Saturday, a little sad

The Maryland House of Delegates yesterday decided to move the Marriage Equality bill back to the House Judiciary Committee. This will allow us to avoid a possible defeat, and to keep the bill alive for next year's session. Not the outcome we desired, but probably a better outcome than a losing vote--and we just didn't have assurance that we would win.

So I'm a little sad.

Last night, church had a delightful and "easy" dinner to kick off our Commitment Campaign . . . and then I went to a house concert with my favorite live performer, Dean Stevens. Dean's music always moves me to tears, especially the moment in "Wood and Strings" where he sings

Thank you, George Lowden

Thank you, Jean Larrivée,

Gordy Bischoff, C. F. Martin,

I am thanking you every day.

Thank you, rosewood, thank you, cedar,

Mahogany, ebony, bronze and steel,

Thank you wood, oh thank you metal,

Thank you hands that make it real.

This ebullient moment of gratitude makes me cry.

Likewise, from "Old Man in his Garden,"

I'll be thinkin' rain, I'll be hopin' sun,

I'll be dreamin' greener gardens. Is this my last one?

You can see me growin' slower,

But, ah! the grace of the garden grower.

And when we sing, simply, "Cuida el agua, cuida el agua, cuida el agua, cuida la."

Bring me to overwhelming joy.

I listened to a colleague's sermon this morning and was moved in my heart. How can I myself become a minister whose podcasts others listen to, find helpful, welcome in moments when they need to be more centered.

Well. prayers said for my people; intention expressed and optimism asserted. Much of what this morning thing means to me.

Off to a baby naming, child dedication and baptism. My work! Blessed be.

10 Years, and counting

My church marked the 10th Anniversary of my ordination a couple of weeks ago. I was especially pleased that we invited Dean Stevens to come from Boston to present a concert. Dean invited two young musicians, Chloe and Chris, from Milan, Michigan to share in the concert. And then Dean stayed over to perform at our Sunday morning service.

The weekend of his visit was one of the rainiest we've had, and Dean made the choice not to drive to Grand Rapids and Indiana to visit family and friends, but rather to stay at my home, to practice and read and stare out the window.

One great gift Dean gave me was the observation that I live in a beautiful home. He shared that he could see the rooms where work was still being done, the rooms where work hasn't even started, and the mismatched furniture. Still, what a grand yard! What a relaxing library! What joy to have a pretty good piano in the living room! What a place to put your feet up and enjoy a book!

Of course, what he says is true. I don't look at my place and see its charm. Rather I'm weighed down by its expense, I'm sometimes immobilized by the thought of its declining value, and I so wish that the _____ (kitchen, living room, bathroom, you fill in the blank) could be finished. Cheaply. Soon.

I purchased a beautiful glass mezuzah when I was in Fort Lauderdale for UUA General Assembly in June. I finally got it up on the doorpost. I know that I'm appropriating someone else's culture, but I think it is the resident culture of the home I am only beginning to be owned by, and I mean it to honor the Golden family, not to dishonor Judaism. It has two scrolls in it, one traditional Hebrew scroll and another with the UU principles. It pleases me.

  

My friend Jack came to visit, and gave me a hand in putting up new curtains in the living room and sun room. They're somewhat sheer linens with a simple silkscreened pattern that is very Scandinavian. I need to get some more attractive rods, and raised them 10 inches or so . . . but they make it feel, more and more, like it is my house.

My dear friend Elissa showed up this weekend and spent a day helping me get my recyclables to the recycling center. We put up another coat of faux Venetian plaster, in a less red color, and I am so pleased. With just a little more of a skim coat, a good dry, cure and burnishing, the kitchen will be ready to be declared "done," at least for my living. (For selling, some day, it will need to be neutered, beiged, toned down!) But I'm close, I'm close.

The furniture has largely been rearranged. I have a new bed (from IKEA) that I enjoy. I need to figure out the dining room. But hey, it is a beautiful house, a great place to relax, a wonderful place to live, a supportive place to be. 

Songs in my Head

It is not uncommon for me to awaken with a song in my head. This morning, it was a song that I love when Music Week conferees at Ferry Beach sing it at least once during nightly sing alongs. My friend Dean Stevens sings it on his album, "Love Comes to the Simple Heart."

