Valerie preached on Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”  today, a fine centerpiece for the first Sunday of Black History Month—especially in 2021, when we are so desperate for change, large and small.  Cooke himself, not only as a Black man in the mid-twentieth century but as a father grieving the death of a young son, knew profoundly that need for change.

And yet today’s Ancient Testimony was John 1:1-5: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  I associate John 1:5 with the beginning of the Christmas Eve liturgy in my ELCA church, and I often forget completely that the verse is not from the Christmas story at all.  John also writes in the past tense for the first four verses, and then switches to the present continuous: The light shines, the darkness has not overcome it.  The passage speaks of the constant—not merely constant, in fact, but eternal, beyond grammatical tense perhaps, outside time at all.

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 2/7/21: And the Darkness Has Not Overcome It” →

Photo: Olga Serjantu on Unsplash.

There was a first time to speak publicly even for Jesus, a first time to demand attention and claim authority.  Yesterday’s testimony from the Gospel of Mark related that story, in which Jesus teaches in the synagogue and drives out an “unclean spirit.”  Onlookers were amazed—by what, really, I wonder?  Was it a supernatural intervention that drove out the spirit, or was it Jesus’s audacity in that moment—not merely authority but authorship? 

Micah was preaching on theopoetics yesterday, and not for the first time—not even the first time he preached about it and I noted the occasion.  But it was fresh for me nonetheless.  Eight months into motherhood and nearly eleven months into the pandemic, I find myself professionally and creatively rudderless, obviously with plenty of energy to give but deeply lacking in direction.  When I care for the baby, I try to practice a certain amount of loving nonattachment, as paradoxical as that sounds—I need to get out of her way sometimes, literally and metaphorically.  She is on her own journey, and I tell her often that as long as she is honest and kind, she can be whoever and whatever she needs to be, and I will be proud of her.  I figure that I can start practicing that nonattachment now, which is sometimes harder than it looks.  She took a tough fall at one point today, as she does with increasing frequency while practicing standing and walking, and I dearly wanted to just hold her for a while and encourage her to cuddle a plushie and read a book or two.  But she doesn’t like to stay still for long, and although she tolerated The Very Hungry Caterpillar, she made it clear that she was ready to be on the move again as soon as we were finished.  And I had to watch her pull herself up on her Pikler triangle yet again, and prepare for her to tumble yet again, and accept that she is on her own journey.  This nonattachment leaves me with further paradoxes: I spend most of my days guiding and nurturing a child who will be her own creation; I have so much energy, so much will, but so little authority, or authorship.  

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 1/31/21: Once More with Authority” →

(Previously.)

I.

If staying home is the smell of onions, leaving home is the smell of rain just before a heavy storm: cool, weighty petrichor.  It’s too easy to forget anything is different just by looking around.  The sun shines, the sky is blue; the bags from the grocery store are heavy with oranges and oatmeal and cheese; the birds call and the mailbox clangs when you relieve it of another clutch of Christmas cards, now more than a week late.  But something hangs in the air, heavy and foreboding and not quite familiar.  Noah, six hundred years old, may have caught it before he boarded the ark.  Sure smells like rain, he might have thought.  This pile of junk better hold together.

Noah is described in Genesis as both “blameless” and “drunk,” which I appreciate.  After he pulls off the modest achievement of preserving male and female samples of all earthly life, he plants a vineyard and really leans into it.  (Following my abstemious ten months of pregnancy, I could relate.)  Who could fault him?  Now more than six hundred years old and having spent however many months (I gave up on the math in Genesis 8; let me know what number you come up with) on the ark, he probably felt like he’d earned the fruits of his labor.  We leave Noah at the end of Genesis 9, hungover and cursing Ham, before living to nearly a thousand years old.  Some real highs and lows in this Noah story. 

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 1/3/2021/2020 Part Two (The World): The Waters, The Flood” →

The public consciousness still lingers over the indelible images of 2020: faces half-obscured by masks; marchers on the move, shouting in defense of Black lives; and, as I write this, Donald Trump’s glower and its slow supercession by Joe Biden’s grin.  Close your eyes and, for better or worse, the glow of them are there, the film negatives that flood your vision when you think you can’t see anything else.  

Along with these, we have our own collection of images.  Mine includes my daughter, of course, transforming from a disoriented deep-pink blob-wrinkle of a newborn to a confident, chubby-cheeked, downy-headed seven-month-old blowing spit bubbles and reaching for absolutely everything.  My heart is humbled to remember her.  And I am lucky, lucky, lucky that my mind’s eye rests on her, in a year in which so many will never forget their last glimpse of a loved one falling to the pandemic, in which Aidan Ellison’s mother had to begin to turn to memories instead of to the living face of her son. 

And I am lucky, lucky, lucky to have seen so many onions.

Continue reading “2020 Part One (Home): The Year in Onions” →

Micah invited us to “check in with [our] breath” at the beginning of his sermon this morning, and when I dutifully did so, I noticed that I had been more or less holding mine since he brought up the election, however obliquely, a minute or two before. It didn’t feel good—the tightness in my chest, like trying to push sand between fist-sized rocks—and I forced myself to breathe in and out, slowly, the way you’re supposed to when you’re noticing your breath. It’s one more thing you have to notice, in this time when nothing can escape your notice—when, if you take your eyes from Twitter or the Times for an hour or a night, there will just be a backlog of outrage and grief waiting for you whenever you come back. So you don’t, and your breath stays ragged, the discomfort a small sacrifice in your otherwise comfortable life when thousands are dying and disconsolate.

