Grand Trunk Pub

Posted on 21 August 2013 by eebelz Standard Reply

In the days before rail service was consolidated under Amtrak, different lines were run by different companies, often using different stations. The Grand Trunk Western Railroad line passed through Detroit (not to be confused with Michigan Central), and its station was located on the Detroit River at Brush and Atwater, near where the Ren Cen is now. Railroad lines used to operate a separate ticket office in the business district, and the Grand Trunk operated it rather close to the station—first, at Woodward and Jefferson (where One Woodward Avenue, formerly known as the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company building, a Minoru Yamasaki design, now stands); and then at 612 Woodward Avenue in the Traub Brothers Jewelry building.

Currently, that building, and an adjoining one, houses the Grand Trunk Pub, formerly known as Foran’s Irish Pub.

The pub has plenty of atmosphere. Its owners have done some restoration, with sensitivity to the building’s history and an interest in the railway theme.

The restaurant side is a little hole-in-the wall spot, but the good kind. “Gourmet pub grub” is what the menu says.

Foreground: Veggie burger with grilled onions and a side of Better Made chips (and one fry stolen from the other plate).
Background: A shaved turkey sandwich with a side of fries.

One of my favorite things about their menu is that they source much of the food locally, and include Detroit classics and favorites, such as Better Made potato chips as a side, Faygo to drink, or Sanders Hot Fudge on the “Michigan Mud Pie.” The prices are also quite good.

As a vegetarian, I often don’t have a lot of options in this sort of place, where the fare is primarily sandwiches and burgers. However, the Grand Trunk Pub has a unique approach: you can substitute a veggie burger patty on most of their specialty burgers, or you can have a basic veggie burger with the toppings you prefer.

This is a snapshot from the menu on their site. Click on it to visit their online menu.

For dessert, the bread pudding with whiskey caramel sauce is pretty good (especially for $4.25!), but I prefer the Michigan Mud Pie (just $5). Pro tip: We ate dinner at the Grand Trunk Pub, then went over to the Riverwalk for a while, walked around there (as you do), and returned to the Grand Trunk for dessert!

Michigan Mud Pie, shown here with a scoop each of vanilla and chocolate ice cream. We were given a choice.

Bread pudding with whiskey caramel sauce.

Detroit’s new Meijer

Posted on 20 August 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

Meijer has dipped half of a pinky toe into the city. This is big news. Old news, yes, but I finally got to see it for myself.

I’m not normally a fan of big-box stores, but I do love Meijer. Maybe it’s just from growing up with it (I’m old enough to remember it as “Meijer Thrifty Acres“)—although I also grew up with K-Mart (a Detroit original, based in Troy) and could take it or leave it. Meijer did have its full one-stop shopping long before Wal-Mart and Kmart ever introduced grocery departments.

Meijer is a Michigan-based store, headquartered in Western Michigan just outside of Grand Rapids. They claim to be the original “one-stop shopping,” and many stores host smaller shops (independently run), or “services” inside, from banks to shoe repair to barber shops to dentistry. Most, if not all, of their stores are in rural or suburban locations. The Detroit store breaks that pattern, but, more importantly, it could be a show of faith in the city: that a Michigan-based company like Meijer is willing to open in Detroit is, to my mind, as big a deal as Whole Foods opening in Midtown.

I say Meijer dipped half a pinky toe into Detroit, though, because the new store is located on 8 Mile—on the Detroit side—at Woodward, and it faces 8 Mile, thus facing the northern suburbs. So it’s just barely in Detroit, and it seemingly can’t bear to look.

To be fair, though, it is the anchor for a strip mall (also not the norm for Meijer).

The layout is completely different from the old Meijer stores I grew up with, or even the slightly newer or remodeled stores. Happily, they offer pamphlet store directories when you enter:

(Temporary note: I’ll add a picture of the inside of that pamphlet later.)

The look of the store is somewhat stark and cold, if clean—mostly white, letting the products be the color. (This is reminiscent of Farmer Jack’s “Future Store” built in Canton in 1988-89. I guess they were right about the future.) We were only there for a brief time, with a few items to pick up, so I don’t know how it would feel to shop for a long time surrounded by so much white paint (my least favorite color).

I wanted some Michigan cherry wine and some Faygo. In the wine section, there was a spot dedicated to Michigan wines of all varieties:

Since I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is near Napa Valley, I thought the wine section overall was a bit small, but it was bigger than your average grocery store, even in California. Pictured here is just the Michigan wines. (And the bottles missing on the bottom shelf are the ones I purchased.)

I couldn’t fit all the Faygo in one photo, so here’s a side shot of the Faygo section:

I picked up some diet Rock ‘n’ Rye, Red Pop, and Creme Soda, 20-oz. bottles 2/$1.

One difference from most Meijer stores is that this location is only open from 6am-11pm, whereas most are 24 hours. This location offers a gas station, a pharmacy (with a drive-through pick-up window), a bakery, and deli, along with all the usual departments. In addition to the store’s own services, Huntington National Bank has a branch inside the store. Meijer’s one-stop shopping means you can buy motor oil, a bed pillow, fresh produce, and a digital camera all in one place—or whatever other odd combination of stuff you might need. And speaking of produce, Meijer usually has some of the best produce compared with local grocery stores. Meijer also normally has a great selection of products, especially in grocery, including locally made products, ethnic foods, vegetarian/vegan selections, and more. The store brand (meijer) is almost always of excellent quality. (We also picked up some store-brand Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream—theirs is, in my opinion, the best brand of that flavor.) The prices are quite good, as well.

