The Dance

            Years ago when I was young and fresh in ministry, full of galloping hope and energy, I went to a continuing education conference in San Anselmo California at our PCUSA seminary there.  The title of the conference was “Companions on the Inner Way.” The Episcopal priest Morton Kelsey led it.  He was marvelous, as I recall, but since I had already read every word he ever wrote there were not a lot of surprises.  There was, however, the wonderful sweet recognition of remembered insights and there was the loveliness of his spirit that filled the room with a winsome light. 

            There was also the powerful presence of his wife.  In those days as a young woman in ministry, one of the few I knew, I relished every experience with a strong and self-assured older woman. I was anything but strong and self-assured then, although those who knew me at that time remember me differently. Memory is a wily thing.

            There was another speaker there as well.  I cannot remember his name or what exactly he was speaking about.  Did I go to a workshop of some sort?  Was he a worship leader? Was he a pastor?  I don’t recall, but he told two stories that have stayed with me for nearly thirty years. I beg his indulgence, whoever he is, if the details have gotten a little muddled over the years.  Still the power of their grace is as clear and pure in my mind today as that startling day I first heard them. I’ll tell you one now, the other in my next post.

            The speaker had, over the summer, attended the wedding of his cousin.  The bride and groom planned every aspect of their day together…the service, their guest lists, each canapé and colored ribbon.  It was to be a witness to their life, a well-planned partnerships filled with family, friends and laughter.  Everything went off without a hitch. The ‘I do’s got done.  The veil flipped like a cloud.  The bride blushed.  The congregation applauded.

            At the reception, he and a group of his friends from school sat at a table reminiscing about letter jackets and school papers and nights at the drive in.  A longhaired disc jockey played swoony tunes and raucous rumbas as well as some English Invasion 60’s rock.  People danced on the slick parquet dance floor.  He was having a fine time.

            Shortly, he noticed a man in a wheel chair whom he did not know.  He was in his fifties perhaps.  It was hard to tell.  Pain and immobility age a person.  The man in the chair wheeled himself to the dance floor alone, fine arm muscles pulled against his shirt.  For sometime he struggled to get his chair over the tall lip to the floor.  He backed up and tried to crash up.  He wheeled sideways and tried to sneak up. Finally, in a do or die moment, he crested the hurdle and wheeled himself to one side of the floor.  There, carefully out of the way, he moved his chair with the music.  Switching arms, one turning a wheel, the other lifted around an imagined waist, he danced.  Tune after tune, eyes closed, head lifted.

            One of the young women at my speaker’s table couldn’t take her eyes from him.  She began to have trouble following the conversation at the table.  “No thank you.  I’ve had plenty,” she responded to a question like, “What time did you get in last night?” The conversation went on around her.  When one of the young couples got up to dance, the woman leapt from her seat and went to the man dancing in the wheel chair.

            “May I have this dance?” she asked him, wondering how in the world to proceed.

            “It would be my honor,” he said, reaching for her hands.  And they danced together until the wee hours, swaying and dipping, even managing a twirl or two.  Just with his hands he led her all around the floor.  They were in sync.  They chatted a little, but not much, each intent on the music and the movement.

            At the conclusion of the last song of the evening, he took her hand and kissed it lightly.  “You have done me a great kindness,” he said to her.  “Until tonight I have not danced in 20 years.  I used to be a professional ballroom dancer.  My wife was my partner and vice versa.  There was an accident coming home from a competition.  My wife was killed and I was paralyzed. You have brought me joy and healing tonight.  Thank you.”

            “My pleasure,” the woman said as he turned his chair and headed for the door.  She went back to the table with her friends who were gathering up their things.

            “Did you know him?” one asked.

            “No, not really,” she said.  “He was just an exquisite dancer.”  The young men looked at her puzzled, they with their rippled muscles and their seamless hair. 

            “That was nice of you,” one said.  But she did not hear, did not notice.  She was dancing with her arms.

            When I heard that story, I felt a wash of Spirit over me, like warm grey seawater, like an envelope, like a cloud.  When I heard that story I felt a glow of Spirit and the great power of kindness to change life dawned on me.

            Around the first of the year, I was praying for our church and asking for guidance about where we should go and how we should set our goals and priorities for the year.  Secretly, of course, I was hoping that God would say, “Don’t worry about it.  Just keep doing what you are doing.  I’ve got you covered.” But that was not the reassuring answer that came to me.

            As I prayed I felt God say, “Genie, this is to be the year of kindness. I want my people to learn to be kind.” I’m thinking, well, we aren’t mean as snakes to begin with. Most of the time.  God said, simply, “Let the Spirit make you kind.” That was it. “Let the Spirit make you kind.”

