Sermon on Atonement

Aldo Mondino, Kapparot

My fiancee works at a private Jewish high school in town.  He loves it.  Many times the mixture of him (WASP) and the students (mostly Jewish and hailing anywhere from Israel to Mexico) strikes all of us as just hysterically funny.  I find myself amused in no small part because he teaches in the neighborhood I grew up in, then and now chock full of Jews.  Old hat for me, but for my fiancee everything feels new: the Shabbat service on Friday, the abundance of days off in October, the Ma'amad he'll have to present in December.  My father, a long time fanatic of the 6-man football phenomenon in West Texas, is tickled silly that my fiancee's school has a 6-man team.

I like when he comes home and says things like, "I love that everyday we get to eat Challah.  Holla!" and lifts the roof with his hands.  I roll my eyes, but it's still funny.

Occasionally, though, he'll bring home something sincere and serious, and in truth he takes the whole place sincerely and seriously, as he should.  This past Wednesday Jews all over celebrated Yom Kippur, a day of atonement.  Even I had the school day off.  My fiancee told me a story about a strange act of atonement that the school community performed together based on the custom of Kapparot.  Originally the custom required use of a live chicken, into which the sins of the individual could transfer during the ceremony.   Each person would swing the chicken three times in a circle above her head while reciting these words: "This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement; this rooster (or hen) shall go to its death, but I shall go to a good, long life, and to peace."  Then the rooster or hen is slaughtered and given to the hungry to feed them, thus ridding the sinner of his sins.

At my fiancee's school, they did not use live animals, thankfully.  Instead, in a more compassionate version of the ceremony, each student wrote down his sins on a piece of paper, wrapped the paper in a dollar bill and swung the dollar bill over his head three times while reciting the requisite words.  Afterward, the rabbis took the money to the needy and burned the papers filled with the all the sins of teenagers.  

"What was your sin?" I asked my fiancee.

"I didn't write one down.  The teachers didn't have to write one down.  Just the students," he said.

I forgot about it after a few hours.  

But yesterday morning I remembered.  I woke up and shook my fiancee awake.

"Baby.  We should write down _________ and put it in money and then give it away."

He didn't laugh.  We had some atoning to do toward each other.

I'm sure our version of Kapparot differed in almost every visible way from the original custom.  We used the back of a torn envelope.  Both of us wrote something down about abusing alcohol a little too often; I quickly scribbled down a few more things I never said out loud.  And won't.  I only had a $10 dollar bill so that's what we used.   He went first.  I recited second.  We stood on our rained-out deck, the deep green ivies dripping fat drops of water onto the brick walls, steam rising up from the humid earth beneath the wood planks below our feet, cars humming past toward the makeshift entrance to I-10 at the end of our block.

We burned our scraps of envelope with a citronella candle that never staves off mosquitoes, ever.  We watched them fizzle and curl their way way down to black and ash.  Because of the cry-your-eyes-out downpour so typical of a September in Houston, we couldn't find anyone outside to pass on our $10 dollar bill to, even in the usual places under the freeway.  We'll do that today.  I am under no illusion that we will improve the world in any real way because we gave a homeless guy some money, nor should we permit ourselves any self-satisfaction from this symbolic act.  

But listen.  I have always been moved by the idea of atonement.  My favorite holy day of obligation in the Catholic church was and still is Ash Wednesday.  I love that mass.  I never miss it.  Let me here say something about the difference between atonement and repentance.  A Jewish colleague of mine told me her rabbi conceptualizes atonement as "at-one-ment", a way to become whole again, to recreate the sacred unity between man and the divine, and man and his fellow man.  Certainly "at-one-ment" captures the spirit of Ash Wednesday too.  On these days--Yom Kippur and Ash Wednesday--we are not called to repent or wrack ourselves with guilt.  We acknowledge our broken and torn souls, and ask for stitches.  We do this in communion with others, because a god will use these people around us as the thread through which she passes her needle and stitch them into our skin like train tracks or road paint methodically spread down a long, lonesome highway we all must travel, the entire act like any healing both public and intensely private at once.  

Frivolous and antiquated as it may seem (I kept picturing the narrow backyard of a Brooklyn brownstone, the poor fowl screeching for dear life above the din of taxis, Latin beats blared into the streets, and subway cars tumbling overhead), I like the idea of the chicken, or at least the idea that we may release our "sins" instead of bury them inside our bodies to be confessed again and again and again.  So many useless Hail Marys.  I like the idea even that atonement may require a blood-letting of sorts, that our ability to forgive ourselves and others is a matter of life and death.  I also like the final movement of Kapparot, that instinct toward generosity and giving, without which no atonement can ever come full circle.   Confession is not enough; one much actively love others and engage with the divine to repair the world.  And no matter how dirty and down low we get, we always can engage in such repair.

What an invaluable lesson for teenagers.  And for all of us.

Amen.   

Sermon for the First Sunday in Ordinary Time

A friend said to me recently, "I'm just dealing with the fact that I'm not a rock star.  I'm a high school teacher."

