Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, November 08, 2003
It looks like most of my readers have been very loyal during the serialized narrative about Gene Robinson’s consecration, but I thought a digression from religion and politics would be welcome (for me, too). So here is a response, very belatedly, to the
ECOTONE TOPIC for November 1, 2003: COFFEE SHOP AS PLACE
Back home, I don’t go to coffee shops. There aren’t many, to begin with, and those that exist fall into the categories of “self-consciously-hip-and-pretending-to-be-urban”, or “here-we-are-in-a-mall-looking-at-books-let’s-have-latte”. Neither appeals. I prefer the atmosphere of a greasy diner, actually, with truck drivers and lumbermen next to bikers and local sad-sacks, all downing their java in shoulder-to-shoulder silence at the long stainless-steel counter. I’d rather sit in the Polka Dot, next to the train tracks, writing and drinking coffee, than go to the hip joints with the rural yuppies and artsy types who seem so desperate to bring Boston and Manhattan to rural New England.
But when I’m here, in Montreal, I’m in a city filled with bistros and cafes, with bookstores-avec-espresso; upstairs aeries for people-watching and chic basements for warmth and escape; internet cafes; outdoor spots for rendezvous and long afternoons. No city in North America can claim better food, although most can claim better weather. So I have my choice, but I keep going back to one little lunch/breakfast/café in particular.
It doesn’t have a name, or at least I don’t know it. It’s near the internet place I used to use, and I went in the first time to have some coffee in the middle of the afternoon, and immediately saw that the food in the small, refrigerated display case was all Middle Eastern, and homemade. There was shish taouk, fresh falafel, and spinach piestudded with sesame; bread with fresh zatar; and an array of homemade vegetable salads: taboulleh, cauliflower, beet, carrot, lentil, beans and chick peas – un plat, trois choix. And there was baklava. Not many things, but good ones. The grey-haired proprietor, a man of 40 or 45, didn’t look Arab or Persian or Greek or Armenian; I decided finally he might be Turkish. I ordered a café au lait, and he made it for me, and set the white china cup and saucer on the counter. Then I realized I only had a $20. He looked – disgusted. I apologized, embarrassed. He took it, made change, and turned away.
I drank the coffee, which was delicious, at one of the small marble-top tables arranged along the windows, trying surreptitiously to watch him. He spoke several languages, but to the patrons, mainly French. He rarely smiled, and at one point engaged in a heated argument with a North African reading a newspaper, but then they both broke out laughing. I had finished and needed to leave, so I put my cup on the counter, said “shukran” and left, getting barely a nod.
The next day I brought J. there for lunch. We ate shish taouk, in paper-thin lavash lightly grilled after the sandwich was made – fantastic - and some of the salads. But that day a new wrinkle appeared: the proprietor’s wife. She was very young, with a lovely face, wearing grey pants and a matching long tunic and her head and shoulders wrapped in a white veil. She worked behind the counter and moved back and forth between the café and the kitchen while her husband waited on customers. She never looked at the men, but kept her eyes down. I immediately liked her and wondered about her, with not a little concern – where had she come from? What was her life like? Did they have children? Had she left her parents and family halfway around the world? Was she happy? There was a door on the far end of the café that opened onto a little garden with nice trees, but there were no tables out there for eating. I wondered if she went out there and sat when she had a moment; I hoped so.
I’ve been back a number of times, and the wife is rarely there, but when she is, she smiles shyly at me and acknowledges my feeble Arabic greetings and thanks. I’m so obviously non-Muslim, but I don’t want to offend, even though they must be used to it; I put on my sweater on hot days and check to see if too much skin is showing, which, of course, it always is. This time, after several months away, J. and I went in for lunch and coffee, and the proprietor nodded his head and gave a small smile of recognition. “I think it’s better when you’re with me,” I told J. The food was great, and the coffee even better.
