Las Posadas

Celebrants press wall-to-wall into houses where we gather, forty to sixty people, grandparents to infants, night after night reciting the prayers and singing the songs of Las Posadas. Steamy windows emanate light into winter’s deepest dark. Posadas (translated literally as “lodgings”) take place for nine nights, from December 16 through Christmas Eve, and reenact Mary and Joseph’s attempt to find lodging in Bethlehem. The tradition, over four hundred years old, originated in Spain and was carried to Mexico. The uniquely Mexican version seems to have started in 1538, when Spanish friars intent on assimilating the faith with Aztec rites, combined posadas with the nine-night winter ritual of imploring the sun god’s return. Mexicans still celebrate posadas, enlivening them with balloons and papel picado, and the shrieking of children as candy erupts from handmade piñatas.

On foggy and chilled Oregon coast nights, in the homes of immigrants who work mainly for dairies among the cows and hay of our nativities, who struggle to find open doors at banks, at college departments of financial aid and dental offices, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, we await the advent of Jesus, the one with no place to call home. I stand shoulder to shoulder with my Mexican friends in their rented houses that have seen better days, that sleep several children to a bedroom and boast a shrine of mother Mary displayed in her Guadalupe form, surrounded by frolics of icons, plastic decorations, Christmas tree and lights. I step outside and sing along with the “posada song”, pretending to be Mary and Joseph at the door of the inn (or on other nights, the innkeeper, roused from his sleep and ill-tempered). And as each night passes, I begin to understand a part of the Christian story I have previously not understood. Mary and Joseph were like these Mexican immigrants, and I, standing there in my invisible cloak of white privilege, will find it harder to know them.

Mary and Joseph were Galilean. And the people from Galilee were belittled in Bethlehem and throughout Judea. In a reversal of geography, they were the disregarded neighbors from the backwater north, the presumed uncouth and superstitious and freeloading and rebellious and lazy. Down in Judea where they went to pay taxes, they were often shut out as a matter of course. Galileans were stereotyped by Judeans as lawbreakers because of their reputation for bucking the status quo. Galilee was a renegade land that tended to spawn messianic figures who gathered peasants into movements awaiting the coming of the Lord, a new day of fairness. These movements, started by leaders like “the Egyptian,” or “Judas the Galilean,” were historically successful. That is, until the Romans got miffed and sent riot police to disband or kill them or paramilitary troops to intimidate them, or turned on them their own client kings like Herod Antipas, who lived luxuriously by wiling away the wealth of his subjects, sending them to border towns to pay their dues.

In some ways the term “Galilean” was used in Jesus’ day to simply mean an outsider, especially of the political sort. Galilee was a center of economic protest, where the Messiah named Jesus would wax prophetically on wealth and the sharing of it, on how the rich couldn’t make it into heaven any more than they could make it through the eye of a needle, or the Rio Grande, or a few days in the Arizona desert. In his last years, Jesus’ friends and audience were Galilean fisher-folk, and in the Roman Empire, dwelt at the bottom of the labor pool. In the words of Cicero, quoting the well-bred Terence: “The most shameful occupations are those which cater to our sensual pleasures: ‘fish-sellers, butchers, cooks, poultry-raisers, and fishermen’” (Cicero, On Duties 1.42). In our day, Cicero might have added hotel cleaners, line cooks, gardeners, vineyard or dairy laborers, makers of Versace denim jeans.

At posadas, we are reminded by word and ritual that God chose an indigent, young Galilean girl, “Alegría, alegría!” We pray for the immigrants facing deportation, for the women with back pain and diabetes, who need strength to rise each day and make two dozen beds. We pray for the children, for the church and its message of good news. We pray for the high school students fighting for a chance at a dream. We pray to live lives that are generous and just.

The litany, prayers and songs culminate in a meal, a feast of hospitality that night by night includes carnitas, tacos, Mexican barbequed chicken, tamales, saucy burritos, pozole, or taquitos, always accompanied by rice and beans and a prismatic display of salsas. After dinner, children swing at brilliant piñatas.

