination of the world’s problems, especially the destruction of the environment.  The book is part meditation, part travel journal as the author hikes the Rocky Mountains with his teenage son Jesse.  The father and son have moved into that vulnerable and often humorous stage of their relationship where the father can do nothing right.

The dialogue on the hike is rich between the environmentalist educator and his high school son who, unapologetically, likes to spend time in malls.  They begin their discussion on the trail, after several hours of silence, due to the son’s accusation that his father ruins everything.

“’How do I ruin everything?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.

‘I want to know.  What is it about me that grates on you?’…

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said.

‘Try me.’

‘You’re so out of touch.’

‘With what?’

‘With my whole world.  You hate everything that’s fun.  You hate television and movies and video games.  You hate my music.’

‘I like some of your music.  I just don’t like it loud.’

‘You hate advertising,’ he said quickly, rolling now.  ‘You hate billboards and lotteries and developers and logging companies and big corporations.  You hate snowmoblies and jet skis.  You hate malls and fashions and cars.’

‘You’re still on my case because I won’t buy a Jeep?’ I said, harking back to another old argument.

‘Forget Jeeps.  You can look at any car and all you think is pollution, traffic, roadside crap.  You say fast food’s poisoning our bodies and TV’s poisoning our minds.  You think the Internet is just another scam for selling stuff.  You think business is a conspiracy to rape the earth.’

‘None of that bothers you?’

‘Of course it does.  But that’s the world.  That’s where we’ve got to live.  It not going to go away because you don’t approve.  What’s the good of spitting on it?’

‘I don’t spit on it.  I grieve over it.’

He was still for a moment, then resumed quietly.  ‘What’s the good of grieving if you can’t change anything?’

‘Who says you can’t change anything?’

‘You do.  Maybe not with your mouth, but with your eyes.’  Jesse rubbed his own eyes, and the words came out muffled through his cupped hands.  ‘Your view of things is totally dark.  It bums me out.  You may feel the whole planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it.  There’s no room for hope.  Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t.  I’ve got a lot of living still to do.  I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess.  Otherwise what’s the point?  Why study, why work—why do anything if it’s all going to hell?’

That sounded unfair to me, a caricature of my views, and I thought of many sharp replies; yet there was too much truth and too much hurt in what he said for me to fire back an answer.  Had I really deprived my son of hope?  Was this the deeper grievance—that I had passed on to him, so young, my anguish over the world?  Was this what lurked between us, driving us apart, the demon called despair?”

The changing relationship with his son Jesse is the catalyst for changes within the father; deep changes as the elder reorients himself to the hope no human being can live without.  The father and the son are both right; but what are we going to do about it?  Our world cannot survive for long without the song of hope stirring in someone. 

As a boy growing up, I remember how the secondhand stories of my own father affected me—stories about how people survived in the very difficult times before our own.  My father was a veteran of World War II, a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7^th, 1941, as a sailor in the navy.  He saw the first Japanese zero airplanes fly into Pearl Harbor, and, like many others, he initially thought they were our own airplanes (they had to be)—until he was being strafed by gunfire himself.  The worst my father got was a scraped knee, but he watched many men lose their lives around him, and it affected him deeply.  He was forever changed. 

            Like many veterans, my father was mostly quiet about his experience of war, sometimes completely silent, shut like a steel trap.  I never heard the stories all at once.  They came out indirectly, at odd angles of conversation, in the unexpected moments between a father and son, the surprising, and often elusive, shape of hope between generations.  Sometimes I could coax the stories out, and I could feel their power in what he said, and what he didn’t say. 

My favorite story of my father’s—it’s really no more than an image—involves President Franklin Roosevelt.  My father worked in naval intelligence, under Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations.  On an unforgettable occasion, President Roosevelt flew to Hawaii to meet with Admiral Nimitz, and my father was able to meet the President of the United States, at a great moment in human history.  Yes, Roosevelt was like a god in my family--but not the kind of god anyone expected. 

