Prayer, Alms-Giving, and Fasting

Reading an issue of Image journal from last summer (Issue number 74, Summer 2012) that somehow got buried under months of poor-housekeeping detritus and just resurfaced recently, while waiting for our ecumenical Ash Wednesday service to start (having arrived 45 minutes early so that James could prepare, as a participating clergy—I, for once, having no responsibilities in this liturgy besides attending), I came across these lines in an essay by Matthew Milliner entitled "Seven Years in Chelsea:  From Barricades to Beauty in New York's Gallery Scene":

After a gallery walk one wintry afternoon, I finally visited [General Theological Seminary], because the sunset had cast the nineteenth-century brownstone gothic tower in screaming red.  I had arrived just in time for evening prayer, and a hospitable seminarian gently guided me as to which book to use and where to turn.  The Anglo-Catholic vespers were recited with solemn perfection between two small bands of worshippers across the darkened choir.  Makeshift liturgies, invented by artists just yesterday, simply can't compete.

Aya Sofya, Istanbul

 Although our ecumenical Ash Wednesday service tonight had many fine elements, and though I was moved to be in community with the impressive number who turned out from our congregation (especially since it wasn't even at our church) as well as those from other congregations in town, I would still have preferred to recite an age-old liturgy in a darkened sanctuary, chanting the time-tested words with just a few adjustments for inclusivity, in ancient psalm tones, that no one wrote yesterday.

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Reading the New York Times Magazine from this past Sunday, February 10, that I just got around to today, I came across an article by Rob Trump (an ironic last name given the subject of the article) about Kickstarter and why it works:  "Why in the World Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter?"  The most quotable line is probably, "Kickstarter as a phenomenon is made much more comprehensible once you realize that it's not following the logic of the free market; it's following the logic of the gift."  Or maybe (referring to Lewis Hyde's "The Gift"):

Hyde emphasized the forward motion of the gift, arguing that artistic creation is propelled by eros, or love, rather than the logos of number-crunching, and as such it is incapable of being subsumed by the market.  Even if art is sold, the forces that led to its existence operate according to the need to share something with the world.

So, not much in the way of quotable lines that particularly caught my attention that I can share with you, but the article as a whole definitely made me say Yes.  Capitalism will never conquer, nor understand, the human need to give.  As Trump describes it in another unmemorable line, "... the personal logic of the gift exchange, a transaction by which a personal relationship is strengthened, not diminished."  Communities since ancient times have been built on gift-giving. 

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Reading that same aforementioned issue of Image, I found this poem by Alice Friman, entitled "Enormous Holdings":

At the Montreal Jazz Festival, 2012

All this day:  a gift
of abstraction.  The trees
sway with it, murmuring box this up,
this fifth day of this fifth month,
as if to say, You'll need it
when you're gaping like a fish
for kindness, for this day gave you
emptiness and the permission
to feed yourself by choosing
not to fill it.
                    So I made myself
vacant, old sweater on a hook
and heedless as running water,
to forge of myself
nothing, so as to retrieve
nothing, neither from my old
ragbag of stumble and trip
nor from the creaky dead, my giant
pair of windmills whose battles
blotted out the sky.
                                    This time, I
blotted out the sky.  Who needs it—
big blue nothing scribbled with shredding
faces, streaked with white chalk.