Marching in Song

I suffered from a case of the blues last night. People around the world —including treasured Christian colleagues and friends—would be part of the People’s Climate March. They would walk in solidarity out of care for our only earthly home.

Colleagues in NYC

What was I doing on the eve of this march? I was preparing to lead our first children’s choir rehearsal of the season. I had a plan in place to introduce the choir to songs from all around the world: “Sizohambe naye (We Will Walk with God)” from South Africa  “When the Poor Ones” set to a beautiful Spanish Folk tune, the African American spiritual, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” and a canon set to the most important commandment: love God with your heart, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.  

I told the children that the theme for our year together was  “Walking with God.” It wasn’t until this afternoon that it dawned on me like a big slap on the forehead:  Here I was teaching the children that God walks with all of us, yet I  was down because I couldn’t be marching. Did I not believe that God works through us, walking with us wherever we are walking or sitting? What about the claim that “We are one in the Spirit, one in the Lord?” Is not teaching these songs a form of solidarity?

Perhaps its self-delusion or an exercise to assuage my own guilt, but today I’m choosing to believe that we do support one another in prayer, song and worship and that it makes a difference. We didn’t plan it to coincide with today’s march, but our church’s gathering hymn this morning included these words:

“Give heed, O saints of God! Creation cries in pain;

stretch forth your hand of healing now, with love the weak sustain.”

                                   

I long for creation’s healing. I long for our eyes to be opened to the long road ahead and not just the sensationalist headlines that do nothing but distract from what matters (An insightful blog post from pastor friend Daniel Wolpert points to this shortsightedness).  We humans charged with caring for the earth have a long road ahead of us. Dangerous theologies that treat the earth as a candy wrapper alongside the road to heaven only make the work of ecologically-minded Christians more urgent.

The children’s choir this fall will be singing these words:

“When the poor ones, who have nothing, still are giving;

when the thirsty pass the cup, water to share;

when the wounded offer others strength and healing:

We see God, here by our side, walking our way.

We see God, here by our side, walking our way."  

When I look into the eyes of children and hear them sing, hope abounds. Still I wonder: will the children take this song to heart? Will they see God at work in the poor and the wounded, even the wounded earth? I don’t know, but we can begin by singing about it and trust the Spirit’s work.

Family-friendly?

Along with “family values,” the descriptor “family-friendly” gets tossed around when considering something’s appropriateness. The recent decision of my Alma mater, South Williamsport Area Junior/Senior High School to drop its planned school musical was made, in part, out of concern that the musical might not be “family-friendly.” One of these potentially non family-friendly dimensions was the musical’s brief portrayal of a gay wedding (We seem to have no qualms about the pervasive violence in “family-friendly”media, but that’s a post for another day).

What astonishes me in all the media attention that this situation has already received is how love can be perceived as threatening and unfriendly to families. In 2010, my children attended their first wedding, the wedding of a pastor to a musician. Our kids were ages 2 and 4, hence they didn’t really “get” the whole thing, but our family had no qualms about supporting this gay couple in their commitment to one another before God and those gathered to pray, sing, and share Holy Communion. We are so proud to call them friends of our family.

We have other friends, a lesbian couple, who have been such lights in our lives, remembering our children on their birthdays, sending children’s books and Christmas gifts. When we lived in rural Minnesota, these friends made the long trek to visit us in our home. They are friends to our family and we are so blessed. 

I could go on, of course, about those many gay and lesbian friends who have enriched our family’s life, but the point is clear enough: Their love for each other causes no offense to us. It is nothing to fear but cause for celebration.

I hope and pray that South Williamsport’s schools can be motivated not by fear but by love for their neighbors, especially those families they’d rather not befriend.

The Spirit says sing, but what shall we sing?

As the spiritual invites us:

“I’m gonna sing when the Spirit says sing…”

This Sunday the church celebrates Pentecost, that Spirit-filled day when worship spaces are decked out in red, when we find the red clothes in our closets, when we display red flowers. It is a day of celebration, a day when we proclaim that we can be church only by the gift of Holy Spirit.

This is certainly worth singing about. But what do we sing? This decision required some extra attention and altering of our worship plans. Many of the hymns associated with Pentecost are grand testimonies to the purging, cleansing fire of the Holy Spirit. Take, for example, this stanza from “God of Tempest, God of Whirlwind” by Herman Stuempfle:

God of blazing, God of burning,

All that blocks your purpose, purge!

