Tag: faith

The Lenten Season

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

When I was in sixth grade, in Mrs. Sims’s class, I remember David Elmore talking about what his father chose to give up for Lent. Mrs. Sims had asked which kids observed Lent, about which I knew nothing. David said with a grin that his father always gave up watermelon. Mrs. Sims remarked, “But that’s not in season now,” and David said, “That’s why he gives it up!” And several students laughed. I always felt left out on religious topics, often because I didn’t know it was religion they were talking about, and I didn’t practice any.

I guess my mom, Lynne, (I think I told you her lapsed Catholic story) explained Lent to me when I got home and asked her. It represents the forty days Jesus Christ wandered in the desert (why?), she explained, as if I followed; and so to commemorate that, we give something up for Lent for the 40 days before Easter (which “resurrection” date is still chosen to be the first Sunday after the fourth full moon after the winter solstice/Christmas because Pagan parties rule). Okay?

I asked my mom what she gave up. “When I was a kid, I gave up candy,” she said, since back in the 1930s and ’40s, candy was a penny, so even in relative poverty, kids could usually afford an occasional candy. “But I cheated,” she said, and saved up for Smith Brothers’ Cough Drops instead. “I told myself it was medicine.”

Smith Bros S.B. Cough Drops 12 ...

But deep down she knew. I think about why we do these rituals of personal sacrifice when so many people around the world have to sacrifice, with no say in the matter.

Collage in readiness for St. Patrick’s Day, and the St. Pat’s Day for All Parade here in Queens, the real celebration.

When I first started practicing Lent I was in middle school, then, and I gave up Doritos. Later it was all junk food. Lucky child. In my grown years it’s been media of all kinds, but this year I don’t dare give up media as the nation’s democracy collapses daily. This year, I had no idea what to give up. I barely eat junk, or drink, or indulge in anything beyond sleep. I thought I’d give up sloth trying to exercise more.

As if in answer to my dilemma, my friend Tom sent me a Substack this morning, which I very much recommend, because heaven knows I’m not religious, and I found it moving and intelligent and inspiring. Here’s a snippet, followed by the link:

If you feel disoriented, you are not weak.
If you feel angry, you are not unfaithful.
If you feel grief in your body, tightness in your chest, exhaustion in your bones, tears that come without warning, you are not dramatic.

You are paying attention.

And paying attention is a spiritual practice that this culture actively discourages.

Thoughts, Prayers and Art

Ashes in the Time of Disappearance: A Lenten Reckoning

We are entering Lent at a time when it feels like the world is unraveling in plain sight…

Read more

11 hours ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Rev. Allison Burns-LaGreca

“We are not entering Lent with neat spiritual goals. We are entering Lent with social dis-ease lodged in our chests. With rage we don’t know what to do with. With helplessness that threatens to harden into cynicism. With the terrible knowledge that people are suffering right now, and we are implicated in systems that enable it.

“So how do we hold it all at once?

“First, we stop pretending that spiritual discipline is separate from public life.”

There it is. So this season, I’m paying attention with my whole body, giving up fear and freezing and being utterly selfish. It’s a goal, an attempt at a practice. I wrote and called both senators today, as I do every week, but now it will be every day for 40 days. I will send money wherever it can do good. I will take walks and try to engage more. I’m trying to be of use.

To be of use, should that interest you where our democratic republic is concerned, you might consider doing some Lenten lifting, if you aren’t already, which I know you are. Here’s something to know, by the way, about the SAVE Act (from poet Robert Arnold), which act you absolutely should want to stop, though ironically it will hurt Republican women the most.

There’s much to do. Gather your strength. Have a cough drop.

Now get to work.

Now, Voyager

Dreams of the dead

The Untold Want

by Walt Whitman (1819 –1892)

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find

Last night I dreamed I came out of the room where I sleep when I’m at my parents’ house, but it was my bed here in Queens, and my very aged, dead mother sat before a bright computer screen at the living room desk in the dark, her alert face blue-lit and her thin hands wildly flying over the keyboard, flying up and over the keys, eyes focused but expressionless. She was wearing a version of her blue pajamas. “Mom?” I needed to tell her she was dead, she didn’t need to do this, and I pulled myself awake. It was disturbing, seeing that tiny body, so pale and shriveled, working on a computer, which she never did, and so frantically.

