Love this World, She Whispers

 

A Solstice Message 

Delivered to High Street UU Church

Sunday, December 21, 2025

          Starting out this morning with “A Winter Blessing” by Rebecca Ann Parker.

In the shadowed quiet of winter’s light

Earth speaks softly

Of her longing.

Because the wild places are in tears.

 

Come, she cries to us

Kneel down here

On the frosty grass,

And feel the prayer buried in the ground.

 

Bend your ear to my heart

And listen hard.

 

Love this world, she whispers.

Distill peace from the snow

And water the cities

With mercy.

 

Weave wonder from the forest

And clothe grief

With beauty.

 

Rest in the rhythm of the turning year,

Trace the bending arc

Rounding the curve toward justice.

And vow anew to do no harm.

 

The winter trees stand watch

Haloed in the last gleams of the slanting sun.

Glory sings here.

Heaven echoes the call:

Repeat the sounding joy.

 

Make your life an answer:

Bow.

Praise.

Rise.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class in existential philosophy in which we read one half of the 589 page Macquarie and Robinson translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The book is credited with opening up the examined life via Dasein, literally “being there,” much like Ram Dass’ “be here now” if Ram Dass had lived between the world wars and joined the Nazi Party. It is, in a word, a slog.

The class met two days a week starting in January at 10 in the morning. That first day, the professor walked in, turned out the overhead lights, and said, “If we were really going to study existence the way this book presents it every meeting would be at 5 o’clock in the morning on the winter solstice.” As that suggests, it is a very depressing book.

Winter solstice, part of the month-long holiday called Yule, has a somewhat deserved reputation as the start of a long depressing slog toward the joy and sunshine of Summer solstice, something to be gotten through. It is the longest night of the year followed by the shortest day. It is also my thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. I planned it this way. I’m no fool.

Winter Solstice is the day that marks when the earth is at its northernmost apogee from the sun. Our orbit around the sun is not a circle but an oval, with extremes at two ends. In the northern hemisphere are at our furthest away from the sun and so at our coldest. In summer we have been traveling to the north and then furthest in that direction, and so have arrived at the point where our section of earth begins to feel its warmest. If we still have the patience to observe it for the day, the sun seems to stand still on the horizon for about six days at this time of year, rising and setting at about the same places. This period of the sun remaining in place, which is what solstice means in Latin, “sun standing still”, marks the periods when we can be certain we’ve reached the end of the cold season and, because we are now facing the sun as we return in our orbit, the days will become warmer. Although no one seems to have explained that to January or February. This is the cycle by which we count the days until winter.

Cycles are important, not just for groups of people, deciding when it’s safest to plant or recognizing when the coldest months are coming, but for individuals too. We operate cyclically. Women’s bodies, of course, ovulate on a monthly schedule, and there is research suggesting that men also have a cycle of hormonal changes that happen every thirty days.

          Things, like people and animals and plants, are born, live, and then die. Then they rot and diffuse, or break apart, and mix with bacteria and enzymes, which themselves live and die cyclically, to be born again, perhaps as something else, and live, and die. Farmers know this. Keepers of suburban composts are acquainted with it. The whole process describes a huge circle that life as we understand it follows. We even breathe in and out cyclically, although it’s so subtle we’re usually not aware of it. Take a moment to recognize that you’re breathing now. Don’t concentrate on breathing or hold your breath, just notice that you breathe in, and then breathe back out. Consider too how many times you do this. The average person inhales and exhales about thirteen times each minute. That’s seven hundred eighty times per hour. That’s eighteen thousand, seven hundred twenty times per day. That’s nearly seven million times per year. Over the course of an average person’s lifetime, which is about sixty-eight years—that’s taking into account everyone in the world, in the richest places where people live longest and the poorer places where most people die youngest, you will breathe at least four hundred seventy-six million times.

          But that isn’t our only important cycle. Most of us wake up at morning, go on with our day, and go to sleep at night. We eat food and drink water, digest them for energy to move, and then expel them as liquid or as solid. Even our moods operate as a cycle. We will be up, happy, exuberant, experience that for a time, and then down, sad, depressed, experiencing that too for a time. Some of us experience extreme periods of that cycle and regulate it with medications; no one has a perfectly even, balanced experience of no joys and no sorrows. We aren’t built that way. We’re meant to suffer and enjoy, stress and relax. This is 8a part of what makes us alive, part of what helps us experience life in all its aspects.

          As those farmers and composters understand, nothing new is added to the universe. Physicists have determined that there is exactly the same amount of matter existent today as there was instants after the Big Bang. So nothing is created out of nothing; everything is made up of elements of something that already existed, usually in another form. Astronomer NeilDeGrasse Tyson—has he reached a point at which he can be called a public intellectual yet?—has said,

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.  

Here are some cosmological terms that Neil deGrasse Tyson would use to describe the process of winter solstice. I’m not going to explain them because I don’t understand them, but what I want you to hear is the music in their very words. Celestial navigation. Ouranioi. Heliostasis. Circumference. Parallel. Perpendicular. Obliquity of the Ecliptic. Heliacal circle. This comes about as close to the ancient music of the spheres as we can get.

A person dies and rots and becomes parts of grass and flowers, bees carry off the sweet stuff of flowers to make honey, and the honey is eaten by bears and wolverines as well as people. This is how the universe is transmitted from part to part to part. One huge, endless cycle. A movement from solstice to solstice.

