Author Archives: Fred Yi

White House Makes Ready for the Pope

Posted on by

The White House has been keeping details of the pope’s visit under wraps, but last week a few officials from the president’s and First Lady’s staff briefed reporters on some of lighter touches of their pontiff-planning. George and Laura Bush will meet Benedict at Andrews Air Force Base when he arrives on April 15 — something they have not done for any other head of state. Usually, world leaders are greeted with pomp and circumstance on the South Lawn, something Benedict will be treated to as well. But Joe Hagin, White House deputy chief of staff, said the president thought the tarmac greeting showed an extra level of respect the pope deserved. The White House has also arranged for about 5,000 military family members to witness the arrival.

REUTERS/Dario Pignatelli

The South Lawn greeting will  also depart from the norm because the White House has practically thrown open  the gates. About 10,000 regular folks have been invited to watch the welcome  up close. Hagin called it a hot ticket and said volunteer and community groups  have been given priority for the event that will include speeches, a  twenty-one gun salute, a fife and drum corps performance, and some “patriotic  and religious music” from a still to be announced “vocalist” [according to this morning’s Washington Post, it will be American soprano Kathleen Battle].

The crowd, some of whom will need to be at the White House for vetting three hours before Benedict is expected, shouldn’t expect much intimacy with the Holy Father. There are no plans for John Paul II-esque crowd wading during either the South Lawn welcome or the Andrews arrival.

Anita McBride, chief of staff to the First Lady, said the Bushes are also well aware they’ll be hosting Benedict on his 81st birthday (April 16). She said they plan to give him a “small” birthday gift and suggested the surprise might appeal to Benedict’s love of music (so probably not a keepsake bobble-head).

Later on Wednesday, Benedict will meet Bush in private. No aides are even expected to be in the room. At the same time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will meet nearby with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and will likely tackle heavy topics, perhaps Iraq and the status of Christian minorities. But there is no agenda for the Benedict-Bush one-on-one. Hagin said there isn’t even a timetable, despite the 45-minute entry on the official schedule. “The president and the pope can talk as long as they want,” he said. “Nobody’s going to go in and say, ‘Time’s up.'”

— Janice D’Arcy, religion news associate producer, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

Poetry and the American Religion

Posted on by

by David E. Anderson

It makes sense that the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to printing authoritative editions of America’s most significant writings, would bring out an anthology of American religious poetry. After all, it has already done excellent two-volume collections of both 19th- and 20th-century poetry, as well as acclaimed volumes by Whitman, Stevens, Frost, and Pound, and in 1999 it published a worthy and well-received collection of American sermons.

For the most part, AMERICAN RELIGIOUS POEMS follows in that esteemed tradition. The anthology contains works by more than 200 poets, from the Colonial-era Bay Psalm Book (represented by Psalm 19) and the Puritan Thomas Dudley (1576-1653) to Korean-American Suji Kwock Kim (b. 1968) and Wheaton College English professor Brett Foster (b. 1973). In addition, editors Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba, reflecting the ambiguous place of American Indians and African Americans in the nation’s cultural history, include two separate sections — one of American Indian songs and chants and the other a brief collection of spirituals and anonymous hymns.

There is the usual apparatus of an index of poets, titles, and first lines, as well as a short set of brief notes explaining potentially difficult or obscure references in the poems. A note on Michael S. Harper’s reference to “the demonic angel, Elvin, / answering my prayers on African drum” in his poem “Peace on Earth” explains that it is an allusion to Elvin Jones, the jazz drummer who played with John Coltrane. Another tells the reader that the title of Hart Crane’s “Lachrymae Christi” can be translated “Tears of Christ.”

More unusual is a reader’s guide that gives brief definitions and descriptions of topics in some of the poems — Apocalypse, Being, Nature, Praise, Prayer, The Spiritual Quest, and so on. Thus, under Apocalypse, Robert Frost in his “Once by the Pacific” is understood to see “apocalyptic energies at work in an ominous coastal landscape, though the invocation of the world’s end that closes the poem, with the word of God cast in the American vernacular, is as much playful as prophetic.”

American Religious Poems

All anthologies of necessity mirror the taste of their editor, or, in this case, editors. Reflecting perhaps ego or renown, the volume is called “An Anthology by Harold Bloom,” but both Bloom and Zuba are listed as editors. There is no indication of the division of labor, and each contributes an introduction — in Zuba’s case, a conventional and useful essay that explains some of the guiding principles at work in the selections, for indeed there is much fine poetry here, a great deal of it by lesser known poets.

It is always, given space limitations, a tough choice whether to include two or three poems by a single poet, thus limiting the number of poets represented, or to let a larger number poets have their say with a single poem. On the whole, the anthology strikes a generally fine balance. It is nice to see a generous representation (10 entries) of the 18th-century devotional poet Edward Taylor, but to my mind a dozen poems by Emily Dickinson is excessive. In the 20th century, A.R. Ammons with a half-dozen poems (why is the self-serving poem titled “For Harold Bloom” among them, except that Bloom identifies “the Whitmanian” Ammons as “my close friend”?), and Lucile Clifton, lovely as her work is, are both overrepresented, while the paucity of Robert Lowell (only a single poem), as well as the absence of Daniel Berrigan, Adrienne Rich, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, are near unforgivable.

More unfortunate is Bloom’s introduction, made up of equal parts bombast and muddle, obfuscation and plain silliness (“Being a god is rather hard work”), as well as irrelevant political asides (“Emerson, opposing the admission of Texas to the Union, rightly prophesized that Texas would destroy America, though President Bush II goes beyond even Emersonian admonition”). Is Bloom’s view of Whitman bombast or silliness: “He is American religious poetry, and he himself is a Christ rather than a Christian.” Presumably, Bloom’s introduction is an effort to establish a justification for the poetry that follows, a theory about religion in America that he finds expressed in one part of a poetic tradition that runs from Whitman through Crane to Ammons and Ashbery.

Bloom, who eschews history, seems either not to understand or to willfully misread American religious history. He grasps neither its diversity nor its main currents. Nor does he seem to know or care about religion as it is experienced by most Americans, Christian or not, including many of the contemporary poets — say a Samuel Hazo, Mary Oliver, or Paul Mariani — included in his anthology. For Bloom, the two hundred years prior to Emerson do not exist, but he cannot even get Emerson right.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Bloom’s Emerson appears to be the inventor of a uniquely American creedless religion — “the American Religion” — in which Whitman is sometimes Adam, sometimes Christ, sometimes a version of Yahweh. “What is the center of Whitmanian religion? Clearly, it is Walt Whitman himself as Divine, post-Christian yet a messiah, another son of a carpenter who is also a son of God.” It really is a version of the myth of the American Adam, which R.W.B. Lewis so skillfully explored and skewered in his 1955 book, THE AMERICAN ADAM: INNOCENCE, TRAGEDY AND TRADITION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The myth — of America as Eden, the American as Adam inventing a new world with no ties or connection to the Old World — flourished among one strata of influential American intellectuals in mid-century America before the Civil War. But Emerson did not spring fully formed from the soil around Concord, Massachusetts. His American Religion — and Whitman’s, too — owes much to British and European Romanticism, evolving Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and pantheism, not to mention concepts from Hinduism and Buddhism, such as Brahma and karma, that were also part of the cultural and intellectual milieu, as the late Yale historian Sydney Ahlstrom (whom Bloom also quotes on Emerson without recognizing the wider context) pointed out in his classic text, A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Indeed, Bloom seems to be so anxious to turn the Whitman-Dickinson-Crane tradition into a religion (“Dickinson, like Whitman, is a major poet of the American Religion, but she does not assume the role of American Christ as Whitman did” and “Crane’s still undervalued American epic ‘The Bridge’ celebrates what I again would call the American Religion”) that he ignores religion and the many religious sensibilities that have marked the nation’s remarkable religious history. Apart from Emerson, the only references he makes to actual American religious history are to the Second Great Awakening, when he quotes a letter of Dickinson seemingly distancing herself from its emotionalism; Whitman’s recollection of Quaker preacher Elias Hicks; and the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Bloom misreads Cane Ridge as badly as he does Emerson, calling it a fusion of Gnosticism, Orphism, and Enthusiasm, which would certainly be a surprise to all those evangelical, Bible-believing Protestants spawned by its remarkable events. It is worth quoting Ahlstrom here: “The most important fact about Cane Ridge is that it was an unforgettable revival of revivalism, at a strategic time and a place where it could become both a symbol and impetus for the century-long process by which the greater part of American evangelical Protestantism became ‘revivalized.’ A second consequence of this historic camp meeting and the great revival which swept across Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio during the next three years was the vitality which it poured into the participating churches. The future of the country’s denominational expansion was in large part determined by the foundations laid during this period.” While Cane Ridge may have manifested Enthusiasm, the religion of the revival was neither Gnostic nor Orphic, and it had little in common with either Bloom’s American Religion or the mainstream poetic tradition.

