The Very Reverend Brian Grantz on Standing Rock

"We have been praying for this day and God has answered our prayers. We knew it would happen. The priests are here." To say we were welcomed with open arms by the people of Standing Rock does what happened today no justice. We were greeted with early morning waves and words of welcome in many languages, stopped in the parking lot at a gas station for stories and hugs and tears, given tokens of thanks, and otherwise invited to stand as the presence of Jesus in the midst of desperately hurting people. "God alone can change this. We have been praying, and now the priests are here," we heard, over and over again. "We knew you would come. We knew that an honorable nation would come and stand beside us."
This is complicated, make no mistake. It is far too easy to vilify the motives of Energy Transfer Partners, whom we did not interact with on this visit. It is a mistake, also, to dehumanize those in law enforcement who stand guard at checkpoints and on the other side of barricades. But, make no mistake, what is happening here is unjust and immoral, if not about the pipeline specifically (although that case can be argued), then certainly in the way our government and some private interests continue to treat indigenous peoples. What is happening here is an icon of America through which we see that, to quote Neil Young, "behind big money, justice always fails."
In an effort to keep this post reasonably rather than absurdly too long, here are just a few stories of encounter from the past two days:
On Wednesday afternoon we made our way to St. James Episcopal Church in Cannon Ball, which was the epicenter of this event that drew well more than 500 people from all across the country representing numerous faith traditions, including Christian (with a plurality of Episcopalians), Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and others. At St. James we met a young man named Peter (not his real name). I asked him to tell us, from his perspective, what was going on at Standing Rock. Peter was cautious and circumspect in sharing, reminding us that those on both sides of the conflict will need to live together and work towards reconciliation long after the protesters go home. But, he said, it's bad. 1960s Deep South bad. Law enforcement, he observed, has largely been co-opted as a private militia for the oil company, not serving the people, but protecting a corporate interest. Intimidation and arrest are standard practices at peaceful, lawful assemblies. He told the story of a man who, dressed as a protester, drove his truck recklessly toward a crowd of people and then, when forced from the road, shouldered a semi-automatic weapon and pointed it at those who were approaching him "with large knives." Video evidence refutes the knife story. The man was arrested but released without charges. It was determined after the fact that he was a corporate security company employee. Who knows what he was intending to incite, Peter said.
Later that afternoon, our companion, Paul Nesta, asked us to stop at the grave of his friend and seminary classmate, Deacon Terry Star. While there, Terry's father, Woodrow, who lives in Colorado, happened to come by to pay respects to his son. Mr. Star, a career law-enforcement officer, delighted in telling us many stories about his son and the meanings of various tribal names (hint: the names we use tend to be derived from French words and are not the names they use), but also filled us in on the movement of various tribes in the area after treaties were signed, with the US government relocating a tribe that used to live on land north of Bismarck to the land the Standing Rock Sioux now occupy, which displaced the tribe that was already living there to reservations out west. Such relocations meant that ancestral lands and burial places, which are revered in native culture, exist in many places. And unlike our conception of graves, which are clearly defined and marked, the graves of indigenous people exist in an area which is known to the tribe as a sacred burial site. It is not as though you can simply say, "don't dig here, but if you move six feet that-a-way you will miss the grave." That's not at all how it works. Mr. Star gave us the analogy of considering running a pipeline across the battlefield at Gettysburg. The whole place is hallowed ground, not just the exact plots where you can prove a soldier fell and died.
Wednesday evening, at our pre-event assembly at the gymnasium in Cannon Ball, I had an extended conversation with a priest who serves a congregation of indigenous people in South Dakota about what is going on at the lines of this conflict. She told stories of arrests made at lawful, peaceful protests on public lands, of detainees being kept in dog kennels in a parking garage through cold nights, of detainees having numbers written on their arms to identify them, of the personal effects of those arrested being "lost," of obfuscation concerning the whereabouts and health of tribal elders who had been detained, about needed medications not being administered after assurances they had, and about middle of the night transfers of those arrested to facilities over 100 miles away, far from family and legal aid.
We heard stories Wednesday evening from young men and women of the Standing Rock Sioux and other nations about poverty, addiction, lost hope, struggle and high suicide rates; about how this pipeline, which was too risky to cross the Missouri river north of Bismarck where a spill would have affected that city, was deemed to be safe to cross through their water supply and told their concerns are unfounded. And we heard powerful, tearful testimony repeatedly about the deep prayers of the community, and how the presence of the priests was God's answer to them.
