Ash Wednesday

Attended an Ash Wednesday service—I'm sitting at the computer with the little ash cross still marked on my forehead. Until this year, the church we attend had always had the custom of wiping the cross off when you went up to commune, because the Gospel reading for the service is the passage from the Sermon on the Mount about not showing off your piety to be seen of others. This year, they announced that we could wipe the cross off or keep it, according to our own discernment; they put out towels by the basin of holy water for people to use if they wanted. It looked to me like most people left after the service with their crosses still on their foreheads.

During the Eucharistic prayer that they like to use for Lent (there's a variety to choose from), there's a passage about "God of our fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." These days, I usually hear that read as "God of our fathers and mothers," or "God of our forebears," and then sometimes the priest will start plugging in the names of wives: "God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and..." And then things get tricky. "Jacob, Leah, and Rachel," is how I seem to remember hearing it done. (One year I heard a priest take an entirely different tack: "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; God of Deborah, Ruth, and Mary.")

Last year, I was teasing the priest here, who adds the names of the wives, by daring her to add the concubines as well. So she did, much to my surprise. All through Lent last year, she read, "God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah; God of Isaac and Rebekah; God of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah." That's one name short of being able to constitute a new Quorum of the Twelve. She did it again tonight. Afterwards I told her, "You know, you don't need to keep doing the polygamous thing on my account." She laughed and said, "But it's so much fun—all those Hebrew women."

Tim DeChristopher

I've been hearing in the news about Tim DeChristopher. My prayers are with him. What he did was courageous or foolhardy or some combination of the two. But he was fighting the good fight. And now he's suffering the legal consequences, which is the risk you take on when you undertake civil disobedience.

Comparing him to Jesus sounds unbearably pretentious. But the comparison is perfectly valid, and not really all that aggrandizing, if it's understood that lots of people have performed this kind of Christlike action—disrupting the powers of this world in some small but dramatic way (you remember that incident with the moneychangers, yes?) and then being crushed by those same powers as the price of their witness.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to see people go to prison for criminal negligence in the Deepwater Horizon spill, or the housing crash, not to mention the architects of the last administration's policies on torture.

There are times when the conspiratorial populism of the Book of Mormon speaks to me, and this is one of them.

Those Gadianton robbers had filled the judgment seats,
having usurped the power and authority of the land,
condemning the righteous because of their righteousness,
letting the wicked go unpunished because of their money—
to be held in office at the head of government,
that they might get gain,
and do according to their own wills.
(Helaman 7:4-5)

Taize service: Christ the Living Water

I'm back from the first-Friday Taize service. I chose as the theme for this month's service "Christ, the Living Water." In addition to the usual icons and candles, the focus of meditation included a little fountain Hugo bought for me to have running near my desk as I work on my dissertation.

Here are the readings and intercessions I prepared.

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PSALM 63

O God, my God, how eagerly I watch for you!
My soul thirsts for you,
my body is weak for want of you,
as in a dry, barren land without water.

Your loving-kindness is better than life itself!
I will sing your praise.
I will bless you as long as I live.
I will call on your name with uplifted hands.

As I lie in my bed, you are the focus of my thoughts.
Late into the night, I lie awake thinking of you.
For you have been my help:
I rejoice under the shadow of your wings.

My soul clings to you.
Your strong hand holds me close.
Keep me safe! Let me live without fear
of those who would do me harm.

************

ISAIAH 35: 4-7

Say to those whose hearts are sinking,
“Be strong! Do not be afraid!
Here is your God!
God is coming to administer justice.
God is coming to rescue you.”

Then darkened eyes will see.
Closed ears will hear.
Enfeebled legs will leap like the gazelle.
Muted tongues will sing for joy.

Fountains will gush forth in the wasteland.
Streams will flow in the desert.
The burning sands will be transformed into a pool;
the parched ground, into springs of water.
The arid habitat of jackals will become a marsh.
Desert grasses will give way to reeds and rushes.

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JOHN 4: 6-11, 13-14

As Jesus rested by the well,
a Samaritan woman came to draw water.
Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”

The woman replied,
“How is it that you, a Jew,
are asking me, a Samaritan, for a drink?”
(She said this because Jews would not use vessels
that Samaritans had used.)

Jesus answered,
“If you knew who I am,
you would have asked me for a drink,
and I would have given you living water.”

The woman said,
“You have no bucket, and the well is deep.
Where do you get this living water?”

Jesus said,
“Water from this well
will quench your thirst for a time.
But the water I give
will quench your thirst forever.”

************

INTERCESSIONS

Jesus Christ—you are the source of living water.
You alone can satisfy our souls’ thirst.

Refresh all who are weary, sad, or suffering.
Immerse them in your loving-kindness.
Wipe away all tears.

Rain down gifts of grace on every person.
Nourish them in their needs.
Cultivate their possibilities.

Teach us to love others as you love us.
Make compassion well up in us like an overflowing fountain.

Make all that is barren, fruitful.
Make all that has been laid waste, flourish.

Make justice flow like a river.
Sweep away prejudice and oppression as with a flood.

Fill the earth with knowledge of your goodness
like water fills the seas.

