Monday by Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth-
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see-
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think-
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Speechless: A sermon on December 16, 2012

Advent 3 C                                                                                         December 16, 2012

Luke 2:28-39                                                                                       St. Alban’s, Austin

There are times I don’t know what to think. Let alone what to say. I have to tell you that it is daunting to stand up here before you on a Sunday morning and feel responsible for helping you to make sense of something that makes no sense.

Imagine you were with me yesterday morning at Torchy’s Tacos grabbing a quick breakfast with my sister. The man at the next table, who was sitting with a darling little boy about seven years old, stood up to put his trash in the bin, and I saw that he was wearing a black T shirt with a white assault rifle on it. It took my breath away. I didn’t know what to think. My jaw dropped, and I was speechless. I’m glad we didn’t actually have eye contact because anybody who would wear such a T shirt on the day after twenty children the same age as his were slaughtered was clearly looking for someone to pick a fight, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He could even have had such a weapon in his car. But the sight of him haunted me all day long. I don’t like believing that there are people so utterly insensitive in the world, let alone people who would actually murder first graders and their teachers. If you need me to make sense of Sandy Hook for you, I am sorry, but I will let you down.

If I had kept with the lectionary this week we would be talking about John the Baptist again,

and he would be calling people a brood of vipers. But I just spent the fall in Florence and while I was there I spent a great deal of my time and attention on images of the Annunciation to Mary, and that was not one of the offerings for this year, so I snuck it in. Apparently when I played fast and loose with the lectionary a couple of weeks ago and joked that the liturgical police were coming to get me, just that minute a couple of helicopters flew over the church, which caused some degree of hilarity in the choir. Trust me, it is legal to do this.

And so today we read the story of the Angel Gabriel coming to an unsuspecting young girl and, without giving her ample time to think about it, announcing that God has decided that she will bear his son. Mary is startled and confused, but she quickly accepts the invitation. The angel departs, and that is that. The world is changed forever

It is a scene we can easily get all sappy and sentimental about, and some artists over the years have done exactly that. The angel can look like a belign fairy godmother,

and Mary can look so sweet it will make your fillings ache, but those paintings don’t take into account the world into which the angel is bursting forth. They don’t consider the cost of this consent to Mary. And they don’t stop to think about the power of the Incarnation, that even though this precious little baby is Jesus, this is in fact God incarnate coming to live among us

as innocent and helpless and vulnerable and hopeful as those twenty first graders who got on their school buses on Friday with their Hello Kitty lunchboxes looking forward to playing with their best friends and running around in PE and pleasing their teachers and coming home to a weekend to houses magically decorated for Christmas or Hannukah.

There are many stories still to be told. Much is still not clear at all, and I’ll have to admit to you

that I have not spent every hour since it happened glued to the TV or even to Facebook, so you may well know things I don’t know. One story, though, is about one of the teachers, Kaitlyn Roig, who had fifteen children in her room when she heard the shooting begin. She shoved a bookcase against her door and got all the children into the bathroom and told them they had to be quiet so the bad guys wouldn’t know they were there. She told them that there were bad guys out there right then and that they had to wait for the good guys to come. (See interview with Diane Sawyer: http://now.msn.com/kaitlin-roig-sandy-hook-teacher-recounts-saving-her-students-during-shooting)

You’ve probably heard the wonderful quote from Mr. Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.’ Ms. Roig was assuring the children that there are helpers.

She told them that she loved them, which she does, because she thought they were all going to die, and she wanted the last thing they ever heard to be that they were loved. And the children said that they wanted to go home, that they wanted Christmas.  She told them they would have Christmas and Hannukah and that if their family believed in prayer to pray, and if they didn’t believe in prayer to think happy thoughts. The police came,  but she refused to open the door, thinking it might be a trick, and she said that if they were really the police they would be able to get the key. What an amazing young woman.

Little children, six and seven years old, facing trauma they could not comprehend but which will haunt their lives from here on out expressed that what they wanted in that moment of terror and darkness was Christmas.

I remember being six and feeling like Christmas would never come. Looking back, we had pretty average Christmases. We didn’t go to church. My parents always went to a party on Christmas Eve and we were left at home to hang our stockings with the babysitter, who might or might not read us The Night before Christmas, but definitely not Luke’s gospel.