Bloom’s little essay leaves one scratching one’s head, asking either “What does this mean?” or “So what?” or sometimes both. To say, as Bloom does, that “so pervasive is the American Religion that it makes obsolete most distinctions between theism, agnosticism and atheism” is to say, finally, that language doesn’t count, that it points to nothing. At the same time, while Bloom dismisses traditional religion, especially Christianity with its Middle Eastern and European origins and expressions, he wants to garb his American Religion with all the trappings of Trinitarian Christianity. Thus, the non-American D.H. Lawrence is not Whitman’s John the Baptist but his St. Paul. The Exodus is the thematic center of American religious poetry. “The American Jesus, the American God, the American Holy Ghost: these have only spectral traces of European and Middle Eastern dogma.” What we have in Bloom’s American Religion is a version of faux Christianity.

But no matter. His redundant introduction can be safely skipped for the more sensible and usable one by Jesse Zuba. Better yet, the poems themselves, despite some glaring lapses, offer the best antidote to Bloom’s bluster and demonstrate the host of religious sensibilities American poets bring to their work. As the poet Samuel Hazo, who compiled a brief volume of contemporary religious poetry in 1963, said of the poems he gathered, they are “testaments of how poets have tried to discover themselves in the world around them, and the world around them in themselves. This is ultimately every poet’s mission, and it is a spiritual or religious mission.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. He has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on the novels AFTER THIS by Alice McDermott and GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson.

 

Krista Tippett

Posted on by

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a profile today of Krista Tippett, the host of the weekly public radio conversation “Speaking of Faith,” which won a Peabody Award this week. As Tippett and others note, the program might also be called “Speaking of Life,” because it explores big life questions through the personal stories of poets, scientists, writers, and sometimes a theologian or even a journalist, of all faiths. That breadth and Tippett’s skill are why 600,000 people each week tune in and why they are so diverse — faithful believers, atheists and everyone in between. Tippett records her program in St. Paul, Minnesota.

onair2

KRISTA TIPPETT: (Host, “Speaking of Faith,” talking to listeners on-air): I’m Krista Tippett and this is “Speaking of Faith.”

ABERNETHY: Most of her interviews are remotes with guests in distant cities, and when she’s doing them, alone in her studio, you can see the intensity of what she calls her “life of listening.”

What Tippett and her producers create is spiritual and theological insight expressed in everyday language without doctrinal certainty.

Ms. TIPPETT: No one who is listening to the program is hearing someone else say, “This is the truth.” But they are hearing people of integrity and wisdom say, “This is my truth. This is how I came to it. This is how I live with it,” and that’s listenable. You can disagree with a person’s doctrine. You can’t disagree with his or her experience.

ABERNETHY: “Speaking of Faith” and Tippett’s book of the same name have created fervent fans. This book signing followed a forum in the Washington National Cathedral, where Tippett was the interviewee talking about her own beliefs — for instance, on religion and science.

Ms. TIPPETT (addressing audience at Washington National Cathedral): I just completely reject the idea that these are incompatible parts of life. If God is God, we can’t be afraid of what we can learn.

ABERNETHY: And the challenge of Islamic extremism.

Ms. TIPPETT: This is not, first and foremost, a battle of Islam versus the West. It’s first and foremost a crisis within Islam.

ABERNETHY: And atheists.

Ms. TIPPETT: I don’t think that to be a moral person that you have to be a religious person.

tippett2

ABERNETHY: Tippett’s grandfather had a strong influence on her. He was a Southern Baptist minister in Oklahoma, where she grew up. She turned away from religion for 10 years while she went to college and then worked in Cold War Germany as a reporter and a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador. But she came to think diplomacy and politics did not explain the world well enough, so she went to the Yale Divinity School and studied theology and the Bible. She also experienced a spiritual evolution.

Ms. TIPPETT: I would say that what has changed is that I have more comfort with mystery, with the fact that there’s a lot that I can’t add up or pin down that I think that’s right, I think that’s good.

ABERNETHY: Does it surprise you and perhaps even make you laugh that you, who started out wanting to repair the world using your mind, now speak of mystery?

Ms. TIPPETT: Oh, but I think mystery is intellectually thrilling. One of the things I reject in our cultural divisions is the clash between faith and reason, and I would say the same about mystery and intellect. They are somehow mysteriously akin to each other.

priest2

ABERNETHY: In the 1990s, the Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota hired Tippett to do interviews with people of many beliefs, and that’s where the idea of “Speaking of Faith” was born. One of the monks, Father William Skudlarek, became a friend and her guide at the Abbey. Earlier, she’d gone back to Christianity and become an Episcopalian. She says she is now firmly Christian but less certain about her denomination.

Ms. TIPPETT: My identification with the Episcopal Church is not as strong presently. I’m a little in a bit of a denominational limbo, which is also a place many of my listeners find themselves.

ABERNETHY: Tippett writes in her book about having suffered a serious psychological depression.

Ms. TIPPETT: Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It’s really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn’t, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems.

ABERNETHY: And your divorce, along with the pain — what were there lessons there?

kids2

Ms. TIPPETT: Divorce is a death, and it’s a failure — or that’s how it feels. That’s just another way in which life is not what we wish it to be, and we have to live gracefully with what it is. I’m quite proud of how my former husband and I now are friends and absolutely co-parents to our children.

ABERNETHY: Tippett’s children are Aly, 14, and Sebastian, nine, and sometimes when she revisits St. John’s Abbey she takes them with her. I asked her why.

Ms. TIPPETT: This experience of mystery that we talked about, I have that experience in the Abbey church here. It’s a feeling. It’s — it’s a transcendent experience. I want them to experience that, that mystery.

ABERNETHY: Perhaps they did in church or as they looked at a page of the illustrated Bible St. John’s Abbey has commissioned.

SEBASTIAN TIPPETT (reading “Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom”): Give me the wisdom that sits by Your throne, and do not reject me from among Your servants, for I am Your servant, the son of Your servant.

Ms. TIPPETT: It’s amazing.

tippettread
ABERNETHY: It was late winter when Tippett and her children visited St. John’s, and we asked her to read a passage from her book.

Ms. TIPPETT (reading from “Speaking of Faith”): “As a journalist, I’m deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant, or at least as perversely thrilling as evil. But if I’ve learned anything it is that goodness prevails not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them, and my radio conversations teach me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness and contend openly with darkness all of their days. They don’t let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, ‘Yes and,’ and they wake up the next day and the day after that to act and live accordingly.” That’s not something I had ever put words around before.

ABERNETHY: I asked Krista whether she thinks of her work as a ministry. “If it is,” she said, “it’s a ministry of listening more than of preaching.”

