Lent 3: Oh Eve. Where is Adam?

"Dreams: There Was No Apple" by Dianne Hodack

A palate cleanser for the next post. (Click on the hot link for the video)

"Letter to Eve," by Pete Seeger; performed by the Indigo Girls

 Oh Eve, where is Adam, now you're kicked out of the garden?
Oh Eve, where is Adam, now you're kicked out of the garden?
Been wanderin' from shore to shore, now you find there's no more.
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Don't you wish love, only love, could save this world from disaster?
Lo-ove, only love, could save this world from disaster?
Don't you wish love could end the confusion, or is it just one more illusion?
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Well, if you want to have great love, you've got to have great anger.
I-if you want to have great love, you've got to have great anger!
When I see innocent folks shot down, you just want me 'shake my head and frown.
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

If you want to hit the target square, you better not have blind anger.
I-if you want to hit the target square, you better not have blind anger!
Or else it'll be one more time the correction creates another crime!
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Well, if music could only bring peace, I'd only be a musician.
If music could only bring peace, I'd only be a musician!
If songs could do more than dull the pain, if melodies could only break these chains!
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Oh Eve Eve, go tell Adam, We've got to build a garden.
Oh E-----ve, go tell Adam, We' got to build a new garden.
We' got to get aworkin' on abuildin' of a decent home for all o' God's children!
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Oh Eve, you tell Adam, next time he asks you.
Yes Eve-Eve, you tell Adam, next time he asks you.
He'll say baby it's cold outside, What's the password to come inside?
You say

Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!
Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!
Four thousand languages in this world, means the same thing to every boy and girl

Oh-oh Pacem in Teris, Mir, Shanti, Salaam, Heiwa!

Lent 2: Another Creation Story. Still Not Eve.

"Creation of Eve" (circa 1310-1330 CE), Marble Relief by Lorenzo Maitani Orvieto Cathedral, Italy

Following the completion of the great creation liturgy with day 7, the day of God's rest from creating, another creation story is offered. (The New Revised Standard Version actually captions it so: "Another Creation Story.") This one focuses on the garden, and the rivers, an describes, not a creation by the Word of God, but a God who plays in the mud (the dust/ the earth), breathes into the nostrils of this creation, and creates a "living soul" (KJV), or "living being." Though our English translation calls this creation "a man," the Hebrew calls it "the human," really, "the earthling" ("adama" is the earth; "ha-adam" is the "earthling"). Not too long after this, the King James Version starts using the proper name "Adam." Newer translations correct that premature usage.

Finally, we come to the creation of woman as most remember it from the Bible. Despite the fact that it is the second story ("another story"), for reasons that quickly become obvious, it has claimed the spotlight in the minds, certainly, of most Christians.

God places the human in the garden to "till and keep" it. (Another nice translation of the Hebrew is "serve and defend"). It is at this point that God gives the human the following commandment: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Please note: in this "other" creation story, the woman has not yet been created.
 
Shortly thereafter, God states, "“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”

The idea of woman as helper, or "helpmeet," has been the source of all kinds of moral mischief throughout the millennia. Here's my favorite fact about the word "helper' ("ezer" in Hebrew). It appears something like 18 times in the Hebrew scriptures. Most frequently, this word refers to God.

So, let's set aside the notion that a "helper" is automatically a person of lesser, subsidiary status, someone whose being is only relevant with regard to a superior who is being helped.

"But surely, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life!" ~ Psalm 54:4

God creates and parades many animals in front of the man, who pretty much says, "Nah." So God  performs a minor surgical procedure on the human, removing a rib, and from it, fashioning what becomes "a woman." 

I'd like to say a word, now, about ribs. Ribs are a part of the human respiratory system. They enclose the lungs and the entire chest cavity, including the heart. You might say, ribs guard and protect the heart and the vital apparatus for life, for breath. A rib is a part of a whole that is complexly designed. A rib is a marvelous and important thing.