At this time in the early 1940s, most buildings were not accessible to those with disabilities.  The great secret, a secret guarded by the White House and protected by the media was that the president was a disabled man, from polio at the age of 39.  He never walked again, but this was not acknowledged publicly during his lifetime.  The most powerful man in the world was fighting against Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler from a wheelchair.  Not only that, his wheelchair couldn’t negotiate the naval headquarters at Pearl Harbor, and some of the planning for the war in the Pacific took place on ships in the harbor as well.  How did the President of the United States get around the naval base?  A large marine, just a teenager like you, would pick him up and carry him piggy back from one place to another.  What a sight for my father to witness. 

How can you see that and not be changed in how you see the world? 

            God is still with us, even in the darkest moments, carrying us with the tender and strong hands of human hope, picking us up as we dig deep.  God is with us now, in our day, and even to the end of the ages.  God is with us in how we carry each other during tough times.  My father witnessed the fear and destruction of December 7^th, 1941.  He saw the war from beginning to end.  Yet it increased his faith.  As a matter of fact, he had no faith—not really—before the war.  He came to believe in God, but not a god who fixes our problems, who stops our wars by magic, or one who heals our planet by waving a wand.  This is a God who stands with us as we face our problems together.  Our God doesn’t change the world for us.  We have to stand on our feet, sometimes with help from each other.  God changes the world by changing our hearts.  We change the world by reaching out to our neighbors in need.  That’s how it works.

Mohatma Ghandi once said these words to those who hungered for change in the last century: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  Can the students of this school, especially the graduating seniors, change the world?  The better, more intimate question comes instead for all of us today: Can one person have a change of heart?  A change in one’s whole way of thinking and feeling and being in the world.  The answer is yes; a glorious affirmation of all that is still good in us, still digging deep, even in adversity and sorrow.  Be the change that you want to see in the world.  Be the change that you want to see in this community.  

I will close this morning with a simple 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: your first times that you remember at the end of the year.  This is the first time the class of 2012 has graduated from Kent, or the juniors to experience Tapping and Rock Day tomorrow and Tuesday.  These first times 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.  We envy you, and you envy us.  It’s crazy the way we are.  I think there is another way: to be completely awake in the moment, especially in our golden goodbyes this year.  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, which is there for those who are diggers for hope.

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 to the bathroom 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.

“H.D. and the Lifted Being of God: In Our Time”

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

29 April 2012

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel

Kent School

Women at Kent Weekend

There are many things we celebrate on this beautiful spring morning.  This is the fourth Sunday of Easter as we continue to celebrate new life and resurrection.  Today is called Good Shepherd Sunday in the church calendar with readings from the 23^rd psalm and the gospel of John.  Here at Kent School, we also celebrate the lives, and witness, of Kent alumnae—the women of Kent--who have enriched this institution over the last 50 years.  I would like to especially welcome our female graduates who are here in St. Joseph’s Chapel this morning.  This morning is also a moment to celebrate our current female students as we recognize the experience of women who have come through this school before you.  Today we wake up the echoes of the girl’s campus, and St. Mark’s Chapel, here in St. Joseph’s. 

My sermon this morning will be in honor of our female graduates, as I focus on the life of an extraordinary woman poet from the twentieth century: Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under the name of just her initials, H.D.  In her epic masterpiece of a poem called Trilogy, H.D. explores the major Mary figures associated with Jesus: Mary, his mother, Mary Magdalene, his follower and disciple, and also the often forgotten Mary of Bethany who is the person who anoints Jesus before his death in John’s gospel.  The fact that most people have never heard of H.D., or know very much about the three Marys of Christian womanhood, is truly amazing.  This Women at Kent weekend is the perfect time to do some spiritual and literary education this morning, and I hope you will enjoy my approach—part lecture, part sermon--on Good Shepherd Sunday.  At any rate, I won’t go on for too long.  I’ll have you on your way.          

H.D’s major work called Trilogy presents the female poet as a seer in culture and history.  The narrative poem is a proposition for the poet to be a partner in God’s redemption, the new thing that is happening.  The poem is utterly unconventional among modernist works, or poetry from any period.  The more apt comparison is with the mystics who seem to be above time: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Dame Julian of Norwich.  Though an American from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, H.D. wrote in London while Hitler bombed the city daily, and nightly, during the blitz.  H.D. wrote Trilogy, three narrative poems, in a war zone, and the three poems are “The Walls Do Not Fall,” “A Tribute to the Angels,” and “The Flowering of the Rod.”  The last poem is about the flowering of the cross, the rod, or the rood, like in the old English poem The Dream of the Rood.  In H.D.’s vision of the sacred, she experiences the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the modern scenes of warfare.

On a personal level, I should note that H.D.’s work affected me as dramatically as any work of art ever has in my lifetime.  I experienced my calling to the priesthood while reading Trilogy for the first time at the age of twenty-one.  It was like opening a magical book of ancient runes.   

There are sacred stories and visions in our time as well as in ancient times, I learned from H.D.  From her birth in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hilda Doolittle was fascinated by the idea that each of us has a sacred birth and sacred life to live.  She was a patient of Dr. Sigmund Freud who encouraged her poetic genius at a time when she lacked confidence; he also remarked that he found her to be simply enchanting as a woman.  Trilogy begins during a time of war, when the cross was twisted by Nazism.  Her poem is directly intended to straighten out human values—to straighten out the swastika.  She writes: “The Christos-image/ is most difficult to disentangle.”  The “incidents” of the bombing of London, as the British press called them, provide the context for a new sacred witness.  From H.D.’s opening words:“An incident here and there,/ and rails gone (for guns)/ from your (and my) old time square.”  The destroyed neighborhoods are the setting for H.D. to search for God in a world at war.  The poet stands in her own time, but also goes back to the moments of ancient witness to God, the moments of revelation.  She writes: “there as here, ruin opens/…the tomb, the temple; enter,/ there as here, there are no doors.”

H.D. is entering the sacred temple on one level of her composition.  Back in London, she is literally walking through the damaged churches of her adopted city: “the shrine lies open to the sky,” she writes.  War, paradoxically, produces intimacy with the sacred; or perhaps it is just that we need God the most during wartime.  World War II is the new crucifixion.  The beginning motif of destroyed churches and the broken human body convey that the human spirit has been shaken from its moorings.  But the churches, and humanity, haven’t lost God.  God just needs to be sought, and found, by the seer, the new prophet.  The Spirit of God is loose in the world, and the female poet responds to the Word of God like the first prophet of old.  H.D. writes: “unaware, Spirit announces the Presence;/ shivering overtakes us,/ as of old, Samuel.”  H.D. had many religious dreams and visions in London, including a vision of her own death.  In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” H.D. experiences a sanctuary of the human soul that God protects, even when human beings are doing their worst to the human body: a sacred center that can hold the individual psyche, as well as human civilization, together.  The terrifying war triggers a search for wholeness in a female writer.  In the first two poems of Trilogy, H.D. gives thanks to God for her and our spiritual survival during wartime.  She writes: “…we pause to give/ thanks that we rise again from death and live.”

The implications of her vision are far-reaching in “The Flowering of the Rod,” the final poem, especially with H.D.’s emphasis on the Mary characters of Scripture: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany.  The last poem remembers the feminine principle in God’s redemption, both ancient and modern, through the trinity of Marys that H.D. explores poetically.  Some background on these Marys we think we know.  As Mary gave birth to Jesus’s life, Mary Magdalene was the mid-wife of his death: the one who anointed Jesus before his crucifixion.  However, this would be following solely Luke’s Gospel, and only by a logical leap: “And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.”  The woman is unnamed in Luke, but Mary Magdalene is introduced at the beginning of Luke’s very next chapter: as a woman of means, a wealthy woman and patron, not as a prostitute.  In no biblical tradition is she described as a prostitute. 

