Perhaps the Elevation Enabled us to Hear More Clearly

The church I last served had an actual “upper room.”  It was a simple, open space on the topmost floor of the building just beneath the chime tower and the cross, where youth of a different era had once roller skated.  With a simple linoleum floor, portal windows and a sloped, painted wood ceiling it exuded the feel of an attic, far away from the sidewalks and trafficked streets five floors below.  It was the perfect location for Maundy Thursday services through years.  

 

In the Christian calendar, “Maundy Thursday” is the Thursday of Holy Week – the last week of Jesus’ life. Thursday, the evening of the “last supper,” after which Jesus was arrested by his friend’s betrayal, the effluence of which was Good Friday and its crucifixion.  “Maundy,” from the Latin for “mandate” or, more commonly, “commandment.”  

 

Neither Matthew nor John among the New Testament writers ascribes elevation to the setting for Jesus’ last evening with his disciples, simply referencing a borrowed “room” in which they gathered.  But Christian imagination through the years has been sparked by the notation in both Mark and Luke of “a large room upstairs.”  Since we, in our situation, had the architectural assets to take those writers literally, we eschewed the sanctuary on those annual occasions in favor of that humble space at the top of our building.

 

As the appointed hour approached, the smallish crowd would travel up the elevator, find our seats among the folding chairs arranged in a square, facing inward around a simply set table set with a filled chalice and a stark loaf of bread, flanked elsewhere in the open clearing by a couple of stools and basins of water.  The format of those experiences varied, but always the tone – established as much by the room as by the liturgy – was intimate, almost hushed.   There would be simple songs – unaccompanied, or supported by a guitar or accordion; there would be spoken words, responses and prayers.  Eventually the bread would be broken and the cup would be shared.  And then bare feet, stripped of their shoes and socks and all pretensions of sophistication, would be entrusted into hands that would tenderly bathe and dry them in awkward quietness, until the silence was broken with the familiar words of Jesus:

“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you…I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

I loved those services, and I’ll confess, miss them.  I loved that room and the Spirit it could invite.  Sure, more glorious music could easily be found, and more poetic liturgies could be shared.  But there was, for me, something profoundly inspiring about those simple and austere gatherings on the 5^th floor.  

 

Something both provocative and evocative.  

Something grounding; centering.

Something awe-filling.

Something…holy.

 

There was something about the unadorned, artless, stripped-down elementariness of the moments that enabled us – enabled me – to plainly hear and receive afresh the routinely choked-out but elemental definition of discipleship; that to which the motions and the words, the loaf and cup, the basin and towel all point:  love.  “Love one another.”  This, according to Jesus, is how people will know who you are – not by your creeds or your piety or your confessions or your sacraments; not by your buildings or your pronouncements; not by your liturgies, your blandishments of scripture, nor your songs. 

 

By your love.  By the way that you love like Jesus loved.  

 

Bare feet, received by unoffended hands, and tended as if they were one’s own.

 

Because in every way that ought to matter, they are.

 

The service would end, and that upper room would empty.  But something had changed among us.  There never was much chatter in the elevators on the trip back down to ground level.  We were “cleaner”, I suppose, in more ways than one; “clearer”, at least, about who we were and what lay ahead of us, and chitchat didn’t seem to fit.  We had, as it were, work to do.  

 

The work of discipleship.

 

The work of stripping down and leaning over.

 

The work of this “new commandment.”

 

The plain, ordinary, unglamorous, foot-washing sort of work, in a word, of love.

 

Falling in Love With Lent

 “Always fall in love with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against; with.”

         —Robert Frost

 

No one needs to point out one more time that it hasn’t been an easy year, or enumerate the experiences and ones we’ve lost in the course of it.  I’ve heard many spiritually devout mutter, upon washing the ashes off their foreheads, that they didn’t feel like giving anything up for Lent this time around – such a discipline being redundant amidst enduring quarantine precautions. We’ve been “giving things up” for the last 12 months.

