Maundy Thursday

"My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come." John 13:33

OK, so yes, I just put a Bible verse in here. But it's a really good one, this story in the Book of John is really down to earth and beautiful, and I enjoyed thinking about it while working on the service for Holy Thursday.

I was very excited when I got asked to be on the committee to plan the service, and in the end it was a pretty standard production meeting, only instead of "aesthetically" we said "liturgically." This is a fun new adverb. Example sentence: "Liturgically, it makes sense to use mason jars."

The Maundy Thursday service was beautiful, not least because it was the first time for me to be in the sanctuary at Broad Street when the sun was up in the sky, and coming through the stained glass windows and shining on the hardscrabble floor, it was a picture of grace. 

We forewent the traditional foot washing for hand washing, allowing the divine awkwardness of ritual. The water was cold, our paint covered hands (from fingerpainting!) wouldn't get clean. There's a special transcendence in the giggling solemnity of ritual practiced. A certain number of required actions, like pouring water out from a pitcher, breaking bread, tilting a cup, and everything else, however graceless, is absorbed by the intention of the task. 

The water turned a brilliant, luminous purple, somehow, instead of brown. 

We read the words and sang the songs and ate the bread and dwelled on the story of Jesus' last meal with his sadsack bunch of friends, who were socially awkward and ridiculous and whom he loved anyway. It's good to live out old stories in real time, to stop and think. It's good to be strange and lost with other people, and it's good to have a reason to. 

Inventory

There is a thick tangled knot of muscle in my uppper back, on the right, by my shoulder blade, and it hurts all the time.

What am I doing, or how am I sitting that makes this happen?

A body is a terrible thing to have to keep track of. They are idiosyncratic and things are always weird. You never know if you're dying of something or that's just what they do. 

Holy Week, Batman!

Well, it’s holy week, six days to Easter Sunday and the snow is falling thick and fluffy outside the Green Line. My fingers remembered the feeling of palms to thread and make crosses and lanyards, but they couldn't remember the form, and I ended up stripping the green leaves to fringe last night at church.

Culture offers us, thankfully, so many restarts for false starts.  Rosh Hashanah, and if that doesn’t work out New Year’s Eve, and then ChunJie hot on its heels with the honey lipped kitchen god ready to absolve you of transgressions between January and February. Easter, too feels like a kind of New Year, and it brings spring or spring longings along.

It’s been a useful Lent, grey and thoughtful. It’s strange how the sacrifices of this season bring so much relief. No need to battle myself over a chocolate bar, it’s simply not allowed. When I think about applying the rules for all time, it doesn't seem possible, and it makes Lent feel precious in the power it brings. That’s what the lovely myths of faith do for me. As they carve the calendar into seasons, they makes the bites manageable.

Passover

Yitzahk Pearlman is now presenting a program called “A Passover Seder for the Ears” or some such, it’s an exploration of the seder meal through song and sound, and it’s on WNYC and gunning for some kind of supersaturated Jewish frenzy.

I’m sad not to be passing Passover this year, no seder to be invited to. I remember how precious the invitation to spend that night with Leigh and her family was, and is, as I’m sure the candles are burning and the bread is baking in her home even now, with savory dishes that make deference to vegans and a careful hagaddah that poses questions for gentiles, too.

Why is this night different from every other night? For me, because I’m savoring bread and jam in a Lenten way that I would never if candy were at hand. Because Lent has also taken the dull pleasures of TV and the internet away, and I am listening to the radio, feeling vulnerable about having nowhere to put my eyes.  Because I’m thinking of Leigh’s deep dimpled smile and the warmth of her home, and what it is to lose people for any kind of reason. How it’s never a clean slice and crumbs of them stay on you.

It’s how life breaks us, in a kaleidoscopic, smeary mess, away from each other and occasionally toward again, just like the years go, dragging pieces of the previous ones with them in memory and ritual. 

Memo

Dear Manarchist

You have been assigned to the listening committee until further notice.

Sincerely,

The Committee Committee

The Revolution Will Not Be

Dan had this friend who majored in “Revolutionary Studies” at NYU. When we asked how he would pay his loans, he assured us that the revolution would have come by then, and the debt would be erased.  This did not, has not, so far, occurred.

