The Gift of Human Decency

 

“Those who think that the world can only be structured as they have known it are the slow learners of history.  They fail to realize that their slow learning curve is actually a form of narcissism and also a lack of knowledge.  Thus, change comes with great difficulty in human history.”

(Richard Rohr, in Hope Against Darkness)

 We have spent time recently in Italy where we are, in every way, out of our element. Despite our rudimentary efforts to familiarize ourselves with the language, we do not speak Italian.  We get by counting out Euros in place of dollars, but it remains to us a “foreign” currency.  Otherwise we point, we pantomime, we make up words.  Every once in awhile, one of them is even recognizable.  

 

What bridges the gaps of understanding?  Sometimes it is the signage or the menus that charitably offer English alongside the native tongue – a generosity rarely exhibited at home.  But as often as not, it is the kindness of strangers that offers the synapse between blank and desperate stares and grace filled comprehension.  Sometimes it is the merchant that is managing a transaction.  Often it is someone simply standing nearby equipped with more multilingualism than either of us mono-speakers.    

 

This is high among the many reasons we visit here:  the immersion in the effluent generosity of strangers.  Italians count it a virtue to be helpful - to notice need, to pay attention to distress, and do what they can to alleviate it.  Yes, that’s a generalization.  There are certainly exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule.

 

Italy, of course, is hardly stainless.  There was and is that whole problem with the Mafia, and more than a little corruption.  And Italians have had their own experience with totalitarian fascism.  Mussolini headed Italy for 23 years, asserting self-interested nationalism and suppressing egalitarianism, while installing dictatorial rule by both legal and illegal means, and ultimately allying himself with Hitler during World War 2.  Eventually Italians recognized that Mussolini was one of the bad guys and, without going into the details, it ended badly for “il Duce.”  Let’s just leave it at that.  Neither he nor his way were ultimately adjudged to be “Italian” in the truest sense of the word.

 

I’ve been thinking about the juxtaposition of our experience with generous Italian hospitality and the current fervor in my own country – choking, as it is these days, with authoritarian suppression, repression, condemnation and sedition. Orwellian doublespeak has become the language of the day, where words have been inverted to suggest the opposite of what they mean.  “Freedom” suddenly looks, for all the world, like coercion. “Liberty” is now enforced by constraint.  Imagination is now blasphemous, self-exploration and expression are now immoral, while exploitation is nonchalantly assumed.  As for historical reflection, that’s now against the law.  “Remembering” is only permitted to be patriotic so as to romanticize it; never honest or critical so as to learn from it.  Has there ever been a time in American history when more freedoms have been removed in the name of…freedom?

 

Moreover, our elected leaders are actively and openly scissoring the fabric of American concourse.  Far too many of them.  They are actively undermining – without supporting evidence other than a dislike of outcomes – our electoral process.  The Governor of the state in which I live recently beat a path to a news conference to condemn as illegal and immoral a grand jury’s indictment brought forward in another state – a grand jury of ordinary citizens of that state, on which she had not sat, and had not been privy to the evidence, and therefore about which she can hold an opinion but no intelligence, and yet about which she feels qualified to speak.  And she is in plentifully ignorant company.  Surely this attempted discrediting of the very legal system by which our country thrives is irresponsible, if not treasonous.  She should know better.  We should all expect better.  We should all collectively be better.  

 

This isn’t theater.  This isn’t a television show.  This isn’t farce contrived for our collective entertainment.  This is “us” – or at least it is who we aspire to be.  Or once did.

 

Honest, not duplicitous.

Imaginatively large, not judgmentally puny.

Expansive, not constraining.

Blessing and encouraging, not mockingly condemning.

Generous, not selfishly stingy.

 

I think about how wonderfully kind it was for the young Italian woman in line behind me to help me know where to go to wait for my cappuccino, and the woman at the market who helped me weigh and label my vegetables; the stranger at the station who confirmed I was boarding the correct train.  The farmer a few miles away who picked us up for a visit because we didn’t have a car.

 

And countless other mercies.

 

And how in earlier times we Americans helped each other build barns.  We gave each other rides.  We shared our equipment.  We shoveled each others sidewalk.  

 

We were community.  Because somehow we knew it was the human way to be. 

 

As I clumsily counted out my Euros, and turned to wait for my coffee to be brought to me on the porch, I knew there was more I should say, but all I could mouth was, “Grazie.”

 

Thank you.  

 

For being human.

 

And recognizing me to be, as well.  