The proximity of the woman who is a sinner (still not necessarily a prostitute) to Mary Magdalene in the text of Luke provides the connection; they must be the same woman.  Mary Magdalene, the woman who is a sinner, is then the one anointing Jesus so intimately.  This connection was first made official by Pope Gregory in the sixth century, six hundred years after the fact; there is no proof for it.  But, lost in the sound and fury of Mary Magdalene’s alleged status as the woman who is a sinner, is the fact that Matthew, Mark, and John all agree that Jesus was anointed by Mary before his death.  But she was not Mary Magdalene.  It was more likely Mary of Bethany because the anointings all take place at Bethany.  Only John’s woman is explicitly Mary of Bethany in his anointing at Bethany.  A logical assumption would then be that Luke’s unnamed woman is also Mary of Bethany because it follows the same structure of the anointing scenes of the other three gospels; it just doesn’t locate it specifically at Bethany.  Despite the overwhelming agreement of three gospels, and the anonymity of Luke’s woman, the anointing tradition is most often associated with Mary Magdalene.  The tradition of anointing the human body was not embraced by the early church, and there is a great deal of mystery surrounding Mary Magdalene as a result.  Bruce Chilton, a Religion professor at Bard College and also an Episcopal priest, attempts to rectify the repression of this remarkable woman in his biography of Mary Magdalene.

“Mary and her nameless colleague in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel both show what other ancient documents demonstrate: Women in Jewish antiquity, particularly within the folk wisdom practiced in Galilee, exercised a prominent role as anointers.  Their domain extended far beyond the conventional household, and there is evidence that significant groups of practitioners looked to these women to guide them in their quest to leave this world behind them and experience the divine world.”

Mary Magdalene’s suppression as an early leader in the church, which she was, as well as the first apostle—the first witness to resurrection in the gospels, which she was, is likely the result of the early church’s discomfort with physical anointing, especially its physical component.  There is an unhidden element of eros in all four gospel traditions with the woman anointing Jesus with oil from the alabaster jar.  For his part, Jesus is not embarrassed by it; he is instead deeply moved by the woman’s love and tender devotion.  But the male witnesses are quite alarmed.  In all but one case, they are too disturbed to even name the woman directly.  The evangelists share the taboo panic with the witnesses; or rather they project it on to them.  The scenes with the anointing woman show that the evangelists and the early church were uncomfortable with powerful women anointing others as a spiritual practice of the church, yet it was too important for them to fully cover it up.  So it’s there, but confusing.  Jesus also approved of it; all the gospels agree on that point, however reluctantly.  Despite this institutional discomfort, the church has retained the remnant of the anointing tradition in four of its seven sacraments: Baptism (with the chrism, the oil anointing the forehead), Confirmation, Holy Orders, and Last Rites, with laying on of hands; as the bishop did to our five confirmands this past Thursday, along with our student who was baptized.  The hidden history is actually in front of our eyes, hiding in plain sight, in the sacraments of the church.  What a strange way for an institution to continue its past while repressing the mystical female tradition of Judaism and the early church, and completely forgetting its first priestly practitioners.  H.D. remembers all of the Marys for who they really were.    

The last poem of Trilogy is “The Flowering of the Rod,” the poem which celebrates the ecstasy of the cross in the full joy of resurrection.  The rod is both the cross and the writing implement of the poet.  The recovered writing implement, the rod and the rood, the stylus and the sacred tree, celebrates the full creativity of the masculine and the feminine now united, finally, in humankind and in the divine.  Their balance has been restored in nature.  The flowering of the rood and the rod is thus the full circle of resurrection.  As much as any poet in the English language, H.D. writes about Easter.  She is fully in touch with resurrection joy, with the resurrection ecstasy that came first to Mary Magdalene of all people.  What does it say about human culture that it is far easier for us to imagine crucifixion than resurrection?  What does it say that we have forgotten, and then misrepresented, the first person, a woman, who experienced the Easter miracle?   In her own day, H.D. not only imagines resurrection, she presents the real experience of Easter.  H.D. encounters the Risen Jesus in her broken modern world. 

            In resurrection, there is confusion

            if we start to argue; if we stand and stare,

            we do not know where to go;

            in resurrection, there is simple affirmation,

            but do not delay to round up the others,

            up and down the street your going

            in a moment like this, is the best proof

            that you know the way;

            does the first wild-goose care

            whether the others follow or not?

            I don’t think so--he is is happy to be off—

            he knows where he is going…”

“do not think of His face

or even of His hands;

do not think how we will stand

before Him;”

           

“Now having given all, let us leave all;

above all, let us leave pity

and mount higher

to love—resurrection.”

