Write for God

  
I stepped into our garden this afternoon and also stepped back in time. A heavy pot near one of the paths my husband and children made last summer was overflowing with leaves that took me back  about 45 years to the days when my grandmother, Abuela in Spanish, had an herbal remedy for every ailment known to man.

Lyme disease and Legionnaire’s disease would have been goners if Abuela had been given a chance to brew something on her stove to cure them.

How that pot and the leaves in it came to be is another story. Some time ago, my husband and I had been shopping in the garden section of a tool store. A small neglected plant called to us, since my green-thumb husband can bring anything back to life in his garden. On its own, that little plant has grown to take over the large pot and to spill over the sides.

The tag on the plant said it was peppermint, but there was something about the leaves that looked familiar to me. In smaller print, and misspelled, the tag also announced that this was yerba buena.

That was an herb I remembered from Abuela’s kitchen, where linden and chamomile–tilo and manzanilla–steeped in pots with yerba buena, depending on what ailed one of us. There was a remedy for “nerves,” another for headaches, another for upset stomachs and so on. I won’t go into how Abuela believed that colonics were the solution to a lot of ailments.

The tag on the scrawny plant we rescued at that garden area made me laugh. It reads, “used as tea to settle stomach upsets” followed by “excellent with roast beef.” I couldn’t decide if yerba buena was a seasoning for roast beef or if the tea for upset stomach could be taken with roast beef.  Mentha x piperita is the name printed on the tag, which means it’s a type of mint, but a quick internet search for that plant told me the label was wrong.

Seeing the overflowing plant in the pot this morning instantly took me back to my childhood watching Abuela work in the kitchen, where I am now ashamed to say that I probably got in the way of her work. I always had a lot of questions and constantly asked to help with shucking corn and peeling potatoes.

Sometimes she took me with her when she used our Communist Cuba ration books at the corner store to purchase whatever we were due that day. Each day’s meal was delicious because it came from the kitchen of a great cook who made everything with love.

This afternoon, I stripped some of the yerba buena leaves from one of the sprigs and brewed a hot tea. After removing the leaves, as I had watched my grandmother do so many times, I drank it slowly, savoring each memory of the days I spent learning about food and life from Abuela.

I ate lunch outdoors today on a glorious Florida afternoon with a bright sun tempered by a breeze that flipped the pages of the novel I was reading. Our state is known for brutal summers when both the temperature and the humidity are in the 90s and being outdoors is a battle against dehydration, but today is a perfect Sunshine State day. When I left for work this morning, the blooming pink azaleas in our garden were another sign that winter is on its wane.

As I returned to work, I recalled the words of a short Robert Browning poem titled Pippa Passes:

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his Heaven -
All’s right with the world!

The beautiful days that God creates indeed remind the He is in His Heaven and that all’s right with the world. I will enjoy every minute of this perfect Florida day.

The widow's mite

Our family is registered at one church and now attending another one more regularly. In fact, we were at the second church yesterday for Ash Wednesday.

The church where we’re registered published a list in the after-Christmas bulletin that gave us pause. An entire page contained the names of everyone who gave more than $100 during holiday season collections. Of course, our one-income, two-parent, two-children household would never have made the grade, but not from lack of desire.

I found it odd that a Catholic church would publish information that should be a private matter. After all, what we place in the collection basket is what we can afford to give according to our means. It’s between us and God. Some parishioners ask for receipts at the end of the year for tax purposes, so every church office keeps an accounting of what is donated, but it’s not a matter of public record what a family can afford to tithe.  In fact, a higher authority than the IRS, Jesus himself, had something to say on the subject:

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what the right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be a secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. 

Yet, there it was, a list of more affluent donors during a time when joblessness and foreclosures are denying families the most basic of rights to feed, clothe and house themselves. A woman I know sent an email to her friends asking if she could pick up a few dollars doing odd jobs around their houses while she searches for a job. Another friend told me she was willing to work for $10 an hour if she could just find employment.

