PeaceBang

A New Body

Someone I simply loved died last weekend of cancer.

I say I “simply” loved her because it was simple. I loved her the first moment I saw her come to church on her husband’s arm. I had an immediate reaction in my heart, kind of a shy recognition of real beauty, the way you feel as a little girl when you see a woman who strikes awe in your heart because she’s just so pretty, she is the most beautiful lady you have ever seen, and you want to be just like her when you grow up.

But this was more than prettiness.
It was purity of spirit clothed in kindness and bright, humorous presence– the kind of loveliness that you just don’t see very often.

(One of my colleagues has this kind of loveliness. Her initials are PP. I feel the same way when I see her)

This lovely woman died last week, and she was in agonizing pain for much of her final days. Her hospital room was full of people who wrung their hands with grief and helplessness as the medical team tried to find some combination of drugs that would give her some relief. We wanted so badly to help her.

Her sister said yesterday at her memorial service that her suffering assaulted our faith.
I shuddered at the words, so there must have been great truth in them for me.

Last week I was reminded — we are were — that all the love in the world, even surrounding you in the tiny boat of your dying bed, even pouring in as God’s holy spirit — cannot endure the sufferings of your body for you, and cannot make the journey of the soul for you. We struggle alone no matter how held we are in care; no matter how surrounded we are by compassion. God abides with us, God does not live our lives for us.

But yesterday at the memorial service, as people queued up for Communion, I understood something for the first time. By becoming the body of Christ (or the Beloved Community), we can make whole what is torn asunder by violence, pain, the natural limitations of the body, human sin and fear.
I looked at the long line of patient people standing in line to receive the bread and the cup (and many who were there who chose not to partake, but were no less part of the Body) and I thought, “Sweetheart, here’s your new body. Here’s your new body.”

And now the tears finally come.

Single Men: Yo!!

Great article in the NY Times, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/garden/29breakers.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087%0A&em&en=8fe5465208e08c14&ex=1175313600

I can’t TELL you how many times I have dated someone I thought was a decent guy and been totally grossed out by his living standards.

Some questions I have asked myself on dates over the past 20 or so years:

> If you don’t have any furniture, where am I supposed to sit? Or is that a ploy to get women into the bedroom, to the one flat surface in the whole place? Lame.

> Eau de Frat House is one of the most depressing smells on earth. I was already in college. I don’t want to go back there. Nor do I want to be reminded, as I sit chatting with you, of all the babysitting gigs I had in 8th grade and all the elementary school boys I cared for on those nights whose bedrooms smelled exactly like your entire apartment.

> If you can’t pick up your own dirty (and clean) laundry that you’ve flung all over your dwelling place, does that mean you’ll expect me to do it if we should ever decide to co-habitate?

> Your filth-encrusted bath mat : is one supposed to shower oneself clean and then actually step on that? How about the lack of soap at the sink, and towel? I think I just figured out something about your personal hygiene, and I’ll be saying “night-night” now! Thanks for a lovely evening!

> When you’re over-40, we should be seeing something in your fridge besides beer and milk for cereal. Nothing screams, “I can’t nurture myself” like a kitchen full of disposable dishes and utensils, mismatched plastic mugs and a pantry full of canned food dating from the Carter Administration.

> Dear guy on Match.com who has the stuffed animal collection on the couch behind him: that is so so creepy. Please believe me when I tell you: that is so creepy. Ditto, 50-year old single male friend with “Star Wars” pillowcases. It’s not ironically hip and youthful, and I don’t care if you got them for fifty cents on sale. It’s creepy. Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi.

> Dude whose tiny condo I could barely walk through because of the extreme filth and mess caused by your “home improvement” projects, I commend your efforts! You’re a cool DIY type!
However, when you told me that you had been working on the dining room for about two years, I saw my future if I got involved with you, and in my mind, I backed slowly out of the room. A little bit of chaos, fine. Eternal chaos at home because of your perfectionism and inability to complete a project: not okay.

