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.

Shown the Way by One Who Has Been There

 Several years ago (OK, it was SEVERAL years ago - like 1991) I keynoted a high school youth camp in east Texas.  My presentations that year used as a springboard a recently released song by the rock group, Styx, called "Show Me the Way."  It struck me at the time to be an unusual kind of rock song - reflectively serious and almost anthemic in character; putting its musical finger on the disillusionments of the time and the questions of the ages.   

Every night I say a prayer

in the hope that there's a heaven

And every day I'm more confused 

as the saints turn into sinners

All the heroes and legends I knew as a child 

have fallen to idols of clay
And I feel this empty place inside

 so afraid that I've lost my faith
… Show me the way, 

show me the way
Take me tonight to the river
And wash my illusions away
Show me the way

It all sounds rather current now that I listen to it again, and still swells a lump in my throat for sentimental and even spiritual reasons.  I've asked those questions myself, after all, and prayed those very prayers.  I've sifted through the broken shards of those "idols of clay" and plumbed the depths of that empty place inside.  I know what it's like to "wake up each morning and turn on the news to find we've so far to go..."  So far, indeed.

I hadn't thought of the song - or heard it - in years, but it came to mind this week as I prepared to start recording the audiobook version of the memoir I wrote a few years ago about finding a home at Taproot Garden.  Talking with the owner/sound engineer of the recording studio in which I had booked time - a relatively new operation that opened just before the pandemic - I learned that he had purchased the mixing board that now anchors his studio from the widow of a sound engineer in Chicago who had recorded all or at least most of the Styx songs during the '80's and early '90's - Styx being a Chicago-based band.  

I pondered the poignancy and possibilities of how all those various vocal and instrumental tracks that translated all those angsts and questions and disappointments and discontents and higher aspirations - the musical and emotional raw materials - had passed through this board to create "Show Me the Way" and others of those well-known hits of the time; and how now, all these years later, my voice speaking aloud some of those same questions and searchings and aspirations would be passing through the same board, subject to the same knobs and slides and levels, in service to my own humble project.  

I'm guessing that "Show Me The Way" and the other Styx tracks of its time went on to sell hundreds of thousands - millions - more copies than my little audiobook ever will.  I'm under no delusions about the comparative scale and reach and influence.  No one will dance to my words, nor use my recording as the basis for a youth camp keynote.  No one will go around quoting my lines like I have found myself this week singing Styx's chorus.  But I'll just say that I stood up a little straighter and tried a little harder in my sessions this week, thinking about the provenance of the board.  Its old-soul experience - the wisdom of its work - has been inspirational to me.  In ways that seem foolish and trite to say out loud - but honest - it has, indeed, "shown me the way."  

And it has felt good.  

I finished up my part of the project today, 5 days early.  Bob, the engineer, said I had done well - my efficient use of time credited to few mistakes and vocal persistence.  I arrived each day, I got to work, I read my best.  True, I brought those virtues to the task.  But I give the board much of the credit.  Every day it demanded my best.  Every day it made me smile at the presumed collegiality.  

The rest is now up to Bob and the board - removing the random breath sounds and extraneous pops and flops, and getting the tempo right.  I look forward to the finished product, and releasing it "into the wild."  

In the meantime, and for this very brief moment, I'm feeling like a rock star.  My vibes mingled with those of the big guys.  I had, as it were, help.  

Moral support, if only in my imagination.  

A legacy to live up to.  

A "cloud of witnesses".

Resident in - channeling through - the board.

And there, with the mixer board and all that it has heard through the years and digested - mistakes and harmonies, discords, resolutions and all - I got to add my voice.  You gave me, "the strength and the courage to believe that I'll get there someday."

And at 1 pm today, with the reading aloud of the book's final page, I arrived.  

Toward Planting Better Seeds

 “I am struggling, amid all the current political uproar, to keep clearly in mind that it is not merely because our policies are wrong that we are so destructive and violent. It goes deeper than that, and is more troubling. We are so little at peace with ourselves and our neighbors because we are not at peace with our place in the world, our land.”

~Wendell Berry

The magic of the greenhouse is underway.  Sunlight, even on cold, wintry days, is transformed into heat inside those milky translucent walls.  Seeds are transformed into stems.  And from there the miracle continues.  Eventually moved, when the time is right, and nestled into the land, the seedlings become plants that proceed according to their kind.  For some, the mature growth dwarfs the sower.  But there is one piece of alchemy the greenhouse never accomplishes.  Regardless of how many zinnia seeds I sow, none of them will produce a tomato.  

It follows a common agriculturally methodical reliability.  Plants live to reproduce themselves, not something else.  Creative, they are not imaginative.  Lettuce from lettuce seed.  Peppers from peppers.  Scripture, in the voice of the Apostle Paul, underscores the principle flatly:  “what you sow is what you reap.”  

Ordinarily that schema points our attention forward:  selecting seeds appropriate for the desired harvest.  But beyond the garden, and more metaphorically speaking, perhaps it would be wise to spend some considered time looking back:  given the harvest we are reaping, what was it that we sowed? At best we were careless, if not malignantly misguided.

