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.

To Be Together

I recently officiated at a funeral for a gentleman I didn't know. It happens from time to time: a person dies devoid of church connections and the family, in need of ceremonial leadership, falls upon the kindness of a stranger. One of these days people will realize, in the looming presence of institutional absence, that anyone with a willingness to stand before a crowd and traffic-cop an order of service can emcee a funeral. In the meantime, the funeral home calls someone like me. I choose to believe that I bring a few cards to the table beyond glibness, but that's for others to judge.  The point is that the occasion doesn’t really need me - except when it does.  

In this case, the mourners gathered, I led us through the memories, rehearsed the attributes and commendations, remembered the affirmations, and reasserted the comforting commendations to the extent possible for the spiritually disconnected, and pronounced the benediction.

Afterwards there were compliments amidst the sandwiches and chips, and gratitudes. I was more than adequately appreciated. I said my goodbyes, reiterated my sympathies, and went on my way. Some days later, I received in the mail a handwritten thank-you expressing the family's appreciation for the service, but more effusively for the opportunity I had afforded them, in the days preceding the service, to sit down together and remember and talk about their loved one. It was, the note elaborated, the first time they had been able to do so since the death.

I was certainly grateful for the note. I had valued the interactions with the family and, as usually happens on such occasions, left lamenting that I had never been privileged to know the deceased.

And yet there was a poignant, melancholic element to the note.

Some years ago, we hosted a clergy renewal program here at our farmstead through which ministers would spend a day each month in work, private retreat, and guided reflection around assigned readings and the experiences with the land. Every month, during the personal retreat time, one or more of the participants returned to their car and took a nap. I had no complaint. Participants were encouraged to use that time however it might be useful and renewing. Some walked the trails, some walked the labyrinth, some sat and watched the chickens while others relaxed in the shade of a tree and journaled or read.

While others took a nap in their car.

As I say, I didn't disapprove. But I did feel sad that someone needed to pay someone a registration fee for the privilege of closing one's eyes and catching up on neglected zzz's.

Or in the more present case, needing an officiant's convening to create the time to sit down together to remember, through laughter and tears, the loved one who has just died. Why is it that we can't take a nap on our own time? How did life become too busy to grieve?

I'm happy to be the impetus - for a nap or a family moment to remember and give thanks and lament. It just makes me sad that we need that much external permission or help or insistence. Sad, I suppose, but grateful that at least it can happen then.

Is it the Protestant work ethic or the “keep a stiff upper lip” ethos, or are we simply that out of touch with ourselves?  Yes, I know there are those who push the limits of self-care - who spend so much time and invest so much energy taking care of themselves that they cease to be any use to themselves or others. But surely they are the exception.

One of these days perhaps we can grow self-aware enough to take care of ourselves - to sleep when we need to sleep; grieve when we need to grieve; share stories when we need to reminisce, and both laugh and cry without apology.

With or without some stranger’s initiative or permission.

One of these days.

In the meantime, give me a call. I'm happy to tell you to take a nap or to tearfully slobber your way through a story you will regret not sharing, or to simply hold your family member's hand.

We are, after all, in this life together.  And you can thank me later.

What We Know

It startles me to hear Iowans speak with such faux common sense.  It is so different from the pervasive groundedness that characterized these people from my first introduction to the state in the fall of 1992.  Forthright and unveneered with the sugary sweetness frosting so much of the southern concourse among which I had been raised, Iowans had a penchant for observation, rumination, and reserved but considered opinions.  Education was a collective priority, as was “retail” politics.  This, after all, is a caucus state where neighbors met in living rooms and churches and school classrooms to discuss and consider the candidates on offer.  In its DNA were barn raisings, trend bucking, magnanimity, and forward thought.  Historians and sociologists likely have explanations for how these traits evolved.  I only know it was a refreshing contrast to the “charm” ethos of my childhood where one learned the hard way not to read too much into the interpersonal and transactional facades.  This, after all, was the land of those who saw no conflict between the hymns they sang in church on Sunday mornings and the lynchings they perpetrated that night; no rub between the cordial and genteel greetings they extended by day, and the bodies they dragged behind their pickups through town after dark. 

 

Iowans, in my experience, didn’t waste a lot of time on “charm offensives” and conversational saccharine.  There was, instead, an operational assumption that you were as likely as me to have something important to say, that life was too short not to tell the truth, and that the better part of wisdom was the recognition that our particular “truth” was always and ever partial and in need of growth and correction.  Not calcification.

