“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children” — Ephesians 5:1

Brethren, I’m writing today about a couple that was for a short time living in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. 

Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg were Lubavitchers.  For those of you who don’t know about this, they were super-faithful, quasi-evangelizing (to Jews who have fallen into secularism), quasi-messianic (The Lubavitchers had a rabbi who died a few years ago, and some few of them believe he was Moshiach, not Yeshuah, our real Moshiach) Jews who hungrily attempt to follow the teachings of the Old Testament in the Law.  These are not people who were on the fence about God.  They had no born-again moment, but clearly they loved YHWH, Ha Shem, the name, and they were desperate to be obedient to Him as they understood Him.

If that isn’t enough to make you respect them by itself, brethren, then try this on for size:  This couple, in their twenties, had an audacious plan — to build a Chabad center in Southern India.

Okay, here it is — you’re sitting in Brooklyn, maybe you’re visiting your aunt in Israel.  What makes you think to yourself, “What we REALLY need is a Jewish community center in Mumbai, India!”

What makes a person think that?  What kind of a person would you have to be to do that?

To be clear, there are a few ethnically Jewish people in India.  Remember that for centuries, the Jews were the traveling merchants of half the world, and as a result, a few settled in what is now Mumbai and live and worship there.  But it’s not Brooklyn.  It’s not Israel.  Even the Lubavitcher headquarters in Israel were designed to be exactly like the brick building in Crown Heights.  The Chabad Lubavitch movement seems to engender a great deal of conformity.

However, Gavriel and Rivkah had some kind of vision for this center.  Here’s a picture of Rivkah opening the mikvah at their modestly-sized center.  Look at her and look at the Indian women around her.  They look respectful, but they also seem like they are wondering what on Earth she is thinking, but Rivkah knows.  She has a distinct purposefulness to her in the photo.  This is the way someone looks when they have heard from God.

Look at the serenity of her face.  Look at her confident, steady gesture.   Her footsteps to this place are ordered.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” — Isaiah 55:8

I have one more photo to show you of this brave, odd couple, courtesy of The New York Times.  The husband Gavriel is the one with the book in his hand, and the wife Rivkah, is obviously pregnant to the far left of the photo:

Look at them!  They are performing a wedding ceremony under a huppah in the sweltering heat of Southern India, in the polluted air of Mumbai, and these people are fully committed to the life they are leading here, a life that even in Brooklyn seems like it came from another time, and they transport this life, this Godly life to a far-away place where they are surely, surely misunderstood by almost everyone.

Rivkah and Gavi were killed yesterday by Muslim terrorist gunmen.  The baby in the belly of Rivkah in the photo above, Moshe, ran out and was rescued — I say miraculously — by the Chabad  center of Mumbai’s cook.  The little boy’s pants, he is turning two today as i write this blog entry, were stained in the blood of his parents.  It breaks my heart to think of what they will miss in his life, his graduation from school, his wedding, the birth of their grandchildren through him.  It breaks my heart to think that if these brave, interesting Brooklynites had stayed closer to the group-think of their subculture, they would be alive today.

So here’s my question to all who would listen:  Did Gavi and Rivkah miss God when they thought for certain that they were led to open a Jewish center in Mumbai?  After all, why would God send them there and let them be killed?

If being killed for belief, for surely this is the only reason why Gavi and Rivkah were targeted, were a sign of being out of God’s favor, then Paul was a failure, Jesus’ cross was a symbol of absolute failure.

I say they did not miss their calling.  I say they were sent.  Why?  Why did God need a center for an unusual group of Jews in Mumbai?  God knows.  Perhaps He finds, as I suspect He does, the diverse juxtaposition of unusual things one to another, absolutely glorious.  After all, who knew there were Lubavitchers who were so experimental? Who knew in Brooklyn about the Jewish community in Mumbai?  Who knew among the Hindus about the mikvah?  God wants to wake us up.  God loves, I say, original thinkers.

But make no mistake — original thought is dangerous.  It may lead to death.  Jesus even promises people who act like Him that they will be persecuted.  Honoring God in unusual ways that actually wake up people to God’s presence in their everyday lives will lead to persecution.

The Jews are chosen and set apart by their bloodlines, their attempts to conform to the Law of YHWH from the nations.  The church is set apart by the circumcision of the heart that Paul talks about and the New Birth Redemption, grafted into the vine by the Blood of Yeshuah that Gavi and RIvkah claimed by natural bloodlines.  If we really are interested in pleasing God, we will attract animosity from the world.

There is an old saying in the African-American community — If they are shooting at you, you must be doing something right.  That was true for the movement of liberation politically of African-Americans, and it is true, as Martin Luther King said, that acts of civil disobedience have the primary purpose of making people call into question the way things are usually, and some people get angry enough to shoot.  I say Gavi and Rivkah were doing something right.  What are Jews doing in Mumbai?  Serving the Most High as best they know how.  That someone got angry enough to shoot proves that they were effectual challenges to the merciless systems of the world.  God bless them.  In His thoughts, I believe He sees victory, even where there is mourning today.