Continuing King’s Legacy

Posted on by

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Next Friday, April 4, is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the age of 39. He was in Memphis helping sanitation workers who were on strike trying to get recognition for their union. If Dr. King were alive today, would he be campaigning for economic justice, or might he be a social conservative opposing abortion, or both? Kim Lawton has our report on the very different ways African-American ministers are trying to carry on the King legacy.

KIM LAWTON: They call him “The Rev.” He’s Reverend Lennox Yearwood, social activist and community organizer. On this day, Yearwood is in New Orleans meeting with young survivors of Hurricane Katrina and talking about how they can be a force in revitalizing their city nearly three years after the storm. At 38, Yearwood wasn’t even born when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. But he says he’s deeply influenced by King’s dream of a better future for America, and Yearwood believes his mission is to carry that dream forward.

Rev. LENNOX YEARWOOD (Hip-Hop Caucus): Our generation at the 40th anniversary, being more years away than he actually lived — it’s something that is a calling for us as we are now the “dream generation” in the 21st century.

Bishop HARRY JACKSON (Senior Pastor, Hope Christian Church, Beltsville, MD, preaching): Lift your hands, and let’s pray for America. Lord God, we ask you to move in our land.

post01
Rev. Lennox Yearwood

LAWTON: Bishop Harry Jackson is also a social activist as well as senior pastor at Hope Christian Church, a megachurch in Beltsville, Maryland. Jackson’s involved in several political causes, among them fighting against abortion and gay marriage. He, too, says King’s ministry has shaped his own.

Bishop JACKSON: King in his public persona, in his civil rights ministry, if you would, in what some would call his prophetic role to the culture, epitomized a Christian answer to civic involvement.

LAWTON: It’s been 40 years since King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. But African-American ministers across the spectrum continue to invoke his legacy as they work in sometimes vastly different ways to change the world around them.

Professor CHERYL SANDERS (Howard University Divinity School, Washington, D.C): The prophetic mantle of King did not fall on one person. It fell on a community. I think it’s important to keep that legacy alive, not just looking for one person to be the reincarnation of King. Martin Luther King really set the standard for prophetic ministry in these United States.

LAWTON: For Lennox Yearwood that means taking his convictions to the streets, organizing communities and sometimes engaging in protests and other acts of civil disobedience. The nondenominational pastor has been especially active fighting for justice for New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Rev. YEARWOOD: We’re still dealing with racism. We’re still dealing with poverty — people not looking for just jobs but good quality jobs.

LAWTON: Yearwood has frequently criticized U.S. use of torture in the war against terror, and he’s an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq.

Rev. YEARWOOD: We’re still spending more money on our military than we are on programs for social uplift, and Dr. King said it best, that if we’re still spending more money on our military than on our programs, then our country is headed toward a spiritual death, and we are.

LAWTON: These battles, Yearwood says, are similar to the battles King was fighting at the end of his life.

Rev. YEARWOOD: I believe that New Orleans is our Birmingham, and I do believe that Iraq is our Vietnam, and I think that New Orleans and this war in Iraq is our lunch counter moment for the 21st century.

post04LAWTON: As president of a group called the Hip-Hop Caucus, Yearwood focuses on getting young people involved in advocacy. There was this hip-hop concert, cosponsored by Amnesty International, to raise awareness about people displaced both by Katrina and by the war in Iraq.

HIP HOP PERFORMERS (on stage): Homicide, genocide, suicide. Holler, holler! When’s it gonna stop?

LAWTON: Yearwood often points out that King accomplished everything he did before the age of 40.

Rev. YEARWOOD: For me it was inspiring, because your voice can have a huge impact. The passion and the energy you have, particularly using the Gospel for change, was amazing, and he used that in a very appropriate and a very strategic way.

LAWTON: Bishop Harry Jackson tries to create social change through public platforms, from his pulpit to a broader stage. He’s co-author of a new book called “Personal Faith, Public Policy,” which examines what he calls the most urgent issues of the day, including poverty and racial reconciliation as well as abortion, religious liberty, and the family. He has a daily radio commentary heard across the nation and leads a Christian grassroots group called the High Impact Leadership Coalition.

Bishop JACKSON: I often say that the white-led church in America has been oriented toward righteousness or what I’ll call personal holiness, such as they’re against gambling, same-sex marriage. They’re against things like abortions, etc. But the black-led church, coming from King’s background or his legacy, often has been tremendously mobilized around the issue of social justice, and so what we’re saying is that these two things are being married together — righteousness and justice.

LAWTON: In his efforts, Jackson often partners with conservative white and Latino evangelicals.

Bishop JACKSON: Blacks are only 13 percent of the population at this particular point. But if blacks and Hispanics are working together, and people of faith from the evangelical community, you now have a huge, huge voting bloc.

LAWTON: Jackson says King showed that the most successful social movements have a strong spiritual base.

Bishop JACKSON: I believe that spirituality was at the heart of who King was, and for me that legacy is really, really critical.

LAWTON: As time passes, there is more and more debate about how King’s legacy might look today.

Rev. YEARWOOD (speaking to audience): Dr. King was 26, and, you know, he died when he was 39. He would’ve been hip-hop.

post03
Bishop Harry Jackson

Bishop JACKSON: The foundation of King’s work really was biblical, and there’s been a great affinity with social conservatives with the Bible, values, etc. So I believe King would be a social conservative, but I’m not so sure that he’d let himself be owned by any party.

Prof. SANDERS: You can easily say, “Well, Dr. King would’ve done this” or “What would Dr. King have said?” and “Dr. King would’ve supported this.” So it’s almost, it’s almost like you sort of make up, it’s sort of like, “What would Jesus do? Well, Jesus would’ve done this and Jesus would’ve done that,” without really looking at what did Jesus actually do?

LAWTON: Yearwood fears that King’s more radical comments and activities are being domesticated.

Rev. YEARWOOD: I think, most importantly, I think that what people are getting now is a very much lukewarm edition of Dr. King, this “I Have a Dream” only, and that’s it.

Bishop JACKSON: I don’t share that concern, because at the root of it the radical side of him was the Christ-like side.

LAWTON: If anything, Jackson says, it’s the religious side of King that is being downplayed today.

Bishop JACKSON: I think our lack now in terms of black leadership, especially in our generation, is that we don’t have people as committed to a Christ-like stance, and therefore the power of their words has no conviction.

LAWTON: Professor Sanders worries that King’s legacy is all too often misappropriated by those trying to further their own agendas.

Prof. SANDERS: People who have all kinds of different political views can find something in his legacy that they can honor — if nothing else, the dream. The dream, the vision, is great and important. But the vision is grounded in an analysis of the reality, and that reality is still with us. It’s not 40 years, there’s been a lot of progress. But some things are the same.

Bishop JACKSON: Blacks still are sentenced to heavier time in prison, if they go there, than whites, that there is a problem of racial profiling, many other issues along that nature, along that line, that need to be dealt with, and those are some of the things that we’ve got to address. So King began a good work, but it hasn’t been fully manifest.

LAWTON: Still, these ministers say they are committed to seeing it through.

Rev. YEARWOOD: The dream did not die on the balcony, and while the dreamer was killed, the dream did not die.

LAWTON: Fulfilling that dream, they say, will still take hard work on every front.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Remembered

Posted on by

Six prominent African American ministers remember the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and describe his influence on their lives, their ministries, and society at large:

Rev. James Forbes (Healing of the Nations Foundation): The day I heard the news I was in Richmond, Virginia, on my way to the Medical College of Virginia, where I was doing chaplaincy work. I heard the news, I was in the middle of a bridge called Marshall Street Bridge, I heard it, tears rushed to my eyes. I managed to get across the bridge, turned into the parking lot at the hospital, and I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel, and I said “Martin, you shall not have died in vain.”

