Adventures on the Island of Misfit Toys

A couple of years ago, PW and a local rabbi presided over the wedding of a Romanian Orthodox Christian woman and a Russian Orthodox Jewish man. The wedding ceremony included a chuppa, a three crowns ceremony, and a eucharist, with challah made by the groom’s grandmother who lives in Israel and wine made by the bride’s father. I’m not sure what the grandmother thought happened at communion, because the challah loaf was approximately the size of a miniature pony.

At the wedding, some of the groom’s family surprised PW by lining up to receive communion, along with the bride’s family. In a scene that has long since taken on a life of its own, PW quickly changed the words of distribution to “Bread for the Journey” when she put bread in the hands of the Jewish family members (instead of “the body of Christ.”) She hadn’t had time to suggest alternate words to the chalice bearer, so she heard him repeat as he followed along behind her, “Blood for the Journey” (instead of “the blood of Christ.”)

Can I just say that, to me, never is Christian liturgy more like a Monty Python sketch than during communion? Of course I can, this is my website! The scene above is reason #814 why I wish Christianity would move past this yucky body and blood of Christ business. The first 813 reasons are that it’s just gross. This is the 21st century, folks. Must we STILL be littering our liturgies with the language of cannibalism and vampirism? But I digress.

This same couple brought their new baby to church last Sunday for the Jewish ceremony for naming a daughter, and a baptism. The church bulletin included the Jewish prayers in both English and Hebrew, along with the usual Episcopal baptism liturgy. In addition, we had the Boston Children’s Chorus as guest musicians, so we had a house full of company, so to speak. I’m sure most of us have never been involved in a service like this until Sunday.

Here's part of the worship bulletin for last Sunday

Male members of the groom’s/father’s family all wore matching bright pink kippot, perhaps in celebration of the new baby daughter? No idea what the color signified, if anything, but it was stunning. After brief remarks by PW and the rabbi, the families were invited up to the front for the Jewish ceremony, which included a Chair of Elijah and ceremonial sips of sweet wine from a kiddush cup. Immediately following, everyone moved down to the baptismal font for the baptism.

In PW’s comments prior to the two ceremonies, she noted that the baby girl (whose name combines the Greek word for “wisdom” with the Hebrew word for “life”) would have full dual citizenship as a Jew and a Christian. This will likely be a stumbling block for many on both sides of her citizenship aisle, since we humans are notoriously exclusively-minded. I can hear it now:

“What religion are you?”
“I’m Jewish and Christian.”
“What? You can’t be both?”
“Yes I can!”
“No you can’t!”
“I already am!”
“No you aren’t!”
“Oh yes I AM!”

This imagined conversation reminds me of the time I picked up GForce at preschool one day and overheard a boy asking where her dad was and why he didn’t ever pick her up.

“Who is your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad. I have three moms.”
“You can’t have three moms!”
“Well, I do!”
“But where’s your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad.”
“WHAT? Why do you have three moms and no DAD!”
“Because THAT’S how I wanted it!”

The next time I saw that kid’s mom, she told me that her son went home that night wondering why he only had one mom. She and I had a good laugh about that.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom how Christian and Jewish communities can justify any kind of exclusiveness – particularly when it comes to hosting ceremonies that mark rites of passage: weddings, baptisms, naming ceremonies, funerals, etc. If anything, these are the occasions when faith communities should be throwing open their doors.

Believe it or not, even opening communion to anyone who wants to participate is STILL a radical thing to do in the Christian tradition. Crazy, right? Thankfully, PW’s eucharistic theology is basically this: if you put your hands out, she will put bread in them. She’s not going to bother interviewing you about whether you’ve been baptized or attended membership classes or whether you’ve repented for anything. She doesn’t even care if you are Christian, Jewish, Atheist, whatever. If you want bread, you get bread. She’s a rebel like that.

I won’t even bother getting into the handwringing hoohaw that various strains of both Christians and Jews go through over whether queer people can/should be ordained, and if so, to what level. Really? Both the Christian and Jewish faith traditions are rooted in generations of people being exiled, outcast, persecuted, and annihilated. So what do we do? Well, we exile, outcast, persecute, and annihilate. Or, we study things to death in hopes that the people who want to join our ranks (as well as the issues they bring with them) will give up and/or go away — which is just a more passive form of exiling, casting out, persecuting, and annihilating.

