Washington Monument Re-opens

Washington, DC

May 12, 2014

The Washington Monument re-opened this morning in the nation’s capital. 

A most unexpected 5.8 earthquake, centered in Louisa County, Virginia, about 100 miles southwest of Washington, gave the 555 foot-tall unreinforced masonry structure quite a jolt in late August of 2011.  It had recently been renovated, the stones cleaned and minor cracks repaired.  Now the work had to begin again.  A metal framework rose to the top last fall and came down just a few days ago. 

As the re-opening of a building of this magnitude and significance requires public ceremony, various military units and appropriate dignitaries were called upon to display their craft and say a few words in front of a crowd of several thousand gathered on the grounds southwest of the monument. 

The Armed Forces Color Guard presented the colors at precisely 10 AM.  The fifty flags at the base of the monument fluttered in a steady wind from the south.  The US Navy Ceremonial Band played the National Anthem.  Weather forecast: sunny, warm and humid, highs in the upper 80s.  It must get over 90 to qualify for hot in this southern city. 

As the Washington Monument is administered ultimately by the Department of the Interior, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell led the list of dignitaries, followed by Jonathan Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service; John Podesta representing the President; Washington Mayor Vincent Gray and various others from the agencies that had a hand in the renovation effort, including philanthropist David Rubenstein, who wrote a personal check for $7.5 million. 

Candace Glover, of American Idol fame, sang “America the Beautiful;” boy and girl choristers from the National Cathedral sang “My Country’Tis of Thee.  Honor of performing last went to the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps, clad in scarlet 18^th Century coats, buckskin trousers, white gloves, powdered wigs and tricorner hats, led by an officer in a fur shako who brandished a wood-shafted pike topped by three gleaming spikes.  They played 18th-Century tunes and displayed superb parade-ground abilities.  Finally each dignitary took a giant pair of shears, made a simultaneous snip of the red, white and blue ribbon, and the Washington Monument was again open for business.

The whole ceremony took a little more than an hour.  The purpose of this and all ceremonies like it is to remind those present that the republic will endure.  The symbol of the nation’s founder will need to be repaired again.  Dignitaries will gather, all different probably, but the soldiers will present the same colors, bands play the same tunes, singers sing the same songs.  Government of the people, by the people, for the people, will not perish from the earth.

Sense of Place; California

I began this blog several years ago in order to share my meditations on the places where I have spent most of my life:  the Midwest, where I grew up; the Northeast, where I was a chaplain at Dartmouth College; northern California, where I did my Ph.D. at Berkeley; and Washington, DC, about which I wrote a doctoral dissertation and where I have taught and lived, off and on, for the past dozen years or so.  During many of those years, I have also spent considerable time living in northern California; visiting the northeast, especially Cambridge; and the Chicago area, including the University of Notre Dame, where my Dad graduated in 1935 and where I was a visiting scholar in the summer of 1997.

I continue to write about these places because I love them.  There is something about each that continues to draw me.  I spent time at college in Iowa and graduated from seminary in New York City, but I was quite miserable at both places and I have not been back.  I also lived for a year during my college years in Canterbury, England and Tubingen, Germany.  Perhaps I will write about them some day. 

I began to add my occasional sermons to this blog, not because they deal explicitly with a sense of place, but because I had no other place to put them.  Sermons do, of course, take place in a particular place, namely the church of Such and Such in Somewhere, USA.  And sermons generally attempt to relate something written in a far away place, namely the Mediterranean basin, a long time ago, to some place today, in this case, a church in the Washington, DC area or northern California.

Now I am reviving the blog to supplement the web page that promotes my tours of Washington.  If you arrived here from there and want to read the posts that deal with Washington, DC, go back to the beginning.  If you enjoy reading what I write about Washington, consider joining me for a walking tour.  Starting some time in May.

Meanwhile, I have spent the winter and now early spring in St. Helena and Santa Rosa, California; Napa and Sonoma counties respectively.  I have grown to love these places.  What’s not to love?  The climate, landscape, food and wine are among the best in the world.  If one tires of so much pleasantness, so many good sights, sounds and tastes, the city of San Francisco and East Bay cities are about an hour away to provide yet more.

I drove down to Berkeley on Saturday morning, March 15, one of those warm spring mornings when the miracle of life induces gratitude even in the most snarky and philosophy in the most obtuse. 