Last week in Des Moines, a group of 14-17 year olds assassinated another 14 year old boy and seriously injured 2 young girls outside their high school.  The prior week the governor of the state in which I live signed into law a punitive and life-sucking bill passed by the legislature targeting transgendered youth.  A storm of other bills privileging individual autonomy at the expense of common good have straight-jacketed efforts to protect the public good, while others have elevated the placidity of ignorance over the pursuit and promulgation of truth whenever such veracity might cause discomfort.  Truth, in particular, swings on the scaffold these days, to borrow James Russell Lowell’s hymnic allusion, as we more and more decide what we want to be so and simply call it truth, whether the topic be environmental degradation, species extinction, electoral integrity, the “threat” of immigration, or our various rationalizations for why black lives don’t really matter.  Or brown.  Or fill in the ethnic particularity of your choice.  Churches are emptying and closing.  Perhaps it is that fewer and fewer have any interest in matters of the holy and the movement of the Spirit, but might it be instead that those disinterested people simply aren’t impressed by the way they have seen it selectively, sometimes manipulatively, superficially and shamefully often abusively practiced?  

What were the seeds we sowed that produced this toxic harvest?  We could attempt to be honest about such matters, but it might discomfort someone and there is a law against that.

I’m intrigued by Berry’s observation that, “We are so little at peace with ourselves and our neighbors 

because we are not at peace with our place in the world, our land.”

We have, in short, lost our footing, our root-securing grounding.  And so unmoored to anything solid, and adrift in the ideological gases of partisanship, prejudice and willed self-deceit, we can’t help but collide with one another in the erratically capricious currents of gratuitous righteousness.  And having thusly collided, our inevitable recourse is retributive blame-making rather than peacemaking.  Having lost track of what makes us who we are – our origin, our being, the essential “is-ness” of our existence as persons – we drift like the fragile soap bubbles we have become.

And then “pop” at the least abrasion.

In the prophetic legacy of the Hebrew prophet Hosea, there is a warning to those who “sow the wind.”  They “reap the whirlwind.”  From the context I hear Hosea using “wind” to describe a kind of vacuous pretense that displaces lives of authentic integrity and rootedness; ephemerality in the name of substance; hot air in the name of truth.  “Throw enough of that out there,” the prophet seems to say, “and the nothingness of it all will ultimately dismember you – yourself and everything you touch.”

In the face, then, of just such a present cacophonous swirl, I ask myself again:

What were the airy seeds we sowed?

And how might we uproot them, and plant something better?

Remembering How to Blush

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,

saying, “Peace, peace,”

when there is no peace.

They acted shamefully,

they committed abomination;

yet they were not at all ashamed,

they did not know how to blush.

Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;

at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown,

says the Lord.

 

When I wanted to gather them, says the Lord,

there are no grapes on the vine,

nor figs on the fig tree;

even the leaves are withered,

and what I gave them has passed away from them.

~Jeremiah 8:11-13 (NRSV)

 

“They have no shame.

They don’t even know how to blush.”

~Jeremiah 8:12 – MSG

 

I’m not sure why I recently chose Jeremiah for a devotional partner each morning.  He’s hardly the jovial sort; certainly among the Eeyores of the biblical Pooh saga, always rescuing gloom out of the jaws of joy.  Maybe it had something to do with the malaise that has encircled me too often of late, and I knowingly gave myself over to the old presumption that medicine has to taste bad to be good.  Or maybe it was simple academic curiosity.  Who knows? But not having sat with him for quite some time, and wondering perhaps what he might have to say to our present time, I invited him to join me, to observe, to speak, and if need be, to indict.

 

So it was that this morning I pushed into the eighth chapter where my first real dose of chastisement interrupted my progress.  “They have no shame,” the prophet speaks on God’s behalf, “They don’t even know how to blush.”

 

Indeed.  Not that many years ago, when a President defaced the Oval Office and defamed himself by his sexual indiscretions, we collectively recoiled.  Not everyone, perhaps, but most.  We were disgusted.  We…blushed.  More recently, however, when another President spoke bawdily of…shall we say, “disrespecting” and “objectifying” the intimacies of women’s bodies for his own sexual and ego gratifications, we scarcely batted an eye and continued on uninterrupted.  

 

Without shame; without blush.

 

I hear people say, by way of righteous self-defense, that we are not to judge.  Jesus, after all, said so.  But that, of course, is at best a misunderstanding of Jesus’ words, and at worst a self-shielding bastardization of his intent.  Our life, after all, is a perpetual series of separations of “this” from “that” – chocolate versus strawberry; bone-in or filleted, hip-hop versus classical; digital or vinyl; spicy or mild.  And if these all strike us as trivial, they are nonetheless discriminations – judgments of preferences; of what we find “good” or “bad”, “comfortable” or “offensive.”  We judge between political parties and economic systems, between values-driven imperatives about how we use resources and the relative weight of means and ends.  We draw moral conclusions because, whether Jesus actually said the words or not, we somehow know that not everything is the same; that some words, some behaviors, some choices are better than others.  And some are even more despicable – heinous, even – than that.