Prof. Cheryl Sanders (Howard University Divinity School): I also remember the sadness when King — and the shock — when he was assassinated. And I also remember the outrage. I got my first whiff of tear gas. This was a man who was all about peace and nonviolence, and when he was brutally assassinated there was a brutal response. Everything is up in flames, and — I didn’t know — I couldn’t make sense of it, and I don’t think to this day I can make sense of all of that. But I have very distinct memories of the sadness, of the outrage, but also of the recommitment, the sort of resolve: He has been assassinated but we’re going to keep his legacy alive, and we’re going to keep struggling and fighting for justice and freedom, and we’re going to be concerned about the people who are left behind and left out because of racism or because of discrimination.

Rev. Otis Moss III (Trinity United Church of Christ): For me personally, my parents, one, were married by Dr, King, so literally I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Dr. King marrying my parents. Number two, my parents met in the freedom struggle, and so just hearing the stories growing up, but also developing in a household where the heroes of our tradition and our faith were common names that were called and people who would come through constantly. Never had the opportunity to meet Dr. King, Jr., but his father I remember as a small boy, you know, coming through the house, you know, staying through for dinner, and visiting his home when I was about six and seven. And so I thought it was normal for a minister to be engaged in social justice. I thought that was the norm. I didn’t know that there was another paradigm of ministry until I was much older.

post0a-mlk-remembered-operation-breadbasket-298

The Operation Breadbasket Orchestra supplied the music and set the spiritual tempo for many of the meetings, rallies, and marches of the civil rights movement. In 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. invited the band to Memphis, Tennessee to play at a mass meeting and rally to aid in the sanitation workers’ protest. On April 4, they went to the Lorraine Motel where the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was staying. Just before he was shot, Rev. King leaned over the motel balcony railing and asked Ben Branch, the band’s song leader and saxophonist, to play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at the meeting that night. The members of the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra were unable to fulfill Rev. King’s last request until they recorded the gospel song of refuge in Chicago on April 17-18, 1968. Listen to the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

Rev. Lennox Yearwood (Hip Hop Caucus): And I think for me when I really began to understand Dr. King, more than being introduced to Dr. King, was probably in high school. I began to read his speeches, and I didn’t know that Dr. King. It was actually very different. I’d only known of the Dr. King of “I Have a Dream.” And I began to hear his stance on the war in Vietnam and his stance on poverty. That wasn’t the Dr. King that I was introduced to as a child so much, but I really began to appreciate his ministry and how important it was.

Prof. Cheryl Sanders: The “I Have a Dream” speech is arguably the most prominent sound-bite that gives people who otherwise would not know a sense of what black prophetic preaching has been. When King got to that riff, “I have a dream,” he had already established the analysis of the problem of racism and oppression. If you don’t hear the whole speech, it’s like, “Oh, well he’s just dreaming.” And I think it’s really important to recognize that that analysis of the problem of racism and segregation and oppression and the demand that — I mean, this was a protest march on the Mall of the capital of the United States. I mean, it wasn’t like, “Oh, I just have a dream, and it’s a nice dream that everybody can just sort of join in and hold hands.” Well, there is — there was some of that language in there, but the important language is a call to accountability, calling America to account.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ: The whole nation focuses in after his assassination on the “I Have a Dream” portion of his theology and completely ignores the King who, exactly one year before his assassination, came out against the infamous demonic menage a trois of capitalism, racism, militarism. Those three evils are just as much present, if not more so, than they were April 4, 1967 — 1968. If anything, as I’ve said, they’ve gotten worse.

Rev. James Forbes: My thinking is that we’ve tried to domesticate his vision. We love his beautiful voice and his ringing words of “I Have a Dream.” But I want to give the society credit for knowing when it can no longer just quote those words and then go on with business as usual.

Rev. Otis Moss III: Not just domesticated, but we’ve co-opted the message. Where now Dr. King is utilized to promote McDonald’s and Dr. King is used to promote whatever particular corporation to say that we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, when in actuality these entities were against the message and teachings of Dr. King. So we really have to bring back the radical message of Dr. King and stop seeing him as solely a dreamer and the quote of “I have a dream” or the quote that people love to lift up about “the content of one’s character.” And we’ve really got to deal with the issue that Dr. King, in 1967, talked about the fact that many people of color are living quote unquote in a domestic colony, that people who are poor have been colonized by the majority culture, and the only way to make a shift in power is to really change the issues of poverty and race which intersect in American culture.

Rev. Harry Jackson (Hope Christian Church): The folks who’ve been domesticated are the preachers like myself who don’t have the courage to call people back to biblical accountability. And so when I go into predominantly white settings and preach, I’ve got to be as bold as King was and just speak to truth and love and to say hey, we’ve got to come together and solve these problems. When I’m in black settings I’ve got to be bold enough to say hey guys, there are things you need to do to solve these problems. You can’t talk about these other people as though they’re racist and not acknowledge your own issues of race.

Rev. James Forbes: Dr. King used to talk about churches that were not headlights but taillights. There is not as much difference between the culture and the churches or religious institutions as some of us would like. I think that the churches, the mosques, the synagogues still keep alive a vision of the beloved community. They preach about it, they talk about it. But the power of the church to engage the culture and the society, to bring about policy changes that will allow the realization of that dream, that’s not been too strong lately.

Rev. Otis Moss III: I think that he is the premier prophet of the 20th century that has really shaped the way that we see social justice ministry. Unfortunately, in today’s community and today’s language per se, we have a prosperity gospel that has developed outside of that tradition. So we have competing traditions now, where you have one group that has really developed through this market-driven culture and the gospel, and another group that has developed out of the prophetic tradition of Dr. King, and so both of them are vying for attention per se within the popular culture and also within the African-American community.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: The church of King’s day confronted a government that had demonic policies and was evil. But 40 years later the church is cooperating with the government, so that from those of us who sit on the inside of church it looks very bad in terms of what has happened to King’s dream, what has happened to King’s message, what has happened not just to the dream about the one who heard quoted on the Washington Mall in 1963, but the beloved community where all persons are counted as persons of worth. So when you start talking about is there unfinished work– God, yes. Everything he was talking about got put on hold, pushed to the side. The national holiday was given in terms of his birthday, and that was the end of it. In terms of picking up the agenda he was preaching and what he was talking about? No.

Rev. James Forbes: It is fascinating that for about 40 years we’ve been waiting for the shining star to replace Dr. King in terms of the sharpness of his vision and the power of his oratory. That person never emerged. When we talk about Dr. King’s words, his ideas, and his dream, people forget where Dr. King got his dream from. Dr. King was a Baptist preacher. Dr. King grew up where he listened to the words of the Hebrew prophets, where he listened to the words of the Gospel. He was impacted by theologians — contemporary. He was impacted by people of other religious traditions. Gandhi was very important to him, Emerson was important to him, Reinhold Niebuhr important to him. We read the same Bible, we hear of the same prophets, we are drinking from the fountain of wisdom from that generation. It is not, therefore, surprising that some of us are coming to the same conclusion. Segregation is out. Racialism is out. Tribalism is dead. Violence will not solve our problems. And economic disparity that simply keeps us always on the edge of either revolution or great despair at epidemic proportions.

Bishop Harry Jackson: I think the idea that America is supposed to be multiracial, multicultural, and that we are supposed to embrace other people’s ethnicity has really gotten into our hearts. So in that way King’s vision and his dream has been wildly successful. But it’s still yet to be realized, in my view.

Rev. Lennox Yearwood: So we’re that generation that was born on the balcony. We are that generation now that is, was born in the’70s and the late ’60s and now in the ’80s and ’90s. We’re a generation of young people working side by side. So we’re not just black or white working separately for sometimes the same issues, but we’re black and white working side by side. We are that dream generation, and we have some of the problems that are carried over from the last generation that we must deal with as this dream generation together.

