I Needed This Christmas

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (John 1:5 NRSV)

"I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."                    (Philippians 1:6, NRSV)

I needed this season.  Yes, I love the Christmas tree anchoring the great room, and the nutcrackers standing guard.  I love the nativity set handmade by a friend, populating the mantle.  I love making use of the Christmas dishes and the extra sweets and the holiday playlist emanating from the speakers.  I love the anticipation of cards from loved ones reconnecting the gift of our lives.  I love the memories stirred reanimating people and places and stories from the past.  All that, and wrapping paper and bows never hurt anything, either.  

But none of that names the dimension of the season for which I only now realize I was desperate.  The darkness, I now can name, had overcome me.  

It is, by now, a familiar litany:

• The virus and the ensuing quarantine that have in countless ways stood over us like a severe parent with the constant refrain, "you can't do that."  The illnesses of friends.  The deaths.  So many deaths.
• The economic anxiety that has gripped so many as businesses have shuttered, jobs have been put on hold, while the rent still comes due and the nourishment and medicines still need taking.
• The racial acrimony that is a virus all its own, killing our souls and too many of our neighbors just as savagely as COVID-19.  And the tragic recognition that we don't even seem to be looking for a vaccine to "cure" this social, moral pestilence.
• The political rancor that long ago abandoned the microphone of honest and earnest debate, in favor of the boxing ring where we simply intend to bludgeon our adversaries into blood-covered unconsciousness.  
• The "Poor-Loser-in Chief" who persists in a toxic cocktail of self-aggrandizement and outright sedition.  Persuasively, so it seems.
• A church that, through the years and increasingly today, too often squanders its energies on its own popularity and "fun," and the insularity of enjoying its own salvation to the neglect of the incarnation it is called to be.

It has all been just about too much.  

It is certainly true that the darkness is incomplete.  I am literally surrounded by love and life in ways too plentiful to enumerate.  Unlike so many I know; unlike so many in the world, I live amidst an embarrassment of riches - health, comfort, shelter, food in the pantry, and medical insurance.  I know this.  I am humbled by this.  I am persistently challenged by this to be a better, more faithful steward of these assets to which I am not entitled but of which I find myself in possession; resources and opportunities I have "earned" only by virtue of a constellation of circumstances on which I have had minimal influence.  

Increasingly, however, over the recent months and years these brilliant beams have seemed more like a penlight by which I have been trying to read while huddled under a blanket, as the battery gradually dimmed.  

I haven't been in a good space.

I suppose I have to admit that I drifted far off the path.  

My soul got out of focus.

In ways of which I repent, I lost the faith...

...the faith reasserted this Christmas, with candle flames shared and lifted high, that, "what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Darkness, after all, is nothing new.  My particular darkness is hardly novel.  Poverty, disease, xenophobia, despotic and self-serving leaders are no strangers to the human family.  John's assertion of persistent light has never been an easy one.  Or obvious.  Or, I now realize, personal.  How is it that I have never heard it for the radical affirmation it is?  And ponder, prayerfully, what it has to say to my particular state of mind?  I needed John to remind me, this year especially, that we do not - dare not - ignore the myriad blights; we simply refuse to grant them sway.  Darkness, yes, but the darkness does not overcome it.

That determined affirmation, along with Paul's confident trust that the One who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.  

I needed this season, more than ever - more, perhaps, than I even realized.  

A reality check, of sorts.  

Or perhaps it has been the Spirit as obstetrician, slapping my infantile faith into cries of new life.

Let the New Year begin.

I Wonder...Out Under the Sky

It was there but a brief time – proudly plain in the southwestern sky as evening settled into darkness, then gone an hour later; descended, we assumed, beneath the horizon for someone else’s viewing pleasure.  It was intriguing, yes, but why all the interest?  Novelty is surely part of the answer.  This grand romance between Jupiter and Saturn won’t happen again in my lifetime, so there is that.

 

Coming as it does, however, on this Christmas week, perhaps the wonderment has to do with more than novelty.  Aren’t we, after all, always looking for signs?  Of what, we never really know, and signs are best read in retrospect, but we are always…wondering.

 

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky…”

 

Earlier in the day we were pondering the various birth stories in the Gospels, especially the lack of one in Mark’s account.  His is likely the more honest telling.  Matthew’s fanciful story of the Magi notwithstanding, who would have imagined or predicted much significance in the ordinary birth of an irrelevant baby to an irrelevant couple from an irrelevant town?  Mary, according to the stories, “kept and pondered these things in her heart,” but that isn’t unusual for a new mother.  Nobody else was likely taking notes.  It was only later – decades later – that people would have started to care about the beginnings of the man about whom they had come to care.  Hence, the “backfilling” of those natal blanks.

 

If, then, we completely missed the significance of that obscure 1^st century Palestinian birth – even if understandably so – it’s only natural I suppose that we would loathe the thought of missing the significance of other potentially earth-shaking convergences.  If it will mean that something holy is afoot, according to the psalmist, when “justice and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85), then perhaps there is something consequential about Jupiter and Saturn kissing as well?  It would be nice if it were more than mere planetary grinding.

 

A sign of new global health, perhaps.

 

Or the dawn of a new age of sanity.

 

At the very least, perhaps it signals the rebirth of curiosity to fill the void resulting from the erosion created by our leaden certitude about that which simply isn’t true.

 

Maybe that’s why we all trouped outside last night and looked up into the sky.  

 

Hoping…

 

…for even a little fresh light.

Who knows, after all, just what might be being born?

 

 

The Precipitation of Awe

Some keep the Sabbath going to church
by Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

 

Loving Without Bared Teeth

We experienced our first episode of puppy “resource guarding” here at the epicenter of puppy training 24/7.  We were expecting such challenges between the puppy and the older dogs, but painfully Cai perceived the threat to his chew bone to be Lori.  Ouch!  “Resource guarding” is that almost reflexive protection, via a snarl or a baring of teeth or a quick snap, of a highly valued object - such as a toy or food or the aforementioned chew bone.   In essence, it is an act of communicating, “This is mine.  I have it and you don’t, and you can’t have it.”  

According to one of the new volumes in our training library, “resource guarding, like so many other behavior challenges, is a natural, normal dog behavior that just isn’t acceptable in human society.” (Pat Miller in The Power of Positive Dog Training, 2nd Edition, pp. 220-221).

Our dwindling bandaid supply confirms that assessment.  It isn’t a behavior we can or intend to tolerate.  It isn’t a permissible style of interaction for a community of humans and canines that share a common space.

Sadly, the human community at-large hasn’t adopted for itself that simple but essential wisdom.  We are resource guarders.  With seasonal exceptions, signaled by the Salvation Army bells outside of grocery stores, our primary business is taking care of ourselves; hoarding our own bones; hovering over our dinner plates.

It is a persistent pattern that prompts no small amount of dismay in a guy like me who has spent his entire life in the church, first being taught and then proclaiming a very different character of life.  This year the evidence has been acute.  As we noted in our annual Advent reflection, “Each passing week of 2020 has confronted us with mounting and irrefutable evidence of how little skill we have for living together as a people, as a culture, as a country and world.  Two thousand years after Jesus elevated love of neighbor to the second highest commandment, and told the parable of the “Good Samaritan” by way of illustration, we reveal how much we still have to learn about discipleship.”

It isn’t just our behavior.  Our theology has gotten twisted up as well, though which came first - our snapping or our believing - is hard to say.  As Richard Rohr recently noted, “The common Christian understanding that Jesus came to save us by a cosmic evacuation plan is really very individualistic, petty, and even egocentric. It demands no solidarity with anything except oneself. We whittled the great Good News down into what Jesus could do for us personally and privately, rather than celebrating God’s invitation to participate in God’s universal creative work” (Daily Meditation, 12/7/2020).

For all our talk of “love,” we demonstrate little comprehension of it, or facility with it.  Our literary luminaries recognize the problem.  Leo Tolstoy, for example, once observed that, “Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.”

Of course Tolstoy didn’t simply make that up.  Long before him, the apostle Paul admonished, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Even Paul, though, had whispers in his ear.  

It was Jesus, after all, who taught, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11).  And later, still more boldly, he asserted, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Indeed, our puppy has much to learn about living within a household economy.  As do the rest of us.  There simply aren’t enough bandaids to go around.

Some Evil is Easy to Name - And We Must

 "The Democrats, the news media - if the leftists, if scientists, professors have been working secretly with the Chinese Communist Party, then line 'em up against the wall and shoot them.  That's what you do with them."

--Rev. Rick Wiles, Senior Pastor of Flowing Streams Church, Florida

A few years ago, during a season of prolific terrorist activity perpetrated by Islamic extremists, many - myself included - wondered where the moderate Muslims were who could step forward and condemn these heinous acts in service to, and in defense of, a different, more honest expression of Islam.  It would be the voices of the moderates, we believed - insiders rather than outsiders - who could best counter and quell the madness of the extremists, and serve the better cause of humankind.

 

My gentle nudging from the sidelines was, I confess, more than a little hypocritical.  I have been a roaring disappointment to colleagues and friends through the years who have chastised me for not more effectively leveraging my voice in service to the common good.  They have a point, although I maintain the conviction that I had a point - at least a methodology - as well.  We choose, after all, our words but also our platforms. 

Suddenly, however, I have to take my own advice.  If it was true for Muslims, it is equally true for Christians.  Moderate Christians are suddenly obligated to speak out against our own who are vilely and publicly ravaging the cause of Christ.  Take a moment to read again the quote at the top of this entry.  Go ahead, reread it.  Ponder it.  Take your time.  I can wait.

Let those words sink in, and filter them through the Gospel message you read in the New Testament.  Surely it doesn't take deep scholarship or hours in prayer to recognize how egregiously oppositional that statement is to the way and words of Jesus.  There is, quite simply, nothing in them that represents the witness of Jesus or the Reign of God to which Jesus constantly pointed.  

 

Nothing.  

 

They could not be further from the Gospel, and it shouldn't be hard for Christians to condemn them for the very articulation of spiritual death that they represent.  

 

Unequivocally.  

Forthrightly.

Steadfastly.

With all due humility.

Earlier this fall, flag-flapping vehicles bearing signs in support of one presidential candidate attempted to run off the road a campaign bus of the opposing candidate.  I am aware that the electoral contest was heated, but surely we can agree that such behavior is unacceptable.  Around the same time, radicals attempted to kidnap a sitting Governor, purportedly to put her on trial for treason and mete out their own form of justice.  Regardless of your partisanship, surely we can agree that such behavior is self-evidently reprehensible, unAmerican, and a fundamental violation of the rule of law.  They represent the early seeds of anarchy; the antithesis of the lofty aspirations of our nation's founders.  We ought to be able to agree on such things, but given the selective silence that ensued, we appear to be too far gone as a citizenry to manage it.

But all of that is a civil matter.  Law enforcement officials should take these matters in hand.  I have no knowledge of the faith persuasion claimed by the perpetrators of either of these earlier atrocities - or if they claim a faith tradition at all.  That's their business.

The assertion at the top of this entry, however, is a different thing.  These sentiments come from the lips of a Christian pastor - at least one who represents himself as such.  They aren't my paraphrase of his words; they are his actual words.  Spoken, I might add, with calm, cool self-assurance.  I copied them verbatim as he said them.  And here is what I would say:  they are an affront to Jesus and everyone who seeks to follow him.  Neither an American, nor a Republican or Democrat, Jesus did not live and die for such blasphemous nonsense as this.  This neither characterizes the "Holy City", nor marks the way there.  It is, to use a good churchy word,  simply heresy.  This is not what scripture teaches.  This is not what Jesus modeled.  This is not the "good news" we were commissioned to proclaim.  This is not the face of Christianity we should want the world to know.  This is the soul's sickness unto death.

 

And every Christian ought to readily say so.  Loudly, and often.

 

It ought to be easy.  

 

Regardless of political persuasion, it ought to be easy.  

Uncharacteristically for me, then, I am saying so. 

Stocking Up on Treats

 “The social dynamics of a wolf pack is often used as a model for dog-dog and dog-human interactions. I have seen dog people (and some wolf people as well) caught up in the idea of always maintaining high rank by aggressive means, believing their only choices are between forcibly dominating the animal or submitting to it. The problem with this approach is two-fold. Firstly, aggression may well escalate, and secondly, an either-or choice between forcible dominance or submission is not the only choice available to wolves, to dogs or to humans.”

— from the Forward, On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals, by Turid Rugaas

 

Having been several years since we had raised a puppy, and with the day approaching for bringing home the 8-week old Welsh Corgi who is to join our household, we got busy reading up. "Reading up," especially since the continuing pandemic precautions will keep us home and away from the "obedience" classes we have relied on with new puppies in the past.  This time we will be on our own.

The truth is, time elapsed is not our only concern. Puppy training has never been our most celebrated success. Love?  Yes. Training?  Uh, no.  This time, we resolved to get it right. 

