Venturing Much?: A Reflection and Poem for Memeorial Day Weekend

A Reflection and Poem for 2^nd Pentecost (proper 4)  All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC  May 22, 2016                                                              Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Kings 18:20-21,30-39                      Psalm 96          Galatians 1:1-12          Luke 7:1-10

Venturing much?

Today the question for meditation in the bulletin asks you to remember a day of decision when you ventured much.

When the 1979 Book of Common Prayer was being put together, the drafters thought about what kind of prayers and thanksgivings would be helpful to a community. There were no prayers for Memorial Day because it was not a religious holiday. Memorial Day started off almost 150 years ago after the Civil War when civic groups thought that something should be done to fix up the graves of the soldiers that had been slaughtered during that war. At first it was a movement of sorrow for all the young men on both sides. The end of May is when flowers start to bloom, and there was a hope to take the flowers and decorate the grave.  There had been 2.1 million Union soldiers mobilized and 880,000 mobilized Confederate soldiers. About 750,000 soldiers were killed - 2 out of three died from disease - and of those, 90,000 were prisoners. It was a brutal war that brought out the worst in us. Longfellow wrote a poem on Decoration Day in 1882 where the last stanza reads:

Your silent tents of green
  We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
  The memory shall be ours.

But the question is, “What is the memory that shall be ours?” After the war, the political demagogues got in the act, and the memory became be a way to demonize the other side.  There developed the habit of “waving the bloody shirt” during re-election campaigns where a red-stained piece of cloth was waved by the candidate and identified as belonging to a local boy who had died in a particular battle fighting the enemies on the other side who were members of the opponent’s political party. So the memory became the glory of each side’s cause rather than the horror of what we had done treating images of God like disposable objects for economic or political goals.

During the American Civil War, the Diocese of the Episcopal Churches in the South, finding themselves in a different country, formed the Episcopal Church of the Confederate States of America, but during the Triennial General Convention of the larger Episcopal church held in the middle of the War, the Convention went on under the fiction that the Southern Dioceses were unavoidably detained and refused to consider a censure. After the War and to this day, there is still hesitance about an Episcopal Memorial Day observance, because of its being hijacked as an opportunity for division by the time of the revision of the 1892 Book of Common Prayer.  But then again, the early Episcopal Church had a hesitancy about a 4^th of July Celebration in the 1789 Book of Common Prayer because so many of the church members had been British loyalists. It was not included as a major feast until the 1979 Prayer Book, and I think the church decided not to push Memorial Day as well,  Things always take a lot of time in churches.

Outside the church, there was resistance to a national Memorial day, and in my lifetime, my father, a good North Carolina boy, would always ask us to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on the official North Carolina date of May 10^th , the anniversary of the death of Stonewall Jackson from wounds sustained in the Battle of Chancellorsville. That date did not change until 1969’s General Assembly took the courageous step to align state holidays to federal holidays. I remember the moans of complaints from the heritage folks. My father had died more than two years before so I do not know how he would have reacted, but I know that we did not own a Confederate flag and my father saw all battles as failures of leaders to find better solutions.

The battles are not quite over, for just last week, the US House of Representatives had a vote on an Amendment to the Veteran’s Appropriations bill to ban the use of Confederate battle flags from national cemeteries except on Memorial Day and Confederate Memorial Day. It narrowly passed, but last year that amendment caused the shutdown of legislation, and this year might be interesting since the final bill will be coming up on the 1^st anniversary of the Charleston, SC church shootings.

The Prayer that we will use today as the Post Communion Prayer is the Prayer For Heroic Service drafted by Caroline Rose for the 1979 prayer book as there was felt to deal with the divisions that the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Struggle had brought forth and the need to pray in unite in thanksgiving together for warriors and peacemakers, Northern and Southern, ancient and modern.

O Judge of the nations, we remember before you with grateful 
hearts the men and women of our country who in the day of
decision ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy. Grant
that we may not rest until all the people of this land share the
benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines. This
we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The “day of decision venturing much” comes on many days, and it is the venturing much that we hold in memory. Our lessons today have to do with people venturing much. In the Hebrew Testament lesson, Elijah comes forth in the third year of a drought and confronts King Ahab and Queen Jezebel at the risk of his life and safety, challenging the people to turn away from the worship of the Phoenician and Canaanite rain and storm god, Baal. The story that we told today is an abbreviated version because the longer story has the ending that the old men loved to tell around the campfires for hundreds and thousands of years - Elijah celebrates his victory over the Priests of Baal by slaughtering 450 of them. They would laugh and cheer because the only way they knew was how to deal with enemies was to kill them and then wave their bloody shirts in victory.

