A little lower than the angels

Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, by James Hampton. Folk art in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (National Portrait Gallery), Washington, DC, USA. _________________________________________________________________ ____________________ The name of your drum group is Southern Moon. You joined a year after you started working at the Indian Center as a janitor. You're supposed to say custodian now, or maintenance person, but you've always thought of yourself as a janitor. When you were sixteen you went on a trip to Washington D.C., to visit your uncle - your mom's brother. He took you to the American Art Museum, where you discovered James Hampton. He was an artist, a Christian, a mystic, a janitor. James Hampton would end up meaning everything to you. When I read this passage in Tommy Orange's novel There There , I switched my iPad to search mode and immediately put in the name of James Hampton.  I wanted to know about this arti...

                                      I was in the restroom at the evangelical church my brother Stephen attended near Portland. It was the day of Stephen’s funeral. Stephen had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49, leaving a shocked and grieving spouse and six grieving sons. I immediately recognized the man who walked in as I was at the sink. He was a friend of our family who had been a member of a church my father had pastored some thirty years previous. Apparently he recognized me as well, for as he stood at the urinal doing his business his rich baritone voice boomed out: “So Jonathan, I hear you’re hanging out with those liberal Episcopalians!” I left the restroom and went back to my family. I recall this event as a manifestation of the kind of us-versus-them binary so encouraged and promoted in the church culture of my youth  In my youth I was told o...

 Arab women grinding coffee in Palestine “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”  -Matthew 24:41 I went to church yesterday on the First Sunday of Advent with a lot on my mind, given that I've been spending a lot of time recently reading from files left behind when my father died 47 years ago. In those files I'm reading about his religious and spiritual outlook on the world of his day, and it's making me think about my religious and spiritual outlook on the events of today. In the assembly of the church yesterday we marked the beginning of Advent; a season in which Christians are focused on getting ready for the coming of Christ into our midst at the Feast of the Incarnation. We read from Matthew's Gospel of Jesus telling his audience to keep awake and alert in order to be able to perceive the coming of the Son of Man (his name for himself) into a world which - like ours - was full of conflict and threats to peace. Recallin...

Dismas Among all the people we saw on the street last Sunday, hers is the face that I remember clearly. Seated in her motorized wheelchair, she was moving quickly toward us on the sidewalk of West Pender Street in Vancouver, Canada, headed in the direction from which we had come. I only had fleeting seconds to see her face; gaunt, lined with creases and worry lines, with a slight concavity around the mouth suggesting a history of poor dental health. Notwithstanding all that she displayed a face of classic beauty in form and symmetry. The eyes left the most memorable impression. There was suffering in those eyes, visible pain, the unmistakable indication of a daily struggle to live. I thought I detected a degree of desperation. What errand was she on? She was once someone’s beloved child, I thought. Or was she? As Sharon remarked that day, there are those who in their first five years of life never get what they need, being born to parents who themselves are desperate.  Once they ar...