I have dreams like that quite a bit since my mom died, unnerving dreams at times. And it’s easy to feel confused then, and afraid.

This evening on YouTube I caught NPR legend Terri Gross on Colbert talking about her husband’s death and a dream she had about him, in which she turned to him to remind him he was dead, and he vanished. Stephen then told Terri about a dream he had after his mom died, where he told her a similar thing, “Mom, why are you here?” and that she was dead; she also vanished. Stephen’s mother’s dream words before she vanished were, “Oh good. It’s the only way you’ll stay awake.” Terri asked what he thought that meant, and she suggested that his mother’s words meant what her husband’s presence meant in her own dream: you need to live life. By that I gather, when you admit the death, when you face that loss, you can awaken to your own life again. It was a wonderfully tender, adult conversation between two artists, two humans, one I hope everyone, somehow, can see during this horrible week. I needed it.

During their exchange, I found myself teary, and the dream I had last night came back to me. What was my mom telling me? I think my mother was telling me to write my life. Lynne had no interest in my acting, my teaching, or my writing. “That’s your thing,” she’d say. But here she was in death telling me, maybe, or showing me, that I need to keep writing, and even writing about her. Maybe it’s a better dream than first appeared, maybe. Nothing to be afraid of, and in fact quite the opposite.

As I do when it’s on demand on TCM, I watched Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid for the many, manyeth time, and the feelings I have about it change over viewings and years, but whatever qualms or critiques, I can’t help loving Charlotte’s journey as Camille. Unconventionally, Charlotte Vale finds a purpose for her life, waking out of years of emotional abuse to become her own woman. Her most important moment of self-discovery comes during a renewed fight with her mother, when Charlotte is able to say honestly, “You see, Mother, I’m not afraid.” In addition to Max Steiner’s score, her guide out of the sanitarium and into the world was that Whitman quotation, presented to her by Dr. Jaquith. She can sail forth to seek and find; she can do anything she wants now. She can become. “I’m not afraid.”

When I saw the new footage today of Renee Good in her car via the “body cam” or phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE “agent” who shot Ms. Good in cold blood in the face at least three times through her windshield as she left the scene, something became plain to me: that Renee Good, who by all accounts, including her wife’s, was nothing if not kind, “pure sunshine”—that the only thing Good did wrong was be true to her name and her Christian faith.

She was not afraid.

She said kindly to the officer, “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” And Ross opened fire. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed.

I saw an interview with a pastor who was arrested by ICE and was asked over and over again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you afraid now?” And that (true) follower of Jesus said simply, “I’m not afraid,” and you could tell it was driving the ICE thugs to murderous rage. To what end? What do they think this rage at good people gives them?

I look at all the people posting, all the people protesting, all the people still out in their neighborhoods. We aren’t afraid. We are grieving, we are traumatized, we are experiencing all this horror together, we’ve all known loss, been visited by death in dreams, and we aren’t afraid. You know why? Because, whatever our faith or origin, we know who we are. And we are learning more all the time. We seek, we find, and it’s interesting to note that the Bible quotation as we know it doesn’t stop there. Let me close out with a little Gnostic Gospel of Thomas who said, “Seek and you shall find. When you find, you will become troubled. When you are troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.” I’m not a Christian; I study all the faiths, and that feels universal to me.

I hope you have the dreams you need tonight.

