March 28: "The Sunday Times," Sausages, Maunday Thursday

Billy Collins has breakfast . . . 

The Sunday Times

by:  Billy Collins

There's so much 

going on in the world

besides these sausages. 

It's so much easier to focus on the sausages instead of the latest from Ukraine or Washington, D. C.  Lot's of people choose simply to avoid the news, deeming it too depressing or slanted.  (I will be the first to admit that misinformation has exploded, thanks to AI, politicians, and general public gullibility.)  Of course, just focusing on the sausages on your plate hasn't always worked out for the best, historically speaking.  How many German citizens were preoccupied with their sauerbraten instead of what was happening at the Reichstag?  You see what I mean.

It is Maunday Thursday.  This evening, I played keyboard for a service at a local Lutheran church.  The narrative of the Last Supper was read.  Attendees were called forward by the pastor to lay hands on, bless, and give absolution.  Communion was distributed.  Then, at the end, we sang "O Sacred Head Surrounded" while the altar was stripped bare and sanctuary lights extinguished.  We left in silence.

It was a time to really pay attention to more than just the pizza you had for dinner or the mint sitting in the pocket between your gums and cheek.  I find all of Holy Week a pretty raw experience.  Because it's about examining your conscience and life.  It's impossible for me to attend these church services and not emerge bruised and more than a little bloody.

Introspection is difficult.  Nobody likes to think of their failings.  The Biblical story of Christ's passion is brutal, full of torture and death.  According to Christian tradition, that's the price Jesus paid for all the cruelties we inflict on each other day after day.  Things haven't changed all that much in 21 centuries.  We've just found better, more effective ways of hurting each other.  (If you don't believe that, you really do need to look up from your breakfast sausages.)

That's what the days of Holy Week are all about:  salvation from all the times we've fucked up our lives, relationships, and the world.  We need to be saved from our own myopic selves.  Just because Ukraine is 5000 miles away doesn't mean that what happens there has nothing to do with you.  If you call yourself a Christian, you're supposed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the stranger and sick and oppressed.  Jesus is pretty clear about this in almost everything he says.

If you don't believe Saint Marty, try to find redemption in your oatmeal or bacon.

April 6: "Swan," Struck Mute, Wonder and Beauty

Mary Oliver on beauty . . . 

Swan

by:  Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,

an armful of white blossoms,

a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings:  a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,

     like a waterfall

knifing down the black ledge?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds--

a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet

like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light

     of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

This poem is all about being struck mute because of beauty.  For Mary Oliver, it's a swan gliding in a river or lake, taking wing into morning light, its body a rising cross in the silvery sky.  That's what stops Oliver in her tracks, makes her reflect on the meaning of beauty.

Holy Thursday today.  The beginning of the Easter Triduum.  For most of this weekend, I will be a Lutheran celebrating Easter.  I will be playing tomorrow evening for my home parish--a Catholic celebration of Good Friday.  Then two Easter Sunday morning Lutheran services.  

I've always struggled during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.  I think it's the retelling, again and again, of the narrative of Christ's Passion.  I get swept up (or along) in the pathos of the whole story--the extreme humanity of the main actors.  Judas.  Peter.  Mary.  Pontius Pilate.  Jesus.  There's something quite beautiful (and heartbreaking) in all of the brokenness.

When you reach my age, you've experienced betrayal.  You've probably betrayed someone, as well.  And denied someone.  Lost someone.  Grieved for someone.  It's all there.  For me, this week is all about the beauty of being human.  In the gospel narratives of the Passion, humankind at its very worst and very best is on full display.  

My favorite moments in the gospels are when Jesus is at his most human.  When he gets pissed or sad, feels bereft or frightened.  That's the Jesus that interests me.  Because I understand that Jesus.  Yes, I get the whole Son of God part of Christ's DNA, but there's the whole Mary (Oliver) side that watched sunrises, picked flowers, admired swans, fell in love, wept for dead friends.

Maybe Jesus was a poet.  I mean, he's a descendant of King David, author of the psalms.  That means that poetry was in his blood.  It also means that Jesus was stopped dead in his tracks every once in a while by the beauty of the world.  

I think, in a lot of ways, seeing the universe through the eyes of a poet is sort of like having a divine point of view.  I'm not saying poets are gods.  I'm saying that poets recognize the importance of the small, insignificant, gorgeous things that stitch together this life.  Now, what does a person do with that recognition?

I do what Mary Oliver did:  I write poems.  That's how I change my life, sentence by sentence, word by word.

When I got home tonight after church, I led a poetry workshop.  It was a perfect way to end Maunday Thursday--with wonder and beauty.