 

There still is some of that laying around like farm implements rusting in tall grass.  But it’s harder to find; those well-considered conversations increasingly rare among the brassier pronouncements more common now among us.  Donald Trump’s border wall has migrated northward and now divides not only countries but communities, churches, families and co-workers.  The conversations that once were common in the interactions that populate our hours have largely been replaced by arguments or suspicious silence.  We believe what we believe and encircle ourselves with a curated chorus of like minds.

 

And so it was that my larger reaction to the Governor’s newest campaign ad was sadness moreso than anger.  Far from the moral vibrancy it sought to assert, it represented, instead, a kind of death among us to be grieved.

 

"Here in Iowa, we still know right from wrong, boys from girls and liberty from tyranny."

 

There was no need for this not-so-subtle affront.  The Governor is hardly at risk of failing in her bid for reelection.  By her words she lamentably adds her voice to the cacophony of intellectually sloppy sycophants clamoring for leadership in this parade of descent.  She owes Iowans in general, and the transgender community in particular an apology.  She either does not view them as human beings and thusly deserving of common respect, or she simply does not consider them at all.  For either she should be ashamed.  Failure to understand or failure to “approve” does not warrant legal, verbal or political abuse.  People are more than a “topic”.  Personhood is more than an abstract concept to debate or dismiss.  And anyone who even pretends to be a leader should know that and act accordingly.

 

This is not the way we talk to and about each other.  This is not the way we look into the soul of one another - as Iowans have for generations - and know what we see there to be precious, holy and worthy of a priori respect.  This is not the growing edge of truth and the intellectual frontier of understanding.  This is not the bias toward community, but the prejudice that foments demonization.  This is the vile element of human nature given head.  Hardly the fertile soil of vibrant culture, it is the denuded and eroded dirt that only grows the stubbornest weeds.

 

Perhaps the John Deere company could develop a different kind of plow - a kind of social cultivator - that could pass among us and loosen the civilizational ground that has become so sedimented among us.  

 

I would like to think that lush life could green here among us once again - along with curiosity, humble inquiry, and relational generosity.  But it feels quite barren at the moment, with the Governor’s shameful characterizations the tumbleweeds blowing among us.

The Puzzlement of People

Earlier this month we visited Big Bend National Park in west Texas. The climax of one particular and otherwise easy hike involved a precarious climb up a series of boulders. Just as we were scratching our heads and evaluating the least treacherous option, a group of three hikers were descending along the same route. Seeing our apprehension, the three spread out, like a bucket brigade, and pulled us forward from one to the next and the next until we reached the safety of the plateau at trail's end. They were, we told them, visiting angels.

I thought of those angels yesterday in the context of two airports, a regional jet, and my 96 year old father for whom mobility isn't as simple as it once was. He was whisked through security and down the length of the terminal by cheerful, expediting employees who would not countenance interference. Inside the plane, and separated by several rows, one after another fellow traveler recognized his need and took him under their wing, helping however they could.

"People are good," he observed at the end of the day.

The kindness of strangers. The visitation of angels.

Juxtaposing these kindnesses, of course, is the story of a crazed ideologue who broke into the home of the Speaker of the United States House of Representative and, failing to locate the Speaker, attacked and seriously injured her husband with a hammer.

It's hard to hold these two expressions of the human race in tandem. One seems so filled with grace and generosity, the other with such malice and unmitigated, untethered aggression. Like the animalistic, faux patriotism that boiled into violence on January 6, 2021, it is the self-justifying "annihilate opposition at any cost", "end justifies the means" moral disintegration that is the stuff of anarchy. Under the guise of the "defense of freedom," it represents humanity's worst expression. Let me state the obvious: civilized, morally mature people do not act this way. They do not attack each other with hammers when they disagree.  No matter the substance of our disagreement, decent people simply do not act this way.

But here we are, arguing about who is to blame. We live in strange times when, to bastardize Charles Dickens, the best of human nature and the worst of human nature cohabit a razor's edge. But heretofore our collective "better nature" has harnessed and redirected our stormier, more destructive selves. Presently we seem to be baiting and sheltering with contrived justification our vilest impulses.

We lend a selfless hand. When that hand isn't wielding a hammer.

Just when we convince ourselves of our advanced sophistication, we prove how little we have evolved. The jungle is not far behind us.

Or the zoo.

3500 years after Moses, 2000 years after Jesus, 1500 years after Mohammed we are still attacking each other with hammers.

I'd say the religious among us need to step up our game. If we haven't forgotten everything we once were taught, we clearly yet have a long way to go in figuring out what to do with it.

Gracious generosity and violent coercion arm wrestling for the soul of a people.

It remains to be seen who will prevail.

We people are a puzzle.