On Wednesday evening we heard about the Doctrine of Discovery, by which colonial powers laid claim to sovereign nations, the burning of which would be a key symbolic action for our group when gathered with the tribal elders. This Church doctrine led us, ultimately, to this day upon which the government, in the interest of a corporation and over the objection of the native peoples, enforces property laws and rights that overrule their sovereignty. The Episcopal Church repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery by action of General Convention in 2009. So on this day, we were here to say that the Doctrine was wrong, and that we are sorry, a symbolic gesture that we hope finds real-life application.
And on Wednesday we pledged that ours was not a protest, but a presence which would remain prayerful, peaceful, non-violent, and lawful.
Then the Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series in the 10th inning of a far-too exciting baseball game. Huzzah!
This morning began (early) with the Holy Eucharist celebrated by Bishop Michael Smith of North Dakota (and once part-time of Louisiana). The preacher was a local deacon, who spoke passionately about the cultural, institutional pressure towards identity erasure among indigenous peoples and the need for all of us to know and claim our own heritage.
We then caravanned to the camp on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation just south of the pipeline construction route. There we gathered in a circle around the sacred fire with the elders of several nations. Representatives for several denominations read repudiations of the Doctrine of Discovery, then presented a copy of the doctrine itself to each of the elders to decide whether and how to burn it. The sacred fire in the encampment was deemed inappropriate, but the elders did light it ablaze in an abalone bowl. About this time, a police helicopter began to circle overhead, flying low enough to drown out the voices of those who were attempting to address the crowd. This, I learned, is a frequent tactic, flying helicopters and drones over the camp at all hours of the day and night in an effort to disrupt speeches, announcements, and sleep. This is not, remember, public or disputed land; this is the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, their own land, where they are peacefully, lawfully, and prayerfully assembled.
From there, we walked to an area just south of the pipeline construction site, each of us being smudged as we left the circle. We gathered in a large circle on a hillside to listen to speakers and prayers. The helicopter overhead made it difficult to hear much, so after awhile Fr. Matthew Cowden and I, along with our newfound friend Fr. W Lee Domenick, moved closer to the stage - and to the bridge where the tribal elders and protesters were gathered. Here I must confess that I suffer from situational attention deficit disorder (a self-diagnosis, of course); these types of events with speaker after speaker bore me to tears. So after awhile, Fr. Matthew, Fr. Lee and I worked our way behind the stage to meet and speak with some who were there to protest, especially the indigenous peoples. We were, as requested, dressed in splendrous clerical array, Fr. Matthew most of all with his bright red cope and whatever kind of hat it was he was sporting. This drew attention to our presence immediately and, before long, we were being approached by some of the elders to come forward with them onto the bridge, to survey for ourselves the slight damage that is deemed too extensive to re-open the bridge, to see the barricade left by two burned-out military trucks and a car crashed into them by an unknown person, to listen to them, to pray with them. We politely expressed that we wanted to do nothing that would detract from the event we were there to attend. But they had been praying, and the priests were now here, and our presence had to mean something, and would we please come pray with them. Well, Jesus wins, and to be asked to gather with elders is a great honor not to be dismissed lightly. So it was that Fr. Matthew, Fr. Lee, Fr. Paul Nesta (who, I swear, apparated next to me out of thin air) and I, escorted by tribal elders and a small security detail, walked through a security line onto the bridge where we heard the elders' stories, asked our questions, gathered in a circle hand-in-hand, and prayed with one another.
Have you ever had the feeling that all eyes are on you? When we broke our prayer circle with the elders, we turned around to discover that it wasn't just a feeling. We were soon joined by a handful of other clergy: an imam, a Pentecostal bishop, a Methodist minister, some elders from other nations. As we began to make our way back, we were stopped by several reporters who wanted to know what we had said, what we had prayed about, what repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery meant, what we thought of this whole situation. The priests were here, and on this day, more than any other I have ever experienced, they wanted to know what the priests thought.
I am not disobedient by nature. I loathe attention like this. I certainly meant no disrespect to the organizers of the event we were there to attend. But, oh my, what a humbling, troubling, and singular honor it was to be one of the priests today.
This whole situation unsettles me. Say as you will about pipelines and economics, this is an icon of an America that I had rather hoped would be more beautiful. It is a disillusionment; a loss of naivete, perhaps, about the underbelly of our country. We can be terribly violent, terribly cruel, terribly careless with people and the earth. What we have done - what we continue to do - to the indigenous peoples is an outrage; it is deep, systemic, historic, and habitual sin. I don't need to vilify anyone to make that point, but - for God's sake, and for the sake of our sisters and brothers of the Standing Rock Sioux nation and all others at the margins - we do need to figure out how to repent.
I'm one of the priests, and that's what I have to say.
(for now, anyway).

