Teeter Tottering between Beauty and the Storm

Always seek to find the beauty on stormy days...

I grew up as an "American Exceptionalist" -- thinking the U.S. democracy was the best thing since...slice bread? hot tubs? swims in the ocean?! -- to the extent I was an American Studies major in college.

Today I think a lot about our U.S. white culture as a teeter totter that has been slammed to the ground on the side of individualism and is now completely stuck...with our communities dangling mid-air and too many squashed beneath the side on the ground.

It is such a delicate balance, as theorists and theologians far more profound than I, have explored -- between the I and the Thou, the individual and her culture.

The founders sought to balance the rights of the individual with the responsibilities of the citizen in both our Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

The "finger on the scale" that slams the balance down on the side of individualism is that too often we give up citizenship (along with the basic principles of christianity and other religions) for the sake of consumerism.

For the privilege and convenience of getting what we want, whenever we want it.

For pushing ourselves to the front of the bread line even when we are not in need of sustenance.

For always saying "I" comes first and others second.

Our communities are only as strong as we who come together to meet our common needs -- and especially those of the most vulnerable amongst us.

American culture, despite its alleged grounding in christianity, abhors systems thinking. To admit that we have built systems that oppress others (see: slavery; see: sexism) and shape our culture to this day is to break the cult of "American exceptionalism."

If we failed to see this throughout the five assassinations that broke progressive momentum for civil rights and wages for all in the 1960's, then perhaps we will remember that legacy in light of today's political violence.

The politically motivated shooting of public servants -- and the superfluous access to weapons that make it possible -- shows again the U.S. in its most damning light.

We are not exceptional -- especially as long as individual rights are privileged over the common good.

In order to re-balance our teeter totter, all of us that have slid toward the ground side of individual consumerism need to shift our positions.

We'll all need to give something up to achieve a better balance, one that teeters more toward the common than the individual good.

#newblogpost

Pride, Sanctuary, and Why Allies Matter

 

The hand blown rainbow glass gifted
to me by my English teacher upon
my high school graduation.

June Pride. 

This year, we not only remember but activate the true meaning of Pride -- a riotous and righteous fight for our lives as well as a celebration of who we are.

Why does Pride have more relevance and hopefully more impact this year?

Just as in the '60's, when the Stonewall riot launched our marches for equity, and the '80's, when we lived under another repressive Republican regime that attempted to silence us in our fight against a lethal pandemic -- we are fighting for our lives. 

Very simply: fighting for our right to be named, addressed, and respected for who we are, to have sex with whom we wish, and to receive the services and health care to which others have access.

If you already have these rights then this may not resonate with you. You may wonder: what's to fight for? We ask for your empathy, compassion and, most importantly, your solidarity.

I was lucky to receive and feel these actions -- empathy, compassion, solidarity -- from someone as a very young person a very long time ago.

The first adult to whom I came out, in 1976 when I was 15, was my high school English teacher.

She saw my queerness, my loneliness, my distress.

Not because she herself was queer. But because she saw me and my need for support.

There was no one in my hometown whom I knew that could guide me on this path: what would it mean for my future to be queer? to not marry a man? to not have children?

The options to a 15 year-old in 1976 were unimaginable.

The homophobia, particularly in girls sports where we demonstrated our strength and independence, was ferocious.

But like all great teachers: she saw me and went beyond the call of duty, inviting me into her home.

She listened. With curiosity and without judgement.

She provided sanctuary.

A place of refuge and safety. A place I could be who I was without hiding, or fear of reprisals.

I can't make sense of living in a world in which it is illegal to provide sanctuary for those most in need. But here we are, with the current Republican administration punishing "sanctuary" cities for helping legal immigrants.

When I graduated from high school and was approaching the legal drinking age, my teacher gave me the hand-blown rainbow glass pictured above.

This glass is a sign of solidarity: it was the twin to the one she used every evening at her home, which she had opened to me, as she graded papers and watched TV.

I treasure and use this glass and carry it carefully with me to this day.

A reminder of how important solidarity, and sanctuary, are.

We will keep the fight. And hope many of you who do not directly experience the repressions of the current regime will join us.

Mystic Pizza, Sorrow, and Me

The young Julia Roberts as a Portuguese-American
"local" pool shark with her rich, preppy potential
beau in 1988's "Mystic Pizza."

What's a sorrow that's been a teacher to you in your life?

The poet and theologian Padraig O Tuama offered this question up for our Sunday morning reflection in his Poetry Unbound email this morning.

What's yours?