The Enveloping Expanse

Arriving at dusk, the evening cool is a deceptive welcome, belying the withering sun that will find us on the hikes of subsequent days. The baking heat creeps up on you, covertly, like the ocotillo thorns veiled behind the succulent leaves. And yet your feet keep moving, drawn forward along the stony sand - sometimes upward, sometimes downward, but inexorably onward - beckoned by an inarticulate invitation; felt, rather than heard, toward...

What?

Perhaps toward more of oneself. Perhaps into a vaster comprehension of the yet inscrutable magnitude of creation's subtle immensity and complexity. Perhaps those are ultimately one and the same. These lands - we - are as towering and sculpted as the stone canyon walls; as tenacious as the desert streams; as poised and posed as the balanced rocks; as beautifully shy as the succulent blooms, seduced into color by the evanescent dew; as determined as the coyote scavenging for food; as dangerous as the mountain lions and as irritating as the thorns; as known and still unexplored as the caves, the canyons, the looming peaks, the miles of cactus-pocked sand.

Big Bend is as evocatively compelling as it is foreboding and dangerous. Like trekking the soul, exploring this larger than life landscape is as precarious as it is instructive; as grueling as it is nourishing.

Heavy-soled shoes seeking purchase; bodies bending to avoid the pricklies protruding from almost everywhere; eyes scanning for spiders or snakes.

Everything at Big Bend National Park bites, burns, punctures, trips or stings.

And takes your breath away with awe.

When the heat finally finds you, next steps begin to elude you.
​"I look to the hills. Where does my help come from​?"
Water bottles are soon as exhausted as legs. Lips crack. There are miles to go.

How can one endure an hour longer?
How can one possibly leave?

The enveloping expanse first shrinks, then expands you; first decimates, then opens you to unexperienced majesty.

My foot slips climbing the stones, who unapologetically scold, "Pay attention!" My sleeve snags on an encroaching thorn which scoffs and advises me, "Watch where you are going!" A snake slithers across the trail, pausing long enough to admonish me that I am not the only one here. My irises swing between expansion and contraction, torn between taking in the horizon versus focusing on the details.

And then the sun goes down - the mountains and stones and fatigue dissolve into stars. Black and unmitigated sky as vast as the sands, and stars the diamonds envy.

And we are one of them - one with them - born by the desert winds and God's own Spirit into the heavens.

And then the sun rises, and all begins again.

The Blessing Gift of Common Grace

The parks were a refreshing amazement. Even the people who visited them alongside of us.

In Vermont, the state parks beckoned our hiking - well-conceived, well-maintained, and well-augmented for varied physical abilities. We trekked through forests, along streams, below waterfalls. There were boardwalks strategically placed, interpretative signs at provocative intervals, and when we bumped into other tourists they were invariably kind, helpful, interested - and interesting. Public restrooms were matter-of-faculty and plainly marked “gender free.” The parks and their facilities were conspicuously free of subtle barbs or swipes or ideological shade. Instead, they were simply and self-evidently provided, by the taxpayers of the state, for everyone and anyone. They weren’t “gold-plated,” they were simply nice and freely available. The “Commons” here occupy a place of respect.

Similarly in Maine where the National Park is the draw. Here the offerings are not free, but affordable to most. We were surrounded by patient drivers, respectful crowds, congenial and well-trained employees, an army of volunteers, and of course the national and natural treasure that is Acadia. Animating our experience was the palpable demonstration of the good that philanthropy can serve.

As with so many other special places around the world, Rockefeller money is behind the park, but other benefactors have followed their lead. I know there is much to critique about how all their money came to be amassed. I don’t cite the benefits of their benefactions to cancel out those issues, but to stand these shiny actions alongside those tarnished ones where they simply exist in tension. Whatever social and environmental atrocities those family empires might have committed - the self-interested appetites they may have fanned - I am deepened and enlarged by the common blessing they, along the way, bequeathed.

It has, then, through trail and queue and road and shared experience, alongside tour buses and cruise ship shore excursions and fellow-hikers, been a heartening couple of weeks. So much about America has appalled and embarrassed me in recent years - its malignant penchant for suppressing and repressing; its inflamed racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and sexual inflexibility; its matter-of-fact willingness to cage children, demean immigrants, weaponize religion, and simply walk around angry with a perpetually teetering chip on our shoulder. I honor and revere the noble ideals that animated this country’s founding, even as I ache over the ways our founders violated those ideals even while trying to embody them.

At least they tried to embody them. On paper.

Now, we largely can’t be bothered. “For” apparently nothing, while “against” virtually everything; with our petulant self-interest ascendant, common interest is an annoying bug we gleefully and aggressively squash.

