Great Podcasts to Enjoy

Here's a list of top 10 podcasts.   I'm already fan of the top two - Bloggingheads.tv and Slate's Political Gabfest as well as the Economist's on this list.   I'm interested in checking out some of the others.

I also like BBC 4 In Our Time - which covers history, philosophy, culture, religion and science.

BBC History Magazine
"BBC History Magazine’s podcast comes out each month, featuring interviews with notable historians talking about topics ranging from crusading knights, Tudor swimming, or the D-Day landings."  It's so British.  And really cool.  

and Sounds True Insight's at the Edge Interviews with leading spiritual teachers and writers about their latest challenges—the "leading edge" of their work.  I always learn a lot and her questions are good.  


A friend told me the Monocle podcasts are also good.  Any one try them?

David Corn Shares What It Was Like to Share an Office with Hitchens

I admire David Corn too and had no idea he shared an office with Christopher Hitchens when they were young.  Read the whole piece Hitchens and I Shared an Office; Hitchens habits and social life and work life still fascinates.  The stamina.  

Corn writes:

I did learn much from Hitchens, but never how to function in quite this manner. What allowed him to live such a packed life was a trait that any of us would relish: He never forgot what he had ever read or learned. His mind was always expanding. That was a natural gift that few of us possess. He could not teach it. But observing Hitchens practice his craft and thrust and parry with intellectuals almost as sharp as him was as valuable an experience as I could have imagined. It sure beat attending J-school. 

I can just imagine!

Christopher Hitchens' Smile

I love this man's brain.  Even if I didn't always agree with him he was always witty, smart and brutally honest.

And very handsome.

Poetry, Death and a Wind

I went to a funeral this morning, for the husband of a dear friend of mine.

The service was very beautiful.  Great hymns - Love, divine, all love's excelling and For all the saints (not the New Orleans melody, but just as beautiful).  One of the readings reminded me of the context of the bible verse on my mother's tombstone - which, obviously, moved me.  The second reading was I Corinthians 13:1-13, which is better known for the "Love is patient, love is kind," verses often read at weddings.

But I loved this, at the start of that chapter:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all the knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but don not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love trumps all - faith, knowledge, talents, power, things, your body.  Love changes all.  God's unconditional love, our love for others, receiving love.

Toward the end was my mom's verse-

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face to face.

My mom said to me, about that verse, that it was an awesome promise.   Here's my youngest niece at the grave site who last April asked me to take her to the cemetery.   You can see part of the verse engraved at the top.

And then at the end a bagpiped played Flowers of the Forest, which I had never heard and is a Scottish Folk Tune.  The melody embodied so much.   We walked outside for the committal into the Columbarium.  The crisp day was made a bit warmer by the bright sunshine.

The wounded National Cathedral, still closed, loomed in the background and added to the sadness.

But then as we together, for the second time, said the Lord's Prayer together a wind passed over us and...well, I felt God, love, my mother.  I felt a lot, exhaled and surrendered.

And finally, because of his military service, a lone bugler played Taps.

But what I also really wanted to share was the awe-some poem my friend Joanne selected for the bulletin.   I love so much about this:

If Death is Kind

Perhaps if death is kind, and there can be returning.
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white. 

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long genre thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free

 - by Sara Teasdale

 Here are some photos of the Cathedral from that day:

Byzantine's Bad Rap

I love Slate's Explainer column.  Today's edition is on how Byzantine came to mean "deviously convoluted"

Here's the crux:

Was the Byzantine system of government especially complex?Only compared to those of medieval Europe. 

Read more here.  

And related, I LOVED LOVED LOVED these free podcasts - 12 Byzantine Rulers by Lars Brownsworth.  The podcasts are also available on iTunes.  Very lively, very political and very interesting history.  Also a good bit of church history.   Many of these great stories not commonly known or taught in US schools.   His book Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization alludes to that (and is very readable too).

Paul Simon Deepens Meaning of "Songs of Silence"

Lots of moving moments to yesterday's remembrances. Including this performance at Ground Zero.

Ignorance about History, Religion and the Constitution

I find the discovery from Pew that anesthetists know more about Christianity than Christians do - not all surprising, unfortunately.  Even Catholics, nearly a majority, don't understand the doctrine of transubstantiation. 