          Where I’m from when we near this time of the year, this “shadowed quiet of winter’s light,” what we expect is snow and ice, the scrape of shovels on driveways and the roar of plows on the road, the warmth of parkas and mittens. As I remain here I’m becoming more acclimated to late-blooming camelias and magnolias, the hardy contingent wearing sweatshirts and socks with sandals. I’ll never reconcile myself to the sound of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. But in both places the axial tilt of the earth is the reason for the season.  

          When we celebrate Midwinter what we’re celebrating is the death of the former year, the former cycle, and the birth of a new one. It is, almost always, a time that brings excitement and hope. What will I do differently this new year? What will change around me? I say almost always because for many of us the new year holds no more hope than the dying one. Our conditions may not change, our lives may not get better, the circumstances we live in may not alter.

          What we do is hope. Hope can be a verb, a doing word, as much as a noun. I hope the new year changes things. Stereotypically, darkness is seen as bad, as depressing, as the thing we want out of. We hope for the sun. Midwinter celebration was seen as the summoning by the people of the sun. We’d preserve the light we had and use it to kindle the light and life we hoped would come.

          There’s no denying the sun feels good on our bodies. After all, it’s the warmth I chased down here, the opportunity in December to lie on my hammock in the backyard. Recently, during the cold snap at the beginning of the month, as I was doing laundry I realized with a start how many pairs of shorts I’d worn just in the two weeks around Thanksgiving. Six. Six pairs of shorts.

          Solstice is important to me too because, as Dr Robin Kimmerer of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation has said, "Winter is a teacher of vulnerability."  This year has not lacked for lessons in vulnerability and I have no doubt winter promises to bring more, probably harsher, lessons. As religious columnist Elizabeth Dias (behind a paywall) points out, for most of human history and even for many humans today, winter is a period when simple survival is the aim. "Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of what it means to be human...The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter."  

          Yes, I love the sun and warmth. I love to stretch my limbs searching for that feeling of well-being in my body I get from the tingle on my bare skin. But the cold and dark has its place too. Parker reminds us “prayer [is] buried in the ground.” It might be cliché to refer to seeds right now, and I like to avoid cliché. But it’s true, seeds need the dark and the cold and moist, and we do too.

          “Love this world, she whispers,” as if we need to be reminded of our reliance on and our responsibility to it. Perhaps we do. It’s easy to get caught up in everyday life, just getting by, and ignore such a little thing as a turn of seasons, especially one so far off in terms of the cosmos. It’s not a crime, not even a moral one, to forget to pause a moment in the hurly-burly of this season with Hannukah, Christmas, Diwali, Kwanzaa coming fast and furious on each other and recognize that the cold nights are now shorter, the warm days are longer. There’s no reward to it other than the momentary noting that, at least in this, all is right in the world.

          Ultimately, today is not about light, it’s about noticing light. Not about change but recognizing change. But seize on it. Like a candle, allow it to warm you and even to guide you. Of such small things are greater things built.

           

Something Fun, For a Change

 

SOMETHING FUN, FOR A CHANGE

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street UU Church, Macon, GA

11/16/2025

“The greatest enemy of authority…is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter…I’ll tell you this: I read the transcripts of [Eichmann’s] police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud!”  Hannah Arendt

“I used to be disgusted but now I try to stay amused.” Elvis Costello

 

          Let me tell you a little about an avatar of protest silliness, Wavy Gravy.  Unless you’re like me and spend much of your life in tie-dye, you’re likeliest to know him not by name but by his most famous line, uttered in the documentary Woodstock: “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” This was the second morning of the festival, after the rains and the mud came, the New York State Thruway closed and the fences came down. Wavy and his companions from the Hog Farm, the commune in New Mexico they had been living at for some years, had agreed to act security for the weekend. When asked, “How do you plan to enforce security?” he responded with “Seltzer bottles and cream pies.” They didn’t actually use those, of course. What they did was to create the practice that’s still used at events like that, called the Hug Patrol. I’ve taken part in some of those and you may laugh at the idea but it’s really hard to fight when your arms are pinned to your sides by a dozen hippies crowding you until you chill out.

          Wavy, born in 1936, making him nearly 90 now, doesn’t appear in public as often as he used to. I’ve never met him, but I have seen him from a distance a couple times. He’s an overpowering presence even from yards away, decked in his traditional tie2-dye from head to oversized feet, his bright red clown nose and white face paint, and floppy hat. People treat him the way I think people who listened to them probably treated Jesus or Buddha: they swarm him, wanting just to be next to an incredible presence.

          Wavy, who describes himself as “clad in the crumbling remains of my original Prankster can’t-bust-me jumpsuit with the ‘kick me’-style sign on [his] back”, will try to appear serious by removing his giant clown nose in a confrontation. He is one in a long line of folks confronting wrongdoing by laughing at it.

          He’s the first to acknowledge he is a clown. Wes ScoopNisker, the author of Crazy Wisdom, states “We laugh because the clown is one of us, pathetic and lovable, trying hard but always flailing and falling…[He or she] shows us our awkward human condition and encourages us to laugh at ourselves…We climb the ladder only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. We search for hats that are already on our heads. We plan our days only to find the days have other plans.”