Brethren, rather than hang this on a text from scripture, I choose to hang this on the words to an old song, not as gospel, more as ambience –

“…And love, love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off and he stated firm
Oh, oh, oh
You’re a native New Yorker
You should know the score by now You’re a native New Yorker…” — Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell

This song was the tune du jour when Studio 54 was the club du jour. There are surely hipster clubs. There are plenty of velvet ropes left in the city, plenty of back rooms filled with ottomans lined up against banquettes in zebra print, with track lighting and artistically cut mirrors. However, before the clubbing hour – never a minute before 11 pm ever, if you’re really hip, and honestly, it would be much hipper to cruise by about 1 am – where are the hipsters hopping?

I found them at #1 Beard Street, in Brooklyn, all of them, around 4 pm. I passed leather-clad Japanese couples arm in arm, a girl with a saffron Obama T-shirt on with Sarah Palin glasses, a pony tail tortoise-shell-clipped to one side of her head, true religion jeans, and a macramé hip-hugging belt. I locked shopping cart wheels with a German runway model with waist-length red hair with her Catherine-Deneuve look-alike mother. I breezed past young men, with that over-gelled hair spiked up, that crazed look in their eyes from too much World of War Craft suddenly unplugged, eating cinnamon buns, making the Jonas Brothers look old and jaded. I brushed against a Rastafarian man with dreds bound up in hemp, I think, wearing a Movado watch, carrying a futon.

True, there was no velvet rope, no sushi bar with aquarium walls, no giant moon with a cocaine spoon hanging from the ceiling – yes, I DID see the original 54 when it was open and I was too young to have legally entered – but there were ottomans in neon colors, track lights galore, artistically cut mirrors enough to quench the thirst of the vainest among us, and one could buy hanging moon mobiles, spoons, but not the two combined. Besides, exclusivity is no longer hip – it’s obscurity, like a Red Hook warehouse is remotely located, that is the bar to the uninitiated.

I was in Ikea, and not the suburban one. Everything is pretty much the same as the Ikea in New Jersey or Long Island, only people wore more black, more Ugg, people were greener, were more blasé. It was the bootylicious Ikea, the street Ikea, the I-just-bought-a-loft-in-Bed-Stuy-and-am-painting-it-chartreuse Ikea. Even in Europe, Ikea is generally planted in the suburbs, but this one was planted in the just-out-of-reach-of-the-uninitiated gentrifying Red Hook, and everyone knows that the new Soho is now in Brooklyn – the debate is only about exactly where.

I bought some lamps for my desk and my bedroom, a set of casters to attach to the bottom of a cabinet, a curtain rod, and a few other accessories from renewable resources. Green, after all, is the new black. Black is still the new black, of course, but green – green is the new black, and mocha is the new green. Clear – in case you haven’t heard – is the new mocha. What the new clear is, I don’t know.

While I was trolling around with my yellow bag between products with names like Glimma and Trikka, they were piping in a sound track that was cooler than most of the lounges I frequented in recent years, much of it from my misspent youth, others of it sounding like the goth side of the Fuse network or MTV2. I paused to pick up a pink table lamp using low-wattage, energy-efficient bulbs only, and I heard a song that used to close out my nights at Le Privilege, the VIP lounge of the Palace night club where I used to dance mid-eighties, drinking flaming drinks from cups that looked, well, a lot like this lamp in my hand, I thought, and air kissing all kinds of girl models (French kissing a boy model or two). Now my club days have been turned into a retail experience – I am apparently one of the targets of this market, as I did buy some knick-knacks that I might have avoided at Costco with no sound track at all and no hip clientele of which to speak. They are doing pretty well, even as the stock market yo-yos.

Seeking more aficionados of this new hipster, urban American Ikea market, I have some suggested product names and designs for the folks at Ikea –

• Bufda – a home gym that folds into the wall, making an inclining bookshelf unit.
• Mutha – a vibrating baby chair with black and red skull-and-crossbones in a mobile above it.
• Stuppa – An ice pack with a straw – fill it with the hair of the dog for the morning after.
• Sherpa – an environmentally sound, ergonomically designed GPS for pedestrians.
• Friki – a black twin Murphy bed with hand-cuff-suitable hooks.
• Prozaka – black-on-black double Venetian blinds.
• Ganja – a highly flammable organic furniture set, woven from fair trade grasses that are more than just decorative at a party.
• Chikka – a hot pink bed on a large lazy Susan in the shape of a pair of lips.
• Sukka-fri – a narrow quadraphonic speaker system with extra base and with spinning rims on the woofers.
• Hipsta – a combination lava lamp/blackberry/loofah sponge/chaise lounge made out of recycled tires and mulch.

In any case, it was nice to see my co-Brooklynites out en masse with Manhattanites willing to go through the Battery Tunnel to buy that which must be had this season among us. It is nice that exclusivity is out, democracy is in, and the New New York is the Old New York over the East River. Red Hook, in case you haven’t heard, is the new little black dress.

Brethren, I’m back on this blog, after a pause in August.  I take my anger from observable hypocrisy and my scripture from Paul:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28

Here is what I have recently observed.  As I have said here before, I am recently divorced, and I have been looking for a righteous, Christian man whom I might eventually date.  I have not accepted dates or even had conversations wth non-believers.

Twice, it has happened that a caucasian Christian man has engaged me in conversation. Over the coure of time, while he is doing that peacock dance that seems to be the better part of most men’s courtship ritual, puffing himself up to prove to me he is better than other men, he mentions people of color.  He uses — horror of horror — the “N” word, not in a hip-hop twenty-first century way (which would be bad enough, coming from a crunchy white man), but in a nineteenth century Jim Crow way.