Mazel tov to the people who are comfortable enough to give more than $100 in the collection basket for Christmas. It’s nice to know that there wasn’t a grocery or power bill they had to pay like others who were not on the list. A journalist in our daily paper wrote about having her credit card stolen and how sorry she felt for the thief. One of the purchases made by the thief was paying a $400 utility bill. We’re living in sad times.

I wasn’t uncomfortable knowing that there are more fortunate people in our parish, but I couldn’t imagine why the church would publish such a list. Will it open those who are more affluent to theft? Will folks with more money who didn’t give more than $100 be embarassed that others will think they’re cheapskates? Will the parishioners whose outward appearance suggests they’re doing well, but whose finances are dire without anyone’s knowledge, suddenly feel that everyone knows their secret? A co-worker told me about a couple she’s known for many years whose beautiful home is in foreclosure. None of their neighbors know that the husband has been searching for a job for many months. Although society as a whole doesn’t feel shame anymore, many of us who were raised right still do.

Publishing the dealings of the right hand so that the left–and everyone else in the church community–knows your collection-basket giving couldn’t have served anyone well during Christmas. I wished instead that the church had published a list of the 100 poorest people in our parish so that more of us could have helped them out during the holidays through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

Times are tough for so many of us. Recognizing people for their ability to give cash doesn’t serve any useful purpose in building the body of Christ. In fact, it even made me think about giving anonymously at Mass from now on instead of using printed envelopes.

No one except God knows that a widow’s mite of two small coins that she might have placed in that same collection basket could have been all she had instead of $100 or more given from someone’s affluence. That I learned from Jesus, too.

1. On Ash Wednesday, the cashier at the supermarket says, “Um, do you know your face is dirty?”
2. You have at least one relative who dropped out of the seminary.
3. You go outside just before 3 p.m. on Good Friday to wait for the dark clouds.
4. At a Baptism you attended, a priest reminded the parents that the baby’s name wasn’t exactly in the canon of saints.
5. You will always think of St. Bernadette as looking like Jennifer Jones.
6. You remember the announcement from the sisters in parochial school that it was time to switch from dark uniform socks to white ones for spring.
7. You wore a beanie with that uniform when the Bishop visited your school.
8. You consider the percentage of Catholics who have actually had all seven Sacraments and how you’ll probably only ever have five or six.
9. Eating with friends at McDonald’s was out on Fridays until they introduced the Filet-o-Fish.
10. The beauty of the Easter Vigil and Midnight Mass makes you so glad you’re a member of the Church founded by Jesus and built upon Peter.

“I would like to say that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Mr. Penn that his winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple ‘Thank you’ would have sufficed.”

Every word–minus the mention of actor Sean Penn–was uttered by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky at the 1978 Oscars. The target of Chayefsky’s censure was Vanessa Redgrave, who had won Best Supporting Actress earlier that evening for her role as a woman helping the underground during World War II in the film Julia. The cowardly applause for Chayefsky’s words and the booing during Redgrave’s acceptance speech were indicative of what’s allowed as free speech in Hollywood.

Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Penn are both brilliant actors known for their fiery political stands, but the similarity ends there. Redgrave’s words weren’t well received by pro-Israel Hollywood and Penn’s words were lauded by pro-gay Hollywood, hence the difference between booing and hissing and cheering and kissing for essentially the same act during an award telecast.  

A little background on Ms. Redgrave: in 1977, she had funded and narrated a documentary titled The Palestinian that explored the position of that displaced nation. Jewish Defense League and its leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom even the Israeli government had labeled a racist, burned Redgrave in effigy to protest her support of Palestine and her Oscar nomination.  

When Redgrave won, she thanked the Academy for refusing to be intimidated by “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums – whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world, and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.”