 

Thanks for the lesson in patient, common humanity.

 

Grazie.  Grazie mille.  

 

Perhaps, should you come to my country, I can return the favor.

 

Just don’t ask the Governor.

 

 

A Thread in the Fabric She Wove

Julie was a step-friend.  She came into my circle by marriage, having been a long-time friend of Lori’s since college days.  They were never roommates - that alignment conjoined several other friends - but they played together, sang and danced together, rapped together (no small feat for two white midwestern girls in the early ‘80’s) and dreamed together.  They were, in other words, friends - not “best friends” in that junior high exclusivist sort of way; their circles were wide and warm and diversely nourishing - but simply friends.  Good friends.  And I had the good fortune to be welcomed into the mix.

So it was that when Julie got sick a couple of years ago, the friendships became more animated.  Conversations became more frequent - among the many, and between each other; visits, during those seasons when energies permitted it, became more intentional; tears and fears flowed more honestly.  

But when friends from myriad connections joined family members recently for a memorial service to celebrate Julie’s life, it wasn’t the illness that dominated the gathering, nor her perseverance through the pain and limitations.  It was the verve and volume of her living.  And the force of it.  Throughout the eulogies shared at the service, Julie was variously described as “cruise director”, “organizer”, and even “boss cow”.  Routinely, Julie would be the one who set plans and events into motion, turned fantasy into reality, and transformed the fantastical (and more than once, the farcical) into commonplace.  She assigned roles, established expectations, and brooked no dissent.

Julie, both friends and family attested, was a bit of a train - a moving one - and those around her had two choices:  they could get out of her way, or get on board.  The former was rarely desirable; the latter almost always was.

But as much joy as she derived from the orchestration, her own titillation was rarely the object.  Yes, she was assertive, but Julie's directorial prowess was always in service to her instinctive passion for making connections; for putting disparate pieces - and people, and groups - together.

Which is to say that Julie was more than simply a train.  

At the edge of a city where I once lived was located a train hub - a massive convergence of dozens, maybe hundreds of tracks; rails and ties extending as far as one could see.  Trains from who knows where would roll into that vast network of knotted tracks, and someone had the job of managing the traffic:  which cars to connect with which trains, to shift to which track, to head in what direction.  

In the great train yard that was Julie’s circle of friends and sphere of influence, Julie was that director.  And it gave her joy to make it happen.  More than that:

She was good at it.  

She had a knack for it - an instinct, innate.

She had fun at it.

She made music out of it.

She wove life out of it.

And we - yes, even me, a step-friend who accepted assignments of my own - are more beautiful because of her:  grateful threads in the fabric she wove.

And hopefully we learned from her more than to simply listen and be obediently compliant.  Hopefully we won’t hang the fabric she wove on the wall and admire it for what it was, but by her example risk weaving a few disparate threads of our own; connecting, building, bringing together, creating new colors by spilling a few old ones into a puddle and stirring.  

It will be beautiful. I can almost hear her pronouncing it so.

And us, believing it - knowing it - to be true.

The Vacuous Age

I have been thinking, of late, about this corrosive and entropic time we are living in as the modern iteration of “The Dark Ages”, but whatever has been the metaphorical and even biblical power of this word “dark”, it is irredeemably lost to us.  God knows that our troubled and troublesome culture needs no more negative associations with “darkness”.  People of color suffer enough from such connotations linking blackness or darkness with ominous negativity, or even outright evil.  We necessarily must seek alternatives.

That, plus my cursory research into that medieval antecedent reveals that the period generally maligned as “The Dark Ages” (those 900 years beginning in the 5th century with the fall of Rome and the descent of the Vikings) wasn’t, in reality, the “darkness” Petrarch construed it to be when he assigned it that unflattering name.

Our age, however, seems every bit so empty.  It isn’t this time the Roman Empire that is collapsing around us, but our own American version of it which has ceased to stand for much of anything, save a bullying and malignant sense of our own entitled exceptionalism.  It isn’t literal Vikings who are falling upon us with a vengeance, but rather their political descendants who are channeling their vicious, marauding, “no holds barred” terror.  “The Vacuous Age” seems as appropriately descriptive as it is sad.

And in the spirit of “vacuity”, there seems to be no mindfulness of the gravity endemic to this moment in history - no organizing, over-arching, meaning-making center.  Whatever noble aspirations and elevating convictions - whatever grounding values and moral principles - that might have shaped and fueled us as a culture in prior seasons have dissipated, leaving behind a cacophonous emptiness, an anarchical void, a vapid toxicity.

