A Day of Dilemmas (excerpt)

The following is adapted from a much longer posting on one of my personal blogs, Outpost Mâvarin:

I had an interesting day on Sunday. It was full of friendship, crises, mild stress, and more ethical choices than I normally run into in a week. Let me tell you about it.

Act One: Church

Before church this morning I rushed into my office and, while checking my email, quickly scanned a sermon by Father Douglas. I've had the thing for four weeks, but hadn't yet turned the hard copy into an electronic one. So I put it on my scanner it this morning, in the hope that later I would be able to save the file both as a jpg or something and as a Word file. I needed to do both, because when I do OCR (Optical Character Recognition - cheap software trying to "read" the words), the poor thing gets confused by handwritten edits. I have to type what it's supposed to be, and clean it all up in Word when the OCR is done.

So anyway, I had this old sermon I was rushing to get into the computer, because I was afraid Father Douglas would be there and want his sermon back. I should have done the scanning and clean-up before, but I'd put it off, first because of a dead phone line in my office, which resulted in my computer and my scanner being in different rooms; and later because, well, it's a lot of work, and I was busy! By Sunday morning, I didn't have time to do the OCR and corrections. But I did what I could, stuffed the sermon in my purse, and went to church.

It turned out that Father Douglas will be back next week. So I have more time to do this right. Whew!

See, I was already feeling guilty, because I've been a slacker on the church web site lately. I think I didn't get the first half of last week's announcements typed and uploaded until Wednesday, and the second half until Thursday. I still hadn't gotten the Advent Bazaar flyer posted. Bad Karen. No biscuit!

But when I got to church, did anyone complain? They did not. Two different people told me that because of my notice about making egg sandwiches for the Casa Maria soup kitchen, three people who Googled Casa Maria saw that announcement, and drove all the way from nearby Vail, AZ to help make sandwiches on Friday. Good thing that notice was in the Wednesday batch. Had it been in the Thursday announcements, it might not have hit Google in time.

So I got away with those two things for now, but I need to do better.

Then came the real moral dilemmas of the morning.

1. At the end of Mass, the Sunday School kids came up and sang two verses of O Come O Come Emmanuel. They were so cute! They sang very well, too.

Father John wanted me to take pictures of them, so I obliged. But I was also mindful of Internet security guidelines that I read a few months ago, that one shouldn't post pictures of other people's kids without parental permission, especially if you identify a place where predators can find them, such as at a particular school. Or St. Michael's, I suppose.

So, since I was serving as Mass anyway, and was therefore sitting behind the kids, I took pictures of them from behind. The photo has no identifying features for anyone to use to get to these children. Did I do the right thing? Should I post this picture? I'm not sure, but here it is.

2. About a month ago, two 23-year-old volunteers for a humanitarian group called No More Deaths were arrested by the Border Patrol for driving sick, dehydrated illegal border crossers to a Tucson hospital, on a doctor's advice. No More Deaths provides water and first aid to try to reduce the horrendous, ever-growing number of deaths in the Arizona desert each year, often in cooperation with the Border Patrol. But this time, two people were brought up on federal charges, and could go to prison for 15 years.

The pro bono lawyer for this group was at our church on Sunday, at all three masses. I heard her speak at two of them. The stand the group is making is that it should never be illegal to give humanitarian aid, to provide succor to suffering people in an attempt to prevent needless death. Now understand, these border crossers would have been deported after their hospital stay anyway. Nobody from No More Deaths was trying to smuggle anyone. They were just trying to save lives.

So anyway, the lawyer handed out lawn signs after church. I ageed to take one, but I didn't promise to put it on my lawn, saying only that I would talk to my husband about it. (John's stance is that he wants to know more about the specific situation from an unbiased source, before putting up the sign). But to be honest, I'm a little afraid to display the sign on our lawn. I agree with it, absolutely, but the border problem is a very divisive issue around here, with a lot of kneejerk sentiment and thinly-veiled prejudice. If I display this thing, will a neighbor take it away? Will I be harrassed? Or will nothing happen at all?