Emmanuel Church has a reputation for having no residency or belief requirements for membership, weddings, baptisms, communion, you name it. As a result, we end up hosting ceremonies and casts of characters that force us to re-examine what it means to be inclusive, and occasionally struggle with how inclusive we really want to be. It’s good, stretchy work. Like any stretch, sometimes it leaves us feeling uncomfortable. And sometimes, what feels perfect to one group of people feels jarring and disturbing to another group. Still, I’d rather be stretched than frozen any day, even if it means occasionally feeling like we’re a kind of Island of Misfit Toys.

I’m pretty sure that the combination Jewish/Christian ceremonies we had this past Sunday would not have happened without our ongoing and deepening relationship with Boston Jewish Spirit and their Rabbi Howard Berman. PW refers to the relationship as “an interfaith family,” which testifies both to our deep commitment and struggles to understand and work with each other, set in an environment of mutual affection, admiration, and respect. It can be hard work, swimming against the tide of centuries of mutual suspicion and distrust, as well as the overt anti-Semitism that is threaded through much of the Christian Testament. But swim we do, and our two congregations have formed a kind of buddy system in the ways we look out for and help each other.

As a capper to Sunday’s extraordinary liturgy, we had a stunning moment during the Bach cantata. At the beginning of the instrumental prelude for the tenor aria in BWV 96 – “Herr Christ, der einige Gottes sohn,” I noticed that the tenor credited in the bulletin was not moving toward the front for his solo. I looked down at my bulletin to make sure I was looking for the right tenor.

By the time I looked back up, the conductor (who used to be a tenor in the chorus before he was selected to be the new music director) had turned to face the congregation, holding the big, clothbound conductor’s score in his hands. The orchestra continued playing without a conductor and Ryan sang the aria beautifully.

At coffee hour after church, I learned that Ryan found out only that morning that the regularly scheduled tenor was having throat problems and wouldn’t be able to sing the aria. None of the other tenors in the chorus had ever sung that particular aria before, so not even an hour before the service started, Ryan decided to sing it himself.

Several people told me after the service that the expression on my face was priceless when I looked up to see Ryan readying himself to sing. Apparently, a look of rapturous amazement remained on my face throughout, and Ryan told me later that looking at my face helped him get through the aria. I had absolutely no idea that I was providing any assistance whatsoever. I was just sitting there, awestruck by the whole morning.

It’s cool and curious how the simple act of showing up and staying open to the crazy possibilities of life can sustain the people around us. And, most of the time, you’re lucky if you find out that you’ve provided this support. Moments earlier, I myself had drawn similar inspiration and sustenance from the brilliant pink kippot bobbing around the empty chair for Elijah and then the baptismal font.

The other day I read an interview with Tom Waits in the New York Times. In the interview, he shared what he tells the sidemen who play in his band or on his records: “I want you to play like you’re 7 years old at a recital. I want you to play like your mom’s in the room. I want you to play like you’re miles from home, and your legs are dangling from a boxcar. Or play like your hair’s on fire. Play like you have no pants on.”

If you substitute the word “worship” for the word “play” in the above quotation, that’s what church was like for me on Sunday. Full of surprise, sweetness, boldness, jarring moments, and tiny shards of time that took my breath away – like watching the Jewish and Christian parents of a newly welcomed baby walk up to the communion rail together for a blessing, or like watching the orchestra play without their conductor, because he has turned to face the congregation and is singing like an angel. It turns out, sometimes you figure out how to do things you’ve never done before by just, well, doing them.

A song didn’t come to mind for me today, so I’m sharing this fabulous clip from the movie “Three Kings.” It was playing in my head the whole time I was writing.

Another day in the seed-shattering factory of life

Today has been one of those days where I feel like my body is neither big enough nor strong enough to contain my life.

I started the day with an early meeting at the hospital, talking with a scientist who works in reproductive research and in vitro fertilization. She herself had fertility problems in her younger days, and ended up with triplets who are now in their mid-20s. My colleagues and I spent two hours listening to her tell about her research and the sorts of reproductive riddles that she has encountered in the course of working with some of the hospital’s most challenging patients who want desperately to have children.

When I got back to the office, I opened my email to find that we were having a big press conference to announce a recent successful bi-lateral hand transplant. The transplant recipient is a man who has lived the past nine years using prosthetic arms and legs to live a life that has included painting, drawing, and writing. He became a candidate for this medical miracle in part because he desperately wanted to be able to hug his wife, children, and grandchildren again.