The two times that this has happened, I have gasped, called the man on his bad attitude, told him to lose my number if that is his attitude toward other people of any race, and then he denies he meant anything by it, and he tells me, “I have plenty of black friends.”

Hmmm…

Twice, too, these men have then told me utterly improbable stories about brave, young, wonderful, much-admired, bff-type best male friends who were black.  One told me he dated a woman of  color who was a wonderful woman whom he cared about — this I doubt even more.

No one white ever uses the N word and has “black friends.”  There may be people of color who have to tolerate these lying hypocrites, but there are surely no confidences, no shared important memories, no affection whatsoever.  I pity those who have encountered these people and received less than their fair share of compassion and respect.

I have attended mixed-race churches ever  since I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, more often than not where I was, as a white woman, in the minority.  I have volunteered for church projects, and I have borne my soul  to women and men of  color, and those brothers and sisters have enriched my life by allowing me to really get to know them.

Even with all that, I would say that I only have made a few lasting frienships with people of color, not for a lack of love and mutual respect, but because racism is alive and well in America today, and African-Americans are right to exhibit some level of distrust, even within the church, with white folks, who are apprently, even as we — in Jesus’ name, elect Barack Obama president — still not conquering their absurd and idiotic ideas about  people of other races.

The good news — We are quite probably electing a black president, so this view is by no means universal, and most of the people  who don’t want to vote for him have other objections to him than that of his race.

Also good news — the men who heard me gasp and spew invectives knew that their views were absurd and idiotic, and they were embarassed by them when they were called on what they had said, and so they lied to cover their racist tracks.  Even if their views did not change — I suspect in both cases, they just wanted to get into my white panties, not embrace the black population (and for the record, my panties remained unconquered)  — however, at some level, they understood that their views were entirely unjustifiable by any intelligent argument.

The bad news, very, very bad news — before those words slipped out of their mouths, they assumed, surely from recent experience, that they were generally acceptable to the majority of white, Christian women whom they might want to date. This shocks me more than I can say.  I am horrified that there is at the very least a complacency among any Christians about racism, who seem to think that it is nothing that needs to be overcome.

I especially don’t understand how any Christians are left without understanding that Jesus is coming soon for an unblemished church, that racism is one of America’s greater blemishes, that it was designed and perpetuated by a group of social darwinians who understood that if they could get immigrant workers to hate African-American workers and vice-versa, they could dominate both groups because they were divided.  An unracist America would conquer poverty and crime, would ensure the welfare of every single child born in the USA, would demand a living wage for all workers, would demand excellent education for all students, wherever they lived, and would, in short, conquer the elite’s stranglehold over the many.  If this sounds communist to any of you, I exhort you to read your New  Testament carefully — it is in fact the way God sees the role of the church.  We are to take care of, as Jesus told us in the  sheeps and goats parable, “the least of these,” in other words, the most vulnerable people in our society, hence the poor, hence the excluded, hence the illegal immigrant, hence the crack baby, hence whoever has been given the short end of the stick, and that often  includes people whose skin color is different than our  own.

We should all gasp when we hear the N word from white Christian friends, especially those whose friendship is not imaginary.  We should storm out.  What fear do we have of calling our bretheren on this?  It is as great a sin as any, and it speaks so very little of the intelligence of the conversation that would bear it.

Any man who thinks he recommends himself by announcing that he is better than another ethnic group ought to have his name written on the walls of the stalls of  ladies’ rooms in churches with this warning –
“Has imaginary friends.  Has imaginary appeal.  Is a great, white hope in his own mind.”

I pray, in the name of Jesus, a man with wooly hair and Middle-Eastern skin darker than my onw, who died on the cross and rose from the dead for me, that we will at long last conquer this horrible affliction within the church.  In His name, I bind the spirit of ignorance and pride from our body.  I loose  the spirit of unity and understanding.  Let the church say AMEN.

Brethren, sorry for the poor-quality cell phone photo of what was a kick-@## rock festival’s stage. I was there yesterday. I got sunburned, and my neck is a little sore from all the head-bopping I was doing.

Here’s the scripture upon which I am basing my homily this week — I consider it a promise to all believers who will pounce on it:

Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. — Psalm 103:1-4

Saturday this past weekend, Coney Island was host to a day-long indie rock festival, the Siren Festival, and everyone from other parts of town who considers himself or herself hip, the same ones who go to hear bands in basements on the Lower East Side, seemed to be there.