Except, that is, in the parks of Vermont and Maine and, I suspect, beyond. There, civility and civilized generosity, alongside ordinary mutual respect, prevail.

Maybe it’s nature’s influence.  

All I know is that it’s beautiful.

 In every way.

Recovering the Verb in the Noun

For 21 years now my birthday has been a complicated celebration.  The first 45 years of my existence I had rocked along, blowing out candles on this favorite day, and tearing off wrapping paper.  And then terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

On September 11, 2001.

My birthday.

Dimming the candles.  

Staining the fancy paper.

Depleting some of the sugar from the cake.

I was still here, of course.  Nothing had changed about the fact of my birth.  It was still the anniversary of the day I emerged into the world.  The truth was simply amplified, from that day forward, that the world into which I had been birthed is many things - including dangerous - and is infinitely larger than me.

This most recent birthday turned the speakers of that amplification in still another direction.  September 11 came, as it always does, a short three days after September 8, which this year transformed into the day my Mother died.

It is a clumsy and disorienting juxtaposition - sadness and joy, an ending and a beginning, loss and gain.  While birthdays are commonly hours filled with the celebration of being, deaths foment a flurry of doing.  There are phone calls to make, arrangements to conceive and set in motion, household spaces to reorder and travel schedules to negotiate and book.  The trailing days of death are a cascade of minutiae that therapeutically distract and physically occupy.  Very little space remains for candles and cake and singing.  A birthday, suddenly inconvenient, is a discordant non-sequitur. 

Unless, I realized, the death in whose context that birthday occurs, happens to be your Mother.

Suddenly, the initially discordant notes resolved into a different kind of harmony.  The subject of both the life and the death aligned as the same.  What more perfect way to observe a birthday, I realized, than to elevate the one who occasioned it?  And how, I wondered, had attentions so dramatically veered away from this gratitude in the first place - layering frosting and fondant on the birthed, rather than the birther?

The attentions, I realize, are not mutually exclusive.  There is room to celebrate both.  Perhaps I am only speaking confessionally that heretofore I haven’t.  My attentions and my indulgences have focused exclusively on me.  I have taken the day off. I have unwrapped gifts and, in those occasional years when I was alone, even bought them for myself.  The pronouns were “I”, “me”, “mine”.  The circumference of the celebration was that I had been born.  For 66 years I have been well-celebrated and more than adequately feted.  The focus was limited to the noun of my being.

I’ll not make that mistake again.  It was, after all, an act in which I exercised no agency, and was only passively involved.  The hard work - the contracting, the dilating, the pushing and panting and rupturing - was not mine.  There was a verb behind my noun.  If anyone deserves a song and a celebration it is my Mother who accomplished the “doing” of my “being.”

The best I can do is to try to be the gift.  

The birthed, living gratitude for the birther.

Making Peace With Grace

We have a perennially conflicted relationship with grace.  Especially in this country where we routinely bow before the altar of the Protestant Work Ethic. Our particular expression of it may be our own, but evidence suggests that humans in diverse cultures have struggled for centuries with unmerited goodness – else why would Jesus, among others, have told so many stories in which grace is the hero?  The passing Samaritan owed nothing to the beaten man in the ditch – who had done nothing to deserve his attack, but neither done anything to merit the stranger’s kindness.  He was given grace.  The loving father owed nothing more to his errant younger son, but he met the shamed child’s return with grace.  “Forgive us our debts,” Jesus taught us to pray, “as we forgive our debtors.”  “Love your enemy.”  Just for starters.  

 

But never mind all that.  In this country, an aspirational meritocracy, sleeping in whatever bed we have made is righteousness while charity, mercy, and the undeserved break are sins.  

 

Grace we begrudgingly confine to matters of the spirit, where, despite our loathing, we accept divine generosity as a precondition to salvation. We want to “go to heaven when we die,” and if grace is the only ticket, then OK.  We’ll go with it.  In church, but nowhere else.  Step outside those stained glass-windowed doors and it’s back to the bootstraps. Pull yourself up.  

 

As far as I can tell, that’s the rub behind the recent decision to forgive, within limits, some student indebtedness. “You knew what you were getting into when you cashed those loan checks.  Don’t ask me to bail you out.”  We have an allergy to the notion of people getting what they don’t “deserve”.

 

Except when self-interest offers an antihistamine. 

 

Most years the government sends me money to augment proceeds from our under-performing South Texas farm. Some years those payments are classified as “price supports,” other years they are designated as disaster relief from some horticultural calamity – a drought, a storm, a pandemic, an embargo.  As far as I know, I did nothing to deserve these payments other than show up.  But I didn’t send them back.