Auditioning to be Trees

THE LAST PAGE OF A JOURNAL: September 2, 2011

On June 4, 2007, I began a three month sabbatical and a new personal journal. September 1, 2011, was my first day as a retired priest, and, 500 pages later, I wrote the last entry on the last page of that same journal. The first few entries from 2007 contain musings upon the death in a car crash of Jim Kelsey, a friend and inspired Bishop of Northern Michigan, as well as upon a book I had begun reading by Henri Nouwen. The book was a journal about Nouwen’s own “last sabbatical,” journal entries he had written that turned out to be his last because he died unexpectedly not long after the sabbatical ended.

Now my sabbatical journal is full, and my rectorship has ended. At St. Stephen’s we spent August baptizing and anointing, crying and laughing, as we moved from one intensive closure activity to the next. All this transpired with a “soundtrack” consisting of loud exultant hymns and sentimental old standards. Now all the observances are over, the last descanted hymn verse has faded into silence, and I find myself inhabiting a strange new landscape, with Jim Kelsey and Henri Nouwen looking over my shoulder as I write.

Strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. Along with Jim and Henri, I sense myself in company with those original disciples in the hours following Jesus’ death. Like me, they must have felt stunned, empty, and uncertain about the future. Like them, I expect, there is a sense of finality, of having seen the beginning and the ending, the alpha and the omega, and that no such public intensity will ever again descend upon me again. But, of course, those disciples were in for a big surprise.

A keen stab of emotional pain brings it all into the present. Caitlin auditioned for My Fair Lady on Tuesday, and was kept until the end, but has received no call. This is a familiar desolation. For me, Caitlin is Ti Moun, the passionate and generous girl she played in Once Upon an Island, waiting outside the elegant hotel with infinite hopefulness and love, utterly convinced that her high class boyfriend will notice her and remember their love.

That image tears me up. It did so when I saw Caitlin play the part, and it does so now, as I think of her in New York, waiting for the casting agent to call.

Except Caitlin is no chump. She loves the stage, and is powerfully motivated to endure the disciplines of her vocation. She will not cast herself upon the steps of the theater and wait there until, like Ti Moun, she turns into a tree. She is already a tree, and, as The Book of Revelation says, “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Well, for the healing of her father, anyway, and of her family, and husband, and anyone else whose life she touches.

And I will be a tree also. Yesterday’s Old Testament reading was from The Book of Job, where Job laments his sorry condition, saying “My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me.” If that seems a bit extreme for either Caitlin’s circumstances or for mine, well, OK… but not for Jim Kelsey’s, or Henri Nouwen’s. Not for those early Christian disciples. We are sitting in the same church with them even now, and will share their pew soon enough. In the interim we will let them teach us how to feel the truth of our condition, and so rise up as trees.