I'm such a coward sometimes. I hate confrontations and ill-will. I have no problem at all writing about this online, because I can explain the situation. I've even written about this problem before. But a lawn sign has to be its own explanation. Do I trust it to be up to the task, in a neighborhood where I don't know my neighbors?

There's got to be some irony in there, somewhere.

Karen

*Whimper*

No pictures tonight. I'm not in the mood.

Call me thin-skinned. Call me oversensitive. I'll even agree with you. This is a fault I've worked to overcome over the years, but I've never entirely succeeded. For example, I always get upset when a conservative Christian pops up out of nowhere to attack something I wrote online. Usually the comment is anonymous, so I can't even respond directly. Instead I look the comment over, and consider again whether the criticism has merit. I second-guess myself. I feel guilty for any deficiencies I think I see in my own writing, beliefs, or character. I get upset and frustrated for not having communicated effectively enough to be understood, to win the person over.

But really, it usually comes down to one thing. What parts of the concepts of compassion and tolerance don't these people understand? I'm not talking about all Christian conservatives, mind you, but occasionally I get a comment like this one, that basically takes me to task for loving my neighbor.

This St. Michael's Arts blog is ancillary to the main church (news) blog, started so that parishioners can contribute photos, essays, prayers, poetry, art--well, pretty much anything, as long as it is compatible with the fact that it's a church's blog. But nobody sends me (or the church) anything for it, so rather than leave it completely neglected, I occasionally post something on it, usually adapted from something in my personal blog, Musings from Mâvarin.

Tonight, someone left a comment to this blog. (Actually, it's the second one this week. The first was commercial comment spam.) It was posted to an entry of pictures and a tiny bit of text provided by Ila Abernathy, about her annual trip to Guatemala to help displaced Maya in remote villages with medical supplies and training. That happened to be the oldest entry on the face of the blog at when the comment was posted. The newest entry at the time, the one this anonymous person was talking about in the misdirected comment, was my rant from June about how poorly a Wiccan friend of mine is treated by doctors, social workers,etc. because of her affiliation with a fringe religion. The commenter felt that I --and St. Michael's generally--was betraying God by advocating compassion and tolerance toward this friend.

But for me, the story of the Good Samaritan, the edict to love one's enemies, and any number of other passages from the New Testament, demand no less. The idea that you can and should be mean to someone, discriminate, condemn, maybe even beat up or kill that person, all because he or she is not one of Us, not a Christian/ Muslim/ Jew/ Democrat/ Republican/ American/ Whatever, is exactly the sort of thing that leads to suicide bombings, the Holocaust, and really, most of the evil in the world. Not that the commenter was advocating anything of the sort, but clearly, my plea for tolerance was being condemned. So what is the person advocating, if not intolerance? The difference between that and those other horrors is one of degree, not one of concept. A person can be wrong about something, terribly wrong, but that doesn't give us the right or the responsibility to treat that person with hostility.

So as I said, it's appropriate for me to disagree with my friend's religion, but it's not appropriate for her pain doctor to refuse to see her, or someone to label her a troublemaker and deny her services, solely on the basis of religion. And really, how does preaching at her, shunning and mistreating her, and implying that anyone who defends her is betraying God...how does any of that follow Jesus's teachings and examples, or convince D/S to become a Christian again? How does the song go? They'll know we are Christians by our hate? Of course I want her to find her way back to Christianity eventually, but this is no way to accomplish that.

Maybe I'm being harsh here. Maybe it's a mutual misunderstanding between me and Mr. or Ms. Anonymous. Maybe I made this person feel attacked, and this was the response.