Prof. Cheryl Sanders: I think he had a wonderful balance of a knowledge of the past, acknowledging the past, but also a vision of what the future would look like. And I think largely in the 40 years we have seen the implementation. A lot of places, a lot of places in the society you can see that the things he dreamed about actually came to pass, and that’s what tells — that’s what makes the difference between a true prophet and a false prophet. What the true prophet speaks comes to pass, and much of what Martin Luther King spoke of has come to pass. It’s just that the full vision has yet to be completed. And that’s work.

Rev. Victoria Sirota Extended Interview

Posted on by

Read more of Kim Lawton’s March 12, 2008 interview with the Reverend Victoria Sirota, Canon Pastor and Vicar of the Congregation at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City:

Q: How important is Easter on the Christian calendar?

A: Easter is the pivotal feast day. It is the most important day of the year for a Christian. The awesome thing about Easter is the way in which it takes what would have been a tremendous tragedy, the death of Jesus on Good Friday, and turns it into the great triumph of God over death, and that changes everything for us. We wouldn’t be Christian if it wasn’t for that … It was what turned the disciples into Christians, when they realized that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he really was the Messiah that they were waiting for and that somehow the world changed in that magnificent sacrifice. That was what gave them the energy, the joy to go out and to preach the Gospel to all people, and many of them were martyred because of it. So that deep, profound faith in themselves and the deepness of who they were was what sustained them in times of their struggles and their trials. A theology or a philosophy that doesn’t deal with death is not going to be helpful to you when you’re in times of suffering and trial. I often find that people talk very nonchalantly about God and religion, and I sometimes think to myself, well, wait until you have difficulties. What will sustain you? The power of the crucifixion is the fact that it was a horrible way to die. That Jesus allowed himself to be killed that way — he could have avoided it if he wanted to. There are other times in the Bible where it talks about the leaders and authorities and people trying to stone him, but he went back to Jerusalem knowing that he had so stirred up the people and the authorities that they were so angry at him that they wanted to crucify him, and he knew that was what he needed to do, so he did it out of his own free will. The pain of that, the sorrow, the struggle, the conflict of that horrible day all turn into joy with the knowledge that he was resurrected from the dead. So suddenly what had been a great failure — the greatest tragedy, the worst thing that could have happened — became the greatest joy, the most wondrous thing, the great triumph of God over death.

Q: How important is music to this season?

A: We know that Jesus, when he met with his disciples on what we call Maundy Thursday — it comes from the Latin mandatum, a mandate, and the mandate actually was to wash each other’s feet. The mandate was to serve each other, to love each other as Christ loves us. At this Passover meal that Jesus was sharing with his disciples, he picked up the bread that he had and broke it and gave it to them and said, “This is my body,” and he picked up the cup of wine and thanked God and said, “This is my blood,” and passed it around. Little did they know that this was going to be the last meal with him. What they knew was that he was very emotional and that he seemed to be telling them things that they knew they needed to remember. One of the last things they did in this celebration of the Passover meal was to sing a hymn. We don’t know what hymn it was, but it would have been a Hebrew chant that would have been sung at the Passover table, and knowing that Jesus was a singer and that he sang with his disciples makes you realize how ancient this form is and how deeply it is engrained in the soul.

Hymns are one of the oldest things we human beings do together communally. What’s wonderful about singing is that you actually breathe together. You say it in the same tempo. It’s the difference between saying a creed together in church, where ir might not be exactly the same tempo, or actually singing it, where everyone has the same tempo. You’re breathing at the end of the phrase together. It is a wonderful moment where we become one. In Christianity we talk about being one body in Christ, and to be able to breathe together and sing together as one is one of the most profound ways to experience that.

The wonderful thing about hymns is that they are encoded with different memories of singing them in different places. I imagine that the disciples remembered that hymn hauntingly the next two days, that they remembered him singing with them, and it probably made them cry as they remembered. And then, when Jesus was resurrected from the dead, then that singing with him became something else. Probably for the rest of their lives they could always see him and hear him singing with them whenever they sang that hymn. That’s the power of music.

The other thing that happened at this Passover meal is that Jesus surprised them by getting down on his knees in front of them, by taking a towel and actually washing their feet. Peter, one of the disciples, immediately said, “No, No, you shouldn’t be washing my feet.” And Jesus said, “If I don’t wash you then you are not part of this whole thing,” and then he said, of course, “Well, then wash everything.” And Jesus said, “No, only the feet.” But this simple, very powerful act of not being the kind of leader one would expect, not being the kind of person who would lord it over them — “Yes, I am God” — Jesus never did that, and that was the most amazing thing, that he of his own free will gave up his life, knowing that was the only way to break the power of death, to be the one who did not deserve to die, but who died in our stead.

Q: What does knowing that Jesus sang with the disciples do for you, and how does that make the importance of music central to this season in the church year?

A: Knowing that Jesus sang meant that he was like me, that I sing, he sang, that he was a fully human being, and that he enjoyed being with people and singing together. One of the greatest things about singing is the way in which it immediately creates community. If you’re breathing together with each other, if you’re singing the same words, you’re experiencing the same feeling. There’s a way in which different hymns give us a different sense of emotion. So, for example, with “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” it is a very personal piety: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Well, if you’ve been in profound grief, you know what that is. That hymn may sound silly to you when you’re in a good mood, and everything’s going fine. But when someone close to you dies suddenly, lingering on the words “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble” will be exactly where you are. So the hymn picks up an emotion and carries it to a place where we can share it with others in a way we don’t do otherwise. Some of the great moments of hymn singing have been at the funeral of some great, tragic figure. When we sing together “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” there’s something comforting about singing a hymn that has gone through many, many, many different tragedies and carries us together at that moment … We seek to be in community with each other, and singing is one of the greatest ways to allow us to do that, where we can feel the same emotion, and we can say the same words at the same time, and we can truly be one body.

Q: There is special music for this season that most Christians don’t usually sing at other times of the year.

A: One of the great hymns, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” was actually a Latin hymn. I believe it dates back to the 14th century. It started in Bohemia. It became very popular, and there’s version of it that came in 1708 in English translation, and we’re still using that hymn and that melody. It is ecstatic in the way that you have “Alleluia,” which is “praise to God,” and that alleluia repeats after every phrase, so it gets the sense of total joy. If you’ve ever been with somebody you thought was dying, and then they make it through the night, and the doctors refer to it as a miracle, that’s the kind of joy which was, “We thought he was dead, but now he is alive. Hallelujah!”

Q: Much Easter music uses alleluia or hallelujah. Why is that?

A: “Alleluia” is the Latin form of “praise to God.” “Hallelujah” is the Hebrew form of “praise to God.” They’re both ecstatic, and I think the sound of it is why we haven’t translated them, because “Alleluia,” the way it falls off the ear, and “Hallelujah” — just that sense of almost moving into the non-verbal, not a translation of “praise to God” but “Hallelujah,” that sheer joy, sheer ecstasy.

Q: And why are those words used especially at Easter?

A: Not only do we use them especially at Easter, but we don’t say them in the Christian Church during Lent. We bury the alleluias and return them on Easter Sunday because we are walking with Jesus through this Lenten period. One of the earliest services in the Christian Church is the Easter Vigil, waiting through the night, being reminded of the great story and waiting for dawn to come, waiting for that moment when Christ is risen. And the early church then began to precede that with two fast days, so you’re having a Paschal fast before the Paschal feast, and eventually, within a number of centuries it became a whole week, what we now term Holy Week … During Lent we work on our relationship with God and prepare ourselves to get to the point each year so that we can walk with Jesus during these final three days. The gift of the Triduum Sacrum, these three holy days, is that we walk in real time with Jesus, and we meditate on everything that happened to him during those times.

Q: How does the music of the season reflect that journey, those moods?