Here the Atlantic Wire gathers up the various accounts for why this may be. 

It's very disturbing yet mirrors the ignorance of history and the writing of the US Constitution as recounted by Bradford Plumer in The New Republic's story The Revisionaries - The Tea Party's Goofy Fetish for Amending the Constitution. 

Ignorance is not a badge of honor.  

St. Paul's Music Program

Here is a video about the wonderful music at my church. 

Hillary's "Family" - A Scary Religious Cult

I first got wind of this news months ago in mid-March in a column on The Huffington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich, Hillary's Nasty Pastorate:

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

She adds, unflatteringly:

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.

Now the book is out.

Basically, the "Family" do not believe the meek and the poor will inherit the earth. I'm not sure how they dismiss the Sermon on the Mount, but they deliberately court the powerful to their group. One caller into an NPR radio interview with the author Sharlet was astounded and said it sounded like something out of the DaVinci Code. That's an understatement. Also, more scary 'cuase it aint' fiction.

A bit ago, NBC's investigative unit - Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin - did a piece back in early April. It's short and a good overview:



For more from NBC, click here.

This quote is from Mother Jones online, co-written by Jeff Sharlet, Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics:

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast.

Okay, just to scare you more (Coe is the leader of the Family/Fellowship):

The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by God—leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance.

Weirdly, nary a whisper of Clinton came up in Sharlet's Diane Rehm interview last week. If I had listened live, I'd have emailed in. Alas, as usual, I was listening on my lap top while trying to sleep, listening to divert my mind from the pain. Democrats - unnamed - though, were acknowledged as being part of the group.

ugh.

Dobson's Fear & Fearful Theology and Sharpton's Pithy Comeback

I agree with Andrew Sullivan - Dobson's ridiculousness is a HUGE gift to Obama, and calling attention to Obama's intelligent approach that will be a game changer with respect to church and state.

In the set up piece, I honestly did not understand the comment of a "neutral" observer that Obama's religion doesn't match his policies. I had no idea where the disconnect was. I saw beautiful harmony. I only later realized that's because the moron assumes that if you're religious you can't possible believe that homosexuals deserve to be loved no less than anyone else or that you can be pro-choice. He'd completely bought into the perversions of the religious right.

Someone sent me today this quote:

St. Anselm described this beginning as faith seeking understanding. He wrote: I do not seek to understand so that I may then be­lieve, but I be­lieve in order that I may truly understand.

Inherent in that approach is a humility, sadly lacking by many of faith. Not my faith.

Best quote of the night: Al Sharpton last night on CNN's Anderson Cooper's 360:

I may think what you do Anderson is going to put you in hell. But I'm going to defend your right to get there.

He went on to add that he, Sharpton, can't force him to heaven, legislating him to heaven rather than converting him.

That's a pithy summary of the difference between right wing and left wing religious approach to civic life.

Sullivan again: But no one should be in any doubt: Dobson is afraid. And he should be.

Here's Sullivan's take on what Obama is up to:

this pushback against the extreme of the right is an enormously important project - central to Obama's promise to get us past the hideous cultural deadlock of the past two decades. Obama is as productive to this debate as Bush was toxic. And what Obama is doing - whether he intends to or not - is to open space within conservatism for the kind of reasoned, limited government, pragmatic conservatism that we badly need to revive.

The speech Dobson is reacting to has been much analyzed and commented. I'm most familiar with E.J. Dionne's.

It's all good.

Harvard Brain Scientist Explains Bliss

A Superhighway to Bliss is the most read article at the New York Times web site. So I checked it out. It's about how a stroke at the age of 37 led a Harvard brain scientist to experience bliss and come back from that to explain her experience in scientific terms.

The story reports on the Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke:

Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

And then explains the role of the two sides of the brain:

Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”

To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.

The Times even interviews two religious and spiritual thinkers I've read and respect. First Sharon Salzberg:

“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”

She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”

And Karen Armstrong:

Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.

“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”

But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”

This is how the experience affected Dr. Taylor's life:

she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.

Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.

And regarding organized religion and it's relationship to brain science, in light of her personal experience:

her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.

Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”

Okay, I'm off to my meditation mat to see if my right brain (empathy, creativity) can overflow my left (ego, context, time, logic, stories).