            As I thought about that call to kindness, I thought of the woman and the wheelchair dancer.  Let the Spirit, wind, Breath, make you kind.  After all, what is kindness but making space for the other and giving complete attention? It is not possible to be kind on the fly.  Kindness doesn’t require much but it does require that we notice, that we are attentive, that we humanize the others in our world rather than adding to the sum total of dehumanizing, fragmented, isolation that there is already plenty of around us.

            The beauty of the story of the two dancers is not just that she noticed the man’s struggle and felt sorry for him.  A quick assist with the lip of the dance floor would have taken care of that.  The beauty is that these two people noticed each other and attended to each other. When she offered her hand he took it.  When she looked uncertain, he gave her a twirl. I suppose they never met again, but each, no doubt, carried the kindness with them into whatever life might be. 

            I wonder sometimes, as I stumble through my life, left footed both, how many dances of kindness have escaped me unnoticed, past like an ocean ripple, dissolved in the murky chaos of ordinariness.  But I don’t stay there long, in that melancholy over the shoulder glance of a place.  Rather I try once more to give attention to the dancing all around me, and the dancer waiting to be released in me still.

            By reading this post you have noticed my hampered dance.  You have seen me bang up against the lip and find my little corner of the floor.  You have extended your hand to mine.  You have done me a great kindness.  Thank you. I’d love to hear your story/dances, too.

  

A Day with Spaces

     As I sit on the warm ceramic lounge chair, the dissonant yet soothing sounds of Indian flute in the background, and stare at the pea soup fog clipped only minimally in two by the bow of the ship, I thank God for a day with spaces.

      I did not realized how long it has been since I had an unscripted moment, much less several, much less a ‘sea day’ day.  Muscles knotted, mind in a twist, I have plugged through these last months on sheer determination.  The weekly trips to Stanford Medical, the tests, the clues, the partial answers combined with the daily-ness of congregational life program my every moment.  Not today.  Today is a day with spaces. And today the spa is running specials and I have signed up: a hot stone aromatherapy massage.  This is how angels spend their afternoons.  This is grace in a cubicle. 

     I have never been much of a chatter when getting a message.  I usually just vacate, evaporate, slowing dial back the notches until I find an old after hours test panel on the screen of my mind.  This is a rare thing.  I have always thought too much.

     I remember when I was living in Denver reading an article in the newspaper about the terrible time the Hmong refugees were having.  Churches all over the area sponsored families, built them small neat homes with sand colored wall-to-wall carpeting that the Hmong covered with real sand and upon which they lay their pallets in rows in the living rooms.  Bedrooms were clean swept and empty. Strangely, strong and apparently healthy young Hmong men where going to sleep at night and dying quietly.  No one could figure out the cause. Doctors from the University of Denver scratched their chins, in print, and encouraged the people to come in for check ups.  They came in, got clean bills of health and went home and died. When asked what they thought was happening, the Hmong women were quite sure of the cause.  Evil Spirits.  Processed food.  And thinking too much. Ah.  That will do it every time.

     When Ejuane ushered me into my little massage room, I willed myself to relax.  What does that feel like?  I wracked my brain and came up with nothing.  Ah yes, that’s it.  It feels like nothing, nothing left undone, nothing running rampant in my body or my congregation, just lovely for a limited and safe space, nothing.  It feels like a day with spaces.

     Ejuane is a quiet young woman, speaking only to ask a question about pressure or scent.  At one point, massage paused and my face wrapped in damp towels tucked with lavender, I asked her where she was from.  South Africa, an Afrikaner.  She told me that her parents had founded the Global Day of Prayer when she was a baby when South Africa was so in need of prayer.  I told her that everyone I had ever met from her country was a true beautiful spirit.

     “Who have you met?” she asked.

     “Well,” I said.  “Desmond Tutu.”  Several years ago when I was a pastor in Birmingham Alabama I was invited to a small private luncheon with Archbishop Tutu and the South African ambassador to the United States.  The Archbishop graciously answered questions for more than an hour.  I don’t remember the context but I remember asking him if he thought there was any hope.  He looked so startled.  “Of course.  We are Christians.  We have nothing but hope,” he replied.  Later the Ambassador turned to me over desert and said, “Tell me, pastor, about your struggle.”  She asked with such sincerity, such interest, as if there were no difference between her struggles and her country’s struggles and my own as a child of the segregated south and a woman in a man’s profession.  There was an exquisite genuineness in her, so I told her, memories, slights, humiliations and triumphs.

     “Oh yes,” Ejuane said.  “I have heard of him.”

     “There is another I have met,” I said.  “A beautiful bird of a woman name Muriel. She was a part of the struggle with apartheid. She is the most forgiving person I have ever known.”

     “South Africans have to be,” Ejuane said.