Saint Marty wrote this:

I Came Home this Afternoon

by:  Martin Achatz

after Diane Seuss

I came home this afternoon to an extra garbage

can blown into my yard by a spring wind

so strong it brought down pine branches,

dug up Taco Bell bags, rolled an empty can

of Miller Lite down the street as if it was

late for a party, the snow banks dwindled

into piles of striated sand, an archeology

of the entire winter of storms and melts,

blizzards and reprieves  It is Holy

Thursday, when the church is stripped,

reds and purples paraded out by serious

parishioners intent on plucking the place

bare, until the world is just a knuckle, raw

and bleeding from hitting the wall too many times.

April 9: Maunday Thursday, Timelessness, Poem from "Kyrie"

It is Holy Thursday, or Maunday Thursday.  In the Christian calendar, that means getting together to commemorate the Last Supper, before Christ is betrayed by Judas Iscariot and turned over to the Sanhedrin for judgement.

Because of the lack of church services right now, Holy Week has seemed lacking in the "holy" department.  Instead, the days just blend together.  I spent all day yesterday, thinking it was Thursday.  Usually, I feel the weight of these seven holy days pretty strongly.  The Christ narrative of the Passion sort of wrecks me every year.  Brings my spirit down and then resurrects it.  I'm craving that like Cheetos or a midnight milkshake right now. 

Without the markers of Palm Sunday and Maunday Thursday, I feel like I'm stuck in some kind of limbo, in between a New Year's Day and next Christmas.  Floating like a full moon trapped in black branches.

This is another result of the Covid-19 pandemic--timelessness.  Where everything and nothing is the same.  Tomorrow, I will participate in a Zoom Good Friday Service.  I'm playing piano and my wife is singing.  Something normal, in a way.  A marker on the map to Easter Sunday.

I will hold on to that tomorrow when my wife and I "go" to church.  It will feel as if I've taken one step forward toward some kind of future.  I know I am living in history right now.  Perhaps, in hundred years, a poet will write a collection of poems about this time.  Maybe the collection will be called Sanctus and start with an epigraph from John Prine:  "Jesus was a good guy, he didn't need this shit."

Saint Marty communioned with Hamburger Helper tonight.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

My father's cousin Rawley in the Service,
we got word, and I think a neighbor's infant,
that was common, my mother'd lost one too.

Then he went to town to join the war.
The Sheriff hauled him home in an open rig
spat on the street, been jailed a week or two.

She ran from the henhouse shrieking, shaking eggs
from the purse of her white apron to the ground.

Before I was born, he built a wide oak drainboard
in the kitchen, didn't just glue the boards,
screwed them down.  Glue held, one split in two.

My mother was an angel out of heaven.
My father was a viper.  I wished him dead,
then he was dead.  But she was too.

March 20: Palm Sunday, Christ's Passion, Classic Saint Marty

Palm Sunday.

In the morning, it was church.  Lots of church.  There was choir practice, praise band practice, morning worship.  My son had practice for a living Way of the Cross that he's got a part in tonight.  As I said, lots of church.  And it ain't over yet:  in a few minutes we will be leaving for the Way of the Cross program. 

It's the end of the weekend.  Holy Week has started.  The holiest week of the church year.  Maunday Thursday.  Good Friday.  Holy Saturday.  Easter Sunday.  Church, church, and more church.  I have been a liturgical musician for over 30 years.  This time always leaves me a little exhausted.

It's more than all the church services.  It's the whole playing out of Christ's Passion.  It drains me emotionally.

Today's Classic Saint Marty first aired four years ago.  We were in the middle of a heat wave. 

March 20, 2012:  Fairy Tales and Elementary School Concerts

Spent most of the day correcting mythology midterms and reading Grimm fairy tales.  Lots of lovers turning into snakes and evil sorcerers chopping up young virgins.  You know, children's stories.  When I went to teach, it was almost 80 degrees outside.  Sunny with a beautiful warm wind.  I couldn't stay inside.  It was a perfect day to sit on the grass and talk about wicked stepmothers.

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who's the most bitter one of all?

I've learned something about fairy tales this semester.  Aside from the fact that almost all evil stepmothers or uncles end up boiled in oil or torn apart by oxen, I've learned that the characters most like children (the simpletons, the virgins, the pure and chaste daughters) are going to end up wealthy and happy, usually married to handsome princes, beautiful princesses, or kindly kings.  These characters don't seek out royalty or power.  They're happy with eating shit like cabbage and peas for dinner and sleeping in one-room cottages with diminutive diamond miners in the deep forest.  But, of course, they also have fairy godmothers and magical birds to help them out.  Some even get to live with the Virgin Mary in heaven as children.  They have all the luck.

