On the potter’s wheel*

I realize I have been missing for a few weeks. Right after my last post I traveled to Amsterdam. The new meds I’d been given had some horrid side effects and I really was out of it for about 10 days, which made the trip sort of a trial. Still, I did some of my favorite things and searched online to find out the side effects would ameliorate. Here is one of my favorite places to sit in Amsterdam on a nice afternoon watching the boats in the canal:

 

 

 

 

 

 

See the ducks? Aren’t they cute? They’re lots of fun to watch. I also got a lot of work done, as usual, in my quiet moments. The following Saturday I travelled to Copenhagen for my first visit to Denmark. It too is very quiet, calming, soothing even. On Sunday afternoon a friend of a friend invited me to visit the bohemian collective Christiania.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on Monday I attended a conference at the famous Royal School of Library and Information Science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went back to Amsterdam then for a few days, to do more writing, and relax a bit before coming home to teach.

Since I returned to Milwaukee there have been a lot of things going on personally and professionally, and it was delightful the other day to enjoy the hibiscus on my balcony … the ones I tried to grow in Philadelphia never ever got this excited.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scripture appointed for today begins with a reading from Jeremiah 18 in which God creates a metaphor of God the potter … God reworks a spoiled vessel in the potter’s hand, making it better. I have to say I feel sort of like that vessel, like the last six weeks or so have been a time of poking and prodding and reshaping me and indeed the whole of my life—make what you will of the metaphor of the vessel, the metaphor of God the potter is worth spending some time pondering.

In my experience as a person on a journey of faith I have discovered a sort of dichotomy, or maybe I should just say there are two ways to see everything. That is, we tend to think of ourselves first and then to perceive everything else as happening against the backdrop of “me.” So we think God is a potter shaping us, and that must be why it feels like things are spinning and shapes are constantly changing. But of course the other way to look at it is that we are part of God’s creation and not its centerpiece, and therefore when the wheel spins we should enjoy the ride and when the shape of life changes we should change with it and do our best to perceive what it is that God the excellent potter is doing with the world around us. And always, then, perceive the role into which God is calling us.

In the reading from Luke 14 we see large crowds traveling with Jesus hanging on his every word and they are jubilant to have found him. They, of course, are perceiving themselves as at the center, gifted with his presence. He turns it inside out on them swiftly, telling nested parables about how unless we can give up everything we already perceive we cannot really be his disciples. (That’s my interpretation, of course—you can read the text yourself). The role of a disciple in the kingdom is to be the vessel of the grace and love that establish the kingdom. To do that we have to let grace and love be manifest in us. If grace and love are manifest in us then they will be manifest through us too.

I often have pondered this set of metaphors, or perceptions, with regard to life as a gay person. During my six weeks of sitting on the potter’s wheel the tax authorities have decided that those of us who are legally married ought to file tax returns as married people, regardless of whether the state in which we reside recognizes our marriages. Now that’s what I call reshaping the vessel! It will take us awhile to figure out what it means economically, or even just exactly what any couple among us has to do. But the fact is that this reshaped vessel now includes us as legitimately married people. Let’s hope our time in the kiln solidifies this new reality, which really is a manifestation of God’s own glory given to those of us who can make our faith—God’s grace and love within us and through us—manifest.

*Proper 18 (Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33)

©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

My head was exploding*

I think we have to think hard about what it feels like when the Holy Spirit comes to visit. I know—I remember well when I was made a priest—angel choirs (and everyone present) sang “Come Holy Spirit” and boy did it ever. I was lying on the floor nose down, and then I was kneeling at the Bishop’s feet, and then he was pressing down on my head and saying those prayers and while he was doing that the priests in the huddle were pressing down on my shoulders and back and whatever part they could lay a hand upon. It felt like I was going down, I kept thinking “I can’t take it, I won’t make it, I’m going to fall down under all of this weight, and then there was a kind of trancelike moment and the weight was gone and there was cool air around me and the Bishop stood me up and turned me around and said “welcome the newest priest” and everyone applauded” and my head was exploding.

Then everyone sat down and they gave me the “gifts”, which was great because it really calmed things down—the stole, a Bible, keys, and then a red chasuble in many colors of red all like tongues of fire was draped over me and the Bishop turned me around and whispered into my ear “give the peace.” Well, I’d heard it done a zillion times, but it was amazing to do it myself. And from that moment onward I owned the office of priest. I was ready.

Outside, in the real world, my mother who was present was sliding into Alzheimer’s, her older sister, my Aunt Margo, the matriarch of our family, was well into the darkness of Alzheimers’s, Dad seemed fine but his wife Maxine was failing. Brad and I were both in good health but had been told the day before my ordination that we were being evicted from our condo (so they could renovate and charge more; but, violating every law, they gave us 7 days notice to a lock-out); they could do whatever they wanted of course, locking our possessions away until we sued to recover them, or we could just leave.  We rented the only other condo for rent that week in Center City Philadelphia. We knew that as soon as the party ended we had to move.

I suppose it was not unlike the move we just experienced, although this one was under less pressure and was better organized. Still, the point is, never mind the nice music, the Holy Spirit’s arrival is always messy, and always within messiness. What is going on for you? Baby sick? Parents ailing? Partner making unhappy noises? Work stressing you out? That is how it works, you have to look deep inside the messiness to find the Holy Spirit at work in your life.