There are three choices we have in dealing with enemies - one is to cower in fear and carefully go along with them to see what you might be able to get out of it, two is to try to destroy them, and three is to confront them lovingly.

In the Epistle, Paul had done missionary work in Galatia and had been successful in helping many to have faith in Christ. But when he leaves, there appears on the scene a kind of “truth squad” from the home office in Jerusalem telling them that Paul was misguided, for if you really wanted to follow Jesus, then they would have to convert to Judaism and no longer associate with Gentiles. The “truth squad” boys said converts first had to become a Jew as Jesus had been a Jew by circumcision and following the ritual laws. Paul shoots back a letter telling them that the love of God in Jesus is not in exchange for following ritual rules of purity and circumcision. Paul had tried all of his life to live into the legal and ritual demands, but it was only through Grace that he was able to be one with Christ. Jesus had been Paul’s enemy and Jesus returned his hated with love. Paul confronts his enemies but he will not try to destroy them because he follows the example of his Savior Jesus. By his confrontation Paul sets us free to Grace.

In the Gospel story from Luke, Jesus is asked to heal the servant of a Roman centurion of the occupying forces, an enemy if there ever was one. The religious leaders have benefited materially and financially from the generosity of the enemy, and they urge Jesus to do what the Roman centurion wants because there could be some advantage to it. Jesus goes to meet the enemy, not out of fearful collaboration but out of loving respect for a fellow human being in pain. The centurion, out of respect for Jesus, stops him so that Jesus will not be ritually defiled by entering into the home of a gentile and asks him to just say the word and the servant will be healed.  By Jesus’ love, he sets us free to love our enemy.

It would be nice to say that the Romans were so impressed that they helped Jesus out, and Jesus gets married and has children and retires off a Roman pension, living a long and healthy life. However, Luke remembers later in his Gospel that it is a Roman group who crucifies Jesus, even though that centurion suggested that Jesus was innocent. Loving your enemies is always a risky proposition, but then on each day of decision, we are called to venture much.

Days of decisions are not just one day, but each day is a day of decision to venture much. 19^th Century American poet James Russell Lowell wrote a poem called The Present Crisis, from which was extracted a couple of very edited verses, 16 out of 90 lines, and many of those lines were changed and edited to create a hymn called “Once to Every Man and Nation”, which was in the old hymnal. The first verse went like this:

 Once to ev'ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
'Twixt that darkness and that light. 

I remember singing that hymn often, usually around Memorial Day. However, the hymnal was revised in 1982 and that hymn was left out. There were two reasons - one was that there are many moments of decision, not just one; and two, the editing was not really true to Lowell’s longer poem which ends:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

On this Memorial Day weekend, what will be the memory that we hold onto and how will we now venture much on days of decision to set us free in our lives together?

Venturing Much? (Poem)

Walking out into the predawn light, the stars stare back

asking how will this day be different in decisions fretted?

Will I, in playing it safe, venturing nothing, gaining lack,

losing only another day of this life to shadows regretted?

Or will this be the day that I will commit into wind a tack

to calling of my own true self, learning only by accepted,

hard failures, three steps forward with two footfalls wrack,

before I’ll have reached that goal of resonance, embedded

ancient rhyme printed in deep unconscious, planted goal

before my birth into a God gift of my much beloved soul.

The Wisdom of Rivals: Reflection and Poem for Trinity Sunday

A Reflection for Trinity Sunday                                      All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC

May 22, 2016                                                                          Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Romans 5:1-5               John 16:12-15 Psalm 8

The Wisdom of Rivals

What is the nature of wisdom? The Book of Proverbs lesson for today reflects on Wisdom, portraying it as a feminine attribute of God. Most of the time when the Biblical authors refer to God, they use masculine pronouns because they lived in patriarchal societies, and the Bible reflects the bias of the authors who were somewhat nervous about women. There is a power in women that unsettled their male culture; therefore they placed their women under strict controls. While they acknowledged the necessity of having women around, many of their myths had bad things happen to the male heroes if they listened to, or fell under the spell of, women. They were afraid of things that went outside the traditional male boundaries for they were terrified that women might want to control them. Looking through the lens of the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the personality types that did well in Hebrew cultures were “Sensing” people who looked to the external world for information and the “Thinking” person who followed logic in making decisions, as opposed to “Intuitives” who got their information from going deeper into the internal world and imagination and the “Feeling” person who made decisions based on emotion. Other religions of the region had feminine deities which demanded obedience, and the Hebrew Scriptures spent a lot of their time condemning those gods. The male Hebrew leaders spent a lot of their time promoting the following of laws and fighting wars of dominance.

