La Cage Aux Folles

I saw the original movie when it first came out and have loved the story in its various renditions since (though I am still partial to the original). I've never seen the musical, but I wanted to commemorate it today for two reasons.

First is to celebrate the performance by high school students in Orlando, despite Bishop Howe's eleventh hour attempt to cancel the event after months of rehearsal and preparation. The arts community helped them find another theatre once they were prohibited from using school property. The result was a standing room only performance.

Second, I was talking to my mother about it today for some reason, and I discovered that the show had a special significance for her, as well. Years ago she started attending a dinner theater in the Chicago suburbs with a friend she had known from high school but with whom she had little contact in the intervening years after she married and had children and her friend remained single and worked in the city. I knew all about the season tickets they had together but, until today, I never knew how it was that they started going together.

It turns out that my mother's friend previously had the tickets with another woman until one year when the series included La Cage Aux Folles. The other woman was angry and upset over its inclusion and the fact that my mother's friend decided to go alone to see it anyway. So suddenly my mother's friend had an extra ticket for the rest of the season, and she offered it to my mother.

What is remarkable about this story (to me, at least) was that this was what rekindled their friendship and gave my mother the means to attend the theater with some regularity long after she was unable to go to the theater or concerts in the city or anywhere on her own -- something she enjoyed very much until her friend died last year of breast cancer. In hindsight it seems like kind of a sign pointing towards what was later initially very difficult for my mother -- accepting her niece's relationship with another woman and having them visit her and stay in her home. While things were fine once they all met, she had a really rough time beforehand, spending much time on the phone with me trying to work through her conflicted feelings. It's nice to think now in hindsight that maybe the dawning of her tolerance and understanding may have come from La Cage many years before. In any event, it brought her back to her old high school friend and brought them several years of renewed friendship and lovely theater afternoons.

The Scent of God

Although I tried to stretch it out the last few days, I have just finished reading The Scent of God by Beryl Singleton Bissell. I think she would appreciate the fact that, just as I put the book down, I was suddenly struck with the sweet-strong smell of fresh brownies wafting upstairs from the kitchen, where my daughter had been baking.

I will have to spend some more time letting this extraordinary book sink in awhile. It is a book full of touch, smell, sight, and sound, infused with spirit.

When passions get thrown beneath a train

Somehow my mind and heart are drawn to radically different thoughts and ideas, often at the same time. I'm currently experiencing some difficulties that seem to call for both dispassion and perhaps even separation from people and things I hold very dear, putting self and self-interest aside [see "East and West" below], and, at the same time, speaking out of my deepest passions and asserting my true self. Paradoxically, both seem required.

Here is what struck me deeply this week from the speaking side:

I do not know how or where I learned it, but I had learned not to say what I really thought or truly believed or most desired. I internalized Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: women who express their deepest passions get run over by trains. The way of safety is to say what others want you to say, to repeat the words of those who hold power. And if you do that well enough you might gain a modicum of control over your own life.

* * * *

Throughout church history, however, the words of women and children, of the poor, the sick, and enslaved, have often been silenced by words of the wealthy, learned, and powerful. And if no one listens, you learn not to speak. When such voices are lost, the Word is diminished. I could express few genuine words. I needed to find my voice. Poet Marge Piercy writes in “Unlearning Not to Speak”:

She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as an infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.

From Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community by Diana Butler Bass (Jossey-Bass, 2002) (From "Unlearning not to speak" at Speaking to the Soul.)

These words seem to cry out what the dignity of every human being requires, the "I" that will not be thrown to the rubbish, will not be dismissed and devalued as something less than the "I"'s or "We" in power. The problem is how to speak with dignity and pride, not in one's self but in one's humanity, created and loved by God, with the spark of his divine image, without inflating one's self into a monstrous, fiery, steam-driven engine of power that seeks to dash others beneath the rails.

Update: Read an excellent essay today on control and letting go by Tandaina at Snow on Roses.

East and West

I have no parents

I make the heavens and earth my parents

I have no home

I make awareness my home

I have no life or death

I make honesty my divine power

I have no friends

I make my mind my friend

I have no enemy

I make carelessness my enemy

I have no armor

I make benevolence my armor

I have no castle

I make immovable-mind my castle

I have no sword

I make absence of self my sword.

14th c. Japanese samurai (quoted by Joseph Goldstein in Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom at p. 13, Shambhala, Boston 2003).


From Sunday's Lectionary reading, Luke 14:25-32:

25 Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. 28 For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, 30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31 Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

ESV Bible

Amazing Grace

Mahalia Jackson

When There is Nowhere Else to Speak

Sr. Joan Chittister, on meeting with Cardinal Eduardo Pironio, Argentinian spokesperson for the poor:

His deep dark eyes were sad. There was no doubt he understood. But then he dropped his shoulders, clasped his hands between his knees and began to shake his head slowly from side to side. “Jhoan, Jhoan, Jhoan,” he said. “What you say is true but you must never say it any place but here. For the sake of the church,” he said, “you must never say these things in public. Only here”---he gestured around the room—“only here behind closed doors, between ourselves.”