> Men: frugality is admirable. Living amidst broken, rusting, rotting, crumbling items is not a testament to frugality, independence of spirit, individuality or “character.” Is is testament to your total inability or lack of desire to create a home in the truest sense of the word, which is a place not just for the harboring of you and your secret, unconscious desire to be alone forever (!), but a place of hospitality and welcome, of beauty and comfort.

A hot tip for hetero single guys from the perennially single PeaceBang: you know how you guys always say in your Match.com ads that you want a woman who “takes care of herself,” and that’s a euphemism for “should have a hot bod?” Well, when we say we want a man who isn’t a slob, we don’t just mean that you should clean your ears, wash your socks and use mouthwash occasionally. We’re talking about your home, too.

Some of us don’t care so much if you don’t make much money, or if you live with family or roommates or if you don’t have a nice car or if you aren’t the best dresser or if you don’t pay for dinner. Those things don’t reveal anything particularly disturbing or upsetting. Living in a borderline or downright disgusting home… that’s disturbing.

Papa to "Kraut"

Thirty letters between star-crossed hotties Marlene Dietrich and Ernest Hemingway are being released by the JFK Library today and I, for one, can’t wait to read them. They include beauts like this, written from him to her on June 19, 1950:

“What do you really want to do for a life work?Break everybody’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I’d bring the nickel.”

When I tell you they don’t make ‘em like that anymore, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

They don’t make ‘em like Marlene, and they don’t make ‘em like Hemingway.
Damn.

And what do we have now for female movie icons? Reese Witherspoon? Or, like, Julia Roberts?

Fasting, Or Eating Well By 2/3 World Standards?

An intestinal infection of some kind hit me on Sunday and I really haven’t been able to tolerate solid foods since then. I’ve had the odd bagel, I’ve had a few sticks of pretzels, I had three chocolate chip cookies today (what a risk!), and on Monday I remember having some soup and crackers.

Nothing digests. I’m like that cartoon car they showed you in elementary school when they were trying to teach you to eat breakfast every morning, because your body needs fuel!

The car is chugging along and driving erratically all over the road by this point. Man, am I draggin’.

I drink as much water and Gatorade as I can get down, as the doctor makes dire threats that if I don’t stay hydrated I’ll have to go into the hospital, which as we know is THE place of rest and healing. Just like Grand Central Station is a place of rest and healing — although come to think of it, I’d be a lot more happily engaged and stimulated at GCS than I would be in any typical American hospital.

I start on the drug Flagyl tomorrow (now isn’t that a name for a drug?). If this is a little parasitic friend I brought back from Guatemala, the Flagyl will keell it. I imagine the Flagyl like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill — ” this awesome drug dressed in a yellow track suit that will kick the butt of any icky things floating around in my body trying to get a free ride on my guts.

I have high hopes.

This is the third time this year that I’ve been taken down with some kind of vile bug — this after going for years and years without anything of the sort.

So I was thinking to myself, “Geez, I’m kind of fasting.”

And then it occurred to me that I’m still — with my drastically reduced and limited diet — eating more every day than a whole lot of people on this planet.

Sobering thought, that.

An Honest Mistake

I was just sending my Music Director an e-mail listing hymns for an upcoming memorial service and I wrote “‘Tis a Gift To Be Single” by mistake.

Heh heh.

Grace Note: A Liturgical Moment Of Salvation

On Sunday I gave an unexpectedly intense sermon on the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” and chose a truly unsingable hymn for the closing hymn. Big mistake; bigger than usual. Because of a very sad loss we had announced earlier in Joys and Concerns, and because the sermon itself mentioned the loss and went on to be emotionally rougher in the delivery than it had sounded inside my head, there was a lack of flow between the end of the sermon and the closing hymn. I allowed for a pretty long moment of silence as the congregation and I shared the heaviness and thought, well, preacher lady, nothing’s coming to you, so let’s have at the closing hymn.

I had chosen #289 in the grey hymnal, “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give” which has fantastic words but a truly awful tune. I can sight-read pretty darn well and even into the second and third verse was totally failing to pick it up. What a helpless feeling, standing up there with this beloved community gamely plowing through this complicated tune.