But either way, I'm feeling all hurt and insecure here. I want to go in a corner and whimper. You don't like me! You think I'm bad! And in this case, I was already feeling a little guilty. I wanted to post something early in the week about the losses St. Michael's has recently suffered, the deaths of Janet Womble and Sherwood "Woody" Bowker. I wanted to say that in the midst of death we are in life. Ila is back from Guatemala, school is starting at St. Michael's, and the choir will soon be singing for us again. Life goes on, and no doubt in the coming months we will have new arrivals, baptisms, renewal. But I got busy with work and other parts of my life, and didn't post in time to give you a heads-up for Janet Womble's funeral on Wednesday. Woody's Mass and reception is on Saturday, August 28th at 8AM. So even before I saw this comment, I was feeling guilty about my recent performance as Webmaster. I could have, should have done more, posting at least an announcement to the news blog if nothing else.

But the comment was not about that kind of shortcoming. It struck at the heart of what I believe as a Christian. And have you ever noticed that saying you will pray for someone can sometimes be a passive-aggressive attack on a person with whom you disagree? The implication is that I'm on the fast track to Hell, and only your prayers can turn me around, so that I will agree with you and go to Heaven after all. Yes, sure, go ahead and pray for me, and for my friend. I pray each night for everyone everywhere, no exceptions. I pray that we will all come to know that God is real, that God cares, that we will all understand better what God wants fromeach of us, and for help to get through the difficult times in each of our lives. I pray that we will learn to live up to our potential, using our talents well. I pray that we will learn to truly love and help one another, not just our particular insular groups but everyone. But don't tell me you're praying that I will see the error of my wicked ways. I'm far from perfect, but I'm not all that wicked. Your prayers will neither keep me from Hell nor send me there.

One of the commenter's criticisms was the claim that I had posted an "evil symbol" on a church blog. This confused me at first. I looked at the entry where the comment was posted, and saw pictures of Guatemalans, and a picture tha a child in Guatemala drew. Was this person seeing something in the drawing that wasn't there? But no, I later noticed that I had a right-side-up pentagram in the entry about my friend, mostly because I didn't have any other illustrations for it. This symbol is not Satanic, but perhaps I should not have put it on the church blog, even as an illustration of the beliefs of others.

Understand: I am not a minister, priest or deacon. My only formal course in religion was nearly thirty years ago at Syracuse University. I've read much of the Bible but not all of it, and I've read some modern translations of rejected (non-canonical) scriptures and other modern scholarship. I am the church webmaster, and I help out at Mass in minor ways, mostly as crucifer and lector. But I don't speak for the church, except to post announcements, mostly written by others. The opinions I post on the Arts blog are my own unless otherwise marked. They're intended to be one person's opinions and spiritual journeys, to be interspersed with the contributions of others. Unfortunately, others don't contribute.

So what should I do? Should I let this comment spook me, again? Should I stop posting to the Arts blog until I find others to contribute, so it's not all me, assuming an authority I don't have or want?

Or should I still express my opinion from time to time, and hope that most people will see Christian values in my words, instead of anti-Christian ones?

Karen

P.S. Obviously I took the advice of readers, and posted a version of this entry, originally written for Musings, to the SMAAARTS blog. This probably pushes the entry with the comment off the front page, but it's still there to be seen in the Archives. I also emailed Father Smith, who was also attacked in the original comment, asking for his input. And I received a lovely, loving email today from a self-identified conservative Christian and fundamentalist, saying that I was right to love others, to keep my chin up. Thank you, and God bless you all--whether you agree with me or not.

Ubi Caritas Et Amor - Or Lack Thereof

Run for the hills, because Karen is going to talk about religion again.

I always get nervous about entries like this one. Some so-called Christians will probably be angry, if they ever read this; and non-Christians who come across the similar entry on my personal blog will probably skip it. I may even get a hateful comment or two--it wouldn't be the first time. Still, I'd prefer that you stick around. It may not be quite the sermon you expect.

I had lunch yesterday with a friend I've known for fifteen years. This friend has numerous problems--multiple physical and mental illnesses, family and money problems. She also happens to be Wiccan.

Now, I'm not a big fan of Wicca, especially as practiced by 21st century Americans. In my extremely limited experience, it seemed silly and fake, more like a self-conscious fantasy role playing game and snubbing of the prevailing culture than a deeply held set of beliefs. I could be totally wrong here, and probably am, but the only Wiccan ceremony I ever witnessed left me with that impression.

