texturedabyss

[texturedabyss]

2015 Pride Sermon, New York

Listen: http://stmarksbowery.org/welcome/sermons/pride-2015/

Good Morning and Happy Pride! As I’m guessing you already know, Friday morning the Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage in all the fifty states.  On Friday I was also writing this sermon, and I started to think about all of you who have been married at St. Mark’s since 2011. We have been so lucky to celebrate your weddings here at St. Marks. 

Scanning through my rainbow filled Facebook feed Friday I saw many of your wedding pictures, your thoughts, and reflections. I was especially touched by my colleague Rev. Ashley Harness’ reflections. She affirmed that throughout time, regardless of their legality, our love, commitments, and families have ALWAYS been real and sacred.

My hope is that this protection under the law will expand to provide protections to other aspects of our lives. Protections urgently needed by those fearing detention, deportation, assault and discrimination.

Today crowds of people will line the street to celebrate the lives of transgender, lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer, same gender loving, non-gender conforming people. And like the crowds gathering along 5th Ave. today, our Gospel text begin with a crowd at the sea.

The Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus is crossing over the sea by boat. A dense crowd has gathered at the shore awaiting his arrival. Jesus, no doubt tired after a long morning, leaves the boat to join the crowd. Jesus begins to walk following a man who’s daughter is sick, and the dense crowd follows after. Each person has shown up for their own reasons. Perhaps they heard stories about Jesus and came to see a spectacle. Maybe their friend dragged them there. Maybe they want some entertainment. Or maybe they want to be healed.

One woman in the crowd has come with only one intention. She believes that touching Jesus will heal her. 12 years have passed since her period started and refused to end. Her blood, in ancient Israel, would make her ritually unclean and literally untouchable. Her bleeding has made her a social outcast. Spending all the money at her disposal to find a cure - the condition worsens. She is desperate. Desperate enough to take a chance.

The untouchable woman takes a look at the crowd. It has been 12 years since anyone, but doctors, have touched her and now in desperation she breaks taboo. Seeing the back of Jesus’ head in the distance she pushes her body into the crowd. Touching, pushing, leaning into others for support she moves father and deeper in. As she gets closer she thinks, “If I can just touch his clothes I will be healed!” She doesn’t need Jesus’ time. She doesn’t speak to him, or make a request. She never begs or try’s to prove her worth. She reaches an arm through two others in the crowd, her finger grazing his coat.

Two sensations hit her at once the texture of the fabric and the dissolution of pain. Immediately her bleeding stops. She stand still as the crowd moves forward and around her.

In the next second the crowd comes to a halt. Jesus turns around looking a little frantic. “Who touched me?” he asks the crowd. A couple men respond in confusion. “What do you mean? Do you see this crowd?”

Overhearing this, the woman’s hands began to shake. She walks forward and the crowd opens making a way for her. Upon seeing Jesus she is no longer able to stand. She feels the years of her suffering lift as word after word falls from her mouth. She tells him and the crowd her whole truth. They listen. When she is finished, Jesus calls her family. “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be well.” (pause)

I’d like to imagine that when Jesus leaves, the crowd attends to this woman. Someone puts their arm around her until she’s finished trembling. Another person invites her over for dinner and arranges for her to take a ritual bath. I like to think that witnessing this healing has turned this crowd into a community. In this crowd-turned-community we meet a woman has the courage to seek out her own healing. She feels safe enough to transgress taboo, act, and heal herself. In this crowd-turned-community the woman can tell her whole truth even though she is afraid and trembling.

Have you ever been in a group of people or space like that?

During the summer of 2011, I lived on the Nun Farm. This is not a place were nuns are grown, but rather a farm run by Episcopal nuns called The Community of the Holy Spirit. Many of you have visited the farm and volunteered on their work days. That summer, a group of us joined the nuns to work and pray. We were a small group that summer, but many of us were bi, lesbian, or queer. And two of the women on the farm had been married in Vermont the month before. That June, New York passed The Marriage Equality Act. While most of us good liberals knew that there were more life threating causes our communities should be organizing around, We were moved by how the world was changing and how our lives were touched in unexpected ways by this news.