Then I noticed something wonderful. The song ends on an F, which is the same note on which our earlier hymn, “There is More Love Somewhere,” begins.

We all know “There Is More Love Somewhere,” and we sing it without the hymnal now. We had just sung it with great feeling earlier in the service.

So after we concluded our death march through “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give,” I just continued to sing… but the first verse of “There is More Love Somewhere.” Everyone picked it up right away — what a relief to be able to sing freely together after such a hard topic!! — and I saw some of the choir members in the back of the meetinghouse join hands.

I’m ten years into this liturgical business, and man, you cannot let down your guard for a moment.

Erm

Erm
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

She’s sneezing and stuffy again. I can hear her snoring a bit when she dozes.

I’m worried, and I have her back on prednisone.

Jesus as Trickster

I am preaching this coming Sunday on Jesus as a Trickster figure, and as Holy Fool.

Does anyone have favorite readings on the subject?

Thanks for helps. Kiss of peace.

"Eat, Pray, Love" A PeaceBang Review

One of the nice things about being confined to bed is that you get to actually read uninterrupted.
I was taken down a nasty stealth flu bug on Sunday afternoon — one of those bugs that comes on like the character Cato in the Pink Panther movies, where you walk through the door with your bag and coat and it jumps out from behind the couch going HI-YAH!

So I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s much-celebrated travelogue memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Women’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia in bed this afternoon, and I must say I have very mixed feelings about it.

The book is divided into three main sections named for the countries Gilbert fled to in search of healing and spiritual growth following a harrowing divorce. Her 108 chapters are a secondary organizational device chosen in honor of the 108 beads of the japa mala, or the beads used in prayer by devout Hindus and Buddhists, and which were adapted by Europeans as the rosary.

I loved the first two chapters of this book. Gilbert is an honest, warm and engaging narrator, and although she initially seemed to me to be over-dramatic and self-indulgent about her man woes, she dresses up her very common pains and fears in beautiful prose and appealing earnestness. I could easily forgive the excessive processing and wailing; haven’t we all been there?

Gilbert decided to take a year off and to travel. She clearly understands the privilege that allows her to do this and goes to great pains to say how lucky she is, which kept this reader, at least, from bitter envy.

First, Gilbert goes to Italy for four months to experience the pure joy of learning Italian (a language she loves but has no practical use for), to eat a lot of pasta and fill out her heartbroken-starved body, and to soak up sun and la dolce via. I enjoyed reading about her enjoying herself.

Then, Liz goes to India to enter into four months of extremely rigorous spiritual practice at an ashram of a spiritual teacher she refers to only as her Guru. In this chapter, she takes on the very difficult task of sharing the path to enlightenment — and actually tries to describe a bona fide mystical experience of pure transcendence. It was approximately at this point in the book that I decided that I didn’t genuinely like Liz Gilbert as a person, but that I appreciated both her desire to write about her spiritual work and her talent in communicating the inner struggle of the yogic path. While remaining emotionally distanced from her as a narrator, I could still cheer her on and say, Right on, kid, when she wrote of her highs and lows in meditation and in the difficulty of peeling away the ego. Without being fond of her, I was eminently interested in her and her terrific writing.

The big problem that began to emerge for me in this chapter is that Gilbert relies heavily on the use of dialogue spoken by other people, and that dialogue read to me as increasingly inauthentic as the book wore on. This is a memoir, and therefore, we are asked to believe that all the dialogue is a fair report of actual conversations between actual people. In the character of Richard From Texas at the ashram, though, I lost the sense of “actual people” and began to feel that the conversations reported were really more Liz Gilbert’s literary take on conversations rather than the words of real people. Does anyone really go around speaking totally in folksy aphorisms? Do golden nuggets of wisdom really fall out every time anyone opens his or her mouth? This, Liz Gilbert would have me believe, and I don’t buy it.

It also occurred to me in this chapter that Liz Gilbert had an awfully easy time being befriended by intensely attentive men on every leg of her journey and yet for all her self-awareness, never seems to intuit that her being a great-looking, young American blonde has anything to do with that. I read a lot of travelogues and can’t help but notice that global harmony is apparently a lot easier to personally experience when you’re not a short, chunky Jewish professor with frizzy hair, or a middle-aged British man with a beer gut and a walking stick, or a Puerto Rican lesbian with a bad leg.