Next comes what is probably the earliest example of "up is down," "left is right," "day is night" recorded anywhere. The human, now differentiated as a male from the female who has been created from his rib, speaks appreciative poetry about the newly created female.

“This at last is bone of my bones
    and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
    for out of Man this one was taken.”   ~ Genesis 2:23

I love this. Because, of course, in the usual course of things, men (baby boys) come out of women. 

This other creation story concludes with two verses. First, the verse that has regularly been hurled like a stone from a sling at gay people, as evidence that they are not right:

 "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh." 

To which I reply: God gave the human (male) the full dignity of choosing his helper/ partner. The human/ male could have said "no" to the woman, just as he said "no" to the animals. The human/ male got to choose the living being who would become his partner. 

And so do we. 

And the second verse, setting up part three of our story nicely: 

"And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed."

Not yet, anyway.

Lent 1: Not Eve. Not Yet.

"The Creation of Man" by Marc Chagall

She appears slyly, at the end of the first creation story.

That's not exactly right. She appears as a quiet presence at the end of the great creation liturgy.

The first chapter of the bible, Genesis 1, the one that begins "In the beginning..." is a great liturgy. It is a great poem. Read it aloud. Even in the clunkiest of English translations, the poetry pushes through, and we read phrases that, repeating themselves, become the choral responses of the unfolding story.

"Then God said...."

"God called (named)..."

"And God saw that it was good..."

"And there was evening and there was morning, the (first, second.... sixth) day."

It is a poem. It is a liturgy. It is a story told around a fire for reassurance, that an unnameable God is in fact the source of all that is good, and the goal of all our longings.

The first woman, or maybe I should say, the first sign of woman, comes into the story on the sixth day, the last day in which God is creating (for now).

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

     So God created humankind in his image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them. ~ Genesis 1:26-27

The first thing we learn about the woman is that she is created, together with man, in the image and likeness of God. 

If indeed God spoke these words, it is an astonishing act of generosity from One to whom we ascribe all power and majesty. It's the origin of Psalm 8.

If these words are the words of God's people describing their experience of God, they are even more amazing. Think: A text that may be three thousand years old affirms that women and men alike are created in some way to resemble their God. A society in which women's power was relegated mostly to the home, and in which women were considered by custom and law to be the legal property of a male relative such as father, husband, or brother.... is telling us that nevertheless, woman is created with the same dignity as man.

That's pretty cool. (Now if only that conviction could be made manifest in the present day.)

The second thing we learn is that this is a creation, not of two individuals, but of "humankind" (which is the NRSV translation above). The first creation story (the next one is coming right up) speaks of creation of people, not individual persons. So, "the woman" is really still "woman." Woman has been created, and, like man, she is without particulars of character or action or any role except, along with man, co-steward of the creation into which she is plopped at the utterance of God. 

She is not "Eve." Not yet. 

But she has arrived.

Lent 2017: Women's Stories, and a Blessing

"The Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel" by Paul Gaugin

I love the church seasons of preparation. As beautiful and glorious as I find Christmas and Easter, it is the run-up to each of these festivals that really captivates me.

I love Advent, when all the world is pregnant, and the outer world gets darker so that we can know we, too, are in the womb, waiting for birth.

I love Lent, when we try to walk with Jesus towards the cross... mostly saying "Hell, no!" the whole time. (At least I am. Who wants the cross?) But wanting, yearning to be on a journey that is so pure of heart, so convinced of its rightness, and so utterly focused on the love of God and the love of others. The love of The Other.

For my Lenten discipline, I have decided to choose a woman from scripture each day, and to write a bit about her. I don't have a formula. I don't have a plan (for this). I simply want to write what comes to me, when I open myself to the story of each individual woman.

Years ago I was introduced to feminist biblical criticism through the story of a man. In Genesis 32, when his life is on the line, and it looks like he may just lose everything as his earlier bad behavior circles back around to get him, Jacob wrestles with an angel/ with God/ with a man/ with God by the river Jabbok.

(I just realized that Jabbok and Jacob seem linguistically linked, at least in English translation. Something to wonder about and look into.)