In the morning my father would be the first one downstairs and without fail, as he got his movie camera ready, he would announce that Santa had forgotten to come. We’d get our presents, which were rarely over the top, we’d go to dinner at my grandparents’ apartment, and we’d go home to bed, but it was all magical. That’s what the children held onto when they were afraid. That’s what their teacher promised them when she honestly believed they were all about to die.

In John’s gospel we read, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

That is the gospel. That is what we hang onto today even as we continue to hear this horrific story unfold. Yes, evil has invaded our beloved season of holiday cheer, but evil will not overcome it. This is the gospel. This is why God sent the angel to Mary. This is why God broke into time and history. This is why God came to live in this broken world, to show us, to prove to us, as St. Paul writes, that neither death nor life nor rulers, nor things present,  nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There are a lot of songs we love to sing at Christmas, and if you stop to listen, you will hear that quite a number of them are the songs of people whose situation is not all holly jolly. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” implies that the singer’s Christmas will fall short of his dreams. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is the song of someone who is lonely and stuck far, far away.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was sung by a tearful Judy Garland to her even sadder little sister when their world seemed to be falling apart. But the song I remembered on Friday

was from the musical Mame:

So climb down the chimney;
Put up the brightest string of lights I've ever seen.
Slice up the fruitcake;
It's time we hung some tinsel on that evergreen bough.

For I've grown a little leaner,
Grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder,
Grown a little older,
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
For we need a little music,
Need a little laughter,
Need a little singing
Ringing through the rafter,
And we need a little snappy
"Happy ever after,"
Need a little Christmas now.

I know it’s secular, but it is the truth. We do need a little Christmas now, not just because of the tragedy yesterday, but because we live in a world in which that tragedy is possible. We live in a world where hearts are broken every day, where people with mental illness can get multiple assault rifles, where families are broken and jobs are lost, where people suffer from depression and betray each other’s trust, where good people and not so good people get ill, where wars continue and refugees are cooped up in camps for years at a time. This is the world that needs Christmas. This is the world into which God sent an angel to a young girl in Nazareth, where God’s own self broke into time and said, “I’m on my way.”

We get our hearts broken again and again. And we get Christmas. And the Christmas we get is way more than the stockings hanging on the mantel, the turkey roasting, the presents we give and receive, or the songs we sing. The Christmas we get, which is the Christmas we need and the Christmas that the angels announce is the redemption of this world  begun with the unexpected arrival of Gabriel and the unimaginable acceptance of Mary.

It is the song of angels, and it is the blessing of angels.

Let us pray:

May the angels in their beauty bless you.

May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the angel of awakening stir your heart

to come alive to the eternal within you,

to all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the angel of healing turn your wounds into sources of refreshment.

May the angel of the imagination enable you

to stand on the true thresholds,

at ease with your ambivalence

and drawn in new directions

through the glow of your contradictions.

May the angel of compassion open your eyes

to the unseen suffering around you.

May the angel of wildness disturb the places

where your life is domesticated and safe,

take you to the territories of true otherness

May the angel of justice disturb you

to take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the angel of encouragement confirm you

in worth and self respect

that you may live with the dignity

that presides in your soul.

May the angel of death arrive only

when your life is complete

and you have brought every given gift

to the threshold where its in its infinity can shine.

May all the angels be your sheltering

and joyful guardians.

Amen

(Prayer adapted from John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us)

Bridge Time

I guess you could say I've been back at work for a week now, but this is just the beginning of my fourth day in the office. So far I'm managing to retain the peaceful energy of my sabbatical. It helps to keep revisiting the images on my iPhone and iPad. They open my memory to the sights and sounds and smells of a place that is still very real to me. I've seen pictures of the Duomo Piazza with its big Christmas tree and narrow streets with Christmas lights and store windows. Oh, how I would love to be at Mercato Centrale right now.

In my imagination I can be there in an instant and tell myself that I'll be going back to Florence again and again. I hope that proves to be true. But when I go back, even if I make a bee line to Osteria Giovanni or to the convent at San Marco or to the little bar where we stood for our morning cappucino, it will be a new day and a new experience. That is as it should be. As Herclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice. Time remains such a mystery to me.

There were three bridges in Florence that I crossed on a fairly regular basis. The one in the picture is Ponte Vecchio. Until the time of the Medicis the shops were butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers. The river, in addition to being a source of fish and a means of delivery, was their waste disposal system. The shopkeepers would toss their scraps and trimmings overboard to hungry creatures below and the currents that carried them away.