You may be surprised to know that mine tied into thoughts I was already mulling about the 1988 romantic comedy, Mystic Pizza.

Yes, that Mystic Pizza. The one with the young Julia Roberts, an even younger (18-year-old) Matt Damon making his film debut, Annabeth Gish, Lili Taylor, and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Mystic Pizza is set in the town in which I grew up: Mystic, CT, a village that is part of the town of Stonington, where much of the movie was filmed.

The sorrow that has been a teacher to me in my life is the sorrow of feeling I had to leave home and family behind to become myself.

I graduated from Stonington High School in 1979. In those days, Stonington, although midway between New York City and Boston on Long Island Sound, was still a lobster fishing village characterized by a large fishing population of Portuguese immigrants.

Thus the characters, and divides, depicted in Mystic Pizza.

Mystic is a lovely, gentle, salt-marshy, watery world. Now like so many beautiful waterfront places over-populated by people with too much wealth.

In Mystic/Stonington in the 1970's as throughout the U.S., the world was changing. Nixon had resigned; we waited in line on alternate days to buy gas for our giant cars; the last helicopter had left too many stranded on the roof of the embassy in Saigon. In the wake of Martin Luther King's racial justice movement and the anti-war movement, feminism and gay rights were ascendant but far from triumphant.

I was 15, and gay, the year of America's Bicentennial (1976). The world depicted in Mystic Pizza was pretty much my world growing up.

A marina rat, I loved being on or in the salt water. While the film would have you believe lobster fishing boats were leaving from the Mystic River, the reality is that the Portuguese fishing population lived primarily in Pawcatuck, the last town on the CT coast before Rhode Island, and Stonington, and fished out of the Borough, home also to the Holy Ghost Society of 1914. The Feast of the Holy Ghost continues in Stonington every August and in Portuguese communities around the world to this day, following the Blessing of the Fleet in July.

The Portuguese community in Stonington dates back to around 1840. Southeastern CT -- New London, Noank, Mystic, Stonington -- was a whaling coast, a history faithfully preserved by and at the Mystic Seaport, site of my first volunteer work. Whalers from the Azores who had been contracted onto Stonington-based vessels returned with the ships to their home port and began new lives. As is the nature of immigration routes, over the next 100 years thousands of other Azoreans followed. St. Mary's Catholic Church was built in 1851; St. Patrick's in Mystic, our parish, in 1870.

Like the feisty female characters in Mystic Pizza who sling a mean pie and shit-talk the too-many-already tourists, I grew up in an old-world, Catholic, very heterosexual culture where the class divides between the Portuguese fishing community and wealthy summer residents, between the college educated and working class folks like my parents, were glaring and deeply experienced.

There was no question in my queer girl, 1970's disco'ing aspiring feminist mind: I had to get out.

And truthfully my parents supported that as well. They were intent on my going to college: a privilege they had not had. And we had already busted up the family compound in Old Saybrook, where I grew up adjacent to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother, when my mother's sister and family relocated to the suburbs of northern New Jersey.

In Mystic Pizza, Daisy, Julia Roberts character, is on the hunt for a man and/or marriage that will get her out of Mystic. Her younger sister, Kat, has punched her departure ticket and is headed to Yale. The third, Jo Jo, faints at the marriage altar listening to the priest extoll the virtues of a lifetime commitment to her fisherman husband.

Best line of the movie, delivered by Jo from the Mystic drawbridge to boyfriend Bill (D'Onofrio) on his boat which he has re-christened NYMPHO to mock her sexual desire for him: "I don't have to marry an asshole. It's the '80s."

Wild applause from tourists gathered at drawbridge. A win for girls!

Somehow, with little help from my high school graduate parents, I get myself into Bowdoin College in Maine -- until very shortly before my arrival an all-male school. Heaven help the working class lesbian.

What neither my parents nor I (nor the girls in Mystic Pizza, I suspect) knew is that upward mobility, and the education that facilitates it, can be a trap -- creating chasms of experience between parents and children that are very difficult to cross.

I never again really went home. I figured that was true of my high school classmates who went to college, too, until I finally attended a high school reunion (my 25th) and found they had pretty much all moved back.

I never again felt close to my beloved family -- who had adopted me and given me an unbelievably stable childhood -- until it was too late to share the appropriate love and gratitude with my parents.

Mae and Evert, happy together, 
circa 1986 in Mystic, CT.
Family portrait with me and David
in the background by
Kathryn Kirk.

This sorrow of estrangement and loss and homesickness has been a lesson for me regarding difference and love.