And while Wavy would characterize himself in the noble clown tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, he is really akin to the archetype of the jester, who are “the wits and critics. They expose the establishment’s lies and make light of the contemporary social scene.” However, as playwright Jane Wagner writes, “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”          

          Nisker continues, “Because jesters are ‘nay-sayers,’ they often speak the truth, saying no to obvious lies, absurdities, and injustices. In the worldly realm of relative truths, jesters are the champions of crazy wisdom.”

          Interestingly, the only recorded historical pranks and jokes are those done by kings and emperors, often on guests and courtiers. In the parlance of jokes, this is known as punching down, the superior political figure taking shots at someone with no power. A prime example from the past few years is when Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas bussed migrants from the border with Mexico to New York City and Washington and then unloaded them literally on the street. In 2022, he even sent a busload to then Vice President Kamala Harris’ home to be unloaded in front of it, leaving them stranded and freezing. This is actually a time-honored Republican stunt, having originated in 1962 in what became known as the Reverse Freedom Ride, when southern Black families were bussed to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, a move calculated to embarrass JFK, and to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Civil War.

          Pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, having first gotten publicity by throwing dollar bills from the balcony of the NY Stock Exchange onto the trading floor below where they were stuffed into trader’s pockets, memorably gathered thousands of Yippies together at the Pentagon with the intention of lifting it several feet off the ground by pure force of will, thereby signaling  the end of the Vietnam War. While they didn’t end the war that day, or budge the building, in a nod to today’s political climate they enthusiastically claimed to have succeeded. The next year Abbie helped draft a pig they called Pigasus to run for president. The campaign was guided by the statement, “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.”

          From the 76 to 88 elections Wavy helped nominate another candidate, Nobody. The Nobody for President campaign ran with the slogan, “Because Nobody is working right now in Washington for you.”

          I was of course too young to have known about some of these pranks when they happened, but I do recall the Pigasus and Nobody campaigns, as well as a few later ones. In the early 90s a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization managed to switch the recordings on the voice boxes of hundreds of Barbie and GI Joe dolls so that they said what the other was meant to say. Since the late 80s a group called Gorilla Girls, female artists wearing gorilla masks in their public appearances, bought billboards, electric marquees, and posters descrying the dearth of women artists in major museum collections. Their most famous line is “A woman has to be naked to get into the Met.”

          Author Andrew Boyd writes, “Humor is a great equalizer. It can puncture the aura of authority. It can pull the wealthy, powerful, and pretentious down into the mud where the rest of us live.” One of the best examples of this is the 1992 work of Nanjunda Swamy in India. Influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, a Sanskrit term meaning “pressurizing for truth,” constitutional law professor Swamy gathered 50,000 farmers on the lawn of the Karnataka state secretariat to “laugh the government out”. This was in response to the flagrant abuses of multinational corporations and their ownership of certain politicians, specifically Karnataka Chief Minister S Bangarappa.

          “The farmers, surrounded by policemen, just sat on the lawn and told jokes against Mr. Banarappa…’They were puns, actually,’ Mr…Swamy said. After warming up the farmers with a little word-play, it was enough to simply say ‘Bangarappaj’ [in Sanskrit, “Bangarappa is inflexible”] over the megaphone and the farmers would shake with laughter.”

          This is punching up, holding the powerful for ridicule, and while it may not change anything in the here and now, it reminds people that their opponent is not impregnable and his policies are not to be taken seriously.

          This refusal is known as frivolous tactics and it has a long line in history, from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which wives refuse to provide, um, physical comfort to their husbands until they give up warring, to Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing royalty and religion scatalogically, to the 17^th Century Levellers, who emphasized equality, popular sovreignity, and religious tolerance, to the Diggers, a San Francisco theatre troupe out of Haight-Ashbury, whose best-known alumus is Peter Coyote, often a voice one hears narrating PBS documentaries, and on whose antics the Yippies and Wavy Gravy cut their teeth. Today, punching up is located in the inflatable frogs and unicorns appearing at in No Kings and ICE protests in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago, and the aerobics classes and dance lines held at the South Waterfront ICE Detention Center in Portland. It continues despite the arrest of clarinet and cello players, the pepper-spraying of people in costumes, the attempts by the trump administration to equate day care teachers with M13 gang members.

          So what can we do? Well, here’s a suggestion, taken directly from the example of Mr. Swamy. Make fun of Donald trump’s policies, his administration, and him personally. We can do so in big and little ways. A retired farmer whose wife I used to visit during trump’s first term referred to him as The Canary, a jab I thought was on the mark. My own practice is to write out his name using lower-case t, because I don’t think he deserves being upper-case anything.

          Now, a caveat. There’s an argument to be made, and it’s a legitimate one, that to point out the physical or mental flaws of another person in a joke also points out those same flaws in people who aren’t the target. Disgraced comedian Louis CK, of all people, reminds us that “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.” But I also think it’s legitimate to note those flaws when they are projected on others by the target. For instance, a French joke of the 1930s noted the discrepancy in Nazi propaganda by saying that Aryan types were as blond as Hitler, slim as Goering, and tall as Goebbels.