But when the Medicis built the Vasari Corridor -- those are the little windows along the top of the bridge -- their 'secret' passageway from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, they were offended by the smell of the shops and used their muscle to displace the food market in lieu of the silver and goldsmiths who have their shops there to this day. Some of the jewelry was nice, but it was all so glitzy and much of it tacky and ostentatious that it wasn't very tempting.

And of course now there are artists selling 'original' watercolors of the Florence streetscapes, Nigerian boys with their knock-off Guccis and Pradas spread out on blankets so they can swoop them up and run when the caribinieri show up, and throngs of tourists being informed by guides holding furled umbrellas overhead. And everybody on the bridge is either eating gelato or smoking a cigarette. At night musicians play there and their music floats up the river.

The bridges of Florence have been destroyed a number of times by floods, which are not all that infrequent, and by war. The Santa Trinita Bridge was designed by Michelangelo, blown up by the Germans, and rebuilt from the pieces they found in the river.
I'm thinking about bridges today, the beautiful, magical bridges of Florence and the utilitarian highway bridges of Austin that take me to and from work every day. My father's family were literally bridge builders. I have a photograph of my great grandfather and my very young grandfather at the ribbon cutting of the Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, which they built. But I'm not an engineer, so my call to bridges is more poetic and theological.

I'm aware of being in a bridge time. The very sacred gift of sabbatical is on the other shore of the river now that I am back at home and at church, but I hope I can keep the access open, that I can travel back to the realities I experienced on both banks of the Arno, the little wine bar right at the stoop of the Church of Santa Felicita, the sandwich shop where we ate and balanced our wine in the street as motorcycles and cars wove among the crowd, the steps of the Convent of San Marco, where I conversed for hours with Fra Angelico's Annunciation, the window of our flat, where I'd watch the bells of Santa Croce swing as they rang the Angelus. I don't know how to keep it all alive until I go back, but I'm clinging to the bridges right now to be my help and my access.

Bells

The bell of St. Deiniol's tells me,

as if I didn't know,

that I'm awake at three in the morning.

This old building whispers,

and I feel the hum of someone, a man I feel certain,

who is asleep in a nearby room.

I check my pulse for anxiety, obsession,

old pals, who are not pestering me in this night.

I rest, wide-eyed in sweet intimacy with those I love,

no matter that an entire ocean divides us.

I sense the shifting infant in my daughter's womb

and can hold on my hand and to my cheek 

my sister's new grief

and the aches of my husband's chores.

And the bell of St. Deiniol's assures me

that I am still awake at four,

and that my neighbor is still snoring

and that a sip of water was not what I needed to put me back to sleep.

The bed is cozy,

warm in a chilly room,

and I know, with the certainty of peace,

that in the sea of Alaska,

where I would never have gone without my love,

the great whales are rising in the pale winter sun for breath,

and that in Florence, where I slept last week,

the bells of Giotto are ringing their different hour,

and that at the top of the steps of the monastery 

Angelico's Gabriel whispers the question to Mary

and waits, with God himself and all creation,

to hear her answer.

This may not be an accident...

Part of me regrets that I could not have anticipated the tech issues I'd have outside the US. Part of me recognizes that it is at least partially user incompetence and partially misplaced user trust in a six year old laptop, which will be blessed and retired as soon as I get home. Part of me acknowledges that internet connection at the library, which is nothing short of miraculous and such an anachronism (in reverse dynamic to how I typically use that word) in the gorgeous, musty library filled with real paper books, is spotty and unreliable.

But what I find I am dealing with, and what I was acutely aware of in Florence, is the choice I must make between living the moment and analyzing and recording it. Yes, I meant to blog more, but I found that I'd rather be present to the person with me than the computer and to the beauty that confronts me rather than the page on which I attempt to offer my pale reflection. I do have time to write here, and I find myself getting lost, in the very best way, in the library, which has resulted in some poetry I didn't mean to write (and which doesn't mean it is worth more than what I got out of writing it), and some lovely rabbit trails I've wandered down only to find unexpected treasures.

In Florence one day I watched a group of darling young students, sent there at great expense by their parents, sitting on a curb in the presence of nothing less than the miracles of the baptistry and Duomo and the bell tower built by Giotto, each of them in their own private world of texting. So many people, wherever we go, more attentive to email and facebook than to where they are and who they are with. And I'm fully susceptible to this. But much of my interior dialogue has been concerned with this dilemma, but also the poignant awareness that I cannot possess even the most magical moment by loving it more fiercely.