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few words from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was published in January of 1776. This later reminder from Paine, when the rebellion seemed its most hopeless, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” via Heather Cox Richardson:

Sunday Sermon

Thoughts from the produce aisle of a grocery store

Yesterday after I published my latest post, I walked to the grocery store to pick up vegetables for some kind of Italian wedding soup I had an idea for as a meal for my friends on Sunday (today). I took a hand basket and walked the outer aisle for celery (check), carrots (check), spinach (check), and was turning to find an onion when I noticed a young man (Black, slender) putting back a prewashed spinach container when he saw the expiration date. “Too soon?” I asked, as I do. “I can’t eat all that by tomorrow,” he said. “You know,” I said, and he turned to listen because I do have an arresting teacher voice, “you can always blanche what’s left, now you can’t do that with these other lettuces,” I gestured, “and put in a baggie and freeze it.” He tilted his head thoughtfully, “I never knew that.” I said, my gray braids on full display as it was too warm for a hat, “That is what the age buys you.” I could see there was no more to be said. Would he do it? Who knows. I turned to find my onion.

I also wanted to pick up unsalted pistachios. In this store, the nuts are in not one, not two, but five different locations (at least) in the produce section. I think the idea is to surprise you everywhere with a nutty idea, or maybe it’s just easier to stash them under the fruit and vegetable displays, but it took me several trips around to find the right stand. I saw the young man walked back and forth looking at the prewashed leafy greens, and just before I located my nuts, the man made a point of walking by me to say, “I’m going to try it,” and I raised my arms high and cried, “Success!”

Here’s what I know about learning after 38 years in education and editing: learning never happens at the moment of impact. I’ve told you this many times, but as with all wisdom, it bears repeating. You tell someone something, teach it, and then you have to allow the student to sort of internalize it, reflect on it, and decide how they will respond. We are a very impatient society, we want it all now, in America. I was like that as a young teacher, expecting that because I told them, whatever it was, it would stick. Later you learn that because you are rushing on to another concept, you have to repeat the lesson, on whatever it was, periodically, just to jar a student’s memory.

And it got me thinking how neither Republicans nor Democrats leave time for reflection. What Republicans do is pick one or two messages and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. They hammer those two messages home for a month; once implanted, they pick two more messages and repeat and repeat until those are implanted. After a short time, their base has four or six messages—blame Blacks, blame Democrats, no taxes, no abortions, no schools, no immigrants—to glom onto until the election cycle is over.

Democrats, by contrast, have a more nuanced base, and they don’t appreciate that enough. Repeated messages on a finite number of things—Trump is unhinged, Project 2025 is bad, women need bodily autonomy—don’t land because they are not elaborated on sufficiently, but also because Dem leaders don’t remember that the base is also being bombarded with lies that they have to think about how to counter.

No one has time for reflection in either political scenario.

A good politician, I think, needs to behave like an experienced teacher. Miss O’ didn’t just say to the young man, “You can freeze it.” I explained how: “You can blanche it, and put it in a baggy, and freeze it.” And because we both had shopping to do, and no lives were in the balance, I left it at that. He had time to reflect, and I suspect Miss O’s continued presence in the produce department, on the hunt for what he had no idea, but still present, reminded him he could keep thinking about what he’d been taught.

Telling anyone once, without reinforcement, is like not telling them at all.

Telling them too many times, without evidence or example, is propaganda.

If this democracy is to survive—and it all hinges on Ukraine, one Eastern European nation, defeating not one but two allied superpowers—the United States and Russia—we have to figure out how to message to the American people.

Our legacy press, now almost fully allied with Trump, is useless.

Independents on social media can only do so much.

But I keep remembering that the American Revolution was won on horseback, word by word by word, passed along when people had time to think, when they weren’t distracted by anything that didn’t mean survival.

So here I am, passing a word. You do it, too.

Sending love and the amassed wisdom of age,

Miss O’

Don’t Let It Be the Last Dance

Reflections on democratic voting in a time of rising fascism

I Sit in My Kitchen Rocker Waiting…

As I Lay Dying, “I Stand Here Ironing”…I keep thinking of titles around the anxiety of working out our lives, and deaths, so much of which is out of our control. We have to, more often than not, depend on others, on the actions and emotions and convictions of others, to make our own lives bearable. And today I’m feeling how terrible that can be, and also how reassuring.