                Thus, I feel no compunction with noting that trump supporters are as innovative as Ivanka, as independent as Eric and Donald Jr, and as trim as trump. I can go on: They are as scientific as RJK Jr, as athletic as Steve Bannon, as conscientious as Pete Hegseth, and as law-abiding as Tom Homan, Peter Navarro, Charles Kushner, Mark Meadows, Wilbur Ross, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, James Flynn, Steve Bannon (again), Roger Stone, Linda McMahon, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth (again), Elon Musk, RFK Jr (again), Rudy Guiliani, and of course Donald trump himself. When you tout yourself as being 6’3” and 224 lbs. people expect you to look similar to others of the same height and weight, say, Chris Hemsworth who plays Thor, or Tim Tebow who plays football.

          The rumors suggested by the release of emails this week are a perfect example. Being gay or performing a sexual act on another man is not funny. But striking at the very heart of trump supporters’ machismo, knowing that, whether it’s true or not, it’s experienced by them as a blow below the best? Now that’s funny.

          Here are several others. Feel free to utilize them as often as necessary.

• ·        There was a terrible fire the other day that destroyed the site of the trump library. It decimated the collection, burning both books, including one he hadn’t started coloring in yet.
• ·        Obama’s Affordable Care Act turns 15 this year. No wonder trump supporters are messing with it.
• ·        Trump walked into a bar. And then he lowered it.
• ·        Trump has suggested that when he finally leaves office he wants to go back to TV with a show about running the government. An interviewer asked, “You mean like The West Wing?” Trump said, “No, more like the Sopranos.”
• ·        I’ve heard a lot of people saying they like what trump says, but they prefer it in the original German.
• ·        Trump is being interviewed by Dan Rather who asks, “You’ve told so many lies, Mr. President, which is your favorite?” Trump says, “I don’t lie.” Rather says, “Yes, that’s one of mine too!”
• ·        Voting a progressive ticket in this day and age means you’re fighting truth decay.
• ·        How many trumps does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. He holds it in the air and waits for the world to revolve around him.
• ·        You might have heard about the bad reception trump received attending te Washington Commanders NFL game the other day. Someone even chucked a beer at him. It was a draft so he dodged it.
• ·        Trump was asked once, “Boxers or briefs?” He answered, “Depends.”

If the devil’s greatest trick is to convince us he doesn’t exist, trump’s great trick is to convince us to take him seriously. Now, is laughing at them likely to force the trump administration to run like rats from a sinking ship of state? Alas, no. Trump and others have proven rhino-skinned. If that alone was going to do the job, it would have by now.

What it is is a tool, a part of our arsenal that reminds his supporters that they are the only ones responding to his bleats, that the rest of us see through the gauze of their attempts to turn back the clock a century or more, and that they will be the only ones standing naked in the light of history,

This is not to say we should laugh at the things being done at his command. There’s nothing funny about people being grabbed off the street, their homes, or their work, or zip tying kids. But separated from their actions, these people deserve nothing but scorn, these Gravy Seals and members of Meal Team Six. The impetus behind their cruelty is itself a joke. They can’t strongarm their way into respectability and honor, and the mark they know is that they cover their faces, their badges and their names. They know they should be ashamed of what they do. As others have pointed out, if you have one Nazi holding forth at a podium and nine listening to what he has to say without contradiction, you have ten Nazis.

Give them what they deserve, what they’ve earned. A good, solid belly laugh. Underneath the silliness is something serious. We will not surrender. As Wavy Gravy himself says, “It only hurts when I don’t laugh.”

DO THE BEST THINGS IN THE WORST TIMES

 A Sermon given September 21, 2025 

At High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

Macon, Georgia

Guy’s walking down the street not paying attention so he trips on something and he falls in a hole. Sprains his leg good so he can’t stand up, and that wouldn’t do him any good because the hole is deep. The sides are sheer, and he can’t get a handhold. 

So he’s lying there and a priest walks by. Guy shouts, “Hey, Father, can you help me? I’m down in this hole and I can’t get out.”

Priest looks over the side, sees he’s in there deep and says, “I’m on my way somewhere but I’ll pray for you.” He prays over the hole, goes on.

Guy’s getting cold and he’s feeling desperate. Doctor walks by. Guy yells, “Hey, Doc, can you help me? I’ve fallen down this hole and I can’t get out.”

Doctor looks over the edge, says, “This isn’t really my area so I’ll write you a consultation.” So he writes it up, throws it down. He goes on.

Now’s it’s getting darker and the guy’s feeling pretty hopeless. He’s cold and his leg hurts. He starts crying and he’s not sure if he’s ever getting out.

Homeless guy walks by and looks down in the hole, sees the guy crying, and he jumps in and sits in the dirt next to him. 

Guy just about explodes, says, “What are you doing? I need help getting out of here and instead you jump down with me! What’s wrong with you?”

Homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it over the other guy’s shoulders. Says, “You looked like someone who could use a friend, and here I am. Besides, I’ve been down here before and I know how to get out.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is so ubiquitous in American culture most of us can probably tell it off the top of our heads. Admittedly, this version owes more to Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing than to the New Testament, but like theologian Karl Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both,” but nobody gets a newspaper anymore, so we’ll go with a TV show

Here's a real life version from theologian Diana Butler Bass. In a sermon from 2022 she writes about riding a steep escalator when an elderly man ahead of her collapsed, tumbling down the steps, bleeding. People came running and they lifted him and found a bench to lay him on. A waiter from a restaurant brought paper towels and someone else had a water bottle. Blood running down his face, the elderly man tried waving them off, saying it was all right, he was fine. Someone called for an ambulance and the crowd waited with him until the ambulance arrived and he was wheeled out by EMTs. She says, “We all shook hands and went on our separate ways.” 