            Thanks so much for your attention this morning.  Welcome back to Kent, ladies.  At the heart of H.D.’s religious witness and modern experience of revelation is the heart of the Christian faith: the central understanding of Good Shepherd Sunday is that God is with us.  God is still with us, just as in olden times, and we are in God’s image, as male and female.  God loves each of you in a way that surpasses all human understanding.  And God will be with us to the end of the ages: all will be well.  May God bless our female graduates and students, and all of us at Kent School on this Good Shepherd Sunday.  

“The Open Door of Suffering”

6 April 2012

Good Friday

St. Joseph’s Chapel

Kent School

For some of you, dropping everything on this Friday to come to chapel, in the middle of the day, is a new experience.  Weird.  What’s going on?  What’s this all about?  The foot washing last night was strange enough (ending in darkness), but now, this day called Good Friday.  For others, those who have a history with this day, there is more experience—some spiritual muscle memory, and understanding of this day.  For me, images of the crucifixion go very far back into my memories of childhood, with three hour services on Good Friday, like the death itself.  Jesus died after just three hours on the cross, all of the gospel writers report.  We won’t go that long today.      

For everyone, both new and veteran, the question inevitably is posed by someone who is paying attention: Why is this day called “good”?  Isn’t it actually terribly depressing?  This is torture, a painful and humiliating death for the Son of God.  And yet the cross is the foundation of the Christian faith.  Last weekend, this very question was asked in my Confirmation class.  “Why do we call it Good Friday?”  The question was put to our recent guest from Cambridge, the Reverend Canon Brian Watchorn, who responded: “Because of the good that came out of this day.”

This day is good because people have done some theology, some attempt to explain what the death of Jesus accomplished.  And the Church grew wildly, by embracing the cross, not running from it.  But at the heart of the day is the execution of Jesus of Nazareth—an innocent man suffering for all humanity.  And, as our guest Father Watchorn said on Palm Sunday, “Crucifixion is not a pretty business.”  That is British understatement for you.  It was a horrible way to die, with suffocation of the human body after days on the cross for some. 

There are many different theological and academic explanations for what is happening on the cross on Good Friday; what the death of Jesus accomplishes for us and for the world—the good that came out of it.  Jesus is the great sacrifice within the sacrificial system of his own Jewish religion.  Like the perfect, or sinless, lamb led to slaughter, Jesus is often thought to be the culmination of the old system of atonement through sacrifice: a great and lasting climax of religious understanding which begins a new covenant, reconciling humanity and divinity through the body and blood of Christ.  But does God really demand the death of animals, or especially an innocent human being, to forgive humanity?  A deeper theology of the cross can still be sought, but we will need to go further into the mystery of suffering in order to find it.  Yes, I am saying that there can be more than one theology, more than one way to explain the goodness of Jesus bringing God into the mystery of human suffering, and the reality of human suffering into the heart of God.  

     The last two verses of the Gospel of John—two very fascinating verses—point to this; they acknowledge the limitless legacy of Jesus with a reference to the literary productivity resulting from the life and death of Jesus:

     “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.  But there are also many things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

     We are still talking about the cross—that’s the amazing thing--two thousand years later; we are still approaching it with awe, dread, and wonder.  For all of the theories about the cross, this day is not intellectual at all, not really.  Good Friday moves us into the blind side of the human heart where there aren’t easy answers or convenient theologies.  And there shouldn’t be.    

To be comfortable with the cross is to no longer see it.  We’re not supposed to be comfortable or intellectually confident today.  We’re supposed to live by faith, as Jesus did.       

     At our safe and reasonable distance of two thousand years, we forget the enormous taboo of the cross within the early Church.  Why should Christians even wear crosses?  So strange.  It’s a symbol of violence, of state terror, absolute power over human life.  Dr. Greene actually sighted chocolate crosses at Wal-Mart this week.  Only in America.  The crucifixion was never portrayed in art by the early Church.  It was too raw, too painful.  It took five hundred years for images of the cross to reach the canvas of Western artists; to come to grips with the portrait of suffering.  This portrait of suffering collects the pieces of our broken world, the bloodshed and violence, especially of the innocent, in our fallen world.