The boos began there, but Redgrave wasn’t intimidated by disapproval, either. Chayefsky then took it upon himself to upbraid her for her opinion of Rabbi Kahane’s tactics. Redgrave continued her acting career and has distinguished herself as an ardent supporter of human rights, including the abuses at Guantanamo and the war in Iraq.

Wait, isn’t Sean Penn known for the same positions? Yes but, after he won Best Actor for his role as a gay politician in Milk, Penn didn’t discuss Guantanamo or Iraq: he was cheered for saying that anti-gay religious protesters don’t share his same right to freedom of speech because he disagreed with their position. Here’s what Penn said:

For those who saw the signs of hatred [italics mine] as our cars drove in tonight, I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.

Sean Penn may not have known that some of the “signs of hatred” outside the Oscars were directed at Jerry Lewis by disability and gay-rights activists who are of the opinion that he demeans them when he calls them his “kids.” Lewis has been quoted as saying that muscular dystrophy makes one “half a person.” Gays don’t like his use of the derogatory term  “fag.” (An online petition sought to cancel Lewis’ humanitarian award at the Oscars.)

Who could hate Jerry Lewis, who has raised about a billion dollars for MD research and whose politically incorrect terminology reflects his age and probably not his true feelings? The droll way that Carroll O’Connor stretched out the one syllable in that derogatory term for gays was one of his classic Archie Bunker routines in All in the Family.  By contrast, kids today use the term “gay” to describe something shoddy or corny and not to describe sexual orientation. Some of the kids I’ve heard using that expression are too young to know how the word evolved from meaning “happy” to meaning “homosexual.”

Gay activists can attack Jerry Lewis for one word, but religious people bear “great shame” for expressing their beliefs. Whose ox is being gored? Free speech cannot be reserved for popular beliefs or for ones we agree with.  “The test of democracy is freedom of criticism,” as David Ben-Gurion said. Unpopular free speech, free speech we don’t agree with and free speech guaranteed by the Constitution are one and the same.

Some film critics had predicted a Hollywood protest against the voters who struck down Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage law and they were right. Milk won Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor and Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn excoriated those who voted against Proposition 8 which, by the way, passed by a margin of 52 percent to slightly less than 48 percent. 

Ninety-six percent of gays and lesbians voted for it and 83 percent of those who never attend church also favored it. Those are huge numbers, but the majority of heterosexuals and churchgoers voted against it and their numbers are much larger.

Calling religious beliefs “hatred” because they oppose your own is free speech, but calling homosexuality a sin is also free speech. Both are protected. When free speech gives way to violence, it stops being free speech and becomes hate speech.

Paddy Chayefsky took offense at Vanessa Redgrave’s political statement and then made his own political statement about hers. Sadly, no one dared to counter Sean Penn’s political statement with an opposing view. Hollywood is too mealy-mouthed to espouse values like religious beliefs, chastity and goodness. For every kid-friendly Marley and Me, my daughter’s favorite film last year, there are 20 or 30 gory, violent films with nothing for audiences that don’t want to be dragged through raw sex and inhumanity at the movies.

Had it not been for Mel Gibson’s immense star power and his religious integrity, The Passion of the Christ would not have been produced in Hollywood. In mainstream films, religious people are always intolerant, repressed, hateful fools who are never the heroes.

Free speech belongs to everyone, whether it’s expressed by Sean Penn, Mel Gibson, Vanessa Redgrave or the protesters outside the theater. It seems that courtesy toward those espousing opinions you don’t agree with is another value that Hollywood no longer possesses.

We live in Dunedin, a small town in Florida that’s not too far from Tampa and St. Petersburg. Each city has festivals and events that are traditional. Unfortunately, our little town is known for its Mardi Gras, which will take over the downtown area tomorrow and leave a trashy mess to clean up on Ash Wednesday.

I’ve never really understood the concept of Fat Tuesday. The Lenten season is a time to pray and meditate on the Passion. It shouldn’t be all about the self-denial of giving up high-calorie treats just to pig out on them on Easter Sunday. Is Christianity such a bitter pill that it requires a raunchy street feast the day before we can begin to think about Lent?