(An aside from my perverse imagination...picture Mary with an iPhone in her hand letting the angel cool his heels while she texts her BFF "OMG...") Yes, indeed, OMG!

And so today I am disciplining myself to recording as best I can the moments I would like to possess. Words are all I've got, and they are inadequate. I took enough photographs of the things I could photograph, given that most museums and churches forbid them, not that that stopped a lot of people. But JB and I acknowledged that we are at heart a couple of goody-two-shoes when I found a guard and asked permission to go into a roped off area of a chapel at Santa Croce to get a picture of an Annunciation while other people tromped around wherever they wanted to go and snapped away as the guards shouted 'no photos!' Actually most of the art works I want to deal with are available online in much better form than anything I could get with my camera or iPhone or iPad. There is one I haven't found, though, the third Andrea del Sarto at the Pitti Palace, the one with the warrior angel.

One moment I'll hang onto forever. Betsy and I walked to the convent at San Marco, which is pretty far from our flat. The minute you get into the cloister it is as if all the traffic and bustle of Florence is miles away, and you feel as if you are out in the country, which it was when it was built for the Dominicans in the 12th century, when they were a new order dedicated to preaching orthodox theology to combat the Albigensian heresy that all matter is evil, hence a repudiation of the doctrine of Incarnation.

If there is one reality I've been in touch with on this pilgrimage it is Incarnation. It is that holiness can and does indwell matter. It dwells in people and places and works of art and Italian food, for sure.

And if you know me, you know how I feel about the ministry of preaching. So, here is this magical place, this open, green space just inside the walls that face one of the busiest bus hubs of the city, a square that is filled with beggars and gypsies, and directly across from one of the best focaccia shops in Florence. Holiness in all of it, replete with noise and dirt and deliciousness. You walk into the cloister and the first thing you see is Angelico's crucifixion with St. Dominic. San Marco is all about Beato Angelico. His sweet theology is the essence of its presence.

We loved the paintings -- his delicate Virgins, the compassionate Christs, his vision of heaven and even hell, and the musician angels, two of which have hung on golden boards in the stairs of my house for as long as I can remember. We start up the stairway to the monks' dormitory, my sister half a flight ahead of me, due to my recently unreliable knees, when she stops at the turn and looks back at me with an aghast look on her face, which I read to mean that there are more steep flights of stairs to climb.

But no. When I arrive on the landing I see that it is that the Annunciation is right there, only half a dozen steps away, as unexpected a confrontation to me as the angel's arrival must have been to Mary. It is huge, painted right on the wall, this moment frozen in time. This is the sermon preached to dedicated monks every night last thing before they go to bed. I imagine that like anything they became accustomed to it, that it wasn't always  shock to their psyches that it was to mine first seeing it.

But I see it as a call to presence. To attention to the moment in front of me. I'm going to be doing a lot of writing around the Annunciation. Actually, I have begun, and have had some surprises of my own. For now, though, I'm still wrestling with the dilemma, and I'm going out for a walk because the morning is beautiful and chilly and the trees have turned and I am actually in Wales, and along my way I'll meet lots of dogs running happily along the trail. I'm asking all their names because I'm in the market for a good dog name.

Pontormo's Annunciation

This is the Annunciation I wrote about yesterday. When I wrote my proposal for this grant, I suggested that the story of the angel's annunciation to Mary would be an informing metaphor for this liminal space, this odd and wonderful time of not only rest and recreation but of allowing myself to be open to God's invitation for the next phase of my life.

I had no way of knowing 1. that in Florence you cannot take more than a dozen steps without encountering an Annunciation or a gelato shop, 2. that the story of the Annunciation is in many ways not only a favorite biblical story but a defining metaphor for the creativity that is Florence especially during the early Renaissance, or 3. that the Annunciation is included as an element of an enormous number of other paintings. It is as if the artists feel the need to acknowledge that without this one terribly raw and pivotal moment the project of God's salvation would not have proceeded as it did. It is as if the entire weight of the Christ event rests on this one angel and this one eighth grader. It did.

I'm not an art historian, so as I write about my encounters with the Annunciation, as I intend to do with greater focus and attention once I get to the library in Wales, it will not be with academic expertise. I do hope to be able to read enough and research enough not to be entirely ignorant, but I am approaching the Annunciation as a lens for enlightenment rather than as an object of study.