A: The songs and the hymns, especially for Good Friday, reflect the pain, the conflict, the torture, the incredible sadness and mourning around the death of someone you love. Any of us who have had that kind of experience know that it’s like having the rug pulled out from underneath you. You can’t imagine the world without this person. You can’t imagine going on. Your life has totally changed.

In “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” we have a wonderful hymn. It started as a Latin hymn. It got translated into German and then into English. One of the early English translations was “O head so full of bruises,” which I don’t think we’d still be singing today. But the translation, the music, the harmonization — what’s so wonderful about it is the way it holds complex theological issues together. There are moments in major keys, moments in minor keys, there are dissonances and consonances, there is tension that gets resolved. It takes you on a journey, takes you on a long journey through the text. It’s a meditation on Christ and on his body, specifically his head and on the gift of his sacrifice, so encoded in the music, in the sonorities, in the choice of chords, in the way in which the melody moves, in the way in which the harmony flows. We hear the anguish and that suffering, and we linger with it. “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” if you sing all the verses, takes a long time, and in general the songs we sing on Good Friday are longer. They are slow, they may be in a minor key, they have a sense of suffering, of sorrow, of mourning, and that is a great gift. To be able to stand together in that emotion and do it together as a body is the gift to us. If you’ve been to a funeral, where suddenly everyone is singing together, there’s something very comforting about that, that you’re not alone. Death happens to all of us. That is one of the great tragedies of being human.

Q: And then there is a big contrast from the emotion of Good Friday to Easter.

A: I don’t think anyone can tell you that you must believe Jesus rose from the dead. I think that we all struggle with that in our own time … I’ve been through all the doubt, so I understand why people can’t just say, “Yes, this is for me.” But I also know in my heart that my Redeemer lives, that I’ve seen miracles surrounding the deaths of good friends of mine, and I know that there’s something more than what we see. I know somehow that the invisible is louder than the visible, that there are saints and angels that sing their praises. So on the Sunday morning of Easter, the cathedral is totally changed from Good Friday. On Good Friday, it’s been stark. We’ve cleared off the altar; there is little there. We have the cross, the starkness of the cross, and the sadness — no flowers, no incense. And then on Easter Sunday the church is filled with lilies and spring flowers. The smells are overwhelming, the incense comes back, the lights are up high and bright, the music is loud and joyous and fast and fills us with such happiness to know that our God lives, that love has triumphed over evil.

Q: How does the music convey the Easter message?

A: The theology of Easter is one of joy, triumph, resurrection, rebirth, surprise. The joy of Easter is in the triumph of the resurrection. It’s an incredible and profound joy knowing that God has broken through and that love has triumphed, and so the music tends to be more straightforward, less lingering on harmonies and dissonance, very straightforward, a joyous, faster tempo … One of the things people love about Easter hymns is the incredible joy and happiness of singing them. The tempi are faster. The organ plays loud. We can let ourselves sing at the top of our lungs, and no one is going to yell at us for singing loudly. We have ecstatic moments and hallelujahs. We have just the sheer joy of knowing that love has triumphed. The message of Easter is encoded in the music. We hear the joy, we hear the triumph. We sing fast music, we sing it joyously, it’s in a major key, and it helps us to feel that this is the day the Lord has made.

Q: How is the message expressed differently in different cultural and theological traditions?

A: Every hymn is the result of someone’s spirituality. What’s so interesting about hymn writing and hymn composing is that we take together a text, sometimes it’s a Latin text from the 12th, 13th century, it’s connected with a translation, it might be translated into German and then into English. We have the piety of all those people who are working on that. We have a tune. We have someone else who might harmonize it. All of these pieces fall into place. It is always a miracle as to which hymn people decide is the one they want to sing. “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” was a hit tune the moment it appeared in 1708 in its current form, and we have been singing it every Easter since. This wonderful hymn “Because He Lives I Can Face Tomorrow”: Being able to have that as your core theology, singing it so that you remember it, so that it’s in your mind the rest of the week, waiting to sing it until Easter Sunday, and that is a profound theology. That’s absolutely helpful to you, and so as you have that tune going through your head the rest of the week, you’re thinking about the Easter message, the core message, which is Jesus lives, Jesus was resurrected, therefore my life has a new meaning. Death is not the end of me.

Q: At Easter time, there are traditional hymns that are sung pretty universally, but there are lots of new songs as well, much more so than Christmas. What does this say theologically?

A: It actually is terribly theologically important that we keep composing and writing new music. If we stick with all the old music, then somehow there lingers this idea that God is dead. The Holy Spirit in my theology is still moving in the world and is still encouraging us to write new songs, to write new texts, to write new poetry, and the gift of a living faith is rediscovering again what that means for you … What we love about something new is that we see an old idea or an old truth with new eyes, and that’s a great gift to the world. So we absolutely need new Easter hymns, new Easter songs, and it’s lovely that these different traditions all have their own hymns that pop up.

Q: So many of the Easter songs have the image of Jesus as a lamb.

A: Jesus and his disciples had that Passover meal, and at that they would have had lamb. The sacrificial lamb is deep in Jewish theology — the idea of one sacrifice representing the sins of all. And so that was an obvious thing for the early church to come to, the idea of Jesus being the paschal lamb, being the lamb of Pesach, of Passover, and because of him our sins are passed over. In the early church, the idea of crucifixion was so horrendous; it was such a horrible way to die that they couldn’t imagine using that as a symbol. Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky before he overcame his enemies, and two years after that he decided crucifixions should be banned. There is no symbolism of crucifixions or crosses in the fourth century or the fifth, and it’s only later that people began to portray that, when it’s not a form of death, a form of execution that’s being used all the time.

Q: And the Hallelujah Chorus. Why is that such a common staple of Easter music?

A: I think the Hallelujah Chorus, which comes from Handel’s Messiah, somehow represents the sheer ecstasy of the joy of knowing that our life has meaning, of knowing that love has triumphed, of knowing that God is and that there is more to life than just the dreariness of the day — that Christ has triumphed over death, that we can hope for greater things, that there is life after death. There are some hymns and songs that seem fine on paper, but when you sing them they don’t resonate, and then there are other hymns and songs that the first time they are sung, somehow everybody knows this speaks an eternal truth. “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” is one of those hymns.

Q: Many of the Good Friday and Easter songs emphasize blood.

A: The truth of the reality is that we are dealing with life and death issues. The idea of blood, which is so horrifying — when you bleed you are terrified that you are going to die — but to use that as a symbol, then, of new life is the gift of it as symbol. There is much poetry that is written that seems sort of gory, but the best of it transcends that and calls us to a different place. It reminds us that yes, we are human and that we die: Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. And yet it reminds us that there is another side to that, that the story doesn’t end there, that we end in resurrection.

Easter Music

Posted on by

 

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, as we mentioned earlier, Western Christians are celebrating Holy Week and Easter, their most sacred time of the year. In the many special services and observances that take place during Holy Week, music plays a crucial role in setting the mood of the worship and in helping to convey the Easter message. Kim Lawton has our report.

CHOIR #1 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

KIM LAWTON: Easter is the most important day on the church calendar, and for Christians, the music of the season is central to the celebration.

Canon VICTORIA SIROTA (Author, “Preaching to the Choir” and Pastor, The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York): The awesome thing about Easter is the way in which it takes what would have been a tremendous tragedy — the death of Jesus on Good Friday — and turns it into the great triumph of God over death.

Canon Victoria SirotaCHOIR #1 (singing): And He shall reign forever and ever.

Canon SIROTA: The message is encoded in the music.

CHOIR #1 (singing): And He shall reign forever and ever.

THOMAS TYLER (Special Assistant to the Pastor for Worship, Shiloh Baptist Church): If there’s anything that’s going to connect to people across any line, any sector, it will be its music.

LAWTON: The importance of music stretches back to the first Holy Week, on Thursday, when Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples at the Last Supper. According to the Gospel story, they sang a hymn together before they parted.