That’s great, isn’t it? A spontaneous act of help, a crowd of people coming together to make themselves useful and remaining with the injured until he’s tended to by professionals. Great story. 

Then she goes on. “About three weeks later, I was crossing a street…and I tripped, landing spread-eagle in the crosswalk. My purse flew one direction, my glasses another. My hands were scuffed and bleeding from my feeble attempt to break the fall. And my knee hurt.” She was goggle-eyed and cried because she knew she was in danger.

Butler Bass was 62 when this happened. “A car stopped, and a woman opened the driver’s side door…[but] instead of helping, she began to yell at me. ‘What’s wrong with you? Get up! You’re blocking traffic!’ When I didn’t answer, she shouted, ‘Are you deaf?’ and she leaned on her car horn. I crawled across the street to the far corner. ‘Idiot!’ she shouted as she drove away. I sat on the curb sobbing. No one asked me how I was; no one helped. Several people walked by without comment, turning their gaze from the rattled, bleeding woman on the sidewalk.”

She concludes, “Occasionally, you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you’re in the ditch.” 

Friends, we are in the ditch. 

Fred Rogers’ mother famously told him in an emergency, look to the helpers. But what if there aren’t any helpers around? Butler Bass writes, “sooner or later, we’ll all be in the ditch…Splayed on that road, I didn’t care who helped me. I just needed help.” That’s the real point of the Parable, she points out, citing Amy-Jill Levine, a scholar of parables. Where most of us associate with the Samaritan Levine insists that Jesus’ hearers, Jewish hearers, would have identified as the wretch in the ditch. “’I’d rather die than acknowledge that [a Samaritan] saved me’; ‘I do not want to acknowledge that a rapist has a human face’; or ‘I do not recognize that a murderer will be the one to rescue me.’” Jews of Jesus’ time were certain that the Samaritans weren’t, in the phrase popular today, sending their best people. That Samaritans were the descendants of rapists and murderers and worshipped at a corrupt Temple. Levine writes that “a contemporary version of the parable would turn the Good Samaritan into the ‘Good Hamas Member.’” The real message of the parable is that “Whoever shows up—even your enemy—especially your enemy—is your neighbor.” 

Let me give you a for instance from my own life. My wife and I work with dog rescue groups. We’re currently fostering two blind chihuahua pups and we go to a lot of foster events. One of the most visible members also appearing at these events are this guy I'll call Frank and his wife. Now, there’s no question they’re good fosters or members in good standing. But I’m leery of Frank. Very white, overfed, bluff, he appears at every event wearing an unconcealed gun at his hip. Like the Paiutes will race over the hill to rustle the dogs any minute. I’ve strongly suspected he has a MAGA hat he only wears around the house.

I know where my antipathy toward him comes from. I’m afraid of guns. I was shot at once and I don’t like firearms anywhere near me. I don’t trust the people with them, even cops, even my wife’s family, even my own family, not to suddenly take a potshot at me. 

A couple months ago at one of the adoption events, I drove over a curb and got a flat tire. Jayne went in with the pups and I tried to change the tire. In vain. It turned out my car, having originated in the wintry central Midwest, had acquired an accumulation of rust on the underside that in retrospect I’m surprised I hadn’t put my feet Flintstone style through the floor when braking. 

While I was mismanaging my solo tire changing, I saw Frank out of the corner of my eye. I hoped he’d go on but he came over to the side of the car and said, “I bet you can use some help.” I swallowed what little pride I still had invested in doing this and said, “Thanks.” We tried this and that, none of which worked, but in the process we both worked up a good sweat. That’s when he said, “You’re wearing patchouli, aren’t you?” Yes, I was. I like the smell of patchouli. I even wash our clothes in patchouli-scented detergent. I espected grief from him.

Frank said something like, “Boy, that takes me back to my hippie days. I used to always get the evil eye from the guys I went to school with, and when we moved out of the commune my wife made me stop wearing it in public.”

Shock can’t begin to suggest the look on my face. You could have driven a Toyota in my mouth my jaw dropped so much.

Butler Bass concludes, “Down [in the ditch] we feel helpless, hurt, afraid, and angry. We stare in shock at those who threaten to run us over if we don’t get out of their way. In the ditch, we have the chance to learn the most radical truth of all—even our enemy is our neighbor.” 

Find the helpers. Would Donald Trump or JD Vance be acceptable helpers? That’s stacking the deck because, while they could have a change of heart and offer their hands, the scenario itself is so unlikely as to be a joke. Let’s make it more probable. Do you accept help from the guy wearing a MAGA hat? From the woman in the Marjorie Taylor Green tee-shirt? From the local Republican Party chair? 

It’s a hard question to answer, I know, and it’s their own extreme actions that make it hard. Keeping people accountable to their words and their deeds are an important part of keeping each other honest.