In a normal winter, the rains begin here in November and continue until May.  The rains can come in drenching three-day storms and periods when the skies cloud up for days and it rains off and on.  But many a winter is far from normal.  I remember one when it rained for the entire month of January, then stopped.  One year it rained almost constantly for sixty days.  Another year it did not rain until mid-March.  Spring that year was painful to watch as the plants put forth their shoots above a dusty brown earth.  This year promised to be like that.  The vineyards were a brown desert until mid-February.  But we have now had two major storms and a minor one, yielding anywhere from ten to twenty inches of rain. 

This past week a warm sun came out and the biosphere burst into bloom: yellow mustard topping a carpet of green; wildflowers, flowering trees, buds and shoots of a thousand shades of green.  The landscape all the way down Highway 101 this St. Patrick’s Day Weekend was as green as any part of the Emerald Isle itself.  Arriving early at my destination, I walked around the neighborhood north of the university and west of Shattuck Avenue to gaze rapturously at varieties and colors of flowers beyond my ability to name and smell the hedges of fragrant rosemary in purple blossom. 

After appreciating various shingle-style and craftsman houses, I found myself, as I often do, in front of the small apartment building that replaced the old house that Allen Ginsberg lived in and Jack Kerouac often visited in the 1950s.  There is another small apartment building next door and next to that a house surrounded by a chain-link fence, being prepared either for demolition or radical reconstruction.  Across the street, on the grounds of the Berkeley Arts Magnet School, the poetry garden dedicated to Ginsberg and the other beat poets is likewise under reconstruction.  I wonder what the neighborhood arts committee has in mind.  The sign is still there:

“This garden honors Berkeley’s many innovative poets, poetry presses and their legacy.  It was dedicated in 1999 on the second anniversary of “Beat” poet Allen Ginsberg’s death.  Through their writings, the nonconformist poets sought liberation from traditional social, political, artistic and personal conventions.  Ginsberg lived across the street in a now-demolished house at 1624 Milvia Street while writing, among other poems, parts of his once-banned work Howl!.  Poet Gary Snyder also stayed there.  “Beat Generation” writer Jack Kerouac lived for a while in a rose-covered cottage on Berkeley Way and poet Robert Duncan also lived in this neighborhood during the 1950s.”

Then I walked past yet more radiant living glory to 1924 Cedar Street, where I entered a small Unitarian church to enjoy that day’s 6-hour SoulMotion workshop. 

Early anthropologists, geographers and travel writers, in conveying a sense of place, did their best to convey everything that people did, especially as it differed dramatically from the people who would read their work back in Europe.  They noted the interaction of people and place.  How do people relate to their place, make it theirs, part of their identity?  What stories do they tell, what music do they play, how do they move to music?  How has this environment affected the way they move, the way they work, the food they eat and how they prepare it?

I wonder what anthropologists years in the future will make of the “conscious dance” movement that now flourishes in North America, Europe and, I would guess, everywhere else. 

I walk in to wooden-floored space to find about fifty people moving to music.  For the better part of six hours, that is all we do.  We pause briefly for lunch.  Occasionally the leader, in this case Valerie Chafograck, now of the Bay Area but born in Paris, gives us something to do:  move with a partner, move with a group of three or four; do a solo.  You can call this dance, but it is far from the world of waltzes and tango.  There are no specific steps, no set figures. 

My first experience of this world of movement was a “Barefoot Boogie” in Cambridge some thirty years ago.  Since then a couple of teachers have attracted quite a following.  I now spend every Christmas at Esalen in a SoulMotion workshop:  six hours of dance every day for seven days.  After a couple of days of spinning, swaying, twisting, tilting, and turning accompanied by good food and soaks in the famous mineral baths, the muscles become like rubber bands and a big, irrepressible smile forms on the face.  Perhaps some ancient peoples lived rather like this, not immersed in books, computers and television screens, but moving to music for hours a day, while planting, reaping and hunting as needed.

I’d like to think so.

Louis Halle's Spring in Washington

It has been a hard winter in Washington, yet spring impends.  Thus it is time to re-read Spring in Washington.  In the spring of 1945, in the waning months of World War II and the presidency of FDR, the young Louis Halle awoke early every day to ride his bicycle along the Potomac, somehow managing to pull himself away in time to keep his day job at the State Department.  His impressions of spring are well worth reading whether you have ever been in Washington or not. 