Easter Poem

I was too unwell to make it to church today, Easter. But I'm watching the webcast from the National Cathedral. I was there on Friday for a bit of the three hour service in the afternoon, for the last bit. I planned to write about that, but haven't been up for doing so, but I hope to soon.

Webcast viewing is not the same as being there, I know (intellectually and otherwise). I will not commune. But it's something. Great music, some of my favorite hymns. They are talking about how to be Easter people. And the sermon was good, and quoted part of this poem:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
(1973) From The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

What the Incarnation Means

I heard just a rotten sermon on Christmas Eve at the National Cathedral. The rest of the liturgy was stunning - the setting, the choir, the ribbon twirling. But the sermon was an atrocity - even more so to me when you've got folks there who rarely show up in Church - listening, a captive audience. It's a time to share the good news! And I had with me someone who needed to hear the joy of the Christmas miracle. I needed to hear of the joy of the Christmas miracle.

So what a relief to listen and absorb the Christmas message I got this morning. Before I describe it, I want to share a very personal exchange I had with my mother sometime in the weeks before she died.

She said to me, "If it wasn't blasphemy, I'd say I knew what it was like for Christ on the cross. " The week before, when I had arrived from Washington, I had given her an antique nail, evocative of the nails of the crucifixion I'd picked up on some pilgrimage somewhere. I don't remember where I got it and I don't know what happened to it - but I brought it to my mother at the hospital and gave it to her, a token of Christ's Passion.

So I was taken aback when she said that to me. I gently reminded her - and I consider it a reminder because she was the one who taught me this, as she taught me so much about my faith - that she had it backwards. That it wasn't about us putting ourselves in the place of Jesus on the cross, but rather that God put Himself in our place. God became Man, in Jesus - so that He would understand our suffering and so that we would know that He knew - not intellectually, but experientially - what we were going through. God knew what human suffering was, what it entailed, and cried with us. Jesus asked for the cup to pass from Him, asked not to be forsaken, and prayed for strength in the garden of Gethsemane. She nodded.

That conversation was disorienting for me. It told me that her suffering was so great that she lost sight of that perspective. My mother had suffered for so long with her body; for more than 20 years she struggled. So that she would not see that basic tenet of our faith informed me that this time, for her, was worse. I wish I knew what had happened to that nail in the confusion after her death.

So there I was today in Mass. I confess I still have a very hard time in church. I've yet to make it through without some tears. I so associate my religion with my mother, the love of God with the love of my mother, even the mystery of God with the mystery of my mother - that I can't be there without thinking of her and feeling a great sense of loss. And then the tears.

Today, the beautiful opening of John's Gospel was chanted -

In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. in him was lief, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it...And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

My sermon notes read as follows - Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God and if so, what does it matter? Jesus gives us God - God wants to be known and wants to know us. Jesus shows us God. Jesus shows us what God is like. God is a God of desire, desires us, has eros for us. Do we see ourselves as desirable? In Jesus, divinity partakes of humanity so that humanity could partake of divinity. Ending poem - know this single truth - God was made man in Palestine, and lives today in bread and wine.

Divinity partakes of humanity so that I could remind my mother she wasn't alone in her suffering. And yeah, that mattered. That mattered a lot.

And neither am I. I am not alone either. I hung up every single one of my 56 Christmas and holiday cards to remind me of that. At Mass, I got loving nods and acknowledgment from friends there, who'd not seen me in a long while. I've taken to going to the Cathedral, where no one knows me and asks me how I'm doing. Because even if I'm not in tears that that moment, I'm so tender during and after Communion that the query alone can cause emotion to dwell in my throat.

And I've had the gift of revelation dreams - where she's told me she's right here next to me, that the line between where she is and where I am is porous. And at a particularly trying time this summer, in my dream, she called me up on the phone - three times to let me know she was crying too.

I was awash in tears after that sermon. Couldn't even sing my favorite Christmas Carol - Greensleeves. But I was glad I went. It was good to be reminded. Amid my sense of loss and abandonment, I remember the good news of the Incarnation. I remember that Christmas was her favorite holiday. And I remember why.

What is the Wigilia - A Polish Christmas Eve

As my mother taught me, and her mother before her and my great-grandmother Monica Tillwack Bura taught her (we called our great-grandmother, Busha), I will host a Wigilia this evening.




