PeaceBang

Tragic Romance

On Tuesday night, Ermengarde decided that she was madly and tragically in love with me. She jumped on the bed in the darkness as I was trying to fall asleep and executed Le Grand Flop against my side. This always makes me laugh, because all my other cats have always loved to sleep ON me, but Erm isn't coordinated enough to keep her footing on Human Lady Mountain. She can only cuddle when she manages to fall over stiff-legged like a horse that's been shot and squirm from there into the crook of my arm. She's the most awkward cat I've ever known. When I adopted her it never occurred to me that I'd be getting a cat who would never sleep in my lap and who would only very occasionally curl up around my head or in the small of my back.

Now I Can Die Happy

Ms. Weinstein,
Today I was in an ECFE class with my youngest daughter and in the parent discussion portion today’s topic was “teachers that made an impression” so all the parents went around and talked about teacher’s they had…Funny, but you came to my mind. When I was in 8th grade at Hill Murray in Maplewood, MN, you began teaching mid-semester for our English teacher, whose name escapes me now.
I just wanted you to know that all the writing we did in class with you and all the support and feedback you gave in the short time you were my teacher really stuck with me. I eventually went to college and majored in English Literature and writing. I even have some of the papers I wrote in your class and have mentioned you to my husband.
After class today and as technology progresses I thought I would google you (very stalkerish, I know). Just to see if you were still an actress or teacher, I was surprised to see the path you had taken and that you were out East. Sadly we just moved from coastal Maine back to MN last week (really, last week) due to my husband’s job loss.
While my emailing leaves a bit to be desired, I just wanted to say “Thank you,” and let you know that I appreciate the time you took with me when I was your student.

Sincerely,

XXX (Former Student of PeaceBang’s)

I have a hot date with Mr. Nyquil so will take my drippy nose upstairs now, but I just got this in my inbox and am sharing it to celebrate TEACHERS EVERYWHERE! Rock on, Teachers! You are making a difference in someone’s life!

Come and Get Me, Jesus

I’m preaching tomorrow on Matthew 9:18-26 and I am surprised to find that I feel no need to exegete this as a feminist text any more.

I’m going to go ahead and post my homily because I just want to make you laugh today. And I know that the story of my babysitter (all true, friends, all true) will probably crack some of you up. If you don’t like it, please don’t tell me. This is what I’m giving and it’s done.

I would like to especially dedicate this to You Know Who, who sat with me one night at GA over cocktails and laughed ’til we both cried about the Cult of the Zombie Jesus, our interpretation of what some very discomfited Unitarian Universalists think of our religious beliefs (based on actual conversations). We even designed special liturgical headdresses and tee-shirts. Our worship attire would involve huge rings of deep black eyeshadow all around our eyes. I swear someday we’re really going to make a YouTube video to get it out of our systems.
Please understand that I’m not laughing AT people, I’m laughing with them. Because as you can see from this sermon, I used to literally believe Jesus was a zombie. I have no idea how religious beliefs and ideas can morph and change so much over one lifetime, but I attribute this phenomenon in my own life to my Unitarian Universalist upbringing, where we learned that revelation is something that can happen at any time, and that we’re always free to adapt to new ways of experiencing truth and meaning. Thanks be to God!

Come and Get Me, Jesus

My sister and brother and I had some really great babysitters in our childhood. I remember some of them very fondly, like Helma Mezzie, who used to sew great outfits for our little plastic troll dolls. She was the best. A few times, though, we had a born-again fundamentalist girl named Cecilia. Cecilia made a very serious impression on me, and not in a good way. One night when she was over we had a big storm. We lived out in the woods and the wind was blowing all the trees around. Cecilia called for me to look out the window with her at the thrashing trees and the leaves blowing everywhere. I was maybe 8, 9 years old. I was nervous about it. Cecilia took me by the shoulders and made me look out into the woods and she said in this dreamy voice, “Jesus is coming for all his children. Jesus is coming for all the little children.”

I know that she found that comforting, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been so frightened in my life. You have to understand that the only thing I knew about Jesus back then was that he was this guy with long blonde hippie hair who got killed and came back to life, and that my grandparents had pictures of him all over their house because they actually thought he was God’s relative or something. He was on their calendar with lambs and children, he was on the thermometer telling you the temperature with his arms wide open, he was on the bedroom wall nailed to a cross and bleeding. I knew that Easter was a holiday about him coming back to life, so I concluded that he was a zombie. And now this zombie was coming to get all the little children! What was he going to do with us when he got us? I figured he was going to make an army of zombie children! I didn’t sleep that night. The next day I told my parents about Jesus coming and we never had Cecilia back to baby sit.