I guess the thing that keeps us going back to such places is that we’re equally drawn by the quality of the food or drink, and the mutual untold story. Cafes are not bars where everything hangs out and personal stories run freely out of people’s over-lubricated minds. In cafes you see other habitués, and you wonder about them, but there is discretion and distance. (Matisse went to a café frequented by many other artists every day for years, and no one ever came to sit with him, so respectful were they of his air of private dignity – Francoise Gilot mentions that this actually hurt Matisse.) I want to discover the stories, but I won’t ask. I also want, I suppose, to become regular enough that perhaps they will wonder about me. It is a game, perhaps, a gentle human game of curiosity, hunger, thirst: all satiable for a moment, but bound, like us, to return tomorrow.
People who don’t come from liturgical traditions often find Anglican services pretty strange, at best, and intimidating and confusing at worst. Those of us who grew up in liturgically-oriented churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian/Anglican, for example) often find the recitation and repetition of the words of the various liturgies (services for particular times and purposes) comforting, poetic, and moving, even during times of our lives when we’re estranged or voluntarily separated from the church and religion itself. On the other hand, certain parts of the liturgy can drives us right out of the church – the Nicene Creed, for example – if we find we cannot say it with conviction.
Gene Robinson started going to the Episcopal Church from a Disciples of Christ background (he was the son of tobacco sharecroppers in Kentucky – and his parents, simple, unassuming people, were honored guests at his consecration on Sunday) when, as a highly intelligent, questioning young man, he was told by D. of C. elders that “there are some questions you shouldn’t ask”. Gene says “I could always accept that there would be questions that couldn’t be answered – but I couldn’t accept that there were some I just shouldn’t ask.” He found a home for his searching as an Episcopalian, where his mentor told him about the Creed, “just say the parts you feel comfortable saying,” and Gene says he did that, gradually finding he could accept more and more of it.
I’ll never forget the first time I took my husband – the son of a Unitarian minister – to an Episcopalian service. I was finding myself drawn back to the church after a decade and more away, but we’d been married for all of that time so I was revealing, with trepidation, a side of myself my husband didn’t know. About halfway through a Rite II communion service during which he could barely follow which book was which, and when to stand, sit or kneel, he turned to me and said, “My God, you know all this by heart.” “Yes,” I said, sheepishly, “I’m afraid I do.”
In spite of the fact that most of us never attend the consecration of a bishop, the liturgy for that occasion can be found right in the Book of Common Prayer. I read through it before attending Gene’s. As in a baptism, confirmation, or the ordination of a priest, the special words and rituals for the consecration are folded into a fairly regular communion service, with readings from the Old Testament, a Psalm, the Gospel (a reading from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John), a sermon, the passing of the Peace, an offertory, and the administration of communion. The unusual parts are the presentation of the candidate, the “examination”, and the ritual of consecration.
The Presiding Bishop indeed “presides” over the entire event, sitting in a high-backed, somewhat throne-like chair, faced by the candidate. Those who wish, or are required, to speak address the Presiding Bishop. In the first part of this service, half a dozen representatives of various commissions and church bodies read testimonials that certified that Gene Robinson had completed the requirements to qualify as a Bishop, and had been duly elected and approved. Then, according to the prescribed form in the Book of Common Prayer, the Presiding Bishop says to the people that this candidate has been “duly and lawfully elected” and found suitable, but that “if any of you know any reason why we should not proceed, let it now be made known.”
This was the moment for a collective intake of breath. After the congregation was asked to please refrain from any demonstrative response of approval or disapproval, three groups approached the Presiding Bishop, and one by one, they read statements. The first was a priest, and in the most explicit language possible, he began to describe, in escalating detail, sexual acts that he accuses homosexuals (and only homosexuals, apparently) of engaging in. Four thousand lay people and hundreds of bishops and priests -- including Gene Robinson himself, and his daughters, partner, and parents -- were forced to hear words like “fisting” and “rimming” being not only read aloud, but described, in the middle of a worship service -- and this was the true obscenity. Barbara Harris cradled the side of her head in her hand, a young woman near me burst into tears and ran up the stairs; Gene Robinson simply sat and listened, with the rest of us, in silence. Mercifully, the Presiding Bishop cut the litany short as quickly as he could, and said, “I am sure we all know what you are saying. This is a worship service. Please spare us the details and come to your point.” The priest, who was speaking for some breakaway parishes, finished and yielded the floor to a woman who spoke, much more generally, on behalf of disapproving families in the diocese. Finally, the Bishop of Albany read a formal statement on behalf of the bishops in the American church who had not voted for Gene’s ordination. The Presiding Bishop paused to allow everyone time to reflect, and then thanked those who had come forward to speak from their consciences in what he acknowledged were painful and difficult circumstances for many.
