Summon out what I shall be
As we in the congregation at my church leave our pews to process up to take communion, we sing a simple set of words about what we hope will happen as we receive the host and (if chosen) wine. Recently, those words were these: “Take, oh take me as I am,/Summon out what I shall be/ Set your seal upon my heart/ and live in me.” I can’t get the words out of my head, often waking to their melody’s returning to me. I’m pretty sure the reason lies in the second line; what does it really mean to ask anyone or anything to “summon out” some aspect of one’s being? My trusty unabridged Webster tells me that to summon means “to order, as by a summons, to appear in court.” So am I asking God to order me to be more of what I am capable of being? In a beautiful poem, John Donne implored God to change him through violent means, but God replies that force is not his MO. Rather Donne must love God himself if he wants to come closer to the God-head.
Webster also tells me, however, that “summon” means “to call forth, rouse, gather, collect,” and this seems to illuminate our chant most helpfully. The author of the verses implies that what we “shall be” is already within us, just lying dormant or perhaps dealing with our having pushed that fuller self to the side in order to pursue some smaller, more secular goal. The speaker begins this request of God, however, by knowing that s/he is acceptable as s/he already is, so judgment is precluded from the process. The supplicant also uses the future perfect tense–“shall be–leaving no room for failure. When I sing this, albeit slightly off key, I feel certain that the God of my understanding wants me to be all of which I am capable, to assume full stature. I am even asked to consider how I will become more of my possible self than I am as I walk toward the communion server.
I will be able to answer the summons, sent not aggressively but lovingly, by having my Higher Power set a seal “upon my heart,” not “on” it or “in,” it. I flash to my attaching one of my vast supply of stickers to the front of boring envelopes containing payment of bills or even personal cards. I set those little seals UPON the paper to be a signal to the recipient that I hope they are having a pleasing day as they go about their mundane tasks such as opening my envelope. I also have an image of my going about my life with some temporally invisible but spiritually detectable identifier. If I let God into my life, others will sense the implantation within my heart and I will be able to be what Mother Teresa thought we each was–the face of God working in the world around us.
Though we vary these little verses sung as we take communion on a given Sunday, this one clearly has a profound effect on me. Often, these days, when my larger world seems to be being fractured and shredded by the current president and his spokespeople, I sing these simple words as I walk early in the morning or as labor to quiet my disturbed mind at night as I try to go to sleep. I believe I hear the summons and I work hard to burnish the “seal upon my heart” by acting in concert with others who feel similarly to me.
Racist Snafu at the Oscars
Think about it! You have been tasked with making the final in a long list of star-studded presentations. You open the envelope and read a name of the woman who was just awarded “best actress,” not the title of the picture to be named “best picture.” Might it not occur to you to go to the emcee and say “there must be some mistake”? That didn’t happen on February 26, 2017. I want to posit why it may not have happened., “LaLa Land” was thought to be the “shoe-in,” so perhaps Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty reported what they thought the piece of paper had meant to say. Maybe they have been away from the4 bright lights too long and were genuinely befuddled.
Or maybe something much deeper and more insidious was at work. I’m not suggesting anything conspiratorial–that would be far-too calculated for what I believe happened. Since “LaLa Land” was the only truly “white” movie in the category, I have to wonder if part of the blatant mistake isn’t what Claudia Rankine writes about so often in her poems. It’s what I understand to be the banality of racism displayed by otherwise “liberal” white thinkers. Way back in 1963, the brilliant Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this powerful book, Arendt argued that evil is simply a function of thoughtlessness, behaviors and words exhibited by ordinary people conforming to mass opinions. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine forces us white liberals to recognize ourselves in her poetic characters who think or say or do this kind thoughtless things in relation to black people.
The film that was supposed to be announced as “best picture of 2017” was “Moonlight.” This movie is not just powerful or timely; it is unique in the single regard that there are no “white” people on the screen. This is a script where multitudes of audience members have no one with whom ti identify, no “touchstone” character to guide them in their responses to the larger story being portrayed. “Moonlight” falls, then, outside the comfort zone of most members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts as well. So, no matter what may have motivated its voting body to surprise the audience in the auditorium and across the country/world, those people should be credited for coloring (literally) outside the box. But, it needs to be said that making such a choice has to be categorized as a “surprise” vote speaks right back to Arendt’s theory about banality.
The most heinous part of what Dunaway and Beatty helped happen is this: Given the uniqueness of the moment in a time in American history when engrained racism could not be more blatantly obvious, the announcement about “Moonlight” should have been clean, so all of those associated with making this movie and all of us elated by its being chosen should have been able to rejoice directly, not “after the fact.” We still have “miles to go” in our journey out of our shameful history with black people and the Oscar awards didn’t put us an inch further along a path towards reparations. The last two letters in the acronym “snafu” most surely apply to the finale of the Oscar ceremony.
“Natural” Disasters
Traditionally, the phrase “natural disasters” refers to serious disruptions brought on by forces outside human control. Some call these “forces of nature” while others name them “acts of God.” Either way, we are assured that we had nothing to do with them. An easy list of such moments would include floods, forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, tsunamis, lightning strikes. Perhaps there was a time in human evolution when such events truly were caused by forces beyond human prevention, but that no longer is the case. In the United States, one of the worst weather events in recent history was Hurricane Katrina. It was quickly labeled a “natural disaster” caused by a massive hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard. Even if we allow that the hurricane itself was a natural disruption, what happened to New Orleans and other parishes in Louisiana most certainly was not attributable to natural forces alone. In fact, as scientists and investigators from various areas of study analyzed what happened to New Orleans, it became clear that the devastation to that old city was not caused by the hurricane itself. It actually deflected at the last minute and hit the Gulf Coast with much less force than had been predicted by meteorologists originally. The devastation was caused by levees that could not hold in the face of the heavy rains and from water coming from the north of the city itself. These levees had been inspected years before the hurricane and glibly and falsely pronounced as being able to hold against natural forces. So the “disaster” that was played out on TV screens and in people’s lives for weeks was “caused” by human agencies and individuals who were unwilling to spend the money it would take to strengthen existing levees and build new ones that might actually defend residents from strong natural storms.