Still, D/S believes in it, probably more deeply than I would be inclined to credit from my one brief encounter with the religion. She does absolutely no harm thereby: does not curse or sacrifice or worship the devil, or partake in any other evil practices of which witches have been falsely accused over the centuries. Wiccan, as I understand it, is predicated on a respect for life, human and otherwise. She commits no crimes or atrocities, and is therefore entitled to her consitutional right to freedom of religion. It is appropriate, perhaps, to briefly express gentle disagreement with her, but she should not be subjected to discriminatory treatment, harrassment, hatred, or neglect because of her beliefs.

Nevertheless, as she moves through the patchwork system of government social services and government-sponsored health and rehab programs, my friend frequently encounters all of the above. She is labeled a troublemaker and treated with hostility by people in authority, or expected to change her ways if she wants to be helped. "They wanted me to move to a facility that has three hours of Bible study every night," she told me. A former Christian, my friend is already familiar with the Bible, but that's not the point. The implication is that she would receive nightly pressure to recant and change her mind about religion, as a condition for receiving government-sponsored treatment. Sorry, but that's just plain wrong, on several counts. It's unconstitutional, it's unfair, and it's unChristian.

Equally wrong is the treatment she gets from her pain doctor--or rather, lack of treatment. Having seen a "Goddess Bless" sticker on my friend's mobility scooter, the doctor immediately expressed his disapproval. My friend has since been told by the doctor's staff that she never will be allowed to see him again, and will only deal with the nurse practitioner instead. Aside from the insult, and possible violation of the Hippocratic oath, the treatment itself is inadequate. My friend's pain medication was changed to a famously addictive drug that's "as cheap as dirt," as a result of which she recently spent time in the hospital with withdrawal symptoms.

Not right. Not fair. Not Christian.

I just posted Father Smith's sermon from earlier today on the St. Michael's sermons page. Two brief quotes are appropriate here:

In this age it is not enough to throw biblical statements to the outsider. For God’s words remain empty until they are lived. But when the word is demonstrated in our lives, relationships, lifestyles and loves, it becomes "alive and active," manifesting the living Christ in the world so that the unbelievers or the enemy themselves are forced to ask: where do those Christians get this love and this peace?

But it's never an easy peace. Jesus goes on to say to His disciples, "I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter in law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household." In Jesus’ time, Semitic peoples had a striking way of expressing the love they felt for different people. Instead of saying, "I love you more than I love him," they would say, "I love you and hate him." This was their way of expressing preference in relationships, and did not mean the second person was hated. So when Jesus said these words it was not meant that we should hate our families but, that our love for Him should come as a priority. Some of you live this reality: a family member doesn't believe in Jesus, but you love them and would do anything for them, but your belief in Jesus Christ and knowing Him as Lord and Savior is a priority. You still love them and help them, but you won't follow their beliefs.

This sermon follows on a recent Gospel reading at St. Michael's, in which Jesus eats with tax collectors, 1st century pariahs who were considered sinners and collaborators. In a choice between the self-righteous or the sinners, the rich and powerful or the humble laborers, Jesus always chose to hang out with the lowly ones: the pariahs, the fishermen, the tax collectors and the lepers.

My friend is as close to being a metaphorical leper as you'll find in the modern world. She has no husband, no money, and lots of illnesses. Her own son seldom consents to see her, although he lives nearby. She is terribly lonely. My friend is fat because of her disabilities, and a vegetarian in a McDonald's world. She wants to work, but even self-employment seems to be beyond her at this point. She furnishes her small apartment mostly out of dumpsters. To top it off, she's an adherent to a minority religion that is little tolerated and less understood. And yet she is intelligent and generous and kind, with a keen sense of justice.

So how would Jesus treat a woman like that? Certainly not with disdain and hostility and neglect! He would bring her love and peace and healing. This is what we should also try to do.