“However,” he said, “these objections are known to us, and I believe they have been carefully considered. Therefore, we will proceed.”
Thursday, November 06, 2003
3:45 By now, nearly all the seats are full. The service begins with a fine performance by a hand bell choir, and then the organ and brass begin Richard Strauss’s “Festival Entry”. The crowd gets to its feet, thinking this will be the first hymn, and then, laughing, sits down again. I still can’t gauge the tone of the event: it feels more like a crowd waiting for a performance than a worship service in this bizarre mix of sensory inputs. But when the organist actually does begin the first hymn, I know where I am. It’s “The Church’s One Foundation". What a perfect choice: we’re going to begin by singing about, and remembering, what unites us.
This is a theme that Gene Robinson stresses whenever he speaks. A few days ago we heard him give a talk, and he said,
“And the thing that concerns me, from those who want to leave this church, in America, or leave it worldwide, is that they’re saying that this one thing that divides us is more important than all the other things that hold us together. This one thing. It’s more important than the creeds that we’ve held up for, what, 1700 or 1800 years; it is more important than our baptismal covenant, it’s more important than the doctrine of the Trinity – the list goes on forever, of the things that hold us together. And these people are saying this one thing trumps all of that. And I just don’t believe that for a minute. I really don’t. I think it’s important. I think we have to figure it out. But I think that as Christians we can continue coming to the altar of God, and receiving the body and blood during Holy Communion, and be brothers and sisters in Christ -- and then fight like cats and dogs over some of these things.”
The first acolytes come in, carrying crosses and torches, wearing bright red robes with white cottas, followed by a person holding a very long, extremely flexible wire, at the end of which is a white dove with white ribbbon streamers. This dove "flies" into the arena , before any human except those who have just come in with the crosses, and it leads the procession, slowly flying back and forth across the path that the participants will take. Now comes the procession of clergy and wardens behind the banners of each parish in the diocese. Then another group of acolytes leads in a huge contingent, of non-diocesan clergy and interfaith guests, two by two, all in festival white robes: these are clergy who have come to show their support for what is happening. I see yarmulkes, the black hat of an Orthodox priest, the radiant face of a lesbian priest I know well…the procession is so long that the organist has to improvise interludes between every verse of the hymn. Then he segways into the second hymn, and a roar goes up from the crowd as the procession of bishops enters behind a third group of acolytes. The bishops are all wearing white albs with sleeveless red cassocks over them, and individually chosen stoles – some embroidered, appliquéd, woven - and the effect is stunning.
Then another roar: this time for the entrance of the co-consecrators, the six bishops who will carry out the formal “examination” of the candidate during the liturgy, all in their most elaborate festival white vestments, including copes (floor-length cape-like garments) and tall mitres (the pointed hats found on real bishops, and ivory ones in chess) except for Barbara Harris, the diminutive black woman who was the first woman bishop in Christendom, who is resplendent in bright blue satin. People are continuing to sing, but many of us have tears running down our faces; the sight of so many clergy in partnership with so many lay people, all of us knowing we are doing something either very foolish or very courageous, is intensely moving, and none of us, even the most seasoned Anglican groupies, have ever seen anything like this.
Finally Gene enters, in a simple white monk’s robe with a hood; followed by the Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, (known informally as “the PB”) of the Episcopal Church of the United States; the participants all take their places; the hymn ends with a soaring descant by the choir sopranos; and the liturgy begins.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
CONSECRATION, continued:
Up in the Sky Lounge, about thirty bishops have already gathered, with more arriving each time the private elevator opens. Doug Theuner, the current Bishop of New Hampshire and a very charismatic figure, is playing host, greeting and hugging his colleagues. To my surprise, the bishops are not snobbish at all, but greet me pleasantly even though I’m staying in the background - maybe because I have a “Consecration Committee” ID around my neck, but I appreciate it all the same. The air is rarified up here, nevertheless, in this sea of purple shirts and gold pectoral crosses on heavy chains.