Passing Through
by Dick Blakeslee, as sung by Dean Stevens

I saw Adam leave the Garden with an apple in his hand,
I said "Now you're out, what are you going to do?"
"Plant some crops and pray for rain, maybe raise a little cane.
I'm an orphan now, and I'm only passing through."

"Passing through, passing through.
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
Glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people that you saw me passing through."

I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called Calvary
"Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?"
He said, "Talk of love not hate, things to do, it's getting late.
I've so little time and I'm only passing through."

"Passing through, passing through.
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
Glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people that you saw me passing through."

And I shivered next to Washington down there at Valley Forge.
"Why do the soldiers freeze here, like they do?"
He said, "Men will suffer, fight, even die for what is right
Even though they know they're only passing through"

"Passing through, passing through . . ."

'Twas at Franklin Roosevelt's side just a while before he died.
He said, "One world must come out of World War Two,
"Yankee, Russian, white or tan, Lord, a man is just a man.
We're all brothers, sisters, only passing through."

"Passing through, passing through . . ."

Gandhi spoke of freedom one night, I said, "Man, we gotta fight!"
He said, "Yes, but love's the weapon we should use,
For with killing, no one wins, its with love that peace begins,
It takes courage when you're only passing through,

"Passing through, passing through
Just a stranger passing through, glad that I made friends with you
Tell the people that you saw me passing through,
Tell the people that you saw me passing through."

I'm not entirely sure why this is the song I'm reaching for this morning. We has a day of drama on Sunday at church, and I completely lost my "non-anxious presence" and slammed a door in high dudgeon. It has been deeply unsettling and I'm trying to chart a way forward.

And so it appears my heart has gone to (another kind of) church!

A favorite quotation about Dean and his music is on his website from a review in 2004, when I was still in Boston. "Seeing and hearing Dean Stevens live on stage is proof that sanity, literacy, love, hope, and the forces of good are still alive and well and at work in the universe.

"Losing your faith? Go to a Dean Stevens concert!"

(Geoff Bartley, February 12, 2004--the night before my 50th birthday!)

One of the things I've missed most in Flint is the folk music scene, which happens in Flint, of course, but not much at our church. (Back home, there's a coffeehouse in every town, often centered at, although autonomous from, the Unitarian Universalist church.) "Back in the day," I could count on going to a folk music concert on Saturday night, sit in the corner alone or among friends, and allow myself to be moved by the message. This has sustained me in ministry, this public sharing of sentiment among people, mostly folk who are out trying to make the world a better place. This has given me hope, and moved my soul.

I'm thinking of concerts by Dean, of course, but also Magpie and Cindy Kallet and emma's revolution. I'm thinking of Jon Fromer, and being "on the line" at Fort Benning. I'm thinking of my dear friend Suzy Giroux, and many memorial services. This tradition of social/political acoustic music, this makes me want to live in spite of challenge.

Gray outside . . . but it is still a little early.

Good morning.

What was Lost is Found

I've been finding music!

I've been unpacking at my house for over a year now. It was only a month ago that I realized why some of the boxes were such a hodge podge, and why others seemed to be so unfamiliar.

The unfamiliar ones are easy. I packed them in June and July 2005 and put them into a PODS container, where they sat for a month, and then unloaded them into my Bradley Avenue apartment "for the duration" until I found a new house. Then they were moved into the garage in June 2006, and only now am I getting to them.

The hodge podges?? On the weekend I was going to do the "final pack" of my apartment, after the furniture had been moved, and while all my "stuff" was lying around in piles, I got the news that my dad had died. Within a few hours, volunteers from the church had showed up to move all my stuff to the new house so that I could catch a plane back to Rhode Island and family.

I worked like a demon to throw things into boxes that were brought out to vans and then packed into the garage. Things were mislabeled, poorly sorted, full of numbness and shock and grieving.

And now I'm opening up to find things that I've been missing.