Our Pride service on the farm closed with us moving from our chairs to stand in a circle. Holding onto each other’s hands. Sister Helena Marie led us in song:

How could anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less than beautiful? How could anyone ever tell you that you’re less than whole? How could anyone ever fail to notice your loving is a miracle? How deeply you’re connected to my soul.

We sing these words looking into each other’s eyes, we weep, and smile and hug. We know we are beautiful, we know we are whole, and we know that it’s a miracle that some of us are here at all. (Pause)

I love this song. I love that it is sweet and tender while simultaneously defiant. I love this song’s disbelief: “How could ANYONE EVER tell you that your anything less than beautiful.” And I love how it ends in a declaration of community: “How deeply you’re connected to my soul.” In that circle we were the woman from the gospel text, we had enough faith to heal ourselves, to see the pain of our past and still tell the whole truth about our present. We were also the crowd: witnessing to each others’ truth and acknowledging each other made whole. (pause)

When I returned from the farm I began to come to St. Mark’s. I found a bigger circle of people - both healed and healing. Where space was made for all kinds of bodies and all kinds of loves.  Where each week we returned, to be reminded of the dignity of others, while affirming our own. As St. Mark’s goes through a time of leadership transition I want to affirm the beauty I see in this community. 

We have created a space for people to be loved. We have created a space for people to find connection. We have created a space were people can seek out their own healing. (Pause)

There are complex things going on in our nation today. I have heard fears that in taking time to celebrate we will forget to do justice. After worshiping with St. Mark’s for the last 5 year, I am not worried that you we will stop working for justice. We are not a community that forgets people in prison. We do not forget people living under fear of deportation. We do not forget black and brown bodies slain by police and racist domestic terrorism. We will not forget the nine transwomen murder in the last 6 months of 2015. St. Mark’s is a community of people who do forget. We do not fail to act. In God there is a big enough space to hold all our conflicting emotions. As we mourn evil and combat injustice, let us also celebrate the good, the beautiful, and the sacred, finding joy in each other and the community of healing we’ve created here. (Pause)

When we stand in a circle to share the Eucharist I like to keep my eyes open. I take the time to look around the circle. I feel joy at seeing our loves expressed in this sacred place. It’s the small things that nurture my heart and help me get through the harder moments. You coming to church with your partner, her arm around you during the prayers. Eating wedding cake your mother made and drove here from Michigan. The depth I hear in your singing voice. The stories you tell me of how you survived your conservative past. It is standing in our circle before communion that I know we have fostered a healing space. When I look into your faces I encounter God. Let us not forget that living joyfully admits a violent world is – a radical act. Let us continue to create in each other - joy - as we gather in this space.

[texturedabyss]

I’ll Cover You, Pride Sermon 2016, New York

Listen: http://stmarksbowery.org/welcome/sermons/the-sixth-sunday-after-pentacost/

In 1967, Carter Heyward was a first year seminarian and worked at St. Luke’s hospital.

Walking from room to room visiting the sick she believed that God was a jealous God who wanted her to be alone and without human affection. Little did she know that she would become a mother of queer theology and one of the first  11 women to be ordained in the Episcopal church.

Over her years of study Heyward’s understanding of God grew and transformed.

1 John 4:7-8 says “Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

God was not a narcissist in the sky. Heyward discovered that We experience God in human relationships. And for Heyward, an out lesbian, she found God in the intimacy and affection of her lover and friends.

(Pause)

When Allison asked me to preach last week I wanted to say no. I wanted to say no because I was falling apart inside. On Tuesday morning after the Orlando shooting I ended up leaving work to take a personal day. I couldn’t stop reading the news, I knew I didn't want to cry in front of my straight coworkers, even though they are kind and supportive people. The shooting at Pulse made me feel vulnerable in an almost unbearable way. I walked briskly in Central Park. I called friends. I sat on a bench and cried.