Of course I learned much later that I had it all wrong. Jesus wasn’t a zombie – in fact, his whole life and ministry was spent trying to keep us from being half-dead ourselves, to be awake to God’s presence in the world, to have life more abundant. I also learned that, contrary to what Cecilia said, Jesus wasn’t “coming to get” me or anyone else. While he definitely had a knack for showing up and filling atheist intellectuals like me with the sudden irrational desire to follow him, he wasn’t the type to break through walls and burst out of the closet and grab you like a monster. By the time I figured out how badly I wanted and needed Jesus in my life, actually, I had to break through a few walls and closets to get to him!

Isn’t it interesting how Jesus gets this reputation for having a character like a streamroller, a force that will just rudely plow through our lives to prove his godly powers to us, to charge through the clouds with an AK-47 to bring about his triumphant reign, when in all the real life stories about him, he always seems a little bit tired at being asked to save yet another life?

Look at the gospel stories we just read: this happens all the time! It’s not Jesus marching around going “Oh hey, you there – you need some healing. I’m going to spit into my hands now, blind man, and give you sight.”
“Does anyone happen to have any dead children or parents they’d like me to resurrect this afternoon? Please, line them up!”
No, it’s never like that. It’s always someone like the woman with a 12-year hemorrhage –totally untouchable by her society’s purity laws– who grabs him on the hem when he’s on his way somewhere else. “Mister, you gotta help me.” In Luke’s version of this story, you know, it even says that as the woman pulled at him, Jesus felt his power go out of him. Healing costs Jesus something. This should be a hint to all of us who seek healing that it’s no easy thing – if healing one woman drains even Jesus, just imagine the energy it takes you and me.

There are always needy people clamoring for Jesus. And it’s not minor stuff. It’s big stuff, like “This guy in our neighborhood is being tormented by demons, could you do something about it?” And Jesus does, of course. He says it again and again, “If you believe you can be well, you will be well.” He says it to the woman with the flow of blood, “Your faith has made you well.” He didn’t have to go after her. He didn’t go around breaking down doors nabbing bleeding women and little dead girls for his zombie army.

Did you notice this? No one ever got resurrects by Jesus in the gospels unless someone who loves them begs him please, someone I love is dead. You must help us. We’re begging you, please do this. We know you can do this. Jesus, with a sigh, does it. Your daughter isn’t dead, she’s sleeping. Now she’s alive, please give her something to eat. He’s always underplaying his presence, recommending that folks not go around talking about what they just saw. It’s just not Jesus’ style to come for anyone who doesn’t want him. It is his style to be the living incarnation of God’s vision of how we should behave with one another.

That’s good news for the scared little kid I used to be, who couldn’t sleep that night long ago for fear that this creepy man would crash through my window with his arms out in front of him and drag me away from my parents and my home.

But it’s not such good news for those of us here today who maybe thought that it was Jesus’ responsibility to come and get us and drag us to the life of faith or pull us up from the floor and into the healing waters while we kick, frightened and making excuses and resisting. It’s kind of hard news for those of us who stand far distant from Jesus with our arms folded saying, “Well, if you were really as godly as all that, you would see me over here, you would know how badly I need to be resurrected, you would see my flow of blood and make me whole.”

Friends, Jesus just doesn’t play that. That is not how the Christian life works. We give ourselves to God in freedom, because we were created in freedom, and Jesus is obviously a respecter of that freedom. At our baptism, we are invited into a beloved community hosted by the Holy Spirit, and promised that we are not stranded alone on this planet. We are not washed and installed passively in a hospital bed, assuming that Jesus will give us the right medicine when he makes his nightly rounds.

Jesus is not a cosmic doctor or a magician working tricks on an unwitting crowd. He is offering himself as the way, the truth and the life– and if we happen to be blind or bleeding or possessed by a few demons – (and who among us is not ?) — we need to let him know and welcome him in to do the work of healing. Scripture tells us again and again that if we have faith, we can be made whole, but this almost never happens unless we first go the necessary distance to sincerely seek it out.

