Month: December 2023

Cradle Song

I wake early and make the hour-long train trip to a doctor’s appointment. We finally arrive at the train depot at the transportation center and I spill out with a wave of commuting workers and students and make my way to the bus terminal. I feel wide-eyed in the city this morning; like I’ve never been here before, even though my physical therapy appointments mean I’m here at least once a week, sometimes twice. Today, though, the steel gray of the normally sunny skies somehow seems to emphasize, rather than cover other shadows: the streets are dirtier, the hungry are hungrier; hope seems to always slip in the pavement cracks or slide around buried rebel roots just before I can step in it. I aim, step forward, and hope evaporates. I’m puddle jumping in a hope mirage. The violence of racism, the inhumanity of police-state brutality, and injustice across this country continues to grow, continues to break my heart and then, when I’m weak and tired, invite me to despair. I haven’t felt more like giving Christmas a complete pass in a long time. Just meet it at the door at Twelve midnight, December 24, explain, “No, just not this year. I’m sorry, not this year,” and go back to bed, or prayer, or the streets.

At the transportation center, the connecting hub for the regional train, the Amtrak, and the city buses, I look around and I can’t help but think of lyrics from Les Miserables:

“At the end of the day

You’re another day older,

that’s all you can say

for the life of the poor.”

but the Broadway lyrics in my head are interrupted by the Christmas carols playing over the speakers amid the morning rush and exhaust:

“Come, they told me, ” the song began and they seemed to. I look around and see them shuffling. The crew cut blonde guy, with defeat in his eyes older than he is, shuffles right into my personal space and behind me, studying every crevice and corner for a cigarette butt. He looks up just enough and just often enough as a safety precaution. He is maybe twenty-three. Stooped, leveled, solidly defeated at twenty-three.

“Our finest gifts we bring…pa rump a bum bum,” the story of the drummer boy continues while a few feet away a half a dozen others are shuffling. One man is rummaging through a trash can. Another shuffles left, then right, but never shuffling too far away to protect his two thirteen-gallon kitchen trash bags full of aluminum cans for recycling. I wonder what desperation is making this necessary: his own hunger, his family, needing medication, or a fix for an addiction, but no matter what the reason, they all grow despair, they each rob our spirit and leak our humanity.

“I am a poor boy, too…pa rump a bum bum,” the steady, solemn carol continues and I think that there, in that one unassuming word of the carol, seems to be the key: “too,” “I am a poor boy, too,” a poor boy, also; a poor boy like you: a King on the inside but poor on the out.

One of the half dozen homeless men is moving in start and stop, herky jerky, wide circular motions, his hands in the waist of his layers of pants. The others continue, intense as a forensics team, scouring the area for change or cigarette butts. And this, this is their long day and their hungry night; every night, their every day; everyday for what the Les Miserables lyricist called “the wretched of the earth.” For me, this is a few minutes of my day on my way to my physical therapy appointment. These are lean times. I have nothing extra to share today. My spouse and I live simply; more faith than funds, but I’m assured of at least my next meal and sometimes, sometimes I remember my song.

Of all that I don’t remember from my childhood, I remember that someone sang over me when I was a baby. I had a cradle song and it seemed only logical that if you’ve got a cradle song that you know for sure what your Homecoming song will be. I wonder, did Christ at Calvary hear even an echo in His Mother’s weeping of His cradle song, of Mary’s Magnificat. I wonder if it welcomed Him home.

I wonder if these shuffling, searching men had a cradle song, if they had someone to sing over them. I wonder if it would matter at all now, if they did have one, but they didn’t even know it. “Probably not,” I think, “except maybe, maybe some grace could let a humble and very late cradle song still be their Homecoming song; at least as a backup. If there’s a Book of Life, there’s bound to be an even Bigger Book of Commentary, Corrections, and Back up Homecoming Songs. Everyone has to have a welcome song, especially when the world has been so cold, so brutal; when our waiting, our Advent, has been so long. We should have a Homecoming song. So I grabbed the bus schedule and around its parementer I wrote:

“This cradle song’’s for the brokenhearted,

Hope reborn for wounded souls;

Calling all to come as children:

The scared, the least, the left behind.

Lay down your cares &

all of your strife,

Trade a song of sorrow

For loves’ lullaby:

“Rest wrapped in love,

nestled in peace,

let my voice soothe you,

my heart beat release

everything heavy

and every last cloud

moved to reveal

the very first star.

You’re wrapped in love

nestled in Peace,

You’re soothed, released,

and revealed to be

stardust, too.

Yes, you and me,

are stardust, too;

spirit and hummus

and stardust,

that’s me and you.”

I look up from the bus schedule as the aluminum can man boards a city bus followed by a few of his friends, leaving the others to scatter.

We all scatter, all of us, all of our cradle songs half-remembered, our stories untold, and Homecoming songs unsung.

We all scatter, brothers unclaimed.

– pdk 12/2014

Camino Los Abuelos Liturgy

262 Camino Los Abuelos Liturgy

This mornings’ lectionary is taken from the

poem, “The Gift Outright” written by and read

by Robert Frost at JFK’S inauguration;

“Something we were

withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was

ourselves

We were withholding

from our land of living,

And forthwith found

salvation in

surrender.”

and from “Belonging” by Toka-pa Turner:

“Stripping things & people of their spirit

makes it easier to exploit them as a

‘resource’, and liberates us from our

accountability towards them.”

and finally, from the great Good News, we are reminded that our holding ‘offenses’ *sets the ceiling, the limit on God’s possibilities to intervene, assist, bless, and heal *but* because we understand, believe, and affirm that Christ is in us, with us, through us, and for us and that we are made in the image and likeness of God to mirror It’s qualities and reflect It’s characteristics we can work out our shared, duplicate Divine Purpose together as we trust and share surrendered in humility, layed low by Love, raised by Grace, *together.

Song of Solomon 2:4

Matt. 6:24-25

The Oppressors made weak by their withholding will always call any protest of their abuse and deceit harassment because, for some small percentage, it will have a feeling of conviction, and contrition. Unaccustomed to the presence of a conscience, they will ofen “feel threatened”, mistaking accountability for threat. That discomfort can indicate what’s left of their active conscience; exactly what the protest hopes to appeal to. It is the predictable reaction of oppressors, who relish their power in crushing their victims, to simply apply more crushing pressure when their victims complain and protest they’re being crushed.

Remember, the oppressors’ toolbox is very limited, fear and intimidation are their solution to everything because they’ve learned and hold almost nothing inside them to work with. They, the oppressors and each of us, can only offer what we have, so that if our heart has been left untended and has been filled with privilege, greed, and the thinly veiled violence of getting our way no matter the human cost, of course, that’s all we’d have to offer And it’s what we’d expect from others but we’d be wrong in our hearts, actions, and our expectations but we can find and be and do right by simply coming back to humanity, back to our heart.

Your heart calls you home.

No need to explain or make excuses, no blame or shame, no need to throw anyone under the bus, including yourself, just let go of the pressure to participate in the end of humanity. We cannot protect our heart by acting as though we don’t have one. Come back to your heart, come back home, let us make our altar there.