Even though I sing the praises of this chain (and, living in California, actually dream about it from time to time), I hated working there back in the early 90s while I was in college. It wasn’t as bad as some places, and in fact can offer excellent advancement opportunities within the company, but there were definite issues you would expect to find for workers in a big-box store. We were unionized, though, which helped.

It will be interesting to see how things go with this new Detroit location. Will the store maintain its clean appearance? Will it expand or contract its hours? Will its customer base be from the city, or from Ferndale and other nearby northern suburbs? (There is a Royal Oak store which will probably continue to draw most of those northern suburbanites.)

I hope things go well for the store, and for all the stores in this (choke, gasp) strip mall. As much as I hate strip malls, it’s good to see businesses investing in Detroit, and they provide much-needed jobs as well as options for shoppers in the city.

This photo, taken from just inside the main entrance, shows an overview of the 30 checkout aisles (including self-checkout).

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that the store’s employees were unusually friendly; even when just passing us in an aisle, they’d greet us, ask how we were doing, and wish us a good night.

So far, it seems to be a very pleasant place to shop.

Motor City Brewing Works

Posted on 20 August 2013 by eebelz Standard Reply

Motor City Brewing Works is a brewery in Midtown, at 470 W. Canfield, across the street from TJ’s (Traffic Jam and Snug). It’s been there for years now, but I’d never been. We ate there last night.

I’m not a beer drinker, so I can’t comment on the beer. But I had a great pizza. The pizzas are about the size of your average dinner plate, and they’re perfect for one person. Since they’re not in the least bit greasy, they don’t make you feel overstuffed. I opted for the “build your own,” and had carmelized onions, roasted red peppers, and spinach on mine:

The veggies were only 75 cents each to add to the pizza. Between the two of us, we had 2 pizzas, a beer, and a Diet Coke, and the bill was just over $20. Not bad for dinner!

MCBW has a great atmosphere and very friendly waitstaff.

Here’s a look at their menu:

From home to Home

Posted on 19 August 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

I’ve arrived in Detroit. To me, Detroit is home, but not in a sentimental or nostalgic sense. In the past week when I mentioned to anyone that I was headed to Detroit, usually their response was something like, “Oh, are you going to see family?”

Well, sort of. I’ll see family next week, when I head outstate. Right now, I’m visiting Detroit (and also friends in Detroit). Detroit is home in the sense that it is where my mental map is centered, and it has formed my identity. It’s true I was born here, but I didn’t grow up in the city; I chose to live in the city as an adult, and immediately felt a sense of belonging.

It’s hard to explain—but why should I have to explain it? It’s like being in love. If you can explain why you’re in love with someone, then it’s probably not the real thing.

Othering, Eight Mile, and Original Sin

Posted on 3 August 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

Earlier this week, a Detroit pastor was shot dead while asking his partying neighbors to keep the noise level down. I read the online article from WDIV, channel 4.

I know better, but as with any bad habit, I did it anyway: I read the comments. They rivaled the story itself as examples of heartbreaking failures of love. Some commenters brought up the Zimmerman trial, decrying the “liberal” media for playing up white-on-black violence but ignoring black-on-black violence; others called for gun control, implying that the primary issue here was someone’s possession of a gun; still others baldly asserted that this is simply how black people behave; others used the opportunity to badmouth Detroit. The politicization and racism in the comments section is as predictable as inner-city violence itself has sadly come to be. Where is the compassion for a family and a community so senselessly devastated? Where is the respect for the man of God murdered at the young age of 46?

Nevertheless, I think the comments, nasty and unhelpful as they are, stem from two very human impulses: our instinctive drive to figure things out, to solve problems by analyzing them; and our equally instinctive need to distance ourselves from tragic situations, to assure ourselves that such things happen to other people. Both these impulses are ambivalent gifts of evolution. They both serve to keep us alive and functioning.

But both impulses also work against us. In particular, the second—the urge to distance ourselves from danger—constantly warps our ability to analyze: if a problem belongs to other people, then surely my safety lies in disconnecting myself from (certain) others…right? (In Detroit, that’s generally symbolized by Eight Mile Road.)

The Christian doctrine of “original sin” serves as a warning against trusting those base instincts unquestioningly. Our instincts were, as far as we can tell, forged on the fly in response to certain conditions our ancestors—human and pre-human—faced. The goal, or more accurately, the mechanism, was survival. One way to think about original sin, then, is to consider that we, as individuals, but also as a species, learned to do wrong before we’d become moral agents. Just as selfishness, generally, considered a vice in most ethical systems, is necessary to a baby’s survival, behaviors we now consider morally reprehensible actually got us here, as a species, in the first place. But now, as spiritual and moral beings who ought to know better (what Bruce Cockburn called the “Angel Beast“), our task is to transcend our animal instincts, testing them and keeping what is good, but learning to control and move beyond those that actually harm us.

Central to any ethical system is the consideration of others. Our instincts will mostly serve us well if our goal is personal safety, the rest of the world be damned. But humans are social animals. As spiritual social animals, our ethical obligation, and also our health, consists in opening ourselves to each other, to the universe, and to God. Our task is to grow into greater interdependence.

Sadly, our culture itself works against that growth. Consumer capitalism, American “rugged individualism”—these forces, or, as the Bible terms them, “principalities and powers,” are bigger than any of us, and perhaps than all of us; they discourage our growth into interdependence. The market needs individual, mobile workers and consumers. Consumer culture has so pervaded our lives that we identify ourselves with our brand loyalties, including political parties and religious affiliations. The more labels we are willing to wear, the more we are drawing lines between ourselves and those like us, and others who are not like us. Even “family values” have been co-opted by this thinking, becoming a means to delineate an “us” vs. “them” and to camouflage self-interest with the patina of religiosity.