I remember Heyward's story in the context of grief. In the context of having long conversations with queer friends these last two long weeks. I’ve found God in hugs from Layah and Stephanie at the Stonewall Vigil, I’ve found God in drinks and conversation with Spencer at Cubby Hole, I’ve found God in phone calls from CB and Rebecca when I was feeling alone.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the song “I’ll Cover You” from Rent keeps playing on repeat in my mind. Angel and Collins walk down an East Village street and sing to each other:

“Live in my house, I'll be your shelter Just pay me back With one thousand kisses Be my lover, I'll cover you

Just slip me on, I'll be your blanket Wherever, whatever I'll be your coat You'll be my king, and I'll be your castle No, you be my queen, and I'll be your moat

Oh lover, I’ll cover you.”

In the reprise of the song, the singing takes a mournful turn. Collins sings to Angel’s casket at her funeral. In turn, the community of friends fills in the empty duet. They sing to their mourning friend, “I’ll cover you.”

(Pause)

This image of covering, this experience of the divine in human love is found in today’s reading in 2nd Kings. The time has come for the prophet Elijah to ascend into heaven. Elisha will be left to continue God’s work. When Elijah ascends he leaves his cape, or mantle for Elisha to wear. Like the coat Angel buys Collins while they are walking in the East Village, the cape that kept Elijah safe from the cold will now keep Elisha warm. Elijah is gone, but his power stays to be used by Elisha.

I like to think of this cape, this covering, as the wisdom, protection, and power of the love of our friends, lovers and ancestors. “Oh lover, I’ll cover you.” While feeling painfully exposed, on the rollercoaster of grief, anger, and numbness - it is love that sustains me. (Pause)

These past couple days I've been thinking about how Stonewall was a riot. About how that riot covers us like the chorus singers singing to cover Collins at the memorial. Stonewall covers us in the fiercest of loves. As they screamed “enough” and responded to the violence inflicted on bodies and minds with self-defense. The power in this covering, like the mantel given to Elisha from Elijah, is the knowledge that we are worth defending.

You my loves are worthy of defending. You are worthy of love, affection, and covering. We are covered by the work of the past and the present: by Stonewall, by Cater Heyward, and by each other here at St. Mark’s. If you are feeling exposed, shake the dirt off your feet, and take cover! Because the time is here to become a covering for others. To scream “enough!” at the murder of black and brown transwomen, to scream “enough!” to police’s abuse and murder, to scream “enough!” to theologies that say we are anything less than beloved, sacred, and whole. Because you are beloved, and sacred, and whole.

There are so many fronts we can scream “enough” at.

Today we march with possibly the largest Pride Celebration New York has ever seen.

Who will you cover with this act of love? Who will you cover with the acts of love we so desperately need this next year?

[texturedabyss]

A kind conversation between 2 friends to nourish your post-election heart.

[texturedabyss]

♡

[texturedabyss]

First saw this sermon on facebook and then shared it with friends. I’ve never heard sex and the sacred described so profoundly. It feels so good to hear similar experiences on another person’s lips. 

Performed at Class Rage & Gold Chains Working Class Femmes Take The News! Full text available at: https://femminary.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/ungracious-saints/#more-158

[texturedabyss]

[texturedabyss]

Happy International Women’s Day! 

[texturedabyss]

Cartagena, Colombia

[texturedabyss]

[texturedabyss]

Boss Bitch

[texturedabyss]

Prayer For Quiet Confidence

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we will be saved, in quietness and confidence will be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

http://www.missionstclare.com/english/index.html

*Mural of St. Clare of Assisi at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

[texturedabyss]

My girlfriend posted this on facebook...so I took notes ;) 

[texturedabyss]

A Manageable Unknown: Artist Talk March 26th, 2013

Welcome to my strange experiment of an art show. In seminary we talk a lot about exegeting texts, for you non-bible folks out there, exegeting is a fancy way of describing the interpretation of a sacred text. During my first semester here, I realized that I wasn’t just exegeting texts, but that I was exegeting my life and that I viewed my life as a text…. my text was fragmented, it changed, it had inter-textu-alit-ies, a word we use when one Biblical passage references another passage, or when a motif or word is repeated across multiple texts…I was thinking about that with lives.