Most of them were in their twenties, and those who were “older” were in their thirties, and I’m, well — ahem — perpetually thirty-nine at this point, but I was there, too. Does that make me hip? Let’s check:

TOP TEN REASONS I MIGHT BE REALLY HIP

1. Last year, a (Holy) hip-hop CD was released, The Cornerstone, and I was the only white person whose voice was on it — www.newlewmusic.com (Everyone there was half my age, too, it seemed like).
2. I have occasionally been asked for my autograph after readings by hip-looking people in their twenties. I also have gotten a couple of fan letters for my poetry from people who are serious hipsters.
3. There’s a guy in Brooklyn named Jackie, who is an older man of color who volunteers to talk to young black men in “at risk” programs to give them reasons and ways to avoid the mean streets. When Jackie wants to reach these young men across generational lines, he reads them several of my poems that show empowering images of black men. A lit journal that writes about literature of interest to African-Americans gave a positive review of my work.
4. I have watched a cocophonous orchestra in Manhattan — experimental modern music — blare dissonant horns as a woman with a British accent shouted words I wrote about freedom — that happened at Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.
5. I taught a college semester last year where I told my students (truthfully) that I was about their parents’ age, and they said they couldn’t believe me. When I asked why, they told me things like, “My mom doesn’t text her friends like you do.” “You just don’t look that age.” “You dress way cooler than they do.” “You know words they don’t.”
6. I am part of the Colbert Nation — actually, that might make me a total geek in some people’s eyes.
7. I often give readings on stages where legends of the rock world have stood before me.
8. I am so riding the crest of the wave of the return of big earrings.
9. I own clothes by certain hip labels, such as Baby Phat — remember, the Bible tells us that the liberal soul shall be made phat! (Proverbs 11:25, King James Version, Anne Babson spelling)
10. I bought fair trade products long before everyone else consciously started to do so in order to be “hip.”

Understand that there are plenty of things that might disqualify me from hipsterdom — my faith, for one. I don’t have any nose piercings, no tattoos, nor will I get any, when I wear t-shirts, which I rarely do, they may have ironic slogans on them, but they are never cynical, I never do any drugs, designer or other, and while I am always looking for friends, none of those friendships will ever include benefits.

Understand also that when I say “hip,” I really don’t mean Sex in the City chic. Carrie Bradshaw might slum at the events where hipsters go from time to time, but unless Samantha is there professionally to promote them, she wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfits hipsters wear. She would be bored by their artistic and intellectual pretensions. She would not find their antiestablishmentarianism even slightly compelling.

You see, quintessential New York hipsters don’t wear designer labels. I have occasionally joked that I have the K-Mart Jacqueline Smith Collection version of Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe, but that’s not really true. Even if I had billions of dollars, I would never buy from the more fashionable couturiers because of their lack of fair trade practices (see my hipster top ten list). I am more chic than the twenty-something tribe that haunts the corner of Stanton and Rivington on the Lower East Side or any corner these days in Williamsburg, but I’m enough like them that I find myself bumping into them again and again.

Most people my age that I know don’t go to indie rock festivals any more — and I promise, I’ll talk about this one part of the scene, I swear — they go to the occasional movie, go to work, go home, feed kids, water plants, once in a while have brunch — their only potential crossing coordinates with hipsters — and attend establishment cultural events. I asked a few of them to go to the Siren festival with me, but they said no. Only my friend Doris, who is twenty-four, said yes, even though she has a kid she could go home and feed. She left the baby with relatives.

Now the festival itself was wonderful. I particularly LOVED this band I had never heard before, and so did Spin.com — they are called Ra Ra Riot, and they are a marriage between the sound of The Clash and The Kronos Quartet. They call their music “chamber pop.” They are a bunch of fresh-faced kids from Syracuse New York — okay, fresh-faced with really, really intense “I’m making awesome music” grimaces. It’s very original stuff.

Ra Ra Riot (totally go to www.rarariot.com because they rock) was on the main stage, set up by the historic roller coaster the Cyclone, so while they were riffing, the only screams were not from fans but from people sliding down wooden tracks very, very fast. The hipsters looked, well, bored.

At the top of the page is the one lame photo I was able to take. The hipsters are bored. So I borrowed another photo from Ra Ra Riot’s promotional material which is more fun to look at:

As a part-time, non-card-carrying hipster, I had forgotten, as my friend Andrea reminded me today, that one of the cardinal rules for being hip is that you’re not supposed to appear to interested in anything, even stuff you spent a lot of time and energy to go see.

Me, though, I was bopping my head and dancing around. If I like something, I just like it. I’m not going to pretend to be ironically detached from it. That’s just lame, that’s missing the point. Honestly, the young, bored people around me were wasting their time, in my opinion, if they weren’t going to even bother to enjoy what they took the F Train all the way to the end of the line to come see.

This brings me to the passage that I quoted — let me focus on that rather mysterious part about our youth being renewed “like the eagle’s.”

Cosmetics promise us this, but surely not in quite the way God meant it. I don’t think here that God is talking about literal age. I think he’s talking about an outlook that brings joy and a freshness of being, physically, perhaps, but because one’s mouth is involved, and good things in it, I have to assume he means something spiritual and intellectual.

One of the things that I find frustrating about talking to people my own age these days is that many of them have stopped entertaining new ideas. It seems with each passing year there is less and less originality among my chronological peers. I did not go to the siren Festival to be “hip,” in fact. I went because I wanted to see it for my own enjoyment. I do a lot of things — like when I learned about “bars” and “hooks” in rap, and the difference between gangsta rap and more mainstream rap from a hip-hop producer’s standpoint, that was just for my own edification and enjoyment.

My peers used to be curious about new things. What happened? I admit wholeheartedly that someone with a child has a lot less time to focus on cultural phenomena. I understand that. But still, wouldn’t being around that child engender greater curiosity by constant contact with someone who can’t seem to stop asking “why?”

And as for those youngster hipsters — isn’t youth supposed to include the ability to just let loose and enjoy without fetters? If being hip means being detached, I’d rather be a geek.