There is a short poem from G.K. Chesterton, the British writer and unabashed Christian, that takes us faithfully towards the cross.  How can God redeem the death of Jesus?  How can God redeem the tragedies of our world?  This poem has been a guide for me this week, with its British understatement.  From Chesterton: 

     “Good news; but if you ask me

     What it is, I know not.

It is a track of feet in the snow.

It is a lantern showing a path.

It is a door set open.”

Good Friday is about suffering and pain and faith all mixed together.  It is a door set open. 

One of the major truths I have come to understand, somewhat late in my life, is that the avoidance of pain is one of the ways that we increase human suffering.  The avoidance of pain creates more pain.  This seems illogical, or counter intuitive, but I have found it to be almost axiomatic, in ways both large and small.  The avoidance of work makes it more difficult to do the work at all.  Skipping a class can make it even harder to go the next time.  Or avoiding questions about your health can lead to greater problems later on.  Seeking to escape stress can create more stress.  It can lead to addiction and tragedy.  And then there is the experience of Kent karma.  If you have a problem with someone, they will be the very next person you see.  Count on it.  This past week I was having a miserable time until I had to admit to myself I was getting sick.  Then things got better. 

The avoidance of pain creates more pain. 

So, today we put the cross of Jesus in the center of the school day.  We choose not to avoid pain, but to embrace it on Good Friday.    

My current class Buddhism and Western Literature has been studying the life of the first Buddha, Siddartha Gautama.  Like Jesus, he was the great spiritual thinker of his age.  But he was also being groomed to be a great ruler of a kingdom, and his father didn’t want him to experience anything that would make him depart from his path of privilege and power.  But Siddartha was curious—perhaps he felt like he was even being told a lie by those hiding pain and suffering from him, one that human culture often perpetuates.  It was a shock for me when I first discovered that my life would not be one success after another.  So Siddartha begins to leave the palace, all on his own.  On four occasions, he witnesses the four passing visions.  He sees an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and, on the last visit to what is now the real world to him, he sees a monk—a figure who has found balance, even serenity in the face of suffering.  Aging, illness, death are the nature of reality.  Siddartha then begins a spiritual journey; he goes forth from his palace to seek the ultimate reality.  He no longer avoids the normalcy of suffering, or the dignity that can be found by those who enter it openly, freely.       

Our culture runs from aging, illness, and mortality.  We want to hide in the palace of eternal youth.  We don’t want to see our elders, let alone hear their wisdom, or see their courage (or even joy and curiosity) when facing mortality.    

The avoidance of pain creates more pain.  On this day, this one day in the calendar, we don’t run.  We stand fast, in faith.  We stay with a suffering and dying Jesus—as young man, dying man, and corpse, the holy one of God who suffered with all of us on his heart.  On Good Friday.    

“Good news; but if you ask me

     What it is, I know not.

It is a track of feet in the snow.

It is a lantern showing a path.

It is a door set open.”

“Linsanity in February: Hoop Dreams and the High Mountain”

19 February 2012

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany

St. Joseph’s Chapel

Kent School

I’m going to begin this morning with two very powerful words: Jeremy Lin. 

You may have heard something about him in the last couple weeks.  He has riveted attention on the NBA and the New York Knicks with a nearly unprecedented run of points and assists as a fourth string point guard who took the Knicks on a seven game winning streak with their two best players out of the lineup.  So much for the superstars.  Only a handful of players in the history of the league have had this kind of statistical impact in their first games as professionals, but no one has had the emotional impact.  Many of you know about the Linsanity, Linderella, and, my favorite, Linsane in the Membrane.  And if you haven’t heard about the exploits of this first Asian American in the NBA, you just haven’t been paying attention.  Lin’s best game was probably the game against the Lakers when our unassuming and humble point guard dropped 38 points on Kobe Bryant and the Lakers.  But how about the last second three point shot against the Toronto Raptors? 

Who is this guy?  Where did he come from? 

How did this happen all at once?   