Traditionally, the meal begins with the sighting of the first star. The Trifle dessert was in honor of the Syrian Christian whose Christmas was more English growing up. Besides George, my other guests included Ali, an Iranian whose mother was Christian and father Muslim; Maggie, a former Roman Catholic; and Juliana, a secular Australian, aggressively so. Made for quite a mix.

We had a lovely evening. Maggie made the mushroom soup and after some concern, the final mix enjoyed a multitude of flavors. The perogis from Sophie's Place in Baltimore was worth every minute of the hour on line. And my Christmas ham came out great - with pears and cranberries. I was a bit worried about that, as it was a new recipe and I had to make adjustments to the directions to accommodate time away from home to go to church. But my mom taught me her cooking instincts well. I also prepared the traditional cauliflower recipe and the cucumber salad.

And the evening favor's were in the mode of the city in which I live - a candy cane and an Obama bumper sticker!

Here's some more background on the Polish Wigilia that I shared with my guests.

The Wigilia (or Wilia)

- from the Latin word vigilare meaning "to watch" -

is the Polish meal on Christmas Eve.

Poles greet the evening with

such anticipation, such careful planning and such mystical symbolism,

that it is considered by many to be a greater holiday than Chrismas itself.

The meal is traditional and includes from the forest - mushrooms, wild berries and honey.

All await the the most significant moment of the entire Wigilia supper

- the breaking and sharing of the Oplatek.

Oplatek is taken from the Latin word Oblatum - meaning sacred bread.

In every house in Poland, family and friends break

the traditional wafer and exhange good wishes.

The Oplatek is a thin unleavened wafer, stamped with the figures of the

Holy Child, the Blessed Mary, the Holy Family or the Angels.

The Oplatek is known as the Bread of Love and wafers are sent to absent family members.

A small layer of hay is place under the tablecloth in memory of the Godchild

in the manager & to remind one and all of our humble beginnings.

Sweet Christmas hay, my Polish childhood knew,

You cradle in your tangled wisps the white

Unleaven bread and spread your fragrance through

the mystic silence of the sacred night...

While we remember how the Virgin smiled

Beside a hay filled manager on her child.

by Victoria Janda, Walls of Space 1945

"A Guest in the Home is God in the Home." - ancient Polish adage

What I'm Thankful For

Mostly people. I'm deeply grateful for these people in my life :

• Ali M. – for his generosity of spirit, his time and his care.
• Ali S. – for offering his knowledge and service free to help me get better.
• Ari – for helping me quickly with all my computer ails, doing so cheerfully and efficiently, and liking Obama too.
• Anita - for providing emotional support and information in my endeavor to have a child, and for memories.
• Barbara - her sense of humor, encouraging my writing, her companionship with this endeavor to write, her understanding.
• Cecilia - for making me laugh, her emotional support and trips to Cosco.
• Chantal – for her constant and unconditional support, our long friendship (31 years!), and her resilience which is an inspiration.
• Christina – for her knitting help, for her emotional support, laughter, intelligence.
• Christine – for her checking in on me, her notes, care, and our long conversations and making me laugh.
• Claudette - for always making me belly laugh, being artful, and her loving gift of art that hangs on my bedroom wall.
  
• Connan and Blake - for checking in on me, sharing my love of theater, and for memories.
• Corinne - for checking in on me, encouragement and love.
  
• Elizabeth - for her steadfast example of dealing with loss and challenges with wit and intelligence and generosity.
  
• Emily - for checking in on me, and for memories.
• Erik – for adding to my hip factor, and always calling me with loving messages.
• Francesca - for her encouragement, good sense, and humor
  
• Gabriel - for his constant encouragement to keep me social, for the birthday party he gave me this year, and for bringing me groceries.
• Jen - for encouraging my writing and providing excellent and enthusiastic feedback, and for memories.
• John - for deeming me hip enough to have him as a friend, for checking in, and his sense of humor.
• Juliana- for teaching me yoga and inspiring stability and bringing laughter to my life.
  