Indeed, self-interest is entirely at home in American Christianity, which, historically, has largely been moralistic and private. Our spiritual practices, like our consumer habits, are predominately individualistic. In the religious realm, our animal survival instinct concerns itself with what will get me into heaven, the rest of the world be damned. This is an exaggeration, of course; I hope very few, if any, American Christians consciously adopt that attitude! But that attitude is seen wherever “sin” is only conceived in personal terms—epitomized in our culture at the moment by sexual behavior—while ignoring social sins such as institutional racism and environmental degradation. In America, too many Christians honestly believe all is well with their soul as long as they abstain from certain individual behaviors, believe the right things about God, and ask Jesus to forgive their sins. And this is seen as perfectly compatible with, say, unquestioningly benefitting from race or gender privilege, or buying clothing made using slave labor, or making comments like those attached to the article referenced at the beginning of this post.

A father, a pastor, was murdered for asking his neighbors to keep the noise down. This wasn’t an isolated and bizarre action by a disturbed individual we can easily other. What took him wasn’t just a gun or a person’s anger, but some kind of twisted thinking where one’s own enjoyment is more important than the very life of one’s neighbor. That thinking is endemic in America, from the Koch Brothers who are in the news now for dumping their pollution on Detroit, to the food industry using cheap, unhealthy ingredients, to for-profit prisons, to corrupt politicians stealing from the People, attacking minority religions under the guise of freedom of religion and freedom of speech—why would that kind of thinking not also be at a party next door to a pastor? Until we really start to believe that our neighbor’s well-being is as important as our own, all this sickness and violence (literal and economic) is just going to escalate.

All of us are implicated in this shooter’s belief that his “right” to do what he wanted was of more value than his neighbor’s life. Ours is a culture that idolizes the weasel words “liberty” and “freedom.” And however well-meaning we try to be, our actions as consumers and as citizens of this representative democracy constantly privilege our own comfort, wealth, rights, and freedoms over whatever neighbor needs to be othered in order for our privilege to remain intact. I know this from experience; I try and I fail all the time.

It’s human instinct. It’s original sin. It’s bigger than any of us as individuals and it’s bigger than all of us lumped together, at least in our sub-cultures. And sometimes it’s how we survive. But it’s also what we’re called to struggle against.

But what if Christians really believed that their personal salvation depended upon the well-being of their neighbor? If that seems a scary prospect, don’t go asking Jesus precisely who your neighbor might be.

Chances are, they’re on the other side of Eight Mile.

Here are some questions to consider:

How often do I secure my own interests at the expense of someone else’s life, health, happiness, security?

What might repentance look like? How would it really affect my daily life, including my consumer choices?

How can I use my spheres of influence to encourage growth into interdependence in myself and those around me? How can the wider culture be transformed, and what might be my role in that?

A Psalm for Detroit

Posted on 19 July 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

As Detroit enters bankruptcy, this Psalm comes to mind.

Let all who rejoice at my ruin be ashamed and disgraced;
let those who boast against me be clothed with dismay and shame.
Let those who favor my cause sing out with joy and be glad;
let them say always, ‘Great is the LORD,
who desires the prosperity of his servant.’
(Psalm 35.26-28, from the BCP Psalter)

Earlier in the same Psalm, the psalmist declares:

My very bones will say, ‘LORD, who is like you?
You deliver the poor from those who are too strong for them,
the poor and needy from those who rob them.’ (v. 10)

Pundits will say all kinds of things about my beloved hometown, and some even salivate at the misery of our people. I won’t wish all kinds of nasty things upon them like the psalmist does (especially in the bits of the Psalm I didn’t quote), but I do wish they’d shut the hell up.

Our motto is my prayer today: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. Amen.

The “Good Samaritan”

Posted on 15 July 2013 by eebelz Standard 2

Once again I’m blogging on a lectionary passage at the end of the day, just as it’s fading from view to be replaced by next Sunday’s texts — at least for sermon-writers. But the rest of us churchgoers can spend a bit more time with today’s Gospel. So here goes.

In light of the “not guilty” verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial for the death of Trayvon Martin, other stories with similarly predictable plotlines have been circulating in social media—most notably, of a black man convicted (though later pardoned) for shooting a white teen, and a black woman sentenced for firing warning shots when her abusive husband, against whom she allegedly had a restraining order, made her feel threatened — as well as comments about other notable cases, such as the shooting death of Oscar Grant and the beating of Rodney King by police.

Among my friends, no one seems surprised, but everyone seems outraged. But friends are also reporting their own shock at racist comments their acquaintances are making. The comments are predictable, but the names and faces attached to them can be jarring.

We’re working from a dog-eared script. We know it by heart. We even find ourselves trapped inside the dramatic action, and feel helpless about how to break out of this tiring, predictable, racist, sexist, violence-addicted tragedy that keeps replaying itself as if it has a life of its own. Who wrote this, anyway?

We need a new script.

Turns out we have one, in today’s Gospel lection, from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Luke 10.25-37

25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ²⁶He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ ²⁷He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ ²⁸And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ³⁰Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³²So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” ³⁶Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ ³⁷He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

This passage was already also making the rounds on social media yesterday, when the news of the verdict broke. In the ensuing conversations, I wrote, “Incidentally, for many Christians, tomorrow morning’s Gospel reading will be the story of the Good Samaritan, who did reach across racial and religious boundaries to help someone in need. A good contrasting image for us right now.” A friend re-posted it, and a friend of hers commented that reaching across racial boundaries shouldn’t be “good,” it should be “normal.” “No extra cookies,” she said. I loved that comment. In fact, it seems to be precisely what Jesus is saying in this story.