As I started to think of women’s bodies, and mainly my body, as a religious text I began to acknowledge the many layers of meaning held within its skin.

Looking at Cardboard Mary and Dishtowel Macrina I wonder if any of their lives inherent meaning is left for us? The recently published fiction book “The Testament of Mary” highlights the fact that all the information we have about her was written down because her son’s followers found useful. All we have left of Macrina is what her brother’s Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil found useful. I wonder if Mary and Macrina are anything, but literary motifs for someone else’s theology. And in a way this is what drew me to auto-biographical comics written and drawn by women. In comics women are exegeting themselves. Re-tracing and re-framing the past to tell the story they find useful. In her book Graphic Women, Hillary Chute asks “what does it mean for an author to literally reappear-in the form of a legible, drawn body on the page-at the site of her effacement?”

I guess I’ll try to answer her question for myself. I made the comic about shame for myself…in fact I had a compulsion to do so. Imagine me sitting at my desk drawing pictures for hours and filling picture of my own body with the word shame…in pencil and ink and brushes. This was anything, but cathartic. While I hope it might be cathartic for the reader, the experience was more about sitting, producing, and discovering things I thought about myself. I remember drawing the first frame where you see the narrator’s entire body with the silhouettes in front of her. I had drawn the elevator bar in, and when I looked I saw the image of crucifixion. The words at the top say she is not alone and the viewer’s gaze parallels the silhouettes’ gaze, and her pain is no longer invisible. I just sat there and wept.

Once it was done I showed it to some people, and it was interesting to see their responses. Some people kinda seemed horrified and werided out, which makes sense. Other people got teary and said that it had meant a lot to them - that they could understand the experience portrayed by the narrator. That meant a lot to me, it made it seem worth showing. After sharing it with a friend (Alexis), and she proposed I put it in Lampman Chapel to see what the religious space and the text say to each other.

In comics there is an emphasis of meaning making in the gutter, so the space between the frames, you the reader are having to make up or invent a connection or causation. So there is powerful content in what isn’t being shown, what isn’t being seen, what’s only being seen in the mind’s eye of the reader. I was curious if the larger gutter- between pages- was filled with the chapel what would that mean for the text. I don’t really know yet, so I’ll have to ask you all later.

Initially didn’t think of the emotional consequences of showing such a revealing piece, it didn’t hit me until I started designing the postcard for the event. I included a triptych with images that included my bare breasts and I worked on all day. Actually I worked on it all day in coffee shops in the east village after church. And it wasn’t till the end of that day I started to freak out. And was like “I can’t hand this to people. I can’t hand this to people at my church…or a professor…” and I realized “oh shit, people are going to come and they’re going to see all these images of my body … and inside my mind …” and it was like the shame of feeling shame.

In her book Saving Shame, Virginia Burrus points out that shame is one of those feelings that can be compounded by shame…you can feel ashamed about being ashamed. I think that both true about Christianity and queerness today. There is a passage where Paul says “He’s not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for he…” and in that way there’s a contemporary Christian songs I remember listening to on Christian radio in my Mom’s minivan when I was evangelical kid and it’s like “I’m not ashamed to let you know I want this part of me to show I’m not ashamed to speak the name of Jesus Christ.” (sung) (you can sing along if you want to…I see you know this song to) and you’re not really a very good Christian when your ashamed of being Christian. So then I have these experiences where I go out on internet dates--right?- (I know you do too) and it never ceases to be difficult to be like “hey, I’m gonna be a priest” on my internet date. And they’re like “oh-cool-ah-ya” and then for the rest of the date I’m like, “but I’m kinda cool you know, I’m gonna be a hot priest.” It’s also shameful to ashamed of being gay too. You’re not really a good gay if you’re ashamed of being gay. And I think that might be one interpretation of this story –that its ok.