     Really?  Muriel once told the story of her father, bent and torn by apartheid’s horrors, telling her that if he got to heaven and there was even one white person there he would spit in God’s eye and go gladly to hell.  She told the story of her arrest at the seminary where she taught.  The Afrikaner policemen stormed up to the school while the faculty was sitting under a shade tree having tea, machine guns pointing, fingers itchy. 

     “We have a list of terrorists to arrest,” they said. 

     “Well, sir,” the seminary president said, “There is no need for guns.  Get me your list and I will get the people you want for you. Now please, sit down for tea while I find them.”  The soldier had the decency to look abashed as he handed the list to the president and a member of the faculty handed him tea and a biscuit on a china cup and saucer. 

     Muriel was one of those arrested that day for attending a peaceful protest rally the day before.  As she and her companions were loaded into the truck and driven away, she looked through the back window and saw her colleagues standing, holding hands and singing hymns: How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace, I Greet Thee Who My Sure Redeemer Art.

     Later, or maybe before, I can’t recall, Muriel and a friend were at the train station coming home from holiday.  They had a cart piled with all of their luggage and the gifts they were bringing home. Muriel saw a young Afrikaner soldier, barely more than a boy, struggling with heavy gear.  There were no more carts.  She went up to the young man, a chargeable offense in those days.  “You may share our cart if you like,” she said.  He could have hit her.  He could have arrested her.  He could have shot her with no repercussions.  But he just looked at her, threw his things on the cart and wheeled it to the curb.  Then he disappeared.  Did he say thank you?  Did he look the woman in the eye?  Did he see her?  I wonder.

     Her friend was aghast.  “Why did you do that?  Are you crazy?  Why do you help the oppressor?” 

     “Because he is a human being,” Muriel said.  “He is someone’s son.  Someone’s brother.  Maybe someone’s husband or father.  I have to decide everyday whether to hate or to forgive.  I choose to forgive.”

      Ejuane, my masseuse interrupted these memories and said,  “The troubles were a long time ago.  Soon the old ones will forget and everything will be ok.”

     “We may be forgotten,” I thought but did not say.  “But we will not forget.  If we forget, we will forget the best of us, whether in South Africa or south Alabama.  If we forget the struggle, then we do not know who we are and we can never be better than we are. Whether it is Mandela on Robin Island or James Meredith with a walking stick and a Bible his only possessions as he tried to prove a black man could walk the highways of Mississippi in the open in 1964, if we forget then forgiveness is hollow and has no meaning.

     But if we remember

             in those precious few days of our lives where there are spaces for all that is noble and fine and forgiving,

            in the moments of small triumph and fleeting loss

            in those moments of sweet clarity and breathtaking compassion

if we remember

            those who sang the songs of freedom and made a space for our today, then the spaces in our days will be filled with graceful dips and sways and we will be that crowning glorious thing that is a truly human being.

     As the hot stones glide along my ragged back, I give thanks for the young woman who touches me so expertly, for the fact that ‘the troubles’ are only history to her, and for the spaces of this day.

MoMA

       The heavy rain clouds that hung low on the city buttoned up their bottoms sometime during the night.  The lights of Time Square flashed red, gold and blue: “Nuns Rock, The Book of Mormon, Best Musical of the Century. Samsung.  Corona Beer.  Disney.” All flashing, all calling to me. There is nothing in the world like Manhattan and there we were with only one full day to spend. 

      We woke late after a long night.  My husband, mother and I had gone to see Pricilla Queen of the Desert the night before.  It was playing in the old Palace Theater, I think, with its ornate gilded boxes and tiny flip up seats.  Pricilla is the story of three drag queens who buy a bus (Pricilla) and head to the Australian outback to play a gig at a casino run by the ex wife of one of the men and, unbeknownst to the others, to see his son.  I had expected fun…feather boas, platform shoes and Gloria Gaynor; but I had not expected the poignant moments, the sweet reality that the actors gave their characters.  I laughed and boogied, but I wiped more than one tear as well. 

      Before the show we went for dinner at The View restaurant atop the Marriot Marquis Times Square where we watched the sunset light the tall buildings as they slide softly past us, all full of stories. 

When we returned to our room after the show, I drank ginger ale from a Pricilla Queen of the Desert sippie cup and read the bios of every actor we had seen.  It was the final tags of those bios that touched me.  After the list of credits…the Broadway, the Off, the regional, the cruise ships…each actor had a word or two for someone.  Some thanked God.  Some thanked their mothers, their partners, their acting coaches.  Some sent kisses to their babies. One just said, “Oh Wow!”  My favorite. My sentiments exactly.  Just “Oh Wow!”

