In memoriam

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

From the edge of the cliff we see no horizon.
Earth, air, water merge, solid state
dissolves, breath condenses, dessicates;
we lick salt out of the sky.

I drive him to the airport.
Lumbering hulls filled with gear
and stuff; jet fuel, too fast, too high,
caught in time, never soon enough.

Once upon a time, fear of falling
over the edge kept us close to home.
Now we are unafraid even to fly,
although still to die.

We want too much. We want
to reach beyond the fall,
to find solid ground beneath us, the days
when earth bleeds into heaven

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Earth, oil, ashes, and a pound of precious nard

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

I have anointed people for death, and I think Mary was right to get in early, because when I return, a few days later, or a week, I do not come bearing precious nard.

The Cassock

I carry dust in my pocket:
a mess of dirt and ashes with the faint whiff
of burnt palm nestled in my hand
in a black film canister, the kind that’s gone extinct
now. I am ready in confessional clothes,
armed with dirt and ashes and a dust-dry mouth,
a pocketful of earth to fill the grave.

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Running away

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

A ghost  ‮A  ghost

‭is following me;  ‮ is following me;

she makes noise to be where  ‮ she makes noise to be where

there should be nothing to see;  ‮  there should be nothing to see;

she makes patterns in deep water ‮ she makes patterns in deep water

from which nothing emerges  ‮ from which nothing emerges

clearly; she trips me, tricks  ‮ clearly; she trips me, tricks

me, traps me, tracks  ‮ me traps me, tracks

me, I try to out  ‮ me, I try to out

run her, out  ‮ run her, out

fox her, out  ‮ fox her, out

wit her, sweat her  ‮ wit her, sweat her

out. But when I step out  ‮ out. But when I step out

of the shower, I am afraid to wipe the steam from the cold, damp mirror.

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Jesus, Mary, and Judas

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,

eyes stinging from the stench

and from the memory: “See

how he loved him!” they said

when Jesus wept,

and now this woman spilling fragrant

death all over. Her sister

rattles the plates on purpose.

Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,

rolls at his feet.

Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,

pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”

Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.

Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,

swears his own lips will kiss him the last.

Only then will they understand;

maybe then they will weep to remember

how Judas loved him.

_____

Poor, jealous Judas, love-lorn puppy,

eyes stinging from the stench

and from the memory: “See

how he loved him!” they said

when Jesus wept,

and now this woman spilling fragrant

death all over. Her sister

rattles the plates on purpose.

Mary, rapt face hidden by her hair,

rolls at his feet.

Poor puppy, Judas, always attention-seeking,

pants, “Teacher! She’s doing it wrong.”

Martha hollow laughs. Lazarus ghosts.

Poor, jealous Judas, his passion betrayed,

swears his own lips will kiss him the last.

Only then will they understand;

maybe then they will weep to remember

how Jesus loved him.

 

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Year C Lent 4: life and death

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

It is such a familiar story, and one which we love: God running to us, skirts hitched up, “my child! My child!” It is all the good news that we need. We were dead but are alive again, by the grace of god, the love of Christ.

But the first ones to hear Jesus tell the tale did not have any such tradition of layers of interpretation. Just for a few minutes, I want to see if we can set aside the Sunday school children’s bible picture of the father God running in the road, and hear the story of an ordinary family, as though for the first time.

A man had two sons, the one who left, and the one who stayed away.

Thirty years ago, or so, I was still at home finishing school. My brother was living in a land to the west, working drudge shifts in a fancy hotel. An acquaintance reported seeing him lately in town. Nonsense, said my father; he is working out west in a fancy hotel. But then my parents got to thinking that it had been a while since they had heard from him, and when they tried to call the fancy hotel, he was no longer living there, or working there. Some trouble over drugs, the manager said. For a week or two, we wondered where he might be, whether the neighbour had truly seen him, and not some ghost that looked like him.

We found him, in the end, because in his desperation and degradation and drug famine, he broke into the pharmacy at our  doctor’s surgery.

There was no feasting at his return; but there was some kind of relief, resolution. My brother, who might have been dead for all that we know, was alive, and kicking; and although there was no fatted calf, there was a bail-out.

Or am I conflating his infinite cycles of exile, disgrace, and restoration; his many returns from the dead?

I read this parable, and it is impossible not to recognize the addict in the younger brother. Even as he is coming home he is working out how to get around his father, calculating the angle that will get him off the hook, because he is hooked. And even then, reading him, his blessed return, it is impossible not to weep for the ones who never made it home.

Last year, according to figures from the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, deaths from heroin overdose totalled 183, or one at least every two days. Add in Fentanyl, oxycodone, other opiates, and the death toll rises to 279, in Cuyahoga County alone, in 2015. In one graph, Euclid is second only to Lakewood as a suburban site of overdose death. In another graph, Parma throws out the curve and Euclid is third; but we are head and shoulders above the next-placed city, and this is not a competition we want to be winning. We are our brothers’ keepers, are we not?