There’s a meme I’m sure you’ve seen, a New Yorker cartoon where one person says to another, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” We might be tempted to subscribe to the solution offered by Rabbi Bob Alper who quipped when he moved his family to Vermont, “We’re too remote for cable so we have a satellite dish. We can pick up some pretty obscure stations, including a Jewish Cable Channel. Every hour a guy meanders on the screen and says, ‘You don’t wanna know.’” 

Okay, so maybe that’s not really a good solution. An apocryphal story about Margaret Mead says the first sign of civilization is a human femur that’s been broken and then healed. In the animal kingdom, you don’t heal from injuries like that. You become lunch. Let me acknowledge the other Bible allusion in my story. I’m talking about the part where the homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it around the guy’s shoulders and says, “You looked like you could use a friend.” I took that little bit from a comment in the Book of Job, specifically the end of chapter 2. 

These are the three friends of Job who, when they hear of the tragedies that befall him and his family, go to comfort him. He’s so changed they don’t even recognize him from a distance, and when they do, they weep, “they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads.” These three get a bad rap in most analyses because in the next chapter they try convincing Job that he’s somehow brought all his problems on himself. 

But let’s stay with the end of chapter 2. There, they do what a lot of people won’t do. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw his suffering was great.” They get down in the dirt and the dust and ashes with my man for a week—a week!—imagine that. And they keep their yaps shut because they know the only thing that will come out will be recriminations and poppycock about how you, my good friend Job, brought this all on yourself even if you don’t know how, but in my heart of hearts I know that isn’t going to give anyone anything but agita for Job and a smug feeling for me. 

There is a reason they would have done. Per psychology researcher Steve Taylor, for most of human history we’ve lived as tribes, and certainly the Bible qualifies as a tribal testament. Taylor writes, “There’s no reason why early human beings should be competative or individualistic. That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival.” He concludes, “There’s such a strong association between well-being and altruism that it would be foolish not to live altruistically.

This jibes with something I’ve observed, which is there are more “good” people than ones who take advantage of someone. In seminary I was taught Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s practice of the non-anxious presence, the guy just there in the house where tragedy has happened to provide support. Visit the lonely. Do the dishes or the laundry. Mow the lawn. Hold the baby. Stand quietly by, available.

In my title I call these The Worst Times, but make no mistake, these aren’t the worst times in world or even American history. To the contrary, everything considered, these are good times. Many of us have enough money to see to our needs if not our wants. Here. People aren’t being shot in the streets. Here. People aren’t dropping dead from preventable diseases. Here. Yet.

Some of us have seen some really bad times, some of our parents and grandparents lived through them. Maybe that’s what stings the most about these times. We’ve seen things get better. In my lifetime little black girls had to be escorted to school by US Marshalls. Black churches were bombed. The National Guard fired live ammunition into students protesting at Kent and Jackson State Universities. It was a long slog getting past a lot of that and some of us are in danger or have already lost the rights others worked and died for. In the annals of the 300,000 years homo sapiens have existed, these troubled times don’t even merit a footnote, let alone being called the worst. But these may qualify as the worst times many of us will live through.

The saddest part of all this that’s happening, the chaos, the pulling back of the smiling mask of bigotry and repression that many of us are seeing for the first time, but that has lain dormant underneath, is that there is no Samaritan coming to save us. We’re lying in the ditch or in the hole or creeping across the street. We’re on our backs like turtles. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, in the words of poet June Jordan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We are the homeless guy, the woman on the escalator, the gun-guy ex-hippie in the rain, the non-anxious presence. This is what we must do. Hold up the hurt and disillusioned. Feed the hungry. Shelter the unsheltered. Raise your voice for the voiceless and afraid. Don’t expect anything in return except the feeling of having done right. Do the best things in these worst times. 

Just Another Bad Joke

 I used to live on the rim of suburbs and small towns circling the Twin Cities. I attended seminary just north of Minneapolis and did much of my teaching and interning in that city. It's a beautiful city full of beautiful people. That there are two fewer of them today, both children, is much on my mind.

That people, including children, die in that city and too many others everyday sits heavily on my conscience. That they die from a disease to which we have a cure is ironic. That these children died in church during Mass is just another bad joke that doubles as irony. That their killer was someone who attended classes there as a boy and then killed as a girl is another.

Many of us see ourselves in the mother pictured above, running Pell Mell through the streets, not even taking the time to put on her shoes in the rush to answer the question, "Is my child safe?" There is always conflict when we consider murderers who may have been victims and I wish I could but I can't provide an answer to that. I hate Robin Westman for what she did but I would have loved Robert Westman for what he was going through. My friends in the trans~ communities are more conflicted than most and I don't envy them. All I can do that has any value is to be with them as they grieve. That is how the Beloved Community responds. Those of us who will, like Job's friends, sit wailing with them must also be ready to shield them from the assholes who frame this as confirmation of their bigotry. It is long past time to lay down the automatic weapons and other killing machines and, in the words of Minneapolis mayor Jacob Fry, wrap "our arms around these families with every bit of love that we can possibly show."

Capitalism will not survive trump

 

Mancur Olson showed that kleptocracy at the top stunts the growth of...countries. Having a thief for president doesn't necessarily spell doom; the president might prefer to boost the economy and then take a slice of a bigger pie. But in general, looting will be widespread either because the dictator is not confidant of his tenure, or because he needs to allow others to steal in order to keep their support.

