A Personal Take in the Aftermath of Robin Williams' Untimely Passing

My sister is bizarrely pissed off about Robin Williams’ death.  Or not so much about his death, as about people’s continuous recognition of it.  About twitter and facebook posts and blogs and newspaper articles.  She’s made several inappropriate angry posts herself admonishing others and telling them to “Stop It.” In her more articulate writing, she seems to be expressing the feeling that it’s too much.  That there’s nothing else on the news.  But her first comment that I noted was a reply to my daughter’s tweet within an hour or so of us hearing about it, saying, “just btw u and me: geez you'd think John Lennon was shot or something. I get it. I'm sad. Enough.”  This is problematic on many levels: a) who says Robin Williams wasn’t just as important as John Lennon?  Or you?  Or me? b) maybe it was enough for her, but we’d only just heard about it, and were just starting to grieve, which leads to c) why is her amount of grieving time the right amount, while others is too much?

A lovely shot of Robin Williams 

(photo courtesy of Entertainment Weekly)

This is even more inexplicable because my sister has stared into the abyss many times.  In recent years, she’s been taking medication that seems to help, and that she has said makes her life so much better.  That she doesn’t mentally relive mistakes of her youth or worry about others’ impressions of her nearly as much.  So I am wondering if the real reason she is so angry about people’s need to respond to Robin Williams’ suicide is that it comes too close.  If she looks at what happened here to an outrageously smart, talented, and funny man, (did I mention that my sister is outrageously smart, talented, and funny?) she might have to look a little more closely at herself as well?  Maybe things aren’t always so ducky and wrestling with the pain may just be a lifelong process?  At the fact that while it feels like the whole world is grieving over Robin Williams, who would do the same for her?  So it’s easier to be mad at the world than face her own self-perceived shortcomings.

An early shot of my sister (left) and me (right) and my brother (below)

(Photo courtesy of family archives)

I know I was mad at Philip Seymour Hoffman – and I struggled with the amount of attention surrounding his untimely and tragic death.  But then, I’m an alcoholic and drug addict.  An alcoholic and addict who’s been clean and sober for going on 22 years and who is terrified of what might happen if I have drink again.  Or do a line of cocaine.  So maybe it’s easier to shout at people to “Shut up!” than it is to look at yourself.  Maybe it’s easier to do most anything than look at yourself.  That’s kind of the point of all 12 Step Groups.

So I’m trying not to sit in judgment of my sister and her struggle.  Or of Robin Williams and his.  Or Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Or anyone else.  I think I’ll say “Enough” for now, and see if I can figure out what needs to change in me.  Just for today.

Honduras Mission Trip Musings

I just got back from Honduras.  I spent a week in the northwestern corner of the country in the state of Copan in the Andes mountains, helping to build homes for people who don’t have them.  Or much of anything else.  It was gorgeous country and I was doing meaningful work alongside three beloved colleagues and fourteen hard-working teens.  

Our group in front of the van we took to La Cumbre, in the township of Trinidad de Copan 

(photo courtesy of me - I'm on the far right)

I should be sharing stories and hope and inspiration and aspiration galore.  But about midway through the week, I got sick.  Horribly sick.  The kind of sick that you get from drinking the water or eating raw vegetables that haven’t been properly cleaned or doing something else stupid.  But I didn’t drink the water.  I didn’t eat anything improper.  I didn’t do anything stupid.  Except go to Honduras in the first place.

You see, that’s what I’m getting at.  I went on this glorious trip and yet, because of the physical pain of 24/7 nausea and achy joints and chronic diarrhea, I can barely remember the good stuff.  All I can do is complain.

It’s gotten me thinking: what if your life was like this all the time?  What if you didn’t have access to clean water or good doctors or medicine that can heal you in a week – because that’s probably all it will take for me to be back to normal.  And once I feel alright again, I’m sure that I will be positive about my overall Honduran experience.