 

When we installed solar panels several years ago, we happily and gratefully accepted the tax credits that took the edge off the expense.  

Pretty much every organization with which I have some connection - and many of the businesses I know - received PPP loans during the recent pandemic which were subsequently “forgiven”.  Every one of those same organizations and businesses - along with every one of their Board members and shareholders – breathed a sigh of relief.

 

All manner of industries receive what amounts to “welfare” payments in the form of tax credits, incentives, and outright grants – the ethanol industry, the petroleum industry, hog confinements and even Amazon whenever they build a new warehouse.  America owes its auto industry to federal bailouts.  

 

I have no doubt that there are multiple reasons behind such munificence, some of them almost certainly nefarious. Politics.  Pandering.  Among others.  Against those, however, is the natural and useful imperative of government to encourage the common good, and incentivize it.  We will frequently disagree with the justifications ascribed to one or another recipient of such public support, but they are more Darwinian than even Darwin who assert that no such encouragement should be monetized whatsoever.  The “free market” is crueler than nature, and I am willing to hope that we can do better.  Jesus thought so.

 

We can liberate grace from the sanctuary and allow it to flourish in the breadth of our living and not merely our aspirations of Heaven.  As a lifestyle and not merely a theological transaction.

 

Maybe even in our public policies.  Maybe even in our public life.  Grace, breaking out all over.  

 

Heaven help us.

 

Please.

Who knows what might happen?  After all, we know the hell that happens when it doesn’t,  

Now That We Have Decided

I have often confessed that I am never more successful as a gardener than before I have planted the first seed.  Once the promises are sown, all bets are off.  The seed might fizzle, the proferred moisture may be too little – or too much; there are chewing bugs, choking weeds, shredding winds and withering diseases.  The more I insert myself into this alchemy of growing, the more I am amazed that any of it thrives.  It is utterly simple, and infinitely complicated.

 

I thought of this complexity today when I learned of the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion rights.  The public values on this matter are competing and the respective voices are long-entrenched, and I’ll leave it to wiser minds with more of their bodies involved and at stake to carry the meatier conversation.  I’ll admit that I never really believed we would return to this prohibition, not particularly out of concern for the fetuses involved or the women impacted, but because the ready availability of abortions has been handy solution for Presidents, legislators, jurists, preachers and other men – those who have historically calibrated and policed the public moral compass – whose ejaculations needed handy eradication.  But that point, I suppose, is unhelpfully snide and picayune.  Suffice it to say that the decision is hailed by many as a “win” for “life”.  God knows “life” is due some kind of “win” in this culture of death. But forgive me if I feel a bit skeptical.  As a culture we have never scored too high when it comes to the sanctity of life; we have viewed our embryos like I have viewed my seeds:  never so marvelous as before they are actually born.

 

If, now, the “right to life” is to be the law of the land, with no competing rights superceding – if this moment is, in fact, an honest assertion and recalibration on behalf of life rather than a triumphalist, albeit pyrrhic ideological victory - let’s get on with building out the premise.  Once these babies are actually born, let’s ensure that they have the health care every one of them needs to thrive.  Health care providers and manufacturers might protest that they have a right to a profit, and I can’t disagree.  But we have decided that such rights are necessarily secondary to the right to life and must be commensurately curtailed in deference to life.  Once these babies are school aged, let’s have an honest conversation around what we need to do to keep them safe and out of the crosshairs of harmful actors intent on bloodshed.  Let us develop and impose strategies that will prevent the violation of these students’ right to life.  Gun manufacturers and owners will point to the Second Amendment and reiterate their right to bear arms, and that is certainly true.  But as a culture we have now implicitly declared that the Second Amendment is as secondary as a woman’s right to manage her own body.

 

These, of course, are only initial considerations.  Surely the “right to life” extends beyond the classroom and the playground, to the movie theaters and the ice creams shops and the dance clubs and the worship centers and beyond where the right to life is currently and increasingly routinely abrogated.  Into these arenas, yes, but surely into our criminal justice system as well.  Life, after all, is life, with one no more valuable than another, so the idea of capital punishment is surely as heinous as abortion.  Judging relative value – and when, or even ‘if’ such value can be lost – is surely among the very definitions of sin for those who hold themselves submissive to a supreme being in the vein of the Abrahamic traditions.  Vengeance, we are told, is right retained by God.  Judgment is above our pay grade.  It isn’t a “right” that we can either claim or defend.  

 

And so if life it is to be, let’s honestly, forthrightly, and even inconveniently embrace it.  It will not do to plant this garden and then let it go feral and to seed.