I laughed.  I also felt a tsunami of compassion swell in my veins.  I knew exactly what my friend meant.

Let me begin by saying I have the highest respect for teachers, especially high school teachers.  My grandmother taught high school history, my mother taught high school science, and my partner teaches high school English.  These beloved people, and all other great teachers, do difficult, honorable, often thankless work.  God's work.  It is no easy feat to steer a soul out of darkness and into light.

Still, I understood my friend perfectly.   The older I get, the more my youthful aspirations elude me.  Even five years ago, I was wide-eyed with artistic expectation.  Ten years before that I wouldn't have believed that I wouldn't always be one of the prettiest, one of the brightest, one of the most talented or most successful.  I didn't think I deserved those things, necessarily, but I thought I could earn them.  Vanity may be the bane of my generation and tribe, and the crippling misdirection from purpose that society uses to seduce all pretty girls.  Vanity is certainly my Achilles' heel.  For some people like me to say "I'm a teacher," to a stranger at a dinner party requires a humility and strength that "I'm a novelist" does not.  In her own way my friend is facing the same realization I'm facing: I may or may not become a writer with a capital W.  I may not become famous or semi-famous or even singled out.  I might not save the world.  My metabolism will slow down.  My muscles will atrophy.  My hair will turn gray.  Many of my students will graduate and forget my name.  I might be ordinary.

As with any trial, I turn to literature.  Or rather, literature finds me like a fairy godmother or talisman. The word talisman comes from the Greek, teleo--to consecrate.  In my case, this August I received a talisman charged with sacred power from Lucille Clifton in the form of this poem:

the thirty-eighth year 
of my life,
plain as bread
round as a cake
an ordinary woman

an ordinary woman

i had expected to be
smaller than this,
more beautiful,
wiser in Afrikan ways,
more confident,
i had expected
more than this

i will be forty soon.
my mother was once forty.

my mother died at forty-four,
a woman of sad countenance
leaving behind a girl
awkward as a stork.

my mother was thick,
her hair was a jungle and
she was very wise
and beautiful
and sad.

i have dreamed dreams
for you mama
more than once.
i have wrapped me in your skin
and made you live again
more than once.
i have taken the bones you hardened
and built daughters
and they blossom and promise fruit
like afrikan trees.

i am a woman now
an ordinary woman.

in the thirty-eighth
year of my life,
surrounded by life,
a perfect picture of
blackness blessed,
i had not expected this
loneliness.

if it is western
if it is the final europe
in my mind,
if in the middle of my life
i am turning the final turn
into the shining dark
let me come to it whole
and holy
not afraid
not lonely
out of my mother's life
into my own.
into my own.

i had expected more than this.
i had not expected to be
an ordinary woman.


When I first read the poem, I was in the bathtub at a hotel in Farmington, Connecticut.  I ran naked out into the room and said to my fiancee, "Here.  Read this.  This is what's wrong with me and what I haven't been able to articulate to you."  That same warm night at an outdoor poetry reading, I sat next to him, a rich glass of full red wine balanced delicately on the grass between us.  The emcee chose from an entire anthology of poems to read Clifton's "An Ordinary Woman" to the crowd.  For a split second, I believed in signs.

I also recalled a song I love by Tracy Chapman, First Try, a song she croons in an older, more wistful voice than any song about fast cars.  She sings, "Can't run fast enough, can't hide, I can't fly.  Struggling with the limits of this ordinary life."

That word again.  Ordinary.

In the Catholic Church, we have what's called "ordinary" time.  As a child I didn't understand what the priest meant when he welcomed us into mass on the "Third Sunday in Ordinary Time," for example.  What was the difference, I wondered, between ordinary time and other time?  In the Roman Catholic Church there are two periods of ordinary time on the liturgical calendar.  The exact timing becomes complicated, but suffice to say that Ordinary Time exists between Christmas and the Lenten (Easter) season, and then between Easter and the next Advent Season.  The time between birth and death.

More people attend mass on Christmas and Easter; these are holy days of obligation and Catholics love them some obligation.  As I get older, I do the opposite: some years I attend Christmas mass, and rarely attend Easter mass.  I show up tempus per annum, the latin phrase for "times of the year", translated in English as "ordinary time."   I need lifting when I feel most lowly and alone, most human.

Perhaps that makes sense.  The Catholic writer Henri Nouwen said, "I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes all of creation."  We can display vanity in our suffering too. We must learn ordinariness.  We have to be common to find communion.

In ordinary time we will arrive at the most holy of our life's work.  In ordinary time we will be asked to recognize the everyday-miraculous: sunrise, schoolroom, sentence, spoon, soap, sleep.  It is not the high drama of midnight mass with its trumpets and Halleluia's, nor is it the dusky hours of an Easter vigil.  But it may be the time between birth and death--ordinary time--when life demands from us the most humbling and extraordinary task of coming out of our mother's lives and into our own.

Amen.