There’s an acrid smell of hot wax. Two sheepskins with elaborate calligraphy are spread out on tables, one bordered by heavy purple grosgrain ribbon. Two pots of hot red wax are melting in little burners, stirred by two monks. Informally, one by one, the bishops approach the table and sign the sheepskins. Then they remove their gold signet rings, lick the surface, and as the monk places a glob of hot wax on the purple ribbon, they press the signet seal onto the wax. With each signature, the fate of the Anglican Communion grows more uncertain, but no one hesitates. It is a strange and powerful moment – a medieval ritual that is also propelling the Church into a future many are reluctant to acknowledge. What impresses me is the lack of hesitation. The signatures are made, the signets pressed firmly, decisively, but not arrogantly. The mood in the room is both convivial and determined: the decisions have already been made; today holds the formal ways that they are being acknowledged and set into history.
When I come down from the Sky Lounge, I can’t believe the crush of people in the lobby. There are long lines in front of the metal detectors outside, and here beyond the entrance a milling crowd of clergy, carrying their robes, looks for where the procession will form. Volunteer Lay Eucharistic ministers who will help administer communion head for their training session. Young people carry church banners; later-arriving choir members rush toward the music rehearsal that has already begun; acolytes carry crosses and torches; even bishops wait patiently to pass through security; and the first members of the general public, some wearing round blue, red, and white “Proud to be Episcopalian” stickers on their lapels, start to fill up the seats of the hockey arena.
From this side of the arena, the choir sounds magnificent. When I go over to join my own choir for a few minutes of the rehearsal, even though I’m not going to be able to sing during the service, I’m amazed at how difficult it is to hear the organ and one another. The director is working very hard. He can’t hear well either, there are about two hundred singers, the organist, tympanist, and a contingent of brass players who’ve never rehearsed together, and he has an hour to get all the music together. He doesn’t know how wonderful it sounds.
Scanning the steep banks of rapidly-filling seats, I wonder if it’s really possible to control or secure a crowd like this. What a nightmare. No wonder stadium crowds and concerts can be so volatile. But along with the problems comes the excitement that you never feel except in a crowd of human beings united for a single purpose. Nearly everyone here is smiling, joyful, excited, expectant, and proud.
When you live in northern New England, you think you’re always prepared for the weather, and, more specifically, for the weather to change. But I certainly wasn’t prepared to come to Montreal and find it sleeting, snowing, and freezing. Yesterday, as the weather turned colder, nastier, and darker, the local citizens began to look more dour and bundled, and by today they have all retreated into winter-mode: black, grey, and brown clothing, heavy scarves, winter coats, hats and boots, and a general tone not of depression, because these are hardy Canadians, but of stoic resignation. Nothing could be more different from the exuberance of July – the celebratory quality of Canada Day and the jazz festival - when navels are bare; clothing bright, flimsy, and colorful; dining is al fresco; and the nights of music and partying never seem to end.
Montreal’s “underground city” of shops and metro stations is never more welcome than when the weather takes a turn for the worse. We spent today drinking coffee in smoky cafes (yes, Jo:rg, it’s Europe here), in movie theaters, and, this evening, at the symphony (and lest you think I’ve gone upscale, last-minute tickets were available for $17.00 Canadian apiece).