There’s a phrase I often use which I stole from the old British television series, “Rumpole of the Bailey” and which they stole from H Ryder Haggard's book and later movie, She. I use the phrase when I refer to my wife - “She who must be obeyed!”  I laugh - she doesn't, because she has had more than enough patronizing by men covering up their fear of strong women. The character, “She”, is an alluring monster, but what attracted me to Pat was her strength and passion.

Part of becoming whole human beings is for each of us to claim those parts of ourselves that reflect the denied parts of ourselves - women to claim their masculine and men to claim their feminine, the sensate to claim the intuitive, the thinker to claim the feeler, and so on. So it is with God; a God of law and war is one-dimensional and must be seen as also a God of love and peace. The claiming of wisdom as an attribute of God is part of that grown-up view of God for wisdom is not about following the rules, but about looking deeper into ourselves to find what God might be whispering into our souls. Jesus has this habit of quoting the law and then pointing out that the law was not enough, and he urges us to go behind the law to find the love, to go beyond the usual and to enter into life of the Spirit in order to claim what it means to be fully human.

If wisdom is an attribute of God, then the way we enter into wisdom is to listen to the inner musings of God. Wisdom is not about following the rules or developing our own talents, but about understanding how everything fits together through the eyes and mind of God.

Last week I was thinking about how I might make more money since this preaching gig is not making me rich, and I thought about writing a play after I retire. I realized it might take me years to write or as Browning reminds us,  “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/or what a Heaven for?” I started blocking out how it might work. There is a very popular musical in rap by Lin-Manuel Miranda on Broadway right now about Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, and his rivalries with others like Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Burr. There is even a song about Hamilton debating Samuel Seabury, a minister who is a Loyalist to the British, and winning the argument. Seabury will later become the first Bishop in the American Episcopal Church. Hamilton’s song with Seabury has Hamilton exclaim: “My dog speaks more/ eloquently than thee!”  That is his paraphrase; let me read you what Hamilton wrote in response to Seabury’s article on February 23, 1775:

I resume my pen, in reply to the curious epistle you have been pleased to favor me with, and can assure you that notwithstanding I am naturally of a grave and phlegmatic disposition, it has been the source of abundant merriment to me. The spirit that breathes throughout is so rancorous, illiberal, and imperious; the argumentative part of it is so puerile and fallacious; the misrepresentation of facts so palpable and flagrant; the criticisms so illiterate, trifling, and absurd; the conceits so low, sterile, and splenetic, that I will venture to pronounce it one of the most ludicrous performances which has been exhibited to public view during all the present controversy.

I started to think of how I could take historical figures and play on the tension between them, and I thought of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Andrew Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury before Roosevelt won the election. The men hated each other and both of them were seen as wise men by their followers.  It might be a comment on how we see wisdom in our culture.

You may need more information on Andrew Melon. He was of the same generation of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin’s older cousin and Eleanor’s uncle. Melon was Secretary of the Treasury under three Presidents from 1921 to 1932 and had been hailed as the wisest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.

Unlike Hamilton, who was an illegitimate child who the Church of England would not allow to be a member, you can see where the vitriol came from against Seabury, a Church of England Minister.  Both Mellon and Roosevelt were born in good, well-off Episcopal families. They both were born and moved in privileged circles and belonged to the right clubs. Both went to college, and Roosevelt graduated from Harvard and went to Columbia Law, but dropped out after he passed the Bar. He worked in corporate law before he went into politics. Mellon went to a hometown college in Pittsburg but never graduated because when he was 17, his father set him up as the head of a coal and lumber business which he made a success. When he was 28, he took over control of the family bank. Mellon was already a power in the economy when Roosevelt was born. Roosevelt would never had heard of him because Franklin led a sheltered life away people outside his own social circle until he married early at 23 to get away from his mother’s influence, which he is never really able to do. Mellon, on the other hand kept his focus on working and making money. When he was 45, he married a beautiful young heiress 25 years his junior. She was an heiress of Guinness Beer and part of Mellon's later job as Secretary of the Treasury is to oversee the Prohibition enforcement, which I think would add a nice scene in my play…

I am thinking about another scene where Mellon is upset over Teddy Roosevelt’s busting up the monopolies and trusts and Mellon being distrustful of the name of Roosevelt. The outline of the first scene I have between Franklin and Mellon is when Mellow is meeting with some lawyers and they decide to interview Franklin, one of the young tony New York corporate lawyers, for a possible job. In this time of their lives, both are married and there is a party of surface charm between them, but Mellon is fed up with Franklin’s lack of sharpness about the law, and Franklin makes a couple of comments about how he would not really be sure he would be happy in faraway Pittsburg without his friends on the Hudson. An argument ensues and in revenge, Franklin makes an only partially unsuccessful pass at Mellon's wife. She tells Mellon, and so begins their mutual hatred. Pure fiction of course, but fun.