 

It’s true, of course.  Lent took hold a year ago and never let go.  We may have taken a few determined moments to hum a hallelujah when the calendar announced that it was Easter, but it was a forced refrain.  It didn’t feel like any stone had been rolled away, and so we settled back into our Wednesday ashes.  Here we are now, twelve months later, still in the throes of Lent.  Sure, one after another silly politician tells us that the sun is shining and the water’s warm and we should jump right in.  But as a friend of mine recently observed, once you’ve grabbed a live wire, it’s hard to approach, let alone put your hand again on, an electric fence regardless of who might be assuring us that it is turned off. 

 

The season of Lent continues…

 

…which is a richer, more generative observation than it sounds.  Though Lent has largely been reduced, in our understanding, to an onerous and obligatory season of sacrifice, its real purpose is examination, clarification, and realignment with the core of who we are and are called to be.  Jesus was driven into the wilderness – the biblical story that informs the season of Lent – not to subject himself to deprivation “because it would be good for him,” but to distill and clarify the values by which he would live out his life.  The prophet Jeremiah would say that Jesus was setting a personal plumb line. 

 

If Jesus went about that reflective work of his own volition, we have had the wilderness imposed upon us.  One day we were laughing and playing and going about our routines.  The next day the doors were closed and we were working from home.  One day we were healthy and slaying the dragons.  The next, we were constantly taking our temperature, wearing masks and lamenting the loss of those whose death we couldn’t gather to solemnize.  But along the way we have done more than grieve and take precautions and feel afraid.  Like Jesus in the wilderness, we have sorted through our circumstances and selves and separated into piles the “essentials” to keep and the “unnecessary accretions” to set aside.  We’ve baked more bread, made more meals, planted more gardens, and talked with one another about important things.  

 

Not entirely, of course.  Overlaying all this has been a poisonous political season that made a global pandemic seem like a bedtime story.  In the conduct of it we have learned that it will take more than a deadly and paralyzing calamity to break up the sedimented thinking and behaviors that have hardened portions of our hearts and lives and the spaces between us.  

 

Still, in breathtaking ways the Lenten pandemic has sifted us, stripped us, stilled us, worked on us, clarified us; pushed us, of necessity, to reevaluate, reimagine, and innovate.  Not everyone, to be sure.  Some have never ceased to kick and scream and whine.  Countless shops and bars and eateries have closed, the victims of financial starvation.  

 

But there are others who channeled the resilient spirit of Robert Frost – who may not have “fallen in love with” what we’ve been asked to accept, but have accepted it, nonetheless, and worked with it rather than against it.  I think of the restaurants that have found new ways to set virtual tables; businesses that created new pathways to serve their customers; musicians and theatre groups who have created new “stages” on which to perform; churches who have done more than point a jerky camera at a talking head and have created altogether new and beautiful experiences of worship that are more than makeshift, and which evocatively, aesthetically connect with the spiritually hungry far beyond their immediate neighborhood or town.  These, the resilient among us, have leaned into working “with” instead of “against.”  And my guess is – my prayer is – that much of who we have become and much we have trained ourselves to see will endure.

 

We’ve learned some things, in other words, about ourselves and each other, pried away from the present to attend to the possible.

 

Precisely what the season of Lent is supposed to accomplish in and among us.  And if it has taken a year to accomplish it instead of the requisite six weeks, well, the garden was worth planting and the bread was worth baking; the meals were worth preparing and the conversations were worth having.  And who knows what else about all we've been forced to accept we will discover we've come to love.  Surely that warrants a modest pre-Easter "Hallelujah".  

The Greatness of Large Ideas and Noble Ideals

I think now that I was wrong about the slogan.

 

For the past several years we have collectively been regaled with the enjoinder to “Make America Great Again.”  The phrase has energized the populace – thrilling some, while nauseating others.  Count me among the latter.  But I am having second thoughts.  