Today I “early voted” here in Queens, surprised by the lack of turnout, in some ways, but this being New York, local Democrats don’t have a lot of competition. (Still, I live in an area full of Trump voters, particularly Hispanics, too many of whom more or less worship the man (if tee shirts are evidence) who plans to deport them within days of returning to office, citizens or not, it won’t matter.) The poll workers gave me such heart, though, just to see them there, all caring so much about democracy.

Scenes from a day of early voting, Queens, NY

I’ve been imagining during my sleepless nights the consequences of a second Trump presidency—I cannot see how we are really here, but then no one imagined a Trump to begin with, so showered with love and celebrity coverage by a besotted press. Last night I went to see a play at 59E59 Theater here in New York called Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library by Jenny Lyn Bader. The subject of the play is the period of days a young Hannah Arendt was imprisoned and interrogated by a Nazi officer (whom she ultimately convinces to help her) in Germany in 1933. The investigating Nazi officer in the early days of Hitler’s Chancellorship and martial law is convinced that Mrs. Stern, rather than working on her dissertation, is mimeographing and distributing overseas the antisemitic writings and cartoons in the German papers. Because of who she is, we know that Arendt gets out, since she will famously go on to cover the Nuremberg Trials, there to develop a philosophy around the nature of evil and the ordinary people who become complicit.

I became increasingly, deeply horrified watching this play as I realized that this is America’s future, quite literally, with camps and the rest of it, unless Harris is elected. And this time, no hyperbole.

The treacherous New York Times gets scared straight.

The consequences of this election will affect every citizen who is not rich and sociopathic in horrifying ways. Anyone who says we aren’t all in this together is a dope. Years ago (I probably told you this story), I was at a favorite bar in Midtown Manhattan, a great after work sort of bar, and there was a commuter from New Jersey there sometimes, if he had just missed a train. We would chat. When Obama was running for president, I said, “We are all in this together,” and the guy (white, 30s, business type), looked up from his scotch and smirked, “I’m not.” And I said, “Where do you think you got that drink? How do you think it showed up on that bar?” and he said, “I don’t give a shit.” And I got up and said, “You are despicable. I believe I’ll have my drink down here.” And he looked at me, stunned, as I moved. A few days later, he was at the bar again, and he tried to catch my eye. I cut him dead and walked on to the end of the bar for a seat. Returning from the restroom later, he paused and said, “Can a despicable person buy you a drink,” and I said, cold and hard, “No thanks.” Cheers.

Bars are equal opportunity institutions in society, as are commuter trains, and they don’t generally fail us. Two institutions that have failed the United States, however, and most decidedly in the past four decades are 1) the free press; and 2) the Christian Church. Both used to have one thing in common, in that (at their best) in their respective ways, through investigation and preaching, they existed to bring to the People the truth, the way, and the light. Today, both, at their worst, have one thing in common yet again: the love of money.

The love of money is the root of all evil, and if I hear one more ill-informed person of “faith” say even one more time, “I think Trump is better for the economy,” I may run naked and screaming into traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (the “economy” under Trump was Obama’s until Trump wrecked it). Today’s Evangelical Christian churches, since the televangelism on TV in the 1980s to today, preach “send me, your pastor, a lot of cash, even if it means emptying your savings accounts.” The newspapers, bought out by billionaires with egos the size of Arnold Palmer’s junk (keeping it classy, Trump), want to curry favor for and provide support to other billionaires. The information printed in today’s newspapers is accidental and incidental to their owners’ true purpose. And yet journalists, as do some Christian pastors, try.

Sister Lisa and Brother Mike in conversation

Despite the quotation marks I use now—”free” press and “Christian” church—I try to remember that there are, really, so many good people. We cannot give up. Please vote. Encourage others to vote. As I walked home from my polling site this morning, a woman accompanying her (I think) elderly mother on a walker stopped me, pointed to my sticker, and asked where the polling site was. I told her, and she looked disappointed—it’s a bit of a walk—but she thanked me and turned to explain to her mother in their language. Because there really is plenty of room for all of us.

With freedom and justice for all, dammit.

Love,

Miss O’

Share