(derekbaker)

Get Up, Stand Up. Stand Up for Your Rights.

had emergency surgery recently. (It was caused by a hernia that I already had another surgery scheduled to fix, but a strangulated small bowel turned an elective surgery into an emergency surgery, and they had to remove about 6-7" of my small intestine and resection back the healthy parts, leading to a week in the hospital and another week at T's, recovering.) As I still don't have a lot of energy -- and a cold is now sapping whatever brain activity I was capable of to begin with -- I pretty much manage to do some light reading every day, but can't concentrate for long before I find myself getting tired. But one thing I've been trying to stick to is the Daily Office (Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, or both) in the Book of Common Prayer. This has become a highlight of my day, to be honest, and I was rewarded today with a Gospel reading that seemed so applicable to feeling so under the weather as I currently do. It was Mark 5:21-43 for Monday in the 3rd week of Epiphany today:

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, "My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live."

So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?'." He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader's house to say, "Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?" But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, "Do not fear, only believe." He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping." And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Now, of course, the two healing narratives in this passage are what made the strongest impression on me. I've read this passage many times, I know, but I'm not sure I've ever read it when I was myself was sick -- certainly never when I was recovering from a cold and major abdominal surgery. So it's a comforting Gospel lesson in Epiphanytide for that reason alone.

But I was also struck by a couple of things. For one, it's interesting to me to see that, once again, Christ's divinity is demonstrated through his interactions with women. This happens so frequently -- from his birth to his death to his resurrection -- that we don't think much about it these days. But in 1st century Palestine, I understand, it was rather radical for a teacher and a healer to devote as much time -- including, in this story, travel time -- and (literally) energy to women. Or for a strange woman to touch a man and vice versa. Some part of this openness may be due to the fact that, in Judaism, one traces one's Jewish ancestry through the mother, which itself was a novel concept for the religions of the region and is literally more "feminist" than the paternal line of determining who does and doesn't belong. But it also shows that in Christ, there really isn't "male or female, Jew or Greek." (Or "gay or straight," I would add.) Instead, all are welcome to his grace, even (or especially) a 12-year-old girl.

It heartens me also that the leader of the synagogue was so concerned about his daughter that he sought out this healer he'd heard about and begged him to attend to her. How different a story is that from what we hear how women, and especially girls, are treated in so many parts of the world even today! Here, however, two thousand years ago, was a little girl, a "talitha" in Aramaic, who was loved by her father Jairus and the people in her life as much as any boy might have been. That may not seem amazing to us today -- in fact, anything otherwise is hateful to us -- but I imagine this story has far more resonance in those parts of the world where girls still aren't valued as much as boys and where religious leadership is still solely the province of men.

The other thing that struck me as very modern is the description of the woman's ordeal with her hemorrhage: "Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse."

In other words, our healthcare system, which today continues to bankrupt sick people, hasn't much improved in 2,000 years in how its delivered, only perhaps in the science behind it.

Labels: church, faith, personal

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Bad Nonhabits

Just like in keeping a journal (or in exercising regularly, for that matter), I'm not very good at maintaining good habits, if blogging could be considered a good habit. It's getting to the point where the "sorry it's been so long since I've posted" are the only posts I post. As always, I resolve to be more regular (if only to achieve my goal of daily writing-that-isn't-for-work), and think one way to do that is to ignore the need for every post to be a complete essay unto itself.

Not that they've been all that good, as essays, I realize, but having a complete thought, exploring it thoroughly, and making some kind of point always seems the ideal -- but as Voltaire said, "the perfect is the enemy of the good." ("Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," which would normally translate as "the best is..." but such exactitude in translation is, perhaps, exactly what Voltaire was warning me about. I must ask him when we meet next.)

So a few random thoughts for now, if only to stake a claim for perhaps future posts. Otherwise, this blog is likely to revert back to its natural state, overgrown with kudzu and marauding bears.