Jesus never called the hero of his story the “Good” Samaritan; that’s a title he was given later. (Anyone know the history of that? Leave a comment below!) In fact, by calling this Samaritan “good,” we’ve really done a disservice — perhaps even (unintentionally, surely) reinscribing the racial and religious stigma borne by Samaritans in Jesus’ day, since the implication is that Samaritans generally aren’t “good.”

But the story is part of a larger dialogue. Jesus is asked, by a lawyer, what must be done “to inherit eternal life.” The question is intended to “test” Jesus; whether that means the lawyer was trying to trip him up or was genuinely trying to get a sense for this rabbi’s sensibilities we really don’t know. But we find ourselves, interestingly enough, in a metaphorical courtroom. Jesus is, in a sense, on trial.

Also on trial is the lawyer, in a manner of speaking: he’s looking to gain eternal life, a sort of cosmic “not guilty” verdict.

What must he do? Jesus turns the question back on the lawyer, who, it turns out, knows the answer: Love God, love neighbor. Love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself. This summation of the Torah was commonplace by Jesus’ day. But, being a lawyer, Jesus’ interlocutor wants to get at precise definitions. He knows that words can obscure or reveal matters of life and death, and wants to make certain that everything is clear. So he asks, “Who is my neighbor?”

The answer Jesus gives him is anything but clear. We’ve all heard sermons and read expositions and commentaries on this and parallel passages; like any good story, this one has more than one meaning. That’s the power of stories, and that seems to be among the reasons Jesus was so fond of telling them.

Place yourself in the story. Are you the priest? the Levite? the man who was robbed? the robbers? the Samaritan? the inkeeper? Depending on where you find yourself in the story, the meaning will shift. For example, I’ve heard the following reading: The lawyer, after the story, identifies the Samaritan as neighbor to the injured man, and Jesus replies, “Go and do likewise.” Perhaps Jesus is challenging us to let ourselves be ministered to by those we have been socialized to despise. This can be a very important lesson sometimes. For many, it can be all but impossible to ask for help — especially if there are people one would rather die than accept help from. What if accepting help from [insert pariah here] would force an admission that they, too, are bearers of God’s grace?

I’ve seen the alleys where they hide the truth of cities,
The man whose blessing you must accept without pity.
—Bruce Cockburn, “Strange Waters”

The more common reading, of course, is to be the Samaritan, offering help to others regardless of race, class, religion, or whatever socioeconomic boundaries we might be encouraged by our cultures not to transgress. This is a tempting reading, too, because in this reading, we get to cast ourselves as both hero and victim —victim, as the maligned and perhaps persecuted Samaritan, but hero, as the one who saves the day and earns the approval of Jesus Christ himself! It’s a dangerous reading for those of us who enjoy some form of privilege, because we sometimes forget that we aren’t always the experts about what other people actually need. But it’s still a valuable reading, one that must be much harder to live if you really are a member of a persecuted minority and you find yourself in a position to offer help to someone who might not want help from you.

I want to suggest that this story offers us a new script to work with. It’s not a perfect script; it still has villains — though, in a surprising turn, the real villains aren’t so much the bandits but the priest and the Levite. But this script shows us ways to transgress expected norms.

If this were just a story about being good to people, why would Jesus have identified the hero as a Samaritan? We can be pretty sure the priestand Levite were Jews; but both Jesus and his conversation partner seem to assume that “a man” would be a member of their own in-group. We do the same thing, don’t we? — identifying the ethnicity (or other significant identity) of only the persons in our story who stand out from whatever is considered “normal”?

I wonder if Jesus’ listeners would have imagined the robbers to be Jews, Samaritans, or Gentiles. When you hear of a robbery in your area, does your mind supply a racial or ethnic identity to the robbers? To the victims? To any heroes responding to the scene? In the US, it seems that, just as the word “doctor” is still assumed to describe a man and “nurse” a woman, “immigrant” conjures up the image of poor Mexicans, and AIDS the image of a sickly, probably white, gay man. Like ours, Jesus’ culture had its own gendered, racial, and religious stereotypes, and Jesus exploits that in this story. Chances are good that the only non-Jew in the story is the only character whose ethnic identity is named. The injured man is “a man” — Everyman, “man” defined in a culturally normative way. He’s probably the character in the story Jesus’ original audience were most likely to identify with. The priest and Levite, whose religious and ethnic identities are implied in their titles, are actually identified by their status. These are more than Everyman. Culturally normative is their starting point; but they exceed it. The Samaritan is precisely the person in the story who is less than Everyman. He’s an other, an outsider, one to be eyed with suspicion. He’s probably wearing a hoodie.

Ultimately, though, Jesus seems to be saying that when God commands that we love our neighbor as ourselves, that means we are to be merciful toward precisely that human being within our reach who is in need of mercy — to help, heal, and provide for precisely thathuman being within our reach who needs resources we have. To love such a person as ourselves means to ignore the fact that the resources they need are (by our limited economy’s reckoning) “ours” and not “theirs.” The Samaritan didn’t place a limit on the sharing of his own resources. He told the innkeeper, “Take care of him… I will repay whatever more you spend.” Unless he was a gazillionaire, that was a pretty big risk.

The man who was robbed and beaten didn’t merit this help (we assume) by being a fellow Samaritan. Even if he had been, the hero of our story would have been already stretching the concept of neighbor, since he doesn’t appear to have recognized the man as a literal neighbor of his. When we expand our own notion of neighbor until it’s coterminous with our own ethnic, religious, or national identity, we haven’t gone far enough. It is reasonable to assume from the context of this story that the injured man was a Jew. But we don’t know whether or not the Samaritan actually knew that. Clearly, he didn’t care. The Samaritan may not have intended to make some kind of gesture to reach across religious and racial barriers. He did, however, recognize the man as his neighbor simply because he needed help.