Mellon continued a phenomenal success as a banker and financier before he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury with the election of Warren Harding. Harding had overwhelmingly won the election against the ticket in which Franklin Roosevelt, the Vice Presidential candidate, had been badly beaten. The next year Franklin would come down with polio, which would put his future in doubt, while Mellon is at the top of his game. Mellon pushes for loose regulation over the stock market and is able to cut the highest income tax rate from 77% to 24%. In the 1920's, he was the third highest income tax payer behind John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and people saw his wealth and declared him wise. His art collection would later form the core of the National Gallery in Washington where I spend some of the best moments of my life appreciating his taste in art. He was a well-known philanthropist and helped to build up universities and charities.

He was also the Secretary of the Treasury leading up to the Wall Street crash and into the Great Depression. After the crash he was declared the worst Secretary in American history, and hearings were held to have him impeached until Hoover appointed him as Ambassador to the Court of St. James to save him that humiliation. In the Depression, Roosevelt's allies held Mellon up as a malefactor of wealth and remembered that he had been a member of the club that owned the earthen dam that was allowed to be in such disrepair that its collapse caused the Johnston Flood, killing over 2000 people. The families of those killed could not sue the club because the club founders made sure that the members were never foolish enough to be liable. His marriage to his young wife had ended after 12 years with a bitter divorce after his wife's flagrant adulteries, and Roosevelt’s Justice Department kept investigating Mellon for tax evasion until he died. After his death it was announced that there really was no evidence of tax evasion

In their times both men were seen as wise, but I think they were clever, aware of their own agendas, rather than wise. They were both very successful in their fields of work but not in their personal intimacy. They were well-mannered and charming and, for both of them, charm had a purpose. They went to church and listened to preachers, but neither of them seemed to have time to do a lot of listening to God. They didn't really seem to spend much time trying to figure out what God would want; rather, their public words seem to suggest that being a Christian meant that you ask God to help you in doing what you felt the country needed and you wanted. They both loved and appreciated beauty. They both worked for what they saw as the common good, and they were good at it.

In the final song of Hamilton, Washington raps:

Let me tell you what I wished I known

When I was young and dreamed of Glory

You have no control

Who lives

Who dies

Who tells your story.

I think that they were like the rest of us who arise each day to capture fleet glimpses of wisdom when we become fully human in the fullness of God’s vision of living as God’s images on earth. In the play I see two redemptive scenes of wisdom: The first is for Mellon, who stands before a piece of art which he loves but knows he cannot buy, he cannot own. Yet it is in his inability to own it, to control it, that he finds the greater awe. He makes a decision to give his art collection to the National Gallery and refuses permission to name the Gallery after him, for it is a gift and it no longer belongs to him. He sees the divine wisdom that all of our gifts don’t really belong to us; they are to be used for others. The other scene is for Roosevelt, when he has children with polio with him at Warm Springs, and he finds the wisdom of joy even when he cannot fix, he cannot control; he cannot use this for his own agenda, he can only love.

I am reminded of the second verse of Kipling’s poem Recessional

 The tumult and the shouting dies;

   The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

…An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The Wisdom of Rivals

Hating in you what I dread seeing in myself

   You become villain mine own enemy worst.

I want be seen as priceless Dutch blue delft

   Yet you remain as a cracked mirror cursed.

Oh if you could only see me and I you

As God’s child showing full love true.

Norah's Creed

A Reflection On the Occasion of May 20, 2016 Memorial Service for Norah Mitchell

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC              Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39             Psalm 121,       John 11:21-27

Norah’s Creed

The Hymn we sang at the beginning of this service was Jerusalem, which is from a poem by William Blake, And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time. It is a reflection on an old Druid myth that was updated with Christian characters where the child Jesus first came to England with his uncle, a tin merchant Joseph of Arimathea, checking out the tin mines in Roman Empire Days. The story went that every step that the young boy took blessed the land and, in Blake’s time, the Industrial Revolution was fouling the air with sulfurous smoke from what he labeled “Satanic mills”, creating a tension between Heaven on Earth and Hell on Earth. You may have recognized the tune as the theme song from the movie Chariots of Fire and the song that the church ladies would sing, as some rolled their eyes, in the movie Calendar Girls.