Perhaps being renewed in one’s youth like the eagle’s in Christ is like being held aloft in a state of perpetual vivacity, to be like the Nobel Prize winner whom I met who decided in his late nineties to learn the minutia of artificial intelligence design at the software engineer level, just because it’s cool, or to be like a woman I met years ago in a night club who was in her seventies and in the VIP lounge past the velvet rope, clubbing with her granddaughter because she wanted to see it all. I guess I’m on my way to being like that.

I exhort you, in the name of Jesus, bless the LORD, forget not all His benefits, and remember that if your mouth is filled with His good things, your youth can be renewed. Never stop asking impertinent questions. Never stop trying new things. His mercies are new every morning. Amen.

Brethren, those of you who have been following my blog must have discerned that I am going through a rough period of my life. I just got divorced after the man I loved literally went crazy — off his needed medication, and became menacing. I’m old enough that I thought by now I would have the white picket fence American dream — you know, the Norman Rockwell painting of Thanksgiving with patriarch at head of table, the children, the lovely home. When I was married, I lived in a suburban, lovely home. I now live on Coney Island, back in bohemia, writing my poetry in a (very nice part of the) ghetto. Have you seen the movie He Got Game? Spike Lee filmed that in my neighborhood. As a white woman, as a woman with a job that pays above poverty level, I’m in the minority here.

For those white (or otherwise Rockwell-cliched) people reading this entry, there is an expression that is used in the ghetto — one that I like but that I fear — “ghetto superstar.” The ghetto superstar is the person who plays ball better than half the people in the NBA but who never gets through enough school for the scouts to notice him, it is the singer at the local church who is better than Mary J. Blige but never gets the recording contract. Jefferson’s ideal of a meritocracy is belied by the very existence of ghettoes — don’t believe for a minute that the race is always to the swiftest in our society, not yet. There are people who are known locally in any ghetto for their talents, but the system, and sometimes their own personal weaknesses — drugs, general unreliability, shut them out from real success. I never want to be a ghetto superstar, not in poetry, not in any field.

So here is the scripture on which I am hanging this homily:

Hebrews 12:1 — “ Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us…”

This passage of Hebrews comes right after the “faith superstar” chapter — we get the list of people in the Old testament who hung on to faith despite adversity — then it says “wherefore.” Think “therefore,” “since they did all of this and are watching us.”

A few weeks ago, I gave a reading in Manhattan with a brilliant collection of women for WSQ, the premiere academic women’s studies journal. I was VERY honored to be included in their current issue. I was included with some other poets, among whom is a woman whose name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but when I saw her face, I knew exactly who she was.

Here is her beautiful face:

Nicole Cooley and I met in high school during a summer writing workshop at Bennington College in Vermont. She changed my life. I had never met anyone who was my age and took writing as seriously as she did. I was a little punk rocker at the time, at least the suburban version of one, and everything was ironic. I was not so much an artist as a misunderstood teenager with a variety of radical fashion statements and a real interest in poetry.

Nicole had already finished the manuscript of a novel. She was brilliant, intense, quiet, conservative. I was much the woman in the previous blog entry, dancing with bare-chested men painted green. Nicole’s choices were much more conservative than mine. My poetry was wild and loose. Hers was tight and clean. This is still true.

Today, Nicole has many things I wish I had, at least things that I wish I had my own version of — she is happily married to a like-minded man. She has kids. She is the new chair of a new writing program at a local college. She wholly deserves this distinction at her comparatively young age because she remains as she has always been — a phenomenal talent. She has published novels, poetry collections, and her latest book, soon to be published by Louisiana State University Press, entitled (I believe) Resurrection, is going to be the definitive book on the recovery of New Orleans (where Nicole is from originally) from Hurricane Katrina. I have heard one of the poems from this collection, and it is a brilliant work of art, one that borrows cues from Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda alike. In short, Nicole is amazing and deserves absolutely every wonderful thing she has.

Have you ever been to your high school reunion and met someone who you used to hang out with, and you find she is still as pretty as she was on graduation day, rich now, with kids on the honor roll? Have you ever then looked at your own double chin in the mirror, reflected on your own bank account, reflected on your own kids, in trouble with the vice principal’s office again?

Oddly, or so I thought it was, I met Nicole in such a way and yet felt not the slightest bit jealous. Really! I mean it! Stop looking at me that way! It’s true. I am genuinely happy for Nicole. Praise God for what He has done in her life. I could not have met her at a time of greater self-doubt than where I am now, and yet I looked at her with everything she’s got, despite all my sweat and travail that I don’t have, and yet I felt blessed, profoundly blessed, that Nicole is not a ghetto superstar — she’s in the NBA, she’s got the Motown contract — and I’m okay, glad, thrilled.

Because God never misses a moment to show me he likes irony as much as I did as a punk rock teenager, here is one of my poems I read that evening in Manhattan, which appeared originally (I am obliged to say legally, as they have first North American serial rights to it) in Red Rock Review:

SONG OF ENVY by Anne Babson

The God of the triple-process blonde is in a heaven where black is never worn, where cream cheese is eaten by triple-process blonde angels, just like in that commercial. The God of the triple-process blonde is in heaven, and there are songs of praise to be sung in a Texas two-step lilt, and there are blonde babies to be pig-tailed and pressed into new dresses. It is Sunday, and the God of the triple-process blonde hovers in a heaven filled with snowflakes over the church converted from the bowling alley, while the triple-process blonde sings songs.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish in an empty night club where crushed cigarette butts line the morning floor, the stench of beer wafting from the broken boards. This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in the bitterness of tea without sugar drunk hungover. This is a song of envy to the triple-process blonde who voted to close this place down last election.