Or consider images seen more and more frequently as the planet warms alarmingly fast of tornadoes tearing through parts of this country and the larger world at seasons and with a strength not experienced in the past. Just a day or so ago, New Orleans itself was struck by a tornado that demolished scores of dwellings, many in the wards most devastated by the waters that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. So people who had only just restored something resembling the lives they lost in that earlier unnatural disaster now find themselves once again homeless and destitute. Or listen to veteran fire fighters in California and other places in the United States who appear on the nightly news saying in all their decades of fighting forest fires, (only some of which were ever “natural disasters” since many have been started by arsonists or careless people who toss a still-burning cigarette in the wrong brush pile), they have never seen anything like the one they are trying futilely to control at the moment. These catastrophes that are so expensive in terms of loss of trees needed to ward off a hotter and hotter atmosphere and of human property should no longer be referred to as “natural disasters.” Our own selfish behaviors are the real causes. Until we are willing to name them truthfully, we have little hope in getting legislatures to pass laws that might at least slow down the rate of atmospheric warming that will cause worse and worse events that may continue to be mis-labeled.
It is convenient to call all these current tragedies by the old, familiar term. But we hide our heads in this particular sand box at our own peril and, more significantly, at the peril of the planet we call home.
Marching
On Saturday, January 21, 2017, history was made in the United States and across the world. Several million people, mostly women and children of all shapes, colors, ages, conditions, took to our streets to send a message to the new administration in Washington, D.C. that we will not let the advances carved out over the past decade be swept away by the Orange Man. In my home town, Minneapolis, the women’s march organizers hoped for 20,000. By early afternoon, press were estimating 60,000 and on Sunday, the more or less official number stood at 100,000. My old friend of forty-six years and I were two of those marching in St. Paul, MN. We’d been advised not to try and take usual exits off the freeway because they would be closed off, so we got off at an exit just inside the St. Paul city limits and parked in a huge shopping mall’s lot that seemed fine with taking a passive but important role in the day’s protest. As we started making our way to the light rail line so we could take the Green Line train from our stop directly to the Capitol where the march would end up, we were immediately aware of scads of other people doing the same thing. Once on the platform, we made our way to a space just behind the safety yellow line and waited for the next train.
Four trains, each with seven big cars, arrived over the next forty minutes. As each stopped and opened doors in case some one wanted to get off, we were met with people packed in so tightly that I didn’t think we could get a piece of paper into the car. As the fifth train approached, I said to my friend “I’m going to be aggressive about getting on, so hang on and do what I do.” The doors slid open onto a similarly stuffed car and I said to the young people nearest to me “Can’t you scrunch a little more and let these two old ladies get on?” They did and we did.
As we all spilled out at the Capitol grounds, a helpful marshall told us not to bother going back to the origin of the march since it was already almost at the Capitol. So we walked with the ever-growing crowd till we saw the huge American flag carried by the march leader. We fell into step with what looked like the proverbial sea of people coming from all angles. Most signs were handmade and lots of people (including some of the many men present) wore the little pink knitted hats that dotted every gathering. One of my friends later told me one of her friends had knitted 20 hats to give to family and friends who were going to be marching. The signs spoke to virtually all the issues in danger of being erased or severely gutted by those taking the reins of power/control. And, though billed as a “women’s” march, I was delighted to see so many men, not all of whom were with a woman to whom they related personally. In fact, one of my favorite signs was the one held by a pleasant, middle-aged white man that read “Men of quality always support e-quality.” I thought to myself “A word-smith made that one.”
Of course there were oodles and oodles and oodles of children, some carrying their own home-made signs often with smiley faces or big bright suns as decoration. One new mother carrying her little baby girl in a back-pack sort of thing had sewn onto the back of the carry case this message: “Nasty Woman in Training.” Though I didn’t see this message at my rally, the one that declared “There are better cabinets at IKEA” seems inspired. And, sadly, true….
Though the sun wasn’t visible, projected rain held off so no one got wet. We all just walked in solidarity and with total positive energy. My friend kept saying “Look how courteous everyone is” as people helped new-comers meld into the crowd or made room for little children not to be squeezed by too many adults around them. This was the largest group of people I’ve every experienced in my 79 years, and it was wonderful to feel that every one of us agreed about the “big picture” we want for our country, no matter which smaller aspects of that picture might be a special focus for us. A few women had brought left-over Hillary signs–the light blue ones that read “STRONGER TOGETHER.” I felt that axiom tangibly as I snaked my way toward the Capitol stage where music and speakers waited to host a long and fierce rally.
My friend and I didn’t stay till the end since we knew the same positive delays on the light rail would happen when all of us who had taken it to get to the site would need to take it back to our cars or neighborhoods. As we were sitting down in a virtually empty car going away from the uplifting event, we strategized about how we’d use the train system the next time we wanted to march against some attempt to pull back support for the people and programs that embrace diversity, acceptance, and life. We know there will be those other times as the next four years pass, slowly and often painfully. But if a tiny percentage of the energy and resistance I witnessed in St. Paul Saturday can be harnessed into local and national movements in support of what all of us there believe in, we will prevent large-scale erasure of the idea of democracy that got us on our feet, into our modes of transportation, and out into those late January streets.