Here we are on a rainy day much like that one so many years ago when my babysitter told me that Jesus was coming for all his little children. I don’t know where she got that, bless her heart. Jesus isn’t coming to getchya, my friends. But he is there for the getting if we need him – and we do.

Rev. Victoria Weinstein
October 10, 2007

PeaceBang Preaching and Singing (and Looking For Potential Dates)

PeaceBang will be preaching the midday service tomorrow, October 10, at King’s Chapel at noon. She will be talking about the Zombie Jesus. And if that doesn’t pique your interest, nothing will.

On Friday night at 7 pm, PeaceBang will be singing with the New England sacred roots ensemble Sweet the Sound at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, MA. You should definitely come if you can!

If you do come and you see a nice-looking man sitting alone, would you sidle up to him and tell him I’m single? I just realized I haven’t had a date since December of 2006, and it’s my policy to have at least one ill-advised romance each calendar year.

Thanks, friends. I knew I could count on you to help.

Is God Keeping You From Liking This Ad Campaign?

Just kidding. Couldn’t resist.

I saw the “Is God Keeping You From Going to Church” UUA ad in Time magazine today (courtesy of a parishioner who clipped it for me) and really liked it a lot. It’s elegant and provocative and strikes just the right chord.

But then I saw this on YouTube and extremely much disliked it (<— trying not to say “hate”). It looks like some weird Richard Linklater production and I’m not sure what demographic finds jumpy purple cartoon graphics appealing, but it ain’t fat, forty-something East Coast liberal Christian Witchy Transcendentalists of Jewish heritage. A shame, ’cause the distracting, hipper-than-thou visuals almost ruin the whole thing for me, and there are some very sincere people in that ad saying lovely things. (Go, Shana!) Why’d they have to make them into animated people? I think that was seriously ill-advised. Real people go to churches, not cartoons.

Isn’t it weird that the same message in two different media can evoke such different reactions?

So I’m sitting her patting my nice little TIME ad on the head. Nice ad, niiiice ad.

Panzi Hospital

I was thinking yesterday that Americans seem, in general, to be less sexually energized than I’ve ever seen us. Maybe it’s just me getting older and more accepting of my spinsterhood, but I don’t know… aside from the young hotties working their thing (and the usual relentless droning of the porn industry), our erotic mojo in the U.S. seems way down.

As well it should be.

Stories like this make me think that, if we have a sense of global solidarity at all, we should all be in mourning in a specifically sexual part of our beings.

The article says that most of the perpetrators were psychically damaged by their participation in the Rwandan genocide. I’m sure that’s true.

And how about just plain evil? How about Satan?
(I’ve studied the person of Satan for so many years and with such intensity of focus, someone once introduced me as “an amateur demonologist,” and I didn’t correct him).

There are other colonized, traumatized populations whose men don’t go around tearing out the insides of their sisters and mother’s bodies with penises and bayonets. What is happening? What is happening? In a world with so much sexual violence against women, we haven’t seen the worst?

Someone, I forget who, said to me yesterday that America is no different, but the genocide is slower.

Why do people have to say these things, set up obscenely ridiculous parallels between unimaginable horror in Africa and our problems here at home?

Look, I can’t process what I am reading about the Democratic Republic of Congo any better than any other American. But please God, can we bear witness without engaging in competitive oppression?

That’s a rhetorical question.

I apologize for not opening this for comments. My heart just isn’t in it.

I Love To Singa

I grew up loving Bugs Bunny, for but my money this is the greatest Merrie Melodies cartoon ever made.

If I ever get a tattoo, Owl Jolson would be at the top of the list of images I would choose to permanently affix to my skin. Boy, I love that little crooner.

Brings tears to my eye every time. Tex Avery was a genius.

HONK Festival

I went to the HONK Festival today in Davis Square. In case you didn’t know that there’s a whole subculture of “activist street bands,” I’m here to tell you that there is indeed!

They had names like Brass Liberation Orchestra and Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble and Hungry March Band and they came from as close by as Providence, Rhode Island and from as far away as New Orleans,Lousiana and Rome, Italy. My favorite group was the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, which had the best choreography and oom-papa kick-butt music and message.

It was one of those “Hush, Little Baby — Mama’s Gone Hunting a Sermon” outings — I already wrote 90% of my sermon on “Can These Dry Bones Live: Singing, Dancing and Laughing-In The Revolution” on Thursday and knew I’d get my first page or so from attending the festival. We’re hearing “Stories From the Cha Cha Cha” by Vern Huffman (in Paul Rogat Loeb’s marvelous book of essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While) as our contemporary reading and Ezekiel 37:1-9 as our ancient reading. I’m referencing “Hairspray” and Baby Suggs’ Sermon in the Clearing from Beloved in mysermon:

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. … This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. … hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.”