There are some things we are beginning to get right, in spite of our Pharisaic impulses to self-righteousness and morality plays. “Just say no” is so much easier to say from outside of the spiral of addictive disease. But there are some things we are beginning to get right: zero tolerance is beginning to give way to an understanding of acquired tolerance, and the dangers of overdose after withdrawal and treatment, when that tolerance has dropped, and the same dose that used to do it for us now is deadly. Zero tolerance is not, anyway, a good Christian response to chaos and crisis. Healing sounds more like the Jesus we know.

It is easy to be bitter, to remember that when black bodies were dying of the same addictive, predatory disease, the answer was to declare war, waged less against drugs than against drug addicts, as it happened. It is worth noting that cocaine still accounted for 109 deaths in  Cuyahoga County in 2015. It is worthy to point out that more than 75% of people dying from heroin are white; and in the face of that crisis, we are willing to extend our tolerance, even beginning to venture out to meet them on the road, to catch them with our naloxone kits, to save them. Those who were dead are alive again.

But one who was dead is alive again, and may we all learn to live again. I don’t know that I have the right to say so, but I am trying to be honest with you.

I have wondered, this week, how we are called to respond to the family crisis unfolding around us. I have not always been able to do much for my own elder brother. None of us saves the other; but God, who is the father and mother of us all, loves each of us beyond understanding, beyond all reason.

That, I think, is what we have to offer. That is the good news that should send us flying out, skirts hitched up, to forestall the one who is lost on his way to death. One way or another, there is always a place for you in God’s house, we should tell her, your own home. One way or another, we tell her mother, his father, one way or another there is welcome, there is food, there is life. And we will do our best to leave our own baggage in the fields, and come into the light with the lightness of love hitched up to join the feast.

Amen.

_____

Further reading:

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperCollins, 2014)

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)

Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis, 2015)

 

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The prodigal God

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Waiting 

for the God to come

home; if I saw her

on the road would I run,

hitching up my skirts,

fire up the pyre,

melt the golden calf,

sacrifice my unbelief,

my cold soul

on the altar of her passion?

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A cynical preacher on the prodigal parable

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Every story has a point of view. I knew that family. I would have told their story a little differently than Jesus did. I would have told you a little more.

The kid was a chancer, a gambler, an addict. Not his fault; he took after his old man: emotional, extravagant, uninhibited. When he hit rock bottom – seriously, pigs? And in a conveniently foreign, far-off land; a likely story – anyway, when he finally ran aground he thought, as addicts do, strategically, lining up his next hit in his head. His father had always been a soft touch. He’d lay it on thick, he’d have the old man weeping, promising the sun and the moon for his redemption by the end of the night.

It went even better than expected.

The elder brother: sober, serious, steady; he took after their mother. He had never forgiven father or brother for driving her, as he saw it, to an early grave with their profligate ways. He heard the sounds of carousing and he knew; he knew. He went to have it out with his father; he didn’t trust himself to go near his brother. Their father was already drunk, promising the moon while his threadbare sleeve caught the cup of wine and floored it, thick red liquid spilling across the mud floor.

In the morning, by the time the elder brother could trust himself to approach the main house, his younger sibling had flown the coop. Recharged, redeemed, refinanced, he had left with the dregs of the dawn. The father, well hungover, wept and belched. The elder brother, caught between his mother’s long-suffering love and compassion and his own anger at her leaving, watched him wearily, balanced between pity and contempt, shifting his weight from one to the other like a boxer.

So tell me, Jesus: how are you going to pull this one out of the pigswill (to put it politely)? What miracle will you work to rescue, to redeem out of this thick muck the bright shining river that runs from the throne in the kingdom of God?

(… to be continued)

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Year C Lent 3: self-examination and repentance

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Lest ye repent, says Jesus, you will all perish as they did. It was the first soundbite of Jesus’ campaign trail, his initial mission statement: Repent, for the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Our exhortation to a holy Lent includes an invitation to self-examination and repentance (BCP 265). Self-examination and repentance. They are two sides, really of the same coin. They are two steps on the journey, one foot in front of the other; the journey closer to God, in the footsteps of Jesus.

James Ussher, an early scholar of Trinity College, Dublin defines the parts of repentance as

Two. A true grief wrought in the heart of the believer, for offending so gracious a God by his former transgressions. And a conversion unto God again, with full purpose of heart ever after to cleave unto him, and to refrain from that which shall be displeasing in his sight. (Jame Ussher in Love’s Redeeming Work: the Anglican Quest for Holiness, Rowell, Stevenson & Williams, eds (Oxford University Press, 20014) 156)

Self-examination, penitence, that true grief wrought in the heart of the believer for that which has been done or undone, which grieves the heart of God; then repentance, a conversion, a turning, a new beginning as many times as it is necessary, to turn us towards God, to cleave us more closely to Christ.