For reasons unknown, the children flock to me and my husband, throwing hugs around us like coats on a rack. They glow with beauty and unyielding hope, and in America they are not unlike Jesus and his friends running about Jerusalem at Passover, yet unaware of how they are seen, or who they will become, only that they love the songs, the traditions of Christmas, the smell of the Passover tamales, and the community of Galilean pilgrims who love them. These children know only that Jesus and his parents were poor and had to stand at a door and knock only to be ignored, and then finally let into our broken and peregrine hearts as the queen and kings of heaven.

{First appeared on EpiscopalCafe.com, January 2012.}

Pristine Voices

San Marco Convento, Florence is a simple cathedral by Florentine standards, shadowy but for shards of light through high windows, minimally adorned in geometric black and white. Despite the influx of tourists, the chapel almost shudders with stillness and, unlike many Florentine cathedrals, calls people to worship. You see them kneeling at prayer benches and attending mass at altars.

But the day I first visited San Marco it swarmed with American teenagers. Clustered in small groups, they teased and flirted, running between sections of the cathedral with the heckle and jive of adolescence. The disruptive crew caught irritated glances around every corner. I exited the cathedral through a side door, planning to escape them and explore the defunct monastery adjoining the church. It turned out the kids were everywhere, rushing through the halls of the stark old monastery, up and down the narrow stairs. I was away from the chapel only ten minutes before I gave up and returned to the church where I rejoined other tourists perusing alcoves and famous paintings that all began to look the same.

And then it happened.

A sound rose through the chapel, peaceful, soft music from a choir of pristine voices. The sound was so rapturous and unexpected it was shocking. I turned to see the same rag-tag group of teenagers, seated in pews, making the sound. Their singing filled the church with light and charged it with spirit I could feel to the tips of my fingers and toes. I sat down in a pew behind them and closed my eyes. The music, the resonance of it in that cold cathedral, was as rich as good Chianti, as harmonious and gentle as love. I surmised the teenagers were a traveling choir, returning the hospitality of Italy with surprise offerings of song in its cathedrals. The song, and the gift of it issuing from such an unlikely and off-putting source, became a sort of parable to me. Grace, the spaciousness of God and God's tendency to reveal beauty in the most unexpected places and through the most unexpected people were all present in the angelic notes of this traveling choir of teens.

{First appeared in GEEZ Magazine, Fall 2011; Excerpted from author's memoir Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit published in 2011.}