Jacob is amazingly strong, because this possibly divine being asks him to ease up, and let him go.

Jacob's reply is the Patron Saint of verses for women doing scriptural criticism and analysis:

“I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”(Genesis 32:26b)

We wrestle with scripture, and we don't let go, until it gives a blessing.

For Lent I will be doing this, with the stories of women from what feels like an impossibly dim and elusive long-ago.

I will be wrestling with their stories. I won't let go until I am given a blessing.

Peace.

Binghamton Responds to the Orlando, FL Mass Killings

Image by Brett Jaspers, WSKG News

I don't need to recap it for you, the horrific events at the Pulse in Orlando, FL, in the early hours of June 12, 2016.

I want to share my remarks on the occasion of Binghamton's Candlelight Vigil, held on Tuesday evening June 14.

For me, the most moving part of the evening was the sight of perhaps thirty members of our  local mosque, the Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier, filing onto the stage in a show of solidarity.

Or maybe it was the silence when the candles were lit, soon to be broken by "We Shall Overcome".

Or the sight of lanterns gently lifting off.

This was an event in which we refused to be divided from one another, vulnerable communities-- Muslims, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

I was so very proud to be a part of it.

*****

My name is Patricia Raube, and I’m the pastor of Union Presbyterian Church in Endicott, a congregation that loved me right out of the closet in 2009. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has been intentionally ordaining LGBTQ people since 2011, and allowing its pastors and churches to celebrate the weddings of all people since 2014.

Because I’m up early on Sunday mornings, I read about the shooting at 6:30, when the news was “20 casualties.” By the time church was over, the whole country knew that there were 49 murdered, and 50-plus in the care of hospitals.

And we want to know why, and we, some of us, are quick to say why,

even before we really truly know.

But the one thing no one can challenge, the one thing we must agree upon, is that this was an attack whose targets were members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer community, as well as the Latino/ Latina community. Queer people and people of color bore the brunt of this act of hate, no matter what impulses or beliefs inspired it. It was an act of homophobia and perhaps racism. No matter what we learn about the motivations of the killer, we must not erase the identities of those whose lives he took.

This was an attack on the queer community and its allies.

But this was also an attack on our safe spaces, our sanctuaries. Many of us in the churches have not done nearly enough to make our congregations the safe spaces they should be, to make our sanctuaries, sanctuary to the LGBTQ community. So our queer community has found sanctuary elsewhere—in places like Binghamton’s own Herizon, and Merlin’s, and Squiggy’s, and Orlando’s Pulse. And now—for so many of us—these sanctuaries have been violated. These sanctuaries are haunted by this terrible act of hatred. These sanctuaries, for some of us, have ceased to be those holy spaces of safety and love.

So where do we go from here?

In one sense, we do what we always have done. We continue to find families of choice, and safe spaces, together. We hallow new grounds and rooms and clubs, and make them our sanctuaries and, perhaps, we re-dedicate and re-sanctify the old spaces with new fervor and intention.

At the same time, for you, for me, for each of us: I offer you what my faith tells me to be true: that Love, a love greater than any of us is capable of on our own, created us, each of us, and made us mysterious, and beautiful and perfect, just as we are. I offer you what I believe with all my heart: that our love and our bodies and our lovemaking are precious, good, and sacred. I offer you what each of us must cling to: that our goodness and our holiness cannot and will not be diminished or erased, no matter who tries to hunt us down, or keep us out of our preferred bathrooms, or in any way legislate us out of existence.

We exist. You, and I, and each person dancing their heart out in their sanctuary of choice. Those whose names we will say tonight, and those who are still dancing cannot and will not be diminished, or forgotten, or erased. Just as it has before: Love will win.

Image from WICZ News

Healing, By the Numbers

I returned to the pool this week, for the first time in a long time.

First time since having pneumonia.

First time since last summer, actually. I had to look at my calendar and check. It was true.

I am in the midst of a... what? A program, maybe? Of actions I am taking, very intentionally, to restore myself to health.