But what about the Honduran experience for Hondurans?  The town of Trinidad where we stayed got a Water Treatment Facility in 2013.  (Thanks to a Presbyterian church in Alabama who sponsored it– did I mention how proud the trip made me to be a Presbyterian?  Lots of good work being done by people from our denomination all over the area.)  That’s LAST YEAR?!  Still, the Water Treatment Facility requires that all people in the area go to the plant to fill huge water bottles, jugs, or cans.  If I remember correctly, they fill 750 gallons a day.

The water for bathing and washing clothes and force flushing toilets when the water was turned off (which happened quite frequently) was not purified.  Electricity was also sporadic, off more often than on.  Hot water was pretty much non-existent.

As for medical care, well, there was the rare Health Clinic – one in the town of Trinidad that serviced a huge part of Copan – but no hospitals.  One doctor, no nurses.  No CVS on the corner.  No “health and beauty aids” section in the grocery store.  Actually, no grocery store.  And dentistry.  Oh, my gosh, I know Americans are obsessed about their teeth, but these people need some basic dental care.  It’s heartbreaking to see six year olds with more cavities than teeth.

So what I’m trying to say very poorly here is, I’m miserable for one week and have a hard time remembering the good things that happened.  What if you were miserable for your whole life?  All the time.  What if you constantly walked around with body aches and GI problems and nausea and there was never any relief?  What if when you got sick, you didn’t have what you need to get better?  What if when your child had a fever, there’s nothing you can do but hold him while he cries?  What if when your baby got dehydrated, there was no Pedialyte to give her, much less a refrigerator to put it inside because there was no electricity? 

No one should have to live like that.  We should do more as a church, as people of faith, as human beings, to insure that everyone has pure water, and decent homes with electricity, and access to health care.  Hands down.  And if it took me getting a bacterial infection or parasite or whatever the heck I’ll find out it is when the test results come back today to truly realize that, it’s actually a pretty small price to pay.

SCOTUS, Hobby Lobby, and the Loss of Religious Freedom in America

Like many people in our country, I am reeling from yesterday's Supreme Court decision to treat Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood as private individuals with the right to erroneously withhold affordable access to contraception from their employees based on their (HL and CW's) religious beliefs.  I say erroneously because their claim that said contraceptives cause abortions is patently false, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.  Yet these facts are apparently not pertinent to the case, nor is the fact that the very definition of religious freedom is that I don't have the right to impose my religion on you, nor do you have the right to impose yours on me.

I suppose should not have been surprised when this maddeningly conservative Court moved in this direction. Two weeks ago, I was scheduled to go to Albany, along with another clergy colleague and a young woman in my congregation who cares deeply about these issues, to speak with our respective senators about the Women's Equality Act.  The WEA is a 10 point plan proposed by NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo in his 2013 State of the State Address that covers a wide variety of issues vital to women, among them reproductive rights.  Even though this Act is overwhelming popular in statewide polls, it has struggled in the state legislature.  It recently passed the assembly, and we had hopes that it might get through the senate, but here's the rub: our senators refused to meet with us.  There were clergy and people of faith coming from all over the state on Wednesday, June 18th to speak with our senators and their staffers, and they unilaterally refused to see us.  They stated they already had heard from their constituents and knew how they were going to vote.  They then proceeded to vote separately the Monday before our previously scheduled meetings on three of the points but to ignore the rest.  So apparently religious freedom is only important if you are a conservative Christian in this state and in this country - and it is the freedom to impose your very narrow and particular brand of Christianity on others.

The Jesus I follow cared deeply about women, about their hearts, and minds, and bodies.  He healed women dealing with gynecological problems and brought women into the fold who were not of his Jewish faith.  But he never forced anyone to follow him, to believe in him, to live by his rules.  Rather he gave people the information they needed to make a decision, and then allowed them the free will to decide.  How a bunch of unelected old white men (that's right: not one female on the Court voted in favor of this 5-4 decision - Justice Breyer was the only male dissenting) can decide for women (and undeniably financially challenged women if they're working for Hobby Lobby, although it remains to be seen how far-reaching this decision will be) what type of contraception they may use is inconceivable, to steal a pun from my former seminary classmate who wrote an article on this topic for the Huffington Post.