We are auditioning to be trees.

Christified

At St. Augustine's House monastery I sat in the chapel yesterday, engaging in my own version of "centering prayer", meditation, whatever.. using as a repetitive phrase the words from Psalm 75, "The world is tottering, with all its inhabitants." As often occurs, my thoughts began to verge o

n the dream-like, and I imagined a young man, unknown to me, standing with another more familiar person and welcoming me to the monastery. Habitually, I let go of the image and while awareness of the second person remained, the young man vanished, leaving behind an emptiness that I have come, over the years, to identify as Christic.

 
The world totters and dissolves, and I along with it. I am part of the nothingness, except that nothingness has no parts. On the tottering edge, the absent youth welcomes me into being, but the "I" who witnesses all this goes unnoticed and unseen, of all things to nothingness the most akin.

All this occurs on a "stage" not of my crafting, a place beyond conscious choice or design, a place where gifts are bestowed and dangers threaten and what transpires is always true. 

Reflection on Chapter two

REFLECTION ON CHAPTER TWO, “The Theological Structure of Things”, in Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, by Kathryn Tanner, Fortress press, 2001

     In this densely-argued chapter Tanner writes, oddly, about God’s “effort” to bring about a certain kind of non-divine reality utilizing the “willing partnership” of human beings, and does so by a “series of partnerships” as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures and culminating in the incarnation, an effort that is “less external” than the previous versions and “without any distance to be overcome”, that is, between God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth.

    I’m pretty sure Tanner is speaking of these 2000 year-old topics in new and unfamiliar terms. This is, I would think, part of her project to “reconceive Chalcedonian Christology”, and thereby examine “where human beings fit in a broader theological scheme that has Christ as its center?”

   This prompts my own perennial question: why does God bother with the creation of worlds?  With time, evolution, history, incarnation, redemption, etc…? Why not just “make it all right” all at once, with a snap of the divine fingers, so to speak?

My (tentative) conclusion… “God”= the “Story Loving One”, whose “effort” is to produce a cosmic drama with human beings as associate directors, stage hands, audience, actors, and critics.

Reflections on "Art as Ritual"

ART AS RITUAL

At a conference at the Detroit Institute of Art today, I joined a large group of artists, art-lovers, and a few clergy in some high-powered talk about the capacity of art to "close social distance", "make the secular sacred", and "create meaning through spatial transformation." We were given hands-on demonstrations of ways that art could transform grief, create moral community, and help cope with deep personal and communal loss. Speakers referred to an "interruptive truth" revealed when "spectator ship" moves from a passive "consumption" of museum pieces to an active participation in the creation of artistic meaning, and a corollary shift from the definition of museums as "protectors of valuable objects" to "ecstatic spaces," a process made more complex by the fact that art is more likely to be seen on the internet than in a museum or gallery.
   "Art" occurs when there is an interaction between artist, medium, and audience. We live in a disenchanted world that tries to commodify everything, but authentic "art" is subversive to commodification, shocks or tricks the audience into seeing the world through a new lens. In the film "Detroit Upright" actors are ceremoniously draped in elaborate costumes modeled (To my eye) on those worn in some traditional African tribal rituals. When a gospel choir lays down a soundtrack and the 12 foot high towers of what looks like confetti start moving around, it does feel like a transformative occasion, or at least extremely odd.
    But no more odd than Sunday Mass. The elements of choreography, exotic costume, ritual silence, and a resonant soundtrack combine in a very familiar way for me. If our congregations' collective awareness of ecstatic transformation is less common than than rote submission to pious routine, it is no more surprising than the secular piety of museum-goers going through the rituals of art-consumption. The artist's task is to provoke the "interruptive truth", and invite the audience to share in a "liminal experience" of transformation.
      In seminary I learned about fascinating research done in Africa by Victor Turner, which described (what Turner hypothesized) was a general pattern of a ritual deconstruction of the usual categories of every day life, i.e. Male/female, human/animal, God/mortal, Etc. , and then a symbolic reintegration that restored the community to "normality" but with a new level of awareness and appreciation. This has influenced my own practice of and appreciate for ritual, as has the work of Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion and, as it happened, a colleague of my father's at the University of Chicago.

   

In the August 7 Travel Section of the NY Times there was a long story written about fly fishing on Montana's Big Blackfoot River. The author was drawn to this location by reading Norman Maclean's novella, "A River Runs Through It", and the Robert Redford film version of the same. Near the beginning of the article the author writes about fly fishing on the Big Blackfoot, "I am not  religious person, but I'll be damned if I didn't feel something holy."
    He is not alone in his perception of the holy. From the time my brother and I, and our father as well, first read "A River Runs Through It" in the 1970's it has served as a kind of 5th gospel for us, putting into words a whole set of intuitions, values, and memories that have conveyed whatever it is that the theological word "grace" is supposed to mean. There is no "something" about it.
    My earliest "religious experience" came at about age 6 when my father returned from fishing in the Delaware River with a stringer full of Smallmouth Bass. I was astonished to learn that these mysterious creatures came from a region beyond our sight, from beneath the shining surface of the water-world, and that they could be coaxed to reveal themselves by engaging in a traditional ritual called "fishing", and that one could learn the elements of this ritual from practitioners such as my father, who would teach me. Hence I came to know that if I was quiet, and patient, and humble, as well as skilled, I could invoke a relationship with beautiful beings from an unseen realm, and they would feed me, if need be, and, in any case, bless me.
     Later, in my teens, when I learned about "God", and "grace", and the techniques of liturgy, it all seemed quite familiar, although I had been hitherto innocent of religion. Prayer, it seemed, was much like casting a fly out onto the opaque surface of the world, in anticipation of affirmation from unseen depths. Sacred behavior, the solemn movements and gestures, the exaggerated  respectfulness shown to participants and symbolic objects, all reminded me of rituals I had performed many times by streams and rivers. So it was not "faith" that informed my fishing, but rather fishing that informed my faith.
     There is a holiness that is invoked by fishing that comes, I suspect, from the embedded memory of our ancestors who, by accident or by grace, discovered the saving mystery of the fish. They discovered that by a combination of skill and luck they could lure fish to their nets and spears and hooks, and find themselves blessed and supplied with food. They could lure the fish, but they could not create them: that was a gift, and it astonished them and filled them with gratitude. It is from this astonishment and gratitude, most likely mingled with fear that the gift might be withdrawn, that "religion" came to be. So not only "something" holy, but rather, the source of holiness and genesis of sacred meaning.
   
   
    In the film-version of "A River Runs Through It" there is a sequence where Norman Mclean is with his father and brother beside the river after an abundantly successful day of trout fishing. "My brother stood before me, " Norman's voice recites, "not on a bank of the Big Blackfoot River, but suspended above the earth, free from all its laws, like a work of art." Or, I would say, like an icon, or a sacrament.
    That occasion was to be the Mcleans' last together, as Norman's brother was killed a few days later in a gambling dispute. In the film, Norman's commentary states that "I knew just as clearly that life is not a work of art and that the moment could not last."
I wonder about that. While it is true that "life" does not fit neatly into  an artistic paradigm, and churns with random eruptions of absurdity, mindlessness, and triviality, yet it does seem to organize itself around certain key events like this transcendent moment by the Big Blackfoot, not a "work of art" in the sense of having been contrived by any human hand, but a creation nonetheless, a graceful confluence of disparate choices, actions, and meanings, "suspended above the earth" like a Dali crucifix, or a hatching mayfly. Mclean's character in the film says "the moment could not last," and of course that is literally true. But, in a sense, such moments do outlast their duration in the flow of time. Such moments transcend duration, and  partake of that quality of "anemnesis" invoked at the Eucharist, as well as by trout streams.
   "Eventually," Norman Mclean writes in both the book and film versions of "A River Runs Through It", "all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." So it sounds to me as if there is a sense in which the moment does "last," does ascend into heaven, as it were, does straddle the boundary between time and eternity.