Canon SIROTA: We don’t know what hymn it was, but it would have been a Hebrew chant that would have been sung at the Passover table. Knowing that Jesus was a singer and that he sang with his disciples makes you realize how ancient this form is.

LAWTON: At Maundy Thursday services, music helps set the mood as Christians begin their annual time of mourning the arrest, prosecution and crucifixion of Jesus.

Thomas Tyler is in charge of worship and music at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. He says it’s spiritually important to sing the songs of grief before celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

Thomas Tyler, Shiloh Baptist ChurchMr. TYLER: We want to skip over the sorrow. We want to skip over the abandonment and go get our praise on. But, if you don’t remember what he went through, then I feel your appreciation for the significance of that resurrection is marginalized.

LAWTON: The most somber practices take place on Good Friday, and the music reflects this.

Canon SIROTA: In general, the songs that we sing on Good Friday are longer. They’re slow. They may be in a minor key. They have a sense of suffering, of sorrow, of mourning.

LAWTON: At the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Canon Sirota works with organist Tim Brumfield. They say one of the most common Good Friday hymns, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” holds complex theological truths.

Canon SIROTA: What’s amazing about it is the way the music goes between major and minor, uses dissonance notes, resolves them, there’s this underlying sense of conflict that still needs to be resolved. We Christians are thankful to God for the crucifixion. but on Good Friday we spend the time lamenting the fact that Jesus had to die on our behalf.

LAWTON: Another widely sung hymn is “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” — an old African-American spiritual.

FEMALE PERFORMER (on stage singing): Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Canon SIROTA: It’s a very personal piety: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Well, if you’ve been in profound grief, you know what that is.

LAWTON: Although some Easter season music has become universal among Christians, many traditions put the basic theological concepts into their own cultural settings as well.

Mr. TYLER: That culture helps to shape who you are and it’s reflected through how you do what you do, how you go through your — in this case — your spiritual practices.

LAWTON: Many of the crucifixion songs focus on the blood of Christ, which Christians believe atoned for the sins of the world.

Canon SIROTA: The truth of the reality that we are dealing with life and death issues; the idea of blood, which is so horrifying. And when you bleed you are terrified that you are going to die. But to use that as a symbol then of new life, it reminds us that the story doesn’t end there, that we end in resurrection.

LAWTON: And so comes the great transition to Easter Sunday, from mourning to resurrection.

Canon SIROTA: We hear the joy, we hear the triumph. We sing fast music. We sing it joyously. It’s in a major key and it helps us to feel that this is “the day the Lord has made.”

LAWTON: Many Easter songs incorporate the words, “Alleluia” or “Hallelujah.”

CHOIR #2 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

Canon SIROTA: Alleluia is the Latin form of “praise to God.” Hallelujah is the Hebrew form of “praise to God.” So they’re both ecstatic. And I think the sound of it is why we haven’t translated them. Hallelujah — just that sense of almost moving into the non-verbal. Not a translation of praise to God, but “Hallelujah” — that sheer joy, sheer ecstasy. Not only do we use them especially at Easter, but we don’t say them in the Christian Church during Lent. We bury the Alleluias and return them on Easter Sunday.

Mr. TYLER: Because it’s the highest praise. It’s the highest praise. And on this day, of all days, he deserves what: the highest praise.

LAWTON: There are Easter old standards that are sung with great meaning. One of them is, “Because He Lives.”

CHOIR #3 (singing): Because He lives I can face tomorrow.

Canon SIROTA: Because He lives, I can face tomorrow”. And that is a profound theology.

LAWTON: But there are often new Easter songs too.

YOUTH CHOIR (on stage singing): Our Redeemer lives…

Canon SIROTA: If we stick with all the old music, then somehow there lingers this idea that God is dead. The Holy Spirit in my theology is still moving in the world and is still encouraging us to write new songs.

LAWTON: Perhaps the single most popular Easter song across the Christian spectrum is “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” also called, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”

Canon SIROTA: “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” is one of the great Easter hymns. And one of the wonderful features of it is this Alleluia that comes as the refrain of every single line so it has this ecstatic quality of singing with great joy all these notes.

Mr. TYLER: We celebrate the “now”-ness of the event, even though the event happened over 2,000 years ago. Each time it occurs it’s a fresh experience — a fresh observation.

Canon SIROTA: The core message, which is: “Jesus lives. Jesus was resurrected. Therefore my life has a new meaning. Death is not the end of me.”

CHOIR #4 (singing): Alleluia. Alleluia.

LAWTON: And the music, they say, is key to conveying that message. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Bangladesh Relief

Posted on by

TIM O’BRIEN, guest anchor: If you think it’s been a hard winter in the U.S, consider the weather in Bangladesh. People there are barely recovering from a devastating cyclone, a not unusual tragedy in that part of the world, and this time global warming threatens to flood much of the country. As the land begins to disappear, climate refugees, as they are called, are learning to farm differently and to live and go to school afloat. Fred de Sam Lazaro tells the story.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It was the strongest cyclone ever recorded in a place that’s seen many of them. Two months later, the modest homes seem in hopeless disrepair. The human suffering is on fullest display at distribution centers like this one run by the charity Islamic Relief. On this day, 700 families were given basic care packages. Many more went home empty-handed. Saidur Rahman was among the luckier ones, though he’d hardly call himself lucky. His house was badly damaged, but his large extended family did get emergency food aid and was able to move back, with the painful exception of their 27-year-old son.

SAIDUR RAHMAN (through translator): He went out to fish. When the cyclone came he was trying to park his boat, but another boat collided with him. He fell in his boat. He was injured, and he died.

DE SAM LAZARO: He and about 3,200 others died in November’s cyclone. It’s a figure that relief officials feel good about. A cyclone here in 1991 killed 140,000, but this time there were early warnings and schools became shelters.

VINCE EDWARDS (National Director, World Vision, Bangladesh): World Vision moved over 30,000 families in 33 cyclone shelters prior to the cyclone.

DE SAM LAZARO: So these are 30,000 people who could potentially have perished were it not for the preparedness?

Mr. EDWARDS: Sure, that’s true.

DE SAM LAZARO: Non-government organizations, especially faith-based ones, have been key to relief efforts in a country known for ineffective governance. The Christian organization World Vision has been helping people put their homes together temporarily with corrugated iron sheets. It will take years to build sturdier homes. Restoring livelihoods seems even more distant.

UNIDENTIFIED FARMER #1 (through translator): It’s not just the cyclone. We are facing a disaster every day with water problems.

DE SAM LAZARO: The rice fields are less productive because salt water from storms and from river and sea water mixing has inundated them, a problem steadily worsening due to climate change, these farmers complained.

UNIDENTIFIED FARMER #1 (through translator): From past years to now, gradually the land is decreasing, going further and further down.

UNIDENTIFIED FARMER #2 (through translator): We really don’t know but it’s our guess that the developed countries that have big factories and machinery, they’re producing some gases. These gases mix with the air, and that is making the environment polluted, having the negative effect on our soil.

DE SAM LAZARO: Doctor Atiq Rahman is this country’s leading climatologist.

Dr. ATIQ RAHMAN (Executive Director, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, pointing to map): So the ocean will rise this way, and the central flood plain will be inundated more.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says Bangladesh is pummeled from the south by cyclones and flooded from the north by the major rivers swollen by warming glaciers in the Himalayas. In this, the dry season, it’s easy to see the impact in erosion. Like people, trees struggle to stay rooted here. If, as some scientists predict, sea levels rise significantly by the end of this century, a lot of Bangladesh will simply disappear.

Dr. RAHMAN: If the sea level rises by a meter, this is the amount of land that will disappear or go under water.

DE SAM LAZARO: About a quarter of the land mass?

Dr. RAHMAN: About a quarter of the land mass.

DE SAM LAZARO: How many people live here today?