 

I know this is dangerous.  Such a reconsideration requires a careful, close reading of ourselves and our history – indeed, our collective soul- and Americans aren’t known for subtlety.  Nuance has not been our gift.  We draw with bold strokes – with jumbo crayons on a wide-lined tablet.  We know well the three primary colors, but can’t be bothered with the shades and hues.  So it is that we talk of capitalism and communism, law and order and anarchy, morality and corruption, patriotism and treason, Christianity and atheism, government involvement and personal liberty as if such binaries were the only options.  They aren’t, of course.  There are vast spaces and limitless possibilities between any such polarities, but exploring them, teasing them out and considering their potentialities requires an intellectual patience and labor that, for the most part, we aren’t willing to invest.

 

All that acknowledged, I accept the risk.  Never mind that the progenitor of the phrase in question is someone I experience to be a despicable blight on the American consciousness, I don’t want to turn a blind eye.  We should, indeed, strive to make America great again.  By that I do not mean that we should endeavor to resurrect some mythical moment in our past when all was right with ourselves and the world.  This country never has been “great” in the jingoistic ways that politicians trumpet.  America never has been remotely close to embodying all that it aspired to be.  There surely is no prior period in U.S. history to which women would want to return, or people of color, or indigenous peoples, or those differently abled or sexually oriented or aligned. The past, for all but the narrowest elite and privileged, was defined by constraint, invisibility, or outright repression.  That hardly sounds like “greatness.” There never was such a wondrous and idyllic season in our history that was somehow punctured when voting rights were extended, when marriage equality was recognized, when women gained agency over their bodies, when prayer was supposedly removed from schools and access to affordable health care was expanded.  We did not lose our greatness by liberalizing immigration policies or making room for different religious expressions or reevaluating words in our vocabulary that can exclude and offend.  

 

What once made America great was not our actualization, but our aspiration.  We thought big, we reached high; we had sprawling dreams.

 

Like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. 

 

Like “liberty and justice for all.”

 

Like the pursuit of “a more perfect union.”

 

Among other lofty, aspirational goals.

 

But somewhere along the way we gave all that up.  We reduced our tools to nailing down rather than prying open; to whittling away rather than building on.  We fell in love with “no” instead of “why not?”  Our large and noble ideals were reduced to puny ideological prejudices.  Our statecraft became obstructionism.  Victory became more compelling than wisdom; maneuvering became more practiced than persuading; coercing more than inviting.  Any potential greatness we may have known has given way to a runty petulance that ought to embarrass us all – liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or any of the other silly jerseys we have come to wear.  We have become miserably small not because we have grown weak, or because we lost manufacturing jobs or signed treaties, or because of any terrorizing or threatening or morally corroding “them”.  We have shrunk politically, morally, economically, and globally because our interest in big ideas has atrophied, our sense of the whole has narrowed to the individual, and our inquisitive patience with wonder has fossilized.  Content with what we think we know, we haven’t the time or the tolerance for what we might yet learn or comprehend or apprehend.  

 

And it is a smaller and smaller place to be.  

 

We used to be grander than that.  We used to be greater than that.  And I miss that.

 

So let us abandon this village of Lilliputian petulance and thought, and indeed make America great again – not the America that ever actually existed, but the America we once-upon-a-time aspired, together, to be.  

Somewhere Along the Way, Iowa Got Lost

I still remember the characterization.

 

Living out of state at the time, I had been contacted about considering a vocational opportunity in Des Moines.  I knew nothing about Iowa, and even had to consult a map to situate it in my cosmos.  A friend who had until recently lived in Iowa called to check in on my consideration, and to counter any apprehensions I might have about living here.  

 

“Yes, they are all driving tractors,” she reported, “but they are listening to NPR inside the cab.”

 

Of course, even then it was hyperbole.  Iowa’s farmer-driven identity has steadily given way to inexorable urbanization – a transformation already well underway by the time the movers unpacked our boxes in the winter of 1993.  But if there were fewer tractors than my friend had led me to believe, she was right about NPR.  Iowans, I would soon discover, were sharp, intelligent and actively aware citizens who eschewed easy labels.  Slightly right of the political center, Iowa had nonetheless a reputation for independent thought.  