One of the down-sides of social media is that quotes start going around, quickly misattributed or attributed to many different people. Here is one you have no doubt seen in some form or another:

How cool would it be to live in a world where George Zimmerman offered Trayvon Martin a ride home to get him out of the rain that night?

Clearly, Jesus thinks so, too.

The Geresene Demoniac

Posted on 26 June 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

(This passage is the Gospel assigned by the Revised Common Lectionary for Year C Proper 7: Luke 8.26-39. In other words, this past Sunday. My point isn’t to stay ahead of the lectionary, obviously. This is too good a story with too many insights to let go without blogging on it, though.)

If you’re not familiar with the story, please read it at the above link.

[Reading this story as a] factually literal account of what happened…is not only boring, it impoverishes the text.

In this Gospel story, Jesus steps off a boat only to see a crazy man, “demon-possessed” in first-century language, naked and thrashing about in a tomb, cutting and bruising himself. He had shackles on his hands and feet, but had broken the chains. Still, he remained where he had been shackled. “What do you have to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High?” the man screams as he sees Jesus approaching. Yikes! The demons inside him knew who Jesus was!

Jesus, being Jesus, engages him in dialogue.

“What is your name?” The crazy, not the man, replies: “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Jesus commands the demons to leave the man alone, to never bother him again. Now, demons, just like the rest of us, apparently are not interested in being sent to hell. They beg Jesus to let them enter a herd of swine—which tells you how many of them there were!—instead, which Jesus does. Then they drown the pigs. Oops. Off to hell with them, now, we assume. The story doesn’t find that detail important, though, so doesn’t really say.

Sadly, to some, this story is nothing more than a newspaper account—a factually literal account of what happened. In my opinion, that sort of reading is not only boring, it impoverishes the text. To be clear—there’s nothing wrong with believing this all literally happened, or not believing it all literally happened, either. The point is that biblical texts have so much more to offer than a surface reading. This story isn’t just there to wow us with some cool miracle Jesus did, even if by being wowed by it we come to believe Jesus is the Son of God as he claimed—not that such an insight isn’t already quite valuable!

People who are oppressed or in captivity often internalize their oppression or captivity and become complicit in it. A literal, bodily freeing is a great first step, but healing is also necessary.

On a recent thread (NB: the link may break if the thread disappears) over at Ship of Fools, we were discussing this text, and I think the original question posed is a great entry into the text: Why did Jesus destroy the livelihood of the pigs’ owner(s) and/or tender(s)? In a story about healing and liberation, in which Jesus clearly values the demon-possessed man more than a herd of swine, doesn’t Jesus care about the person(s) who will suffer as a result of losing their swine? Pointing out that pigs are unclean under Jewish dietary laws doesn’t help much; this is the same Jesus we believe eventually gave Peter that vision of the sheet full of unclean animals and said, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” (Meaning primarily, of course, the Gentiles who eat that stuff, but also the stuff they eat.)

It may be that we can accept that Jesus was, sometimes, and toward some people (and animals), a bit heartless. But this troublesome question might also suggest that we not take the pigs bit so literally. One common reading of this story actually has the pigs symbolizing the occupying Romans—after all, the demon(s) self-identified as “Legion.” I do find this reading helpful. In fact, it provides a further insight (as I realized while posting on Ship of Fools): that people who are oppressed or in captivity often internalize their oppression or captivity and become complicit in it. A literal, bodily freeing is a great first step, but healing is also necessary.

Note that the man possessed by demons actually broke his own chains. Yet he continued living in the tombs, cutting and bruising himself. Most of us read this story as the healing of a mental illness rather than the casting out of literal evil spirits, but the demonic is still a powerful symbol. Luke, in good poetic fashion, seems to take the opportunity to let the demonic oppression of this one man symbolize not only his own mental and physical suffering and captivity, but that of the people living in occupied Israel. And while Jesus drives out the occupying forces, letting them drown themselves (as God did with Pharaoh’s army in the prototypical liberation story), the most important liberation is the healing of the formerly-possessed man. He is seen, at the end of the story, “clothed and in his right mind.” He wants to go with Jesus, but Jesus gives him something more important to do: stay home, and declare what God has done for him. He now occupies his home land. But his neighbors are terrified of Jesus precisely because Jesus has returned this man to his right mind. What will they think of the now-sane man? Will they receive him? The story doesn’t say.

Are we supposed to take all this
greed and fear and hatred seriously?
It’s like watching dust settle.
It never changes. It’s too consistent.
Mercy is not consistent.
It’s like the wind—it goes where it will.
Mercy is comic,
and it’s the only thing worth taking seriously.
—T Bone Burnett, “The Wild Truth“

One alternate way of reading a passage, at least on the occasions when the passage is read in church, is to listen to its juxtaposition with the other selections from the lectionary for that day. For the Sunday in Year C on which this Gospel is assigned, the Revised Common Lectionary allows a choice for the Hebrew Scripture reading. One of those choices—the one I heard in church this past Sunday—is Isaiah 65.1-9. In that passage, God declares judgment on those who “sit in tombs” and “eat swine’s flesh,” among other things. I doubt St. Luke intentionally alluded to that passage when composing this story, but when placed together, something interesting happens. Instead of judgment, Jesus brings the demoniac liberation and healing, restoration to his family and community. Yet no one had sent for Jesus. In Christ, God was, as Isaiah puts it,

“…ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,
to be found by those who did not seek me.
I said, ‘Here I am, here I am’,
to a nation that did not call on my name.”

Jesus overcomes the demonic oppressors just because he sees a suffering man and pities him. Mercy goes where it will.