We have entered in real life that moment in the movie “Ghostbusters” when the power to the containment grid was shut off, releasing all the heretofore captured and contained spooks who burst through the roof of the converted fire station and wreak havoc on New York City.  

Our moral power has been shut off, and our collective ghosts have all been let loose.  And it isn’t pretty.  

In a word, we have become sociopathically mean - punitive, repressive, suppressive, manipulative, and dishonest.  We behave violently, brutishly, selfishly.  And we seem neither to notice or care.  We do what we want to do for no apparent reason other than that it is what we want to do, regardless of whether it is noble, virtuous, or constructive.  

We have become vacuous.  

I don’t want to be misunderstood.  I’m not mourning the demise of, or calling for the resurrection of some Falwellian “Moral Majority” which, in reality, represented neither morality nor a majority.  I am, however, aching for the recovery of some ennobling center, some reweaving of the social fabric that honors the diversity of the public “commons”, that lives in and through an awareness of the larger realities that variously nudge and constrain and twistingly contort us - meta-forces like systemic evil, environmental degradation, capitalistic overreach, the erosion of respect for human life, and the reality of our own mortality.  Deaf and blind to these framing forces, we will continue in our determined drive to wipe each other out.  “Wipe”, on second thought, being exactly the wrong verb.  Implicitly viewing each other and the world we collectively inhabit as toilets, we are suicidally, homicidally and quite literally poisoning and drowning ourselves and each other in our mutual defecation.  Wiping is certainly in order, but we are too oblivious to our filth to recognize the need.

If it sounds bad, it is.  

If it sounds hopeless, it isn’t.  

If, as we have been taught since childhood, we are made in the image of God, we have the capacity to speak new, more generative words, and enact more rehabilitative behaviors.  We can choose to stop shooting each other, denigrating and mocking one another.  We can choose to stop ignoring, blaspheming and discarding all that simply is not “us”.  Creation itself demonstrates the virtue of harmonious balance - of mutually beneficial interdependence - but we must rediscover the humility to observe and heed the instruction.  

We can, of course, if we quit standing in our own way.  

It just remains to be seen if we will - if we will choose to bring to an early close this Vacuous Age, and refill the cultural, moral and interpersonal emptiness with the vitalizing nectar that lubricates our rusted collective.

It remains to be seen if we will, and if it will take us 900 years to invite a new and more flourishing Renaissance.

Seasons Greetings

 Among the detritus of the holidays now behind us is a card from an organization we support.  Perhaps five inches by seven, the heavy card stock piece struck me as a viable book mark, which accounts for its placement at the ready on my bedside table.  “Seasons Greetings,” it trumpets, and while I know such verbiage is controversial I’m rather grateful for it.  True, “Merry Christmas” is the purer sentiment, and I know that many view the more generic greeting to be a cultural sellout to nefarious secularism, or worse - a diluting pandering to the supposed evils of profaning multi-culturalism”. 

But I harbor no disapproval. Indeed, in this case I unapologetically prefer it.  There is, after all, the promising utility of the card, yes, along with the sentimentally significant hand-signed gratitude of the sender.  And then there is the embossed admonition of the mentor/sage:  “Be joyful because it is humanly possible.”  

I - and those around me - can benefit from that reminder.

All those, yes, but it is the portability of the presenting sentiment that teases my imagination.  Seasons Greetings.  There is, I note, no possessive apostrophe in the greeting - as if it belonged to, and was bounded by, the moment.  Not, “season’s greetings”, but rather “seasons greetings”, as in “greetings for the seasons”.  Omitting the punctuation engenders a generosity I appreciate.  It is, after all, not simply Christmas that needs a greeting - not simply December or, more broadly, winter.  Every season could benefit from a kindly greeting, and a fresh, reminding nudge toward joy.

Because in every season - the drab sluggishness of winter, the muddy renewal of spring, the blistering weediness of summer, the languid chilling of autumn - joy is humanly possible.

Blessings, then, on this New Year already unfolding, and the greetings hungered for and received in each of its seasons, and the joy that will be their labor and their fruit.

The Heals and Toes of God’s Coming Reign

“The Spirit is moving farther and farther from the centers of power and propriety toward those most victimized by the empire.”

(Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope)

For years I was privileged to share ministry with an organist of international acclaim and accomplishment who was, at the same time, among the humblest of friends. Having preceded me by decades in the chancel of this historic church, his tenure there continued beyond my own 19. Countless sanctuaries across the country are filled with the music of his students - congregations who never heard Carl’s name but who were nonetheless blessed by his pedagogical and artistic excellence. Not merely a musician who happened to play in a church, Carl was a church musician who was attuned to the movements of worship - its surprises and inspirations - and responded to them as the Spirit led. As I acknowledged at his funeral a few years ago, Carl was my pastor, though he surely would have balked at the attribution. In the wordless eloquence of music, he proclaimed the gospel in transformational ways. Sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, sometimes improvisationally and sometimes according to the massive scores he had reproduced and taped together and positioned on the music rack, Carl reliably elevated whatever I might dribble out from the pulpit up to within close sight of heaven. Quite often, in ways that give fresh and tangible meaning to the overworn, increasingly cloying phrase, his literally were the “hands and feet of Jesus” that transported us over its threshold.

I was struck, when I had the disciplined patience to listen carefully, how often all that vitality was carried by his feet, sliding over the peddles with deceptively subtle power. Most of the time, the fingers ignited the flash and fizz. Their sprints and pirouettes, their trills and trumpeting command of the melody garnered most of our aural attention. Only rarely did we notice that, for all the noteworthy agility of the fingers, the heft of the music was borne by the feet; that without them, the notes prancing above them would be shallow, thin, and reedy. One could stand and watch and be mesmerized by the hands dancing upon the keys, while all the time, virtually hidden from view by console and bench, were the feet, moving the measures to their compositional resolution. Given that one of Carl’s rituals of grace was to polish the shoes of his students before their senior recital, I think he understood this better than I.

I thought of Carl and his laboring feet as I reflected afresh on the Christmas story. As Luke unfolds the story, the cast of characters is striking. The “where” and the “who” and the “among whom” is notable for what is missing. There are no “important” people - no “movers and shakers”, no rich and powerful influencers. There is no castle or Capitol, no prestigious address. There are only peasants and poor in a marginal town, laborers and lambs, an old lady and a young girl, and their husbands who followed rather than led.

“It’s a strange way to change the world,” we might say to God. And revealing, as Kelley Nikondeha hints in the quotation above. “God is working his purpose out,” the old hymn almost metronomically sings, but hardly in the gears and engines we might expect. Through the “irrelevant poor” and peripheral,

according to Luke, rather than the name-recognized and volubly “powerful.”

“But what about the kings?” someone will surely object. “Surely their presence counters the claim.”

Of course the answer is in the clarification that the magi in Matthew’s telling were scholars, not kings, and “not from around here” at that. Foreigners and academics - adjectives neither of which would afford them credence today.

We in the church could benefit from reading this precious story with a different set of eyes - one’s not blinded by the celebrity politicians we love to trail around after like obsequious sycophants, thirstily lapping up any drivel of “significance” they might leak out in a shallow puddle behind them. We have become addicted to the center, to the klieg lights, to the loud, to the prestigious. Having given up on persuasion, we have, like the tyrants of every generational empire, settled for coercion. One of the most dangerous places to stand today is between us church people and a news camera, or a politician, oozing facile moralities and certainties about God’s approbations and disapprovals.

Meanwhile, God strikes a match and lights a candle in the bleakness of the periphery, among the utilitarian creatures and common folk where most of us have forgotten - or would never think - to look. And from there, with them, sets about to change the world.

God changing the world with the pedals and the feet; 

Never mind what the hands are playing.

It is Hot Here

In recent days I posted on Facebook the news that I had placed first in an international writing competition sponsored by a cultural group in Spello, Italy.  It was, of course, a rich honor that I savor.  The parameters of the contest limited prose submissions to a single page, double-spaced.  Of course, by sharing the news of the award, I opened myself to the inevitable requests to read the winning piece.  With no small amount of humility, then, I reprint it below, affording the reader the opportunity to argue with the judges.  It is, as they rightly discerned, a dark piece, but ultimately a hopeful one.  As far as I am concerned, it is that hope which is far more important than the prose.  If, then, you find any inspiration to join me in that hopefulness, that would be more precious to me than the prize money.  With that, then - keeping in mind that it was written in August - the submission:

It is hot here.  

That isn’t unusual in these latter days of summer, but the heat is compounded by extended drought.  It has not rained for weeks.  The grass browns and refuses to grow.  The wildflowers drip their color.  The sunflowers bow their heads, no longer able to seek the sun.  Great cracks cleave the soil.  Across the road, the corn, for which this farmland is famous, is shriveling.  The rivers, once flowing and then reduced to simply muddy soil, are now but hardened dirt.  No longer navigable by boat, we walk there.