Then further down the pyramid of wealth, development is thwarted because the rules and laws of the society do not encourage projects or businesses, which would be to the common good. Entrepreneurs don't establish official businesses (too difficult) and so don't pay taxes; officials demand ridiculous projects for their prestige or personal enrichment; schoolchildren don't bother to acquire irrelevant qualifications...

The rot starts with government but it afflicts the entire society There's no point in investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So, you might as well become a thief.) There's no point in paying your phone bill because nobody can successfully take you to court (so there's no point being a phone company). There's no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit (and in any case, you can't borrow money for school fees because the bank cannot collect on the loan, and the government doesn't provide good schools.) There's no point setting up an import business because the customs officials will be the ones to benefit (and so there is little trade, and so the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.)...

[China's 'Great Leap Forward'] seemed to make sense, but it was the greatest economic failure the world has ever seen. Mao conducted economic policy based on the hidden premise that if people tried hard, the impossible would happen. Zeal alone was sufficient. Villagers were ordered to build steel furnaces in their backyards but had no iron ore to put into them. Some villagers melted down good iron and steel--tools, even doorknobs--in order to meet the quotas demanded by the state...

If industrial policy was a farce, agricultural policy was a tragedy...Mao ordered the people to kill grain-eating birds, and the population of insect pests exploded as a result. Mao personally redesigned China's agricultural techniques, specifying closer planting and deeper sowing to increase yields. Rice planted so closely together could not grow, but party officials, anxious to please Mao, staged shows of agricultural and industrial success. When Mao traveled by train to admire the fruits of his policy, local officials built furnaces along the railroad and brought rice from miles away to replant, at the officially specified density, in adjacent fields. Even this charade could not be maintained without the use of electric fans, which were used to circulate air and prevent the rice from rotting.

--From The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, 2007 edition 

We Don't Go Golfing

 By now it's probable you have heard about the loss of over a hundred lives in the July 4th flooding of Texas' Guadalupe River. I'm not interested here in who's responsible for the lack of information or timely warnings. Those people will be identified and I hope they will face consequences.

What I am interested in here is the misinformation you may have heard or seen thanking Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for having immediately dispatching rescue teams from her country to Texas to help in efforts there. This, in spite of the meanness, cruelty, and racism displayed by the trump administration's ICE efforts. But that is not true. The truth, I think, is better. 

On July 6th at 5 AM the Dirección de Protección Civil y Bomberos de Acuña, Coahuila (I could not hope to accurately write that out so it is also a link to their Facebook page), along with members of Fundacion 911, left for Kerrville to assist. This was in response to a request from Texas Equusearch, a search and rescue based in Houston. 

Direccion de Proteccion is located in Cuidad Acuna, near the Texas border and Kerrville and the Guadalupe River are 275 kilometers northeast.  Their response was not based on permission or arrangements. Both organizations are volunteer. While President Sheinbaum acknowledged them for their swift response, she did not claim to have contacted or facilitated them. 

The volunteers of Ciudad Acuna responded on their own. They did this because a call went out to a neighbor for help. As President Sheinbaum later said, "That is the people of Mexico. That is our culture." It is what we do in the Beloved Community. We don't go golfing. We put on our big boy and big girl pants and we respond. 

You Know It's Time to Act

 I like post-apocalyptic fiction as much as the next guy, but I've often wondered why there's such an emphasis on dystopia rather than on cooperation as the method for going on. In reality, guns and motorcycles and theft are only going to feed you or keep you safe for so long, and it won't help your contributions to the future, i.e., children. The term I often think describing these kinds of novels or movies or TV shows shouldn't be dystopia but nihilist. 

Recently I read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and I'd call it an excellent example of what I think is the proper way we need to think about anything like a post-apocalypse. Published in 2020, it presents a world facing the certainty of climate change with nothing having been done to slow it down or even address it. After a devastating heat wave kills millions of Indians over a course of weeks, the UN recognizes something must be done and empanels a ministry designed to focus on both the future and the development of ways to be certain there is one. Various countries, starting with India, decide to ignore the richer nations and their do-nothing procedures and jury-rig a program meant to help themselves first of all and benefitting all other nations secondarily. 

Not to spoil a 500+ page book, but this jump-starts a series of escalating programs and laws that manage to keep the earth turning for the near future. The reason I applaud this "science fiction nonfiction" (as Jonathon Lethem dubs it) and I suppose a reason it was named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year is because the solution doesn't lie in guns and marauding bands and white American individuals making heroic sacrifices but in the subtle use of economics, policy, and science to come to terms with our reckless disregard for responsible use. The world finally discovers it needs a Plan B.

What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it's called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts...Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It's as simple as that.

Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let's call it real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some, it's probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation...

[There] still has to be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already existing central banks have to be a part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it's true, and maybe obvious...It is what we've got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it's castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos...It's like being hypnotized; you have to agree for it to work. So we are all hypnotized in a giant dream we hallucinate together, and that's social reality...

 [The] current order is so unequal, so unfair. Old story, of course. Biblical; detailed in Genesis; it's the oldest story, inequality, and never much changed from the start of civilization. So how can we change that? What do we do now?

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real condition of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works. You know the world is spinning toward catastrophe! You know it's time to act. Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed. So now things have broken. We broke them; we broke them on purpose! Riot, occupation, non-compliance, general strike: breakdown. Now it's time for Plan B. Time to act...