When, and how often, do we really ask Jesus to leave, because what he might do, or lead us to do, is too scary?

This past Sunday evening, Jude Harmon, a minor canon at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, preached precisely on that compassion of Christ, pointing out two other instances that, unlike the first, are unexpected. First, Jesus has compassion on the demons, who ask to not just be sent back “into the abyss” (v. 31). Jesus honors their request. Of all the characters in the story to receive Jesus’ compassion! But at the end of the story, Jesus also has compassion on the townspeople, who are terrified by the whole event. They beg him to leave, and he honors their request too.

What were the townspeople so afraid of? It’s an interesting question. Liberation can be scary: it leads to the unknown. Clearly Jesus was a strong force who could effect that kind of miracle—what might he do next? Jude invited the congregation to see themselves—ourselves—at this point in the story. When, and how often, do we really ask Jesus to leave, because what he might do, or lead us to do, is too scary?

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

In our discussion over at Ship of Fools, a member who goes by the screen name “leo” had another interesting insight about the drowning of the pigs. In his reading, not only does their drowning recall the Exodus, but it also symbolizes the now-bearers of the evil spirits being plunged into the waters of chaos at creation (to be re-created)—perhaps even into the waters of baptism! Recall that for the early Church, and still in the Catholic, Orthodox, and (sometimes) Anglican traditions, baptism was and is an exorcism. In the Catholic Church, there are prayers over catechumens during Lent that refer to this ancient understanding. In the Episcopal Church, it mostly turns up in our baptismal liturgy:

“Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”
“Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”
“Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?”

Reading this story in light of baptism, then, actually makes sense—not that it’s the “correct” or only reading, but that the symbolism really is there. The man formerly possessed by demons is clothed as the newly-baptized are. Baptism, then, puts us in our “right mind”—what St. Paul calls “the mind of Christ.”

Personally, I want all these readings to be true. I want the story to tell of a literal physical and mental healing, of the liberation of a people, and of the spiritual liberation given in baptism (despite what political, mental, or physical captivities we might still suffer). While I still have questions about this passage—for example, why do the demons get a name, but ultimately the man doesn’t?—I find a lot of hope in the story. And why not? It’s the nature of a good story that it have many layers of meaning, many truths to keep telling. And this one is nothing if not a good story.

Especially if we re-write the pig bit.
(Image swiped from this blog post.)

Crumbs of Christ

Posted on 11 June 2013 by eebelz Standard Reply

As I partook in that great banquet—a tiny bite and sip of Infinity—I reflected on the hardened crumb in my left hand. It became for me an icon of our Lord’s chosen vulnerability.

On Saturday, we ordained a new deacon and a new priest at the cathedral where I work. The diocese‘s new Canon to the Ordinary, Stefani Schatz, delivered the homily. She urged not only the newly ordained but all baptized Christians to pattern their lives after Christ. Among the features of that pattern, she named love, and described it as a vulnerability.

Love does make you vulnerable, and we see that nowhere so clearly as in the Incarnation. In joining the human nature to the divine, God the Word became that most vulnerable of all God’s creatures: the human baby. Unlike other species, we humans remain helpless and fragile for years, doing the energy-intensive work of wiring up our brains while our animal cousins are mastering the hunt or achieving sexual maturity. We, instead, still live with our parents who dress us, feed us, and protect us, because we can’t defend ourselves. Willing in love to unite God’s creation with God in eternal wedded bliss, the Logos—the very Wisdom of God that sparked the Big Bang—entered the creation in need of human parents to change his diapers and burp him after feeding.

He grew, but not into the kind of man our own culture would encourage or admire. He pushed back at all temptations to worldly success, opting instead for the true power of vulnerable love.

That choice got Jesus killed, as we all know. The Roman world saw this as a clear mark of failure. But as early as St. Paul, Christians were foolishly claiming and proclaiming that shameful death as the way of salvation. The vulnerability and self-giving that had characterized Jesus’ life and led him to his death is the same pattern through which the Triune God loved creation out into being and is now, in Christ loving it back into union—unity-in-diversity, not dissolution of difference—with God.

Jesus’ death wasn’t merely reversed in his Resurrection. Rather, his Resurrection reveals the power of that love which has scandalously joined, for all eternity, the human and divine natures. The risen Christ reveals to us what our death, that ultimate ecstasis, now leads no longer to the extinguishing of the self into nothing but to a rebirth into a new kind of being.

Anticipating that new kind of being, Jesus, “on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.” Somehow, in a mysterious way we can’t fully understand because we have nothing else to compare it to (it being only possible for the One who alone is fully God and fully human)—somehow, in the Eucharist, Christ comes to us in another most vulnerable form: under the species of bread and wine.

On Saturday, as I knelt at the altar rail to receive Communion, I noticed a sizable crumb—well, morsel, really—of the home-baked bread we use for the Eucharist every Sunday. It was nearly wedged behind the kneeler cushion. Had it been there since the most recent Sunday, or longer? Being a sacristan through and through, I picked it up for proper disposal. It was crisp as a crouton. I held it in the palm of my left hand, my right hand placed over it to receive a fresh morsel. As I partook in that great banquet—a tiny bite and sip of Infinity—I reflected on the hardened crumb in my left hand. It became for me an icon of our Lord’s chosen vulnerability.

Bread that is broken and shared is also easily wasted, spilled, stepped on, or left to harden behind a kneeler cushion, despite our best intentions. That little bit of consecrated Bread was no less potent, no less “the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” than all the other bits that did make it onto communicants’ tongues, to be mashed between and into their teeth, and swallowed like ordinary food. But there it was, unused, lost, forgotten, stale. A symbol of the prodigally vulnerable and abundant love of God, willing to risk, to accept such waste in the course of distributing spiritual food to us needy people.