This, Blondie, is my confession — think of it as a prayer before bedtime — even though it is Sunday seven a. m. my head has not touched pillow since high noon Saturday — well, his front seat headrest tilted down wasn’t a pillow, and we weren’t sleeping. This, Blondie, is my confession, my confession to you — your church doesn’t abide Latin or popery (unless you spell it pot pourri), but my confession is this — mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – I stink of sweaty cowboy, sweaty nightclub, and Sweaty longneck beer, of sweaty sin, of sweaty desperation. This is my battle hymn, a song of envy.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish chipping in my metal bathtub, in frothy water drawn to scrape the glitter off my tattooed back, the stink of cigarettes and “Yeah, baby!” From my single-process head of spiked-up devil-red hair. You — Triple-process: that’s bleach, bleach and Bleach again — you are the object. You are the object of this song of envy.

My God is a jealous God, Blondie. He is a loner. He sulks often. He is enigmatic. He’s like any one of my dates this year — promising to call, but never dialing my number again. Even the answers He provides are in the form of a question, just like on Jeopardy — “What is children going hungry?” “Who is an underachiever?” “What is surviving bitter pestilence?” “What is war, what is it good for?” The holy book I read is filled with more riddle than rhyme, Blondie, and I’ve dog-eared the pages looking For where I get your pristine life, where I stop flirting with losers, where the deus is ex machina, where.

This is a song of envy. This is an epistle from my church — a bathtub for baptism, a beat-up pick-up truck For the lectern, two pair of jeans stiff with paint and cow patties crossed to form crucifix — to your church — The one in the old bowling alley, still boxed-in coffin-like with faux wood paneling, the one where I see Only whitest whites, the one where everyone flosses daily, the one where your God answers everything Before it is asked and whose voice is as clear as the voice-over selling cream cheese, the God of my envy.

Don’t think, Blondie, that my skepticism is chosen. I know a world where you have never walked. I have seen the blisters on my mother’s hands. I have seen my father’s nakedness uncovered. I have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has trampled on the vineyards where the grapes of Wrath are stored — that would be in my uncle’s gun rack, where my cousin picked the lock and exploded his brains on the Naugahyde sofa set. Yes, Blondie, I have smelled burned brains and vinyl, so point me to your Jesus who heals this. I dare him to clean the ring from my bathtub, the scum from my veins.

This is a song of envy, a battle hymn to battle Him. I envy your shingled roof. I envy your fresh-baked Lingonberry pie. I envy your porcelain skin. I envy your pressed dress. I envy your diamond-heavy hand. I envy you your cream cheese heaven and your interceding savior. I envy your ignorance of people like me, who have stared into eternity downward and see their own mascara-murky faces staring back at Them from Darwin’s pond, who see the darkness of “In the beginning” — before your God moved over The face of the Earth, before anyone saw that it was good, before I saw anything but envy.

I mean for this poem to be an exhortation to the Body of Christ who would evangelize women like the speaker, a woman like so many non-believers, who has made choices that were the best she knew how to make, and who feels condemnation from church folks who seem to have it better than she does. We need to tread compassionately with such people, for they are more like us than they let on at first, and they are hungry for blessing and love.

Reading the poem that I wrote years ago on the evening of my brief reunion with Nicole Cooley, however, legitimate superstar, made me test my own spirit for signs of envy. The truth is — I told you to stop looking at me like that — I’m not. So why not?

I cite the passage from Hebrews I quoted earlier for the reason. I don’t know how much or in what Nicole believes, but I do know what I believe. The race that is set before ME is different than the race set before another, and the prize is not a book contract, although, Jesus, that’s one of the desires of my heart. The prize is not family. The prize is not even brilliance. I’m competing in a much more important prize. I’m running the race of faith. I have a stadium filled with onlookers — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Hannah, and the rest. Praise God, and to Him be the glory, I have set aside the weights — divorce, childlessness, every brick in nearby housing projects, disappointments, getting older — and the sin that does so easily beset us — covetousness comes to mind here, and I truly don’t covet, just continue to hope for my own — and I am running the race that is set before ME with PATIENCE, just like Paul told me to.

Trust me. I’m not that holy. I didn’t make my heart any special way here out of my own volition. I’m surprised I’m not jealous. It’s not my own goodness at work. That’s why you can stop looking at me doubtfully. I’ve done only one thing right, it seems to me. I have surrendered my heart and my real belief and confidence to God’s promises. I believe I will have a husband, or I’ll have peace about not having one. I believe I’ll raise children, or I’ll have peace about not raising any. I believe my writing will be published on yet higher levels, that my career will explode, or I’ll have peace about where it goes. I don’t write for a press. I write for the one who gave me His Word. And my poems are what He fashioned them to be. He may have given Nicole a violin and me a trombone. It’s His orchestra, and I am playing the notes He gave me on the page. I hear the music in my head, and it sounds beautiful to me. If that’s all that ever happens, to Him the Composer be all Honor of it. Amen.