• There's a skunk at the garden party. Or to be more precise (apologies to V.), we have skunks in my co-op's garden. For non-New Yorkers, a "co-op" is an apartment building or complex in which you own shares in the overall "co-operative," but don't own your actual apartment. It differs in some legal ways from a "condo," but in practical terms, it means you have to be approved by the board before you can buy and they can sometimes impose rules that condos generally can't. (As I understand it, a condo you own "from the paint in." In a co-op, officially, you don't, but they generally treat it the same.)
  
  Anyway, my co-op is actually five separate buildings, each divided into two sections with separate entrances, surrounding a 2+ acre (?) garden, which is obviously a rarity in New York City. A few weeks ago, they posted a sign in the elevator informing us that the management office was aware that we had a skunk in the garden and that a humane trap had been set, and the skunk would be removed (and released elsewhere?). A week or so later, the note in the elevator told us all that we had so far caught four skunks. I saw a fifth, dead skunk on a sidewalk about a half block from our co-op a week ago that someone had likely poisoned (as it was lying beside a snow shovel that had the remains of an orange, probably poisoned, on its blade.
  
  
• If you follow anything going on in the Episcopal Church or the wider Anglican Communion, you know that there's a huge showdown underway between the U.S. church, the minority of fundamentalists in our church, and the fundamentalist Anglican archbishops (also a minority, but representating a majority of the world's Anglicans) of other national churches. It's getting both tense and ridiculous, but listening to the arguments on all sides, it's made me update my bias against Biblical literalism, which would be....
  
  
• I've long felt that Biblical literalism replaced a worship of God with a worship of the Bible -- or bibliolatry, in other words. Despite the fact that the church created the Bible (or determined its canon and scriptural nature), and not vice versa. I've decided that, too often, even that doesn't adequately describe the ways literalism is used to pervert the Gospel of Christ. Pretty much these days, it's not even worshiping the Bible, it's worshiping a concordance of the Bible.
  
  An excellent exposition on this was written by the Rev. Thomas Woodward at the Episcopal Majority blog, to which I posted a comment and then got into the kind of "Bible says/Jesus says" argument that this stuff generally comes down to these days.
  
  
• I'm co-chairing a capital campaign at church this fall, and the preparation for it (including a four-color brochure and pledge cards) is taking up all my non-work time. But this is also the time of year that life picks up steam, anyway. Right now, for example, I need to quit adding random bullets to this post and go practice a few hymns on the keyboard, as I said I would play the bells before the service tomorrow. I'm also filling in for someone else as a torchbearin' acolyte. And next week, I have a Voices of Ascension concert to attend (at Carnegie Hall; normally they're at church), and a campaign committee meeting to attend. So as I say, the fall is picking up steam. As in "steamroller."
  

Labels: church, faith, Inwood, personal

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The Bells in My Head

kay, so that was weird.

I had to get to church early to play the bells last Sunday. It was my first time, actually: the bells are up in the tower, but you play them from one of the ranks on the organ, and we have a small group who volunteer to play two verses of three or four hymns on the bells before the service as people are coming in.

I had gone through my first hymn, and my friend Ned was standing next to me at the organ console giving me encouragement and explaining which switches go on or off before and after, and I get through the second hymn, and it's on the third hymn -- which is the toughest, and I have to transpose it down a key to play on the very limited scale available with our bells -- when I hear Ned whisper, "Oh, my gosh!" I thought I'd done something wrong.

"What??" I say, as I'm playing the hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" (we'd be singing it in a few minutes, as one of those traditionally sung on the last Sunday before Advent, sometimes known as the Feast of Christ the King).

"There's a guy who just came up to the altar," he said. I glance quickly to my right and see some young guy in the chancel start to kneel down in front of our communion altar. "I can't really look," I said, "or I'll flub this."

"He's...he's taking off his shirt!" Ned said. So I glanced again to my right, on a whole note, which I could hold a bit longer than even was warranted. And sure enough, he was.