Many paintings of the Crucifixion didactically depict angels collecting Jesus’ blood in little chalices. Yet no one would deny that Jesus’ blood actually soaked into his Cross and spilled into the dirt. Ancient peoples, including the ancient Hebrews from whom Christ and his disciples descended, believed that blood was the seat of life. As such, it possessed great power. In sacrifice, that blood was released, and could be manipulated to ritually cleanse, consecrate, and give life to others. That metaphor was applied early on to Jesus’ death: the shedding of his blood released the power of his life to be applied to us, in much the same way ancient priests had sprinkled blood on the people in various liturgies. What, then, does it mean that such power should fall into the dirt? As Jesus continuously demonstrated during his ministry, when the holy or pure comes into contact with the unholy or impure, it isn’t tainted. It consecrates. It makes the impure pure. It transforms death into life, sickness into health, hatred into love, fear into peace. Light shines in darkness and it is not overcome. It’s completely backwards to our human way of thinking, but it isn’t magic. It’s the actually real, normal course of things: it’s God loving creation back to Godself.

We handle the elements of the Eucharist with respect not because they’re magical and would bring harm to us otherwise. There’s no seven years’ bad luck for spilling Communion wine. Rather, we treat these elements with respect because God has honored our prayer to “sanctify them by [God’s] Holy Spirit to be for [God’s] people the Body and Blood” of Christ. That’s a pretty amazing gift, one that certainly shouldn’t be tossed into the trash or poured into the sewer system. But in choosing bread and wine for the Sacrament, and telling us to share it, surely our Lord foresaw the inevitable and eventual crumb in the kneeler cushion or wine stain in the limestone floor. (Well, maybe he didn’t foresee such things as kneeler cushions, but the point stands.) Like the sower in the parable who scatters seed on the rocky, hard, and thorny ground as well as on the good soil, God is not ashamed or afraid to be profligate when dispensing grace. Rather, God places Godself into fumbling human hands. The potential for spillage is tremendous—but it also means you never know where you might find Jesus.

A story of Detroit as told by its street maps.

Posted on 26 April 2013 by eebelz Standard 1

Satellite view of Detroit and Windsor, showing Lake Erie (bottom) and Lake St. Clair

Detroit’s street map has often been described as a palimpsest. I’ve called it the broken hub of a wheel dumped beside the river (which isn’t really a river; it’s a strait), but my metaphor actually leaves out most of the streets. How the map came to look as it does today is a story of…well, palimpsest, really: the occasional plan, destruction, expediency, and economic interests. (Neglect and decay affect the look of the map on Google Street View, but so far don’t seem to play a huge role in altering the map itself.)

Detroit lies on the northern side of the Detroit River, a strait (in French, un détroit) running between Lake Erie (a Great Lake) and Lake St. Clair (a Still-Decent Lake). It’s the only city in the US where you head south to get to Canada. That means that Canada is beneath us. On a map, anyway.

Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was founded in 1701 by a rather colorful character, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, whose achievements also include (in no particular order) inventing a fake noble lineage (the “de la Mothe Cadillac part)—complete with a fake family crest, a simplification of which you can see today on the Cadillac next to you in the parking lot; losing his entire fortune (reputedly by ignoring a fortune teller’s admonition to not do anything foolish like poke the Nain Rouge with a stick); and moving to Detroit’s younger, more popular sister, New Orleans. Couldn’t stay put, that Antoine. Physical and social mobility, and reinventing yourself were things you could do quite easily in the “New World” where no one knew you. They became popular hobbies in Detroit, where people came for opportunity and left when it dried up, often reinventing themselves in the process.

A statue of Cadillac in Hart Plaza. On the right, he stakes his claim on a Lexus.
I took these photos in 2008, I’m not too proud to admit..

The city’s original white settlers brought with them from their native Normandy a method of divvying up land. That method was to lay out “ribbon farms”: very thin, long strips of land that gave each farmer his own access to the river. The oldest roads in Detroit mostly reflect the locations of the ribbon farms and/or are named for their owners. That’s why so many of Detroit’s streets have funny French spellings, despite no one pronouncing them in French anymore.

Ribbon farms: Notice they did the same thing on the other side of the river, too.

Fast forward about a century, and in 1805, Detroit stakes its claim as a city by doing what all cities do at some point in their history: burning to the ground. (Just ask Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or London. It’s a cliché, really.) Two major Detroit tropes occur with that fire: (1) the Nain Rouge is seen dancing in the flames, the bastard; and (2) Father Gabriel Richard, co-founder of the Catholepistemiad (later sensibly re-named the University of Michigan) and priest at Ste. Anne de Détroit Church, said something along the lines of “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus,” which, being translated, means, “We hope for better; it will rise from the ashes.” Whatever language he actually said or wrote it in, it was such a great line it was eventually made into the city’s motto, and has been kept ever-relevant by generation after generation of Detroit pyromaniacs (the bastards).

Detroit city flag, incorporating the motto and the 1805 fire, as well as the three national flags that have flown over the city.

In 1806, Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory Augustus Woodward produced a plan for rebuilding the city. He laid out broad avenues in interlocking hexagonal patterns with parks or plazas at the intersection points. The plan was supposed to have been expandable with the city’s future growth: just add more hexagons! (W. Hawkins Ferry calls the plan “so French in its geometric precision.”) Woodward’s plan inscribed a new pattern over the surviving traces of the old ribbon farms. Residents hated it at the time, because they no longer recognized their hometown.

The Woodward Plan. Grand Circus Park makes more sense now, doesn’t it?

Someone drew up this image of what the interlocking hexagons would have looked like,
had Woodward’s plan been expanded.