Undone

Beach is a teacher. Let it undo you. Let it rattle your perceptions and discipline your senses. Observation matters, the beach tells you, wake up.
Beach is how the “aum” would look if it were a land form, extending in a line that encompasses shape and non-shape, galaxies and their smallest particles, disappearing at beginning and end, yet never really ending. At the beach, we stand and watch the earth bend like a bow and we see how little we see, how the world we think we inhabit is an illusion of lines and boundaries, hedgerows and horizons. We are so much smaller than we think until, at the beach, we think about it.
At the beach, the ghostly hands of time and erosion become visible. We see how cliffs have settled into current postures, separating from other land forms in a dramatic cleaving. We see the layers of time painted on sides of cliffs. We find sea creatures petrified and laid to perpetual rest in stone. We observe how the earth has shifted since last we were there.
Yet worlds beyond our perception exist in the sea. Schools of fish shimmy and sway like silk scarves, landscapes of stone and kelp merge with craggy outcroppings of shellfish. Mammals that dwarf the homes we live in create, fall in love, and dance under the blue-gelatin surface of our sea. There are depths of green, symphonies of sound we land dwellers will never know, separated as we are by our need for air and light.
Beach lengthens our perspective, makes us more alive on our best days. We step onto the sand and awaken to a deeper level of intimacy with ourselves and others. A walk along the ocean beckons long, sinewy conversations, expressions condensed and boiled down to the core of the matter. Commonplace at the beach, the unimaginable. Perfectly refined people squat to pee in the sea grass. People shy and modest are seduced into love-making on the sand. People reveal secrets on the beach that later come to haunt them. Grieving people cry openly at the beach, where we feel free and alone despite the presence of others.
Not long after moving to the north coast, while walking the beach with a friend, my companion commented, “Sometimes it seems like the beach is the only place big enough to hold what I feel.” Maybe that is why I came to the beach: to find a place big enough to hold what I feel.
I remember the moment I decided to come. I was in Oceanside, visiting the beach house of a friend, running from my life and running in circles. It was the summer of 2004. I walked exhaustedly along the beach, trying to accept all the things I wanted to change and could not seem to change. I had never imagined myself moving to the beach, picking myself up, along with my daughter, and moving away from the town I called home—the town of our family, the area where I’d lived my entire adult life. But as I walked along the beach on that sun-spilled summer evening, I apprehended a message, a mysterious instruction that told me: “Come here.” Seldom had the guidance of the universe come across to me with such searing clarity, “Come here,” it said. And I looked down at the sand to find a pristine sand dollar.
I moved to Oceanside. One afternoon shortly thereafter, while sitting in the picture window of the house I was renting, a beach cottage perched on a cliff that overlooked the Pacific, I saw the word “WELCOME” spelled out in slanting foam on the beach. The delusions of wishful thinking? The deception of eyes staring too long at sunlit water? Call it what you will. I took it as another message. I had come, and I was welcome.
In 2005 I relocated further up the Oregon coast, to the town of Cannon Beach. During the harrowing fall of that year, a friend of mine was among a group of human rights workers taken hostage in Iraq. His name is James Loney. When Jim was lost to captivity and none of us knew where he was or whether he would be freed, I remember thinking that Jim would want us to savor every moment of freedom he could not experience. He would want us be fully alive to what we encounter. So I began to walk on the beach in the evening with this in mind. I would tell myself I was walking the beach for Jim. I would breathe sea air into my lungs and notice the ripe smell of it. I would take note of every hue the sunset gave birth to, I would feel powdery warm sand massaging my feet and breezes lifting my hair. I would try to notice, while walking the beach, all of the artful forms wrought by nature. And I would think, “I’m taking this walk for Jim.” I did this for the 118 days of Jim’s captivity.
Now, five years after that incident, I sometimes remind myself of this as I am walking the beach. I ask myself, “Are you paying attention?” After living on the coast for six years, I get jaded. I expect we all do. And so I ask myself again “Are you paying attention?” Not for Jim this time, but for you.
And I remember how the beach can undo me.

{First appeared in RAIN Magazine 2010}

Silence

If you happened onto this site looking for new work, please pardon the lack. But do enjoy the old work! My recent writing energies have gone the direction of book projects (memoir and fiction), and less in the direction of poetry. If you are interested in my poetry chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes, hand-bound with letter-pressed illustrations, you can find it at galleries and book shops in Cannon Beach and Manzanita, Oregon.

A Wintery Poem for Summertime

Attending Yoga at Winter Solstice

Class starts at five and already it’s dark.
Radiant sconces in the Rec-Center yoga room
draw us like men to a dusky bar on a rain-split
night in December. Black locust trees twitch

scarred branches outside the windows, stripped
of their nimble fringe, as we fold bodies
like quilts around suspended hearts, release
our breath, laden with its spores of longing.

Summer solstice, the class will dwindle—but not
in winter, on the coast, where we store light
in the root and go deep. Where we ride out
storms that threaten to drown us. I rest

into Balasana, Child’s Pose, and let it pull
my tears like a drunk man’s whiskey, as I think
how winter has stolen you—each year but this,
and how I clutch my measuring stick as waters rise.

spring writings

The Other Part of the Miracle

is the red-wingeds’ return, black
birds with a revel of crimson
on their shoulders, a call that sags

like a drawl, like the short-long-short
of their flight. March has finally
come. Mind you the birds perch

on cattails sprung and faded, and
the grass towering still above
the swamp is dead.