The movie we saw this afternoon was a new documentary on the Weather Underground (titled by the same name), and it was excellent. (For those who weren’t alive int hose years, the Weather Underground were the militant radicals of the largely white, college-student mass movement called SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen (and women) eventually went “underground” and carried out a series of bombings of public spaces, including the U.S. Capital and State Department. Very few people were hurt in these bombings, and the perpetrators tried to ensure that innocent people weren’t hurt. Nevertheless, casualties occurred and property was destroyed, and the public never sympathized with the means they chose. Most of the Weather Underground came “up” around 1980 and turned themselves in, but few ended up doing jail time – probably a result of being white, not black.) I don’t need to ever see footage of the Vietnam War again, and I certainly don’t want to see Nixon. But it was quite a trip to go back 30 years to the late 1960’s and early 70’s, when I was a college student, and re-live the tumult of that extremely difficult time in America. I’m not sure we’ve learned anything, and that was really the instructive part of the film – to see how deeply our society has bought into capitalism. But it was also a film about terrible choices made by essentially well-intentioned people who allowed hate to seep into their souls and twist their minds – good, intelligent minds – into the justification of violence.
Bernadette Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground, was one of the people interviewed for the film. She said, in retrospect, “I cherished my hate as a badge of moral superiority” -- an interesting comment in the face of last week’s discussion. Mark Rudd, who was a student leader at Columbia and later of the WU, expresses his mixed feelings very well – “guilt and shame, along with awareness that I didn’t know then, and still don’t know, what to do in the face of the injustice and enormous violence done by the U.S. government”.
Tomorrow I hope to write more about the consecration.
Monday, November 03, 2003
CONSECRATION NOTES: PART ONE
Saturday, November 1, 2003
Noon It’s a beautiful, bright, unseasonably warm autumn day in Durham, New Hampshire, a town near the New England seacoast that is home to the University of New Hampshire. I’m at the Whittimore Center, site of tomorrow’s consecration of Gene Robinson to be Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire – an event that the entire world is watching because it will be the first ordination to the episcopate of an openly gay man. Outside, girls in shorts are playing field hockey on brilliantly green artificial turf. Here, under the cool fluorescence, a hockey rink is in the first steps of its transformation into a holy place.
The ice has been covered by a layer of Homosote, but when you stand on it, it’s cold. My friend who is chairman of the Consecration Committee came here for the first time a month and half ago, and when she stepped onto the ice, she felt rain falling from a "cloud" hovering above it. “Yes, it rains in here,” she was told. “The rink has its own atmosphere, its own weather.” Today though, the air is dry, and the overall impression is of blue, the predominant color of the seats. Then there are the grey of the covered ice and the concrete structure itself; the colored college banners hanging from the white ceiling struts: Boston University, Maine, Northeastern, Amherst, Providence; and advertising banners above the seats. I can detect a faint smell of locker room. It’s very hard to imagine a worship service here, let alone a grand ecclesiastical event with hundreds of priests and bishops, an audience of thousands, a choir of two hundred, an altar and the administration of Holy Communion to everyone who wishes to receive.
Right now there’s a crew of electricians at ice level working on two huge banks of silver lights that will, apparently, be raised into position around the cubical scoreboard near the ceiling. Over in one corner, two technicians are poking at the Rogers electronic organ that will be used for tomorrow’s hymns, printed in blue in the service program I was just handed, hot off the press, from one of the cardboard printers’ cartons out in the receiving area. Two carts of folding chairs, silver with blue cloth seats, have been wheeled onto the ice: these must be for the “altar party”, as the contingent of celebrants and preachers is called, and for the visiting bishops – 52 at last count. A blue rug leads in from one of the central doorways, from which a team in shoulder pads and helmets would normally emerge. This must be for the ecclesiastical procession – but the big genie bucket which is used to lift lights and adjust the scoreboard has been driving over it all morning. Organ, chairs, carpet: all seem dwarfed by the size of the rink and the omnipresent sports atmosphere. I try to suspend my worries and find myself repeating, “All will be well, all will be well”.
3:00 pm It’s happening: a holy space is being created. The ornately carved Bishop’s chair now stands on the beautiful carpet, flanked by chairs for the celebrants. There are seats for the bishops, the other clergy; an altar table and side tables, still uncovered, for the bread and wine, the chalices and patens. Most important, four processional crosses have been brought in, and now rest in their stands: three in the back, near the organ, and one directly behind the altar. I see them shining from here: silent symbols of who we are and what we are about. They surprise me by making me feel better instantly, the moment I saw them carried in, the shining brass glimmering against the blue rows of seats.