But to be honest I really wanted to leave the story as open as possible, so the reader could read their own shame into it. The information I included as narration, whether about evangelicalism, queerness, or womanhood was not intended to have a direct link to the shame. In the first script there was no background information about the narrator, but I was challenged by the need to ground the narrator in specifics that would make you, the reader, care about her internal life. The second round had a drawings a calendar pages of all the possible event of the summer that could relate to the shame soup I found myself drowning in that summer morning. I did not want to reduce the shame to one source, or pretend to understand myself more than I actually did. While the calendar idea gave the narrator a thick intersectionality the feminist in me loved, I ended up axing the pages because all those details did not leave room for the reader to see themself in the text. Hillary Chute describes this this struggle over the ethics of testimony the “risk of representation.” For me the highest risk of representation was to express the most honest affect I could produce.

When I started working through some of my own traumas the door way to my past was opened by hearing about someone else’s experiences of feeling degraded and shameful --then I was able to admit to her what I had experienced myself. I realized that there was SO MUCH POWER in sharing shame. Admitting my shame to someone who hated themselves just as much as I hated myself was actually the gateway into self-knowledge, and into a lot of healing, hard healing. I can’t talk about shame without giving those past trauma’s some of the credit for it (smile). A lot of my work and interest in domestic violence, abuse, and rape come a place of seeing other people and myself paralyzed at emotional impasses because of violence done to our bodies or souls. You can see my more blatant work about abuse in the zine I made in 2011.

One thing Virginia Burrus talks about is how working through shame is not to become honorable, but to work through shame is to become shameless: to embrace and almost flaunt one’s shame.

Virginia Burrus gives the examples of early Christians in the Roman arenas. If you read early martyrologies, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, you will see that people were intentionally shamed when they were brought into the arena. Often stripped naked to be devoured by animals in front of a cheering crowd, their shaming literally turned their insides out...ya…that doesn’t sound good. The texts written about the martyrs portrayed them as embracing their shame and moving through it to shamelessness. Thecla shamelessly stairs down government officials in her nakedness and claims that Christ have clothed her when offered a robe. This religious minority found strength by transforming their stigma into a new identity. This narrative of terror that the Roman Empire was selling, this story that said these transgressors didn’t deserve to be alive, that they weren’t part of society, these early Christian narratives reverse that and said that they were. And it didn’t become honor it became shamelessness. So I started thinking about the performativity of showing this comic book and choosing to be shameless.

Along with shamelessly performing shame, I explore other uncontainable bad feelings fabric pieces. In January, while preparing for this show, I began to think about my experiences of the past 4 year in the terms of an uncontainable abyss. I feel like I’ve identified-or experienced- two interconnected abysses in seminary. The first abyss is the abyss that feels despair, shame-the abyss of bad feelings your drowning in----------which can also be the abyss of the divine-but no matter what we call it---this is the abyss we experience as outside of our-self. I had this image of a person, probably myself, vomiting out a bed sheet sized abyss, and then the person, which is probably me, falling into and just drowning. That pretty much explains a lot of my experience of seminary-just vomiting out what was inside of me, and then observing this external abyss as a part of my internal abyss. The unknown and the uncontainableness of the divine and bad feelings is also the uncontainableness of the self and of who I am.

It is important to me that my comics about shame and these images of vomiting attend to bodies. It may be the one thing all the pieces have in common: Clothing a body in religious garb, wiping one’s hand or dishes on a towel, using cardboard to symbolize our vulnerable existence, items to hold hair back, a zine about domestic violence, handkerchiefs for bodily fluids, and comics about a feeling so deep it seeps out of the skin. All of these feelings, all of the memories attached to them, are carried in the body.  

 But they are not just carried by the brain or a metaphysical heart. They hide in my lower back and my elbow, my spine and my stomach, my bowls and my toes. I’ve found that entering into the depths of who I am is quite frightening—not only because emotions are hard, but being physically overpower by emotions is excruciating.  

