Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director in advance of our session for March. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them.
Hi Sister —
Hope you’re having the same nice spring weather we are in Springfield! Here follows my monthly email, to: (a) confirm our Zoom session for 6 p.m. Monday, April 15; and (b) sort out my thoughts ahead of time. You’re in luck! I’ve been busy, and it’s been a pretty good month, but I haven’t gotten a whole lot down on paper — or up on a computer screen — for you to wade through.
Overall it’s not been a bad month. My oncologist confirmed the good news from the latest CT scan and says it suggests my immunotherapy is keeping the cancer at bay for now. So it’s kind of like a reprieve. (Or a stay of execution pending further litigation?) Not much writing, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading, much of it pop scholarship on the post-resurrection narratives in the New Testament; I’ve kept up with the yoga; and started learning the harmonica.
Two blog pieces:
- “How a straight white cisgender male learned to stop worrying and wrap his head around intersectionality,” Dec. 8, 2023, rev. April 8 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2023/12/08/intersections/
- “How Beyoncé’s crossover country and a Black harmonica player of the 1930s got me back to making music,” April 9, 2024 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/03/25/swing-low/
The first one I started back in December, and discovered I hadn’t uplinked it when I consulted it for Sundays@6. So I finished the job. We’re taking a different tack in the parish book study and won’t be using it, but I think it helps me sort out my own thinking on something that’s gotten to be a political football.
Intersectionality. Basically the post explores (tentatively) a way of thinking about it less as a matter of identity politics and more of overlapping oppressive systems. A definition I picked up from a Dominican sisters’ Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Committee newsletter:
Intersectionality provides a prism-like lens through which we recognize the connections between issues of social justice. Different forms of social discrimination are inextricably linked. Whether based on sexual orientation or identity, race or ethnicity, or other factors like economic status or religion, discrimination is rooted in prejudice based on identity and the need to identify with a particular group. It leads to division, hatred and even dehumanization. Such prejudice is most often rooted in our own irrational fears.
And this: “Encountering another as other involves finding out what questions, concerns, needs, loves, and values they are living and to make those, at least in part, my own.” Or this, “to listen deeply to one another and to the brokenness of the world.”
My own thoughts on the subject:
[…] So, if I’m getting this right, we’re called to be in relationship with the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives and those who are oppressed. The people on the margins.
Hmm. Where have I heard that before? This whole business of relationships — it all seems basic to humanity, acting like a decent human being created in God’s image. Acting like a mensch (to invoke another faith tradition). Looking out for each other.
So, yeah, I’m not an expert but if you ask me, this whole business of intersectionality is just basic love thy neighbor stuff.
What does this have to do with my spiritual life? I think it reminds me of that sense I get from the Jesuits that my contemplation better be followed up with some kind of action, or else it’s just navel-gazing.
Making music. This one is almost impossible to summarize. It’s about how by pure coincidence, I was reading the New Testament scholar Elaine Pagels when I was listening to an African American blues harmonica player mentioned in the publicity about Beyoncé’s country album. So I’ll just quote a paragraph or two (with a footnote on why I chose not to fix a typo). In the first graf, Pagels quotes the poet Wallace Stevens in the context of her coming to terms with the loss of her husband:
How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” (Why Religion?: A Personal Story,pp. 168, 174-75)
Something about this spoke directly to me. I’m not exactly grieving the loss of my bladder (we hadn’t been on very good terms anyway, after it developed cancer), but I do feel, since getting back that last CT scan, like I’m living in the warmth of the present sun.
And then, when I was receptive to stray thoughts anyway, I was listening to DeFord Bailey, one of the Black country music artists Beyoncé mentioned. Something clicked, and here’s what I made of it in the blog:
The poem by Wallace Stevens is “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” (the italics in the quoted passage are Pagels’). How to go on living without despair? Or — with stage 4 cancer. After the final no there comes a yes. I can’t make heads or tales1 out of the rest of the poem, but for obvious reasons, the quote stayed with me.
Yes is this present sun. Yes. Let’s make the best use of whatever time I’ve got left. And, then, when I heard DeFord Bailey playing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” all of these coincidences came together. Yes, I thought. He’s playing (most of the time) in first position. I could do that.
And that’s as close to a full-blown spiritual awakening as I’m likely ever to have.
By their fruits — and toots — shall ye know them, I guess. Next thing I knew, I was rummaging around in my home office looking for those old harmonicas.
Notes
1 I meant to write “heads or tails.” But sometimes my typos are so much fun, I can’t bear to correct them! Considering the importance I place on narrative, I suspect a Freudian slip. Anyway, I can’t get a storyline, or tale, out of Stevens either. So the typo stands as written.
It’s been a couple, three weeks now since I picked up that old harmonica. I’ve improved to the point I don’t scare the cat when I play, and Debi and I have resumed occasionally sitting by the fireplace occasionally at night. It feels good to be making music again, and I suspect you haven’t heard the last of it.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to our session at 6 p.m. Monday.
— Pete
[Uplinked April 14, 2024]
Ordinary Time 