This is a picture of Su — my collaborator in all musical things — isn’t she pretty?  She’s very, very smart, too, and incredibly talented, so utterly, unspeakably brilliant that she inspired the following homily:

“I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me.” — Philippians 4:13

Oh, yes — let the church say “amen!” Christians will tell you, if they are familiar with the Word, that they believe what this Pauline epistle says. Yes, Christ strengthens us, allowing us to do all things. Some will say, all things which we are called to do — I mean, perhaps Christ wouldn’t help us rob a bank.

It is easy, of course, to say that one believes this until it is time to do something really hard to do, something that one knows could not be accomplished in the natural.

This week, I had such an incident this week, brethren.

Ok — Here’s what happened: I’ve written the words to an opera, a very modern and hip one. In it, I wrote a small comic role, that of a bad 1980s pop star. I wrote words that go like “Orange Mousse! Everyone is a Flower! Everyone is a Fruit! Drink that Pineapple Flower!” Not exactly cogito ergo sum, not exactly the words of Dr. Faustus when he meets the devil — just think B-52s, think Go-Gos, think Lena Lovich lyrics, and because I expected my brilliant composer collaborator to write something melodically on the level of sophistication of “Lucky Star” or “Turning Japanese,” two admirably foolish 80s hits, I said to her that I would LOVE to play the part of the bad 80s pop star on the bad 80s recording and rock video that would accompany the production on international tours and appear no doubt in the best concert halls of New York. After all, I sing in church and can surely carry a tune as well as any bad 80s pop star, and I can imitate the attitude and make it funny.

I forgot one thing, brethren. My collaborator is a GENIUS. She can’t help herself. She wrote something very sophisticated. It’s in the bad 80s pop genre, but it has got a three-octave range and rhythms that could put a flamenco dancer out of business. I heard a music-only version of the piece and did not understand that she wanted me to sing more than five notes — I thought all that piano music was an instrumental solo, not where MY voice was supposed to go!

Okay, I’m clueless. I’m not a real singer. For a singer, I’m an excellent blogger.

When she called to practice with me — understand the girl has been in the company of the world’s greatest musicians since she was knee high to a Malaysian tree frog — she was horrified I did not have a better instant command of the music. I could hear her disappointment in her voice. This opera means the world to her — it establishes her, rightfully, at the summit of contemporary classical music. She can’t afford for this not to work.

When we hung up the phone, I started to pray and cry — life has been a little hard lately, and being a nineteen-eighties pop star in my own mind has felt like a renaissance of sorts to me, a rebirth of my high school fantasy cool self. I couldn’t afford to mess this up either, on an emotional level. I called the engineer who was supposed to record (see my plug of him above) and asked him to rehearse with me.

A nicer guy has never been born than this young engineer. I think he’s single, ladies, and if you’re about twenty-two years old, he’s I’m sure quite luscious, too. Again, look above for his contact information.

I prayed, standing on the above-mentioned scripture for my text, and I got other believers to agree with me, including but not limited to Pastor Mike Burns of Christian Joy Fellowship, the prayer ministers at Kenneth Copeland Ministries, my good artist friend Andrea Bonifacio, a believing painter who paints in tongues — a story for another blog entry — and an engineer pal of mine who loves the Lord. Jared the engineer rehearsed with me for hours and hours with my still not making the sophisticated piece of music either palatable to the ear or funny. I began to despair.

I cried on the way home from the recording studio, and I fretted in my apartment. My voice was hoarse, and I was no closer to being an 80s pop star, bad or otherwise, than I was in high school. I decided to reread the passage in Philippians, looking for God’s loophole out of helping me with answered prayer.

Truthfully, it would have been unrealistic for me to expect to prosper in this project without practice. There are some people who think that the anointing of some gift should hit them without their preparation in the natural at all. That’s just stupid. God expects us to do our very best, and then He adds His very best, which of course is beyond all we can ask or think.

So that’s my testimony. I went to bed weepy and exhausted, discouraged and still standing on the Word, and God gave me better than what I had asked for by the time I got up.

I woke up at 4 am — it was the day of the actual recording (the video will come later), and I heard a funny voice singing the song in my head. She was incredibly pretentious, more pretentious than what I had imagined. THAT would be how I would succeed! I would make my “pop star” so full of herself, even though her voice was mediocre, it would be a send up of both pop stars and opera divas alike, and the piece would take on the air of the intentionally, rather than the accidentally, ridiculous that it needed to succeed.

When I got to the studio for the first take, I was ready. Jared the engineer heard it and said, “You did that a lot differently yesterday! It’s good the way you’ve got it now.”

Ah, says the agnostic, you just had a moment of inspiration of a human kind that pulled you through, Anne. Wait! Not so!

Before I tell you what happened next, allow me to praise God, whose Word NEVER returns to Him void. A moment of silence, please.

My composer had written me a high F sharp — that’s high f sharp over high c, y’all, and I’m a frigging ALTO. I HIT that note!

Let us have a moment of selah.

Again, I hit that high f sharp. It was NOT in my capacity to do it the day before, and I had no natural reason to aspire to it, but I hit it like Whitney Houston telling me that she’d always love me.

The song is funny, just what the opera needs. I don’t sound bad so much as snooty, in the best possible way for the context, and by the way — the opera is being filmed for TV, and we expect it to air in 2009. Details when they are confirmed.