• Libby - for her like-minded politics, encouragement and moral support, and visits with lunch, for groceries.
• Maggie - her thoroughness and information about film, arts, books, her companionship on this journey of illness.
• Mercedes - for checking in on me, letting me know when a good film is on TCM, and for her emotional support.
• Monica – for reminding me in ways big and small of my mother, sending me articles, and many phone calls checking in on me, her companionship in and understanding of chronic illness which has been a comfort.
• Nickie – for making me laugh, for working my muscles, for welcoming me so warmly and sharing her family and home.
• Sara - for her information, encouragement and visits with lunch.
• Sally - for informing me about Crossings which gave me the best gift, the gift of a dream about my mother.
• Sheryl – for her professional encouragement, her self-reliance which inspires, and her companionship in dating a Brazilian.
• Shirley - for her love, support, making me dinner and bringing her beautiful kids by for a visit.
  
• For my writing group last summer and this spring - Bill, Matt, Sarah, Tom and Zach - for keeping my mind awake, encouragement, and being funny.
  
• And most of all - my yoga students: Aaron, Ali, Carole B., Carole G. Cissy, Ellen, Jan, Karen, Kate, Laura, Maria, Reid, Sylvia, Tamra and Libby and Sara too - for their patience during this year of mourning.
• My care givers - Abdul and Fatima, Kevin, Rebecca, Nickie, Juliana, Claire, Rosalba, Alan, Jennifer, Karen, Ali, Ali, Dorothy and David.
  
• I am also grateful for the joy of children, especially my nieces and nephews Isabelle, Lucas, Austin, Curtis, Jack, Andrew, Margot, Sabrina and Ava.
• I am very grateful for the financial support of my father.
  

Boy, that makes me feel pretty lucky. These months have been trying, and I am appreciative of these connections and relationships which have buoyed me in all sorts of ways.

Thanksgiving Service at the National Cathedral

I attended the Thanksgiving Day Holy Eucharist at the Washington National Cathedral today. But two winters ago, on the first weekend in February of last year, I was at the Cathedral College for a weekend retreat on Centering Prayer. That Saturday, cold and rainy afternoon, a single bell tolled from the Cathedral bell tower at least 60 times, slowly and heavily, rotund with emotion. I lost count, but the sound seemed to go on and on and on, like the mist, that afternoon. There was a funeral and after the service the bell tolled in sadness. And I had just learned the night before that my mother had cancer.

It's a tender time now because my mom died less than a week after Thanksgiving last year. The night before we worked furiously with her doctors to get her out of the hospital so we could all have Thanksgiving safely at home. She'd been in the hospital for nearly three weeks and had discovered during that time that the cancer was back. But she was ready to come home and we were ready for her - with a bed, a baby monitor, television set up, flowers, nebulizer, home nurse, oxygen tank, wheelchair - and lots of love.

I can hardly believe that a year has past. It feels like eons and it feels like moments. And it still feels pretty awful. At the Thanksgiving service, despite the fact that I could hardly get through an entire verse, a stranger complemented me on my singing, which was nice, especially because my mom often did.

A Welsh folk tune, borrowed from my childhood hymnal, the Lutheran Book of Worship of 1978 was the hymn before the sermon.

Let all things now living a song of thanksgiving to God the creator triumphantly raise, who fashioned and made us, protected and stayed us, who still guides us onto the end of our days. God's banners are o'er us, his light goes before us, a pillar of fire shining forth in the night, till shadows have vanished and darkness is banished, as forward we travel from light into light.

The second verse speaks of the "stars in their course and sun in its orbit." And the preacher told a tale of a friend who'd seen the Aurora Borealis and how it'd affected her. It made her slow down, to feel instead of think, to allow her to be aware that she was of something larger than herself. The word "consider" from its Latin roots - means "with the stars" or "to observe with the stars." so that consideration and contemplation was always meant to take you out of your own world, your own universe. (For more on etymology, click here.)

She also spoke of the flower star gazers. And how they represented the life of contemplation, and how stargazers were thought to have arms open to God and arms open in service to our neighbors. You can listen to the entire sermon of Reverend Canon Carol Wade here.

The closing hymn was an Easter tune, Lasst uns efreuen, a melody written in 1623. The introduction started and I recognized it immediately. My religious heritage and understanding is one of my most treasured gifts from my mother. And I thought how appropriate, given where my mind was, that the service would close with a hymn that I associated with the celebration of the resurrection. It was a comfort.