Beads, drinking and excess seem to be how many people celebrate the night before Ash Wednesday in our town and in many areas of the world. I remember seeing the street carnival in Havana once when I was a child and loving the costumes, music and colorful lanterns carried by the dancers. I was too young to really understand Lent the way I do now.

Thousands of party people come to Dunedin’s Mardi Gras, where the festival queen is always a female impersonator from the gay bar downtown. Streets are closed and making it home through detours always makes for a rotten commute on that Tuesday afternoon. The town doesn’t ready its residents for Lent in any meaningful way.

Lent is the season to begin turning to God as we remember the Passion, the Crucifixion and the Easter season. Ash Wednesday’s first reading reminds us of the importance of self-examination:

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.

We return to the Lord in spirit through our fasting and prayer, not by remembering how drunk we got on Mardi Gras. When we rend our hearts, we open them so that Jesus may enter. The ashes on our foreheads are a sign that we are dust and to dust we shall return. At a parish where I was a Eucharistic minister, we used “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel,” too. It always seemed a more direct link to the meaning of Lent.

As we anticipate Lent, we would do well to consider it a gift to have the opportunity to move closer to God rather than turning the eve of Ash Wednesday into a drunken street party that gets rowdier every year.

Just about every year since I was 10 or so, I’ve watched the Academy Awards. During many of those years, I would have seen all of the nominees and had a stake in who won. This year, I’ve seen only two of the films nominated–The Dark Knight and WALL-E–only because, in one case, I braved sitting in the theater and getting annoyed and, in the second, because the film was already on DVD. As much as I love films, it’s just too difficult to sit in a movie theater these days.

I love getting lost in a film and movie audiences today won’t let me. The endless unwrapping of candy, talking, children running wild at films that are inappropriate for them, cell-phones ringing (and being answered) and the general lack of how to behave in public are too much to take. TV has turned a generation of moviegoers into boors who think they’re sitting in their living rooms when they’re out in public. Thank God for Netflix!

This year, there were several films that my husband and I wanted to catch: Doubt, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, The Changeling and Frozen River were just some of the ones I would have seen in the theater. Instead, I’ll be watching them at home once they’re available on Netflix.

Even though I was a film major for some of my years in college and even though the anticipation of opening credits in a movie is still a great thrill, films in the theater are no longer a pleasure I can enjoy. These days, I watch films alone or with my family. Audiences have turned me into a curmedgeon and home is the only safe place to get lost in the magic of the movies.

I was reading an online selection of the best film scenes from the silents to the present day and I found it difficult to read many of the scenes from the past 20 years. In the scripts from the time before sound to the end of the 1960s, actors spoke eloquently and writers wrote skillfully–without profanity. Today’s films can’t seem to avoid it.

The modern scenes from a host of films, some of them Academy Award winners, dropped more “f-bombs” than I cared to count. In the case of Good Will Hunting, a sweet story with a wonderful cast, the gratuitous use of the f-word made the script impossible to read and the film difficult to watch. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas…the list goes on. Whether Quentin Tarantino sits at his Final Draft screen and actually types endless four-letter words or whether he lets his actors “create,” the trend is tiresome as well as a lazy way to write dialogue.

Some of my favorite film scenes are from the days when writers were more creative in how they crafted scenes. A film that’s always worth seeing is On the Waterfront, a beautifully written movie that I never tire of. There’s a particularly beautiful scene played by Karl Malden, whose character, Father Barry, is a socially-conscious priest guiding the longshoremen in his parish to resist the intimidation of the mobsters who’ve taken over their union. After a worker who had promised to turn in the mobsters is killed in a staged accident, Father Barry goes to the hold of a ship for an impromptu homily. (To see the entire script, click here.)