 

Before the rest of the country deigned to recognize indigenous peoples as “human,” the Iowa Legislature bucked the prevailing federal statutes and sold – with title – land back to the Meskwaki tribe – implicitly if not officially acknowledging personhood.  It wouldn’t be the last time Iowa would lead the way with imagination.  In 1873 the University of Iowa Law School became the first in the nation to graduate a woman.  Iowans may not have invented the community college system, which was trialed in Illinois in 1901, but we quickly recognized the merits of the idea, establishing the first of our campuses in 1918.  Decades later, Republican Robert Ray was conspicuously alone among his gubernatorial peers in the country in responding to President Carter’s plea to states to receive refugees, welcoming desperate refugees from Southeast Asia and establishing a state office of Immigration.   Decades later, Iowa broke new ground again by dismantling the legal obstacles to same-sex marriages.  When I moved to town, and for years to come, we were a pragmatically “purple” body politic, with a U.S. Senator from each major party, a divided statehouse, and Governors both Republican and Democrat.  

 

Public education was a high value statewide, with a passionately defended preference for local control; insisting that the best decisions for our kids are made by those closest to them.

 

And then we began to change.  I’m not enough of a social scientist to pinpoint a date or a cause – perhaps we simply succumbed to the same debilitating infection of ideological certitude that has swept so much of the country.  All I know is that my beloved adopted home – thoughtful, independent, common-sensible Iowa – has become sedimented into a dry, crusted and lifeless ideological aridity.  Suddenly the “state knows best”, wrenching local control away from communities and school districts.  At a time when our leaders are fecklessly flailing with managing a localized global pandemic, the State Legislature is meanwhile debating a “bathroom bill”, reverting public consciousness to a fixation on genitalia at the expense of human beings; proposing a return to the non-efficacious barbarism of capital punishment, stripping professors at state universities of tenure, enshrining gun rights in the state constitution, and strangling women’s right to an abortion.  

 

Meanwhile, when the nation’s Capital was invaded in January with insurrectionists destroying and defacing “the People’s House” and threatening assassination – a crisis I would like to think superseded bathroom talk - what did we hear from our leaders? 

 

Crickets.

 

Nothing.

 

I wrote our two U.S. Senators at the time to solicit their views, and eventually received nothing more than boilerplate drivel by way of response.  

 

In the end, it wasn’t complete silence.  In response to a New York Times reporter’s question about the Impeachment Trial of the ex-President that grew out of the Capital invasion, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst described it as “a total shit show”.

 

Oh my.  We seem stuck in the bathroom.

 

I don’t know what has happened.  We Iowans used to be so reasonable, intelligent, and articulate.  In place of all those our intelligence, our morality, our compassion and our acute perceptiveness have, in recent years, fossilized into ideological stone.  And it isn’t pretty.

 

What will loosen the sedimentation?  I can’t help but believe that it will start by talking less and listening more; preaching less and discussing more; honoring the voices of each other.  There will necessarily be required an excavation of the kind of humility that begins with the presumption that we have more to learn, more to understand than we have heretofore comprehended.  Change occurs best, it will be good to remember, in the midst of genuine community where minds are moved by the winsomeness of our arguments, not constrained by the forcefulness of our office.  

 

And failing all that, perhaps it means climbing up for a long tractor ride and tuning the radio dial back to NPR.