The melody has at least two versions in the Episcopalian hymnbook - #400 and #618. We sang a version of #400 which was set to words of St. Francis of Asssi -

All creatures of our God sing praise, with thankful hearts your voices raid, O sing praises! Alleluia! O Brother Sun with golden beam, O Sister Moon with silver gleam! O sing praises! O sing praises! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

As I left, the bells were ringing more hymns. The day was warm and I sat in the garden while I called my family from my mobile phone. The bells were joyous, uplifting, melodious and quite different from another sound of those bells on a colder, dreadful day earlier last year. The sounds heartened and yielded a glimmer of hope.

Why Pat Robertson Endorsed Guiliani

The Dean of Grace Cathedral, the Episcopalian cathedral of San Francisco, is Alan Jones, the author of several books. I've read The Soul's Journey, Exploring the Spiritual life with Dante as Guide, which was just terrific! Also - I own, but have not (yet) read Passion for Pilgrimage, Notes for the Journey Home and Reimagining Christiainity, Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind.

Jones is erudite, religion and able to write. And he interviewed Gary Wills - a historian at Northwestern University whose many books delve into American history and religion. He is also a frequent and excellent contributer to The New York Review of Books, most recently writing about Ghiberti's doors, "The Gates of Paridise" from Florence, now on exhibit at the Met. He covers the history, the competition, the religious meaning of the images, the art. To read, click here. (It might be restricted to registered subscribers, but some of NYRB articles are not).

Gary Wills has a new book out, Head and Heart: American Christianities. I wrote about it on October 8th and highlighted a radio interview done on NPR. There's also a book excerpt at that link.

And so Wills and Jones talked about American Christianity. Two smart guys talking about an important subject given how religion is being used in politics by the Republicans. They show how uninformed so much civil discourse is (especially when it invokes the religiousness of our Founding Fathers). And Gary Wills explains the apparent mystery of a social conservative's endorsement of nasty Rudy Guiliani. Pat Roberson, and his ilk, believe that we are fighting the devil (in Iraq and the Middle East) and fighting the devil is more important than anything else. And Guilani seems, to them, to be the best person to lead that fight.

To watch the whole program, click here.

To watch a five minute answer to Was America Founded on Christianity, from Wills' talk at Politics and Prose, watch this:

Karen Armstrong's New Book on the Bible

Karen Armstrong has a new book out on the Bible, "The Bible: A Biography." She did a 30 minute interview on Talk of the Nation.

Reynolds Price on Faith and Reason

Reynolds Price, a literature professor from Duke, offered an engaging interview today on Fresh Air. (It's actually rebroadcast from June 2006, on the occasion of the paperback edition of his book Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith. Reynolds Price has written dozens of volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and translations.

Steven Colbert is Everywhere!

Okay - so apparently he is running in both the Republican and Democratic primaries of South Carolina. He noted you can do that in South Carolina but you also can marry a 13 year old girl. He was the guest on my favorite radio show on Saturday, Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Very fun show and will make you laugh.

He also appeared on Meet the Press. He noted that if won at least one delegate in South Carolina, he'd consider it a win. And that he'd give that one delegate up if he'd be allowed to make a speech.

I wish he'd be harder and more aggressive with Russert. It seemed a bit rehearsed, as if Tim knew where and how the conversation would go. (He even had Bert, from Sesame Street handy as a prop).

As far as I'm concerned, Russert is the one of the most culpable in his passivity and inability to properly frame the issues or his questions. He doesn't listen to the answers and curb his follow ups because he is so self-impressed with his prepared queries. These times are too fraught to suffer incompetence in such a powerful post. Colbert could have hammered him and he didn't. Too bad.

If you want to hear from or about the real Colbert there are three options:

1. The Meet the Press web extra - watch here.
2. Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross - listen here. A friend noted to me she heard from Colbert in this interview the best definition of God and hell she'd ever heard. When I heard it, I agreed; its exactly how I would explain God and hell. Thank goodness for different voices discussing religion. Ones other than the religious right.
3. Vanity Fair October 2007 issue piece, The Man in the Irony Mask by Seth Mnookin. This profile is lengthy and revealing. Read here.