On this last Sunday of the season of Epiphany, we have truly had an epiphany in the world of professional basketball; Lin’s appearance as a star in the basketball cosmos is a lightning strike, a sudden breakthrough.  Jeremy Lin is our collective hoops epiphany.  But I don’t want to ruin the storyline with the truth: what Jeremy Lin is doing is not a surprise at all.  He has been doing it his entire life; it’s only now that we are noticing.  The question is: what took us so long?  Jeremy Lin led his high school team, Palo Alto High School—Mr. Saxton’s alma mater, to a 32-1 record and a state championship in California, my home state where I once played the game with my own hoop dreams wearing very short shorts in the 1980s.  32-1.   He was the Northern California Player of the Year and first team all state.  Surely all the college world would come calling on this spectacular point guard.  No, not exactly.  No one noticed.  Total silence.  Jeremy Lin was not recruited--never offered an athletic scholarship, not even by Cal or Stanford in the Bay Area.  So he tried to sell himself with his DVD to the Ivy League, and initially there was little interest; but Brown and Harvard eventually came around after watching.  He also had a 4.2 GPA (that’s out of four not six, Kent slackers).  Also, it’s not like a 6’3”, 200 pound point guard doesn’t have the right body.  So what was wrong with Jeremy Lin?  The answer is absolutely nothing.  The question is what makes us unable to see who and what a person is. 

The unavoidable answer to that question is race. 

After an extraordinary career at Harvard University, the old stomping grounds of Father Schell, Lin went undrafted by all of the professional basketball teams.  After getting signed as a free agent, Lin was then cut by two NBA teams who would do most anything to get him back right now.  Jeremy Lin could be very angry about his journey.  But he is not.  Instead he is playing his heart out; he is on fire, playing with passion and heart.  And Lin is humble and down to earth, articulate, ready to give credit to his teammates and always God, but not himself.  Before his breakthrough as the Knicks point guard, he was living on his brother’s couch because he wasn’t sure if the Knicks would keep him.  In your dorms, you probably have more space than Jeremy Lin.  Even now, he doesn’t have a contract for next year, but he will get one. 

How has Lin been able to handle this adversity?  How has Lin been able to stay so level-headed during the Linsanity?  Lin is a committed Christian and has been active in Christian student fellowships since his days at Harvard.  Jeremy Lin believes that God works in mysterious and miraculous ways, and every now and then we wake up and notice.  God is capable of redeeming anything that we human beings screw up in the real world, and we do that really well.

Ok.  I have been coaching basketball for fourteen years, and I have coached many Asian players.  I currently have four players; from Hong Kong, China, Korea, and Japan—Phil, Ning, Danny, and Ryohei (who is probably sleeping through chapel right now).  I love all of you guys, though Ning is definitely the best.  Ning is also the best trombone player in the state of Connecticut.  The trombone is a very sonorous instrument.  But for all my players: I know what Jeremy Lin means to you.  He is like watching your lives, your potential, freely in motion, finally, going to places you never dreamed of going but in your actual dreams.  But Jeremy Lin is wide awake, and so are all of you, bringing Madison Square Garden and New York City and the world to its feet.  I find myself watching Lin with strange tears in my eyes sometimes, and I am not an Asian American, though my two sisters-in-law and nephew and niece are.  And they are my family, all of us together.  I also think my fearsome foursome would make me an honorary Asian, unless they’re sleeping through chapel (like Ryohei). 

But this kind of thing has happened before.  Jackie Robinson was once an undeniable force of inspiration and hope for Black Americans as the first African American player to play major league baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Robinson combined power and speed in a way the game had never seen before.  One of his signature moves was to steal home from third base.  Stealing home, the very idea says it all.  We need to make new room in our home, and in our hearts.  I belong too, Robinson and Lin are saying.  I have a home.  I too am a child of God.  Jackie Robinson was a daring and taunting artist, and blacks saw their potential in his artistry and magnificent talent, in his absolutely electric movements, and in his tremendous heart that wouldn’t quit.  I’m going to steal home.  Watch me do it right now.  And they and we watched him with strange tears in our eyes.  Jeremy Lin is a kind of Jackie Robinson, and you too may have felt the love vibes because of his play, no matter your race. 