I understood his concerns. I know as well as he did that unity is a fragile strength. But I also knew what he didn’t. For the sake of the church, what women wanted had to be said in public because there was nowhere else for a woman to say it.

Excerpt from Called To Question: A Spiritual Memoir in this week's "Ideas in Passing" at Benetvision.

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

                the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

                and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

- Galway Kinnell

Audio at http://imaginenature.amnh.org/st_francis/stfrancis.html

Inspired by reading Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom by Joseph Goldstein.

Do Nothing or Change (or keep mixing up the game)

Seeking spiritual wisdom and insight can sometimes lead to odd results. Ann Fontaine recently wrote a piece called "Do Nothing to Change Your Life" over at the Episcopal Café based on a book recommended by the Archbishop of York.

Meanwhile, my email newsletter from Benetvision contains an article by Sr. Joan Chittister that asks "Why Can't I Change?"

Needless to say, there's food for thought in both pieces. But I especially liked the humor and wisdom in this story Sr. Chittister had to tell:

Then we come face-to-face with the flat face of the soul, that part of us that grows only in increments and insights, never by trampolining from one self to another. This kind of change only comes slowly, only from one struggle to another, only barely.

The spiritual masters, given to whole lifetimes of confrontation with the self, knew it all too well.

Once upon a time, Abba Poemen said of Abba John that Abba John had prayed to God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care.

“And, in fact,” Abba John reported to him, “I now find myself in total peace, without an enemy.”

But Abba Poemen said to him, “Really? Well, in that case, go and beg God to stir up warfare within you again, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.”

And after that, when warfare came, Abba John no longer prayed that it might be taken away. Now he simply prayed, “Lord, give me the strength for the fight.”

- from Welcome to the Wisdom of the World
By Joan Chittister

Do read the whole piece and Ann's as well.

The Lord loved him

Reading Morning Prayer in the Daily Office today, I stumbled across this passage about King David. Although the story of David and Bathsheba is one of the few in Old Testament that is readily familiar to me, I can't say I ever paid much attention to the actual text.

I found this extraordinary:

2 Samuel 12:15-31 (NRSV)

Then Nathan went to his house.

The LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child; David fasted, and went in and lay all night on the ground. The elders of his house stood beside him, urging him to rise from the ground; but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead; for they said, “While the child was still alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us; how then can we tell him the child is dead? He may do himself some harm.” But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, he perceived that the child was dead; and David said to his servants, “Is the child dead?” They said, “He is dead.”

Then David rose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the LORD, and worshiped; he then went to his own house; and when he asked, they set food before him and he ate. Then his servants said to him, “What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you rose and ate food.” He said, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who knows? The LORD may be gracious to me, and the child may live.’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”

Then David consoled his wife Bathsheba, and went to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he named him Solomon. The LORD loved him, and sent a message by the prophet Nathan; so he named him Jedidiah, because of the LORD.

I knew full well that David's first child by Bathsheba was struck ill and died, presumably as God's punishment for David having caused the death of Bathsheba's husband Uriah so that he, David, could have Bathsheba for himself. But I had missed the poignancy of this story, how David fasted and wept, hearing no one while his son lay dying, but once death came, he accepted it, stood up and put aside his grief, without complaint to God and without the kind of remorse that mires one in regret and inaction. Instead, he did the only thing he could, go to Bathsheba, console her, and lie with her again, this time truly as husband and wife. And God did not strike out against them, but gave them a son, Solomon, whom "the LORD loved."

David did a truly terrible thing, yet he went on with his life, making things as right as he could under the circumstances, after accepting the awful consequence of his wrong. This is the stuff that we all face, day in and day out, whether our wrongs are great or small, the sin being the ways in which we stray from God's will. Yet I wonder if David's way of standing up and moving forward is better than the endless regrets and worrying over choices we might have made and consequences we might have avoided if only we had been stronger, wiser, or more virtuous. We cannot bring back our past and live our lives over, we can only make them anew from this point forward.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh....

To put it nicely. The blogeaters came to my blog (thanks Eileen, for sending them my way!). I had managed to save part of my original text on the dance along with Clark+'s lovely comments about his young daughters and Angelina ballerina, etc., while transferring the videos over to il bel far niente, the new place I've created for collecting odds bits and pieces such as videos, quizzes, notes, whatever. I checked to see that comments stayed up, but somehow later they blipped away somewhere where I cannot get them back. My apologies, Clark+.