At Broad Street, the minister refers to what most Christians would call the apocalypse as “the revolution,” equating a world according to Christ’s vision with what the Revolutionary Studies major would have liked to see. Maybe the revolution is what Jesus will bring back. If he does, I hope I will have time to do some shows and make some sculptures before nation rises against nation and the seas turn to blood.

So in this pre-apocalyptic world, can it really, possibly be true that all of the creative energy and genius of these people I know belongs crammed up in our desperate weekend conversations, on the plane of what we plot and will never do? All this talent and excellent intellect is housed in bodies that we rent to the companies and schools where we wear those bodies down. Can this really be what’s going to happen, and the only thing that’s going to happen? It doesn't seem well.

I work with a guy called Gio, and this is the guy who was born to thrive in my dad’s world of hard work and reward, of entrepreneurship and integrity. He’s magic with students, with customers, and with us, he turns desperate situations around. He gets in with the sun and out with the midnight cleaning crew, and when something’s not fair sometimes he yells and sometimes he cries because he wants it to be fair.  This energy gets poured into meaningless paperwork and adherence to silly slogans, alphabets of acronyms. “Excellence.” 

That’s one of many people in my circle who work, give and care till they sob to nothing very worthwhile. We do it because we don’t know any other way to work. And we do it because we need health insurance. It’s our lives and they’re going and that’s one thing, but also…there’s just all this good energy lost.

The revolution has bummed/burned me out so bad in the past. It’s the domain, truly, of the prophets and of 22 year olds. But I wouldn't mind its coming if it meant Gio’s and my and all these people’s care could go somewhere. 

"Great Place"

There is a cool new initiative at my workplace called the “Great Place” initiative. Just kidding it is terrible, if the fact that we put “great place” in quotation marks did not tip you off.

The “Great Place” initiative comes in reaction to employees’ expressing that they feel our company is a “terrible place” to work, as its business model is to wear out devoted young idealists by paying them nothing and treating their full time job as a part time job with no benefits, then replace them with new devoted young idealists.  They expressed this by forming a union, which management does not think is cool, and so we now work in a “Great Place,” because I have receive d several mass emails telling me so.

But it’s not just these helpful emails that make things so “great.”

Also, we now no longer refer to the central office that makes company-wide decisions as “corporate.” We now call them “home team.” It’s so “great” that we are actually forbidden to say “corporate.”

Home team! That’s who we root root root for! We can work towards earning health benefits by teaching a certain number of hours a week, but we are restricted to teaching a number below that number, rendering earning said benefits mathematically impossible! Woo! Home team, you hit that one out of the park! Rah! Rah!

You sent some smooth talking asshole hippie to the school claiming to be there to hear our honest feelings about our “great place” who then actually reported everything we said and brought disciplinary action against the speakers through human resources! Just like the Hundred Flowers Campaign in Communist China! Hey batter-batter-batter! Swing batter!

You refuse to pay teachers for holidays and natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, even though students still pay for the classes on the days that schools are closed! Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks, I don’t care if I ever get out of crippling debt!!! Wooo!

OK, Home team. Bottom of the ninth. We are a school that takes in billions of dollars of foreign students' money, but are drastically understaffed. Bases loaded.  The windup…and! You cut the entire academics department, leaving only financial, marketing and human resources! FTW Home Team wins again!

What a game!

On My Fervent Desire to Integrate My Personal Goals with The Company’s Goals

I am daydreaming about visiting the corporate, about living among them and studying their ways. Their language is a derivative, a pidgin of our own English, so I feel I have a connection to them, as foreign as they are.

I would like to get some sort of Pew Grant for this work. Pew, if you are out there, call me.

Here is an awesome email I received today:

New to our goal setting process this year, we will be aligning our individual performance goals with how they support our broader organizational priorities.  You will see this change reflected in your SuccessFactors form as you write your 2013 goals. Launched last year,our goals articulate our shared priorities across the entire enterprise: Student Success, A "Great Place", Continuous Transformation, and Shared Values.  As we have been discussing, the strategic goals of the company directly support these goals.  This is true of our individual goals as well.  