  

 

Rekindling a Longing for the Warmth of Truth

 My first experience was in the mid-1980’s when every year or so a non-descript letter would arrive at my office warning me, as a pastor, and enlisting my support against efforts by atheist agitators to pass legislation in Congress banning religious broadcasts from the airwaves.  The Federal Communications Commission was mentioned; a particular bill number was referenced and I was urged to contact my congressman (they were all men in those days) to encourage his opposition.  It seemed shocking that such a move could be gaining traction in the hallowed halls of government, and wanted to learn more.  The internet was still years away, so investigation required more rudimentary tools than Google. I picked up the phone, called Directory Assistance for the number of the Federal Communications Commission, and proceeded.  A kind official took my call, and heard my questions.  There was no such regulatory change being considered, he told me.  There had been no such House Bill introduced.  That legislative file number did not exist.  It was all a hoax.  He thanked me for doing anything I could to counter this annoying conspiracy theory (mine was clearly was not the first call he had fielded), sent me documentary, supportive evidence by mail, and I filed the information away after throwing away the provoking letter.  

Until the next one came along, fanning the very same flames.  And the one after that.

 

And then there was the revolving suspicion about the Proctor and Gamble logo (satanic) and later the Starbucks logo (demonic).

 

Falsehoods, all of them.  Conspiracy theories stirred up and fanned by the nervous, the fearful, the intrinsically suspicious and the religiously paranoid.  But those were the good old days, when such fictions were promulgated only every few years.  Now they are manufactured multiple times daily.

 

In recent days, just to note one example, a story has been circulating on Facebook – an angering story; the kind that makes you mutter about how mad and miserable the world has become – a story usually introduced with the attribution, “shared by a friend”.  The story reports that the misery in Texas caused by the recent extreme weather and resulting power failures was at least exacerbated by the refusal of the current administration in Washington to allow state authorities to ramp up the state’s generating capacities. The result, according to the story, was the human tragedy that ensued – misery that could have at least been reduced had the federal authorities been less politically punitive and more humanitarian, more lenient, flexible and responsive. 

 

It is a horrifying story – precisely detailing and colorfully illustrating the kind of political maneuverings that have infuriated the electorate. 

 

The only trouble is, the “news” story was false.  In fact, it is worse than false.  It gets the story slanderously backward. Yes, Texas authorities requested a variance from federal regulators in light of forecasted weather conditions (variances in the level of polluting emissions permitted, not power generation per se), and the request was…granted.  Matter-of-factly.  There were no arguments, no back and forth, no wrangling or hand-wringing or horse trading.  There was the simple agreement that in light of the approaching danger and anticipated emergency demand, the variance should be approved.  Power generation ramped up in Texas, until malfunctions caused by the bitter temperatures intervened.  There was no conspiracy.  There was simply weather too cold for the equipment as it had been configured. There is almost certainly blame to be assigned for the suffering thousands experienced, and past decisions to be reviewed and reassessed, but it serves no one to point fingers wherever it feels good. And in this case, it simply isn’t Washington, no matter how satisfying that might be.

 

How do I know this?  Troubled by the allegation, I looked into it.  I researched it.  It isn’t hard to do these days.  The story was easy to track down; easy to bump into the miscellaneous fact checker websites who’s business it is to pursue their own truth seeking.  With serious and honest pursuit of accuracy, they test, they footnote and document; they question and verify.  They both confirm and debunk.  It turns out that the original story was concocted by an ideological organ with a political ax to grind – one that Facebook has flagged as inaccurate and deceptive, which is why the story is passed along now without attribution. “Friend” to “friend.”  Falsehood to falsehood.

 

I cite this example not to vilify those who perpetuate the falsehood.  I bring it up as an example of the ongoing fomenting that simply needs to, well, run out of gas.  There ought to be room to disagree on policy issues - we will, indeed, need to argue; but let's argue intelligently and well.  Let us do each other the favor of starting with bonafide information. If we are going to debate, let’s at least debate over what is, rather than what we might enjoy thinking might be.  It might be too much to hope that we “expect the best,” of each other, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to assume the worst.  We don't have to be this morally flaccid, this intellectually facile, this relationally puerile.

 

It simply isn’t that hard to verify information. We should have learned how to do that in junior high. And learned that we ought to do so while younger than that.  Let’s stop making fools of ourselves and do our homework. The world can’t afford a nation of loose cannons, constantly firing.  In a circle.  