The idea that a handkerchief holds bodily fluids, often uncontrollable bodily fluids -like snot- and tears- and blood-and sweat- made using them as a medium very appealing. I had made handkerchiefs in the past for grieving friends and a friend of mine who was dying. And the idea that we pour our grief and our pain---- that is almost uncontainable into these containers was really the affect driving my use of this medium. In her book Depression: a public feeling, Ann Cvetkovich says:

“It can be hard to tell the difference between inside and outside-between what's inside your body and what's out there, between what's inside the house and what's outside in the neighborhood or on the other side of town, between your heartbreak and the misery in the world.''

An excess of who we are spills out like an oil slick, and we wonder if it will ever be cleaned up. In processing trauma, depression, or grief- one often encounter that they are not in control on their own body, that self-sovereignty and agency are far out of reach. And this is where crafting can powerfully come in.

For those of you who’ve had time to walk around you may have noticed that Cardboard Mary and the Mourning Scrunchies were both created during a time of grieving a dear friend’s death. Cvetkovich describes crafting as “foster[ing] ways of being in the world in which the body moves the mind rather than the other way around.” Crafting helps to integrate the body and mind. It is clear to me that Cardboard Mary and the Mourning Scrunchies functioned this way for me; it is possible that all this art expresses an element of what she is talking about. Cvetkovich continues saying “It produces forms of felt sovereignty that consist not of exercising more control over the body and sense but instead of ‘recovering’ them from the mind or integrating them with it.” Crafting is an embodied art form that helps to slowly create a container or “new way of living” for the uncontainableness of bad feeling. In other words crafting is one of many rituals used to contain the divine or to contain our bad feeling or to contain our-self…. so that we can interface with each other, so that we can interface with our feelings, so we can interface with the divine.

While I feel I could keep talking all night I will end there and take any questions you have.

[texturedabyss]

I Thought We Were Walking on the Same Road (What I Learned in Seminary Part 1)

Fall 2012-Winter 2013

Handmade handkerchief, embroidery thread 

“Meditating two centuries ago on, ‘how everything begins in darkness, Schelling intimated that ‘most people turn away from what is concealed within themselves just as they turn away from the depths of the great life.’ So we ‘shy away from the glance into the abysses of the past, which are still in one just as much as the present.’ Yet ‘most people’ are not cowards. We are trained to fear the darkness. ‘What terrifies you?’ ask Irigaray of her masculine interlocutor. ‘That of the lack of closure,’ she surmises. ‘From which springs your struggle against in-finity.’ What might happen if we ceased to fight, if we let the undertow draw us toward the depths?”

Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

  A Manageable Unknown (Pocket Sized Abyss with Silver Lining)

Winter 2013

Fabric, embroidery thread

Is it presumptuous to say we all want revelation of the divine and the self to arrive in pretty bite-sized packages? Swallowing a camel would be more realistic.

“In fact, nobody-but nobody-can experience our lives for us; nobody can feel for us the pain that life inevitably brings. The price we must pay to grow is always in front of our noses; and we never have a real practice until we realize our unwillingness to pay any price at all.”

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

   I Qualify (What I Learned in Seminary Part 2)

Winter 2013

Handmade handkerchief, fabric, embroidery thread

 “[W]hat is the actual work of theology-but an incantation at the edge of uncertainty?”  

Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

How do we create containers for the uncontainable? Daily we answer this question by creating rituals to interface between an excessive divine, our overflowing selves, and the world around us.  

*Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Neighbor

[texturedabyss]

“It can be hard to tell the difference between inside and outside-between what's inside your body and what's out there, between what's inside the house and what's outside in the neighborhood or on the other side of town, between your heartbreak and the misery in the world.''

Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: a public feeling

“Shame is the site of a subjectivity articulated at its thin-skinned limits. Indeed, it challenges the very distinction between inside and outside. ‘Shame is the hyper-reflexivity of the surface of the body, can turn one inside out-or outside in.’”

Virginia Burrus,  Saving Shame

[texturedabyss]