But contrast this with the text of a banner I saw last night on a website that a Jewish friend of mine considered absurd enough to be funny. The web page was primarily about Noah's sons riding dinosaurs. Frankly, I was too angered by the page's header to be amused by the pseudoscience:

WHERE THE WORTHWHILE WORSHIP. *UNSAVED ARE NOT WELCOME (AS JESUS COMMANDED)*

I totally missed the fact that the page was satirical, no more in earnest than The Onion. The words on this banner are more blatant than most of what one sees from the religious right, but I found it all too plausible. Churches all over the country struggle with issues of tolerance, and all too many come down on the side of exclusion. I'm thinking particularly of the gay issue here, but it also extends to the denial of communion to politicians who don't want to pass secular laws to enforce church doctrine. Admittedly, there's a serious issue of morality involved here, but it seems short-sighted to place that single issue above all others, especially since reasonable people disagree on the subject. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, birth control or abortion, but that's all some people seem to care about, not the "love your enemies" stuff that Jesus did talk about.

Some groups of Christians routinely declare that other Christians aren't really Christian at all, because they don't pass some sectarian litmus test. Come to think of it, I suppose I'm doing that myself here. It's not that I think that the most homophobic, intolerant Christian conservatives don't believe in Christ. It's just that they have a twisted way of showing it, informed more by Us and Them mentality than by the Beatitudes.

It galls and astonishes me that after all these centuries and all we've learned, after crusades and pograms, burnings and persecutions and an Inquisition, people still use Jesus to promote hatred and discrimination instead of love and peace. My friend will never be inspired to return to a religion that's supposedly about love and peace, when its practitioners primarily exhibit the opposite qualities in dealing with her.

Father Smith's sermon today pointed to a much better approach, and St. Michael's sets a much better example. This church and its parishioners feed the homeless, help the sick, and welcome refugees and the marginalized. Despite the current strife over the gay clergy issue, the graphics provided by the Episcopal Church USA send a better message than those who hate others in the name of Jesus. They tell us we are welcome. We are here for each other. We are one.

When religion and hatred and intolerance go hand in hand, neither God nor humankind benefits thereby. Instead there is evil and malice. This is true whether the religion in question is Islam, some form of Christianity, or anything else.

If, on the other hand, a person practices peace and love and tolerance, helps others and does not judge them harshly, that person is following Jesus's example. This is true whether the person believes in Jesus or not. These principles are universal ones, taught by many religions as well as secular ethicists. The Ten Commandments are not a Christian invention, although certain presentations of them may be. Even the numbering of them varies by denomination. But the basic principles of honesty, kindness, and fairness are acknowledged the world over in one form or another.

Myself, I'd rather eat lunch with a kindhearted Wiccan, or Jew, or atheist, than someone who claims to love Christ and yet treats non-Christians (or gays, or any other category of "Them") with hostility and disdain.

And so, I think, would Jesus.

Karen

Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est. - "Where charity and love are, there is God."

Beyond the Door: A Peek at the Antiphonal Division

Note: I originally wrote this as part of a photo challenge on my personal blog. If it has a few odd references to "mysterious doorways," that's because that was the theme of the challenge. . - Karen

Mysterious Doors

The doors I seem to pass most often without ever going in are all at St. Michael's. This one, for example, the one to the Bride's Room, is mysterious in a couple of ways. What's inside that a bride needs before a wedding? Why is there no "groom's room?" More important, going through that door means that one is about to embark on the much greater mystery of married life itself.

I've never been through that door. There could be anything in there. But I imagine that it's basically a dressing room. There was nothing like that at St. Patrick's in Syracuse when I married John--not that I recall, anyway.

But for me the main mystery door at St. Michael's is just to the right of the main ones that lead into the church itself. It's usually locked and barred, but not on Sunday mornings. Just as Mass begins, Proscovia or someone else opens it and pulls on one of the two ropes inside, setting off the (probably electric) church bells. I always wondered whether there was a real bell pull, or just a button to push. And was the space beyond the door just a closet-sized chamber with the bell controls in it, or something more? It didn't look as if there could be room for more than the bell mechanism, whatever it might be, and maybe a broom or something. Oh, and a fire extinguisher. The red and white sticker in the window says, "Fire exinguisher inside." I don't know how you'd get to that fire extinguisher in a hurry, except when the door is unlocked for Mass. That makes sense, though, because that's when acolytes and deacons and priests are lighting matches, carrying candles and burning incense.