 

There is enough mayhem blighting this earth – more than enough global accidents to slow down and gawk over as we pass by.  Surely what the world needs from us is leadership, not simply one more source of bloody and morbid entertainment.  

It Isn’t Socialism, It’s Power Sharing

When Lori and I installed solar panels on our farmstead several years ago, we had a choice to make.  “For whom is this energy being generated?”  It was a pragmatic question, but also a philosophical one.  If our intent was to be “off the grid” and generate electricity for our household alone, we would need to add battery storage to the system to sustain us through the nights and even those cloudy or snow-covered days when generation is diminished or halted.  If we intended to remain connected to the world at large, then batteries were an unnecessary expense.  Functionally, we didn’t need to be self-sufficient.   Power lines are readily available in our area; our home, in fact, was already connected to them.  

 

The larger question, then, would lean us into the philosophical realm.  For whom, indeed, would this energy be generated?

 

That we ultimately opted to connect our solar panels to the energy grid strikes many as incomprehensible.  We remain as subject to power outages as anyone else on our gravel road.  A propane-fed backup generator gets us over those humps.  Because autonomy – complete self-reliance – was never our intent.  Instead, we rather like the symbiotic reciprocity of contributing, and receiving.  The larger body of electrical consumers benefits from our overproduction while we earn credit; when we under-generate, we use those credits and then purchase more.

 

Somehow, in recent years, that system of mutual benefit has gotten a bad name.

 

Of late, America has been characterized as an amalgam of totally independent monopods who simply wear the same jersey.  There is no “us,” just an accumulation of “me’s” who are singularly responsible for themselves.  We are “free”, to cite the current holy incantation.  “Don’t fence me in.”  “Don’t tread on me.”  

 

So it was that the Mayor of a Texas town, amidst the cold darkness of his town brought about by the power outage of a paralyzing winter storm, could shout to his constituents:

“The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! [sic]…. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts…. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family! Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic].”

 

“Take care of yourself.”  Anything else, we are told by the angry Mayor and just about anyone else in the prevailing thought of the day, is socialism.

 

But “socialism” is a shibboleth; a tired and sad trope used to divide the good from the bad, the lazy from the strong, the righteous from the parasitic.  Expecting one another to live and contribute their best, to take personal responsibility, and to be stewards of their gifts, resources and opportunities does not negate the concomitant truth that “we are in this together.”  I learned the latter not from some Marxist manifesto, but from my parents, my church community and its example, and the West Texas town in which I was raised.  I learned the former from those same teachers who found in the two principles no contradiction.

 

It isn’t an alien rapport.  We receive this paradoxical instruction from the craftsmanship of our own civilization – celebrating independence and privacy and the stimulating value of personal freedom, while simultaneously obviating those freedoms in the interest of the common good. We impose traffic regulations, erect stop signs and string signal lights to instruct who should “go” and who should “stop.”  We require seatbelts and liability insurance.  We abridge our otherwise wide-ranging freedom of speech, outlawing such mischief as crying “fire” in a crowded room where there is no blaze. We require, with only limited exceptions, vaccinations against virulent diseases.  These examples, along with thousands of similar abridgments – all for the common good.  Do we go too far at times?  Of course!  But we can just as harmfully become too libertine.  The political system exists, in part, to manage the tension between too little and too much.  Surely we are sophisticated enough to resist the silly – and dangerous – binary alternatives of all one or the other.

 

But if the disciplined witness of civilization isn’t teacher enough, we could revisit the scriptures we claim to hold in such high esteem.  Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures it was the failure not only to honor God in prayer and piety, but also the failure to honor God in the care of one another – especially the poorest and weakest - that routinely earned the people holy wrath.  In the Christian scriptures, the “one anothering” passages express the core of the gospel message – love one another, protect one another, feed and clothe and shelter and attend to one another.  Loving God is all mixed up with loving neighbor and self.  According to the letter to the Ephesians, we are to honor and hone and mature our particularly personal gifts not for the advancement and aggrandizement of self, but “for the upbuilding of the whole.”