     Robbie and I decided that we wanted most to go to the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA.  Robbie grew up on Long Island in the 50’s and 60’s.  His father took the train into Manhattan each day to work as an auditor for the state of New York while Robbie rode the bus or thumbed a ride to St. Dominick’s High School in Oyster Bay.  When he could, Robbie would sneak into the city after school, take the subway to Chinatown and buy fireworks that he hid under his letter jacket and sold at jacked up prices to all his friends back in Bethpage.  Chinatown he knew and even a little of Harlem where he had worked summers for the Cohen brothers installing windows in the 6^th floor walk-ups and the well cared for brownstones, but he had never been to MoMA and always wanted to go.

      At first I resisted.  Not a fan of Picasso and Pollack, I wanted to go to the Met and pour for hours over the tiniest of antiquities, reliquaries and tiny ivory crosses, fading icons that still pulse with energy, Hittite household gods…bronze and nearly shapeless like the ones Rachel stole from her father and hid under her skirts as she and Jacob fled after robbing Laban blind.  But when we woke late and I realized that Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Monet’s ‘Water Lily” panels hung there, I was ready to go.

     We stopped for lunch at the Stage Deli.  It was recommended to us by a street vendor whose round, dark, dreadlock framed face was full of sparkle as she pointed us toward her favorite eatery.  Our waitress, maybe her name was Velma, was short and solid.  Her old SAS shoes, run over on one side, had clearly schlepped decades of matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches.  We gave her the opportunity again.  She talked about her love for New York, how she would never leave it. 

     When she learned we were from California, she asked us about the Michael Jackson doctor’s trial.  “I watched it for seven hours yesterday,” she said.  “Day off, you know.  I think he did something.  I just don’t know what.” 

     “Well,” I said.  “He either did something or should have, I guess.” 

     “Yeah,” she said, pointing a twisted finger at me.  “That’s it.  He should have.”

      After lunch we walked the few blocks to MoMA.  It is a sleek building with fencing covered with signs and drawings from people who visited the museum.  “I told you I’d come, Mom,” one of them read. Others had line drawings of dragons and daisies and short notes of awe and immortality.

I am always surprised, although I don’t know why, at how great works of art affect me.  They make me cry.  Every single time.  Especially Van Gogh. 

     The first time I really remember this was on sabbatical in Zurich. It was there that I saw one of his ‘Sunflowers.’ I just stood in front of that small canvass and cried.  That was when I first discovered that Van Gogh was my favorite, right then on a jet-lagged Thursday in a gray Swiss summer.  The energy nearly knocked me off my feet, like lightening bolts, like stand-your-hair-up-straight sheet lightening. I knew that there was something powerful and transcendent at the heart of the universe when I looked at that picture.  No, I always knew that.  I don’t remember a time before knowing that. When I saw “Sunflowers” I felt it, an internal goose bump of the soul. 

      It was the same with ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Olive Trees’ and Monet’s ‘Agapanthus.’ And so I cried.

     After we made our way through the exhibit, Robbie and I went to the café for tea and a cookie.  In line an older woman turned back to speak to us.  “Did you see the de Kooning exhibit?” she asked as if she could not believe what she had just seen. 

     “No,” I said.  “We’ve been up on the fourth floor.  I wanted to see Monet and van Gogh.”

     “Good,” she said with unexpected force.  “The one I just saw was awful.  I don’t get it.  What was the point?  I liked him in the beginning but boy, later, sheesh!  Don’t go. It was just awful.”

     By this time we were approaching the counter to order.  “Listen,” she said. “I’m a member here.  Stay with me and you’ll get a discount.”  So we sat with her for a bit. 

     “I’m 87 years old,” she said “and I still walk with no cane.”  She winked.  “And I’m spending all my money.  Who cares?  My kids don’t need anything and I’m having the time of my life.” For years she worked as a school psychologist on Long Island. One day she came home and told her husband she had just bought an apartment in Chelsea for $42,000. 

     “Get rid of it,” he said.  But she wouldn’t.  Now she lives there alone.  “It is a wonderful building,” she said.  “It is my family.  I can walk anywhere or take the bus.  I go to concerts at Julliard every week.  I come here and learn things every time. I just love my life.”

     Every part of her was alive, inquisitive, open, and ready.  When I looked at her it was like lightening, stand-your-hair-up sheet lightening. Like Sunflowers, like Starry Night, like tiny reliquaries and simple bronze gods; the woman at MoMA was a force.

     As we walked back to our hotel, I tried to memorize her face.  She was wiry and gray like a city pigeon.  Her skin was mapped and soft.  Her eyes were startling and full of fire.  Maybe they had once been the color of an iris in full bloom.

     “That is what I want,” I thought to myself.  “A well mapped face, full of life, waking each day thirsty for more.  That is what I want, to walk without a cane, to say de Kooning stinks, to eat a mushroom tart and tell strangers my stories.  That is what I want: to be just such a work of art.”