Born in New York City, he graduated from Harvard.  From 1941 to 1954 he served in the U. S. Department of State and was a member of the policy planning staff.   Spring in Washington is a small book, 201 pages to be exact, but one that has held me enthralled through countless readings.  It is mostly about birds, but there are astute observations about other wild creatures, and more than a little musing and wondering about the nature of man himself. 

My copy is a paperback, much handled.  Some of the pages are loose.  Sentences and whole paragraphs have been underlined at one time or another, with copious comments and exclamations in the margins. 

Let me quote firstly one of his exclamations:

“I shout Encore! Encore! I leap to my feet in a standing ovation. I want to sate myself with this cornucopia of wonders. I gaze with admiration at the dazzling mathematical complexities of minerals. I stand in true awe at the convolutions of storm clouds, the sizzling bolt of lightning and the ominous roll of thunder. Even a sun dog turns me on. And all of these things are inanimate, completely devoid of life. Or are they? And I haven't spoken yet of my exaltation of wild birds.”

Yes, birds were what really set his heart a-flutter:

“Somewhere in the mists of time the eagle and the warbler had a common ancestor. Now the warbler sings in the pine woods, the eagle soars above the marshes, the ducks swim in the bay, gulls wheel.”

If the thought ever occurred to you that politicians are like a bunch of rowdy school children who should be closely monitored, you will not be surprised at Halle's remark:

"If you want to know about Politics . . . just observe a flock of crows."

He spends page after page noting which birds appear and when, exactly, along the Potomac; somehow it is endlessly fascinating.  Each time I read, I repeat with him:

"For a few ticks of the clock I am here, uncomprehending, attempting to make some record or memorial of this eternal passage, like a traveler in a strange country through which he is being hurried on a schedule not of his making and for a purpose he does not understand."

I would like to have known Louis J. Halle. He would have been the consummate birding companion and a wise commentator on current affairs. I do not know what impact he made upon the State Department, but his mark on Washington endures forever.  Because of him, we see that the whole Washington area, the land and water from Great Falls to Mt. Vernon, across the broad Potomac to the Anacostia, over to Rock Creek and up the Potomac to complete the circle, is a magical, wonderful place, full of wild creatures. 

I have seen great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, cardinals, warblers, countless squirrels and ducks, deer (in the tiny woods south of the National Cathedral) and, on two occasions, eagles.  One flew past my eighth-floor window to hover above Wisconsin Avenue; another swooped in front of me to perch in a tree across from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.  For those who wish to exercise their sense of wonder in the city of Washington, he may be the patron saint.  He deserves a monument in stone. 

Movements of the Spirit, a Sermon

Cleveland Park Church

3400  Lowell

Washington, DC

May 19, 2013

The story we have today in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles is, of course, a fascinating story and worthy of our full and undivided attention.  But we decided to focus today more on the subject of this story, namely the work of the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit works with us today.  To assist us in that focus I am going to lead you in some brief and easy movements of body and breath.  And I am going read you a children’s’ story and tell a rather long personal story.  I  don’t believe I have ever done that in my sermons here or anywhere else.  I learned the art of preaching from people who warned against personal stories from the pulpit.  The personality of the preacher is of no interest in the Calvinist tradition.  The preacher’s job is just to illuminate the scriptures. 

So in a nod to our Calvinist tradition, let me say just a few words about the Book of Acts.  Biblical scholars have ripped into the book and concluded that much of it could not have happened the way St. Luke says it did.  But we cannot help concluding that something extraordinary obviously happened.  Something very important happened to these people whom the Gospels all portray as none too competent and in Paul’s case none too nice.  Something happened to these mostly illiterate people to make them fearless public speakers who changed the world some 2,000 years ago and whose preaching and example is still sending out shock waves.

Luke tells us that a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting, and tongues as of fire appeared and rested upon each of the disciples.  Did it happen exactly like this?  Does this sort of thing still happen?  Does God still intervene in our lives like this?  Is there anything we can do to make God intervene?

These are difficult questions to answer, and as we attempt to answer them we are at ground zero of some of the most disputed territory in the history of Christianity. 