FATHER BARRY
Some people think the Crucifixion
only took place on Calvary. They better wise
up. Taking Joey Doyle’s life to stop him from
testifying is a crucifixion— Dropping a sling on Kayo
Nolan because he was ready to spill his guts
tomorrow— that’s a crucifixion. Every time the
mob puts the crusher on a good man— tries to
stop him from doing his duty as a citizen— it’s a
crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen,
keeps silent about something he knows has happened—
shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier
who pierced the flesh of Our Lord to see if He was dead.

(A mobster then tells Father Barry to go back to his church.)  

Boys, this is my church. If you don’t think
Christ is here on the waterfront, you got another
guess coming. And who do you think He lines up
with—

He sees why some of you get picked and some
of you get passed over. He sees the family men
worrying about getting their rent and getting food
in the house for the wife and kids. He sees them
selling their souls to the mob for a day’s pay.

What does Christ think of the easy-money boys
who do none of the work and take all of the gravy?
What does He think of these fellows wearing
hundred-and-fifty-dollar suits and diamond rings—
on your union dues and your kickback money?
How does He feel about bloodsuckers picking
up a longshoreman’s work tab and grabbing
twenty percent interest at the end of a week?

How does He, who spoke up without fear
against evil, feel about your silence?

You want to know what’s wrong
with our waterfront? It’s love of a lousy buck. It’s
making love of a buck— the cushy job— more
important than the love of man. It’s forgetting
that every fellow down here is your brother in
Christ.

But remember, fellows, Christ is always with you—
Christ is in the shape-up, He’s in the hatch—
He’s in the union hall— He’s kneeling
here beside Nolan and He’s saying with all
of you—If you do it to the least of mine,
you do it to me! What they did to Joey, what they
did to Nolan, they’re doing to you. And you. And
YOU. And only you, with God’s help, have the
power to knock ‘em off for good!
(turns to Nolan’s corpse)
Okay, Kayo?
(then looks up and says, harshly)
Amen.

Father Barry’s homily is beautifully written and speaks to the power of Christian principles. It has force and poignancy…and no foul language. In this case, screenwriter Budd Schulberg wove a scene without one profane word. Nothing in Pulp Fiction is as good as this scene; it never fails to move me. The film is worth seeing to catch the nuances in the characters who are witnessing Father Barry’s speech and the abuse the priest takes from the mobsters who pelt him with rotten fruit and objects that gash his head.

Profanity has become so overused in films that many of us don’t notice it anymore. The occasional use of a foul word that sets the mood or establishes the character doesn’t offend me, but the constant reliance on certain words in lieu of originality is insulting. One of my favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, is just as guilty as hack writers and directors who overuse the f-bomb when other words would suit the project better.

On a positive note, Scorsese’s upcoming film project promises to be a film we could take our children to see. His 2010 release is going to focus on the 17th century martyrdom of the victims of Nagasaki, whose deaths established a toehold for Christianity in Japan. (Ironically, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the cradle of Catholicism in Japan. The atomic destruction of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 left the shell of the cathedral as a reminder of this crime against humanity.) Top names like Daniel Day Lewis and Benicio del Toro are said to be in Scorsese’s cast.

When a film about the Nagasaki victims is news I’m excited about and films bursting with profanity are the usual fare, we who appreciate quality films have to rely on old favorites for entertainment. Here’s hoping a “Father Barry” scene is somewhere in the pages of Scorsese’s film script.

Shea Stadium in Queens, NY is no more. In less than 30 seconds, the home of the NY Mets was demolished to make way for a corporate abomination to be named Citi Field. I haven’t wanted to watch the implosion because I have too many good memories of Shea and the 1969 Mets that won the World Series when no one expected them to.

Last year, our Tampa Bay Rays almost pulled off a Mets-like Series championship against the Phillies. Here in the Tampa Bay area, the community went crazy following our worst-to-first team that had sound leadership and talented young players, just like the 1969 Mets. We will always remember the Rays’ pennant chase as the time when we were spending our days and nights at our daughter’s bedside while she was in a coma. One night, we watched the Rays with the hospital staff cheering the team on from Tally’s bedside. I’m convinced Tally heard us.