A prayer of thanks

I learned tonight that a friend of mine—a fellow student in my graduate program—has been offered, and has accepted, a faculty position at an institution in another state. In a terrible job market, it's very, very good news for her. She's going to make a fine scholar and teacher.

I express gratitude for this opportunity for her, and I pray that all will go well as she finishes her dissertation, prepares to move, and settles into her new career. I'm thankful for the friendship we've had during our time together in the program, and I'm going to miss her when she's gone, though I hope we'll be able to collaborate in ways as colleagues in the same field.

Protests in the Arab world

So much could still go wrong, and yet it's so hopeful to see the democratic protests that have been springing up across the Arab world. God of justice, Liberator of the oppressed, be with them.

That law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind and is justifiable before me. (D&C 98:5)

Laws and [a] constitution of the people . . . should be maintained for the rights and protection of all fliesh, according to just and holy principles. (D&C 101:77)

Post-mortem for a funeral

Live together in such love
that you weep for the loss of those who die.
(D&C 42:45)

I'm nearly 40 years old, and I have no experience with funerals. Until attending my mother's funeral this last weekend, I can remember attending one other funeral—that of a teenaged peer from one of my wards. I didn't attend the funerals for any of the three grandparents I've lost so far. I've been to a handful of memorial services, but never a viewing or a graveside service.

I found the viewing disconcerting. I had gone in wanting to touch the body. But then when I saw her, she looked like a wax doll—like something you'd see in Madame Tussauds. I presume that the viewing is supposed to help reconcile us to her death by giving us an image of her in peaceful repose, but I found the artificiality of it alienating. I couldn't touch her. All I could keep thinking was: This is a wax shell pumped full of formaldehyde.

On the other hand, I suppose I would rather have had that last sight of her than a closed casked without a viewing.

Once they closed the casket, she was gone for me psychologically. The casket became a sign standing in for her; I wasn't thinking of it as a container with her inside. When it came time for me to help carry the casket to the hearse, I just thought of it as carrying the casket. It didn't dawn on me until the next day, as we were revisiting the burial site, that I was actually carrying her body. And it didn't dawn on me until even later that night that as I was carrying the casket, I was positioned right by her head. Again, I find this all alienating. I was inches away from her face, but I had no consciousness of her being there.

The funeral was... I don't know what adjective to use. Nice? People spoke well. It was good to hear takes on her life that are less tragic than mine. I'd been gloomily anticipating the "prettification" of her life—the same process that turns church history into hagiography. But I respect the representation- and meaning-making that was done there.

A theological reflection that rolled around my head during the weekend: If we take seriously the statement that "the spirit and the body are the soul" (D&C 88:15), then my mother's disembodied spirit (assuming it exists, which is my operating assumption) is no more fully and truly her than her inanimate body is. We use the idea of the immortal spirit to tell ourselves that the dead continue as we knew them. But it seems to me that our doctrine actually works against that idea. The same sense of false or incomplete identity I had when I looked at her body—this isn't really her—I should also have if I were able to see her spirit. Her spirit isn't really her, because it's missing the body, just as her body isn't really her because it's missing the spirit. What reason do I have to think that I would even recognize her spirit if I encountered it? Why would it look like her body? Why would it have her personality? It doesn't have her genes. It doesn't have her brain.

More alienation.

Alma 40 tells me that my mother has gone home to the God who gave her life. I want that to be true. I want her to be in a state of rest, as that passage says. But D&C 88 and 138 tell me that she's in a profound dissociative state. Her soul has been broken in two. And now she waits to be fixed—restored. "For the dead had looked upon the long absence of their spirits from their bodies as a bondage" (D&C 138:50).

I believe that ensoulment is embodiment—I'm firmly decided on that point. Which I guess means that I also have to hope for a physical resurrection if I want to hope for the immortality of my mother's soul. I'm not really thrilled about that: physical resurrection is so problematic, philosophically. I'd prefer to be much more agnostic and noncomittal about the afterlife—just trust that we're in God's hands. But that's not going to be enough to let me maintain my beliefs and hopes consistently. Bodily resurrection it is, I guess. Not the most enthusiastic profession of faith.

I'm tired. And I'm not in the right emotional state to be getting philosophical about these subjects.

Music

I fly out to Utah tomorrow for my mother's funeral.

Music has long been an important part of my spirituality: the song of the heart really has been a major form of prayer for me, as the scripture says. Ever since I was young, I've been composing—really amateur stuff, since I'm mostly self-taught as a musician. Mostly religious songs. Won an Honorable Mention or two in the New Era music contest, actually, in my young teens. Between 1997 and 2004, I did quite a bit of composing for the guitar, which was important to me as a way to keep engaging with texts from LDS scripture after coming out.

I've composed hardly anything since I've been in graduate school, until just recently. I'm posting here two things I've composed in the past couple of months, as a way to cope with my mother's decline and death. Just sheet music, I'm afraid (PDF files), no recordings—I don't know how to do that. The songs are inspired by the Taize style of music: a simple verse, often taken from scripture, sung over and over as a kind of meditation.

Take her home (Alma 40:11-12) - PDF
We shall declare (D&C 133:52-53) - PDF