As a congregational church, we are the direct descendants of some people, Augustine, Luther, Calvin who taught that there is not much we can do about the workings of God and the Holy Spirit.  God is sovereign and we people are such flawed creatures that there is really nothing we can do to merit God’s love.  The Sovereign deity simply chooses whom to save.  All we can do is celebrate the fact of salvation with the singing of hymns and attending to the Word of God. 

 On the other hand, an equally distinguished group of theologians including Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley, St. Ignatius and a contemporary of Augustine named Pelagius asserted to the contrary that people are not completely depraved and are capable of doing at least a few things to make it easier for God to work through us.  This has become the more popular tradition in recent years. 

Whatever your view of the matter, please know that you are welcome in church this morning.  If you’re a Wesleyan, we thank you for choosing to come; if you’re a strict Calvinist, thank God for bringing you here.

And now we’re going to engage in a little Wesleyan experiment.  We’re going to do just a little something that may help the Spirit work through us this morning & who knows, perhaps for the rest of the week. 

But first, I’m going to read you a story from The House at Pooh Corner.  I’m sure you have read it but perhaps you have forgotten that one day Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit went out for a walk on a misty overcast day, got lost and ended up in a sand-pit at the top of the forest.  Every time they left the sand-pit in an effort to get home, they somehow ended up back at the sand-pit.  While Pooh and Piglet confessed to being hopelessly lost, Rabbit stoutly maintained that he knew where they were and could easily find the way home if only they would try again.  So Pooh devised a little test:  Rabbit, if you’re so smart, can you leave us and hop away a hundred yards or so into the mist and find your way back?

  “If I walked away from this Pit, and then walked back to it, of course I should find it,” said Rabbit.

  “Well, I just thought perhaps you wouldn’t,” said Pooh.  “I just thought.”

  “Try,” said Piglet suddenly.  “We’ll wait here for you.”

Rabbit gave a laugh to show how silly Piglet was, and walked into the mist.  After he had gone a hundred yards, he turned and walked back again . . . and after Pooh and Piglet had waited twenty minutes for him, Pooh got up.

  “I just thought,” said Pooh.  “Now then , Piglet, let’s go home.”

But, Pooh,” cried Piglet, all excited, “do you know the way?”

  “No,” said Pooh.  “But there are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they’ve been calling to me for hours.  I couldn’t hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they’re calling from.  Come on.”

  They walked off together; and for a long time Piglet said nothing, so as not to interrupt the pots; and then suddenly he made a squeaky noise . . . and an oo-noise . . . because he now began to know where he was; but he still didn’t dare say so out loud, in case he wasn’t.  And just when he was getting so sure of himself that it didn’t matter whether the pots went on calling or not, there was a shout from in front of them, and out of the mist came Christopher Robin. 

So you see, the calm, centered self, aka Pooh Bear, can indeed save itself provided, of course, that it banishes the ever-chattering, distracting, multi-tasking, self-deceived self.

Now we’re going to investigate this truth through movement.

I then led the congregation through four movements: Seaweed, Upper Body Twist, Half-Moon and Chair. 

Added information:

People have been moving in imitation of nature for some 100,00 years

Directions:  Breathe evenly and deeply.  Accept that you are who you are, where you are and how you are & see then if you can bend or twist a little more.  Then just maybe the Holy Spirit may come along and give you a little nudge.

And that little nudge might be a lot.

Thank you for your cooperation, for bending, stretching and breathing.

Now remember I promised you another story, a story that partly explains how I got interested in movement, breath and so on and might give us something to think about. 

The story begins at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in September of 1974, almost forty years ago.  One of the first people I met there was Eugenia Lee Hancock of Bluefield, West Virginia.  We met one evening in the makeshift student pub in the basement of the vast complex of gothic towers on 120th and Broadway in New York City.  Somehow I found myself in a small group of people, no more than three or four, and Lee was telling us what she had done that summer. 