The 1969 Mets had a great pitching staff:  Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan won games and made us Miracle Mets believers. We kids loved the Mets because they were about as old as we were; there wasn’t a long history from the days that seemed to be the Stone Age as was the case with the Yankees and the other ”old teams.” One fateful day, our teacher, a Dominican sister who was a huge baseball fan, promised us that we could forget about our mountain of homework that night if the Mets pulled off a playoff win. She might as well have told us to forget about genuflecting at Mass. A day without homework in parochial school in 1969 was truly a miracle.

The Mets stole the World Series in underdog style from the Baltimore Orioles, who had the fearsome Brooks Robinson on third and we skipped another night of homework from our teacher. I’ve always thought Dominican prayers from a certain sister helped seal the Mets’ victory.

I still have an autograph book signed by many of the 1969 Mets, including their manager Gil Hodges. My best friend’s father was a waiter at the Hilton in Queens where the team had one of its victory dinners. Elisa’s father sneaked us in through the kitchen. We cornered the players as they were coming in and most were kind enough to sign our autograph books. That was another miracle during a year when the Mets were truly blessed.

Growing up in Queens, I remember visiting Flushing Meadows, site of the Mets’ stadium and the former location of the New York World’s Fair in 1964-1965. I ice-skated there for the first–and last–time. We had family picnics at Flushing Meadows that we traveled to on the subway. My brother, sister, our cousins and I jumped into the reflecting pools around the Unisphere, a model of the globe that towered over the park in the shadow of Shea Stadium. I always loved the cheesy orange-and-blue geometric shapes on the exterior of Shea back in those days. I still think of those as Mets colors when I see them together. Even though I live in Florida, they will never really be Gator colors to me.

And so Shea is now a victim of progress and corporate sameness. Those of us who were Queens kids in the 1960s and 1970s will always have good memories of the plucky Mets who pulled off the greatest triumph in baseball in 1969, when Dominican sisters ran orderly classes with more than 50 girls crammed in a single room and we kids believed in a miracle called the Mets. Long live Shea Stadium!

Some people waste their time and talents worrying about the historical Jesus and not enough about the living Jesus. Where historians might have noted Jesus or the lack of contemporary descriptions of Him aren’t as important as His place in our lives. Since there’s no physical description of Jesus anywhere (the letter of Publius Lentulus in the 15th century with the flowery mentions of His hair color and all was a forgery), artists have had to use their imagination to create the images in our churches and homes.

In 2003, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops funded The Face: Jesus in Art, a two-hour documentary that originally aired on PBS stations. Despite its unexplained holes (the Shroud of Turin isn’t even mentioned) and despite short shrift given to 20th century art, the documentary remains an awe-inspiring work that can serve as a prayer focus.

The changing images of Jesus through the centuries was the most intriguing aspect of the documentary. To the early Christians in the Roman empire, Jesus took the form of a Greek divinity like Apollo or a mythical figure like Orpheus. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Jesus became Durer’s Man of Sorrows or Michelangelo’s model of bodily perfection in the Pieta. The young, musclebound Jesus at the center of the Sistine Chapel’s composition says more about the artist’s vision than about any historical precedent.

As Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” We will say he is God, but His image is of our own creation. The gentle, Semitic Jesus in Rembrandt’s portraits radiates love; the Christ in Majesty on the nave of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC rules in judgement. Each artist’s interpretation can allow us to visualize Jesus in all the ways He touches our lives.

The Face ends with a gorgeous photo montage that morphs many images of Jesus into a seamless whole. Just as the faces shift, our perception of the divine does, too. Whether we picture Jesus as Semitic, European, African or Asian, we still must answer when he asks who we say He is. That perception is more important than the image we see or the folderol of the Jesus Seminar.