All I can hope is that the fight against such rulings is swift and strong, and that we do not lose heart in the midst of it.  How the country I love and have been blessed to live in and minister in can head down such a treacherous path is a mystery to me.

What Makes Us Us?

I have several parishioners who are losing their minds.  I know that may not be the politically correct way to put it, but I can’t think of a more apt description.  They are mentally not who they were when I met them.  They’re forgetful or confused or angry or lost.  They are all in their eighties, although I know plenty of people that age or older who are fine.  I am troubled by the changes or even loss of personality in these people who have become so dear to me over the almost 11 years that I have known them.

There is one woman who is so afraid of what her memory loss means that she has pushed everyone in her family away.  She needs to be in control of everything – to the point that she wouldn't let them take her out to lunch on Mother’s Day but insisted that she follow her routine and have a sandwich at the kitchen table while they weren't allowed to vacuum or do anything that might make her home cleaner or more livable. 

There is another woman who is always delighted to have me visit, but is unable to carry on a conversation beyond expressing her delight that I am there.  We've had numerous fascinating talks over the years about the development of the local area in her lifetime and I had hoped to someday film or record her telling them, but she is no longer able to string coherent thoughts together, much less share them in any meaningful way.

Then there’s the sweetest gentleman who is also happy to see me, but wonders what method of transportation I took to get to him – train, bus, or plane – as he’s convinced he’s in his summer cabin three states away.

There are others in my congregation who are also struggling with memory issues; these are just three examples of people who once were vibrant and productive in the church, in their workplaces, in their family lives, who now are bare shadows of who they once were.  It really makes me wonder what it is that makes us who we are, what makes us us?  

We have lots of conversations in the church about the soul: who has one, who owns it, what happens to it when we die.  But I am wondering what happens to it while we’re alive.  If we are no longer able to remember who we are, are we ourselves?

This question has been raised in several ways, one of the most compelling of which was in the short-lived television show “Dollhouse.”  The crux of the philosophical debate in that fictional context was in the technological ability to strip an individual’s personality and save it to a hard drive, then download other personalities into the brain pan for corporate gain.  People in the show who've been “wiped” do have a vestigial personality, but it is simple and malleable.  One of the taglines for the show was “you can wipe away a memory, but can you wipe away a soul?”

Boyd (Harry Lennix) is Echo's (Eliza Dushku) handler, while

Topher (Fran Kranz) is the brilliant mind who makes stripping

hers possible. (Photo credit: IMDb)

What exactly is the soul?  If it is the essence of what makes us who we are, is what we remember important?  I first pondered this about 10 years ago as I watched the documentary “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.”  That Oscar-nominated film by Deborah Hoffman shows her struggle with the loss of relationship with her mother, Doris.  Not because she and her mother have had a falling out, but because Alzheimer’s takes Doris’s memory away.  She no longer recognizes Deborah, and even though Doris is mostly happy in her minimized condition, Deborah is – understandably – not.

I have no answer for these questions, only sadness.  As I watch person after person that I know become something not less but definitely other than what he or she has been to me, I wonder whether a long life without the connections that make that life meaningful is worth living.  Do I wish to exist beyond my ability to remember those I love and the experiences that have given my life purpose and direction?  All I know is that I will continue to love these people as they are now, as well as how they have been, in hopes that it is enough.

Cloning and Musings on the Question of Creation

I love the television show "Orphan Black."  I think it's a great deal of fun.  I love watching Tatiana Maslany playing Sarah and Alison and Cosima and Helena and so on.  I really love watching Tatiana Maslany playing Sarah pretending to be Alison or Cosima - or that time when she played Helena pretending to be Sarah pretending to be Beth - or last week's episode where Sarah was fending off an attack by Daniel but then he's killed and the stark utter terror in her face when a knife-carrying bloody Helena (who is, remember, also played by Tatiana Maslany) comes in and hugs her - it's crazy fun.

Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) confers with her best friend and

foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris) who also happens

to be one of my favorite characters on the show

(photo courtesy of Entertainment Weekly)

I'm not quite so crazy about the role the church plays in the storyline though.  The twins Sarah and Helena were given away by the woman who carried them in her womb, one to the church and one to the state.  Both symbols of authority are presented pretty badly in the tale, but I think the church gets the worse end of the deal.  I don't know how this woman selected the religious organization to which she gave baby Helena, but she couldn't have chosen more poorly.  The "church" leaders who raise the baby clone into adulthood see her existence as a slight against God and abuse her beyond belief.

However, even in the midst of the loudly stated blasphemy of her very presence, it seems pretty clear to me that Helena is a human being.  A crazy one.  But who wouldn't be if s/he were kept in an animal cage, beaten, brainwashed, and told that s/he had no value.  It is no wonder that she is a self-hating and "sister"-murdering creature.

In light of that very obvious point, it is hard to understand the number of characters who loathe her simply on principle.  It is as though they cannot see what is literally in front of their eyes.  That is that a human clone would first be a human being.  Notwithstanding how the gestation process began, whether initiated by science or sex, I fail to see how a person is not created by God simply because the process by which he or she began life was different.

Clones have identical copies of DNA.  

(photo courtesy of Professor Alfred Cuschieri, 

"Fertilization and the First Week of Life")

I do understand that as people we change or mutate or evolve through the process of fertilization and that cloning does not use a sperm and an egg but rather is life recreated from a single donor.  I can even understand that cloning may be problematic for a wide variety of ethical reasons. But the argument that "only God can create life" is a specious one.  Yes, only God can create life.  However, is not God creating the life that begins in a petri dish, goes through the process of artificial insemination, and is then born of a mother who carried that child to term?  How would a clone by definition be any less inspirited by God than any other type of life?  However the miracle of life begins it is no less a miracle.

"Frozen" and the Power of Sacrificial Love

I always struggle with the sacrificial part of Lent.  As I've mentioned in a prior post, sacrifice is not big on the Protestant roster of Lenten activity.  We don't give up anything as a group, not even meat on Friday, which is pretty standard for my Roman Catholic friends and colleagues.  I could joke that some of us give up going to church on Sundays until Easter comes, but that might hit a little too close to the bone.  So imagine my surprise when the biggest example of sacrificial love I've seen this season showed up in Disney's latest film "Frozen."

This movie was not at all what I was expecting it to be.  I had viewed clips from the movie.  I had watched the  character Elsa transform during showstopping song "Let It Go," and watched the Academy Award show where John Travolta mangled Idina Menzel's name as he introduced her singing the nominated song shortly before it won the Oscar.  I thought the movie was about Elsa becoming this strong independent woman, with no idea that she wasn't even the main character.

No, the primary protagonist is her little sister, Anna - a young girl that Elsa unwittingly injures when they both are young and then shuts out of her life and her heart after that.  Thus Anna grows up longing for love and willing to look anywhere for it.  Through a series of unfortunate events, Elsa once again harms Anna, this time perhaps unto death, as her heart is pierced by the frost that her sister spews from her hands like Spiderman's webs.

Anna is told that only an "act of true love" can cure her heart, and at once goes in search of True Love's Kiss as the remedy to her ill.  In the middle of a blinding snowstorm, the two sisters, a good-hearted ice purveyor, and an evil prince are searching for each other, and when the prince attempts to kills Elsa with his sword, Anna runs from True Love's Kiss as it's being offered by the iceman and sacrificially throws herself in front of her sister, saving Elsa's life, and also her own, in the Act of True Love necessary to heal her.

Photo Courtesy of Disney

I've been reading "Bread and Wine" this Lenten season, writings by various authors and theologians on the aspects of Lent, and just finished the section on "Invitation."  Invitation, according to this particular devotional, is all about sacrificing oneself - one's heart, mind, soul, self - to God's glory.  An idea that I am on board with in theory, but it turns out am less so in practice.  Kierkegaard, in one of the more palatable essays, differentiates between Christ's Admirers and His Followers.  "The admirer never makes any true sacrifices.  He always plays it safe," Kierkegaard admonishes, whereas the follower fulfills "Christ's requirement to die to the world and deny self."