Because of her lifelong activity in youth groups or whatever, she had been part of a rather lengthy series of conversations with various leaders of the Presbyterian Church, elders, presbyters, executive presbyters, ministers, lay people, and a youth delegate on the topic of church renewal; or in terms of our purpose today, how to fill churches with the Holy Spirit.  Somehow discussion of the human potential movement came up and these Presbyterians decided that it was worth looking into for its relevance to church renewal, which surely made Luther, Calvin and Augustine, looking down from heaven extremely nervous.  The Presbyterians decided that they should look into the matter at the source, namely the Esalen Institute and that they should send someone there to investigate and report back and decided further that the youth delegate should be the one to go, to the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, on the central coast of California, where mountains rise immediately out of the ocean , where hot water gushes out of the ground and is channeled into enormous stone bathtubs that can comfortably fit about a dozen people at a time.  There went Eugenia Lee Hancock of Bluefield, West Virginia, 23 years of age, for one month, all expenses paid, take as many workshops as you want and report back.

That evening she was still aglow from the experience.  It was obvious that something very important had happened during this month and that this Esalen Institute was someplace I had to go.  So as soon as I had a steady job some ten years later as a chaplain at Dartmouth College, I made my first trip to Esalen.  I have been back for at least a week or so almost every year since.

So let me give you just a brief account of one of my most moving experiences there, which I interpret very much as an experience of the Holy Spirit.  I have no better terms for it.

It was January of 1991 and I was at Esalen for a five-day workshop.  We met three times a day for two hours.  There were two workshop leaders, Jessica and Scott and fifteen participants.  On a winter afternoon it was starting to get dark, about 4 o’clock.  This workshop had a format similar to many at Esalen and now elsewhere:  over the course of a week everyone had the opportunity to share his or her life story with the group.  People shared dreams, talked about their marriages, their jobs, their families.  We had been together for a few days, had heard a lot of stories, so we felt comfortable with each other.  It was my turn.  After I had spoken for a very minutes, Jessica, the leader that afternoon, suggested that I stop talking and just sit quietly, eyes closed, meditate for a moment or two and simply report what I was experiencing. 

Understand?  Get Rabbit, the conscious mind out of there?

I was not terribly happy with that assignment for I was not then, am not now nor have I ever been very fond of sitting meditation.  I squirm a lot.  My mind wanders.  I fidget.  My knees hurt.  I want to scratch something.  Anyway, I followed directions.  

After not very long, I reported the obvious thing to report in such a circumstance: that I felt very nervous and self-conscious and on the spot, etc.

“Mmmm-hmm,” said Jessica and repeated the instructions.  “Just keep your eyes closed, breathe and report what is happening.” 

That calmed me down and I began to just pay attention.

Of course, for a few moments, nothing was happening.  There was nothing to report.  I breathed in, and breathed out.  It was quiet.

Then I reported that I felt a distinct surge of energy.  If that had been all I experienced that afternoon, it would have been remarkable enough.  My breathing deepened and I felt like I had never felt before, like something much more powerful than I had just taken over.  I was not breathing – I was being breathed.

Then I reported an even more powerful infusion of energy and I felt the center of my forehead pulsing powerfully, unmistakably, in and out.  I felt warm, alive, energized.

Nobody said anything.  Nobody had said anything about third eyes or somatic responses to meditation.  This was certainly remarkable enough.

Then I had to report that I sensed very distinctly in my mind’s eye – or wherever- the presence of beings who were with me in the room, but who did not have a physical presence in the room.  However they were – unmistakably – present.

And they were beaming at me, most lovingly beaming at me.  Beaming?  You mean with faces, smiling?  Well, they didn’t exactly have faces.

After just a few moments, I found this love impossible to bear and I burst into tears.

What exactly happened after that I have trouble remembering.  It was fully dark by then.  I’m sure I got a lot of hugs from group members and we all left for dinner.

Now, what does this experience prove?  I’m not sure it proves anything, but it suggests a lot.  First of all, experienced meditators don’t find this story very surprising.  They have heard about and in some cases experienced levitation and travel to distant galaxies, so this is not all that unusual. 

What I notice some twenty years later in the context of church and the Bible is that in Genesis I, the Spirit of God moves upon the waters.  In Genesis 2 God breathes the breath of life into the human.  The word for breath and spirit is the same.  Thus the Holy Spirit has been with us from the beginning and is with us with every breath we take.  I really believe that.  God is loving us all the time, with every breath, every step of the way.

All I did to get this remarkable experience was pay attention to my breath in the context of community.  Although the fifteen or so people with me that afternoon did not say or do anything, they paid attention and that made a huge difference.  Thus I suggest the royal road to living a spirit-filled life is to pay attention to your breath and spend time with people who pay attention.  Do that and the Spirit will rock your world.