Perhaps there's a lesson to learn in there somewhere.  Something about being satisfied with the simple things in life, not wanting more than you need, accepting with grace the things God gives you...

Naaahh, I don't think so.

Saint Marty has to go to his daughter's chorus concert tonight.  Did he mention it's 80 degrees outside?

September 19: John XXIII, Pope Francis Visit, Laura Boss, "Remarkably You Love Me," Confessions of Saint Marty

There were the activities of Holy Week in Rome.  Holy Thursday at Saint John Lateran, Stations of the Cross on Good Friday evening, held on the viale outside the cavernous floodlit Colosseum, Easter Sunday at the Vatican.  There had been that morning in Saint John's, when, through a mist of frankincense, a procession of skullcapped cardinals in scarlet robes, and priests and altar boys carrying elaborate candles and antique bronze crosses swept in toward the sacristy.  And among them, as a choir sang and an organ shook the floors, Il Papa, John XXIII, blessed the crowd and, touching the heads of the faithful, laid his palm upon his son's brow.

Ives counts the above moment as one of the highlights of his son's short life.  Ives believes something holy happened; he felt a surge of energy pass from John XXIII to his son and then him.  He doesn't know what to call it.  Grace?  The Holy Spirit?  God's goodness?  Of course, as a Christian, I believe those three explanations are one and the same.

The United States is currently preparing for the first papal visit of Pope Francis.  The newspapers are full of the details of his trip.  Francis is going to address Congress and celebrate Mass.  I don't know much else about his itinerary, but people (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) are incredibly excited.

I have to say that I really like Pope Francis.  He does things that make people uneasy.  He celebrates Maunday Thursday by washing the feet of Muslims in prison.  He doesn't live in the papal apartment but in a simple room in a hotel attached to the Vatican where cardinals stay during papal conclaves.  He hugs people, dispenses with formalities.  He's not worried about being THE POPE.  He's worried about simply loving people the way Christ did--without judgement or agenda.

I would say that Pope Francis' guiding principle is love.  Particularly, he wants to make the world aware of social inequality.  Of the poor and desperate.  The unloved.  That's the mission of his papacy.  He goes around and tells people to love one another--Christian or Muslim, brown-skinned or white-skinned, straight or gay. 

I try to live by that credo myself, and I usually fail miserably on a daily basis.  I swear at other drivers when I'm in my car.  I get irritated by people I encounter at work.  I hold grudges.  I'm not above talking about people behind their backs.  In short, I'm human.

Sometimes I'm not a very lovable person.  In the past month, I've been moody, angry, sad, indignant, worried, angry and sad again.  Reading over my recent posts, I don't even know why people are still reading this blog.  I've been wallowing, and it's not very attractive.

Yet, there are no limits and conditions on love.  I'm loved by people even when I'm unlovable, when I'm mean or sarcastic.  That's what loving like Christ is all about--find the dirtiest, crabbiest, most unloving person in the world, and love him/her.  It's a tough assignment, but it's what will change the world.  No election, no army, no war, no financial bailout, no vaccine will alter the future.  Unless love is involved.

I'm going to climb down off my soapbox now.  I'm not perfect.  Pope Francis is not perfect.  It's the striving for perfection that makes the difference.

Saint Marty has a long way to go.

Remarkably You Love Me

by:  Laura Boss

me of the vacuumless rooms,
me of the paper cluttered rooms,
me of the I'll do the dusting tomorrow
me of the if it's mechanical or electronic
     I blank out
me of the if it's boring conversation,
     I stop listening
me of the unanswered letters and unpaid bills
who sit ankle deep in dust writing poems all night

Confessions of Saint Marty

March 29: Good Friday, Ackely, Church

"Only around!"  Ackley said.  "Listen, I gotta get up and go to Mass in the morning, for Chrissake.  You guys start hollering and fighting in the middle of the goddam--What the hell was the fight about, anyhow?"

If you can't tell from this little piece of dialogue, Ackley isn't a model Christian.  There's a lot of irony in what he says.  He has to go to Mass in the morning, followed up with "for Chrissake."  Then he starts complaining about Holden fighting with his dorm room mate in the middle of "goddam..."  Don't get me wrong.  I like Ackley, and I think Holden does, too.  As Holden says at one point, Ackley's a prince.