Thomas a Kempis is even harder to take: "When you get to the point where for Christ's sake suffering becomes sweet, consider yourself fortunate, for you have found paradise on earth...(r)ealize that to know Christ you must lead a dying life.  The more you die to yourself, the more you will live unto God."

This just seems to be the opposite of the Protestant work ethic and good old American self-determination.  Everything in me balks at the need to suffer in order to love God, much less that my willingness to suffer determines how much I actually do.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer clarifies in stating, "Self-denial can never be defined as some profusion - be it ever so great - of individual acts of self-torment or of asceticism...(s)elf-denial means knowing only Christ, and no longer oneself. It means seeing only Christ, who goes ahead of us, and no longer the path that is too difficult for us.  Again, self-denial is saying only: He goes ahead of us; hold fast to Him."

How interesting it is to me that the most powerful example that I've connected with in this Lenten season is in the story of an animated character's sacrificial love for another animated character.  Anna, who is willing to give up her own life to save that of her sister - a sister who has not (at least overtly) shown the least bit of love in return.  Yet Anna emulates the Christ, giving up everything in order that Elsa might live.  Unknowingly, unwittingly, instinctively, she holds fast to love - and I would argue, thus to Christ.  That may be a story I can get behind.

Give It Up!

Protestants are not big on Ash Wednesday. Or at least, the Presbyterian tradition in which I was raised and now serve, has never done a whole lot with it.  Long Island, where I currently reside, is predominantly Roman Catholic and thus the religious rituals observed on this day in the liturgical calendar are variously embraced, maligned, or ignored by other local Christian congregations.  The latter is the most common within my own community, although my Presbyterian colleagues express any range of responses from theirs.

So while many in ministry work on this day, it is, like any Wednesday in the calendar year, a Sabbath day for me.  I decided many years ago to take Wednesdays as my holy day.  My day of rest.  And so here I am, at home, not "working," pondering what I'm going to give up this year.

Protestants are also not big on giving things up for Lent.  That whole sacrificial ethos is not one that we particularly care for.  A people of the empty cross, we'd rather celebrate the resurrection than go through the death, much less acknowledge pain/suffering/sacrifice or choose to go through any of our own accord.  The Good Friday service is one of the most beautiful and meaningful that we hold at Sweet Hollow, but also the least well-attended - some years we've barely made it into double digits not including the choir.

So giving up something.  Should it be something physical, tangible like sugar or meat?  Should it be a behavior like slothfulness?  Or should be an attitude like anger or fear?  Those things would all be choices that would be "good" for me - leading me to eat more healthily, work out more regularly, better manage my emotions, etc.  Perhaps should it be something that I will really miss, something that is truly sacrificial, like reading or playing Candy Crush?

I don't even like to write about these options.  I shudder when I think about putting those two words together: "Give" and "Up."  When I think of giving something up, it makes me anxious, no matter what it is - even if I know that it will have positive benefits.

Yet it's kind of interesting seeing those two words capitalized and separate.  Give and Up.  I DO like Giving things.  I enjoy giving gifts to my daughter, my friends, my parishioners, those in need.  I get a charge out of buying lunch for a colleague, or sending a C.A.R.E. package to Grace or one of her friends who are away at school, or participating in the Souper Bowl Challenge feeding hungry people in Huntington.  And the word "Up" implies God to me - the Presence that we instinctively look upward toward.

Perhaps what I could do for Lent this year is Give my day Up to God.  Every morning.  Start each day intentionally (and perhaps even with words and physical movement) giving it up to God.  It's probably impossible.  I'll probably fail mightily.  But it's an idea my Presbyterian soul could get behind.  One Day at a Time.  I may not even have to take Sundays off from it, like I did when I gave up meat a few years ago!