If I say that repentance is not the same thing, then, as saying sorry; that it is not the howl of the penitent or the hand-wringing of regret; that is not to let us off the hook for the shortcomings we are afraid to find in our self-examination. But it demands even more. It demands that we turn aside from that which we cringe to confess, and that we do justice instead; not once as a penance for our sins, but always afterwards, as part of our life with Christ.

Repent, then, says Jesus. Pay attention. Look where you are going.

There’s a presumably true story making the rounds of a couple driving in their car, following the directions of their GPS system on an unfamiliar route. The GPS did not know, being non-sentient, that the bridge ahead was out. The couple followed its directions past road closed signs and bridge out warnings and diversions, right off the road into the gully below. They were an ordinary pair. They were not worse sinners, nor more stupid or gullible than any of us: we all rely on auto-pilot, the unexamined life, far too much for our own good. They did not examine their surroundings, their misplaced trust, they failed to turn aside when it was necessary. Everything was offered for their guidance and protection; but they perished.

Lest ye repent, says Jesus, you all will perish as they did. Which is not to say that all self-examination and repentance has to be negative. In the case of the couple in the car, the choice of right or wrong way was not a moral decision but one of wisdom and discernment; paying attention.

Those of us working through Growing a Rule of Life are finding that examination and discernment, praying to find a way to grow God’s kingdom within our own souls and our own spiritual home, may bear good fruit.

Next week, our Vestry will meet for a period of self-examination on behalf of this parish; and discernment about which direction we need to turn in next; and we certainly hope that it will not be all hand-wringing and woe. When we are most deeply honest with ourselves, we know that we are made in God’s image, and called as a church to further God’s kingdom.

I look around and I think of the old saw that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I look at our beautiful, blended family and I wonder what we are doing right. Is it just that we meet at 10 instead of 11? Or is there something we can find in our self-examination that may be useful to the culture that surrounds us; a culture wringing its hands over all-white Oscars?

We spoke just briefly last week about the epidemic of heroin abuse and overdose deaths all around and within our families. Only through hard self-examination is our culture beginning to ask what is the difference between the reaction and response to this epidemic and the crack crisis of the 80s and 90s. We know what it is: the answer is black and white. The question is how to repent, and reset, and return to God’s call to love.

This community, this country need not look too deeply into its self-examination to find areas worthy of repentance. The people came to Jesus and said, what about these people killed in religious violence, by persecution, by Pilate? And Jesus replied, yes, and what of those killed by workplace violence, negligence, neglect? What of those dying on the streets of Kalamazoo, or killed by a co-worker in Kansas? Unless you repent, says Jesus; unless you decide to do something differently, then you will perish the same way. For two millennia and more we have continued to wring our hands and say our prayers; but repentance not only says its prayers, but when it gets up off its knees it moves deliberately and surely away from temptation; it delivers us from evil.

If turning the world towards the kingdom of God seems like a tall order, that is what Jesus came for; to turn us, to draw us close to God, even if the way runs through the cross.

Our own self-examination, our facing of the places within ourselves that we fear to uncover, that we cringe to confess, comes at a cost. Repentance contains the acknowledgement that we have made wrong turnings, that our desires have been disordered; turned toward revenge, envy, violent emotion. And yet, it is in that confession that we find our conversion, that we find God waiting with the burning desire not to punish but to turn us around and embrace us; to walk us into the kingdom of heaven.

Moses was going about his father-in-law’s business, minding his own. He was keeping a low profile; he was on the run for a murder he had committed back in Egypt. He saw a strange sight. “I must turn aside,” he said. I must turn aside. He found himself suddenly on holy ground, in the face of God, and he was given God’s name, and the command to turn around, and set God’s people free.

We repent not because we are afraid of punishment. We turn aside, we turn towards a God who is waiting for us, burning with desire to make the name of God known to us, to show us his face in the person of Jesus; who is dying to call us by name.

That is why we make our discipline of self-examination in Lent. To discover that spark, and if it has gone cold, or become smothered by sin, to turn, to turn aside, to turn back towards a God whose fire does not consume but which inflames us with passion for God, for the people of God, for freedom, and the promised land.

Amen

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A word about music

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

For TrebleFest 2016, Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio; in these or other words:

Singing is a profound example of how we are made in the image of God. Whether we come to it through the science of the body, the breath drawn in and transfigured into music, just as the breath of God brought the first human to life (according to Genesis); or whether we find it through the mathematics of the intervals of sound that work together to produce beauty; or the soul of the artist, painting with sighs; there is room for everyone to come together with God in that work of creating God’s image on earth.

Whether you are the outgoing type who just has to share all your feelings and words with the people around you; or whether you are more on the shy side, hiding yourself inside the notes, letting the music speak for you, give you a voice, there is room for every image of God in the choir, in the song.

And just as we never reach the end of the image of God, so we never reach the end of the ways that music can speak to us and for us. It is a gift.

And those who sing it show us the image of God, and bless us with the image and echoes of immortality.

Amen.

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The penitent

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

on her knees scrubbing

blood from the pavement beneath

the broken icon

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