      Here's how I expressed it after a day fishing in the Au Sable River downstream from Mio, Michigan, in 2007.
     
"What we had been doing was more than a fishing expedition, it was an immersion in the symbiotic relationship between fish and insects and river, and in their collective relationship to us. In this setting we were the intruders, the witnesses, the priests who, alone among the actors in this drama, could behold all the elements of the plot, and all the relationships between the players. We could even masquerade as legitimate members of the cast, disguising ourselves as bugs so as to gain backstage admittance, where we could don our neoprene vestments, and wave our sacred wands over the river, beseeching acceptance.
Our lives proceed from such lavish abundance, and end the same way. Love is not scarce, nor is grace in short supply. The problem for us is not how to beat each other to the fishing hole… it is to find a way to inhabit the abundance with humility and grace, like a native, like a mayfly, like a trout."

Thoughts on The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Thoughts on The New Jim Crow: Thoughts on Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, The New Press, NY, NY. 2012

This book puts forth the startling idea that the current system of criminal justice and imprisonment is but the third manifestation of an intentional strategy designed by American elites to maintain over all white supremacy and maintain a ready supply of cheap labor, as well as maintain an on-going hostility between working class whites and African Americans who might otherwise make common cause. There is nothing startling about the idea that slavery, and then segregation, were consciously designed strategies to accomplish these and other economic, social, and political goals, but many people who regard themselves as well-informed would be surprised at the idea that a system akin to slavery and segregation is still operating in the United States and still causing the same kind of misery, suffering, and division as those former, and more blatantly evil, institutions. 

Put oversimply, this author points out the obvious fact that convicted felons, even after release, are discriminated against legally, economically, socially, and politically, just as aspiring black voters were stigmatized in the segregated south, and slaves before them. The chief instrument for this mass disenfranchisement, Michelle Armstrong argues, has been the “War on Drugs”, a systematic network of policies that has resulted in an increase in the U.S. penal population exploding from “around 300,000 to more than 2 million” since the mid-1980’s, so that the “United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates in nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran…[and] the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

To some, the argument advanced here will lack cogency if it is seen as comparing apples to oranges. It may be argued that segregation and slavery were imposed on Black people, whose only alternatives were to move to places in the north where segregation was less institutionalized, or, in the case of slavery, to buy one’s freedom or run away. The effects of the new Jim Crow, however, can be at least somewhat deflected by choosing to abstain from the use of illegal drugs. Gains in the American civil rights movement occurred when the public could no longer ignore the injustice of police power in the south being used to prevent Black church people from registering to vote. The same empathy is less engaged by young black males convicted of using drugs.   

As Alexander points out, however, “studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates” yet white youth are far less likely to serve time in prison for their drug use. This is true for a host of reasons, none of which involve less strength of character on the part of black youth. Alexander’s thesis is that the architects of the New Jim Crow have hit upon the ideal mechanism for maintaining their new system of de facto white supremacy, trading on the fears of middle class people both white and black, and directing government and other resources away from health care, economic development, and recovery programs used by other countries to address drug abuse. Instead, resources are directed toward the construction of new and larger prisons, and increasingly, subcontracting their operation to for-profit corporations that have every motive for resisting any effort that might reduce the number of customers in the criminal justice pipeline.

I have not yet reached the place in Alexander’s book where she makes specific proposals. I assume she will advocate an end to the “War on Drugs” and a change in mandatory sentencing, the drastic expansion of prisons, and their privatization. But, as Michelle Alexander is quoted by Cornel West in his Foreword, “It is [a] failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of social control and every racial caste system that has existed…”.

Even among those who may take issue with aspects of Michelle Alexander’s analysis, it is hard to see how The New Jim Crow will not result in a shift toward away from naïve unexamined assumptions, self-serving rationalizations, and a pervasive “failure to care”.