My peripheral vision isn't great with my glasses on, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was arching his back with his hands extended, in something like a cross between Alvin Ailey and a yoga move. "This is so bizarre," Ned said.

We're both whispering, of course, but we could probably haved spoken in normal tones of voice at this point and no one would be paying attention to what we were saying -- or to my bell-playing, for that matter.

I gave a quick glance again as I ended the first verse. "He's in remarkably good shape for a crazy person," I observed.

As I started the second verse, I saw one of the assistant sextons come up to the front and approach the man -- not aggressively (we used to have a sexton, who was a wonderful old Haitian guy, who would bodily and forcibly grab and remove disruptive crazy people -- which happens more often than you'd think, even for a church in Greenwich Village in New York City) -- but definitely in a careful way; he may have thought the guy might have a gun or a knife on him, which was perfectly possible.

The guy put his shirt back on and the assistant sexton led him back down the aisle and out of my peripheral view. Apparently, he left the building about as quickly as he had rushed in, and the rector saw him just a few minutes later, headed back up Fifth Avenue, possibly to pull the same stunt at First Presbyterian next door. You never know.

That was my last hymn. Our organist and choirmaster showed up to play the prelude just as I was shutting things down, but he hadn't seen any of the commotion, so we told him. I think he was sorry he'd missed it.

Of course this would happen on my debut on the bells, which is probably the largest audience for which I've ever played keyboards (if you consider the neighborhood that's in earshot), and especially on a hymn (with accidentals, no less) that I was transposing.

The rector, who was standing at the door greeting people as the guy rushed in and was again rushed out, seemed to think, and he's probably right, that the guy was at the end of a long, all-night crystal meth bender, and probably out of his mind. He said he had the jerky walk and mannerisms associated with people he'd seen on speed or maybe acid. (Our rector came of age in the 60s.) While I myself can say the guy was maybe "tweaked out on tina," the truth is, I am so ignorant of drugs and drug culture, I only know lines like that from watching Queer as Folk when it was on Showtime.

When I told my dad on the phone about my bell debut later that evening, I told him that the rector thought the guy probably was on drugs. "Yeah," my dad said, "or else needed to be." Which could also be true. Funny how that brain chemistry stuff works.

Labels: church, personal

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The Debut of the AscensionNYC Blog

I know someone who, at the drop of a hat, will create a blog for any purpose or cause. But he's an entertaining writer, so it's all right. (We also happen to share a birthday, so I'm naturally inclined to forbearance.) He created a blog when he got a new bike. He created a new blog when he decided that Match.com was engaging in deceptive billing practices. He created a blog when he wanted to rent out a room in his house.

Anyway, I haven't had the time to match his prolixity. But I have just created my second blog -- except it's not for me, or at least, I'm a minor character. It's for my church. Here's the notice I wrote up for next Sunday's bulletin insert:

Our parish has a new venue for evangelism and explorations of faith, this time online. Visit ascensionnyc.org/blog on our Web site to see the debut of the AscensionNYC Blog -- with inaugural bloggers Stephen Hagerty, Eve Beglarian, and Paul Kahn sharing their thoiughts and interests with the wider world over the next couple of months. Inspired by the wonderful contributions of forty different parishioners each year in our Lenten Devotionals — the online edition of the last devotional even used this same "blog space" on our Web site as a pilot test — the AscensionNYC Blog is yet another experiment for the parish in new ways of "being a church" and in exploring questions of faith with visitors to our parish.at whatever address (street or Web) they choose to meet us.

I'm extremely grateful to my three friends who have agreed to start off our experience as a blogging parish. And so we'll see. I can already foresee the potential for intraparish conflict here, but then — as you'll know if you've ever been involved for any length of time in a congregation or, for that matter, any other human endeavor — it wouldn't really be a new idea if someone didn't get their nose out of joint, right?

Labels: church

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