Gilbert seems not to be able to get through one day of her spiritual search without the promise of male attention at some point during, or at the conclusion of it. I couldn’t help it — I soon began to smirkingly think of this book as “How I Re-Affirmed My Addiction To Male Attention Across Two Continents And Three Countries!”

By the time she gets to Bali, Indonesia, Gilbert is personally happy and serene, but — bad news for her readers!! — her prose has degenerated into something precious and treacly. She finds a perfect house and moves in! She becomes reacquainted with the darling medicine man who read her palm two years ago and prophecied that she would come back and tutor him in English! She wins the heart of the medicine man’s ornery wife! She … gets a hot Brazilian boyfriend!!

What a surprise! Here’s a woman who started out her year of travel with the intense desire to free herself from love-addiction (her own characterization of her overwrought style of being in relationships), and who winds up back in love just in time for the end of the story. This is where the writing gets really bad*, and where Gilbert’s fine sense of perspective and context gets sloppy and clueless.

It’s one thing to share with a western audience the genuinely interesting and rare journey to conquering inner demons and being able to comply with ancient yogic disciplines. It is another thing entirely to write about sex after a time of celibacy with the same sense of gee-whiz-folks uniqueness. Any reader who has had a rapturous sexual experience can only read Chapter 99 with a sense of embarrassed humility, yes, Liz, we know. We remember. It’s great. We get it. Yes, sex can be a transcendent experience. We’re glad you and Felipe are so very, very special. Can we please stop hearing about how exquisitely beautiful you are now?

I can’t imagine how these chapters read to someone who hasn’t ever had a rapturous sexual experience. I suspect one would need either a barf bag or a bullet to bite. Or perhaps a tomato to throw.

Reading the final pages of this saga, I had to laugh at the lack of self-awareness from this woman who has just spent 250+ pages proving to us how self-aware she is. When her Brazilian lover Felipe describes seeing Liz from the back at a party and thinking to himself, “That’s it. That’s my woman. I must have that woman,” it doesn’t occur to Gilbert to add, “Yes, what a surprise. The only tall American blonde at the party, and one of the few white women on the entire island of Bali. It’s amazing, is it not, that this man from the most macho of nations would be immediately drawn to a woman who looks just like the ideal of femininity peddled across the globe by the unbiquitous forces of American capitalism and cultural hegemony.”

I’m sorry to keep harping on this point, but I think it’s the great blind spot of the memoir. Any writer who wants to write about cultural differences then fails to locate herself culturally should be prepared to be taken to task for it.

But there’s an even worse, and more clueless blooper in this chapter, which is also, to my ears, rife with inauthentic and overly-precious dialogue that makes the Balinese natives sound like characters from the “It’s a Small World After All” ride.** In this chapter, Liz Gilbert sets herself up as a saint, the Great White Savior of a poor Balinese women she befriends, and then has the nerve to viciously dish that friend when she fails to accept Gilbert’s great, magnanimous gift in a manner appropriate to American cultural values.

There is something extraordinarily ugly in the way that Gilbert uses the story as a way to cement her own position as a Spiritually Advanced Person at the expense of her friend, the far more delightful, real and likeable medicine woman Wayan. Gilbert frets and fumes and fusses prettily, and shows us how she and her boyfriend Felipe totally have the goods on these backasswards Balinese (but all the while making soft liberal protestations that that’s not really what she’s doing at all), but never for one minute takes her harsh journalistic lens off the characters (ostensibly friends!) she’s exploiting for the purpose of writing an interesting book.

Yes, Gilbert raises $18,000 for her friend and provides a home for Wayan and her three children. That’s wonderful. And yet, how much more wonderful if Gilbert hadn’t used the complexities and the misunderstandings of the transaction as further evidence of how enlightened and mature she has become, all at the expense of a real person who is fully capable of reading– or hearing about– her book.

