Pathways

My husband is a pillar of St. Mary’s, a little activist Episcopal church in Harlem that yesterday kicked off its 200th anniversary celebration with a chamber music and choral concert at the world’s largest unfinished cathedral, St. John the Divine, in our very neighborhood. The musical selections featured our augmented choir performing original songs and traditional spirituals; the sound in that cavernous cathedral was beautiful and haunting. Next up were piano, harp, and violin pieces by two different women composers from the community; each had previously held the world premiere of her original composition at St. Mary’s. At the intermission, one of these composers was approached by a filmmaker wanting to hire her to score her newest film. That’s St.Mary’s for you, the little church that could. After the intermission we were treated to four exquisite pieces by the Harlem Chamber Ensemble, which again got its start at St.Mary’s. Our friends Lisa and Ozier joined us for the program, and they were blown away, both by the music and by St. Mary’s history of art and inclusive and intersectional social justice activism, as shared by those who performed. The program was billed as “200 Years of Praise and Protest: A Benefit Concert” and it was well attended and vastly enjoyed.

The thing that struck me so powerfully is that St. Mary’s has always been St. Mary’s. Right from the start it was about deeds, the practical work of securing a community, of giving people their dignity especially in times of need, of welcoming everyone regardless of faith, race, identity, or creed. St. Mary’s, which looks like a country church on a Harlem side street, was easy to underestimate, yet more than a century ago it became the first church in the city to stop charging worshipers pew fees, and fifty years ago it sponsored two of the three women from the New York diocese who were among the first women to be ordained as Episcopal priests. There’s a film about this that will be shown in the spring as part of the year long anniversary celebration, along with many other events. How many nights have I sat at our dining table working or doing a puzzle while my husband sat at the other end of the table on a Zoom call as chair of the 200th anniversary events committee. He's so low key, fostering team spirit almost effortlessly, because his ego isn't wrapped up in this at all. And this afternoon, my man and his little soul cluster at the church put on an amazing event, nothing ragtag about it at all. Afterward, he was deeply content. "That was a wonderful way to spend my birthday," he said, and it was.

Also at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine yesterday, there was a new art installation called Divine Pathways, created by fabric artist Anne Patterson. It consists of red, blue, and gold ribbons on which are written the thoughts, hopes, and dreams of hundreds of people from the surrounding neighborhood, each one offering a prayer reaching up to the Cathedral's vaulted ceiling. Prayers for peace. For community. Messages to mend the fabric of our world with ribbons upon ribbons of love.

 

The same filmmaker who wanted to hire one of the composers from yesterday's concert, approached me under those hanging prayer threads to ask me about my work. She said someone had told her I was a New York Times bestselling author (haha! that's actually true!) and she wanted to know if any of my books had ever been made into a film. None, I told her, and she then wanted to know was there was one story in particular that I thought was worthy of being told in film. And so I told her about Dr. Ellamae Simmons, the hidden figure who I've previously written about here, who made all kinds of history in her lifetime. When Ellamae was 97 years old, she hired me to write her memoir. It was a highlight experience of my life, and I wished the world could know her, too. The filmmaker was intrigued. She wanted my contact info, my website. She handed me her phone and asked me to type it in, but as I was doing that her husband tried to FaceTime her from Israel, where he is a journalist reporting on the tragedies unfolding in that part of our world. "I'll call him back," she said. "No, you should take it," I said, handing her back the phone. "You don't know what's going on." 

After she got off the call with him she came to find me again, and asked me to finish entering my contact info. She told me about her two nieces, who are in the Israeli army, who she says will soon be entering the tunnels in Gaza, and how worried she is for them. She said she feared that Israel's actions in Gaza will inflame antisemitism around the world. She told me one of her nieces had liberated a city, and her mother was so proud of her she sent their relatives in America a picture. "My niece was smiling," the woman said, "but I could see something different in her eyes, like a light had gone out, like she's seen things." 

 

I chose to just listen, aware that her family members were on the front lines, and how terrified I would be if that were my kin. I didn't try to tell her what I thought the government of Israel, and the government of the U.S. should be doing instead of carpet bombing Gaza. But after we took our leave of each other, I knew that filmmaker would never call me back, because she'd go to my website and see that I had written the memoir of a powerful and luminous Palestinian American warrior woman, and that would put me on the other side of the fence in her mind. Never mind that so many of us, maybe even most of us, actually want the same thing. Never mind that we're out here wearing out our shoe leather and posting on social media and calling our congresspeople and praying with our whole hearts for an end to genocide, for radical reconciliation, for sacred peace.