 

But what is “right?”  It turns out that there is quite a difference of opinion on best practice. There is, of course, the long-standing, “whip-them-into-shape” theory of “dominance”.  Here, the eager trainer will find books and accessories touting the need to teach your dog that you are the boss. Choke collars, prong collars, shock collars, and the “alpha roll” feature prominently in this school of thought. Language is stern. “House breaking” is a big objective. There is lots of talk about “pack mentality,” drawing upon the genetic linkage of dogs to wolves.  

 

There is, however, another school of thought – the “dog friendly” approach.  Dogs may well be the genetic descendants of wolves, this approach acknowledges, but understanding wolf behavior no more clarifies dog behavior than understanding ape behavior predicts how humans will necessarily interact.   “Breaking” is less the focus in this philosophy than “training”.  Aversion and pain are eschewed in favor of incentivizing.  Treats and praise replace thwacks and volts.  Trainers following this path capitalize on the dog’s innate desire to please – and its subsequent rewards – rather than building on avoidance of pain and instilling fear.  Dominance gives way to partnership.

 

It hasn’t been hard to decide which path we will follow.  We look around and observe how commonly the “dominance” theory has been employed - in the way humans have historically approached their pets, to be sure, but each other as well, and all of creation – and see how poorly it has served us.  Even among people of faith.  Having wrestled the almost felonious interpretation of “domination” out of the Genesis assignment to have “dominion,” we have armed ourselves with a divine minting of James Bond’s “License to Kill.”  And kill we have – each other, the air, the soil, and the very atmosphere that suspends us.  We have, to put it pithily, been hellbent on being dominant.

 

One obvious problem with that approach is that, however satisfying it might feel to the dominant few, it simply doesn’t work very well.  Just look at the human community – interpersonally, internationally, politically. “Winning” is very loudly celebrated, but it should be obvious by now to even the casual observer that even when we win we lose.  When we get our way by coercion rather than consent, we condemn ourselves to a never ending application of power and energy to "keep the lid on" that depletes and diminishes everyone involved.

 

Another problem is that it’s sinful. People who purport to follow Jesus certainly ought to know better.  The word “dominion” is etymologically the same as “lordship,” and clearly the model of lordship that Jesus lived bears little resemblance to the practices of domination we employ.  

 

As Richard Rohr observes, “Jesus did not come to impose Christendom like an imperial system. Every description he offers of God’s Reign—of love, relationship, non-judgment, and forgiveness, where the last shall be first and the first shall be last—shows that imposition is an impossibility! Wherever we have tried to force Christianity on people, the long-term results have been disastrous.”

 

And so the puppy is coming home – a home within which we have and will often fail to live up to that biblical model, but toward which we aspire. Perhaps together we, the puppy and our whole growing menagerie, will learn from and teach one another something life-giving about life together.

 

And so, there is much training in store - all around - around the house and around the world. 

The treats are ready.  

To be given and received. 

 

The Scaffold That Sways the Future

“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated.  A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.  In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.”

— Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 1949

 In the communication curriculum that Lori and I have come to value and teach, originally developed at the University of Minnesota Family Study Center, approaching an issue together involves processing a series of elements.  While in no particular order, each element requires its own care and reflection.  It all hinges on the naming of sensory data (the likes of which a camera or a microphone might record).   Within a household that "data" might involve dirty dishes or missed appointments or bills that need to be paid.  Ordinarily, establishing the data is simple.  The process gets more challenging when it moves on to consider, among other things, the unique thinking with which we surround that data - thoughts shaped by past experiences, parental influences, religious beliefs, cultural norms, prejudices, etc., and then the emotions those thoughts arouse.   But it all hinges on that common recognition of - agreement upon - the data; the facts.  

As suggested, once upon a time that was the easy part.  We could generally agree on the due date of a bill or the languishing existence of the greasy skillet.  Culturally speaking, however, that has somehow become the hard part.

No wonder we have come to find ourselves at the throat of each other in recent years.  Somehow it has come to be the case that we can't even agree on the facts - the 'is-ness" of our common reality.  Orange is green and yellow is purple and up is down and 2+2=5 -- or 20 or 2000 if that better suits our agenda.  Never mind what the recording captured me saying, it never came out of my mouth.  If I say there were a thousand on the lawn, then the photograph showing a total of 12 is fake; "doctored"; maliciously tampered with and falsified.  If I don't like "your facts", I'll simply assert "my own" that better reinforce my point of view.  