All of this brings up some really important questions.  Jeremy Lin was overlooked as a basketball player because he is an Asian man.  What is overlooked in your character?  What part of your abilities, talents, and heart is undervalued by the world?  This idea terrifies me right now.  If the basketball world can overlook a superstar because of race, what are we missing about each other?  On more than one occasion, Lin has been stopped from even going into the gymnasium, at the players’ entrance.  He has been told that volleyball night is tomorrow night.  This same experience has happened to Tim Lincecum because he is too small to be a pitcher, and to Danica Patrick because she is a woman in the world of car racing; and once upon a time it happened to Dominic DiMaggio, brother of Joe DiMaggio, because he wore glasses as the center fielder of the Boston Red Sox for thirteen years.  People said he looked like an “assistant professor of biology.”  Now what is wrong with that?  In the 1940s and 50s, he was nicknamed “The Little Professor.”  But for children who wore eyeglasses, he was their ultimate hero.  They were Linsane for their assistant professor of biology. 

The problem is how we see each other, or rather how we fail to see each other because of the categories that separate people into groups by race, religion, country of origin, socioeconomics, or sexual orientation.  The problem may not lie with you, but I believe many people give up their dreams because the values of the world are askew; they’re messed up.  The world is messed up.  It was actually painful for me to declare that my major was English Literature, and then to decide to go to divinity school because somehow that wasn’t manly enough.  Now my earlier confusion makes me want to scream—at myself, for believing in the values of the world.  It was so easy to think like everyone else, and I refuse to do it anymore. 

How then should we live right now?  What abilities of the people around you could you do a better job of drawing out?  How can we bring the people around us up rather than taking others down out of bitterness or insecurity?  Jeremy Lin never became embittered by his experience.  In a way, he converted adversity into challenge, pain into joy, discrimination into opportunity.  This is the power of the blues in music--converting suffering into hope through the medium of music.  Basketball is the blues for Lin, the power that trespasses from pain into pure joy.  He is truly a sight to see, a marvel, on the basketball court.  Tipoff is at 1:00 today against Dallas.  Don’t miss it.      

So where does all of this leave us this morning?  February is perhaps the toughest month at Kent, and at any New England boarding school.  How do we get through the next two weeks?  The natural desire and inclination is to skip over the hard and gritty parts of this week and finals.  And what you really want is a montage.  Cue the inspirational music and condense your actions and training and exercise into sound bytes.  You can have flashes of Coach Herr or Minneman or maybe one of the Robotics instructors nodding their approval as you find your “eye of the tiger.”  Personally, my montage music would be “Welcome to the Danger Zone” from Top Gun.  Despite the fact that the film came out in 1986 (same year as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), it is still so fresh and cheesy, like a great pizza pie.  But the thing about a montage and its music is that it’s not real.  Adversity and pain need their full exposure and experience for us to grow. 

The gospel from Mark, which is the Transfiguration—Jesus on the mountain, seems like a montage, but it really isn’t.  Jesus has been doing the hard work in the messed up world, teaching and healing those in need, and many people failed to notice him because they wanted a warrior revolutionary to overthrow the Romans.  They failed to see who he really was.  He too wasn’t manly enough.  And the moment on the mountain with Jesus and his disciples is absolutely pointed to Jerusalem where Jesus will die a painful and humiliating death on the cross.  Yet Jesus also sees all of this as a triumph by seeing further into the Easter miracle that has not yet happened; he sees more deeply into the nature of a God of love who can redeem everything that we screw up in our blindness and limited imagination and poor, misplaced values.  Christianity is the faith of resurrection, the ultimate power of the blues, of joy through pain.  And February is the month when the good and the bad are all mixed up, when finals week bleeds into spring break and sunshine somewhere, if not in New England.  Keep the faith.  Find your own faith.  Keep working hard, harder than you did yesterday, with the right music to inspire you in the full experience of your life.  You might not get a montage this year, but, like a second generation Chinese and Taiwanese basketball player from Palo Alto, California, you might find the God of all creation that will keep you going, especially when things are tough.  May God bless all of you, my four Asian players, my sisters Jocelyn and Jennifer, and Wally and Ella.  And may God bless Kent School and the New York Knicks.