I CAN NOT WAIT to align my individual performance goals with the goals of Student Success, A Great Place (god bless you, home team, and your consistent and brave rejection of parallel structure. Only in this lexicon could "A Great Place"" be a goal) Continuous Transformation (Hearkening back to your guiding principles from Charmain Mao, who insisted on a continual state of revolution) and my very favorite "Shared Values."  

I don't know which value to share first. Should it be profit? Or worker dehumanization? I really like asinine generalized optimism, but I think everyone else is going to be doing that one, and I want to be original. 

Readers, what values do YOU think I should share with the company? (Just kidding, I know no one reads this.)

You're Welcome For This

(They are doing community-based ensemble work exploring issues of bat identity.)

Missionaries of Catan

I don't like strategy games.

That is why I chose to put most of my resources into helping the poor and building a simple church.

Also, I needed to make a wall to prevent dinosaur attacks. 

I like to play it my way. 

With apologies to Ali Green

Bike Portraits on Grocery Day

Washing the Creamer

I am trying to get pincurls down...

My exquisite models: actress Jennifer Summerfield, with Kate Tomaskovic and Katie Coleman. 

Gain

I saw this photo riding my bike to the grocery store. At first I thought it was from the Bible. (Perhaps a reference to Mark 8:36  What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?) Wouldn't it be great if gas stations and pharmacies used their spelling letters to give us messages about the well lived life and attendant mortality?

The Bible has been a lot more in my life than in a long time since I've started going to church at Broad Street Ministries. I really took my time about going over there, although I had read a lot about it and been very impressed, because I really don't think of myself as a Christian. 

I've been going to Unitarian churches for most of my adult life, and although I love the philosophy, the experience is certainly lacking. The very best UU churches offer  all the balm for distress of a neurobiology lecture and slightly less spiritual uplift than NPR. The worst ones give you a smug but temporary sense of superiority while you listen to trite platitudes that reveal the lack of empathy for suffering that comes with not acknowledging it. 

Most of my life is about thoughtful consideration, measure and analysis. When it's Sunday morning I want to sing loudly, stomp, clap, lean in and say amen. So it's back to the Christians.

I once taught a Sunday School class called "The Radical Jesus" for fourth graders that took the Jefferson Bible as it's text and just focused on things Jesus actually says in the Bible. No walking on water, plenty of giving your shirt as well.And the Christians at BSM are The Radical Jesus Christians. Like, "Do not make my father's house a house of trade," hanging with the lepers and the prostitutes, rigorous inventory of one's place in the world Christians. They remind me of the ones I remember meeting back during the Iraq protests who rag dolled down in civil disobedience and got dragged off to jail. The Christians at BSM ripped out the pews in their sanctuary to make room for homeless people to eat. 

With a congregation that must be at least 40% homeless, and includes people of many races and most ages there are ways in which the church achieves the actual diversity that mostly white, mostly 30's/40's mostly upper middle class UU's talk about. But in the most important way, everyone's the same. You can't go there and ignore the worst kinds of suffering because everybody's there. Addicts, the food insecure and the actually very hungry, the homeless, those just out of prison those just out of the hospital, the jobless. 

These are not people who sit with their hands folded and listen to the sermon. They get up, they walk around they make noises that they can't help making, and when it's time to sing, the people who sing SING. And dance and clap and stomp and yell. 

What is it about needing the song that makes the song so good?

I've always had one foot in the theater and one in the church, and these places have been side by side or the same throughout history. There's something to learn about the way we sing and what it does for us in those places. There's something also to learn from the craft of taking passages from the Bible--a text that is as set as texts can be (and the book which Sarah Vowell wonderfully described as "many mansions of eccentricity" from which it is possible to argue any case) and turning them into stories that mean something to the actual people in the room. 

A couple of weeks ago the pastor preached on some obscure passage which largely lists what groups come to a wall for a fast day. It's pretty boring and you'd have to be pretty inspired to make it meaningful. But good preaching can do that, and good theater could, too. Neither is about the words on the page and both are about the living communication, the translation of the words into an experience for breathing participants. 

That sign wasn't a Bible passage, though. It was an ad for a sale on Gain detergent, which costs (while the sale is on) $4.94.