Just before it was time to head to the conference room where our office was gathering to watch the press conference, I got a text message from GForce. She was in the guidance office at her school, sobbing about an awful humiliation that happened in class, as a result of an insensitive and idiotic remark by a substitute teacher.

I spent the next hour talking by phone about the situation with PW, then with GForce, and then with the school principal, and then with GForce again.

Some people say that having children is like ripping your heart out of your chest so it can walk around outside your body for the rest of your life. I’ve never really felt that way, maybe because as much as I love metaphor, that particular one doesn’t ring true for me.

Sprouting seed

For me, parenting is a daily exercise in living through the inevitable and relentless pain and delight of watching little seeds shatters their hulls and send their tendrils of hope, disbelief, wonder, fear, and/or confidence up toward the sun. That, and the repetitive experience of being one such seed that surrenders itself to new growth, over and over and over again.

I used to work for a guy who was fond of saying, “We’re either growing or we’re dying.” While I think there is some truth to that, I also think that there is no growth without death. Each episode of growth – whether it’s a sudden epiphany that causes (or is caused by) a tectonic shift, or the slow peeling back of a cloud of unknowing into some bright new valley of awareness – each of those episodes is like a seed shattering its hull. The seed has to die – to give up its essential seedliness – so that the plant can be born.

It’s easy for me to see my children as seeds as I watch them grow from one stage to another, oscillating through varying degrees of dependence, independence, and interdependence. It’s harder to watch them do all that while remembering that I’m a seed, too. We’re all of us shifting, growing, changing, watching old paradigms give way to new ones, or explicitly destroying frameworks that don’t fit anymore so that we can make way for new ones that can accommodate and support our evolving hopes, disbeliefs, wonders, fears, and/or confidences.

So instead of attending the webcast of the press conference with my peers, I sat alone in my office talking on my phone. I shook with anger while attempting, mostly successfully, to speak calmly, coherently, and intelligently with PW, the school principal, and GForce. In between calls, I muttered many bad words.

Meanwhile, the hand transplant press conference unfolded behind me on my computer monitor. Apparently, there was a part of the press conference where they showed photos from the operating room, where you see this waxy yellowish transplanted arm flushing pink as the blood begins flowing into it. This was probably happening while I wobbled my way through my phone calls. By the time I got off the phone and turned to look at the computer, I was looking at the transplant recipient, sitting there with his two new and normal-looking hands resting atop a pile of what looked like pillows or sandbags.

Five days a week I come to work at a place where medical miracles occur on a daily basis: new life is born, in a lab dish, or in a disease cured, or in the birthing rooms, or in a newly transplanted limb or face or heart or lung. Tragedies also happen here. People die too soon, or too painfully, or agonizingly slowly. Or their minds die before their hearts do, and their bodies become like seeds that won’t ever crack open.

My hospital is like every individual life. Each of us is a combination of both the things that happen to us and the choices we make about how we’re going to live – or die – with what has happened to us. When GForce asked me if she could leave school for the day, I told her she can’t control what people say to her but she can control how much of the space they take up in her head.

“That beautiful, amazing space inside your head – that is all yours,” I said. “Don’t let anyone else take it from you, especially idiots and ignorant jerks who don’t deserve to have it in the first place.” I felt pretty proud of myself for not using any bad words while I was talking to her.

I started my day hearing jaw-dropping stories about the extraordinary measures some people go to in order to become parents, and the miraculous things science can do to make that dream come true. I have just now looked at the photos of a man’s new arms come to life, arms donated out of the unfathomable generosity of a family who had just lost a loved one.

They don’t tell you that parenting is an exercise in being broken open over and over again. But, if we really thought about it, how could we not already know this? All of life is an exercise in being broken open over and over again. As a parent, it’s excruciating to watch this happen to people I feel an irrational need to protect from any and all harm. From what my own parents tell me, this is true whether your children are infants or in their 50s.

An hour after our initial conversation, GForce called me again, begging to go home. This day is too hard, she said. I thought to myself, “I know. I know. Believe me, I know.” I took a deep breath and reminded her of horse races we have watched together, and how some horses have blinders on to help them focus, and others don’t. I told her, “Put blinders on so all you see are the people who support you.”