I have to go to church this weekend.  A lot of church.  It started last night, with a Maunday Thursday service.  At one o'clock this afternoon, I have to play for a Good Friday service at a Catholic church.  Tonight, I'm going to be singing with an ecumenical choir at an Episcopal church.  Tomorrow night is the main event--the Easter Vigil Mass.  It starts at 9 p.m. and lasts about two-and-a-half hours.  Lots of candles and chimes and reading and singing.  Probably smoke and water, as well.  Then, on Easter Sunday morning, it's the Easter Sunrise service at 8 a.m., followed by an 11 a.m. Easter worship service.

No wonder the Easter Bunny brings chocolate on Sunday.  He has to give everybody energy to make it through the last church services.  I'm feeling pretty good right now, but I have a feeling that, when the alarm goes off on Sunday morning, I'm going to feel more like Ackely, muttering something like, "I just go to sleep a little while ago, for Chrissake."

Today is one of the holiest days of the year.  It's also P.O.E.T.S. Day.  I still have a lot to get done before the sun sets.  Cleaning and writing and reading.  Maybe I'll watch a movie tonight with my wife.  Something light and easy.  Perhaps The Passion of the Christ.

Saint Marty is up for a few laughs.

Have you heard the one about the rabbi and the priest?

March 28: Maunday Thursday, Sort of Cosy, Fire

It was pretty nice to get back to my room, after I left old Spencer, because everybody was down at the game, and the heat was on in our room, for a change.  It felt sort of cosy.  I took off my coat and my tie and unbuttoned my shirt collar, and then I put on this hat that I'd bought in New York that morning.  It was this red hunting hat, with one of those very, very long peaks.  I saw it in the window of this sports store when we got out of the subway, just after I noticed I'd lost all the goddam foils.  It only cost me a buck.  The way I wore it, I swung the old peak way around to the back--very corny, I'll admit, but I liked it that way.  I looked good in it that way.  Then I got this book I was reading and sat down in my chair.  There were two chairs in every room.  I had one and my roommate, Ward Stradlater, had one.  The arms were in sad shape, because everybody was always sitting on them, but they were pretty comfortable chairs.

Sort of cosy.  That's how Holden feels.  None of the bad crap has happened to him yet.  His roommate has a date with Jane, the girl Holden loves, but Holden doesn't know about it.  Holden is being kicked out of Pencey Prep, but he's still safe in his dorm room for the moment.  He hasn't started drinking.  He hasn't had his encounter with the prostitute.  His life hasn't started to completely unravel.  Yet.  He's "sort of cosy" in his warm dorm room, wearing his new hunting hat.

That's what I am right now.  I'm feeling safe and warm in my office at the university.  It's mid-morning, and usually I'm working at the medical office at this time of day.  However, about two hours into my shift, the building's fire alarms started going off.  Generally, I ignore the fire alarms.  They go off frequently (for tests or because some kid has pulled the alarm and run like hell).  I continued registering my patient.  The alarms kept flashing.  Then, over the PA system, a voice said, "Please evacuate the building.  Please evacuate the building."

What ensued was about ten minutes of chaos and panic.  I called the nurses in the back of the facility and told them they needed to get out.  I called my boss over at the hospital and told her there was a fire.  Then I packed up all my belongings--my computers, my books, my teaching stuff--and ran like hell.

People were milling around the entrance to the medical center, and I could hear the sirens in the distance, when I got outside.  I stood there with my coworkers and said, "Perhaps everyone should move away from the building?"

One coworker looked at me and said, "Do you want to go have breakfast?"

We went to Hardees and ate.  It was quite lovely.  When we got back to the medical center, the chaos had subsided.  We found the nurses, and they told us that the building was shut down until at least noon.

So here I am in my nice, cosy, university office.  Safe.  Warm.  That's a blessing.  (I'm not wearing a red hunting hat.)  Everybody got out of the building safely.  No injuries.  That's a blessing.  It's Maunday Thursday, and I'm going to a Seder meal tonight.  That's a blessing.

Saint Marty is ready for a little calm after this big storm.

I think I look like Paul Newman

March 25: Lachrymose Monday, Unsettled, "Rye" Dip

I've always thought that the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of Holy Week get short shrift.  They have no special name to identify them.  Sunday is Palm Sunday.  Thursday is Maunday Thursday or Holy Thursday.  Friday is Good Friday.  Saturday is Holy Saturday or, in the Catholic Church, Easter Vigil.  Then, of course, comes Easter Sunday.