This is about more than having pneumonia.

I am walking, a little longer each morning. I am walking with my partner, S, and a dog we have sort of half-adopted, a beautiful blue-and-black Australian cattle dog who belongs to one of S's tenants. We walk a little longer each day. (A mile and a half, today.) And with that, I notice that this process seems to involve a lot of numbers.

There were lots of numbers involved, at the Y, when I went for my swim.

* Re-memorize lock combination. (Same lock I've had for over 20 years. Always have to re-memorize.)

* Note time when I began my swim. How long are the laps taking me? (Answer: a little longer than usual, by a full 15 seconds.) And wonder: can I successfully keep my start time and the combination in my head for the full duration of the swim? (Yes.)

* Note time/ distance during which I felt great. (It was about 20 yards.)

* Note time/ distance before I tired. Which is to say, before my lungs began to burn. Under normal circumstances, I can return to the pool, even after nearly a year, and swim a half mile with little or no trouble.

(In fact, I do believed I moaned with pleasure at the feeling of the cool water washing over me, on a hot late spring day, at the end of what was my longest day in the office since my return.)

After that... well, it's the lungs, you see. They are still not where they were. I struggled through one lap (two lengths), and flipped onto my back to do the second lap. Backstroke is much easier, breathing-wise. It gives me time to return my breathing to near-normal, before attempting another lap with the crawl.

* Keep count of the laps. (Turns out, when you are alternating crawl/ backstroke, it's relatively easy to do this.)

* Assess level of success: I did not make my half mile; I could only swim half that, a quarter mile. And that felt like a victory, all things considered. ("All things" including: the memory of the first week of being sick, when I sounded like a death scene in a Dickens novel. When, for the first time in my life I could not take breathing for granted, but was experiencing it as an underwater-type of phenomenon, noisy, ragged. When, if I am completely honest with myself, I was frightened.)

And then, there was the exit from the pool...

* Wonder at the length of time I need to lean on the wall, after exiting the pool, before legs stop feeling wobbly. (It was only a minute. Less, probably.)

So... next up in healing by the numbers:

Length of time it will take me to understand that this is a slow process, and I can neither dictate it by force of will, nor game it by racking up the "right" statistics. All I can do is take it step by step, stroke by stroke, breath by breath.

Wind

I awoke to the sound and rattle of wind, moaning in the eves of my house and bending the branches of the trees outside my windows. When I went downstairs I could hear the chimes on my porch dancing crazily in their minor key.

As I awakened on Pentecost Sunday to the sound and rattle of wind, the people of my congregation were soon to gather, to hear the story:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. ~Acts 2:1-4

There is something about this description that thrills and unnerves me. To experience wind, unmediated by the reasonably strong walls of a building around you, is to know a primal sense of vulnerability. This invisible thing is moving you, pushing you, howling at you. It is the stuff of nightmares, or horror flicks. At the same time, when assured of our safety, it is exciting, it is heady. Growing up at the shore we would flock to the ocean as hurricanes were coming in, and gather outside our cars in our rain gear (except umbrellas; don't bother with them, they're useless in the wind) to watch the effect the wind had on the ocean, to feel it push us around. 

Things change when you see the destruction wind can leave in its path. Now my hometown knows what it is to be the place where the second most expensive hurricane in US history makes landfall. People there know what happens when you can't afford to recover from the damage, or to prepare for the next time. People there know what wind can do to your little life.

Wind is dangerous. So, scripture and mystics and poets agree, is God. A post to the Facebook RevGalBlogPals page reminded me of this quote of Annie Dillard's:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. 
~ from Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper and Rowe 1982

I think Dillard's onto something. Pentecost is, at the very least, our annual notice that the waking God wants to draw us out to someplace new, someplace likely to be frightening, thrilling and unnerving, all at once. The waking God of Jesus wants us to walk where he has walked and further-- to walk where we haven't yet dared to walk, but where the wind and fire and healing power of the Spirit are sorely needed.