I can do all things, even ridiculous things, high-school fantasy things, in Christ who strengthens me.

So can you. Practice your way to Carnegie Hall, whatever that is for you, but know that having done all you can, you can stand in your full armor of God, believing His Word, and what you can’t do on your own, you can do with Him and through Him.

I am giving some readings with various groups over the Summer:

Global City Review, founded by that mother of all that is kick-butt, Linsey Abrams, published a short, humorous poem of mine, and they have included me in their “It’s All Relative” Launch reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, a totally awesome place to pose as a deep thinker. Here are the details:

June 5, 6:00 -7:30 pm, Bowery Poetry Club, Between Houston and Bleeker

www.bowerypoetry.com

Because I am in Women Studies Quarterly’s (WSQ) Witness Issue — I wrote a poem about women not being believed by authorities — I am reading with them at the venerable radical bookstore Bluestockings:

June 10, 7 pm , Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, Between Stanton and Rivington

www.bluestockings.com

Then, because Brooklyn is the new little black dress, I am giving another Global City Review reading at The Perch Cafe:

June 17, 7:30 pm, The Perch Café

www.theperchcafe.com

Finally, but totally the most important event of my Summer reading extravaganza, I was honored to be included with such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka in a British anthology of the most happening American poets — Seeds of Fire (2008, Smokestack Books) — and they have invited me to stand next to said luminaries and read at the Bowery Poetry Club in August:

August 7, 6:00 pm, Bowery Poetry Club,308 Bowery St, Between Houston and Bleeker

See link posted above.

If you’re reading this, then come — I promise to agree with a prayer if anyone mentions this blog to me at each of these events. Who knows? You and I might become co-conspirators against the forces of darkness!

It is the start of the season on Coney Island, Memorial Day Weekend, 2008. The candy apple stands and the flume rides are running. The vendors vend. The Wonder Wheel and its minion wheels are spinning. The air smells like burning popcorn and sugar, cigarettes and sand. Everything glows as if it had always been this way — always thriving, churning.

However, passing by here a week ago, the boardwalk was a ghost town. Only the heavy-set Russian Polar Bear Club members were on the beach in their swimsuits, several homeless drug addicts leaned against benches until cops shooed them away, and the owners stands were padlocked shut with corrugated metal grates. Coney Island looked like the press says it looks now — grim, seedy, about to get torn down to develop condos.

However — just look at it today — it is reinvigorated, as if nothing had ever happened.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anne Babson. I am a Christian writer, a girly girl, a new resident of this neighborhood half-condemned, half-celebrated. This blog will be my window to others into one Christian walk along the boardwalk, sidewalk, and stairwell climbs of the toughest borough in the toughest city in the country.

So what does the reinvigoration of Coney Island’s boardwalk have to do with Christianity?

A Presbyterian minister might give a homily on the notion of resurrection from the tomb. Indeed, that which looked so grim is now grinning. The abandoned is crowded. Christians are supposed to think that even our Lazarus things — those which have started to stink for being so very dead — can return to fullness of life. We are to pray for resurrection in all its forms.

For me personally, this revival of The Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, is a sign that my own prayers for resurrection in my own life are being answered. Christian writers are not supposed to get divorced, but I have just fled a marriage that spit me out, and I floated up here on the beach with a bunch of seaweed and trash that was pecked on by the seagulls — discarded waste. But that’s not how God sees me. He sees me fully resurrected, able to thrive again, living and loving with total abandon, more and more the way He loves and He lives despite being rejected by so many people.

I buy a corn dog and sit at a table. The three men at the table next to me are speaking Arabic. They watch with great interest as a woman, obviously drunk, on a dare from her friends a few yards from us, runs into the ocean fully clothed, and runs back to receive a beer from each of them.

This place needs prayer.

Fortunately for all of us, a local church, Fellowship Baptist at 2929 West 20th Street, off of Surf Avenue, right around here, has a prayer station. They wear the red and white vests that YWAM manufactures and sells to ministries, hand out Bible tracts in Spanish, Russian, and English — but wish while I stand there that they also hand them in Bengali and Arabic, among other languages. They feed the poor and minister significantly to the addicted, and they have no head pastor — only three elders, amateur Christians, amateur meaning that they do what they do not for money but for love. While I stand there, a man admits in a heavy Russian accent that he is a heroin addict. One elder pulls him aside, makes an appointment to see him the next morning. A Muslim couple, the man with a full beard and skull cap, the woman with her head fully covered, comes over out of curiosity, then leaves. A police officer asks for prayers of protection — in this tough neighborhood, they need such prayers, the cops. A man from Bengladesh comes up to get a hug from a big, burly elder, barely speaks English, probably doesn’t understand half of what is said to him, but he does understand the message, “Welcome,” which has not heretofore been uttered to him since he arrived in the US two months ago.

I ask for prayer, too. The kind sister who prays for me listens briefly to my war stories, then starts praying for my husband to reconcile with me, but she doesn’t know that he threatened my life, expressed repeated, scary wishes for my death. I don’t enlighten her. God knows the ghost town my life has become. God also knows that this is my season for revival, and soon I, through the resurrection power of our Savior, will look like the boardwalk, as if nothing had ever gone horribly wrong.