Well, on Sunday, May 22nd, totally by accident, I found out what else was beyond that mysterious door. And it was much more than I could have imagined.

It happened like this. That afternoon, a nationally-recognized organist named Todd Wilson was going to play a concert on the church's Æolian-Skinner pipe organ. This pipe organ rededication performance was to celebrate the fact that the antiphonal section of the organ (the part in the back loft of the church) had been installed by the organ builder and is now operational. I'd been seeing those shiny copper-colored pipes for months, and had tried repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) to get a good picture of them. It's hard to get a good angle on the "choir loft" (except that the choir never goes up there, as far as I know!) from ground level in the rather dark church.

Anyway, I was pretty sure that I couldn't make the concert, but I wanted to get a picture of Todd Wilson for the church web site. So I left coffee hour and Eva's gingerbread and went back into the church. Wilson was warming up with a truly glorious and complex piece that reminded me of a (much simpler) Christmas song I sang in choir many years ago.

I waited a few feet away in an empty pew of the almost empty church until he finished playing. As he played, another man was walking around, checking the openings to the main banks of organ pipes, adjusting doors and the evaporative cooler to control heat and humidity--in short, tweaking. This was the organ builder, Grahame Davis. He's important to the rest of this story, and deserves recognition for his work.

When Mr. Wilson finished his organ solo, I introduced myself as the church webmaster and asked to take a photo of him for the church blog. He recognized me from Mass (I got to read Genesis, Chapter One on Sunday) and graciously posed for me. He's a very nice man, and clearly very talented and dedicated to his craft.

As we chatted about the organ, I mentioned that I'd been trying unsuccessfully to get a good picture of the pipes in the loft. Wilson immediately suggested that I go up and get a closer look at them! Grahame Davis agreed, and immediately took me off on a private tour. And guess how that tour started? Yup: he led me through the mysterious door to the right of the church entrance!



Antiphonal!

From there we went up narrow wooden steps to the loft where the new Antiphonal division of the organ was installed. From the back of the loft, there's not much to see, at least under normal circumstances. Most of the pipes are housed in a big wooden box structure. The builder explained that this was to help mute the powerful pipes within, so that they can be played softly and still have the proper tone and pitch. When the organist (usually Jane Haman) wants to play them more loudly, foot pedals can be used to open wooden flaps behind and between the pipes, letting more of the sound out. Grahame Davis opened a couple of doors, one in the back and one on the side, and I took a bunch of pictures of this hidden treasure.



When I came around to the front of the pretty copper ones, I got to hear at least one of them, up close and personal!



The last of the interior pictures is of the upper door to the loft, and the completely unimpressive room beyond it. If you didn't pay attention to that long duct-like pipe thing on the floor, and the giant wooden box thing on the right, you wouldn't know there was anything special here.



I didn't take a picture of the tiny room where the bell pulls are. I forgot / didn't have time. Besides, we should preserve a few mysteries!

Now, the main reason I never knew that door went up to the loft was that I always assumed that this other external door was the way up to the choir loft (except that the choir never goes up to the loft). This door is on a balcony above the main double doors. I don't know how you would even get up to this door to go through it. Perhaps a ladder? And if you do, I'm still not sure what you'd find on the other side. I didn't see that door from inside the loft. Maybe it's where the bells are. Or maybe I just didn't notice it. Either way, the mystery of the upper door remains unresolved. I could ask Father Smith or Alicia, but where's the fun in that?

Karen

Just some pictures

Here are some previously unposted pictures (I think!). I'll try to write something for this page soon.

Karen


An open-door policy.



Looking out



Sacristy



Father John Hooker



Choir rehearsal