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*Our bodies and the land are one. Move the earth with your body, dance on it, farm in it, play with it.  It, the soil, is made of clay, like you and me hydrocarbon molecules, layers of  geological and muscular formations.  The soil, the mountains, the valleys all layering after time . Sometimes the land must be worked and the land must wait to be revealed in a process. The land and our bodies are one, and these are the stories of the death in the land and reaching to dance in the face of it, moving with it. Abudah Hebrew meaning work as worship we dance in the face of death, for the healing of ourselves and the healing of the land, we remember. The following is a recollection of the interconnection of the mourning of the earth and the process of mourning. Mourning is physical. The formation of the muscular system is a layering of muscles.

On January 2011 Anjaneah Williams was murdered across the street from

Sacred Heart Church, pierced in the side, at 2 pm, walking out from a

sandwich shop, it was a Thursday. She lay on the sidewalk until taken to Cooper Hospital where she died six hours later. Dying in the arms of her mother before the children who deeply love her younger relatives around the corner from my house. Another of

this gunman’s  stray bullets shot through the stained glass piercing the Sacred Heart at our church across the street. Anjaneah’s death still reverberates in the air, an explosion  echoing canyon, and a screaming mother in a vacuum, unheard and deafening. Her

murder, one of forty in the neighborhood in the near half-century past,

since the shipyard closed, forty people on the sidewalks, on the lots where the houses once stood, where the children play, kites are flown, and orchards grown.

The stations of the cross is a stop on the dying walk toward death, beaten, nailed, and strangled

walking and suffering, a trail of murders  making layers on the earth. walking the death  the way of the cross, Via Crucis. The week before Easter, the Christian Holy Week is expressed passionately by people from all over the world. The actual death of Christ is reinacted  from the tearing thorny crown, the stripping of the garmet, t the whipping, falling, beating, hanging, killing Jesus,  his blood dripping everywhere, all over the land. There are fourteen stations each station another gruesome description of the death of Christ. I believe I’ve heard of stories of people almost dying during their reenactment of the Stations of the Cross during Holy Week. The fourteen Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, when Christ was killed are the neighborhood are places where people have been murdered. To walk on this walk is no returning, a walk that was forced through violence, surrounded by death, forced by the empire, to walk suffering and dying, a trail, a journey like stops along the trail , full of murder, full of tears, stepping toward a massacre, exhaustion in the forced march.

It was Carnivale Sunday when I met Jorge, three days before the

beginning of Lent this year. He is ten years old, and now he is my neighbor and he has taught me to dance in the face of death. June 2011 he was

walking home to change from his school clothes. He was shot by a man with a gun in the head, severing his optic nerves blinding Jorge. He lost

his sight and stayed in the hospital a long time. He lived on the other side of Camden when this happened, but now his family  moved into the neighborhood with a backyard that connects to the

greenhouse where I work. He has his own garden gate at

the end of his yard, and he works with us as a Jr. Farmer. He rides the bicycle in the greenhouse to pump the water for the plants, and works the check-out at our Farmers Market.I haven’t yet wrapped myself around the suffering, beauty, and meaning, it is deep and I know that I have been deeply moved, healed by this beautiful blind boy.

Carnivale Sunday, the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, when the

poet named Rocky dances all the aisles of the sanctuary, puppet in hand, in

the face of the approaching Lenten season. Mardi Gras  and fauschnuts, we dance in the face of death. Lent is the Fourty days before Easter when Catholics have traditionally gone into deep lifestyle changes such as  I describe the scene to my new friend Jorge who keeps asking more questions. Jorge was introduced to the parish at the morning mass , I think the first thing

I noticed were his large beautiful dimples framing his squeezable face.

I asked him what types of  fruits and vegetables he likes to eat? Broccoli. Wonderful. Jorge, together we can grow all different types of broccoli, you can water

them every morning, and you can feel the different parts of the plant,

stem, stalk, and broccoli sprouts, “OH, Yeah, and then I’ll eat them” we

discussed during mass. He asked me if I wanted to feel something. Sure. He

took my hand and brought  it up to his bullet scar, “this is where I was

shot.”  He asked about all of the people around us, the church

ladies grabbing his face and kissing him. I touched my hand to the area in

his forehead between his two eyes. This is your third eye, Jorge.  He asked about the poet ballet dancing in Carnivale fashion with the puppets in the aisle. Jorge wanted to  hear the details,

of this, our dance in the face of death. To dance truly dance in the face of death we are given a new voice, a voice that is deeply moving moaning, a voice beyond words. We dance and we farm, stay connected in death’s deepness, and we find our way toward beauty amidst the violence.

