LINES FOR ALAN
STOREY
AS HE TOUCHES
DOWN IN CAPE TOWN
AFTER A WEEK
WITH US IN YAKIMA
Pete Seeger’s
dead at 94, blaming Springsteen
for blowing his
cover. You’re in the air,
somewhere, on a
30-hour flight back to Cape Town.
Covers blown
everywhere,
your words
cutting a bleeding people
who give their
permission.
Manna and Mercy
in deed.
Bread for the
people. You turn
Erlander’s book
to bread, lifting it up,
food for people
exiled, saving God-song
until it arrives,
music for ordinary ears,
released through
your own cosmic voice
hidden in its
pages: I grew up in apartheid
South
Africa, born in 1968. The people
who
administered apartheid knew their Bible
backwards
and forwards. How is that people
dropping
drones across the world claim the book?
Thinking large,
perhaps under the influence of Mandela,
God gave you to
me for one day, saying,
Take him
skiing in the Goat Rocks.
Take that
young woman who made
the
trans-Atlantic call and practice your metanoia on skis.
Enough for all.
That’s it? The radical message
for regime
change, just that? No more than that?
Drink green
tea at High Camp Lodge.
That’s God, too?
My friend Jody
crossed into Canada
when Bush, the
Younger, took us to war.
She crossed
again last year, a poet
preparing us in
other ways for Mandela,
sending these
words in every post: Our
deepest fear
is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest
fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
We ask
ourselves, who am I to be brilliant?
Actually,
who are you not to be? Your
playing
small doesn’t serve the world.
That from his
inaugural speech. You were there.
Your Dad, too.
All of you breathing for us all.
My greatest
distance from you is my greatest gift.
Your words
allowing us to talk truth,
as we are able,
to talk across the table.
If God is
not loving, I’m not interested in God.
My still
point. My immovable point.
Through the
lens of Jesus, what is real.
Born in
love, for love, by love.
Breaking our
addictions to the status quo.
Just like that,
we’re freed in the song
sung by slaves
kept alive by Seeger.
Jimmy Crack
Corn, and I don’t care.
Cover blown,
masks down.
We know that
man buried under the persimmon tree.
He died and
the jury wondered why
The verdict was the blue-tail fly.
I’m with kids
on a mountain making like prairie dogs.
You’re eating
María’s tamales. Seeger
sings us into
others, a kind of forever that’s enough.
Jim Bodeen
28 January 2014
FREE THE
PULPIT, FREE THE PEW
Celebrating
the Ministries of Jim & Erica Engel, in Yakima, Washington
…and we
are so awed because it serenely disdains
to
annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
—Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, Rainier
Maria Rilke
Reclaiming
language that moves the story
seems like a
small thing to get one into such big trouble.
We talk about
a few books
and truth be
told, God loves us very much
comes up
every time, especially where terror
shows itself
as path and way. The first book
I stole caused me some guilt but I got over it.
You give me words from a mad Kentucky farmer,
Practice Resurrection, at the airport in El Salvador.
The Bishop of the Poor tells you his way
at stress relief: La calle: march in the streets.
The Subversive Cross speaks prison language,
breaks locks. This cross speaks in code,
has its moments. You were thrown
from a kayak, come from the Yakima River.
My Mom and I sat up front in a church pew
when you walked in. I did not hide my suffering.
I’m sure of that much. What
I have to say comes from here. You brought
spilled blood and a broken body
to spilled blood and broken bodies.
Mom and I stopped by the side of the road.
We’d sing, Jesus loves me. Mom said,
You belong to the school that never closes.
I’m from a school of gang bangers
and Buddhists. Crazy Horse is my father.
I belong to a pack of dogs barking a gospel
before the birth of Jesus. I don’t know
Common Era from the Council of Trent.
Free the pew, free the pulpit.
Jim Bodeen
2009-2014, Yakima, Washington
WHAT COMES UP
FROM BELOW, SITTING IN THE PEW
--Pastor Harald S.
Sigmar Memorial.
The man hounded
me.
From my early 20s on.
He wouldn't leave me alone.
What does he want with me? I'd ask Karen.
The telephone would ring again. “Jim,” he’d say,
“Harald here.
That word," he’d start…
He gave us that
word Koinonia.
Then he took us
to Holden Village.
He took our entire community into the mountains
to Holden Village.
Copper mine
turned monastery—the village we walked into.
Walking out, one
never leaves.
His Icelandic
roots.
Six brothers and
a too-small farm.
The brothers
drawing straws—one with the short straw must leave.
Sig’s grandpa to
Saskatchewan. And North Dakota.
Mountain, North
Dakota.
I’m in the
northwest corner at the border.
We share the
indigenous roots.
He didn't write sermons.
He talked about roots of words--especially
Germanic words.
He got Ethel hired at the Alternative School
with me.
He got himself on the schedule. Taught with no
pay.
Street kids were
the escape from piety.
Sig and Ethel.
As babies, the two of them placed in a pram.
They would meet
later and marry.
Married 70
years.
When we went to live with priests and nuns,
Harald came too.
He became part of Vatican II.
He got himself on the teaching schedule.
He taught one student, one class. Me.
Paul Tillich's
Systematic Theology.
He sat with me
while Stanley Marrow taught me
the genius of
Rudolph Bultmann. He understood.
“Understanding
is only standing under,” he said.
He loved to say
it. My tradition given me by another tradition.
We stood on the
opposite sides of C. S. Lewis.
Sig was trying
to get away from reason.
He took the alternative kids to Holden Village.
They imploded he
said. Suburban kids explode,
but these kids
implode. God rushing in.
He wrote poems all his life.
His daughter, the poet Karen Mason, put them
together. They're here.
He loved to out-agnostic me.
He would
out-athiest me, too, on his way to Jesus.
He used my home-made wine in the Eucharist.
He never cracked a smile.
He was working on this book, Beyond Sanity.
Mark it up, Jim. Mark it up.
He wanted to get beyond reason.
He baptized our daughters.
Harvey Blomberg became part of his pastoral
team.
We saw it work. We saw them make it work.
That's how we knew it could work. Community.
In his 90s he handed me the Bonhoeffer
biography.
Mark it up, Jim. Mark it up. Really mark it up.
Four decades of marking it up.
Hounded the whole time. Hounded.
Harald S. Sigmar, who received
so much pleasure
and relief at blowing his nose.
Jim Bodeen
11 January—15
January 2014
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