“Okay, but I have English class next. I’m supposed to write an essay in class, and I don’t know how I’ll be able to focus on writing an essay with all this stuff that’s happened.”

“Then escape into the essay,” I said. “Let the essay rescue you.”

So I did.

“We Get to Feel it All” by Emily Saliers

My my how time flies
First time I met you had to shade my eyes
Staring into the sun can make a girl blind
Now here we sit in a shadier spot
Got what I wanted, and I want what I got
Through no will of my own
I just found my way home

But, here is what I learned about you
You set the sun and you hung the moon
Mid October or the month of June
Temperatures rise and fall
We get to feel it all
Sometimes I can’t tell
You’re open like a book or shut like a shell
But if I hold you to my ear
I can hear the whole world
Dark stories of a distant past
Our time created in a single blast
You like to laugh at me because I’m serious
Yes it’s true, but

Here is what I learned about you
You set the sun and you hung the moon
Mid October or the month of June
Temperatures rise and fall
We get to feel it all
We get to feel it all
We get to feel it all
We get to feel it all

Time waits for no one
So I’m remembering that day in the sun
How I was thinking you needed time to cool down
Circumstances make us tired and colder
Well, that’s my coat thrown around your shoulder
And I know you’ll give it back to me if I need it
I believe it

Here is what I learned about you
You set the sun and you hung the moon
Mid October or the month of June
Temperatures rise and fall

Here is what I learned about you
You set the sun and you hung the moon
Mid October or the month of June
Temperatures rise and fall
We get to feel it all

Come out, come out, whoever you are

Estimates for how much of my childhood was spent in the car on long road trips range from 30-80%, depending on which trip I’m remembering. Every summer of my childhood, my dad – or both my parents – got invited to minister at week-long church camps called “reunions.” Over the years, we travelled by car to reunions in at least half of the lower 48 states, and several Canadian provinces as well. When my parents became empty-nesters, they got invited to places like Tahiti, Australia, and Hawaii. But I’m not bitter.

One of our trips back when I was five or six years old took us through the Black Hills of South Dakota. My recollection is that Dad had taken some “No Doz” so he could stay awake (Red Bull hadn’t been invented, and he didn’t drink coffee), and he was driving – and vibrating with caffeine-induced jitters – through the night across the other-worldly landscape of the Black Hills.

At some point in the wee hours, I woke up to find that Dad and I were the only ones awake in the car. I looked outside and asked quietly, “Where are we?”
“We’re driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota.”
“What kinds of animals do they have here in the Black Hills?”
“Oh, let’s see. Buffalo. Antelope. Maybe mountain lions. Bears. Deer.”
“Which is the biggest one?”
“Probably the buffalo. But bears get pretty big, too.”

These hand binoculars REALLY work!

I looked out the window again. It was the darkest dark I had ever seen, even with our little headlights, and the occasional lights of a passing truck or car. For whatever reason, I was suddenly obsessed with seeing a buffalo. I squinted hard and peered out the window. I made circles with my hands, and used them as pretend binoculars. I scanned the horizon.

“Psst. Hey Dad,” I whispered. “I see some buffalo out there.”
“Really?” he whispered back.
“Yeah. They’re huge!”
“Wow! What are they doing?”
“Um. Uh oh. I think they’re running toward our car. Go faster!”
“I can’t do that without getting a ticket.”

I looked up ahead, then behind us. No police car in sight. No cars or trucks of any kind. No other signs of life, except for all those buffaloes of unusual size I was sure were chasing our car. The humming in my head became a roar. Ohhhhhh noooooooo. Hurrrrry uuuuuuuuup, Daaaaaaad. Drive fasterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Come onnnnnnnn. Goooooooooooooooooooooooo.

I crawled over my sleeping brothers and found a spot behind my dad. I reached up over his seat and started rubbing his shoulders. He liked when I did this during long distance drives, and it was a way for me to feel connected to him without bothering him. It also made me feel a little safer.

After a long silence, punctuated by Dad’s murmurs of gratitude for the shoulder rub, I said, “I’d sure like to see these buffaloes better. When will the sun come up?” “Not for a few hours, Joybells. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

I thought to myself, “But what if the buffaloes aren’t out there when I wake up? What if this is my only chance to see them? Why are they chasing us? Why are these stupid Black Hills so dang BLACK??”