Our whispering stopped and we listened to Father Michael , the liturgy, the

cantor. Singing together our voices rise beyond and within the words we sing, “Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world,

have mercy on us,  Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, GRANT

US PEACE,”  I sang those words many times with my Grandmother who has died, and hear her voice now when I sing, remembering her and dancing in the face of death I remember, the way her voice felt,  The children who came to

her house for generations to watch the glass on the storm door shake as she

sang beside the player piano.  Grant us peace. I fill my body with her

breathe bouncing up the walls of my throat, the same shape of her own.

The day that she died, I awoke with a terrible back pain.

I went and sat with her, rubbed her feet, and talked about the beauty of the ocean.  I sat with her in silence as she floated, prayers on her lips,

hearing a new song more clearly, she died and she is still with me. I look down and see her hips, and hands in my own body, her frame, my body as her dress form, I am startled sometimes when I look in the mirror and see my face as it is taking shape of my Grandmother’s so much that I almost smell her sauce. Her children, sisters, and the whole family stoof beside her grave on the rolling Lancaster hillside. I did not dig her grave but I planted flowers to remember her.  I have grieved her and I still continue to grieve her, as I remember her, and remember she is with me.

I imagine those who have come before me who have dug the graves of their loved ones.

The Irish farmer poet priest, of Sacred Heart Church in Camden is of the earth. Raised in a time full of the wisdom of the earth, its rhythms, the dependency of people on it, and how it remembers, weathered in seasons,

ways of knowing, intuitive farmer storytelling, touching something familiar for many. In Ireland  when Father Michael was young, the family and friends would dig the grave for the  one of their own died.Working through and uncovering layers throughout the seasons to bury their dead in the earth. They met in the field to dig the grave, the digging as physical act, doing the spiritual work.  Father Michael’s   best

friend died this year, Joseph A. Balzano, a maritime man, director of the South

Jersey Port Corporation, international cargo, men that measure in tonnage, and like an

industrial super-hero a godfather to the neighborhood, bringing his

front-end loader down the street for lifting and good deeds. Joe

died this year, we are grieving him and we remember. Many times this

first winter since Joe’s passing Father Michael deeply grieved the

loss of his best friend,and shared “in Ireland when you lose one of your own, you meet with the others

in the field with your shovel. We didn’t do this for Joe, we didn’t

dig his hole, and I don’t know how to deeply grieve him.” The act of

digging this burial hole, is part of the sacrament, the mystery of mourning, what is done to the earth is also done to you. Grieving is a

physical act, moving through the layers of pain.

We broke three pick axes digging the holes to plant the fruit-trees in

the  orchard at the edge of the neighborhood near the river. The earth groans out the trauma done on it.  This

orchard is one of the stations of the cross,  in Waterfront South

the sites where people have been murdered. Dawn McCarey was murdered

here, her body thrown on this hard and frozen land December 23, 1997.  We dug, we broke three pick axes we remember and transform the soil with air, sunlight, and water into fruit. 

Fruit-trees in the  orchard at the edge of the neighborhood near the river,

this land, this orchard is one of the stations of the cross, here in

Waterfront South,

strangled, beaten, stabbed. There now grows Finca de Ancona. I never

knew Dawn McCarey, somebody’s daughter, strangled and dumped

found dead in the back of the alley  between the industries and the

families, in a place for the unwanted, thrown like weeds going to seed

waiting to be revealed.

This is our orchard, growing new fruits on trees taking root. It grows well with a lot of sunlight one hazelnut, various apples, peaches, pears, and cherries planted on September 11, 2010 blessed by various international peace travelers.  We care for this place, make it more beautiful, and continue to dig our holes. We remember. May eternal rest be granted unto them perpetual light shine on this place, fruitful and multiplying.