I've decided to give names to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  We'll see if they catch on.  Today is Monday.  I've been feeling a little unsettled since I woke up.  I don't know why.  I have a lot going on.  Work and teaching and a Faith Formation session with my daughter this evening.  I'm supposed to meet a friend for lunch at noon.  In between all that, I have Easter plans to finalize with members of the praise team, and I have to correct midterm exams.  Plus, Holy Week always gets me worked me up emotionally.  It's the Gospel readings about Christ's Passion and focus on pain and suffering, I think.  Anyway, these seven days leave me a little worn out.

Which brings me to the name I've come up with for the Monday of Holy Week.  Henceforth, this day shall be known as Lachrymose Monday.  So let it be done.

"Lachrymose" is defined as "crying, sad, tearful, weepy, pensive, gloomy."  It pretty much describes my mood at the moment.  I would think it describes Christ's mood on Monday of the last week of His life, as well.  I mean, He knew what was coming.  I'd have been a little glum if I were Him.

My Rye dip question for this inaugural Lachrymose Monday is obvious:

Will the snow stop falling and weather warm up soon?  (OK, maybe it's not an obvious question, but I'm tired of all this snow.)

The answer from the Gospel according to J. D. Salinger is:

"Go home, Mac, like a good guy.  Go home and hit the sack."

That's not very encouraging.  I need to go home and sleep until the thaw arrives.  That's what I've been doing for the last four months.


Saint Marty wishes all his disciples a Happy Lachrymose Monday.

March 24: Palm Sunday, Holy Week, New Cartoon

I'm weird.  You might have already noticed this fact.

Last night, I played for a Catholic Palm Sunday Mass.  At the beginning, the priest led members of the parish into the church, waving palms and singing "All Glory Laud and Honor."  Clouds of incense and tons of singing.  The sanctuary was decked out in red.  We heard the entire Passion of Christ from the Gospel of Luke, with the pastor reading the words of Christ; the deacon reading the words of Peter and Pontius Pilate and all the other juicy parts; and the congregation droning "Crucify Him!" at the appropriate moments.  It went on for about an hour-and-a-half, and it was glorious.

This morning, at the Methodist church, we had a baptism and a video depicting the Passion of Christ.  The choir sang "Now Sing We all Hosanna," and the band sang the Vince Gill song "Go Rest High on that Mountain."  I cried.  It went on for about an hour-and-a-half, and it was glorious.

I'm weird because Holy Week is one of my favorite things, with all its incense and drama and darkness and light.  I love Maunday Thursday and Good Friday.  I love the three-hour Catholic Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday that starts at 9 p.m. and gets done around midnight.  I love sitting up in the choir loft in the blackness, waiting for the Easter fires to be lit.  I love watching the flame passing from person-to-person, until everyone's faces are glowing like raptured souls.  And I love the Easter Sunrise Service at the Methodist church, all the congregation, still bleary with sleep, listening one last time to the story of Christ's triumph over sin and death.  And the lilies and music and singing.  Then there's breakfast.  Ham and eggs and toast and juice and milk.  Maybe some danish and coffee cake.

There's great sadness and joy in all of these proceedings, and I can't get enough of it.

Saint Marty is a weirdo for Jesus.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 5: Maunday Thursday, New Poem, "Stripped"

Tonight, I'm going to church for a Maunday Thursday worship event.  It's starts at 5 p.m. with a potluck.  At 6 p.m., we're screening The Passion of the Christ in the church sanctuary.  (You can say what you want about Mel Gibson, but this movie is powerful and moving.)  After the film, we're going to celebrate communion and end with the Stations of the Cross.  It's going to be a very draining, but wonderful, experience.

I was actually in charge of putting together one of the stations for the Stations of the Cross.   I chose "Jesus is Stripped," which is number eight, I think.  Anyway, I wrote a poem for the station, and, since I haven't posted a new poem in quite some time, I've decided to share it with you today.

Saint Marty hopes you have a blessed and meaningful night.

Stripped

My stomach is round, a garbage bag
Stuffed with clothes bound for Good Will.
On my knee, two centipedes of scar
Where the leg grew too fast,
Made one side of my body two inches
Taller than the other.  A pink ribbon
Snakes down my brother's sternum
Where they opened him, repaired
The heaving muscle inside.
Across the crease of my wife's belly,
A line where they reached in,
Removed our son, blue as January.
We are all collections of scar and scab,
Rolls of skin, freckle and mole.
Stripped on Golgotha, Christ stood,
Raw as a temple ox, gutted, split,
Heart and viscera, all His secret parts,
Gleaming in the sun.  He stood
Before a mob that hid beneath
Armor and robe, veil and burka.
He stood, knew each of their hairs.
Each of their imperfect ribs.