The mountains in view endure
a thin chill of snow, and
the ocean at my back grows tired

of raging. But if I stand long,
I see the birds are many,
their electric-red flashes almost

hard to believe. And the trees
that edge the wetland flush
a suggestion of chartreuse.

We have outlived one more
winter of storm and loss.
Surely miracle enough.

But the other part of the miracle
is the red-wingeds’ return.

{First appeared in Northwest Coast Magazine, Spring 2009}

Nostalgia

I take issue with nostalgia. By definition, it signifies a “sentimental yearning for a period of the past.” In my view, such sentimental yearning often obscures our vision like the proverbial rose-colored glasses. I admit, I have never been good at nostalgia. I tend to err in the other direction, disproportionately remembering the past’s struggles and mistakes, and this tendency is something I wrestle with. Die-hard “nostalgics,” on the other hand, recall nothing but the glory and felicity. I am closely related to a few such individuals, and their memories of shared times and experiences often astounds me. It can be downright laughable. They have erased almost everything unpleasant from the past, including, especially, their own misdeeds! They have cleaned up the past so thoroughly, it is no wonder they pine for it with dripping sentimentality. In the shadow of such a past, the present will always pale.

I don’t believe we ought to flog ourselves for past mistakes. But I think the rosy mirage we see when we look over our shoulders nostalgically robs us of our ability to learn from the past and grow. It causes us to forget the important, healing words, “I’m sorry.” The greatest gift of the past, of history, is pedagogical. A sober awareness of our past should generally ward off sentimentality and give rise to humility and a staggering gratitude for the grace that has accompanied us. This is the kind of looking back we need for personal growth, but also for bringing healing and newness into our collective present.

Post-November 4 I find much to celebrate in looking forward. Yet I also believe that our progress demands that we not yearn for a past long-gone, a past which, from a safe distance, looks like a time of greatness, prosperity, and purity. Our progress depends on how honestly and soberly we can reckon with who we are, who we have been, and with the wounds we have afflicted on ourselves and others as well as the gifts we have imparted. Instead of glamorizing the past and embellishing the stories of our successes like old men spinning tales of fishing exploits, we must also tell about our mistakes and excesses. That is how we learn; that is how future generations learn.

A sober approach to our past may deprive us of the chance to wax heroic and drown our fears in the syrup of nostalgia, but it will also cause us to look at where we stand and at the beauty around us at this very moment, with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and possibility.

{First appeared in Oregon Humanities magazine, Spring 2009}

(em)brace yourself

Freedom and Loss

All of your gifts fit in one small hand.
Fingers pressed tightly, I wait

for the other voice to fall, the last
crystalline drop to slip away. Some fears

must be faced. Like swimming in the lake—ice
water assault, the breath grab of descent—how

it rewards those who steel and stay.
Shock fades to warmth, fades to ecstasy. This

is freedom: to hurt until extremities cease
to ache because blood conserves itself

in the boiling core of the body—where
eternity whispers, where life is kept,

though every other thing is lost.

{Tricia Gates Brown]


Our Lady of Guadalupe

Onto my shoulder I hoist
my pack of aims. Arrange them,
religiously, in my room,
beside change of shoes, four

books, vitamins. First,
Vespers. The bell chimes and I lurch,
judge who’s been the longest
by the ease of their gait.

On arrival, I marvel
men do this—five times a day,
plainsong the Psalms.
Hands fumbling in floor-length sleeves.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
My mind still full of the day’s wars.

By morning I’ve sprawled
into solitude’s space. I walk
to nowhere on labyrinth trails
festooned with new clover and rocks

donning mossy afros.
Casting off the need to prove,
improve myself, I befriend
a modest book. In the languid

hours of afternoon, snooze.
My captors unarmed. Dusk
on the pond outside my cell
spreads like eiderdown. At

Compline—with candle glow
setting on icons and altar—
my pose yields, becomes a prayer.
As shapeless and open as mercy.

{Tricia Gates Brown]