Woodward’s plan was never expanded, though, despite the city’s growth. Through the 19^th century, the Industrial Revolution was taking place throughout the U.S., and Detroit was no exception. Thanks to its location in the Great Lakes system, Detroit became known for ship building, making stoves, and doing all manner of things that involved bending or shaping metal. (That eventually proved useful when the automobile came along.) As the city expanded, thanks to industry, it did so according to the demands of economic interests. Detroit was not alone in this. There was a growing sense throughout the U.S. that its booming industrial cities were dirty and unpleasant, organized as they were around industry rather than civic life. In Detroit, for example, the river front was crowded with shipping yards, with no public recreational access to the river.

In the 19^th century, most U.S. architects trained only by apprenticeship. The few that did pursue academic study had to go to Europe to do so. Even then, most of them didn’t bother to finish their programs; a diploma was simply not necessary to their practice back home. The fashionable place to study was the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which urged a return to classical architecture, and other things you can read about on Wikipedia.

But something happened at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The fair’s Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham saw an opportunity to showcase his ideas about making Chicago the sort of place people might want to live in, so that the Midwest’s nouveau-riche might settle there (i.e., spend their money there) rather than just pass through on business trips. So he assembled a team of artists, architects, and landscape artists and had them apply the Beaux-Arts aesthetic and ideals to the fair’s site on Chicago’s lakefront. With this project, Chicago’s lakefront was beautified and reclaimed, Chicago’s reputation for its architecture began, and the City Beautiful movement spread like a cliché through the nation (but one that renewed rather than destroying cities).

The Beaux-Arts style prefers to give its buildings and statues a great deal of “look space.”

Today you can drive (or ride a train) from Chicago to Detroit in about 5 hours. Apparently it took the City Beautiful movement nearly two decades to make the trip around the turn of the 20^th century. In 1910, Detroit’s mayor, Philip Breitmeyer, founded a City Plan Commission, which immediately set about bringing Daniel H. Burnham and his similarly-middle-initialed associate, Edward H. Bennett, to Detroit to do some much-neglected city planning. Nothing much had been done since the Woodward plan (which was designed for a population of 50,000; Detroit had reached 700,000 by the time of the Burnham and Bennett plan) other than Michigan Governor Lewis Cass’ 1830 development of old “Indian trails” into military roads radiating out, outstate even, from the city’s center: Fort Street, Michigan Avenue, Grand River Avenue, Woodward Avenue, and Gratiot Avenue. (Poor Fort Street, only a street…)

I can’t find any images of the Burnham street plan, so instead, enjoy this photo of Daniel Burnham, left, and Lewis Cass, right. Burnham’s eyes look so sincere, but surely he’s hiding something under that moustache. Cass is either reaching for his wallet or having chest pains.

The Burnham plan, completed in 1915, emphasized parks and public spaces, much as Woodward’s had done. Detroit’s Cultural Center, which boasts the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University, the Detroit Historical Museum, the Charles H. Wright African American Museum, the main branch of the Public Library, and the Detroit Science Center (and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul) is credited to the Burnham plan. Not much of his plan actually was implemented, though. For example, Burnham planned two major avenues radiating river-ward from the Cultural Center: one leading to Belle Isle, and the other to the then-new Michigan Central Station (completed in 1913, abandoned in 1988, and currently being stabilized, finally).

I took this photo in October, 2012.

By the early 20^th century, Detroit had an extensive and efficient streetcar (trolley) system—at its peak, in some locations, streetcars arrived every sixty seconds! But with the popularity of the automobile and the even greater popularity of moving to the suburbs, the streetcar system fell into disuse and was closed in 1956. It is rumored the streetcars still operate in Mexico City, which purchased them from Detroit. (No, San Francisco, which has the hobby of collecting other cities’ steetcars, doesn’t have them.)

>sigh<

Also with the rise of the auto industry, the need for efficient freight transit into, out of, and across the city led to freeway building. As with many other projects, from the Michigan Central Station to general “slum-clearing” (read: corralling non-white people and poor white people to less desirable locations), the freeways saw the city exercise “eminent domain,” condemning buildings and displacing many people from their homes, and disrupting or effacing historic neighborhoods. I-75 famously had to go right where Paradise Valley, the Black cultural center of the city, was, destroying world-famous jazz and blues clubs among other important sites. Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, was widely razed for the Michigan Central Station and its Beaux-Arts requisite of a really big park in front of it to set it off. Freeways also disrupted Corktown and neighboring Mexicantown, the latter of which has also had to put up with the Ambassador Bridge dumping ¼ of the commercial traffic between the U.S. and Canada right into its residential areas. But thankfully, both neighborhoods are seeing renewal in recent years.

Children enjoying the fountain by the Ren Cen on the Riverfront on a hot and muggy summer day, 2008.

So, as with any city, the street map will continue to change, as will the landmarks and features on that map. Happily, in recent years, the riverfront has been transformed into delightful public space, where children play in fountains or ride the carousel, and people of all ages bike, walk, take lunch breaks, just hang out, or even fish in the Detroit River. All while looking down on Canada.

We’re watching you, Windsor.

(Actually, I have nothing at all against Canada. Vive la Windsor!)

Sources for this post include:

Having lived in Detroit
Ferry, W. Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History.Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980.
Historic Detroit
Herron, Jerry. AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
and various websites, newspaper articles, and other sources absorbed over the years – especially regarding the city’s early history.
Ferry, Hawkins. The Buildings of Detroit: A History. Revised ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968; 1980.

I’ve linked to wikipedia often here for convenience. The interested reader is welcome to google other sources.

The Sound

A blog about Poetry, God, and Detroit (in no particular order)