Who gives a damn if you speak the same language? read the same books? believe the same things? look the same? vote the same?

Well, too many of us.

What if we could stop trying to hurt and control each other with our different beliefs and actions?

What if our culture weren't so self-righteous, so much about being "right"?

As my grandmother Mary used to say when I had done something particularly heinous to my brother: "The girl is good."

We are all good, even when we hurt each other.

The trick is how to look past the righteousness and the hurt and specific actions to see and to forgive the persons -- oneself and each other.

This is the complex and challenging lesson this particular sorrow, and Mystic Pizza, have taught me.

My Grandmother's Great Depression - and Ours

Mary Urban Endrich,
my mother's mother, in front of
their garage in Old Saybrook, CT

Economic recessions hit poor people the hardest. 

The Great Depression following the market crash in 1929 lasted a full decade, ending only in 1939 with the advent of World War II and the "boom" provided by a wartime economy of military production.

It turned many peoples lives upside down forever -- including my grandparents' and parents'. 

Never again did we live in fear of not having enough food.

Never again did any of us live without fear that this could happen again.

Hunger gets into your bones.

The wealthy remain insulated. No matter how hard the market crashes, the robber barons have always survived -- and in fact generally get richer.

The stock market, in which today many keep their retirement savings, went from a record high earlier this year to a 10% loss these past three weeks, losing approximately $5 trillion in value.

It would be nice to think these numbers are abstract, or, if you don't have any savings, disconnected from your health and well being.

However, when markets contract severely, as they are currently doing, it also means jobs and wages contract.

Mary's house, in which both my mother
and I grew up, on the Middletown Road
in Old Saybrook, CT

At its peak in 1933, 25% of the U.S. workforce, or approximately 12.83 million people, were unemployed.

Millions of people lost their homes and hit the road, seeking food and shelter.

My mother's parents, Mary and Richard, were able to hold onto their home and my grandmother's generosity was legendary.

They were lucky my grandfather had bought the property more than 10 years earlier. On it, Mary managed a "family farm" of one cow, chickens, and a large truck garden on the town line between Essex and Old Saybrook, CT.

Born to Bohemian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Mary had grown up on the farm to which they had escaped in Killingworth, CT.  She could grow anything, cook anything, and would feed anyone who came to her door.

Mary Urban, center, with her 
father, butcher and farmer Frantisek
behind her plus unknown relatives.

The "hobos," as my mother and aunt called them -- the unhoused and unemployed who took to the rails and roads -- marked an X on the road in front of my grandmother's house to communicate to their fellow travelers that this was a place at which they might find food.

Mostly doughnuts fried in lard!

Despite their safety and relative privilege, the looming sense of disaster never departed our household.

Mary's great depression -- she was also probably bipolar, and I grew up in the drama of that -- has now become my own.

The economic news has given me nightmares of starving as an old woman with no supports.

While I know this is my family legacy, born of the 20th century's Great Depression, of fearing there will be food shortages and never enough I am truly lucky to have never -- until now -- worried about this in my lifetime.

My generation has been blessed with relative peace and prosperity.

It is not that there is not always horror happening around us: we are flawed humans, some of whom still try to live in god's image and many of whom don't. 

Many in the U.S. worship only the golden calf, as it were.

I find it unutterably sad to be living inside a national culture with few values left. One that has sold our soul for material accumulation.

It makes me miss my grandmother's booming voice and laugh, her largesse with whatever she had, her love for family and pride in her new land.

My aunt Evelyn, grandmother Mary,
me the littlest, cousin Cindy in my
grandmother's garden between her house
and ours.

Her cultivation. Of zinnias, corn, yellow squash -- and me.

And for those of us who still value the gift of this creation we've been given, we do our best to give to the land, to cultivate it. To give of ourselves to others.

We might still, ultimately, starve from the greed and machinations of the wealthy.

The roots of the U.S. are in the genocide of the native cultures that cultivated this continent before the founders' arrivals; in the enslavement of Africans to build wealth from the stolen land; in the ongoing callousness with which workers and their family are excluded and mistreated by those with wealth and privilege -- all the things the practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion were created to heal.

But we will have our doughnuts. And our souls.

The Triumph of Mechanism Over Grace: How Do We Respond?

A new, feminist production of a classic
at American Repertory Theater

Can we break our historic cycles of violence against each other?

If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?

Can you ever go back home?

This is the essential question behind the new version of "The Odyssey" by Kate Hamill at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, which I saw last weekend.