A box of piano music brought back many fond memories. Mrs. Liffmann, my piano teacher (as a college student) in Providence had had a huge studio of children. In her last years of teaching, I walked to her home off Hope Street once a week to work on the most elementary music. (Ah, my sonatina album!) A little funny, and embarrassing, when people heard me practicing in the rehearsal hall; but hey, "you gotta start somewhere."

I found piano music from when I studied with Debi Fishbein (now Adams). Debi was a friend, and after she finished her Bachelors degree and while pursuing her Masters in Piano Performance at Boston University, we ran a music studio together at Steinert Hall in Boston. She taught piano, I taught voice, she sometimes accompanied me, and we rehearsed together. It was a hoot. It was Studio 54, and the nightclub Studio 54 was big then. (Also Studio 54 Jeans which, we discovered, were headquartered in Boston. A fan of the jeans sent a letter to the studio, once, requesting a copy of the poster of the naked guy putting on a pair of jeans. We joked about getting out a camera and . . . )

My music is on the piano now, and bringing great joy.

I also discovered a treasured set of audiotapes from the German Democratic Republic. They were a gift from my friend Ginga Eichler on the occasion of my work as a volunteer press agent for GDR Days, which just happened to fall in October 1989 during the period in which the Wall was opened, the Council of Ministers resigned, Erich Honecker resigned and was replaced by Egon Krentz, and the old East German state prepared to implode and be overrun by the German Federal Republic.

Gisela May is one of the great interpreters of Bertolt Brecht, and I believe the recordings I have date from the mid 1970s (just after she recorded "Hallo Dolly!"). They are (she is) magnificent, full of nuance and forthright "gestus." They remind me of the time I saw Ms. May perform Mother Courage at the Theater auf dem Schiffbauerdamm around the corner from Ginga's apartment at nr. 1 Chauseestrasse.

I think that this music puts me in touch with a deep woundedness I have around being born workingclass. Well, not about being born where I was born, but my awareness of the oppression that workers experience in this culture. This awareness grew in my years at Little Flags Theater, a proletarian political theater that celebrated working people and the struggle for social change. David Jernigan, I believe, was the stage manager who said that two emotions were at work in creating workingclass characters. One was pride: overwhelming pride that everything that exists in the world happens because a worker went to work. Every crop that is harvested, every metal that is mined and smelted and fashioned in to something useful, every tree that is felled and hewn and used to build--everything that is is either given in nature or made available to us all because a worker worked. And the second emotion is rage: rage that over the years milions have died, that laborers have been forced in to chattel slavery and wage slavery, that working class kids receive inferior education and are prepared for lesser jobs, that mental work is elevated over physical labor and that leisure without labor is the most highly regarded and rewarded. These two emotions are dynamically interrelated, which can give working class culture such power, such truth.

Listening to Gisela May brings me to the Memorial Stone for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; to standing before the Memorial for the 26 Commissars in Baku; to laying flowers at the Tombs of the Unknowns in Washington DC and at the Kremlin in Moscow. To standing before Mother Jones's grave in Illinois, seeing pictures of miners and their "Mother," reading tributes by "the faithful" and even recognizing a name of a recent visitor. To my tears, yesterday, reading in the People's Weekly World that Moe Fishman is dead--not a person I new personally, but a persom I know in the movement, a comrade fallen, one who believed that another world is possible, and who was willing to go to Spain in the 1930s to make it happen. Listening to Gisela May brings me to the recent death of Laura Ross and to the heartbreaking truth of my own life, one of pride and rage, disappointment at failures but deep confidence in the ultimate course for humankind; that, through struggle, we will evolve to the next level of human existence, that we will eliminate the profound oppressions inherent in capitalism; that human history will, one day, begin.

I've been listening to Dean Stevens these past few days. "Eyes of Wonder" is, perhaps, my favorite CD--certainly it is the most played in my iTunes library. Dean is the best of the best, an incredibly smart musician with good politics and a balanced life of activism and institution building and family life and relationships of solidarity and bridge building between communities . . . His music is insightful and spiritual and his mode of operations with other musicians is one of inclusion and celebration and learning. I miss having Dean in my life. (And now he's become a hurricane attacking the Caribbean and Mexico!)

It is wonderful to see the sky not so overcast today. A luminous gray, I know the sun must be there somewhere!

Good morning.