As I've spent a little over three weeks now meandering around Florence on my private treasure hunt, it feels to me as if God is a couple of steps ahead of me planting an Annunciation everywhere I turn. There was a dear one above the doorway of a flat in Fiesole yesterday, not to mention 13th century statues in the museum in San Gimignano and a precious pair of panels by Filippo Lippi, so different from and so much easier to fail to notice than his important painting (which I adore) in the Church of San Lorenzo. I've found I have favorites, which is a good thing since I cannot possibly write about all of them.

And so here it is, Monday, and basically we have no big plans. We were going to go to San Gimignano but maybe we'll do it tomorrow. It is a luxury to have the latitude of time that we've had, time to meander and discover treasures we don't have the good sense to know that they are waiting for us. Time to look and time to listen and time to reflect and ponder. Grazie mille.

Where you are and where you would like to be

The Duomo is the center of Florence. Except in a few places where the streets are close together, you can see the dome from just about anywhere. The Church of Santa Maria dei Fiori, St. Mary of the Flowers, is your reference point, with the Campanile, or Bell Tower right beside it. They tell you where you are and how to find where you want to be.

I was wakened this morning by the bells. It was a little before seven, and one of the myriad of churches in the neighborhood was summoning the faithful to early mass. What enthralls me is that these bells spill their beauty and disturb the sleep of the faithful and unfaithful alike. Sundays are the best, with bells going off from every direction all morning long. I wonder how many churches there are within half a mile of us. I imagine a dozen would be a conservative guess. They don't coordinate their bells. They just ring them when it is time to go to church and again at the moment of consecration and some, I suspect, to announce that worship is finished.

As far as I'm concerned, the bells don't need a reason. They are beyond reason. They break into my consciousness and call me to attention. Of course, because I am a Christian and a clergy type at that, they carry with their wild ringing not only the narrative that defines us...stories of creation, incarnation, forgiveness, salvation...but kinship with all the people who have listened to their ringing for all the centuries that people have lived and worshiped here.

There is a church next door to our flat, Santa Felicita. We heard its bells ringing from the little wine bar we like to stop at late in the afternoon. From the outside it is a plain jane parish church. Flat stucco with steps where kids sit and smoke. But then I learned that it was founded in the third century by Syrian Christians. Inside, not only is it exquisite, but it has what may be my favorite painting of the Annunciation I have found so far.



It is a quatroccento fresco painted by Pontormo. The angel and Mary flank the altar. What is fascinating me as much as how each artist has chosen to paint each of the characters is how he has chosen to deal with the space between them. These figures are soft and flowing as if painted in water color. Mary is in motion, as if the greeting of the angel has caused her to pause and turn just as she steps up to go indoors from the garden. There is none of the usual paraphernalia...no candlestick, no lily, no book...just an angel on the other side of the open space. And this angel floats. We don't see his eyes because his head is turned away. He has blond curls and a high forehead. This is not a confrontational angel. I imagine he announced his presence with little more than a whisper. It would be enough.

We know how the story will go. We know that this girl who is barely beyond childhood will say yes. We know she doesn't have time to think it over. In this painting she is wide open. I'm not sure the question has been asked. It is a moment in time interpreted by someone who had to have been touched by that moment, who must have felt the immediate presence of that holy moment in the time it took him to paint the scene. I wonder how long it took. I wonder how his life was touched by it. I cannot imagine that he could have gone home to supper untouched by the grace and generosity of it. I cannot imagine that he was not tinged by its holiness.

There is lots of paradox in this city. I don't know what to do about the beggars, who we are told are pros taking advantage of tourists. Thank God I haven't had a Gypsy mother throw her baby at me, but I am told it is done so they can grab your purse. Old women kneel in the street with scarves over their heads and their faces on the pavement. Young African men sell knock-off designer bags and scatter when a pair of caribinieri appear. The scarf that is thirty euros in a main market is three off the beaten path. I'm not under the illusion that everything is made holy by the presence of the churches or the profligacy of the bells or the legacy of faith that built this city. And, yes, the legacy of power and greed. The Medicis are everywhere as well.

But still the Duomo rises over all of it, an architectural incarnation of faith and human intelligence, which is of course a gift from God, which can be used for good or for evil. And still the bells ring and some of us accept their gift in a full sense of mystery and gratitude. For some of us, at least, they are as profound a call as the sound of an angel whispering your name.