Gilbert has been compared to Anne Lamott, and I’m afraid it’s true. As Lamott never hesitates to exploit her own son by airing his personal business all over her books and articles — she’s the favorite literary Mother Vampire writing in America today — Gilbert similarly sucks the life blood out of all the lovely people in her path in order to serve them up as side dishes for our consumption, always with herself as the clever, delicious main course.

And after the first two chapters, I could no longer swallow it.

* from page 288,

“What I mostly remember about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us. How it looked to me like a parachute. And how I felt like I was now deploying this parachute to escort me out the side exit of the solid, disciplined airplane which had been flying me during these few years out of A Very Hard Time in My Life. But now my sturdy flying machine had become obsolete right there in midair, so I stepped out of that single-minded single-engine airplane and let this fluttering white parachute swing me down through the strange empty atmosphere between my past and my future, and land me safely on this small, bed-shaped island, inhabited only by this handsome shipwrecked Brazilian sailor…”

** According to reviews on Amazon.com, it appears that Gilbert’s rendering of various dialects in the book-on-tape version of Eat, Pray, Love is extremely offensive. I am not surprised.

The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga

Here’s a great article in Slate (thanks, Chris) that articulates some of my squicky feelings about the narcissistic yoga culture that’s been oozing out of control among American spiritual seekers over the past few years…

http://www.slate.com/id/2162283/pagenum/all/

I’d love to be able to do yoga. I’ve tried many times, and my too-short limbs and meatball-shaped body have resulted in failed efforts and giggling through class, which I don’t think is conducive to other people achieving the deep peace they’re looking for. I have lots of people in my life that are serious aficionados and whose yoga practice obviously contribute to their physical health, emotional groundedness and spiritual loveliness. They’re not the strivers I see zooming around Whole Foods in flared pants and exasperated expressions chugging on Fruit Water by Glaceau and making dagger-eyes at me for lingering too long over the artisanal cheeses and getting in their way. True confessions, time, yoga people: I don’t so much shop at Whole Foods as use it as free therapy. I shop at Trader Joe’s and Stop & Shop. I stroll through Whole Foods to fill my nose and eyes with aesthetic ideals of beauty and health. Because seriously, their pears cost like $3 each.

A lot of today’s yoga culture seems to me to be about the re-inscribing of upper middle class values: competetiveness, acquisitiveness, materialism and humorless self-importance, and my very favorite — Just Making Up My Own Religion As I Go Along.

Of course if the liberal church was doing its job and showing people a deep, meaningful spiritual path and giving them unapologetically directive teachings on how to transform their inner lives through prayer, study and service, yoga people might be able to keep their Thursday morning class in better perspective. That is, those yoga people who attend liberal churches might. Hey, if the liberal church was doing its job better, I have to think that more people — including yoga people — would be attending.

Or maybe not. Maybe the idea of disciplined religion is so ruined in the eyes of spiritually liberal seekers that they’ll never embrace it, and those of us in the liberal churches are presiding over a funeral. There’s never going to be anything but a tiny market for floppy, “Gee-I-dunno-what-do-YOU-think” religion, no matter how much it dresses itself up in prophet’s clothes and claims to be the Truth-Telling Group.

One Truth the liberal church has been telling for years is that conservative folks Just Want To Be Told What To Believe. That’s so easy, so dismissive, so snotty and so mostly wrong. All people want a religious life that actually shakes them, demands something of them and transforms them. Liberals, unfortunately, join the effort with the attitude that while this process is occurring, they should be comfortable and even indulged. They join the project with the attitude that there are no rockbound truths, so everything is relative. Who can really be transformed with a permanent orientation of skepticism and self-preservation?

My understanding is that real yoga requires a guru. Some nice guy teaching “Hot Yoga” at your health club is not a guru. A guru makes demands on us and teaches us a path to enlightenment that requires sacrifice and the painful dissolving of ego.

My guru is named Jesus, and his form of yoga was about achieving personal and social change through healing. I kind of wish he taught some form of physical practice beyond walking around, preaching, healing people and eating with people, but he didn’t. He also would be very against spending $3 on one pear.