I look out to the side of the rink, at the anvil cases filled with electrical cords, the trollies of lighting and sound equipment, the bustling workers, the noise of scraping metal and thudding drawers and latches, motors and squeaking wheels, voices in pods of disconnected conversations. And then my eyes return to the crosses and I’m amazed by their power, their calm, their silence in that face of all this human activity.
It may be a mystery, but it’s real, and how grateful I am to be able to feel it.
Sunday, 11:15 am Because J. and I are working with and on behalf of the Consecration Committee to create a photographic and written record of the process leading up to this day as well as the consecration itself, we’ve had special access to this place. But today, no one, not even the chairperson of the Committee or the Bishop-elect, or the visiting bishops (there are 52 of them expected), will be able to enter this arena without a ticket and without passing through metal detectors and having bags searches and sniffed by dogs. Frankly, I feel a lot better knowing this is happening.
Right now the rehearsal for the procession and liturgy is taking place down on the ice. There are celebrating bishops in purple shirts; Bishop-elect Robinson; his family, including his partner, parents, daughters, former wife; and his newborn grandson; the presenters; the clergy who are part of the altar party. Meanwhile, on the edges of the worship space, wine is being poured into the vessels, and Gene’s vestments laid on a table. The members of the committee, who have knocked themselves out to get to this day, pace anxiously around the periphery. And beyond them are the “secret service”, a number of very intense bodyguards with curly cords behind their ears. Outside this venue is a huge contingent of state police, one foot and on horses, plus police and plainsclothes security forces. One area near the outdoor soccer/field hockey field has been fenced off with orange snow fence for demonstrators who have received a legal permit.
I think many people outside of the New Hampshire diocese don’t know that the Bishop-elect has received death threats serious enough that the FBI has been involved for several months; at this moment he's wearing a bullet-proof vest. Right now, though, and at a reception last night in the beautiful, historic St. John’s church in Portsmouth, the Bishop-elect looks like the most relaxed person here.
1:45 The rehearsal is over, the worship space deserted, the lights turned off. Gene’s golden vestments seem, however, to give off a light of their own. We’re waiting now, in a lull before the choir rehearsal begins and congregation begins to arrive. To my right, three of the security guys are seated in an empty press box, talking to each other. Opposite, across the rink, choir members trickle in in robes of bright blue, black, powder blue, red. Jerry, the music director, leans on the organ flanked by three copper tympani and seats for the rest of the brass section. Douglas Theuner, the Bishop of New Hampshire, who’s often been described as “the bishop from central casting”, so perfectly does he fit the part, just came across the ice. He’ll be preaching today, and I for one, am thrilled that the rest of the world will have a chance to hear him.
2:00 pm More activity now. Choir seats filling up; trumpeters warming up their lips with a few flourishes, church delegations of clergy, wardens, and banner-bearers beginning to come in the far doors and mill around. A flock of ushers-in-training have made a complete circuit of the arena.
Still, with the rink so empty, the floor so bare and grey, it still seems incredible that this event that ought to be in a cathedral will take place here in a matter of hours. But maybe that is America: seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, making-do, riding a wave of infectious human enthusiasm rather than relying on history and stones and tradition. A hockey rink for a consecration? Why not?
Last night, my chairman-friend told me that she had been talking to the director of the Whittimore Center, who had been watching the transformation of the rink during the afternoon, sitting back in a chair, hands on his head. She spoke about how amazing the transformation had been already to her. "But you must know all about that,” she said.
“Wait until tomorrow,” he replied. She raised her eyebrows, puzzled.
“It’s the people,” he said. “It’s the people who make it happen. They’re the magic that makes the rink come alive. You'll see.”
Evening: Back home, it's late, and I haven't got the energy to write about the consecration itself now - but it was glorious, an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime event that I feel privileged to have witnessed. The arena-director's prediction did come true: the people made the day, in compact with the pageantry, personalities and determination of the clergy who came and put themselves on the line for a vastly more inclusive vision of what the Church and Christianity could be. Most of us wept at various times during the ceremony; it was deeply moving and at the same time, very joyful. At any rate - more soon.