I know the Spirit is with us. We just moved from Philadelphia to Milwaukee. The drive was fun. Exept for the I-94 part. My car now sounds like a bucket of hardware jostling around on Milwaukee’s streets, which are made of concrete blocks a few meters long, so every 6 meters or so you have a ka-chunk experience. It means we can’t risk driving to church until we get it fixed. Plus, everybody here wants to do things at 8 in the morning. What time do people go to bed, 4:30 in the afternoon? Well, I guess that’s a bit of culture shock.

But, clearly, love is with us, and we’re together and well and barking only occasionally at each other. The Holy Spirit is with us. We bought a new grill, maybe we’ll try to “fire” it up!

*Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:25-35, 37b; Romans 8:14-17; John 14:8-17, 25-27)

©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

Of serpents, demons, fortune-tellers, and speed limits*

This has been moving week for us, Brad and me. I keep thinking it must be sort of traumatic but in fact, it hasn’t been too bad. Oddly, after 28 years in Philadelphia and 12 years in our last home, picking up and moving to Milwaukee has been sort of like an escape, on the one hand, and a new beginning, on the other. I suppose we are escaping from the prison of habit and lethargy and inertia; a life that has been above all else regular and regulated. Work, meals, concerts, grocery-shopping, put the garbage out, bring in the recycling bin, call the police when the neighbors have a rock band at 5 in the morning, and on and on and on. And I suppose we both are a little bit excited about having a new home (with fewer stairs and more bathrooms), with a lawn and a big garage and a driveway (instead of graffiti on the garage door and shoppers from New Jersey parked so we can’t get the car out) and a fresh breeze from Lake Michigan (instead of the oppressive heat and humidity of a fetid Philadelphia summer). As you see I am barely able to find any emotional terms to use as descriptors …. (Or, as I now would say to my students: “that was a joke you know” ….)

The trip was kind of fun. The movers took our stuff in just under a day and a half, and we spent a night in a Philadelphia hotel so we could take off fresh and rested. We drove all of a day and stopped halfway, in Youngstown Ohio. We checked into a hotel and checked out three restaurants Brad had dug up on the web. We had a good meal in a pretty nice place and then slept the night while thunderstorms roared overhead. The second day was similar for the most part. There was little traffic and the weather was mostly okay. I do suffer stress from trying to keep the car moving at a steady pace even though the traffic around me is moving about 25 miles per hour faster than any posted speed limit. The righteous me is always at battle with the masculine me—wanting to maintain a legal speed and simultaneously haul off at the fastest pace my sport-equipped Jetta will go. Near the end of the trip we encountered a band of thunderstorms and tornadoes in Western Indiana, and it was occasionally hard to keep the car on the road in the wind. And then beyond that we encountered Chicago expressway traffic which was even worse. And then we were here in Milwaukee. This week the furniture will arrive, I will teach a class, we will settle in and start creating a new regularity I suppose.

Before I looked at this week’s scripture I had a metaphor about Exodus in my head. Every Holy Saturday after the Easter Vigil we come home to eat in a hurry and wind up watching that cheesy movie about Moses with Charlton Heston. The best part is when they all head out for the exodus, with their goats and chickens and grandmas and pots and pans and music from a symphony orchestra. So in a way I feel a little bit like the extras in that scene, all of my stuff en route to a new and indescribable beginning.

But then I saw that story in Acts 16:14-34 about Paul and his disciples. They were in a new place, but settling into their routine. It says they were going for prayer. They ran into a local, a woman possessed by serpentine spirits who was making  a good living fortune-telling, and she knew at once they were God’s disciples. She rather made a nuisance of herself, and Paul called the demon out of her. Now, this is a quintessential tourist story for everyone who travels. Just because you think you know what you are seeing doesn’t mean you really understand! He healed the woman and chased away the spirit but cost her her job and her bosses their livelihood. They sued Paul and his disciples, had them stripped, flogged, and jailed. Whew! What a welcome to a new place!

But then in the night our friends prayed and sang. What else would they do? It was, in fact, all that they knew to do to restore any semblance of reality, of regularity. And their prayer and song was so intense that God shook the foundations and released them from their shackles. The final part of the story is where the jailers discover them still there and miraculously embrace Jesus Christ and the Gospel of salvation.

Well Brad and I haven’t met any fortune tellers, but we did encounter three distinctly different cultures in two days as we traveled west. We don’t know what we might have left behind, we hope we didn’t do any harm. And we certainly do feel a bit jostled around. But mostly we feel released and saved, released from the captivity of our former lives and now launched, peacefully and with grace we hope, into a new life with new fellow travelers. We will see.

About the only funny thing that happened was in that restaurant in Ohio, where the waitress started by asking whether we wanted separate checks. We both just laughed. But of course, she probably sees few gay couples out for dinner. It’s just another sign of how hidden we are in culture even when we think we are being outrageously out. Marriage equality took a leap this week with the addition of two new states to the roster—Rhode Island and Delaware. We hope someday culture will recognize two men sitting side by side rather than across from each other, each wearing wedding bands, as a married couple out for dinner.

*7 Easter (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97 Dominus regnavit; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)

©2013 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved