12/23/2006

A week in Boston

I have been in Boston for a week tomorrow. I have been visiting friends. I have been checking in at the UUA. I came up to Boston just after the funeral last Saturday.

When I came I was disoriented. Grieving. Tired. Very tired. I was coming down with a cold. The cold lingers. I am less disoriented. I have embraced the grieving, it doesn't possess me like last week. I experience myself owning the grief, and being deliberate about the process. I know I will still find myself overwhelmed and taken by aching sorrow. But right now it is more a sweet sorrow, a contemplative sigh.

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Talking to people who knew Marjorie is good for the soul, good for the grieving. Thanks to all who gave of their time. One good friend observed that those I meet with, knew Marjorie as well, and that the sharing of stories with me was part of their grieving as well. She asked if that was difficult for me. I answered no. I find being alone more difficult, talking with others about Marjorie is healing.

I lived in Boston and its vicinity for most of my adult life. Being here, trying to navigate by rapid transit and bus, walking from the bus to this church, and that headquarters building has been a revelation. My body has become accustomed to a warmer, dryer winter than Boston presents. This is a warm day for Boston, but it is too cold and damp for me.

My soul loves Boston, but my body wants to be in LA. I think I will schedule my Boston visits for the warmer times in the future.

Dec 23, 2006 3:00:00 AM | Places

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Breaking the rules A 1997 sermon by Martha Niebanck recalls Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley: Breaking social rules, sometimes just even talking about our culture and the meanings of what we say and do takes courage. I had an experience this summer at Star Island that brought this message home. I still haven’t learned all there is to learn from the experience. Two weeks before I went to Star Island for a week with religious educators I was driving home from the Doolittle Home one Friday and went into Building 19. That’s my Friday afternoon ritual. I saw a CD of Sweet Honey in the Rock, called Sacred Grounds and played it when I arrived home. The first song, “I Remember, I Believe” left me in tears the first time I heard it. I couldn’t explain it but I was drawn to that song. I played it again and again for the next two weeks, imagining getting a singing group together to sing it for the talent show. In my past years at Star Island, I had always waited to be invited to sing with other people, so to initiate a singing group was new for me. I wasn’t sure of the rules, the conventions involved in inviting singers, of ignoring the choir director, of getting men and women to sing together instead of the usual women’s singing group. I didn’t think about it consciously, but the sense that I was in new social territory gave me a vague uneasiness. The theme speaker that week was the Reverend Marjorie Bowens-Wheatly, an African-American woman who is the affiliate minister at the Community Church in New York. She spoke each morning about the challenges of making our communities diverse. She spoke about the need for African Americans to define and control their own culture rather than to simply...