 

We judge.

 

Or, at least, we ought to.  No, we don’t get to draw up the census list of heaven, or punch the tickets to hell, but if the prophets like Jeremiah are to be believed – or Paul, or Jesus or any of the other voices of scripture – we are called to know and name the difference between good and bad, the lovely and the lascivious, the vile and the virtuous, the sacred and the desecrated.  It is the holy labor of spiritual growth.  We are stewards not just of our money, but of our morals as well - the very integrity of what it means to live into the image of God that we were animated to be.  And if we can no longer recognize or name the breach of it – the soiling of it; if we treat carelessly and superficially with a band-aid the deep wound, and announce, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace; if we have lost the capacity to blush…

 

…then our leaves are, indeed, withered and our lives – along with our life together – are fruitless.

 

Seeking, then, the sweet meat and the juice of the vine, we judge.  

 

“But aren’t we suppose to be loving?” the benignly kindly will ask?  

 

Of course we are, which reaches to the root of our aspiration:  to seek the best for ourselves and each other.  To demand it, really.  To hold each other accountable.  And every time we remain silent in the absence of it; every time we turn aside from the presence of it; every time we choose to make excuses or accommodations or simply prefer not to notice we propagate the "least" instead of pruning and cultivating the "best".

 

Jeremiah, of course, is not all storm cloud and chastisement.  There is that comfortingly evocative assurance toward which we gravitate in the 29^th chapter, “’I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”  We certainly lean into that reassurance, while necessarily leaning away from alternative indulgences and self-constructions.  But in the meantime, there is yet this cautionary, disciplining word:

 

Remember how to blush.

The Silent But Louder Love

“At dinner we light the candles and sit in the dining room, often quietly, kything, rather than talking.” (Madeleine L’Engle Two Part Invention:  The Story of a Marriage, p. 157)

“We have not talked a great deal about it verbally, Hugh and I. But we have talked enough. Better, we have kythed, that silent communion which deepens between two people as they live together for many years. When our fingers are touching, we are communing as well as communicating.”  (Ibid, p.  162)

 

I’ve been reading this memoir about a marriage – a subject that deeply interests me, at least in part because I am anything but expert at it.  I pour myself into the mystery and craft of marriage, devotedly but all too often fecklessly.  And so I search about for wisdom in, and example of, the art of it; wanting and needing to grow in the practice of it.

 

It was, then, in the course of her telling that twice L’Engle used the word to describe the comfortable communication into which she and her beloved had settled over time:  “kything.”  The first time I thought it a typographical error and skipped past it.  The second occurrence caused me to reach for a dictionary.  It is an old verb of Scottish derivation that means, “to make known by action; show; demonstrate; prove."  

And so it is that the couple talk with their touch; their communion a deep and voluble communication.

 

I love the tender warmth of the idea; the quiet, companionable intimacy.  But it is a difficult proposition for a guy like me who hungrily nurtures an infatuation with words.  Words are the stuff of poetry – the nuts and bolts and sheetrock and paint of my days.  Words are powerful enough to create new worlds if the book of Genesis is to be believed, and capacious enough to hold the very manifestation of God according to the Gospel of John.  Words, I want to insist, matter.  

But it was, of course, the word itself that drew me to it and invited me to linger with it.  So there is that.  There is this word:  Kything. It feels good on my tongue and lands well in my ears.  It is a lovely, provocative word.  But I cannot dodge the definitional reality that even in the speaking and the hearing it is already nudging me beyond the confinement of the vocalization.  Eliza Doolittle’s cockneyed protestation in My Fair Lady musically haunts my practice:

Words! 

Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! 

Don't talk of stars 

Burning above; 

If you're in love, 

Show me! 

Tell me no dreams 

Filled with desire. 

If you're on fire, 

Show me! 

Sing me no song! 

Read me no rhyme!

Don't waste my time, 

Show me! 

 

And the admonition dubiously attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words.” 

 

Perhaps, in the spirit of kything and in the present context, we might render it, “Love each other at all times.  If necessary, use words.”

 

It is the essence, now that I recall it, of the winsome country song by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

 

And I linger longer, brooding over the notion.  The vocabulary of enactment.  “To make known by action; demonstration.”

 

It’s not, I suspect, that I shouldn’t speak.  A muted love, after all, would starve me and, I suspect, malnourish my beloved as well.  But I am at once chastened and inspired by the symphonic capacities of the vocabulary of tenderness and touch; pronouncing by proving.  Not so much talking without words, but beyond them.

 

Perhaps that is the Valentines gift to bring:  flowers, yes, and chocolate, of course; but then “I love you,” spoken with lips, and hands, and, grounding and amplifying it all, a kything kind of life.

This day, and all the days beyond it.