Continue reading “Take Me to Church 11/1/20: In Between Breaths” →

This is Judson, I told her, the most special, beautiful place. This is where Mama and Papa were married. This is where we couldn’t wait to tell everyone that you were on the way. This will always be one of your spiritual homes.

*

But before I tell you about how we finally got to take Junia to our church today, let me talk about Green-Wood Cemetery.

It turns out that, once babies are a few months old, a lot of them don’t just pass out anywhere, anytime anymore. They also go through a long spell of brain development that causes, in many babies, a strong sense of FOMO. Combine these two factors and it’s a great recipe for a nap strike—never mind that the baby who doesn’t nap is just as unhappy as her guilt-ridden, exhausted parents (or, at least in this case, her mother—her father maintains his usual Zenlike calm). She has not yet connected her cranky, pouty downhill slide that starts as early as nine a.m. with her refusal to take anywhere near her supposedly age-appropriate number and duration of naps. And after two failed (i.e. the baby finds it more restful to sob than to sleep) naps, her mother gives up on the idea of a formal nap on a safe sleep surface in a cool, dark, quiet room with a white noise machine running, preceded by gentle rocking and a lullabye and a diaper change and a feeding, all of which was initiated at the very first sign of a yawn or pinkened eyebrows (THANKS, EVERY BABY SLEEP “EXPERT” EVER), and packs the baby in the stroller and heads for the cemetery. Yes, the cemetery. Because there are no traffic lights in the cemetery, and one can walk and walk and walk. For up to four miles or so without even running out of cemetery.

Continue reading “Take Me to Church 9/20/20: Walking with the Saints” →

Those who believe we are living in the End Times are easy to caricature. You can imagine it, right? Long beard, cardboard sign, REPENT FOR THE END IS NEAR? But there are those of us who have long believed much the same thing, but more quietly, and without the wild-eyed optimism of the bearded man who believes he actually might be saving souls. We have looked at the way we live and seen its absolute unsustainability, the violence of its shoddy construction. We are pretty sure it’s too late. We turn inward, or towards family or a few friends. We believe in what might be called the Last Times.

The Last Times are different from the End Times. The End Times are cataclysm; the Last Times are tragedy. The End Times are supernatural; the Last Times are painfully, obviously human.

The pandemic is a long stretch in the Last Times, in the ways in which it has lain bare the rickety structures of civilization and turned our weary faces towards the times that we didn’t know would be Last for much later. I keep thinking of the Last Time I went to church (March 8th), and the Last Time I had dinner with my friend Alison (January 30th)—Last Times that weren’t clearly marked as such. But Judson ceased in-person services after that Sunday, and the pandemic and the baby separated Alison and I, and then she moved back to D.C. in August. These are small, quiet Last Times. There are others for those who lost loved ones to COVID before they could say goodbye, barred from hospitals where ventilators would prevent conversation anyway; there are others for those who lost their livelihoods with no sense of when they might return.

And there are the Last Times of those who are watching their homes and communities burn on the West Coast, in fires exacerbated if not caused by irresponsibility, short-sightedness, greed, denial. I’ve seen photos of these fires described as “apocalyptic,” but the better descriptor is “dystopian.” Human, not supernatural. Tragic, not cataclysmic. Within our control, at least somewhat, were it not for hubris.

What if our daughter was born in the Last Times? We couldn’t have known, as last summer was ending, what was ahead (although maybe we should have). When we discovered, a year ago today, that we would be expecting a child, our reaction was unalloyed joy. Never did we think that we would spend most of the third trimester away from the hugs and hearts of everyone we love most but each other. We did not anticipate her birth arriving in the midst of so much death and the shock waves emanating from it: the devastation in the wake of COVID-19 and the righteous rage against police brutality. We did not think we would celebrate her passage out of the newborn stage as the world literally burned. But, again, maybe we should have. The fault lines—environmental, social, political, economic—have been evident for some time. That we believed, however unconsciously, we could pass through untouched is another mark of our privilege.

What if? The answer must be in the same humanity revealed in all its fragility and frailty by the Last Times. We have opportunities, small and large, to reject the lies of empire, the greatest one being that we are alone. It has never looked more like we are alone. We have spent so much time alone during the pandemic that aloneness begins to look and feel like the natural way of things. I have felt alone as I try, fruitlessly, to soothe a crying baby, to see more than a few days in front of me after months of tattered sleep. I think of those who died alone of COVID-19, of families who have lost everything in the fires. I think, even, of Jesus. Even Jesus in his final, terrible, vulnerable moments, when even God in human flesh came to die—even he found himself believing empire’s lie. Why have you forsaken me? he asked.

To reject this great lie looks like coming together for a picnic in the park—on separate blankets but in common cause. It looks like humbling ourselves before those we would discard as criminals and lost causes to thank them for their service and ask them to rejoin society with reason to hope. It looks like teaching our children to giggle and roll over because someday they will be asked to do much more. It looks like logging on to yet another Zoom brunch and church service on Sunday morning, though the novelty of online church has long worn thin, to keep up our connection to the people who want to stay connected to us in spite of it all.

If these are the Last Times, let us face them with the honesty and companionship that empire would deny us. If we can be together, even in small ways, even if not in the ways we’d like, we continue to uncover the great lie. We honor the sacrifices of our fellows and the lonely death of Jesus. We prolong the life of this world and look forward to that of the next with joy rather than desperation. We put out the fires.