Through your church, Christ’s living Body,

Let your flaming spirit surge!

Here’s the thing: Our community has had three funerals in just the last two weeks, seven over the past months. We are praising the breath of the Spirit all the while mourning those whose breath has left them. Moreover, a faithful family’s home was devastated by fire last week. Fire cleanses, yes, but fire destroys.  Singing hymn after hymn with fiery words and melodies may have hit too close to home.

When we gathered this Pentecost morning, we sang hymns laden with diverse images for the Spirit, a little wind and fire, yes, but more, the images we needed on this day, images of the Spirit anointing  wounds, wearing our pain like a garment, reviving our souls.  We sang “There is a Balm in Gilead” and wrapped the fire-stricken family in a prayer shawl. We sang “Lead me, Guide me” trusting that the Spirit is indeed what gives us strength when our own fails us, as it certainly will. We sang of the promised peace of Jesus, the peace breathed on those disciples locked up in their fear and the peace for us in our fear.

Psalm 104 declares:

How manifold are your works; in wisdom you have made them all

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; 

when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.

Pentecost is that day to say yes, God is renewing and recreating, taking the ashes of our lives and the dust of our bones, taking them and renewing them in ways we cannot fathom. And so we sing. In our singing, we are one in the Spirit, one breath joined to another. This Spirit wears our pain with us, enveloping us like one of those prayer shawls, reminding us that in Christ’s Spirit, we are restored, we are whole.

Fair Fish?

You know the advice about not giving a child a pet for Christmas? Received alongside the stash  of new toys and clothes, the child or the family may discard the pet just as readily as the shiny gift paper. The danger of the gift is that it could lead to the mistreatment of the gift, in this case, the mistreatment of a live creature. It is not pro-life in the wider, more appropriate use of that term.

Today I hereby make an addendum to this advice: Do not let your child play any game at a carnival that involves winning fish unless they are already skilled fish keepers. Better yet, abandon the practice of giving away fish at all.

Here is the story that led me to this conclusion. Last night, my husband took our three kids to the elementary fair. They had a great time. Our two boys threw some ping-pong balls in a game and won some tiny goldfish, six in all. I come home later that night and find them swimming around in a plastic Rubbermaid shoebox filled with tap water. This was Mistake #1. When you win fish at a fair, they don’t come with any instructions or warnings like: Don’t put fish in tap water. It will kill them.

Saturday morning rolls around and three fish are floating on the top, two are moving sluggishly and one is still shows some energy. It’s clear the boys want to care for the fish (a healthy inclination) so we head to the pet store as soon as it opens. Eighty-four dollars and some odd cents later, we come out with all we need and one, well three, things we certainly did not need. You see, the nice young girl who sold us the tank, gravel, food and water drops made a huge error, Mistake #2. She sold us goldfish on the same day that she sold us their new home. After spending two hours trying to get the tank prepared and reading instructions that may have well been written in a language foreign to us, my husband called the pet store for advice (He had made Mistake #3, putting in the filter incorrectly). This is when we learn that a fish tank needs to sit at least a month without the fish in it to have the water stabilize. Why didn’t someone tell us that in the first place?!

So after spending three hours of a spring Saturday inside when we could have been outside planting flowers, helping them live, we discover that a total of nine fish have died or will soon die because of these many mistakes.

We call a family meeting and explain to our six and almost eight year old what happened and the certain fate of their new fish they had planned on naming. They actually took it pretty well and now they understand that our fish funeral will be a little larger than initially thought. They will wait patiently while the water is prepared to be a source of life, not death, for these little creatures with the cute eyes and mouths (their best features according the boys).

The lesson to me in all this is that  life is so messy, so full of contingencies, so interdependent. You don’t give a child a fish, hoping it will live, without understanding all that is needed to sustain life. What was going to be a new life for our house became a lesson in death. I’m cool with the lesson, but not cool with the casual way we treat life that is not human.

The next time you are at a fair or carnival and you are thinking, hey, my kid could win a cute fish, think again. Are you ready to care for a fish? Can you afford to care for it? If not, go on a ride instead.

Off to bury the fish…