If you are unfamiliar with that film: in Skipton, Yorkshire England, the local Women Institute (WI) tries to find a way of raising money for helping the local hospital with cancer research. Usually they have a bake sale, sell plum jam and serve tea. One of the women comes up with an unconventional idea that these mature, middle-aged women of the WI would put out a calendar featuring 12 of their members topless. It was based on a true story and they raised a great deal of money for the hospital cancer treatment center. There is a little speech given by the character Chris, played by the actress Helen Mirren, to try to get permission to do the calendar. Norah and I loved this speech, and she would laugh heartily whenever one of us brought it up. I looked it up and it goes:

I'm about to commit heresy. Look, I hate plum jam. I only joined the WI to make my mother happy. I do, I hate plum jam. I'm crap at cakes, I can't make sponge. In fact, seeing as it's unlikely that George Clooney would actually come to Skipton to do a talk on what it was like to be in "ER", there seems very little reason for me to actually stay in the WI. Except suddenly... suddenly I want to raise money in memory of a man I loved, and to do that I'm prepared to take me clothes off for a WI calendar, and if you can't give us ten minutes of your time, Madam Chairman, well then, frankly, guys, I'm going to do it without council approval. Because there are some things that are more important than council approval. And if it means that we get closer to killing off this shitty, cheating, sly, conniving bloody disease that cancer is, oh God, I tell you, I'd run round Skipton market naked, smeared in plum jam, wearing nothing but a knitted tea cozy on me head and singing "Jerusalem".

Norah would laugh and she promised that, if she finally beat this cancer, she would do exactly that - I told her I would find a tea cozy for her. She had a fondness for the song because it projects the England of her youth as a place of paradise, which also had some satanic mills as well. That was her experience. She shared the times of growing up in England as moments of paradise and metaphorical Satanic Mills, when she remembered the time of the bombings by the Nazis during World War II when many of the children were sent on trains to small towns and villages, places where the Germans would not bother to bomb. Norah was one of those children. The train would pull into a station with their names and information pinned to their coats, and the townspeople would look them over and decide who they would take and could still be a benefit, not a burden, to them on the farms or around the house. Some were treated wonderfully; Norah was not.

The good news of that experience is that it helped solidify compassion in her for all of God’s creatures. Her favorite service in the year was our St. Francis Day Blessing of the Animals when beloved pets of all kinds are brought to church and we bless God and them for sharing love. There is a quote from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man, and bird, and beast;

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things , both great and small;

For the dear God, who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.”

If you want to replicate that kind of compassion that Norah had, a suggestion might be to make a contribution of time or resources to the Dare County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. An interesting historical note: when I was teaching Social Work in a college before I went to seminary, I used to tell my students that child welfare action to prevent the abuse and neglect of children had a hard time getting started in this country because there was a resistance to interfering in a private home. The first case of child neglect was brought to court under the ASPCA’s sponsored law about the Protection of Dumb Animals because they considered children “dumb animals” unable to speak for themselves.

For years, even after she was reunited with her mother at the end of the war, Norah was filled with seething rage at how she had been treated by the woman of that house - I will not call it a home - in which she felt like a prisoner. She was unable to speak of it because everybody wanted to put the war behind them. Years later she went back to England after she had moved to the states and she visited that village, looked up that house and told that woman off - and especially reminded that woman that she, Norah Mitchell, had survived in spite of that woman and was living a good life in spite of her.

Norah was not at all interested in forgiving this woman, but she was doing the next best thing - getting on with her life. Norah got on with her life; in the face of how badly she was treated, in the face of the heartbreak of death of friends and family, in the face of disease, she kept on going. The religious functionary within me at first suggested that she had to go through the process of forgiveness, but she took a page from another teaching of Jesus, and she “picked up her bed and walked.” It worked for her, and she would do that with the treatments involved with her cancer.  When they were over, she would pick up her bed and walk - and if she could take a trip to Spain, so much the better. I am not about to condemn the path she took because I do believe the words from Paul in today’s Romans’s reading:

Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?    No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wherever she was, she was never separated from God’s love, for as the Psalmist promised her: “The Lord shall watch over your going out and coming in; from this time forth and forevermore.”

She put in a lot of coming and going.

Norah’s Creed (Poem)

“Well, that was an experience!” Muttering,

“Not wasting any one bit more time crying

over some bad milky memories cluttering

a life full of things need to do afore dying.

I want spending more love, gotten and given

riotously. I’m not leaving this earth regretting

the waste not treating this place as if heaven

is here every moment before last sun setting.