 

The upbuilding of the whole.  Because we individuals are in this together.

 

It has been cold here in Iowa these recent weeks – bitterly, deeply sub-zero cold.  In the main chicken yard behind our house are two coops, between the two of them appropriately designed to house our 30 or so laying hens.  Chickens, as a rule, are fairly independent creatures, drifting off to remote parts of the yard to hunt and peck and, when back at the feeders and waterers, shoving each other aside to access fair share.  But on these bitter winter nights, all 30 of them pack themselves into a single coop that, as I mentioned, was sized for half that number.  It’s crowded and cramped and likely uncomfortable.  They seem to intuit, however, that the night will be difficult, and that if they are to survive, they need the warmth and shelter of each other.  It is, to return to the beginning, a kind of “power sharing agreement.”

 

Is that socialism?  

 

Once upon a time I would have responded, “No, that is common-sensically human.”  But perhaps I have unjustly attributed it.  The most we can say at this point is that it is common-sensically poultry.  They somehow comprehend that they are in this together.  

 

The rest of us apparently still have a few things to learn – or, perhaps more charitably, a few things to remember.

A Day for Different Conversations

 I know, everyone is talking about the impeachment trial, variously celebrating or decrying the outcome.  Fine.  It’s not an unimportant conversation, simply secondary.  While the ex-President wasn’t convicted of treason, he was unarguably convicted of being despicable – a disgraceful leader, an affront to all that is decent, and an international embarrassment.  But I don’t suppose we needed a trial to establish that.  We knew it already.

 

So, why waste my time mired in such nonsense?  It’s Valentine’s Day, after all, and politics and the current dystopian embodiment notwithstanding, I have plenty of reasons to celebrate Love.  Yes, Love.  Capital “L.”  It is a worthy alternative concentration.  I am, when I survey my personal landscape, surrounded and routinely animated by dear and warming friends who beckon, without even knowing it, the brighter lights of my imagination.  I am cradled by a son and daughter and their significant others who augment my soul with a fresh sense of both roots and wings; with parents who continually excavate the best in me and nudge me toward more; and extended family who, like the flying buttresses of gothic cathedrals, steady and inform and expand me, reinforcing my flightier fancies.

 

All that, plus I get to spend my life with Lori Jo Alexander Diebel.   That, as I have spent the past 25 years or so discovering, is a far more wonderful topic still.  Where do I begin?  

 

On the day that I proposed, I picked up my guitar (it’s a sickness, I know.  On my gravestone will likely be carved the epitaph, “There’s a song for that.”) and sang a song.  It was a song by David Wilcox called, “Kindness,” which, though it might not sound like the most romantic tune of the ages, perfectly characterized my hoped-for bride – then, as now.  Kindness certainly doesn’t exhaust my beloved’s virtues – the list, in truth, is inexhaustible – but it is, indeed, up there at the top.  Beauty, welcome, joy, and yes, kindness.  And encouragement; how could I forget that?  Those, of course, and indulgent support.  This, from a guy who prematurely quit his job to uproot our whole marital enterprise in order to move the two of us to the country to completely start over as cultivators of the seeds, stewards of the soil, and fomenters of a fresh imagination.  She didn’t sign on for this – or, for that matter, the chickens, or the coming bees that eventually went along with it – but here we are…with her blessing, her support, and her immersion.  

 

All that, and she still makes me weak in the knees.  Well into our 24^th matrimonial year, I still feel the flutter.  It is a major part of my life’s ambition to give her reason to feel it, too. 

 

More than a distraction from troublesome current events, you are my current event, this day and always.  Happy Valentine’s Day, Lori Jo.  As the old classic sings it, dear Valentine, in your company and your embrace, “each day is Valentine’s Day.”  I’m forever grateful for the mythical arrow that has pierced my heart, and by the piercing makes me, if not exactly whole, at least yours. 

 

And that is quite enough.