I drifted back to sleep for a bit. When I awoke again, we were driving through that pre-dawn darkness that feels so full of hope and possibility (or dread, if you’ve stayed up all night studying for an exam or writing a paper). The long and ridiculously dark night was almost over. My dad had stayed awake. And the buffaloes were STILL there!

I perked up and waited eagerly to see my first real live buffalo. I used my hand binoculars to get a closer look. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I slowly put the hand binoculars down in my lap and looked out the window, unaided. I swallowed hard, first in disbelief, and then in embarrassment.

Trees.

All those enormous, scary buffaloes I had seen before were trees. Gnarly, hump-backed, buffalo-shaped trees. They dotted the landscape as far as I could see. The lighter it got, the smaller and more ordinary the trees appeared. By the time the sun was all the way up, I couldn’t figure out how the trees had ever looked like rampaging herds of buffaloes to begin with. And yet my middle-of-the-night certainty and the fear it inspired were so clear and fresh and real.

This memory was playing like a movie in my head when I awoke in the wee hours yesterday morning. As I lay there trying to fall back to sleep, counting the buffaloes/trees, I remembered that October 11, is “National Coming Out Day” here in the U.S.and in several other countries (it’s on October 12 in the U.K.)

When National Coming Out Day was founded in 1988, I’d be willing to bet that very few people in the queer community, or our allies, friends, or families, envisioned where we’d be now: same-sex marriage is legal in 10 countries, as well as six states in the U.S. You might think that such a trend would render National Coming Out Day irrelevant.

My hunch is that National Coming Out Day and the AIDS Memorial Quilt were among the many things that helped to pave the way for the momentum we see now for same-sex marriage. Back when we queer people were mostly just shadowy gigantic buffaloes of people’s frightened imaginations, same-sex marriage was unthinkable. Even civil unions weren’t on the map, for the most part. As more and more of us started coming out – along with our families, friends, and allies – it was as if the sun began to rise. Lo and Behold! All along, those gnarly buffaloes were just ordinary trees.

I have fewer people to come out to these days, but I have friends and family who are not so lucky. I still have plenty of friends and family who are faced daily – usually multiple times each day – with the exhausting battle of whether or not to come out, how to come out, and to whom. Each decision is freighted with worries that include, “And what if they hate me?  And what if they hurt me?”

Even as It Gets Better, it doesn’t necessarily get easier. Kids still get bullied for being suspected of being queer. People are still killing themselves, or being killed, for being queer. Thirteen years ago today, Matthew Shepard died of injuries sustained when two men beat and tortured him for being queer. That seems like only yesterday to me.

So this year I have a different take on National Coming Out Day. For the first time in my life, I am hearing it as an invitation to straight people who are our allies, friends, and families. Because even in a world where more of us can get married, we still have a long way to go until every queer person can live a life of openness and integrity without fear of losing our jobs, our families, our children, our homes, or even our lives.

This past summer, the hospital where I work started a Be An Ally program, which encourages ALL hospital staff to put rainbow stickers on our badges as a sign of support and welcome to all queer people and their friends, families, and allies who are on hospital grounds. It’s an amazing thing to see so many rainbow stickers everywhere. That’s one way to come out.

So come out, you allies, friends, and families of queer folk. Come out, come out, whoever you are. We need your help, because we can’t create a safe place on our own. As an example, right now the presidential candidates from the Republican Party are busy shooting daggers at each other over who is a Real Christian or a Real Conservative. PW and I were talking recently about what a relief it is to have their wrath focused elsewhere.

Eventually, though, many politicians of all affiliations and many of the religious folk who support them will start shooting at the queers. They do this in every election cycle. It’s exhausting to be so regularly and so predictably dehumanized. So we need you straight people to come out now more than ever, and we need you to do it daily, as many times a day as you can. To paraphrase the queer writer Audre Lorde, your silence does not protect us. We need your active and vocal support to help us shine the light through people’s fears and anxieties, so we can all see our rampaging herds of midnight buffaloes transformed into the benign, shade-giving trees of morning.

Lyrics to “Always” by Blind Pilot

Holy road we are on tonight
Catch as catch can till we get it right
Always… in this dark light
Always.
Tell me more than what you can guess
Feel like thunder then quick to forget
Always looking for what is not yet
Always.
Oooohh…
Lock the keys in my house tonight
Hit the steps for the morning light
Always looking for a new light
Always.