Dr. RAHMAN: Well, right now 18 to 20 million people now.

DE SAM LAZARO: Climate refugees?

Dr. RAHMAN: Climate refugees.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s already happening. In the capital, alongside new skyscrapers are burgeoning slums, their teetering stilts a water mark of the wet season. Joynal Mollah moved into this small room four years ago with his wife and four young children, They scraped by as laborers and earned less than two dollars a day. The land his family had farmed for 200 years and the home on it simply fell into the river, he says.

JOYNAL MOLLAH (through translator): I used to have a piece of land, a third of an acre. We used to have a home. It had a big kitchen. As I lost my land and house in the village, the situation compelled me to come here. Otherwise, no one would live in a place like this.

DE SAM LAZARO: Even here, there’s simply no room. Bangladesh, the size of Iowa, has a population of 146 million. Non-government and some government agencies are trying to adapt to the new realities. The Bangladesh Rice Institute is trying to develop strains that can grow in more saline soils. In the northwest, 1,200 primary students go to school on specially designed boats, the classrooms powered by solar panels. The idea belongs to a 30-year-old architect who says its time to reconcile with spending life on water.

MOHAMMAD REZWAN (Executive Director, Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha): We can see that it is possible to run the completed education system on the boat. Our next step is to develop the floating houses. If it is done, then we’ll work on floating farming techniques.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s no shortage of innovative projects to feed, shelter, and educate families. But they’ll need to get much larger to put more than a small dent in the enormous need, and it’s hard to focus on anything beyond the here and now. Even as relief agencies take on the long-term effects of climate change, their efforts to tackle it are always likely to be hindered by the immediate, desperate needs of victims of this country’s frequent natural disasters.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Morulganj, Bangladesh.

Jewish Life and Times at the Movies

Posted on by

by Chris Herlinger

Can you compress the Jewish experience into a 32-movie, 16-day film festival?

You can’t, but you can, at the least, show the enormous diversity of that experience spanning different genres and themes — some overtly religious, some not, says Aviva Weintraub, director of the New York Jewish Film Festival.

The annual festival, now in its 17th year, just ended a two-week run at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater (with additional screenings at the Jewish Museum), and it gave New Yorkers their yearly opportunity to see a selection of films that “ask hard questions about life, culture, identity, and politics,” according to Richard Pena, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s program director and a member of the festival’s selection committee.

This year the event attracted films from Israel, the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Ilana Trachtman’s PRAYING WITH LIOR

If geographic breadth is something of a festival staple, so is thematic diversity, so much so that Weintraub acknowledges that films touching upon such a variety of experiences — war, displacement, human rights, the relationship between God and community, and even the comic side of life — probably do not have an overtly common theme.

But in an interview Weintraub says she feels many of this year’s films shared “a kind of restlessness, a sense of dialogue and questioning in which there are not always ‘clean’ answers and things are not wrapped up easily.”

That is certainly the case in PRAYING WITH LIOR, a new documentary by American director Ilana Trachtman chronicling the life of Lior Liebling, a Philadelphia teen-ager with Down syndrome who embraces prayer with unusual intensity and passion, prompting friends and family to call him “the little rebbe.” The film opens theatrically in New York City on February 1 and in Los Angeles on March 14.

The story centers on the preparation for Lior’s bar mitzvah, and its honest depiction of the personal and religious struggles of Lior, his family, and his community of faith does not sentimentalize their experiences. While his brother says “Lior is definitely closer to God than anyone else I know,” one of his sisters speaks honestly about her feelings that Lior is too often the center of family attention and concern.

The film may prove to be something of a landmark in examining the spirituality of the disabled. At a screening at the Jewish Museum attended by Jewish and Christian clergy, Trachtman said she was drawn to the subject after meeting Lior and being “mesmerized” by his praying. Despite detractors who told her that no one wants to see a movie about special needs, and it isn’t what a Jewish film is supposed to be about, Trachtman persisted, and her critically acclaimed work is being praised for opening doors for the disabled within religious communities.

Joseph Cedar’s BEAUFORT

The theme of opening doors pervades another documentary, Nitzan Gilady’s JERUSALEM IS PROUD TO PRESENT, an examination of the controversy in 2006 over Jerusalem’s hosting of World Pride, an international gay rights celebration. In a rare and revealing sign of unity among different religious faiths, the event earned the shared enmity of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders, and, as the documentary amply demonstrates, religious conservatives worked vigorously to halt a pride parade through the streets of Jerusalem. Eventually, World Pride had to be curtailed in scope because of the 2006 summer war in Lebanon, but a scaled-back festival took place in several city venues, including a Jerusalem stadium.

At a discussion following one of the screenings, openly gay director Gilady said he revealed his homosexuality to family and friends in the course of making the documentary. “It’s not a fun film,” he said, noting that the movie includes scenes of festival volunteers and organizers fielding threatening phone calls and reading the written threats they received. At one point, documentary footage shows Gilady and others fleeing in a car after opponents physically threatened them on a darkened street. Gilady, a Jerusalem native, acknowledged having a love-hate relationship with his city, but he said his hope that it can embrace a fuller vision of diversity kept him committed to the film project. JERUSALEM IS PROUD TO PRESENT, according to Gilady, does what the controversy over the pride parade did — “put a mirror up to contemporary Israel.”

Joseph Cedar’s BEAUFORT is another such mirror, a dramatization of Israeli soldiers defending a well-known military outpost against bombardments by Hezbollah during Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

Rachel Talbot’s MAKING TROUBLE

This finely etched study of what New York Times critic A.O Scott calls the “tedium, claustrophobia, and anxiety” experienced by the soldiers is not overtly political, but the distant politics surrounding war — be they decisions made or not made by Israeli leaders or declarations against the war made by anti-war activists – are never far from the foreground of a film some critics have hailed as the finest war movie Israel has yet produced. “Joseph Cedar has created a movie of tremendous power — nerve-racking, astute, and neutral enough to apply to all soldiers, in all wars, everywhere,” Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum said about a film that became Israel’s selection as best foreign language film for this year’s Academy Awards and is now one of five such films nominated for the Oscar.

War and catastrophe, flight and displacement — themes so central to the Jewish experience of mid-20th century Europe — dominate a quartet of films by the late Austrian director Axel Corti, who was not Jewish but who had an acute appreciation, according to festival director Weintraub, “for the presence — and later absence — of Jews in 20th-century European history.”

The showing of four Corti films amounted to a kind of festival-within-the-festival and offered what Weintraub said was a much needed retrospective for a director little known in the United States who is considered a figure of conscience for Austria. Corti was also, as the festival screenings proved, a superb craftsman: GOD DOES NOT BELIEVE IN US ANYMORE (1982) is his riveting and hauntingly realistic depiction of a young Viennese Jew’s “life-on-the-run” in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria, and the murder of his father.

No Jewish film festival could be complete without humor, and several films added a welcome comedic touch. One was American Rachel Talbot’s MAKING TROUBLE, a documentary that examines several generations of Jewish women who made their mark in the world of entertainment, including Molly Picon, a doyenne of Yiddish theater; the beloved vaudeville star Fanny Brice; comedienne Joan Rivers; the late television comic Gilda Radner; and playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died two years ago.

In the midst of bleak times, dark themes, and a host of films about ambiguity, yearnings for the divine, and the tragic side of life, “people need comedy,” says Weintraub. “They need a laugh.”

New York-based freelance journalist Chris Herlinger last wrote for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on film and human rights.

Rick Weiss on Stem Cell Research

Posted on by

In an extended conversation, Washington Post science writer Rick Weiss discusses the practical and ethical questions raised by recent embryonic stem cell research, including efforts in Britain to clone human embryos using eggs from other species. He talks about the limits of such experimentation, the buying and selling of DNA, and new efforts in the U.S. to make the first synthetic life form.