Hope and the Courage to Act on It

 

I'm conflicted, I admit. Not a day has gone by since the ignobility of the November vote that there hasn't been an idea floated, an action taken, a decree made, an insult delivered, and thousands upon thousands of lies told, and I have felt the need to talk about it. I've been concerned that, in the wake of the complicity of most media in the pretense all this is normal, there won't be a note for future generations, if there are any, that there were people watching and writing it down and recognizing the wrongness of it all.

So I've felt it's fallen to me. But that's self-aggrandizing, almost worthy of trump himself, that anyone reads these missives, let alone they'll remember that there was someone commenting on it in a way that's worth holding onto. 

Besides, and maybe more importantly, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want what little attention I get to be for a list of lies and laments. That's all such notes would be because frankly just noticing this sort of stuff daily is exhausting. 

I want to be known, if at all, for keeping up a good word, for being the port in the storm, the one who keeps his head when all around them is chaos and dread. I do dread the chaos, of course, because not to do so is to give in to the lie that it's a kind of order, trump uber alles. 

I would be remembered like John Murray to whom is attributed this: 

You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to hearts of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

Quite some thought to be remembered by, isn't it? Of course, John Murray never said nor wrote this. It was attributed to a Time-Spirit counseling Murray in a 1951 pamphlet by Alfred Cole, and somehow made it into a Universalist Sunday text in 1962 and from there into The Larger Faith, the history of the Unitarian Universalists written by Charles Howe. 

But the point here is that, even if Murray didn't write it but Cole created it for his pamphlet, it is still a good distillation of what is important, that we leave people with hope and the courage to act on it. As Ken Davis writes in Don't Know Much About the Bible about the sayings of Jesus, "What's important is that someone said these things or wrote them down." Just as Jesus' words, whosever they may really be, remain a touchstone about how to behave with one another, so Cole's words are a prod to those who comment on the darkness and despair now. As Wayne Arneson reminds us, "The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high." But "Take courage [because] you are not alone."

Let someone else keep the lists. I will uplift hope. 

Turtle mitzvah

It's a small thing, but isn't that what life is composed of? For my birthday I took a short road trip, just a day out and a day back, spending most of both days driving because I miss driving distances. I drove what William Least Heat Moon called Blue Highways, the state and local roads where you have to slow down when you're near a town or church or school. I wasn't in a hurry to get where I was going.

Where I went is Alabama, where I noticed 3 things: even middle aged men in nice cars don't mind losing a hub cap as one I followed for a length of time did so on a corner, and it bounced off a tree and flew back between us, missing my car by a couple feet; there were many houses, both in and out of towns, surrounded by fences, some houses nice but also many that were obviously abandoned, and often those were fenced in by stronger materials, leaving me wondering if the place was a former or current meth house; and near the Georgia border there was a stretch of about 10 miles with fire hydrants spaced every half mile where there were no houses in sight, and even between abandoned and tumbled down buildings.

I love that sort of driving, listening to the radio and watching the trees and trailers and folks in their yards go by slowly enough I could see them in detail. There was a thunderstorm I drove through for hours that closed 3 roads and a bridge I'd intended to take. I'm glad too because on one of those swtched-to roads I was on I crested a hill and made out a turtle crossing ahead of me. Or starting to cross, as he or she was just off the shoulder and aimed at the opposite side. I couldn't see any water on either side but that wasn't any of my business.

I stopped on the shoulder beside the turtle, who turned about and scurried under my car. I found it behind a wheel and picked them up with both hands and carried them across the road and a few feet past the shoulder where they splayed out all 4 feet and head and contentedly continued on their way. 

I'm not a believer in being directed by God or Fate or the Universe into doing something that makes a difference, but as I got back into my car I felt I'd done something that mattered, that left me feeling blessed. Jews say this is what we feel when we have done a mitzvah. It is a good feeling.

Upstanders

 In "A Problem from Hell": America in the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power introduces the concept of being an "upstander" rather than a bystander. "An upstander is a person who goes against the tide and will protect a victim from injustice. The word is contrasted with bystander, which describes a person who does nothing to help when someone is being mistreated."  In her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Power reflects on and explains the term:

Somewhere along the way, I began describing the book's protagonists--those who tried to prevent or otherwise "stand up" against genocide--as "upstanders," contrasting them with bystanders. I noted that very few of us were likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders. 

While Power used it initially to describe people who take action against genocide, it has been broadened, as in the above quote from a teaching website, to mean anyone who stands between the oppressed and their oppressor. It doesn't have to be literally standing, of course, but can be protesting, witnessing, writing, performing, preaching against oppressive policies. Whatever the opposite of ignoring them may be.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, in bringing public attention to the lack of due process for undocumented (or in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, of having documentation proving his asylum status and withholding of removal) people being shipped, against court decisions, to a prison in El Salvador, is an upstander. The lawyers representing New Jersey State and others in litigation against trump's Executive Order denying Constitutional birth citizenship to children of undocumented are upstanders. The millions of people taking part in thousands of protests around the world decrying trump policies and the rise of fascist politicians through the 50501 and other organizations are upstanders. 

It's important to note that these are all legal actions done by folks who, in many cases, have little at stake themselves in the situations they protest. They take the higher ground of determining that, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, "Nobody's free until everybody's free."