I'm wondering if people even read "The Odyssey" in school anymore. Did you read it?

Fantastic new translation.

The epic poem by Homer is memorable for the "adventures" -- the mythical creatures and challenges -- Odysseus has to face to finally make his way back to his home, wife, and son in Ithaca -- 10 years after the 10-year-long Trojan War.

Odysseus: a Greek hero famed for his intellect and craftiness. The devisor of the Trojan horse by which the Greeks finally won the Trojan War, and which today stands as a metaphor of trickery.

Having used the hollow wooden horse to sack Troy, ending the war, Odysseus still had some criminal decisions to make prior to setting his black ships to sail toward home.

Such as what to do with Trojan hero Hector's wife, Andromache -- whose name itself means "fighter of men" -- and tiny infant son.

Allegedly in an attempt to stop the cycles of violence, Odysseus -- in various versions of the story -- hurls the infant from the battlements of Troy, or has him killed. The son can then no longer seek revenge for the death of his father. Odysseus faces the same ethical challenge when he returns to Ithaca to find -- not surprisingly, given his 20 year absence -- his wife surrounded by young suitors.

All of whom he murders.

"The Illiad" was always my favorite of these two epics. Homer wrote "The Illiad" as an anti-war poem, never glorifying the violence of the Trojan War but consistently depicting its horrors. 

But the truth of my passion for the poem is the homosexual love story between the hero Achilles and his Patroclus at the poem's center.

There was not much in the class literature of my school years that reflected my experience as a butch lesbian.

Achilles and Patroclus were what I had.

And now I have these essential questions.

If you’ve gone through something traumatic, can you ever go back to who you were?

Can you ever go back home?

I was never able to go back home once I left.

Sound board and stage at ART's new production
of Homer's "The Odyssey"

How do we discover grace in ourselves? As the eminent mid-century Jewish philosopher Simone Weil defined it, grace being anything that "leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence."

My trauma was not physical violence, but that of being a young lesbian in a homophobic family and world.

I went away to college, moved into the more affirming world of feminism and gay rights, and never went back. It took decades for me to reconcile with my family.

Interestingly, my viewing of this new feminist version of "The Odyssey," which centers Penolope's experience, coincided with the appearance in the liturgical cycle of what is arguably Luke's most famous gospel: 6: 27-38, or, simplified as it so often is, the gospel of the "golden rule" -- do unto others.

I sat in the pew last week wondering how other U.S. christians are reconciling this gospel with the actions of the Republican administration as they eliminate jobs and humanitarian programs that save people's lives around the world in the name of "government efficiencies."

This term should send chills down all of our spines.

"Government efficiencies" are what dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini pursued. Making the trains run on time. Getting people into camps. 

Eliminating people. Or their livelihoods. Because they are not people to them. Their hatred has turned whole groups of people into things. Avatars in some imagined online gaming system.

And this, as Hannah Arendt noted and repeatedly warned against, is the essence of totalitarianism: reducing living beings to things in order to commit violence against them.

It is happening around us now.

I recently read a post by a white supremacist who repeatedly dehumanized a black woman reporter right here in Portland, Maine.

We're all watching while action after action, word after word, dehumanizes transexual people.

All the while, a large group of our fellow citizens are chortling happily about "government efficiencies" that are mowing down civil rights and other programs.

Who wouldn't like to see government operate as cost-effectively as possible?

But when, as my father used to say, the "almighty dollar" becomes more important to you than treating other human beings as you yourself want to be treated -- then you are no longer a christian.

Many would argue that you yourself are no longer human.

That only monsters care more about money than about those in need.

Luke's gospel is not only about turning the other cheek.

In it, Jesus requires us to actually DO GOOD to those who hate us.

"Give to everyone who asks you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back."

Pray for those who mistreat us.

"For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them."

This is how we end the cycles of violence with which we are afflicted. This is a gospel that stands as an affront to the "prosperity gospel" of contemporary U.S. evangelical christianity -- and to the actions of the current President of the United States.

Woe to those who seek to make a business deal from others' suffering.

As Ukrainian's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted, after being loudly and publicly berated by the U.S. President for defending his country from the totalitarian attack of Russia -- only woe will follow.

Ultimately, our compassion for these perpetrators must acknowledge that they are not well.

They are ill, acting out of character with our world, and spreading their illness.

We need a vaccine against their greed and hatred!

#newblogpost

Sources:

"How America Got Mean," David Brooks, The Atlantic, August 2023.

"Homer's History of Violence," Rowan Williams, The New Statesman, September 2023.