http://preparinganark.wordpress.com/tag/religion-2/
*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.