It is hot here.  And dry.  And all of us are withering.

I am talking not just about the climate, but about the cultural climate as well in which nothing has the relational breath to grow.  Fecundity is yesterday’s virtue.  The present season is loud, but thoughtless; roiling but stifling.  Rhetorical flames scorch and savage, and the cracks pull wider, deepening.

It is hot here.  And suffocatingly dry.  We, too, are cleaving.

Summertime should be the season when the promissory notes of spring come due.  We should be plucking and savoring the nurtured and nourished harvest.  Instead we shelter away, avoiding the yellowed leaves and wrinkling fruit of our gardens and orchards and communities, praying for rain.

Rain from the clouds, and cooling rain from each other.  In the meantime, we are withering.

 

And then I recall that the native plants in the prairie – the species with deep roots adapted through the centuries to the vagaries of climate and diverse abuse – depend upon occasional fires to clear invasive encroachments and crack open protective seed shells so that new life can flourish.

We pray, then, for rain; and for roots anchored that deep, and for seeds of new life liberated by the fires that encircle us.

We pray that fecundity - yesterday’s virtue – might yet be tomorrow’s hope.

A Paradoxical Gaudete

It is the 3rd Sunday of Advent, a mark of seasonal time traditionally labeled as “Joy.”  It is a poignant juxtaposition.

This weekend our small congregation of family convened at the south Texas graveside where an open grave would receive my mother’s ashes.  Together contemplated the immensity of the moment - the profundity of the finality; verbalized a few remembrances, read a couple of scripture verses, joined hands in a prayer, lowered the precious box, and accepted the offered shovel.  Each of us took a turn, replacing the soil that had been broken into a furrow to receive this seed of eternal life.  Scoop by scoop, a final scrape and a smoothing, and then the awkward silence of completion.  A few more words, then taking our seats back in the car, we drove away.  

We have thought a lot about this conflictual transition - individually and collectively.  There is, of course, the chasmic loss - of routine and companionship for our Dad after 70 years of marriage; of anchoring, circumscribing maternal love for my brother and me.  Like turning, shifting tiles of a kaleidoscope our orientation has not yet settled into a new pattern.  If it ever will.  

And yet pushing against this tumbling void is a grateful experience of peace.  For a lifetime Mother nursed a body that was rarely a friend and miserably often was an active enemy.  Without belaboring the details, she bore it courageously, graciously, tenaciously.  She once enumerated the surgeries she had undergone through the years.  It was an extensive list.  She suffered, though few would know it except in these latter months.  Hardly a tragic figure, Mother saw herself as the most fortunate person alive.  A constellation of deep faith, exuberant joy, creativity and nourishing attention, she routinely drank the nectar of happiness squeezed from the stones of circumstance.  If she hurt along the way, that, she would have adjudged, was small enough price to pay.  

But she hurt, and we knew it.  Collectively we ached on her behalf.

Among the traditional readings for this roadside pause in Advent are verses from the prophet Isaiah.  Historically they were addressed to the exiled people of Israel, aching to return home.  The words describe the landscape of the spirit as well as the terrain separating where they were from where they longed to be.  They are, I know, corporate words of passage and promise.  

But suddenly, this time around, they are acutely personal ones as well.  No longer words of far off and hoped for redemption, I hear them now as promise fulfilled; assurance satisfied - a highway not only cleared but traveled; a stream in the desert buoyantly floated down.  With joy, indeed.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus  it shall blossom abundantly 

and rejoice with joy and shouting.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands 

and make firm the feeble knees. 

Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

“Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you.” 

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; 

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness 

and streams in the desert; 

the burning sand shall become a pool 

and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp;

the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 

A highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Holy Way;

the unclean shall not travel on it,

but it shall be for God’s people;

no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. 

No lion shall be there,

nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

but the redeemed shall walk there. 

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return 

and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

(Isaiah 35:1-10)

We will light today this 3rd candle of Advent - not one of the purple ones of elusively opaque and enigmatic hope, but the pink one proclaiming realized joy.  Whatever Mary might have thought of that divergent color, Merita would have loved it.  Pink was her favorite color. 

Strength and restoration.  The grace of new life.  The Holy Way the prophet bespoke, paved with the petals of gladness and joy, from which sorrow and sighing have fled away.  

With gratitude and peace we light this candle.  Those, and perhaps I can even say it amidst the enduring grief,

Joy.