Word is that we are engulfed in a tsunami of "fake news."  The inevitable implication is that we can trust nothing, not even our own eyes and ears.

Back to that communication theory, it is difficult to parse out our respective thoughts and emotions, or consider what we are really after and the actions we are willing to undertake in their pursuit, if we can't even agree on the data about which we are purportedly thinking, and to which we are presumably reacting.  We are islands of righteously fortified, well-insulated ignorance.  Or as the band, Stealers Wheel sang in the heyday of my youth, "Clowns to the left of me; jokers to the right.  Here I am:  stuck in the middle with you."  And I don't really trust you.  

The inevitable destination of such personal and collective delusion is depravity.  We can speak from experience, because we have collectively arrived there, unpacked, and made of it a home.  Through our indulgence of the lie - our refusal to agree on the simplest facts, we have, as Thurman predicted all those decades ago, become deception itself; the moral mercury of life reduced to zero.  We are told it is all in the service of "greatness," but that, too, is a fiction.  In the eyes of the rest of the world, such faux "greatness" is variously the stuff of derision, mockery, or disconcerted perplexity.  

It isn't, of course, a hopeless state.  It is a prison, but one of our own making.  C.S. Lewis once famously observed that "The gates of hell are locked on the inside."  Whether or not that is true of hell, I am certain it is true of this desolate courtyard of moral, politically driven depravity.  We can emerge if we choose.  The key is neither hard to find nor difficult to use.  

In fact, it isn't even particularly new.  But, then, what is?  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wryly observed, "There is nothing new under the sun."  

The 19th century hymn writer James Russell Lowell insisted,

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future...

Truth.  Not wrong.  

The key is not will-power or asserted imagination, but simple honesty.  

Truthfulness sways the future.

Once inserted in the lock, the key doesn't take strength to turn; rather, simple...

...humility.

We have to give up believing that we are the only person, and the only set of opinions, in the room who matter.  And then, even when it disfavors us, and despite its occasional sour taste, to acknowledge the facts.  

And speak the truth.

Only then can we truly begin to communicate.

And get the bills paid and the dishes washed and who knows what else?

My Vote As My Reflection

 My absentee ballot will arrive today in the mail.  It’s a moment – and an act – I have been anticipating for a good while.   I’ve been eager to make my marks, seal the various envelopes, and return it to the counting machine.  Suddenly, knowing of its imminent arrival, I’m sobered by the prospect.  It is, as we have been reminded, consequential – locally, nationally, even globally.  What will guide my choosing?   

And so I have felt the need to prepare – not by reading policy statements and platforms; not by watching “debates”.  The positions and implications of the various candidates are, after all, patently clear.  No, the preparations are more personal; more fundamental.  

These are some of the basics I’m pondering while waiting for the letter carrier to deliver today’s mail:

§  “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”Deuteronomy 10:17-19

§  “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Micah 6:8

§  “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”  Ezekiel 16:49

§  “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…” Psalm 24:1

§  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Matthew 22:36-40

§  Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Matthew 25:41-46

§  “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Galatians 5:22-23

§  “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” Philippians 4:8-9

§  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  1 Corinthians 13:4-7

§  “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  Hebrews 13:2

§  “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.  What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”  James 1:27, 2:14-18

I know, I know, we aren’t electing a savior, a “Saint-in-Chief.” As flawed as we are, these are aspirational goals.  We will get it wrong as often as we get it right.  More often, if I am honest.  Anger will distort.  Greed will pervert.  Vindictiveness will completely twist us out of shape.  Power will seduce.  But their aspirational nature is precisely the point.  Or, rather, it is the question.  To what extent am I actually seeking their particular shape?  I, but of course also those for whom I am casting my vote?  Because while it is true that we are not electing moral models, we are electing representative leaders – which is to say, among other things, someone representing me.  Whoever gets elected will certainly not embody my particular set of values, but I cannot cast my vote for anyone who stands as their antithesis.  I don’t require the recipients of my vote to share my confessional commitments, but values and behaviors and ideologies oppositional to those commitments are deal-breakers.  

And so it is that however much my vote says something about the various candidates on the ballot, and about the county or state or nation they aspire to serve, more than anything my vote says something about me.  And so I sift again through the sketched values articulated above – the life parameters assigned to me and adopted by me - to remember all over again…

…what they are… 

…what matters to me.  

To trace, again, their lines.  

To reaffirm their aspirational shape.

And then, with fear and trembling...

...and clarity...

...to vote.

Reading A World Into Being

I feel a certain sadness when I finger it. Odd, in a way, given that it is “only a book.”  Such a deprecation is foolhardy, I know.  As a bibliophile of long-standing I intuited early the fact that “only” is an adjective woefully small and  ill-suited for the expansive, world-making power of books.  Books are as vast as the soul, as expansive as the mind, and potentially as holy as the universe itself.  God, after all, created by the utterance of words. 

 

That said, it is this particular book as object that saddens me, completely unrelated to the story it tells or the world it creates.  

 

The cause of the sadness?  It has never been read.  After all these years.  

 

One from the 10^th printing of its first edition in 1933, I obtained my copy recently from a used bookseller in Stanley, NY through the wonders of the internet after learning that it wasn’t available from any of our nearby libraries.  For all of its pedigree It wasn’t expensive.  This first edition volume cost me less than $15.

Never mind that it was a bestseller in its day.

Never mind that it was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose popularity surpassed his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Never mind that multiple movies were derived from his various books.

Never mind that he socialized with the likes Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Never mind that this particular title has influenced countless readers and set in motion an entire movement that influences and shapes us to this day.

 

Never mind all that.  It was relatively cheap.  But that isn’t the sadness.  The sad fact is that this particular copy, now almost 90 years old, has never been read.

 

Books are written to be read.  I happen to know that first hand.  Born from an idea impregnated by the Muse, coaxed and nurtured through the hard labor of hours and days and anguish and imagination, a book is a swaddled love entrusted to the cosmos with the hope – the perhaps naïve certainty – that it will pass into wider imaginations and sow seeds of its own.  A book is a gift, simply and forthrightly and vulnerably offered…

 

…for the express purpose of being read.  Words, after all, are precious.  Ideas, after all, are powerful.  And when ideas are put into words almost anything is possible.  Every copy of a book is a seed.

 

But sadly, this one was never planted.  This copy was never read.  How do I know?  In the printing process, multiple “pages” are printed on a larger sheet of paper.  Eventually the sheets are folded to the size of the pages, the folds are cut and the finished pages are bound.  Except in my copy the last fold was never cut.  Pages 344 and 345 are unreadable, imprisoned inside pages 343 and 346.  A blade would be required to liberate those pages, and after all these years, over all these many decades, through however many hands have held and considered this book, no one ever has.

 

But now the volume has come to me, and I am reading it.  And when I arrive at those final four pages I will carefully, beckoningly razor blade them apart so that those two denied pages can have their say – along with all those ignored ones before them, and that very last one that follows.  Perhaps then the book, having accomplished its goal, can rest.  

 

No, perhaps then it can finally come to life…in me.

 

 

 

The Gift of Air

The Gift of Air

 

Air.  

Basic, indeed; essential, but hardly a constant awareness.  Like blinks and heartbeats, air is the “given” we take for granted…

 

…until it is absent.

 

“I can’t breathe,” moaned George Floyd with a knee on his throat.

“I can’t breathe,” gasp COVID-19 sufferers.

“I can’t breathe,” choke whole communities in the pacific northwest as wildfires rage.

 

Suddenly air is something we cannot take for granted.

 

“I can’t breathe,” Adam and Eve might have said – if they could have spoken at all – until God breathed into them the very breath of life.

 

Which is to say that it never really was something we could take for granted.  And we try not to.  Living, as we do, in the country, strolling through the wooded trails or amidst the native prairie, we bask in it.  In this season we relish the briskness as well as the clarity of it.  

Breathe in; breathe out.  Such is the antiphon of life.  Air is one on a very short list of items we can’t live without.  Air, food, and – well, one other thing:

 

“All I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you,” sang the Hollies a few decades ago.  

Yes, to both of those. 

 

It is a topic on my mind because our wedding anniversary has rolled around again – September 20 being the official day of celebration – and according to one source the suggested gift for the 23^rd anniversary is “Air.”  Huh?  I’ll admit that my first reaction upon reading that note was deflation – air, after all, being hard to slide on a finger or hang by a chain around a neck, or hook on a wall like conventional gifts.  You can’t wrap it, wear it, or display it.  Not even Amazon sells or delivers it, with or without a Prime membership.  The marital website I consulted gamely tried to make the best of it.  Suggested applications were “balloons” (hardly very inspiring), a “hot air balloon ride” (definitely not on Lori’s wish list), or “airplane tickets” (enticing, but not during a pandemic).

 

The more I live with the idea, however, the more and more I’m drawn to it – perhaps because you can’t buy it, only receive and protect it.  Air, that ubiquitous but perilously fragile element we cannot afford to ignore, choke off, or pollute, precisely like the love for which it is a token.  

 

At least in year 23.

 

As far as I’m concerned, it can stand in for all the gift suggestions for every anniversary to come, if for no other reason than to remind me.  

 

Breathe in; breathe out.

Love in; love out.

Kiss; kissed.

A tender whisper.

A delighted gasp.

A contented sigh.

A playful breath in the ear.

 

Air.

Invisible, but demonstrably manifest.

Everywhere, until it is scarce.  

With the rhythm of my lungs to remind me of what I cannot live without.

 

All I need is the air that I breathe…

…and to love you.

 

Happy anniversary, my love, my breath.  

Toward a New Alteration and Enlargement

“It isn't knowledge

It's humility we lack”

—-Don Henley, “Praying for Rain”

It isn’t entirely true, of course.  There is always more to learn. For starters, there is the knowledge about each other that seems to be sorely absent among us just now. That, along with the still largely unexplored landscape of ourselves.  We have much to hear; much to learn; much to understand.  

The sobering reality, however, is that it won’t ultimately be enough.  That was the naive and ultimately tragic flaw in the Age of Enlightenment:  the fiction that we could educate our way into a whole human community - the embodied Beloved Community that our faith traditions have taught us to seek.  We are more educated and knowledgable than any generation preceding us, buried as we are beneath data and facts and the 24-hour news cycle.  There is ample data, widely accessible and scientifically validated, about climate change and yet we still ignore it.  All ambiguity has evaporated under the scrutiny of credible research about agricultural runoff into the Mississippi that travels downstream to feed the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, but still we spray chemicals in excess of what any crop might need.  Despite decades of clear information about the importance of exercise and what we eat, we are increasingly sedentary, consuming ever bigger mountains of junk beverages and food, and spending more and more on health care.   We know volumes about racism and the generational implications of trauma, abuse, dehumanization and implicit segregation, but all the information at our fingertips has had little impact.  We still act in a historical vacuum and react with prejudicial suspicion and fear.  

It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.

Despite our occasional but fleeting flashes of ingenuity and magnanimity; despite an effervescence here and there of grandeur or moral, communal stature, we largely remain a species of juvenile delinquents - delinquents who have been to the moon, to be sure, and smashed the atom and mapped the human genome and eradicated countless diseases, but juvenile nonetheless, roaming the streets of our common life metaphorically and literally stealing trinkets and breaking windows - with a soul deep within that is aching to grow up.

It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.

Not long ago, Lori and I visited the grave of Carlo Carretto, the 20th century Italian activist and mystic, in the charming little Umbrian village of Spello across the hillside from Assisi where he had spent the latter years of his ministry.  In the months since our visit, I’ve been reading Carretto’s books.  In one of them, In Search of the Beyond, he makes the dismal observation that, “I have too often been wounded by ‘intelligent’ people, disconcerted by unloving champions of orthodoxy or by self-advertising revolutionaries who are incapable of an act of humility.”

We know those people he is describing.  Wincingly often, we are those people he is describing.

It isn’t knowledge

It’s humility we lack.

We know too much about that which we simply don’t care…

…because it is simply inconvenient; 

…or it’s not my problem;

…or it’s someone else’s fault.  

It won’t, of course, turn out well on those terms.  As the sage behind the biblical book of Proverbs puts it, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”  (Proverbs 11:2)

I’ll keep learning - it’s just the kind of thing I do, and there are whole worlds, after all, about which I know little or nothing.  But I - we - had better start changing as well; bending out of the inert certitude of our intellection, and into the wonderment of humility in which all that is not me is no longer mere object, but holy subject...

...that not only educates me, adding to my knowledge, but alters me and enlarges us all.

Plenty of Room for Light

I mowed this morning in silence - as much silence as can be with 30 horses of power throbbing in the tractor beneath you.  Eschewing my usual headphones with their podcasts or playlists, I just couldn’t stand any more sound.  The roar within was all I could manage.

This was the week it happened for me.  Some will likely wonder what took so long.  Others will be surprised that this week seemed any different from the ones preceding.  I can’t honestly account for it.  Something just…snapped.  

Yes, there are the increasingly heavy ramifications of the pandemic - the escalating infections, the mounting death toll, the prolonged isolation.  The flagrant refusal by many to acknowledge the risk.  But that’s all getting to be routine.  

This week was somehow different.  It all began with the surprising news of the unexpected, unexplained death of a brother-in-law - a kind and winsome soul three years my junior who laughed and listened and generously loved.  The thunderous silence of his absence is part of the noise.  Following that death, the week proceeded inexorably downhill.  There was the raucous protest in Kentucky on Sunday, in the space between the Capitol and the Governor’s mansion, during which the Governor was burned in effigy while the militants chanted the words of Lincoln’s assassin.  All this, with complicit elected officials looking on, presumably because the protesters do not agree with the Governor’s policies.  I say, “presumably,” because I do not have access to their minds - granting them the courtesy of that stressed presumption.  If they have a mind, any evidence of it was obliterated by their heinous actions the likes of which surely should be behind us.  Then there was the murder by suffocation of a black man in Minneapolis by an on-duty police officer while his fellow-officers looked away.  A knee on the throat of a handcuffed man, gasping for breath.  This, in the name of — what?  Justice?  Order?  And by such means as matter-of-factly deemed appropriate by who, outside of ISIS or the Taliban?  I had come to think of Minnesota as the last place such an egregious act might occur, but then I recall that whole “Governor Ventura” episode several years back, confirming that nowhere is apparently free of lapses.  

This killing, then, followed predictably by street protests of escalating violence, about which the President mused that the protesters should be shot - a reaction that made me gasp, but then considered the prospect that death by gunshot might be pleasanter than the cruel asphyxiation that had precipitated it all.  This, the same President who is berating social media outlets for fact-checking his falsehoods, and who has been busily firing government watchdogs - five as of this counting - allegedly because we no longer need them.  Proof, of course, that we do.  

But the week was just getting started.  News reports emerged today from Pennsylvania - the home of the "City of Brotherly Love" - that legislators of one political party who had tested positive for Covid-19 alerted members of their own caucus, but neglected to share the warning with those across the political aisle.  As if we had any doubt that politics is a blood sport.

Beyond all this, I’ll just gloss over the other political atrocities, corruptions, duplicities and chicaneries that by now are almost commonplace in this "land of the free and home of the brave."

All this, on the week headed by a collective commemoration and remembrance of those who died in service to their country - who fell in the line of duty.  

I can’t believe that this is what they fell for.

There is a scene in the classic movie, “Ghostbusters,” when a public official steps in and demands that power to the containment grid be shut off.  It is the grid that holds all the captured paranormals.  Protests ensue, court orders are produced, and eventually the switch is thrown; and all that had held back evil was removed.  In a riotous scene, the liberated specters burst through the roof of the converted fire station and catapult into the sky above and subsequently into and throughout the city.  All hell quite literally breaking loose.  

That’s what it feels like has happened.  The containment grid has been unplugged, the roof has been burst, and the demonic has been unleashed.  This, from a guy who doesn’t believe in demons.

There are those who will say I am getting “too political”; to whom I respond,” I haven’t even begun to be political.”  The actions I am decrying, the choices I am condemning have nothing to do with politics but with common decency, moral character, and the guiding principles of civilized society.  Neither “left” nor “right,” Republican or Democrat, these are the foundations I learned as a child from my parents, from my volunteer teachers in Sunday School, in public school, and the writings of our nation’s founders.  We have come to be so fixated on the Constitution - defending it, arguing over it, splitting the hairs of it, but a guiding creed that does not live in the hearts and lives of its citizens but only in its ink isn’t worth the paper on which it’s written, and has ceased to matter at all.  The wind has left the flag.

I pondered all this while mowing in silence, circling and circling, back and then forth; the lawn and the trails, the paths and even the culverts.  Mowing, motor throbbing, until I ran out of fuel.  

An apt metaphor, it seems to me. 

I’m ordinarily a fairly positive guy.  I can usually find a patch of blue in most stormy skies.  “Silver linings” and such.  

But I hit a low this week.  Something snapped.  And now here I am with a soul full of all this mess, and nothing left to mow.

I am left, as I often am, to lean on the wisdom of poets - 

—like Leonard Cohen who observed,

“There is a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.”

—like David Wilcox who notes that, like healed bones, we are…

“stronger than ever now in the broken places.”

I hope to God they are right.  We’ve got plenty of room for light to get in, and in the dubious event that we do actually find some healing amidst all this brokenness, endless locations for new strength.