Prayers for Beauty in Hard Times

When I was a child growing up in the Episcopal church, I never understood the iconography of Jesus dying on the cross. To me it was a morbid image, and I stopped going to church in my early teens.

As an adult pondering the intersection between despair and beauty, however, I have come to see that this dominant image of Christianity does what Radical Joy for Hard Times does: it invites us to ponder for a while what is painful and sorrowful, that our hearts may be opened to love and compassion.

Therefore, when my friend Liz Maxwell, a rector at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in New York City, invited me to lead a Radical Joy for Hard Times program for Lent, I accepted eagerly. Last Saturday, March 14, a small group of participants gathered in a little chapel just off the main sanctuary of this church, which is transformed five days a week into soup kitchen that has been operating for thirty years and now serves meals to 1,200 guests a day. Today, we sat in a circle as sun wafted through the stained glass windows and people talked about personal concerns in their own lives and about their wider concerns for oppressed peoples, damaged places, sick friends, and the ravages of the economic crisis.

Grief opens us up to compassion. As the Sufis, the mystical sect of Islam say, when your heart is broken, there is space for God to move through the cracks. The liturgical season of Lent, when Jesus died, precedes Easter, the springtime celebration of new life and shared joy. Suffering heightens our perception, too. In a state of sorrow, we perceive beauty with extra clarity, whether it is the beauty of nature determined to thrive or the generous act of another person— friend or stranger.

Our group witnessed beauty thriving when we went outside to the church’s small garden, right at the intersection of two busy streets in Chelsea. Crocus and daffodil buds struggled up through the hard soil, despite scraps of litter that had blown in during the winter. Birds sang in the trees, their songs muffling the noise of traffic. We concluded the gathering by writing prayers on white ribbons and tying them to the tree in the garden.

Many people are afraid to tap the well of sorrow that pervades life on earth. Why bother, we ask? What can any one individual do? And yet, merely by willing to see what is true and, even better, then to share that with others, we touch the reality of humanity. That simple act can infuse us with the determination to see more beauty and to act with more compassion.

Cross Bones Graveyard

The goal of Radical Joy for Hard Times is to bring beauty to orphaned places, that they may once again become part of the cycle of life. The story of Cross Bones Graveyard http://www.crossbones.org.uk in southeast London is a remarkable example of how giving that kind of attention to a place and its people satisfies a deep human need to sooth old injuries.

Near a London Underground station a metal gate in the midst of a brick wall is adorned with ivy, colorful ribbons, some with prayers written on them, flowers, feathers, bundles of dried grass, and other gifts. Inside the enclosure a small garden features a heart-shaped topiary and carefully tended flower beds.

This is Cross Bones, a graveyard where prostitutes were buried for hundreds of years beginning in medieval times. The women, known as “Winchester Geese” because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to work in legalized brothels, could not be buried in hallowed ground.

The land was sold as a building site in the 1880s, but nothing was erected there until more than a hundred years later when the London Underground built a power sub-station on the land in 1990. It was when they began excavating that they unearthed a few of the old skeletons, which they estimated to total approximately 15,000.

Since then this place of anonymity and ignominy has been beautified and commemorated inside and out, informally and formally, through gardening and ceremony and simply through respectful attention.

John Constable, author of a series of poems and plays, The Southwark Mysteries, based on the imagined life of one of the women, writes:

“We've conducted many rituals and community events at the graveyard. The rituals are simple, inclusive and non-dogmatic, emphasising respect for ‘the Ancestors’, and honouring the spirit of this particular place. The Halloween of Cross Bones has been observed every Halloween night since 1998, with hundreds of people making the candlelit procession to the site, to honour 'the outcast dead' with candles, incense, songs and offerings.”

Members of the community pick up trash and replenish the impromptu shrine on the gate with fresh flowers. They are currently working to get permission to dedicate at least part of the burial ground as a memorial garden.

What is most remarkable about the attention and care given to Cross Bones is that it is ongoing. Because people in the community have cared for a wasteland and for forgotten women in simple, beautiful ways, the place has become what it never was in the past: hallowed ground.

THE ORPHANED PLACES

In 1987, when I was living in New York, writing scripts and producing soundtracks for multimedia productions, I read an article about an Oneida Indian engineer, David Powless, who had received a National Foundation grant to research and develop a process for recycling hazardous waste from steel mills. Along with a small group of co-colleagues I made a short video about David, funded by IBM and later shown to international IBM employees at a conference in Miami Beach. (The photo at the left was taken at that event.) The video explored David’s work, both as an engineer and as an Oneida man dedicated to fostering the traditional ways of his people. While we were working together, he told this story:

When he learned that he had received the grant, David said, he drove out to an enormous mound of steel waste and scrambled to the top. Triumphantly, he declared, “I’m going to conquer you!” Almost immediately, however, he knew that this approach was all wrong. “I realized that the waste was an orphan,” he said. “It had been lost from the cycle of life. My job was to bring it back to the cycle of life.”

I never forgot this story, which seemed to me to offer a new perspective on ecological crisis: a way loving parts of the earth that were, by most standards, unlovable, and even unlivable.

Ten years later, in 1997, I was guiding a vision quest in the Utah Canyonlands with Bill Plotkin when I had a vision of my own. That day the questers had come back to base camp after their three-day solo. In council they had told the stories of their journey, and in the morning we would hike out of the canyon and head back to Durango.

All that night, I remained suspended in a chaotic, uneasy state of half-sleep/half-wakefulness. As I lay in my sleeping bag under the stars I kept hearing someone walking around me, perhaps twenty or thirty feet away. Surprisingly, this constant movement in the dark did not worry me. I felt only a vague curiosity about it.

Toward dawn I became alert enough to ask, “Who’s there?” In that instant I had a vision of a young Anasazi man. He paused, approached, and said to me, in effect, that my task was to take people to the wounded places on the earth and give them beauty and compassion.

I was deeply touched by this vision, and for years afterwards tried to figure out how I might carry it out. I led a weeklong vigil in a clearcut forest in British Columbia; worked with a small group to make a mandala out of trash on a Pensacola, Florida beach; and presented a ceremony at New York’s Ground Zero shortly after September 11. However, I found that most people weren’t interested in going to troubled places; they preferred to visit pristine, beautiful nature. I often grieved that I could not enact the task that had been given to me. Then, over the past eight or nine years, I became very involved in writing and teaching about the path of the inner lover, the Beloved, and put the vision of troubled places temporarily aside.

Recently, however, it has become clear to me that the time is now right to bring forth a new way of looking at and being in the company of the troubled places on earth, what David Powless called “the orphans from the cycle of life.” With serious attention now being devoted to global climate change and other ecological challenges, and a new willingness on the part of so many people to examine their behavior on and toward the earth, it feels as if what I now Radical Joy for Hard Times is ready to unfold.