I’m singing “Our Father (The New, Revised Edition)” by Susan Werner as the Prelude and the choir is doing “The Fire Of Commitment” by Jason Shelton. The music will all be fun, irreverent and contemporary. My Music Director is going to play “You Can’t Stop The Beat” from “Hairspray” as the postlude!

I used Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy as research reading.

My message is basically this: one of the most tried-and-true ways to oppress a people is to control their laughter, dancing and singing. The work of social change must reclaim these things. There’s a lot my sermon about colonialism and Western attitudes about the place of the body in spiritual practice (ie, none! ’til very recently!). We will remember the African slaves who sat in the choir loft of our own church building with their hands properly folded, having been taught that their own embodied forms of worship were demonic. The sermon concludes with the (somewhat inaccurate but by now legendary) words of Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Take and use as you like. I believe in sharing liturgical materials.

I’m really excited about this service. It has the potential to be a failure, and I think it’s important to take those risks now and then.

Thanks, Philip Gulley

Last night I was on my way into the city to meet a pal for his birthday dinner when the T train stopped cold. No problem; that happens. I still figured I’d make it to Cambridge a lot earlier than I would have had I been driving, and I’d even have some time to shop for a sock monkey for my friend before dinner. The train was air-conditioned, so I was comfortable and fine.

After about fifteen minutes, the other passengers and I started to realize something was seriously wrong. Finally the conductor’s voice came on the PA, apologizing for the delay and announcing a FIRE between Park and Downtown Crossing stations.

Oh. Oh.
Suddenly I was not so okay. A FIRE?

See, I have a tendency to get panic attacks when stuck in enclosed places LIKE THE SUBWAY TRAIN BURIED FAR UNDERNEATH THE WORLD IN THE COLD, RAT-INFESTED DARK.

I knew I didn’t have a stray Ativan or Valium in my bag, ’cause I only get those from my doctor when I’m flying somewhere and would rather not break into a heart-pounding, terrified sweat three miles in the air over Topeka, Kansas.

I knew that I could let my mind start racing (”Oh my God, a FIRE? What happened? Was there a BOMB? Are there TERRORISTS in Boston? How about ARSON? Is MARVIN THE TORCH running around setting fire to T stations? Why don’t they let us out at South Station and put us on a shuttle, or let us get a cab or a bus, or WALK to where we need to go? I could walk to Cambridge! At least I wouldn’t be stuck in the dark underground in this freezing cold airless CASKET with all these nice, calm Bostonians who don’t know we’re all going to DIE!), or I could let go of control, turn off my monkey thoughts, and read the nice book I had just checked out of the library.

I opted for the latter. Especially since, as I said, everyone was being so gracious and nice and patient and I didn’t want to cause a scene. In fact, I’d like to mention here that Boston folks have really impressed me lately. I’ve been attending some big, rowdy Red Sox-related events in the city and have found people to be fun, friendly and really delightful, whereas in the past the crowds seemed more like those guys in the ad for the movie “300″ — you know, the ones who all look like WWF champs and like they don’t know how to use a knife and fork?

Anyway, I decided to do some deep breathing and to read the book I had just found at the library called Porch Talk by Philip Gulley, a Quaker pastor from Indiana. The book is hilariously funny, charming and extremely endearing. Gulley writes like I wish I could : he’s wickedly sarcastic but manages to be so in a way that’s homey, sweet and sly and never snarly or caustic . I suppose that’s the difference between a small-town Indiana boy and a girl who was raised by drama queen parents (I mean that with love, Mom and Dad) and New York Jews.

I’m so grateful I just happened to have this book in my purse — I usually don’t bring reading material on the subway with me because reading and riding makes me nauseous — but it kept me from having a nervous breakdown during the hour we were trapped underground, and I now have a huge crush on Philip Gulley. I mean, he’s a great writer, a faithful Universalist Quaker, and extremely CUTE. Bless your heart, Pastor Gulley. C’mon, is this guy swoon-worthy or what?

Friday Cat Blogging

From the hilarious folks at http://icanhascheezburger.com/, our favorite site for cat hilarity.

This is my all-time favorite: