too long in the wasteland

deacon blues

2012-01-29T19:33:00.001-08:00

on the drive home tonight I heard a steely dan song I hadn't heard in a while: "deacon blues." what it put me in mind of was driving home some 32 or so years ago while living with my parents and in my late teens. it was a delicious feeling, driving in the dark on country roads, the headlights focusing on trees and snow and casting ghostshadows up branches. what it reminds me of too is the feeling of something to look forward to. I was one of those new york-mad teens who made it worth bookland's effort to keep issues of apartment life and after dark in supply. we thought of ourselves as growing up sophisticated and leisurely, as experiencing the smooth life we coveted. it was a lovely feeling, that sense of what could come, and the song, with its brass and piano that conjured up the sensation of ease and comfort and always being warm and full, still leaves me happy and content and just a little sleepy.

why don't we pray?

2012-01-24T08:40:00.000-08:00

here is a sermon from 2 weeks ago that I'm just getting around to posting. the topic is 1 I covered originally in 2007 when I was serving the menomonie congregation and I was asked to speak on it again this year at 2 other minnesota congregations. it's a trifle longer, at 11 pages, than I'd like it to be so I need to edit it prior to its use in willmar in march.

HOLY, HOLY, HOLY: WHY DON’T WE PRAY?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that it still surprises me. Nearly every class I’ve taken part in at seminary begins this way. The teacher enters the classroom, says a few words to students, and then sits down or stands at a podium and says, “Let us pray.”

At first, I thought this was the norm only at the first meetings of classes. It made sense, calling on god at the opening of a new course in, say, Older Testament or Theology. But I’ve experienced this as well in my classes in American Religious History or Church Management and Budgeting.

I’m not a person who prays, or at least who doesn’t pray the same way I see it done by others. I don’t bow my head or close my eyes, so whenever someone leads a prayer I use the opportunity to look at what everyone else is doing. In my seminary classes, even some people who are diehard Unitarian Universalist humanists and who probably don’t pray in their congregations, bow their heads and fold their hands and close their eyes. This is the way we’ve come to be expected to pray, and my compromise, since I don’t believe in a god who would expect me to abase myself before her, is to set both feet on the floor and observe silent observation.

This seems perfunctory. It is expected at a church service or even a seminary class that the authority will ask us to bow our heads in prayer, and the correct thing to do is to assume the position. But every once in a while, on the faces of some of these people, I glimpse something very like what I’d identify as transcendence. There is, if only for a moment, a hint that something, or someone, has touched them very, very deeply.

I’m reminded of my father, who really isn’t a praying man, but who puts his all into it when he’s asked to do it. It’s as if he’s Jacob wrestling with some aspect of a physical god, and it’s getting the better of him. His eyes screw up, as if it was his life if he opened them, and the veins stand out on his forehead and his neck, and he grimaces. His hands are welded to one another as if each was in a wrestling contest with the other. His shoulders, which are already frail and narrow, become blades. This is the type of prayer I associate with his forebears, Tennessee Appalachian holy rollers who were only a generation away from taking up serpents.

But he isn’t that. In fact, my father and my late mother were Seventh-Day Adventists who took seriously the admonition in Matthew not to pray in public like the hypocrites do, but behind closed doors. As a child, I remember asking my mother, who was a teacher, about whether it was right for me to pray every morning at school before the Pledge of Allegiance with the rest of the kids, like we were expected to do. Many of you are my age or older: I’m sure you remember having to pray before reciting the Pledge in school. Her answer was to the effect that, “if this is all they ask you for, give it to them.”

Older now, and capable of my own decisions, I haven’t prayed, if prayer is like that, for decades. There are, of course, other ways to pray. Orthodox Jews sing their prayers. American Indians and some Sufis dance. Some Buddhists and most Muslims chant their prayers. I’ve bowed my head and gotten down on my knees and clasped my hands or clasped hands with another person, and I’ve directed comments to a disembodied “other” who may or may not be listening, but I’ve done those things because I’ve been asked to, not because I’ve believed in their efficacy or their benediction.

I suspect it’s like that for most of us. We were probably taught to pray or forced to pray when we were younger and in the clutches of another faith, and now that we’ve found one that’s comfortable or that’s got something we want, we don’t want to muddy the water with fairy tales and silly requests for a pony or curing someone’s cancer. That’s all prayer is, isn’t it? Asking for things? Maybe not for yourself, but it is all about the asking, isn’t it?

Maybe it’s all about the hearer, or the not-hearer as the case may be. After all, if we don’t believe in a god or a goddess or an ultimate reality or a hearer of some sort, there’s no point speaking to what’s not there. “Prayer,” we need to remember is one of those words, like “love” or “god,” whose meaning depends on how the person saying it defines it. “Work” is a similar word: when I say something about “my work,” you might hear me saying something about my ministerial duties, but I might as easily be talking about my teaching responsibilities or my responsibilities to my wife or my family or I might even be talking about the chores I do around the house. So let me define, for this sermon, what I mean by “prayer.”

Like those other words that can get us into trouble, we think we know where the word “prayer” originates—it was always associated with religion. But like with everything else we know, it ain’t necessarily so. It entered Middle English around 1290, admittedly in a book of services called The Early South-English Legendary, where it appeared as preyen, prayen and preien, and it meant simply to ask earnestly of someone. It entered through the existence of the Old French preier “to request,” which itself first appeared around 880. Prior to this appearance, we are less certain: it is etymologically related to Latin of course through the French, which has precor, precari, prex and the prefix prec-, all of which mean “to entreat,” “to wish well or ill,” “to request” and “to address another with a wish.” None of these had a religious or worshipful tone to them. They simply referred to a strong request.

There are also three ways of emphasizing my subtitle. The first is a simple question: “Why don’t we pray?” Why don’t Unitarian Universalists, this congregation, this denomination, this faith, pray? We are, after all, oriented toward it. On both sides of the aisle, Unitarian and Universalist, we started out as Christian sects centuries ago, and while we’ve dropped off the trappings of most of that history, we still carry some. We meet on Sunday morning. We have a minister. We have rituals and symbolism, from chalice lightings to Child Dedications. Why don’t we get down on our knees or put our hands together or at the very least close our eyes and pray to, well, to god? What we often mean by this type of prayer is called intercessory prayer, in which we ask god or Jesus or Mary or some other intercessor to step into our lives and problems and give the solution we ask for. For every one of these in which the intercessor seems to respond positively, there are thousands of examples in which this same intercessor would seem to have had his mind elsewhere. What else are we to make of the deaths of dozens of Nigerian Christians over the course of 24 hours of sectarian violence late this week, or the arrest Friday of Alabama’s 1993 Teacher of the Year who has admitted sexually molesting at least 20 girls, some as young as 9, over a 25 year career, or the death of my young friend Alex, age 26, from stomach cancer? Any number of people prayed for help and a positive end to those situations, and none of them will be written up for the “Prayer at Work” section of Guidepost magazine.

That last one is a flub, by the way. Alex was in so much pain even I stepped into the Basilica in Minneapolis and lit a candle, asking that she die quickly and in as little pain as possible. I can’t see it was answered except that she did die eventually, although it was weeks after my prayer.

We see the answer to this one quickly: Unitarian Universalists aren’t asking anything of anyone. Not for forgiveness, not for world peace, not for understanding, not for a pony. We know none of these things will be given to us. We have to earn them, and even then there is a question whether we will ever really “get” them. Except maybe the pony. If you open your eyes and a pony’s there, then you got the pony.

At the nursing home/rehab center where I am doing my clinical pastoral work, I am often asked to provide prayers similar to this, although not often for the benefit of the person asking for the prayer. You might think, given the number of degenerative diseases I work with and the people who are in constant, unyielding pain, their prayers would petition God for help or relief; but the prayers are often for family members or caregivers or for people at large, that they stay safe and are at peace. I like to think, if someone must pray for intervention, that this is the prayer she would indulge in.

Margaret Guenther Cowley reminds us that our “prayer makes a difference in who we are and who we become.” There’s another way to read “prayer” and that’s as a form of communication rather than a supplication. This is the way it’s often used by Jews and Muslims: you do this in a group—in Judaism it takes a minyan, ten adult men, to make it official, although women can join the prayer, and in Islam it can be as few as two people—and the larger the group, the louder the prayer. The prayer in these traditions doesn’t “ask” for anything, they are done several times daily as simple recognition of god’s existence and praise and appreciation for all she’s done. Talmudic scholars have said god created people so he’d have someone to talk to, and it’s this idea that this type of prayer speaks to. You are in conversation with god, although admittedly it’s pretty one-sided—god is not expected to answer, at least not in the way god’s been addressed. This prayer can often take the form of application—“god, please do these things”—but more often it’s viewed as a way of saying, “hey, god, nice going, good to see things happening, just wanted to say ‘hey’.” This is the sort of prayer we should all practice with our elected officials. “Hey, good bill, keep it up.” This is often called an experiential approach. Through this prayer we catch a glimpse or a sense of god or the divine or ultimate reality. It’s similar to an educational form of prayer in which we become more aware of the universe’s being by concentrating on the myriad tiny ways it works through its inhabitants.

Thus, the second way of saying my subtitle: “why don’t we pray?” This is not so easy to answer, since UUism is so composed of many, many ways of seeing that which is outside ourselves. Some say god, some goddess, some divine or holy, some ultimate nature. Some say there is nothing outside us at all. Former UU minister Davidson Loehr uses this as an example of how we are destined to fail as a denomination for the simple fact we can never get everyone on the same page the way, say, Catholics can—although if you know your Catholicism you know they’re never all on the same page either, although often they’re in the same chapter. In contrast, UUs are rarely holding the same books. It may be true, though, that although we ascribe to separate beliefs, we often end up more or less in the same section of the library.

This is by the way a roundabout way of saying that actually, we do pray this way. When we meditate as a group, when we gather together and direct our thoughts in the same direction by listening to the sermon or poem or singing the same song, we pray. Some of us might take exception to that idea—“I’m listening, I’m not praying”—and I respect that exception. I can’t do much more than suggest that maybe, in some small, conversational, educational way, when we sing “Spirit of Life” together or we announce “Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law,” we’re praying this way. If there is something bigger than all of us, this is something that might be heard. Kind of like in Horton Hears a Who, in which Jo-Jo, the tiniest Who of them all, provides the necessary volume lift to make their combined voices heard. After all, “a person’s a person no matter how small.”

This is slightly different although related to the way prayer is treated in Buddhism in which it supports meditation and study. You’re meant to contemplate what you have learned while in silence or by chanting a mantra. One form of this is popularly known as the prayer of the Bodhisattva: “Sentient beings are numberless, I will save them all. Delusions are inexhaustible, I will put an end to them. The Dharma is endless, I will master it. The Buddha Way is unobtainable, I will obtain it.” You aren’t asking the universe for anything in particular, other than the enlightenment of all beings, but you’re mulling over, conversing with the universe as it were, the things you’ve found and looking for insight into them.

My mentor, reverend Eleanor Rice, asked me one afternoon in response to some problems I’d laid out for her, “how’s your prayer life?” I was taken aback, partly because Eleanor of course is a UU and UUs don’t pray, and partly because it seems like a remarkably personal question, like asking someone when his last bowel movement was. I stammered something to the effect that I don’t have one, expecting that to be the end of that line of questioning. But Eleanor wouldn’t let me off that easy—part of the reason she was a good mentor to me—and kept probing and questioning. “Isn’t there,” she asked, “a time when you feel peaceful, at one with your surroundings and your spirit, and content? Do you meditate?” I said I hadn’t meditated as such in years, not since enforced practice at Dharmapada, the monastery I visited in the late 80s, although I have done a form of walking meditation for decades.

She said, “That’s not quite it. Isn’t there a time when you’re totally concentrated on something other than yourself but you feel in touch with both it and yourself?”

I thought about it. I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve purposely called on something outside myself for answers or help. They haven’t been spectacular successes. When I’m asked to say grace at family gatherings, as I am at times, I usually say something along the lines of, “It’s good that we’re all here and we’re healthy and happy. We’re fortunate to have food to eat and family to be with, and we’re grateful for that.” No one says “amen” after that, although I think that’s a mighty profound statement.

But then I twigged into what Eleanor was getting at. There is a time when I feel at peace, at one with the world and the people in it, in communion with something larger than myself. That’s when I am laying on my back deep in the recesses of solving a difficult crossword puzzle.

I offered that to her and explained that, when I’m working on a puzzle, I’m not me, I’m not a teacher or a preacher or a student or a man or a husband or a father to dogs. I’m simply not. Or perhaps the way to say it is that I’m all things, all those things and other things I can’t even think of. I lose my sense of self as I’m solving a puzzle and it doesn’t matter what’s going on outside the puzzle or even in the puzzle. If I don’t answer it, I don’t answer it, but if I do, that’s a mitzvah. A good thing.

I used to spend time with a group called Direct Centering back in the 80s and they were a bit of a scam operation but they were also onto something with their notion that one should detach from stressful situations. Their rationale was that by detaching you would be okay with any result to the situation, and sometimes that led to a sense of helplessness or powerlessness, but I think what they were getting at was this sense of being separate from the result, in the way Buddhists think. That is, knowing you have done all you could to bring a satisfactory answer to the situation, and now that you’ve done so, you will be satisfied with the result. It may be life, it may be death. It may be a pony. You have done everything you could and you are secure in what you’ve done as, not necessarily the right thing, but the thing you’ve done. There may be room for correction. There may not. This is why, I suppose, I do crosswords in pen. There is no disgrace in writing over something.

Eleanor said, “That’s your form of prayer.”

I don’t want to romanticize this idea. All I’m doing is scratching words on a piece of paper. But just as prayer invests mumbled or thought words with holiness by the prayer’s intent, so it is the intent of the person doing the action—a crossword, feeding animals, knitting, singing—that invests the action with prayer. Like Yeats, we are no longer able to distinguish the dancer from the dance.

Finally, the third way of reading my subtitle is as an invitation. “Why don’t we pray?” In a UU World article from 2007 Kimberly French calls “Spirit of Life,” which is number 123 of our hymnal, our Doxology, our “Amazing Grace.” It’s become so prevalent in UU services and circles almost everyone knows it by heart. Carolyn McDade, the author of the song, says of its composition that she was faced with a difficult situation made more difficult by difficult people. “’I [felt] like a piece of dried cardboard that [had lain] in the attic for years. Just open wide the door and I’ll be dust.’…I walked through the house in the dark, found my piano, and that was my prayer: May I not drop out. It was not written but prayed…I thought of it as a living prayer…” Will you join me now in standing as you’re able and speaking or singing the words to the prayer “Spirit of Life?”

[“Spirit of life, come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. Blow in the wind, rise in the sea, move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice. Roots hold me close, wings set me free. Spirit of life, come to me. Come to me.”]

Thank you.

"we can't always use pandas and tea"

2012-01-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

this is the sort of writer I've always wanted to be, not necessarily the voice of a nation but the writer who can direct readers to that voice, the writer who makes note of what the nation has become and points up both its foibles and its beauty. han han, who I had not heard of until I'd read this essay (my link is to the digital new yorker copy from last july and may prove unnavigatable and you may need to go to the paywall at the new yorker website), is publishing in english soon and I look forward to finding his essays, perhaps his fiction. I love too that in his native china he's better known as a racer than an author. shades of buckaroo banzai. I'm currently in a fiction mode, reading novels that make a comment on their times, from les miserables by hugo to neuromancer by gibson. these are the sorts of works that move down the centuries.

pastoral clinical week 15

2012-01-17T07:09:00.000-08:00

CPE REFLECTION WEEK 15

I met with one of my residents at her mother’s viewing and funeral this morning. It was as good an experience as I could have hoped for and helped me to recognize some of the ways in which I’ve been privileged during this experience.

First, the preparations for making her aware of her mother’s illness and death were more complicated than they needed to be. But this should be expected, I suppose, when dealing with a family whose relationships are as riven with bitterness and suspicion as those between her sister, the resident’s husband, and the resident’s children are. The complications were magnified by distrust between the sister, her other sister, and her husband, each insisting someone else should be the one to tell her about her mother’s illness and death, but none willing to let an outside source do it. Finally, her husband visited and told her about it, and then we went into the question of whether she wanted to attend the funeral and who would take her.

But this morning’s experience made all that moot. She was welcomed into the grieving group in a way I wasn’t entirely expecting. I have sometimes wondered if her husband is behaving lovingly toward her in response to what he hopes for others to see; but I saw some behaviors between them that seemed genuine, and I didn’t think he could know anyone was watching or listening to him. They were little things, like his gentle wiping of the drool that pools in pools in the cleft between her chin and chest (which is something I also do repeatedly, thinking of her dignity) and running his hand soothingly over her hair. At one point, while he took her to use the bathroom and I was watching outside the door to ask anyone approaching to wait a few moments until she was finished, one of her sisters-in-law said she had to take her child in to throw up, and in the moment when she opened the door, I could see her husband slowly and carefully lowering back into her chair. I am convinced that he is genuine in his dedication to her.

Similarly, a woman who grew up with my resident, went to college with her and with whom she shared an apartment for years, and who is a nurse now in Buffalo, came directly to her when she walked into the funeral home, got down on one knee to be at her level, hugged her, and then spent most of the funeral talking with her, running down memories and experiences, and at times crying with her. The affection in her eyes was wonderful to see.

Her children, with whom there are apparently many issues—I discovered in talking with them that both had spent the intervening years since her debilitating aneurysm living with their father—most particularly their unwillingness (according, separately, to both her sister and husband) to visit her, attended the funeral. (My resident has three children and a fourth adopted daughter whose name has not come up and I didn’t think it was prudent to ask about her. The two who live closest came.) Her eldest son came directly up to her when he came in but awkwardly stood next to his father while he said hello, and then just as awkwardly stood around during the viewing, the funeral, and the social time afterward. Her daughter, who lives in St. Paul, pointedly ignored her mother when she came in, managing to catch her dad during one of the times while I sat with my resident alone while he mingled, and then passed without looking at her when she went in to sit down. (She was looking at me out of her single good eye then and didn’t see her walk past.) But after the funeral she came over to her mother and took her hands and got down on her knees to hug her. She looked up at me as if to tell me, “My daughter. This is my daughter.”

If she didn’t have a good time, which I doubt anyone can say they have when they attend their mother’s funeral, at least she didn’t have a bad time. This whole experience affected me profoundly, as I felt privy to a few hours’ window into the intimate and previously functional life of someone who’s entered my life as a person in need of constant, sometimes overwhelming, care.

On my drive back to the facility, I reflected on how many intense but common experiences I’ve been allowed to share with residents during this CPE. I’ve visited people in the hospital, spent time with them while they were most vulnerable and afraid of death, sat their bedsides while they were in the process of dying and then handled their bodies after they died, talked with them about their families and their relationships with other residents, talked them down when they’ve been angry or frustrated. Outside of birth and marriage, these are the most intimate and bewildering experiences most of us have and most ministers go through with their congregants, only I have been privileged to see them in the course of a few months’ time. I am humbled by their power.

vagabondage

2012-01-11T17:31:00.000-08:00

this is a mashup I've created as part of the worship service during my site visit tomorrow at my CPE facility. my didactic is about homelessness, a condition several of the people on my floor and my site have faced or are afraid they'll face once the move from the current building to a smaller one is begun, and while I've tried and failed to secure a guest speaker on the topic, my supervisor (and my group) argued that, as I had been homeless, I could be a persuasive expert on the subject. I'll emphasize to them, of course, that even within the broad definition of homelessness I was a particularly advantaged individual and that my experiences can't be taken as either the norm or anything like universals. however, as they have pointed out to me, I can speak to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual elements of what it's like to be homeless, and that's a step beyond what they know. I'm looking forward to this with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, as I guess I look forward to everything I suspect I'll enjoy.

pastoral clinical week 13

2012-01-09T20:47:00.000-08:00

CPE REFLECTION 12

This last Friday was the last day for the Music Intern at my site. We’ve had a cordial relationship, having a few conversations mostly about her concerns about having no work lined up for the immediate future and uncertainty about moving back to Iowa, and she’s served as the music accompanist for some of my chapel services. Which is to say, we’ve had a good, cordial, and professional relationship. So when I stopped by her office to say goodbye on my way out, I was completely taken aback by her suddenly hugging me.

Make no mistake, I’m no stranger to hugging goodbye. Back in New York, it’s often the way people take leave of one another whether they expect never to see one another again or to see them in an hour. I tried keeping that tradition after moving here to the Midwest in the early 90s and came to the conclusion after a few years and marrying into a Midwestern family that the correct procedure is that people who are related or have experienced some important and nigh life-changing adventure together are all right to hug. Outside those criteria, hugging is strictly frowned upon.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but the fact remains that I was surprised by her hug. I hadn’t thought of her as a hugger or someone sentimental about the few experiences we had shared. By the same token, I was surprised at how the Nurse Manager on my floor took time from rushing off to yet another management meeting to discuss with me her recent decision to move from management back to fulltime nursing. I had stopped her on the stairs momentarily to ask if she was comfortable with her decision, and her first answer was a quick, “Yeah, yeah, I’m very okay with it.”

We’ve had many conversations over my months here and so I followed that with another question that might not have been thought within the boundaries we’d set. “I wondered if, given what you said a few days ago about the comments your boyfriend had made [these questioned her decisions to sometimes stay late in order to talk with residents and staff when they had concerns and he had argued she’s not as important as she thinks she is], if that had anything to do with your decision.” I expected a kind of perfunctory, “No, it hadn’t,” response but instead she took a moment to gather her thoughts, looking off for a moment into space, and then launched into a solid five minute explanation of what went into her decision-making: her years of considering the loss she feels moving away from practice into supervision, the doubts she has about her efficacy in management, her need to feel as if she’s doing something immediate with residents that doesn’t have to filter through other people, her desire to feel a part of things again. Finally, she said, “When the list of nursing positions at the new place opened up, I looked at it and thought, ‘Maybe this is my chance to go back to what I really love to do.’ I thought that might not happen again, so I took the chance.” I came away from that conversation feeling very confident she had made her decision over the course of years rather than moments and it wasn’t in reaction against some experience, as I’d feared, but in response to something inside her.

Similarly, while our schedules matched only a few times, another intern and I had several fruitful conversations during the couple weeks when only the two of us were here at the facility. Often they were theologically based, usually asking one another about subtleties in our different religions. These were in-depth questions about dogma and practice and I think we both came away from them with a better understanding of our respective faiths. Most of my questions hinged on events or situations I’d read about and wondered, while most of his seemed to revolve around questions about Unitarian Universalism he’d considered for a long time. They were good questions and good opportunities.

It’s surprising to me that I’ve made these connections with people I hadn’t expected to because of the shorter time CPE is happening (as opposed to the eight months my wife is taking to do her CPE) and to the lesser time I have spent with staff and other interns. Most of my time of course is taken up on the floor and so I expected to have strong connections with the residents I saw and talked with everyday. But I’ve been surprised by the joy I’ve experienced coming into community with these other people I likely will never see again I’m not certain if it’s a case of lowering my guard (or of theirs) or the shared sense of change that being thrown together encourages in most people, but it is a benefit of the CPE experience I hadn’t expected.

sunday night reading

2012-01-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

here is an interesting essay concerning the religious impulse in the us. it doesn't come to any new conclusions or make a staggeringly new case for the hypocrisy between what we preach and what we practice, but it does provide a startling series of statistics in which, unless you've taken care to pay close attention to everything, you're likely to find something you hadn't known before. as for me, the following is among the more disturbing information.

In one area, the United States is indisputably No. 1. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. Currently more than 2 million people are incarcerated; and according to the most recent figures, 1 in every 31 adults is in prison, on parole or probation, adding up to a total of 7.3 million at a cost of $68 billion annually. Criminologist Shawn Bushway at the State University at Albany reports that “by age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime.” Our nearest competitor for the No. 1 spot is China. Although China has a far greater total population than the U.S., its prison population is half a million less than ours. Next is Russia with 846,967 imprisoned.

there are many links to author bernard starr's sources available in the original and I encourage you to visit some of them. the essay itself, prone to the problems of most blogs--lack of editing and poor word choice as well as rampant grammatical issues--is still a fine read and should experience a greater audience.

new year reflection

2012-01-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

yesterday in my supervisory meeting my CPE supervisor suggested that my reflections had been resident-driven rather than focusing on what was going on for me and that I might want to try concentrating on my own internal experience. I might do that, depending on what happens between now and my next reflection deadline, but I thought I could at least try doing that here. it's rather fitting, too, as I haven't posted since the new year began, and altering my view a little, from outside to in, might be an interesting, if shortterm, change.

while my wife has noted that this is the 1st midwinter break she hasn't dreaded my descent into my usual sunless funk, which may be a greater testament to the change in my medication than to anything in me, nonetheless I've still experienced a lot of internal roiling over my immediate future. the short of it is I'm worried I won't have a chance to return to the work I love doing: teaching, and now ministering.

it's not that there aren't any jobs available, although there are fewer than there used to be. it's that teaching college english, which used to be a pretty good hedge against unemployment, is glutted--really, in my adult lifetime, when hasn't it been glutted?--and especially here on the rim and closer to the hub, where there are both hiring caps and closing schools. because of our continued seminary schooling, and the fact that my father-in-law stubbornly--I almost wrote "selfishly," which should give an indication where my mind starts traveling when the weather gets brass monkey cold--clings to life, we aren't moving from the rim anytime soon, so I need to focus all my efforts at finding employment here.

and I do need to find employment in the near future, not only for monetary reasons but because I go a little crazy when I'm not around other people for long. while I continue to draw unemployment, and that frankly pays better than any of the local minimum wage general labor jobs--and thank you, schools that hired me for years and paid me a lot of money to teach their kids--that will end around the start of the summer. and while at one time I could reliably drown myself in booze and travel and outside adventure for years on end--my experience of most of the mid to late 80s--I can't do that anymore, not only because I'm married now and have a house and dogs and cats and responsibilities, but because I've found that I really, really like working with people.

I liked working retail. I saw new people every day and I think I was pretty good at dealing with them. but I don't want to return to that. there is something to be said for the holiness of serving people that way but I'm not the person to say it. the recession too has served to make clerking less a human-centered activity and more a product-driven, unit-moving enterprise, and that's really always been the case but even from the outside I can see it metastisizing.

I don't want to return to retail. or outside, shortterm labor. or food service. and especially not to social services (shudder). but I fear I will need to, just to make money (note I did not say, "make a living"). what I fear most is that the work I've concentrated on the past 12 years, serving people as a teacher and a minister, is gone for me, all that I've worked at to better myself in those roles and the skills I've found I'm really, really good at is like so much achingly-remembered dream from which I've been woken to do my shift at the factory.

does this sound like so much navelgazing? I also fear that. because the truth is I'm better off than a lot of other people, even a lot of other people who live around me. I have a wife who makes a lot of money doing what she does (even if she hates her job and would like to leave it for something more appealing, like chaplaincy) and living off whom would not have troubled me 25 years ago. and she has said that we can afford this spring for me to finish my classes so that I can graduate in the fall. but she hates her job and while she's decided she can stomach it at least long enough to keep at it until she's finished herself with seminary in another year or 2, I can't fight off the niggling fact I couldn't do that myself. how can I let her do it?

sometimes what I want more than anything else is to return to the easier, cheaper, lonelier life of my thumb stuck out on the side of the road. somedays I drive toward the hub with some errand in mind, my face toward the setting sun, and I think, "I could just keep driving, further and further, until the car runs out of gas and I sleep by the side of the road until someone picks me up and then I go back to bumming and blowjobs for rides and swiping food from mom-and-pops and being a cheap kerouac, a poorer genet." but that's sentimentalizing and besides I'm over 50 now and sex on offer is a dwindling commodity and I can't sleep without a pillow anymore and would rather not bathe than dip in a cold stream and where would I get my medication?

pastoral clinical week 11

2011-12-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

(I'm late getting this written partly because it's not due to be turned in for another week and partly because I've been writing it in my head for a couple weeks. it's actually a reflection of a pre-christmas situation.)

CPE REFLECTION 11

I’m not certain how upset I ought to be over this situation, as it may be me simply over-thinking it by placing myself in the resident’s place. But I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have let the situation remain if I were still working in group homes.

Earlier this week I stopped in to visit a resident who’s been on a rollercoaster of health lately; sometimes in good shape, sometimes otherwise. When he first joined my floor he was starting the slow descent into dementia which has sped up in the ensuing months, to the point at which he sometimes seems uncomprehending of his surroundings. When I dropped in on him it was roughly 6:30 in the evening. His door was closed completely, which is unusual, and at first I thought he might be in bed already. But I knocked gently anyway and walked in. He was sitting in his wheelchair, indulging in his habit of ripping pieces of paper into smaller and smaller pieces of paper.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We were having our usual conversation about how he was feeling and how he was doing when I noticed his sweatpants were down around his hips. I said, “Were you trying to change your pants?” He started to absently pull at them like he was pulling them up but I asked him to wait a moment I couldn’t see whether his undergarments were on. I looked behind him and realized he was sitting in a very messy undergarment that he’d obviously recently shat in.

I told him, “Wait a minute while I get someone.” I stepped out into the hall and caught a staff I knew and told him, “This guy's Depends are messed and I think he might have been trying to change his pants.” He said okay, and followed me back into the resident’s room. When we got there he gave him the medication that he’d been preparing, then asked if he was all right. The resident said he was. The staff couldn’t have helped noticing his pants were around his thighs and the undergarment was soiled but turned around and shrugged at me and then left the room. I stayed with my resident a few more minutes until I simply couldn’t take the smell any longer and left.

This disturbs me because I’m not at all certain I handled the situation right. My first inclination was to help him change (but I don’t do that work anymore) so my second inclination was to find someone who would help him change. However, that person seemed to take my resident’s word that he was all right sitting in messy undergarments.

On reflection that night, it struck me that the door might have been closed so that no one would enter and he could have some privacy to sit in his room. But I can’t imagine anyone opting to want to sit in a shit-filled undergarment, privately or not. The staff I approached is someone I’ve worked with on the floor for my whole length of time there and I trust his judgment. I didn't get the sense he was simply walking away from a situation but was acting on how he understood the resident to prefer. But I also can’t imagine allowing someone to decide for himself to remain in such a situation, particularly someone with the recent history of health issues of this resident. Should I have confronted the staff afterward and asked if we were making the best decision? Should I have alerted someone else?

I’m conflicted about the situation. My immediate reaction was to change the resident’s undergarments, and frankly I’m glad I waved that option away because I’m not qualified to do that anymore. I’m glad too of my second reaction, which was to recognize my role as being part of a team and report the situation to someone who could correct the situation. This is a role I've been working at. But I’m uncomfortable with the way the situation ended. Is it, I wonder, all right to let a resident opt to sit in shat-in adult undergarments, however privately, for an unspecified amount of time? Should that be within his rights? And can someone like this resident, whose thinking has been muddled at the best of times but is nearing the end of his life and is clearly showing increasing dementia, be permitted to make that decision?

TV dinners for xmas

2011-12-19T20:36:00.000-08:00

A few days ago one of the residents at my CPE facility mentioned to me that his mother and most of his brothers were coming to visit on Christmas. “And they’re bringing TV dinners with them so the kitchen doesn’t have to cook for them.”

“TV dinners?” I said. “Was that a tradition at your house too? We used to have TV dinners every Christmas for dinner.”

He looked at me as if there were bugs crawling out of my nose.

“No,” he said slowly. “They just don’t want the kitchen to have to cook for them and TV dinners are easy to put in the dining room microwave.” He started to back his wheelchair up a little to get a better look at me. “My mom’s over 90 and I don’t think she wants to cook a big dinner anymore.”

My mom, on the other hand, never reached 90 but we ate TV dinners every Christmas as if it was a gift itself. The best part was that my sister and I got to choose two of whatever we wanted: her
taste ran to fried chicken because it came with a brownie, but I always chose two differing Asian dishes, Polynesian and Hawaiian. I loved the contrasting sweet and sour of them, the tastes of meat and fruit.

The official reason we ate TV dinners was so my mother didn’t need to cook a big meal on Christmas, but the truth is my mother never cooked a big meal on Christmas. I think we simply liked the ease and comfort food of TV dinners, which were the content of meals pretty regularly at our house, and wanted to extend that relaxation to Christmas, which for us was a really big day that involved watching parades, opening gifts, playing in the snow, watching my dad burn the wrapping and boxes in the fireplace, and drinking hot cocoa with little marshmallows.

the pantisocratic pirates, part the 2nd

2011-12-15T06:32:00.000-08:00

"We first came together in London in 1753," Wilberforce began. "This was after the Great Comb Riots and alien dissenters were being interned under the Sedition Act, that was us, you see. We were Poles, Prussians, Serbs, Dalmations, any nation you care to think of . Even a Frenchman. Anyroad, we all fetched up together in Newgate jail and waited for the business to blow over. Only it didn't. More tea?" Peter Rathkael-Herbert shook his head. "Very well, we thought, so we wait to be charged. Standard procedure, you see. Get charged, plead guilty, be deported, three days at Boulogne and you're back within the week. But time wore on and we still were not charged. In the meantime we kept ourselves busy, political debates, discussions, a little dialectics. We look back on those days as the birth of Pantisocracy. It was the only compromise we could reach. You see, when you've got dia-hard Anabaptists and Thuringian ultramontanists in the ranks, take it from me, you need something broad. Pantisocracy is broad, if nothing else."

Wilberforce reached for his pipe and began packing it with a gluey substance. "All men are equal," he said as he lit the pipe, and Peter Rathkael-Herbert smelt a sweet scent familiar from the Tesferati. "That's about it, really. The stuff about land ownership doesn't really apply aboard ship. Anyway, in the end we figured out the delay. The section of the Act we'd been charged under had yet to be passed, and with the threat of revolt over, no one was very interested in getting it onto the statute books. We couldn't be released until we'd been tried, and we couldn't be tried because the law didn't exist. We rotted there for over a year until the magistrate who'd arraigned us in the first place chartered a ship. This ship, in fact, though it was called the Alecto then."

Wilberforce sent clouds of sweet blue smoke wafting toward his guest. "The idea was: Stage an escape, hop aboard this ship, be charged with the escape, plead guilty, be deported to France and back in a few days. The only problem was the Magistrate. He retired that very week, leaving us aboard the Alecto. There we were, suddenly fugitives from justice with nothing and nobody between us and the gallows. Technically, we were already pirates. After a quick debate we decided to go the whole hog. We put the master and his crew in the pinnace, hoisted the Jolly Roger, and set sail that night for the Barbary Coast. It's been thirty-odd years now and I can tell you truly that not a man jack of us has looked back since. I still think of that magistrate and each time I do I raise my glass and toast him: 'Happy retirement, Henry Fielding!' Without him, we'd all be living under the English boot, but here we are and here we stay. It's the rover's life for us and a damn fine life it is too, right, lads?"

"Right, Cap'n," replied a trio of hoary-headed tars from the quarterdeck.

Wilberforce van Clam passed the pipe to the Internuncio. "Suck on that, m'boy."

Hot sweet smoke curled in Peter Rathkael-Herbert's throat. Small metal centipedes raced around the insides of his kneecaps.

"Nn," he said, exhaling and handing it back.

The sky was a vacant eye, massively blue. The sun flared low over the sea. He coughed and thanked the captain.

"Only for today," Wilberforce explained to him. "Wilkins is captain tomorrow, then Schell, we rotate, you see, all being equals 'n' all. Gets a bit confusing sometimes."

His head was spinning, slow half-rotations which blurred the ship and its aged crew, somehow making them even more fabulous than they already were. "Pirates," he slurred. The chair was so enveloping, a whole world.

"Look at it financially, morally, politically, however you like," Captain van Clam leaned across, "we're the most succesful pirates these seas have ever known."

--from Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk

many of the characters from norfolk's novel are real, including the title character john lempriere, who did indeed write a dictionary of mythology. henry fielding, of course, as any english major knows, is real, although remembered here for his legal work rather than his satire. peter rathkael-herbert might be a twist on baron peter herbert-rathkael, who apparently had something to do with the breakout of the first world war. anyroad, to quote the fictional van clam, the point is the pantisocratic pirates who are an inspired creation.

the pantisocratic pirates, part 1

2011-12-11T18:29:00.000-08:00

"At first it was the Tesrifati's own shadow. Some strage refraction of the nowhere-light had thrown a dark double of his vessel off to port. Then it was his imagination, an image rising out of the silent hypnotic hours, now redoubted and returning. And then it was a black ship bearing down on him out of the fog. Hamit turned and began to shout. A dark form was running alongside his ship, the angle of coincidence so narrow it must have been there for hours. Hamit scrambled down ladders, through hatches, along gangways, shouting, cuffing the heads of the crew. None of the guns were primed. He could hear water rushing in the channel formed between the hulls. Two or three of the men were stirring themselves. Hamit...saw the black ship loom out of the fog to fill the gunport. He was hammering down the powder, tamping the ball. Lining the wales of the black ship from prow to stern were faces withered with age. Two crewmen were pulling at his arms. He pushed them away. The ship was almost on him, filling the sky, blotting out the fog, huge and black as night. He lit the taper. The crewmen were shouting at him, moving backward. Hamit touched the fuse and turned to see them running away from him with their hands to their heads, away from the cannon. The fuse hissed, he heard the first grappling hook fall with a thud on the deck above. Then the cannon exploded.

"From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound, and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the 'walls' and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space before landing on the deck of the Tesrifati's aggressor. He heared voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realized belatedly, and then the ships were free of each other. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars, and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew, and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prized off and a croaking voice above him said, 'Aha!' before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposti him on the deck. Crumpled, racked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

"'I am Wilberforce van Clam,' he told the disheveled heap. 'Welcome aboard the Heart of Light.'

"The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

"Aboard the Heart of Light, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not a one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

"'Take some tea.' He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. 'Wilkins!' he shouted. 'A cup for our guest, if you please!'...Wilkins, a spry sixty-year-old with a long white mustache, jumped to the task.

"'You are...pirates?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

"'Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren't we, lads?'

"'Oh yes!' came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

"'But we're Pantisocratic Pirates,' Wilberforce van Clam went on. 'We never really wanted to be pirates at all.' He paused and sipped his tea. 'It's society made us what we is now.'

"'Society?' Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. 'But how?'

"'Aha!' said Wilberforce for the second time that day. 'Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!'

"And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates."

--from Lempriere's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk

I have been reading this book for a little over a year and a half, having come across it for a dime at a library book sale in rural pennsylvania. I've read a lot of negative reviews but I have to say I am on the side of the faction that argues it's worth the staying with. it's got many red herrings and sometimes lapses into strange digressions in the middle of a sentence, but on the whole it's been worth the time it's taken to read it. the parts I'm posting today and tomorrow are a little better than 2/3s through the novel, and remind me of some of terry pratchett's discworld, and wilberforce van clam himself has made me think of cohen the barbarian.

part 2, the story of the pantisocratic pirates, tomorrow.

pastoral clinical week 10

2011-12-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

The most affecting experience I’ve had this week has been finding and then going through the artwork and photographs in a resident’s room for her memorial. I was lucky there was such a large cache to go through and I’m disappointed her remaining wants nothing to do with them.

First of all, the artwork is rather nice. It’s not something that will blow anyone away, some hidden Picasso or Chagall, but she had talent and a flair for drawing that comes through nicely. The photos of her sculptures were also impressive: some were horizontal, like a woman looking as if she were coasting through the waves, and were these massive, granite slabs often teetering as if playing with gravity, while others were vertical, like one that resembled a stylized milkweed, and willowy and slim.

But what really affected me was the implication of these photos and artwork that our residents were not always the people in the conditions that they are in now. Intellectually, we all know that. But as I sorted through the work in the interns’ office, sometimes holding something up and saying to anyone there, “look at this,” we were reminded constantly of that fact and commented on it. After her memorial, I showed the display to a nurse who had known her when she was still mobile and somewhat verbal before disassembling it, and she was like a little girl pawing through the work and saying over and over, “she was really, really young once.” I think that’s the takeaway from this experience, that while we’re all aware these folks had previous, maybe extraordinary lives, it’s nonetheless good to be reminded that those lives often didn’t include whatever illness or disability defines them for us now.

teach naked

2011-12-07T05:33:00.000-08:00

this is an essay written for a class on christian education expanding on an earlier essay defining the term.

“Now I Know Why I am an Orthodox Jew”

A recent issue of The Jewish Review of Books contains this anecdote to make clearer late neo-conservative founder Irving Kristol’s identification as a Jew “with an abiding interest in and respect for religion” first and as a political creature second.

A good clue to the answer [why he identified himself as a “neo-Orthodox Jew”] can be found in one of his later essays…Kristol there recounts an experience that his wife [Gertrude Himmelfarb] had while teaching a graduate course on British political thought in which she had spent several sessions on the writings of Edmund Burke. At the end of one class, she was approached by a “quiet and industrious” young woman. “Now,” this student said, “I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.” Needless to say, this wasn’t because Burke had supplied an incontrovertible proof that the Oral Torah had been revealed at Mt. Sinai. “What she meant was that she could now defend Orthodoxy in terms that made sense to the non-Orthodox, because she could now defend a strong deference to tradition, which is the keystone of any orthodoxy, in the language of rational secular discourse, which was the language in which Burke wrote.” (Soloveichik, 19)

This lengthy quote explains nicely, I think, what religious education ought to do: to inculcate in the educated not the dogma of the religion but a way of explaining what it is he or she believes to the non-member of the faith. As Judith Berling writes, “We not only learn through conversation, but we learn how to converse” (emphasis in original; 80). In my previous essay for this class, “We are Church when We are Gathered, We are Church when We are Dispersed,” I defined religious education as follows:

It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

To this I would now add that in addition to helping the student make sense of the world it should also help her or him to explain to others how he or she sees the world. For many students, one of the most important questions revolves around how they can affect the world (hopefully, in a positive fashion). Craig Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, for example, provides

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

I’ve argued that religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to expect students to ask: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

For the graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class, holiness resided in her ability to articulate her faith to someone outside it. To make this particular to my faith, in his pamphlet entitled Should My Child Go to Sunday School?, Unitarian Universalist minister Tony Larsen explains

We teach our children what Unitarian Universalism stands for today so that when people ask them about their faith, they can feel confident answering [their] questions. We help them understand that the inspiration of the divine is to be found not in one book but in many; that we are born not in sin but with the potential for goodness; that the doctrine of hell implies a cruel god, and salvation for members of only one religion would be unjust; and that we have a duty to cherish the earth and revere life instead of sitting back and waiting for some divinely sanctioned cataclysm to come and end it all.

I came to UUism in my 30s. While I spent time with various faiths between them, including Krishna Consciousness, Buddhism and Catholicism, I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist, a religiously and socially orthodox group for whom religious education is based

upon the philosophy that students at all levels of schooling possess individuality and should be educated to use their God-given capacities to become individuals of principle, qualified for any position of life. Education was to begin in the home where the basic values of redemptive discipline and mental and physical health were to be balanced with the importance of work…Adventists have embraced the philosophy that education should be redemptive in nature, for the purpose of restoring human beings to the image of God, our Creator. Mental, physical, social, and spiritual health, intellectual growth, and service to humanity form [its essential] core of values…(Adventist.org)

My memories of my childhood Christian education at what we called Saturday School reflect some of this. I remember quite distinctly the emphasis on work and thrift as well as vegetarianism (for physical health) without which I would be unfit for the Kingdom of God, although I don’t recall a redemptive nature to my schooling. It may have been there and I was too young to appreciate it, although I also recognize a strong redemptive flavor to much of my current theology that may have originated there.

I locate much of my theology of religious education in articulating what is holy. To quote Mullino Moore, who cites Orthodox tradition for her definition: “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (emphasis in the original; 217). I would modify this otherwise excellent definition to reflect my UU perspective by substituting “reality” for “God’s creation.” I am especially influenced in this latter view by Joyce Ann Mercer’s early comment distinguishing practical theology from academic exercises.

For example, practical theologians are not content with abstract proclamations that God cares for all persons as God’s children. Practical theologians ask about the meaning of God’s parentlike care for children in contexts in which particular children experience pain and suffering. They work out visions of such children experiencing and manifesting that care in their everyday lives. They combine such visions with action strategies effecting transformation. (12)

Or, as she writes more succinctly later, “The suffering of children must be acknowledged and addressed…” (244). To paraphrase Jurgen Moltmann, a theology that doesn’t take into account the suffering and pain of children—and in religious terms, we are all God’s children—has nothing to say to us.

Doing this brings into sharp relief my earlier assertion that religious education, in addition to helping people sort out and articulate what they believe, also has to give them the opportunity to determine what the beliefs and actions a moral community of which they want to be a part should include. This attempts to answer questions put by Mark Yaconelli:

What would it mean if the goal of our ministries was simply to be prayerfully present to young people—to allow them to be fully themselves? Could we trust that our presence is enough? How would we treat youth if we weren’t trying to convince them of the importance of the faith, the worthiness of Jesus, the necessity fo the church? What would happen if we sought to minister to young people through our ears, through our presence, through silent prayer and an open heart? What would such radical acceptance evoke in young people? (122)

In her pamphlet UU Religious Education and Your Child, Gaia Brown quotes Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in response to a similar question, “How can you teach without doctrine?”

“The great end of religious instruction is not to stamp our minds irresistibly upon the young but to stir up their own…to touch inward springs.” We have a strong faith in the inherent spirituality of children and see it as our task to nurture, not to indoctrinate. Our respect for the children teaches them respect—for themselves, for others, and for this fragile interdependent web of which we are all a part.

An emphasis on the concerns and experiences of students, supporting their abilities for recognizing the holy in existence, a trust in their abilities to come to sound conclusions, identifying themselves as individuals of principle and helping them to articulate to other people of faith what that means: I would argue that the result of such religious education will look and sound a lot like the experience of that graduate student in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s class. “Now…I know why I am an Orthodox Jew.”

WORKS CITED
• Adventist.org. (2011.) “Seventh-Day Adventist Church: Education.” Adventist.org: The Official Site of the Seventh-Day Adventist World Church. Accessed November 30, 2011, at http://www.adventist.org/mission-and-service/education.html.
• Berling, Judith. (2004.) Understanding Other Religious Worlds: A Guide for Interreligious Education. Maryknoll, NY; Orbis Books.
• Brown, Gaia. (Undated.) UU Religious Education and Your Child: Frequently Asked Questions. Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Larsen, Tony. (1993.) Should My Child Go to Sunday School? Boston; Unitarian Universalist Association Pamphlet Commission Publication. Unpaginated.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Soloveichik, Meir. (2011.) “Irving Kristol, Edmund Burke, and the Rabbis: [A Review of] The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009 by Irving Kristol.” The Jewish Review of Books. Volume 2, number 2; Summer 2011. 19-21.
• Yaconelli, Mark. (2006.) Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI; Zondervan.

"you don't tell anybody; you just deal wit' it."

2011-12-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

just yesterday I read another local article about another former cop arrested for molesting kids. in light of the jerry sandusky and bernie fine stories, which seem to indicate that boys are more often abuse victims than girls are, this has been sitting on my table for about a month and I finally sat down to read it. it's quite a good essay full of information, much of which I've suspected, and some of which I hadn't. I was following the story it alludes to in the village voice back in march, so I was familiar with some of the issues and cast. it's a controversial topic--read the comments here and at the original march story for an indication how so--but even for someone coming into the subject cold (as if anyone has no preformed opinions about childhookups) it is altogether an excellent read. (as a sidenote suggesting that one of the essay's major points, that the media is invested in the false assumption that most victims are girls, when I looked for an illustration for this post by typing "child prostitution" into google images, with the exception of mug shots of perpetrators and a couple illustrating prostitution in other countries, all the images were of girls. I had to go outside that descriptor to find a boy's photo I could use.)

pastoral clinical week 9

2011-11-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

(this is week 9 although it's my 8th reflection. last week was our midterm.)

CPE REFLECTION 8

If you could see the image reflected on my computer screen as I write this, it would be of me leaning forward and a large white cat curled against my chest so that my arms have to make a wide circle coming from extreme ends of the keyboard in order to type. This would be the most relaxed I have been this past week.

It hasn’t been a rough week, just a busy one. Generally, I think of Thanksgiving week as a time of rest and recharging. Normally, in the academic world, it is, and I did have off from seminary classes. However, between the time I spent at the facility and the time I spent preparing for another wedding, plus the time spent with my wife’s family, I ended up thinking (fantasizing, really) about quitting everything and moving back into a van.

Again, not a rough week, but a tiring one. Last Monday was a long, eventful day full of conflicts and confrontations among our group of CPE cohorts. While no major bombshells were dropped, and no new conflicts were begun, I had a feeling of lassitude and exhaustion throughout it. It was nice to hold the seminar in someone’s home rather than the boardroom at the facility, and that gave a nice change in atmosphere, but it also lent the day a sense of informality and ease that wasn’t really borne out by the discussions. Too often I feel as if we are developing artificial conflicts, each given the opportunities to open up and disgorge some wrong or imagined wrong that, in real life, we ignore or pass off on the other person as a momentary issue brought about by too little sleep or not enough fiber. I remember being in Direct Centering in the late 80s and undergoing this process for weeks at a time, and while CPE seminar is sometimes dreadful, I have to admit it has nothing on that.

But that’s not to say I don’t find some fault in the way we relate to one another. The emphasis on seeking some true rationale inside ourselves, while it’s a good idea, also lends itself to the opportunity for some of us to enlarge petty grievences into major issues. These take up a lot of time and energy that should be spent on more immediate topics (like clinical issues).

At any rate, adding to the tiring week for me was Thanksgiving Day itself, spent with my in-laws. This isn’t usually an issue, since we typically spend one day a week with them, but between my wife’s father being in hospice and her family congregating on him for a day, it just added up to a load of quiet drinking and football watching. I lit out for the facility for a few hours the earliest I could.

There was also the preparation for a wedding. I love officiating at weddings—of all the pastoral work I do it’s probably the element I enjoy most (next to just visiting churches). I love the meetings over coffee and talking with the prospective partners about their past and what they want to do and how they’d like their ceremony to look. I love pointing out to them little elements they hadn’t thought of, like the symbol behind a minor change in words or the subtlety of the two of them shifting from one side of the altar to another. I love writing the homily, using information I’ve gleaned from those visits to come up with a new metaphor for what their marriage can be. And of course I love the actual ceremony itself, the quickening of my pulse as I count down the final hour with them, making certain everything is in readiness and, if it’s not, making quick decisions about how important that element is (it’s rarely important). I often tell my couples my job will be to remind them, “Everything’s all right.” This Saturday’s wedding was no different except that my wife accompanied me, and that made all the difference to me. I really enjoyed sharing the ride over and home and having someone with me at the reception and dinner. She felt somewhat fifth wheel-like, she said, and doesn’t intend to join me again. But it was nice to share this part of what I do with her.

Finally, I was asked to do a Thanksgiving Seder for the congregation in Burnsville I sometimes preach for. I’ve done many of these and they’re all different. It’s all a matter of choosing words and rituals that will mean something to the congregation. This one wasn’t difficult to compile—I chose all the readings and communion that morning—but the emotional preparation is wearying and by the time I was finished I wanted nothing more than to sleep in the sun with my dogs, belly-up. The cat reflected in my computer screen will have to do for now.

2 psalms

2011-11-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

Psalm of Lament

Spirit of Life, what was it you saw in me,
What pride, what anger, what uncleanness,
That you would do this to me?
Was I so bad, so inhumane, that I deserve
This humiliation? Spending my days crying out in a chair,
Impotently stamping my foot, eating through a tube,
Shitting into a diaper, waving my hands and arms
At everything near me, grabbing it, pulling it closer.
My tongue is coated in thrush.
My eye is filmed over. My drool pools in the hollow of my throat.
I rely on others to do even the smallest things I used to do thoughtlessly.
If I could, I would thank them in moves of platinum.
I would dance for them a dance of thanks and joy.
I would, like my husband, take them from their own chairs of humbleness,
And like him pivot them in a dance of thankfulness.

Psalm of Praise

Spirit of Life, thank you for the delight
Of geese in the sky against the gray morning.
Thank you for the opportunity to be what others need me to be.
Help me be a half-full bottle
Whose contents are added to without complaint.

last saturday's wedding homily

2011-11-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

Wedding Homily

On this beautiful autumn Saturday afternoon we are privileged to share with ____ and ____ their moment of supreme joy in the new life they begin together. Many poets and commentators have written that weddings are not for the bride and groom but for the guests, and to a certain extent that’s true. However, the focus and the hour of exultation is theirs.

Still, I would speak of new hope for them. ____ and ____, in the years ahead I hope for many things. That your wisdom will be steadily increased. This is in addition to the increase you hope to see in your family size as you move from two individuals, each with your own natures and wants, and with ____ children ____ and ____, into a single unit, complete with a home together. You have already begun that journey.

____ and ____, I hope for you too that you always apply tenderness and strength. Marriage today is a hard proposition, and while it may not be any harder than it’s ever been, many people still find being two people in marriage harder than being two people in love. There’s no way you could have known those years ago when you worked together, dated briefly, came apart and then rejoined, that this is a day you would eventually experience. You may have hoped for it, may even have dreaded it—after all, marriage is a frightening prospect, as any big change in a person’s life ought to be frightening—but together you accepted the prospect, planned for it, faced conflicts, issues and setbacks, and still, today, here you are. Joining together as husband and wife.

____ and ____, you have shared with one another and with me some of your concerns and some of your hopes. It will seem at times in the future that the hopes will have disappeared while the concerns and fears have taken up residence. That’s human nature. But the hopes never go away. I charge you to keep them in your hearts. But don’t keep them only there, silent and secret. Share them. Share them with one another. Share them with ____ and ____. After all, the four of your will constitute a new family. Times change, of course, and what seem like problems today will be jokes tomorrow. Never lose sight of your love for one another, any of you. Never allow changing customs and fashions and fears to dull the sense of loyal love and utter devotion you share.

____, you shared with me that “With ____, there’s always something there.” I submit that when the new life that is your marriage is added to the fellowship of the home you will make together, you give thanks for the blessings of relationship and love. Human beings long to be in community, yearn for companionship, but keeping it is never easy. In the years ahead there will be times of conflict and sometimes of trial. That is as it should be. There will also be times of joy and exultation. That is always as it should be. I will hope for you that the joys will outnumber the trials. The two of you are become a union. The four of you are become a union. It is your responsibility to keep your union strong.

pastoral clinical reflection week 6

2011-11-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

[I have only realized tonight as I wrote my week's reflection that I hadn't posted last week's CPE reflection at all. this week has been a very busy one for me between preparing for a wedding service and expecting a death at my facility. I have many things to post over the coming days. this will bring me up to the point where I want to be.]

CPE REFLECTION 6

I understand exactly why this disturbed me. This has been on my mind since last Tuesday when my seminary celebrated All Saints' Day by holding a Dia de los Muertos service as part of its daily chapel.

This is what happened. The ofrenda—the large ornate altar at the center of the celebration—created for the service was covered with photos and knickknacks and hundreds of small and large sugar skulls that were available for entrants to add at the front of the sanctuary. I picked up a medium-sized one and set it at an angle on the altar.

At a point after about 20 minutes we were given the opportunity to stand up and indicate what we had added to the ofrenda and explain its significance. I stepped up and said that the skull I placed there was for 2 people, one dead and one not yet dead. The dead person I honored was my mother who died about a year and a half ago. The person I wanted to honor who was not yet dead, however, was someone from my CPE site.

This is where it happened. I began to explain what I understand of this resident’s decision (without giving his name or specifics about him) for the way he’s decided to live the end of his life—that he doesn’t want to be flat on his back in bed, although that might prolong his life, but wants to be in his motorized chair and tootle around the facility and the neighborhood, seeing people and being with them—although his wounds have worsened. It was while I repeated the nurse manager's reaction to having seen bone while examining his wounds, and the way she nearly cried telling me, that I began to tear up myself. As I went further, telling how I was in awe of the decision he had made, knowing there is no turning back from it, and that the decision is incredibly hard, not only for the harshness of the outcome but also how difficult it is to make such a decision while coping with schizophrenia, I started openly crying. Someone handed me some tissues and I stumbled back to my seat.

That was what disturbed me, my crying. I often cry after someone’s death but I don’t feel right crying before that has happened. I’ve been examining this, asking myself if it’s because men aren’t supposed to cry. But that’s not the case: my father often cries when he feels sad or after someone dies, and I don’t feel ashamed by it.

The answer, I think, lies elsewhere, in the idea that I’ve often felt that, to remain effective in an emergency situation, I need to be the person who stays collected and keeps his emotions in check. This has stood me well in those situations—someone has to keep a clear head and watch for what needs to be done. After the end, when there’s nothing left to do, then I can let loose.
Here’s why I think I reacted the way I did. I’ve felt overwhelmed at times by the amount of work I’ve needed to do in order to keep up my studies and put in my time at the facility. That has made it hard sometimes to sleep enough and to stay up to date in reading and essays. I had spent that morning delivering a 20-minute presentation teaching other class members how to develop video mashups, a project I’d been working on for several weeks, and it had gone off better I think than I’d expected. However, I did have a midterm due that Friday which I’d half-completed and I
knew completing it would take much of the next few days’ time.

I’m not ashamed of having cried but I am confused by having done so while talking about someone still alive and talking about why I feel admiration for him. Part of me wants simply to chalk it up to stress and being tired, while another part is concerned that I’m going to begin reacting like this when I can least afford to: while talking with someone about his impending death or about a difficult decision she has to make.

MLK essay

2011-11-08T05:48:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is stuffed with relevant appeals to the same elements that make up James Bretzke’s Sources of Moral Theology. In short, Bretzke’s Sources are explained this way:

"Scripture (the sacred text which has a special sacred claim on the Christian community), Tradition (which represents the lived wisdom of the Christian community), Rational Reflection on the Normatively Human (e.g., human rights discourse, moral philosophy, and the whole tradition of natural law theory), and Human Experience…[which] involves not just individuals’ own experience, but the whole range of scientific and social scientific disciplines that help us to gather, organize, and interpret data drawn from our individual and collective human experiences."

These four elements together, according to Bretzke, make up the source for arguments appealing to morality and ethics.

King’s “Letter” makes use of each element. Given King’s profession, it would be surprising if he didn’t appeal to the Bible in his argument, and indeed there are many references to it throughout the “Letter.” He refers in several places to the Apostle Paul, to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to Jesus, and the prophets Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah.

But he appeals also to what we might call uniquely Christian scripture—he quotes John Bunyon, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber (not Christian himself but recognized by Christians), Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as his namesake, Martin Luther. And he references uniquely American secular scripture by quoting Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and American poet T.S. Eliot. He manages also to reference Socrates and Elijah Muhammad, two men outside the Christian sphere but whose works have long been considered a form of scripture to many.

These last names could be considered as King’s appeals to Tradition inasmuch as each writer has developed a following that hews to an exact reading of his words. But more importantly King contrasts the church as it was experienced by the early Christians who

"rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded ideas and principles…it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered town, the people in power…immediately sought to convict [them] for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” (28-9)"

“Things are different now,” he continues.

"So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanctions of things as they are. (29)"

Moving to the sphere of Reason or Rational Reflection on Normative Human Experience, King appeals to the recognition of the difference between just and unjust laws.

"An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power group compels on a minority to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal…A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising…the law…One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. (20-1)"

Everyone, he argues, not simply the majority, wants to live justly and fairly under a system of law and order. “In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law…That would lead to anarchy” (20). But at the same moment “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal’” (21). This appeal to rationally upholding laws as well as whether the laws are just that fixes the reasonableness of King’s “Letter.”

Finally, King makes an appeal to shared humanity by evoking the experiences of Ruby Bridges, James Meredith, Mother Pollard and whites who have suffered along with black protesters. However, it’s his evocation of the experience of his own daughter Yolanda in the midst of a litany beginning “We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights”; then contrasting the slowness of American progress with the speed of Asia and Africa; the willingness of “those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait’”; the visions of lynch mobs and “hate-filled policemen,” the smothering by poverty; the need to sleep in the car on a cross-country trip “because no motel will accept you”;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”, when your first name becomes “nigger,” and your middle name becomes “boy”…and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”, when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (20-1)

It is in the midst of this that King best articulates the appeal to experience as his daughter asks plaintively, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” King confesses himself tongue-tied in the face of such a question. But he recognizes it is also the best question to ask.

Bretzke, James. (2004.) Morally Complex World: Engaging Moral Theology. Collegeville, MN; Liturgical Press: 20.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (2011.) “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Edited and Annotated by Earl Schwartz. Journal of Law and Religion: Hamline University; Minneapolis.

worship service mashup

2011-11-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

this is a mashup I made both for a teaching presentation for my xian education class and for next monday's CPE worship service. by that time we'll have reached the midpoint in our experience (which ends mid-january). what I wanted to get across was the sense that this is tough but it's an effort we, and our future congregants, will be the better for.

clinical pastoral experience week 5

2011-10-31T20:10:00.000-07:00

CPE REFLECTION WEEK 5

What’s concerned me most this week is the newest development—that one of my residents is convinced that I tried to kill him while visiting him in the hospital. I’m not worried about legal or ethical repercussions from the accusation—that I didn’t do anything resembling what he remembers, pulling off his nose tube, is pretty clear to me and to others—but I am worried about how this will affect our relationship once he’s been discharged from the hospital and returns to the facility.

It’s possible he won’t remember the incident at all, that it’s a memory caused by his pain medication and just as ephemeral. It’s possible that he’ll return and his first words to me will be, “Isn’t that funny, that I thought you tried to kill me?” But it’s possible too that he’ll become more convinced of the reality of that memory and it will adversely affect the relationship we have and that’s the biggest concern I have. How do I move both him and me beyond that, especially if he remains convinced of it?

The Nurse Manager for my floor has pointed out to me that this experience is good in a sense, as it gives me an idea of what it feels like to the aides and nurses when the residents call them bitches and niggers or accuse them of ignoring them or trying to kill them, and she’s right. From the perspective of ministering to the staff this is an invaluable situation. If anything good could be said to come out of the situation this would be it. I thought I’d had nearly every experience in my group home years but this one is new and I don’t like the feeling much.

Otherwise this has been a good week. I think that as a group our CPE cohort is coming together better, seeing one another as individuals with needs and concerns and less as other people who simply do much the same things as we do, only not as well or in a different way. The conflicts that strained our initial coming together--one person's perceived distance because of his new illness, a threeway misunderstanding—have been addressed and I don’t see any new ones on the horizon.

My relationships with my residents are becoming more solid. Another, older resident has also been hospitalized this week and my visits to him have proved beneficial I think to him and me. After conversation with my floor social worker I’ve determined a way of connecting with two residents in vegetative states that involves simply sitting quietly with them, much the same way as I’d already been sitting with another. I’ve begun to have positive interactions with still a third who’s so self-isolating that I almost never see her, but who I’m certain to approach whenever I see her out. She remains distant but encouraging: she hasn’t yelled or called me a fucker which I take as positive signs. I’ve sat with her only as long as she seems to want, which is usually about four or five minutes, and I think something she likes is that I don’t have any demands of her: one of her first comments to me was, “What do you want?”

I’m concerned about the development of another resident's abscess. Or not his abscess itself but its effect on the staff and to a lesser extent on him. That he’s going to die from it is a given and that it’s probably going to happen sooner than later is something everyone, including the resident, has known, but while he seems to be resigned to it, I think staff members are realizing that the time has come for the actual process to play out. The floor nurse manager very nearly cried when she told me he has bone showing and the consequences of that. I’m watching this development closely and picking my way carefully.

saturday night reading

2011-10-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

in a short essay on the ezine he co-founded, gary kamiya has articulated some of the feelings many of us in the religious community have felt but have thus far been unable to communicate. I am in awe of his ability to simply and coherently wrap up one of the most important ideas about what occupy america is about.

"Yes, the Occupy San Francisco tent village is illegal. Yes, it is unruly. Yes, there are homeless people there. The movement is filled with oddballs and dropouts and nuts, and based on my own visits there, they outnumber the “respectable” types, the unemployed workers and students and housewives. And if real problems arise, violence or vandalism or disease, the city has the right
and obligation to take steps to remedy them. But since no such problems have arisen, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the hand-wringing about the tents is all about image. The Occupy San Francisco movement is flawed and unsightly, like panhandlers and street people. The tourist-friendly solution: clean it up.

"But the crazies and dropouts and street people who are part of the movement deserve to be there, deserve to be seen. For they bear inarticulate witness to the inequities the movement is protesting. Of course, they didn’t all end up there because of society’s sins; bad choices and personal responsibility also played a role. They’re not the best spokesmen for the movement. But they, too, are part of the America that the movement is trying to make better. They, too, are our brothers.

"That isn’t liberal swill. It comes from a book called the Bible."

clinical experience reflection week 4

2011-10-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

CPE REFLECTION 4
The incident that’s on my mind the most right now, perhaps because it has been simmering for the second half of the week and came to fruition on Saturday, is what I should tell the roommate of one resident who is very close to that person—think brotherly—but who, because of HIPA regulations and privacy concerns, can’t be told that his friend is not doing as well as everyone expected.

It’s not as if the resident is dying (although all of us are dying), but when he went in for routine surgery it was expected he would be discharged after a few days and all would be well. His roommate could be told he was doing fine, he sent his affections, he’d see him soon, all that. The roommate has a tendency to take into himself the concerns he has for his friend and internalize them, apparently fixating on his worries, until it absorbs him. When I saw him last, early Saturday afternoon, he was in a pretty cheery mood, smiling and saying, “Tell him I’m glad he’s okay and I’ll see him soon.”

The truth, on the other hand, is that the resident is not doing as well as everyone hoped. His blood pressure is lower than it ought to be. He’s being fed oxygen by a tube which is strapped to his head. He reports he’s in a lot of pain. Mentally, he’s more alert than he was the first day I visited him, but he’s reduced to answering “yes/no” questions by shaking or nodding his head. He remains in intensive care and his nurse tells me it will be at least several weeks before he’s allowed to come home.

Given all that, what’s my response when his roommate asks, “How is he?”

is nick hornby writing about jubilee?

2011-10-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

I argue that David, the husband of Nick Hornby’s protagonist Ann in How to be Good, is acting out a private, individual jubilee. I don’t know that Hornby is doing this purposefully, that he wrote David’s actions to be a comment on the Christian idea of jubilee. At best it is an interesting coincidence. Firstly, it’s important that David himself would deny that he’s doing anything Christian:

…I don’t think that David has become a Christian, although it is hard to fathom precisely what he has become. Asking him directly doesn’t really clarify things. The evening after we got the letter…Tom [their son] asks—mournfully but rather percipiently, I thought—whether we are all going to have to start going to church.

“Church?” says David—but gently, not with the explosion of anger and disdain that would have accompanied that word in any context just a few weeks ago. “Of course not. Why? Do you want to go to church?”

“No. Course not.”…Tom says. “Just, I thought, that’s what we have to do now.”

“Why now?”

“Because we give things away. That’s what they do in church, isn’t it?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Later, alone, Ann points out to David, “You do give off the air of someone who has undergone a religious conversion.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“You haven’t become a Christian?”

“No.”

And while Ann can’t put her finger on exactly what it is David’s become, she agrees that it isn’t a Christian.

But Tom’s connection between “we give things away” and “people who go to church” is important. This is the idea behind Jesus’ idea of jubilee, particularly in the parable iterated in Luke 16:1-13. The corrupt manager there, once he is found out, decides to remit to his debtors the actual sums they owe by wiping out the graft added for his share. He does this, not to escape judgment, as his master has already taken his position from him, but to be welcomed afterward into their homes, so he may rely on their largess and friendship. Jesus’ explains that “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much…[If] you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16:10-13).

John Yoder’s definition of biblical jubilee in The Politics of Jesus—leaving the soil fallow; remission of debts; liberation of slaves; and the return of family property to individuals—while not corresponding exactly either with David’s behavior is near enough to suggest that we can read his actions as a genuine attempt to do jubilee on a personal level.

For instance, David’s newspaper column and novel, both of which he has decided to scrap because he’s simply not angry anymore, although to which he might someday return (perhaps writing columns as “The Least-Angriest Man in Holloway”), are fields of endeavor that lie fallow. While David doesn’t have debts to remit, per se, or slaves to liberate, he does in a sense attempt to do something similar by finding rooms for local homeless kids. In that sense he’s doing both: he attempts to cancel out those who are indebted to him by selflessly taking on the work of matching up homeless and those with extra rooms, and he attempts also to ease the burden on those homeless—liberate them from slavery, as it were—by doing the same. Finally, of course, his misbegotten attempts to give away the family’s roast dinner and Tom’s computer can be seen, if not as returning property to their original owners, then as ways of redistributing his family’s wealth.

I’d argue that, while David is not participating in biblical jubilee—that “redistribution of capital…accomplished every fifty years by faithfulness to the righteous will of God and in the expectation of the kingdom” according to Yoder—he is participating in the spirit of what Jesus calls for in his parable of the widow who “out of her poverty has put in [the temple treasury] all she had to live on” (Luke 21:1-4)—that is, as Yoder writes, “a jubilee ordinance which was to be put into practice here and now, once…, as a ‘refreshment,’ prefiguring the ‘reestablishment of all things.’” Yoder is justified in his conclusion that “Many bloody revolutions would have been avoided if the Christian church had shown herself more respectful than Israel was of the jubilee dispositions contained in the law of Moses.”

teach naked

2011-10-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

below is an essay defining my concept of religious education that I've worked on the past week. if it seems to follow a pattern, that's because it does. the idea is that we define religious--specifically xian--education in the 1st part, expand on that definition in the 2nd, and then give implications of it in the 3rd. that wasn't really very hard but it took me several days longer than it should have because of a cold that knocked me flat on my back all day tuesday, necessitating not only the length of time it took to finish the essay but also, as tuesday is a 6-hour day for me at my CPE site, requiring me to pull extra hours the rest of the week to make them up.

WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE GATHERED,
WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE DISPERSED

Part I: Based on my experience and on the books we’ve read for this class, I’d offer the following as my current definition for the way I see religious education. It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

Part II: The church, any church (or synagogue or mosque or temple or coven or any spiritual gathering, and for simplicity’s sake I’m going to mean all of these groups when I say “church”), is a community, an ecclesia in church terminology. It’s a community made up of individuals but of individuals who, unlike a geographical community or a working or public school community, choose to associate with one another. Their connections with one another are outside place or livelihood. There are some geographical considerations that might complicate that—while an individual living in the rural Midwest might have several Lutheran congregations in a 20 or 30 mile radius to choose from, including choices between which ELCA or WELS congregation to attend, whereas a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim or Jew might have only one choice, while the options might be the reverse in urban areas or on the coast—for the most part one chooses which church to attend out of consideration of the congregation more than anything else. Craig Dykstra notes

[Faith] communities have formative power in the lives of people, nurturing faith and giving shape to the quality and character of their spirits. Spirituality deepens in community, rather than in individualistic isolation. The beliefs, values, attitudes, stories, rituals, and moral practices of a faith community are the human forces most powerful in shaping a person’s spiritual journey. (83)

More than one researcher has noted that, all other elements being equal, what determines which church a person chooses to attend is his or her fellow congregants.

Once we’ve determined the ecclesia we must determine the message the ecclesia intends to spread. Dykstra writes:

The life of Christian faith is life in such intimate relationship with Jesus Christ that, as Paul says, we may live ‘in Christ” and that Christ is ‘in you’…Similarly, we are now free to live ‘according to the Spirit,’ so that ‘the Spirit of God dwells in you’…This is contrasted by Paul with life ‘according to the flesh’…The contrast is not one between life after death and our life on earth. Both life according to the Spirit and life according to the flesh are forms of present, daily, bodily, human living. But life according to the flesh is life aimed at and directed by things that have no ultimate lasting value and power. ‘Life in Christ,’ ‘life according to the Spirit,’ is life-oriented, empowered, undergirded, and sustained by the Source of life itself. (23)

Modifying Dykstra’s message, it’s in the gratitude for what is bigger than ourselves, bigger than mere individual “birth-school-work-marriage-children-death” life itself, that we find a purpose that can bind us together. For Unitarian Universalists it is in the recognition that two people together are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. For Muslims it is in the adoration of the gift of life Allah bestows on each of us. For pagans it is in the interstices of the web of life of which people are themselves only one part.

This is being in community that acknowledges all of what one is rather than simply a part of what one is. It is looking for a community of challenge over a community of comfort. As Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, “Truth-telling is not easy to hear, and it demands a response, whether by individual action or social policy.” Her example of one such hard-to-hear truth-telling comes from historian Vine Deloria, Jr., who charges in “Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America” that his addressees have “forced ‘opinions, myths, and superstitions on us…You have never chosen to know us. You have only come to us to confront and conquer us.’” Mullino Moore further notes that this “echoes the cries of South Africa and elsewhere, where generations of people have been denied basic human rights” (all quotes, 82).
Religious education should prepare people in the ecclesia to hear such questions, whether from Native Americans, the descendants of African slaves, undocumented workers and their children, the homeless and underemployed, and any of dozens of potential other aggrieved groups. It may not prepare them to answer those questions—it may be that the best answer is that they don’t have an answer—but it must give them the basics of what the aggrieved parties are referring to and that they have a right to be sore. It is in recognizing the legitimacy of these questions that religious education helps prepare citizens for the world of justice and equality they are trying to bring about.

How do we determine what is holy? And once we’ve determined what it is, how do we talk about it? It’s generally assumed that holiness differs according to the beliefs of individual faiths and to some extent that’s true. But while some of the particulars might differ—an icon is venerated by an Eastern Orthodox Church member while it is unconscionable to a conservative Muslim—the point is to find an agreed-upon perspective for all the members of the faith community without lapsing into lowest-common-denominatorness. Mullino Moore cites Orthodox tradition for her determination of what holy is (emphasis in the original): “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (217). My only modification to this otherwise excellent definition would be a change from “God’s creation” to “reality.”

Religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to be prepared for: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

Finally, it’s in putting together these elements that religious education teaches learners what it is that their communities of justice and equality ought to look like and how they ought to behave. Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed provides an excellent and realistic example of the way these elements can be melded and the use to which that melding can be put. It is, he writes,

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

Part III: We can never be certain how our best intentions are going to be received—rather than flowers in the streets we may be greeted with looting and an endless war—and there’s no certainty that religious education delivered in this way will have the results we want. But there’s something to be said for trying and here are my hoped-for implications for this type of religious education.

Teaching religion this way, focusing on the ways, for instance, displaced people are treated by society and religion in order to provide context to understand the complaints of the aggrieved and, hopefully, a way to change it, can lead to greater participation by oppressed people in that church. Churches, especially in the US, have a long history of complicity in the way minority peoples have been treated as subjects rather than as persons by the majority. Being a place where such a history is addressed opens the church, and thus people, to healing. “People do not come to church in a vacuum; they come out of the totality of their lives. They bring the forces and experiences and needs of those lives to church” (Crain 1997, in Seymour, 101). When visitors feel addressed by church, that the church has something at stake regarding them, they become congregants.

The question of what’s holy is, for many churches, a matter of tradition rather than a matter of experience. We venerate the Bible not because of what it says to us but because our ancestors did. We venerate God in prayer not because of what God does in our lives but because we have been taught to punctuate services that way. Locating holiness in the everyday experiences of people lends those experiences not only familiarity but a sense of purpose outside routine. As Elizabeth Caldwell writes, in Christian terms, “Religious education seeks primarily to educate Christians for faithful living, for finding a balance between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the ordinary, between the sacraments in liturgy and the ways we live in response to our baptisms as we move out from the table where Jesus Christ is the host” (in Seymour, 80). Her example points up the benefit to be realized when the link between a duty and a sacrament (for instance) is bridged: “[learners] frame their lives in terms of a new way of seeing, hearing, sensing, being, and finally doing…” (80).

Ultimately, what may happen may be the actual discovery by adult and child learners that the world of justice and equality may actually be within their grasp, that it may be something they can actually bring about. Jack Seymour and Donald Miller articulate this hope:

While the problems of the world we address are complex and immense, we must address them through coalitions of people who are often very different from ourselves… Education empowers us to move from conversation to faithful living…[Religious] education fosters a movement theologically informed by the witnesses from the past to address the crucial personal and social issues of our day with faithful current analysis and a vision that is informed by the long-term history of God emerging in a people. [Religious] education provides open spaces to practice God’s presence and to share our lives and vulnerabilities in hospitality and love. (in Seymour, 120)

There is, of course, no guarantee that defining religious education in this way, as a means by which a church teaches its adult and child members how to make a world that’s more reflective of the just and equal world they want to be citizens of through determining the content of their communities, locating the holiness in those communities, and deciding on the appropriate behaviors and morals of its members, will lead to heaven on earth. But it’s certainly worth the attempt.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Caldwell, Elizabeth. (1997.) “Religious Instruction: Homemaking.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Crain, Margaret Ann. (1997.) “Listening to Churches: Christian Education in Congregational Life.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Seymour, Jack and Donald Miller. (1997.) “Agenda for the Future.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.

clinical pastoral reflection 3rd week

2011-10-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

CPE REFLECTION 3

My friends Mandy and Mel have a daily dinner routine for their extended family and guests; each person must voice a concern and a joy from the day before the meal. This week I’ve had two concerns and one joy. I’ll tackle my concerns first.

I’m not at all in agreement with the statement reported in her verbatim by a fellow CPE-er. I’ve got serious reservations about a Sister-Mary-Sunshine theology which insists heaven is a wonderful place full of light where elderly women are capable of doing cartwheels once there. I’m certain my fellow intern is sincere in her belief. But I am equally certain that, at the very worst, telling a dying woman what is at best an educated guess is some form of pastoral malpractice and, at the very least, fails to take seriously the questions the woman has about her death and the impact it will have on her husband and family and friends. It also may suggest to the woman that having such qualms is anti-God, since who wouldn’t want to hurry up to join such a lovely eternity? How selfish and spiritually ugly must be the doctors and nurses and husband that have tried to keep her in this horrible condition for so long.

My other disturbing situation was with a woman I spoke with about the death of another resident. She started our conversation by asking if the person for whom we’d had last Friday’s memorial was really dead (and this says something about the way people appear and disappear and sometimes reappear without explanation as the people caught up in the healthcare system, especially its mentally ill members, must experience it). We discussed his death and then her parents’ deaths and her own experience of God and trust issues, and I ended our time together by asking if she’d like me to pray with her. It seemed what she expected. I asked her to do the praying but she said she’d rather that I did, and that’s what left me discomfited. I’m all right in communal prayers but as I don’t pray on my own I’m not at all comfortable with one-on-one prayer. I gave it my best shot, stammering out some phrases she’d said and adding my own takes on them, and she seemed sincere when she thanked me. A few days later I spoke with my Christian wife who is more at home with this sort of thing and she suggested that what someone really wants in that situation is the sense she’s been heard and her concerns noted. She also suggested that I try praying out loud on the drive in each day to get myself in the mindset of doing it for other people. I’ve tried that now and confess that I feel a little self-conscious doing it but she is right about my feeling more at ease the more I do it. I’m not about to become an advocate of intercessory prayer or of praying away the disease, but I am better understanding the peace people feel when they hear their fears or their wishes vocalized.

What I feel good about is a short interaction I had with one resident on my floor who, after he’d refused my invitation to join a 7th-Day Adventist service on Saturday, wanted to explain why he’s “pissed off with God.” He was pretty angry about the deaths of his parents and the suicide of his brother, going into detail about the extreme measures his brother had taken to kill himself, all in the space of one year. “Where was God in all that?” he demanded. I said, “I don’t know. And it sounds to me like you’ve got every right to be pissed.” He immediately calmed down and said, “I’m sorry to get so angry, but it still hurts, y’know.” I said I’d have been surprised if it didn’t hurt and that we could talk about it if he wanted. He said maybe later but he was in a much better mood as he left than he had been a few moments before. It seemed a good end to the week.

jesus does not belong to the oppressors

2011-10-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

"as long as the religious leaders and scholars of the dominant culture continue to construct ethical perspectives from within their culural space of wealth and power, the marginalized will need an alternate format by which to deliberate and, more importantly, do ethics. through critical social analysis, it is possible to uncover the connection existing between the prevailing ideologies (namely, the ethics of the dominant culture) that support the present power arrangement, with the political, economic, and cultural components of the mechanisms of oppression that protect their power and wealth. anchoring ethics on the everyday experience of the marginalized challenges the validity, or lack thereof, of prevailing ideologies that inform eurocentric ethics.

"for example, the fact that once upon a time in US history the 'peculiar' institution of slavery was biblically supported, religiously justified, spiritually legitimized, and ethically normalized raises serious questions concerning the objectivity of any particular code of ethics originating from that dominant white culture. at the very least, the marginalized are suspicious of the ethics of those who benefit from what society deems to be xian or moral--then, as well as today. although hindsight facilitates our understanding of how unxian and unethical previous generations may have been, we are left wondering whether perspectives considered by some to be morally sound today might be defined as unxian and unethical by future generations."

[...]

"jesus can never belong to the oppressors of this world because he is one of the oppressed. the radicalness of the gospel message is that jesus is in solidarity with the very least of humanity. the last shall be first, the center shall be the periphery...the blessed and the cursed are separated by what they did or did not do to the least among us. specifically, did they or did they not feed the hungry, welcome the alien, clothe the naked, and visit those infirm or incarcerated? is the ethical lifestyle of individuals in solidarity with the marginalized demonstrated in liberative acts that led others toward an abundant life? so that there would be no confusion about god's preferential option, jesus clearly states, 'truly I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of these, the least of my people, you did it to me.'"

--from doing christian ethics from the margins by miguel de la torre

a brief report from a (brief) time on the barricades

2011-10-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple hours on one corner of government/people's plaza in downtown minneapolis, heart of the hub, last evening with an able complement of fellows from my liberal ecumenical seminary and luther seminary. I dubbed us the amen corner, as all of us are future pastors in our different faiths. we were representative of the faith contingent of people in solidarity with the 99%, a crowd of which we are both members and to whom we minister. (neither were we the only ones; several other pastors and students, some in collars, had been there earlier in the day and earlier in the week.)

I had to leave earlier than I'd intended as the fellow clinician I'd taken responsibility for had another obligation. but in my time there we were constantly and consistently honked at and waved at and given thumbs up and shoutouts by commuters in agreement with our signs--most of which had been penned by 2 women, one lutheran and one uu, and most of which were biblical quotations--without a single negative response to them. I was told the only time any of my compatriots had gotten a negative response was on the previous sunday and it seemed to all be from people wearing vikings paraphernalia. I hesistate to repeat that was not the reaction of everyone in vikings paraphernalia.

I had a couple especially good conversations. one was with a young bhikku in a knit cap and pajama trousers who had graduated high school last year and made arrangements to fly to africa and from there to ship out as a cook on a mercy ship. he wasn't a xian he said, or at least not a very religious one, but he wanted to be part of something bigger than himself and he was frightened and excited by what he expected and hoped for. the other was with a sister who works parttime for a tax preparation company and operates her own online design business. she was just overwhelmed by the number of people in plaza that week--her parttime job was in the tower in front of where we were standing and she looked out on the plaza several times a day--and had also felt overwhelmed by the ways life had gotten tougher and less friendly (my words, I can't remember hers) and knew she needed to make some comment on them. she'd been playing around with making a design but that would make no impact, so she'd been inspired by the protesters on the plaza to decide to come down each day she was at work and join them for a few hours a day, just to be there in support, maybe to hold a sign, maybe to march, maybe just to be there among other people.

on our way off the plaza I swapped thumbsup with several of the people who are actually sleeping under the concrete buttresses and overheads of the government building and told them, "stay warm." because of other responsibilities I may not be able to rejoin them physically, unless the occupation goes on as long as the main one in wall street does, but I will be there in contemplation and spirit and solidarity.

clinical pastoral reflection 2nd week

2011-10-10T19:12:00.000-07:00

CPE REFLECTION 2

The past week has been exhilarating and exhausting. Beyond my visit east, my summer was taken up entirely with work at home, reading, walking dogs, visiting friends, and napping. I knew that a semester of full time CPE hours and classes and classwork would make me tired, but I’ve been a little surprised at how tired. It isn’t a debilitating tiredness, I want to stress, so exhaustion might be hyperbole, but it is one that’s taking me some time to adjust.

I’m glad to be on my unit although I’m frustrated by the amount of time it’s taking to receive my clearance to work one-on-one with residents. As a result, my time on the fourth floor is spent entirely in the public areas like the nurse’s station and the dining room. I’ve made the best of this by using the time both to study resident charts from cover to cover, focusing on psychological profiles, care conference notes, incident reports and social history surveys, as well as their spiritual assessment surveys, and by having prep conversations with the staff. Given the amount of time it’s taken to go through resident charts, I’ve only made it through roughly a third of them, but I think I have a pretty good feel for those residents’ histories.

Staff conversations have yielded some information that may be important as the move to Robbinsdale necessitates downsizing of their force and the resulting anxieties that will produce. For instance, most of the evening nursing and housekeeping staff are sub-Saharan African and have come to the US only in the last decade and will be concerned about future work since most of them brought their entire extended family with them. I am proud of having been asked by the Thursday night staff to share the pizza one of them brought in to celebrate his birthday. (Custom requires that at some point I also need to bring in something to share with them.)

I think I was most affected by the memorial service done on my floor on Friday morning for a former resident who died in early September. Contrary to my expectations, I counted 26 participants at his service, only 9 of which were floor residents. Aside from a few staff who’d worked with him on the floor, the rest were either staff from other organizations or friends from outside the system. His youngest daughter and son from different relationships were there as well and I witnessed an especially moving reunion between a woman he had once dated and who had stayed in touch with him through the years, and the daughter to whom she had been a tutor but who had not seen her for nearly a decade. We make a lot of noise about the need for people after they’re in the social services system to retain outside links and relationships, but too often that’s just not what happens. It’s too easy for them to get subsumed into the anonymity of the system and lose all contact with anyone outside it. But for this resident that didn’t happen. His outside relationships stayed strong and his friends from prior to his illness not only hadn’t lost touch with him, he made new ones as he moved through the system. Those friendships, both with caregivers and peers, had strengthened during his illness.

This was in marked contrast with the experience of my most recently deceased aunt who spent nearly a decade in nursing care and because of her dementia slowly lost contact not only with friends but even with the people, including her son and my parents, who saw her daily. Her death was noted only by her immediate family and current caregivers. While I was growing up her life had been vibrant, loud, and marked by the constant comings and goings of people through her house. Her death was a repudiation of what her life had been and it made me sad. Friday’s memorial service touched me and I recognized my hope that when I reach the same point in my life my own death will be more like his than like hers.

did jesus die for klingons too?

2011-10-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

this fascinates me and I've started a conversation about it in the past which I will doubtless talk about again.

I don't have to be wounded to not be xian

2011-10-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

an interesting observation from today's clinical pastoral seminar. at 1 point after having, on the advice of my wife--who is pretty keen about these sorts of thing--come out to my seminarmates about not being a xian, 1 of them, in response to 1 of my proposed learning goals about being better able to be with xians in prayer and christlanguage, made a comment suggesting she understood my having been wounded by xianity.

and I don't think she meant it this way but I think the unspoken assumption that lay behind her comment was unless I'd been wounded I would see the truth of xianity. I haven't, as it happens, been wounded by xianity, certainly not as much as some people have and not the way some xians who have decided to remain with it have been. while I should applaud the recognition she had that some people can be harmed by what she sees as the ultimate good thing, what it also suggests is an inability to recognize that someone can be faced with the best aspects of xian practice and thought and still, definitely, refuse to accept them. my take on xianity is that, like mark twain's definition of golf as a good walk spoiled, xianity takes a good teacher, jesus, and adds more bricolage to his shoulders than any human should have to bear. whoever or however many people jesus may have been he or she or they could only be human since other than plant and animal and mineral life that's all we've ever seen and I'm not about to ascribe causation to the invisible ghost someone else sees in the room. I don't have to be wounded by the invisible ghost to decide I don't believe in it.

clinical pastoral reflection 1st week

2011-10-02T20:16:00.001-07:00

this has been an exhausting week of seminars and meetings and trainings as I begin my newest work of CPE, or clinical pastoral experience, at a rehabilitation center and nursing home in the center of the hub. it's been a greuling schedule of meeting staff at the site, discovering the peccadillos of the different populations, choosing the floor and the population we are going to work with, learning the legal and ethical limits we must adhere to, and for our small group of 7 students, all but 2 of whom are affiliated with seminaries but all of whom besides me are mainstream xians, it's been a week of trying to learn about each other and each other falls into the scheme of things. to that end we are tasked with writing a short reflection each week and I've posted my 1st below. I want to note that, while the reflection isn't due until tomorrow, since it's the 1st writing I've done all week, I'm posting it in its rough draft form as that's where I'm leaving it tonight.

CPE REFLECTION 1

I think what I like best about Sundays is the opportunity to take a family walk with my wife and our dogs. Today’s was good although it wasn’t for as long a distance as I prefer. Even so, it’s Sunday night, the first after the first week of CPE, and what I’m most often thinking about tonight is how much the woman next to whom I sat in service this afternoon looks like my sister. Or how much she looks like my sister looked twenty years ago, which is probably closer to this woman’s age. The woman is, I think, a resident on the floor devoted to Huntington’s patients, although I could be wrong about that, and after she fell asleep during the service I happened to look over at her and her relaxed face nestled against the pillows she was propped on so struck me as my sister’s face—even down to her double chins and slightly concentrated frown—it was all I could do not to reach over and startle her awake to get that image out of my head.

But I suspect it’s that sort of connection I should welcome, seeing the people I serve as if they were family members or at least as if they were familiar. All the years I worked in group homes or as a companion I never felt that way. I felt close to them, that’s not the issue, but as if they and I were family, and it’s in that distinction that I’m coming to terms with what I’m most often dealing with: the sense I had then of being overused and underappreciated by administration, the lowest on the pole and so given the worst, most labor intensive duties because more senior staff didn’t want to do them, much of which I was untrained to do, often left to flounder under the resentful stare of a client who knew I didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to do whatever I was doing and he certainly didn’t want me to do. I have had to remind myself constantly this week as I toured the floors and met people and listened to them that I was not there to dress or bathe or feed them but there to listen and talk with them.

It was because of a fear of this that I took so long to get my ducks in a row regarding setting up CPE and almost missed the cutoff date. For several weeks in July and August I knew I had to get my paperwork in order, but I always found something else to do. My wife, who’s also undergoing CPE, insisted I bring the fear up with my counselor, himself a minister, who pointed out the incredible differences between the shitwork I had had to do years before and the pastoral work I was entering. His arguments won out but I remain a little wary of the sense I often give into of doing things because they need to be done whether it’s my job to do them or not. One of my biggest concerns at the start of anything new is how anxious I get on thinking about the site when I’m at home and doing something I enjoy (like walking the dogs). I’ve noticed I don’t feel any anxiety about this at all.

Beyond this it has been a good week. I feel competent about learning chaplaincy and I’m excited to start work with the population on the fourth floor. I hope that the week we’ve spent in meetings means we won’t spend nearly as much time there once we get into gear: I’m not much of a meetings person and one seminar day a week will be about as much as I can stand. Aside from the above, if I feel any anxiety about this process at all it’s that, as my wife points out, I may not have completely come clean about not being Christian but remaining willing to pray and speak the language the residents are most comfortable with.

if this paper is wet

2011-09-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

most of my writing the past few days has been of little interest outside a very narrow audience. (really. locating proof of the jewishness of the author in the 1st 2 chapters of the book of luke.) but I have also been writing yesterday's sermon on the topic of forgiveness, particularly apt since rosh hashanah begins in a few days, after which is yom kippur. on my way into the hub to deliver the sermon I realized the congregation, like most uus conversational under the least circumstances, would want to gnaw at the topic like it was a bone, so I cut about a page from it so we would have a 25 minute congregational dialogue. I've marked those incisions with brackets.

“If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad”
A Sermon Delivered to DUUC,
Burnsville, MN, on September 25, 2011

This past July I drove out to Pennsylvania to spend some time with my dad. Having most of the summer free I avoided the Eisenhower Interstate system in favor of the old interstates and back roads. While there I drove out to my sister’s place in southwest New York and the Hudson River Valley where I grew up and then back out west toward Jamestown to meet up with my wife who was flying into Cornell to share my final week with my dad. Together we took another two days driving home.

What I noticed more than anything else on that long, circuitous route was the number of homes for sale and houses that have been abandoned. And not all of them were on the typical Hooterville-type roads that may have been paved at one time but now the only remnant of that is the occasional even patch where if you’re driving a car rather than a truck it might bottom out because the road has washed out lower than the transmission is slung. These were state and county roads that were in very good shape, where the bracken on either side is cut low and the signs are all new. I counted hundreds of such houses—all right, “counted” is not accurate because I didn’t count—but it’s fair to say I noticed what must have been hundreds of such places.

We live about five miles outside the little town of Baldwin, Wisconsin, where I’ve noticed that along the back roads between town and our house there are five homes for sale and four abandoned houses. You know the kind of places I mean by “abandoned.” A home up for sale, besides the telltale sign, often has the lawn cut and the hedges trimmed and all the buildings are in fair shape. Sometimes there’s a welcoming wreath on the front door and a nice little landscaped garden in the yard. An abandoned house can often be seen from the road only by a corner or a sagging porch end jutting out of the greenery. The grass has grown as tall as the top of the porch and the trees have shouldered together to keep the place seluded. Where I come from back east it’s not unusual to see large patches of fields where the farmers don’t plow because of variations in the terrain, but in this part of the country wherever there’s a clump of trees in a field or a flat place it surrounds a weathered empty house or the foundation of one. Sometimes in the winter in an area you’ve just moved to the bare branches uncover one of these places and on your drive home one night you’ll say, “I never knew that place was there.”

As a thought experiment I started keeping track of homes for sale and abandoned houses within a five-mile radius around our house but I gave up when I reached thirty-five. Perhaps the most disturbing part was the number of homes for sale where the house is still being kept up but the sign proclaiming it available and giving contact information is itself obscured by weeds or branches or overgrown by grass and shrubs, as if the owner has given up hope and is only willing to keep up part of the pretence that someone driving by might want to buy it.

It’s a sad time in this country, we all know that. [In some ways it strikes us as a sadder time than ever before even when we remember the turbulent 60s or 30s or even if we reread our history and recall the 1850s and the Civil War. Sadness is often the emotion of the day. We read about young girls sexually abused and murdered and we say, “that’s so sad.” We read about men, high on amphetamines or cough syrup, or women on crystal meth and with nothing left to lose, provoking a standoff with police and pretending they’ve got a weapon or threatening a cop with a car, and the official gun comes out and ends their miserable life and we say, “that’s so damn sad.” Everything around us seems so rotten and people seem hopeless and, well, it seems as if there’s nothing we can do that can make it better. ]

The title of my sermon is “If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad,” and some of you might recognize that as a quote from a recent sad story. It’s one of the messages Steven Cross, a divorced, unemployed man with a young son, left his 11 year old boy in a note the morning he disappeared. Let me remind you a little of that story. It’s a local one so you might have heard it. Sebastian Cross is an 11 year old boy who woke one morning back in July to discover that his dad, architect and single father Steven Cross, had left him alone in the house with two letters. One, addressed to Sebastian, explained that Steven had left for good, and directing the boy to the home of a neighbor and good friend, to whom the other letter was addressed. Sebastian’s letter included this heartbreaking sentence, “If this paper is wet, it’s because I’m crying so bad” as well as the astonishing news that his mother, whom the boy had not seen since he was 2 after which Cross explained she had died from cancer, was in fact alive.

Sebastian’s mother, now known as Katik Porter, had never expressed interest in contacting either of them and her whereabouts at that time were unknown. To be fair, Porter, who has a history of substance abuse and arrest, has since reemerged and asked to be a part of the boy’s life.

In his letter to Sebastian, Cross explained that things were mighty bad and had been for a long time. Cross had been out of work for a while, had been the subject of several litigations by former clients, and his financial problems had been accruing since at least 2007. A bank was scheduled to foreclose on the house they lived in. In booking photos since police discovered him in Cambria, California, Cross looks like a shell-shocked 60 year old for whom the world has turned out to hold more misery than he’d been told it would. After spending a month living out of his car in various California towns, Cross had finally found work at a deli where he was known as a tall-talker for the stories he told employers and co-workers. Doug Lindsey, co-owner of the deli, has said, “It’s a horrible situation…It’s just a sign of the times.”

It is, isn’t it, a sign of the times? Cross has explained his leaving Sebastian as his attempt to keep the boy from seeing the father homeless and destitute. Most of us in this room are fortunate enough not to have to leave behind our kids and our homes in order to start new and better lives. But the chances are that we know someone, maybe intimately, children or friends, only a step or two away from feeling that packing it in, packing up, and walking away is the only honorable solution left. Who is only a paycheck or a job or a marital argument away from that home becoming empty, the grass growing chest-high, the trees slowly merging as if hiding from the world the shame of someone’s failure.

What do we do with those people? And by “those people,” of course, I mean us. Because much as we might think ourselves outside that demographic, if nothing else the current economic collapse, often referred to as the worst in American history since the Great Depression, is a visceral reminder for many of us that we are not that secure in our fortunes. It can take only the loss of a job, of an income, the closing of a place of business, to break out the sweat on our foreheads and make us start to look around wildly for what we can jettison from our lives, the boat or the motor home or the cable connection, the weekly dinner out, the new clothes, the
Christmas or birthday presents, the relationship, what we can do without to keep the wolf from the door another couple weeks.

The other day I had a knock at my door but it wasn’t the wolf. It was one of my neighbors come to ask a favor. Dennis, who looks and sounds like the Canadian actor Graham Greene, is a farmer about three miles to our west and he’d had four stray dogs show up on his property that week in sets of two. The dogs had obviously been cared for and he could see the outline of collars on each neck, although there were no collars on any of them when they appeared in his fields. He already has four dogs and they weren’t getting along with the new ones. He surrendered them to another farmer—our township long ago eliminated the budget for an animal control officer after the county pet shelter also went belly up, and the farmer, who is also the township’s council chair, has been the unpaid acting officer for years, holding strays in one of his barns—but they were scheduled to be shot in a few days if no one claimed them. Would we be willing, Dennis asked, to hold them at our place until he could find adopters?

I want to note this happens, abandoning dogs, in our area often. We’re a couple miles off I-94 and there are wide stretches of roads where no one can see anything you do. It’s not unusual on my daily walks during spring thaw to find deer carcasses some hunter has thrown into a ditch after cutting off the antlers and choice pieces of meat, leaving the head and legs and guts for my dogs to discover. Just the week before last my largest one found where another person, probably after having cleaned his freezer, had dumped about five pounds of uncleaned pond fish by the side of the road. They had bloated and exploded in the sun and the smell tickled his nose a lot earlier than it did mine.

Last year my wife and I were walking our dogs, including the lab we found curled in a tiny broke-leg lump on the side of the road nine years ago, on the trail near our house. There had been flooding that spring that took out a bridge and we used that as a turnaround for our walks. A large brindle-colored dog bounded across the creek and joined us and after he and our dogs sniffed one another, joined us in heading home. He had no collar but he was in good shape and we assumed he was a local dog we hadn’t seen. As we got nearer home and nearer the main road, I was nervous about him following us onto the highway, so I stayed with him and Jayne took our dogs home and came back with a car so we could take him back to his home. He bounded in the back and we drove from neighbor to neighbor, asking if he was theirs or if they knew where he belonged. About five stops in, we realized he had been abandoned.

We couldn’t take him in so we contacted Jim, the farmer who’s also the council chair, and he said we had about four days to find him a place. This story has a happy ending. We put photos of him on Facebook that night and within a couple hours our friend Liz, who’d only the week before lost a local election and whose own dog had been killed the previous year by a car, contacted us to say that now she had the time and energy available to take him in. Liz drove over to Jim’s with my wife the next day and they had cartoon hearts coming out of each other’s eyes on meeting one another. His name is Murphy now and we get regular updates and photos showing how well he’s doing.

They don’t all have happy endings. Jim has had to shoot ten dogs already this year. Dennis didn’t want to make it fourteen if he could help it. I said yes, we’d find some way, and he said he had a couple leads but wanted to have a backup plan. He called me that night to say he’d found placements for three of them and then called the next morning to say he’d found a place for the last one. But he’s keeping my number on speed dial, he said, because he expects the situation will happen again soon.

[We figure, by the way, there are probably nearly as many cats abandoned out our way too, but aside from the few that take up residence at local farms, including one that winters in one of our barns, we assume the coyotes get them.

We say, “how sad” and we go on because what else can we do? Dogs and cats are even less visible than abandoned houses.] People in desperate times do desperate things. It’s not all bad news. Yesterday we learn that a La Crosse mother, citing Wisconsin’s 2001 Safe Haven Law, surrendered her three-hour-old newborn boy at a fire station where she also provided health and medical histories. This boy will doubtless grow up with complications from his abandonment, but I cannot fault someone who recognizes when she’s in over her head, especially in light of the reasons the Safe Haven Law was enacted. Perhaps the flip side to the American Dream, the idea that you can someday have it all, is that when it becomes too hard to manage, you can walk away from it.

Here is my question. Do we forgive these people who do these things? And if so, how do we forgive them? Relationships can be more quickly abandoned as houses. For instance, Dennis is certain he knows at least one farmer who has dumped a couple dogs on his property. He asks me, how can you do such a thing to an animal you’ve cared for? And also, how can you even bring that up when you know the other person?

We don’t all know someone who’s walked away from his home, his child, a pet, but we all know someone who has somehow crossed the boundaries we might think are well-established and inviolable. Here’s a for instance: I had a friend, a good friend, Bonnie. Like me she had been homeless and in need and had gotten back on her feet. At least it seemed so. Back in the late 90s, after she’d been working regularly as an accountant for a homeless advocacy group in the Twin Cities, Bonnie’s employer discovered she’d been embezzling money from the organization to fund trips to Treasure Island casino. Bonnie lost her job and was arrested but it never went to trial and she didn’t serve any jail time. It was, the mutual friend who told me about it said, a sign of the times.

I was incensed. I can’t fault stealing, I’ve found myself in positions where I’ve had to steal food. I’m not proud of those times, but I tell myself I took things that weren’t expensive and didn’t cause anyone much pain. What Bonnie did was to take money from people who least could afford the loss, who had already lost everything, and taken it from a group helping people in situations she had herself been in. It was the equivalent of spitting in the face of a nursing mother. In a fit of self-righteous apoplexy I dropped her from my life.

[You probably have an idea how this ends. Shortly after entering seminary I came to the conclusion that I need to forgive her. After all, if, as I keep hearing at United, the best way we can live out a life like Jesus or Gandhi or the Buddha is to behave as they did, then I need to live out my belief that no one is beyond redemption or forgiveness. If I hope, after all the wrongs and questionable decisions I’ve done in my life, to be at peace with who I am, then I need to be at peace with Bonnie.

It hasn’t gone any further than that.] I know this is what I have to do but the situation hasn’t presented itself nor have I gotten in touch with her through that common friend to bring the moment to its crisis. There is precedent for this. Pope John Paul II forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish would-be assassin who shot him in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. Georgia Congressman John Lewis who, as a young civil rights advocate was spat on and had his skull fractured at Selma, forgave Governor George Wallace before his death. Bonnie didn’t shoot me or split my skull but I admit I’m afraid. She did a great wrong that hurt many people. Somehow the fact her actions didn’t affect me directly makes it harder. How do I say to her, “I forgive you” and mean it?

Someday Sebastian Cross will be faced with the need to forgive his father for abandoning him. Someday Dennis is going to ask that other farmer why he thought someone else should shoulder the cost he couldn’t anymore. Someday each person who walks away from a home or a dog or cat will need to face the need to forgive himself for having done that. Someday each of us will face the need to forgive someone we know, someone we love for having committed an act that, while it may not be the equal of abandonment or embezzlement, nonetheless pushes us away. What do we say, to them and to ourselves? How do we say it?

at least we're not dave

2011-09-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

this is an interesting essay introducing an idea I'd never even considered in the plethora of reasons for the conservative knee-jerk reaction against "wealth redistribution"--that some people fear there will not be a layer of people poorer than themselves. if there is a single objective truth to the newer testament it's jesus' observation that the poor will always be around but it has never occured to me that some people might be afraid that they might be that poor themselves. while I am currently unemployed with little hope of work before january at the earliest and the fear of sliding further is a visceral one that haunts my thoughts, I've never thought that my ego could be placated by there being a class or a group I end up looking better by comparing myself to and that it's in my interest to ensure they remain there.

my wife and I used to have a friend about whom we could always reassure ourselves, no matter how bad things got for us, "at least we're not dave." but dave came from the wealthy family my wife worked for and his future, no matter how he screwed up (so long as he kept his head low beyond the occasional dui or possession charge), was ensured and his ride through life welllubed with women and drugs. the last we'd heard from him, he was married to a wealthy lawyer in the city and his family, remaining upstate with the business, paid him an enormous salary to keep quiet and occasionally appear at trade shows. at the point we knew him--and it's true, part of the reason we were friends with him was the free wine and smoke he brought with him when he visited--we had so little money that we subsidized our dog's diet with boiled government rice. we sometimes skipped meals to make certain he had enough rice and kibble although we always had nice wine to drink while we watched him eat.

and we'd tap our glasses together and say, "at least we're not dave."

culling my library

2011-09-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

my wife has been after me to get rid of some of the thousands of books I've got scattered around our home and we made a deal last week that, in return for her collecting some of her unworn clothes that lays in heaps around the bedroom, I would find a place where I can donate some books. it so happened that I noticed the organization people serving people was having a children's book drive.

so over the next few days I collected 3 boxes full of mostly young adult novels (I discovered just how few actual children's books I own, which is to say next to 0, but I did have many that I enjoyed as a young reader and that I think most teens would relish). these included several dozen I'd filched from free library discard piles specifically, I told myself, for this very eventuality.

I'm ridding myself of my beloved weird heroes collections from the 70s. they are near worthless monetarily but I adored them and I think it's wrong of me to bogart them when they could be enjoyed by other kids. the same for my francesca lia block novels, including my 7 copies of weetzie bat (even a 1st edition that, had it not been a library copy, might have been worth $75, but it's worth more as a book some girl can read). I've gathered a small cache of brian jacques redwall novels for precisely this purpose, and the same for c.s. lewis' narnia books. I've got what I think is a solid girl-friendly hero collection, including marion zimmer bradley's mists of avalon, sheri tepper's sideshow and phillip pullman's golden compass, as well as all the aforementioned blocks. I've even included a history of hip hop from about a decade ago that still has its accompanying cd (I've only played it 3 or 4 times).

all in all I'm quite proud of myself. of course, I must remind myself, all I've done is collect and box the books; I've yet to actually drop them off, and I'm finding many reasons to put off taking the hourlong trip to the center of the hub in order to do that. still, there is something to be said for the morale of actually doing the thing for which the delivery is the smallest part.

a fully enclosed paranoid universe

2011-09-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

crooks and liars has an excellent essay by matt osborne positing that the social conservative right and the religious right have become a single entity, at least as played out in the tea party. he notes they have a creation story, a creed, rituals and sacred words, and other holy articles that mimic fundamentalist belief systems. someone brings up, in the comments, an excellent point regarding the distinction between fundamentalism, evangelicalism, dominionism and "plain old protestantism," and thinks it threatens the foundation of osborne's point, but I don't agree. true, those -isms are rarely more than wary cousins to one another, but as with the tendency of the tea party to ignore the differences between, say, liberals and progressives in order to make their salient points, it's just as fair to elide distinctions between prosperity gospel adherents and premillenial dispensationalists in order to make the larger point that there has been an awkward shift to a new religion of the righteous that is "a fully enclosed paranoid universe where the ice is not melting, the government is too big, and freedom is threatened by change."

hungry guy at the light

2011-09-14T18:31:00.001-07:00

I've been off the road over 20 years but sometimes I might as well not be. on the way home after picking a few groceries at the local market I decided I wanted a hoagie for dinner and swung off my usual road to head to subway just off the rim. at the intersection to the frontage road there was a fellow standing at the light, with roaddust and sunjuice on him, holding a sign that said something about being hungry. I've seen many hitchhikers in baldwin my years here, but never someone homeless or at least that I recognized as homeless.

I went into the subway and got my sandwich and ordered one for him. I got the warmest, most filling thing I could imagine: a meatball marinara with the works. I pulled over to the light just as he was folding up his sign and collecting his things and I said, "here you are, brother." he turned around and he had the gaptoothed grin of the downandout but appreciative. he said, "oh thank, brother." I said, "I got you something warm," and he said, "I'm heading over to the motel and tonight I'll feast!" we both laughed and I drove on and he went back to packing.

there are little things you don't forget. the need for a quick "thanks!" and a warm smile when someone does you a goodness. about a month ago I pulled over at an interstate exit ramp in minneapolis to give a guy a $5 bill. as I sat about a block away I saw him duck behind a road sign and reach down to slip the 5 into his shoe. that suggests he's been on the road a while--someone can easily take your money out of your pocket but he has to really work you over to get it out of your shoe, by which time the money you lose is the least of your worries. I met a guy down south who sewed little sleeves into his hightops to make getting his money in and out easier. when I was a teen and a regular nyc visitor, my mother sewed a zipper pocket into the cuff of my pants for my cash and traveler's checks. one day in an elevator an older guy saw me take a bill out of my cuffs and said, "one time I was mugged down the street here by 2 guys and they were so thorough they got the money I kept in my socks." I said, "why don't you move away?" and he said, "what, and give in to them?"

anyway, am I bragging at least a little by pointing out the good deeds I do? yes, I am, because I think that may be what we must do to remind people that doing such deeds are worthwhile and are done by people who are special. I'm sitting in my warm home with a full belly and I know at least one guy who's sitting somewhere warm, also with a full belly. that's a good feeling, knowing I contributed in some way to someone else's benefit. driving away from that guy at the light I felt like I'd run a good race and done respectably. no matter how old I get such a feeling never does.

pissing in our faces

2011-09-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

the response by a conservative audience to wolf blitzer's question at last night's republican candidate debate to ron paul--"congressman, are you saying society should just let [a hypothetical coma victim who has refused to buy medical insurance] die?": shouts of "yeah!" and "let him die!" and applause--absolutely freezes my soul. to be fair to paul, while he simply did not answer the question and didn't seem to have any clue how to answer it without contradicting his own healthcare plan, he also seemed taken aback by the response.

these are the catcalls of the anonymous crowds that gather where someone teeters on a ledge thinking about ending it all. they have nothing at stake in the matter and are interested only in entertainment, wagering that the wouldbe suicide might be less likely to kill himself if there are people insulting him but if he does, they'll be able to say they were there. that's the response of internet trolls and drunken fratboys, hangerson that want to appear tough and outside social niceties. theoretically, a debate audience ought to be made up of individuals who are really interested in the way society functions. but there is obviously a point that we've reached where the 2 groups, usually seen as separate and at odds, have become a single, nasty, meanspirited mob.

I hasten to point out this is a single, apparently focussed group, one that's presumably representative of the new, more conservative, less social right wing of the republican party. destpite their presence at the debate as representatives, I don't think they necessarily represent most republicans or conservatives. but I cannot imagine a similar reaction to the hypothetical at a meeting of obama supporters, liberals, or even late 60s dixiecrats. it is beyond the pale. such a response by an audience of made up of a group seeking political legitimacy and the presidency pisses in all our faces.

c & e xians

2011-09-12T18:55:00.001-07:00

I've been interning at a couple hub uu congregations so I haven't been attending my home church--what exactly does that mean, anyway, "home church"?--for the past year until yesterday. the service, the 1st of the new congregational year, was the gathering of the waters. it's not unusual for uu churches to stop meeting for the summer, and the one I often attend in eau claire is no different. I mentioned to my xian wife yesterday that xians may not be able to understand the feeling that this rite tickles in us, having not seen one another for months (save perhaps for a few social occasions). but she suggested it was a similar experience to the one c & e xians--christmas and easter--have and I must agree to an extent. it's probable that xians who only attend church a few times a liturgical year have a comparable sensation of having rediscovered the existence of beloved community, although I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. as for uus, we ought to give up the classicism of pausing summer meetings. while the joke that uus are the only sect god can trust for 3 months on our own is worth repeating, the fact is that fewer of us remain of that uberclass that goes away between june and september and our meeting schedule should reflect it.

in the presence of burning children

2011-09-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

just as I think it's an indicator of a superior theology that it's willing to look at its presumptions and say, "we were wrong," so I think it's important for individuals who pay close attention to theologies to admit it when they are also wrong. my trek through mullino moore is slow, but the following quotes are from about 30 pages beyond what I'd quoted and critiqued earlier. I don't think she's answered the questions suggested by the ways biblicism has been used to abuse and oppress people--admittedly, a task worth a whole branch of biblical taxonomy on its own--and I don't think by writing 3 paragraphs she's done more than given a thin veneer to the troubling aspects that she brings up. but she at least touches on the subject and that's more than I thought she had done, and at least she doesn't pretend the issues don't exist. so here I quote her takes on the topic, keeping in mind that so far as I've read this is all she's said on it, but noting as well it remains something worth attending.

"truth-telling is not easy to hear, and it demands a response, whether by individual action or social policy. native americans make this clear in the united states, asking the government to acknowledge atrocities against their people. vine deloria also adresses the christian church, which has forced 'opinions, myths, and superstition on us.' he adds, 'you have never chosen to know us. you have only come to us to confront and conquer us.' deloria's cry echoes the cries of south africa and elsewhere, where generations of people have been denied basic human rights. like [archbishop desmond] tutu, he knows the significance of memory, including the memory of pain and horror." [emphasis added]

"reconciling with the past is undermined when people gloss over pain, blame themselves or others for tragedy, or seek glib words of comfort. these are common responses, however. painful parts of the bible are rarely the subject of sermons or bible study in christian churches. people often carry large burdens of unresolved guilt on their backs, which they hesitate to reveal in their churches, much less to expect absolution or renewal. scapegoating is an international pastime, soaking into our various religious communities as ink soaks into a garment, staining our communities forever with practices of looking for other people to blame for ills in our world. further, people often seek solace in painful times by scouring the bible and devotional books for comforting words. dietrich bonhoeffer notwithstanding, 'cheap grace' is attractive." [emphasis added]

"to reconcile with the past is to engage with hard realities, which finally requires critiquing and reforming theological traditions and religous practices in light of those realities. historical critique is not an empty exercise; it points to real flaws in biblical traditions. to say this is to align with irvin greenberg's post-holocaust analysis--to recognize that no theology is adequate if it does not make sense in the presence of burning children. if anti-judaism and anti-islam are part of christian history and have led to dismemberment of others, we need to reflect critically on traditions that made that possible. if christian theology has aligned with oppressors and ignored the oppressed, we need to revisit and reshape our traditions in light of jesus' central teaching of love toward god and neighbor." [emphasis in original]

day after labor day

2011-09-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

the author of the blog vagabond scholar did a good job yesterday of posting a labor day commentary, better than I might do (although I would connect too to this list). because I was involved instead in shabbating for the weekend, I'm taking the easier way out of simply linking to it. but as a way of making up for this lazy practice, I am reposting 1 of my favorite mashups from a year and a 1/2 ago.

immoral graphic behavior

2011-09-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

comic books were a very big part of my early life. I still have several boxes of them from the early and mid-70s, my prime comic-reading period. and I like to catch up with them every once in a while when I have some free time because they can still be cracking good reads, maybe more so now that I'm more nuanced in my understanding of the way the world works than when I was younger.

which is why a comic book story I read this afternoon has weighed on me. it was one of 5 or 6 stories collected in a graphic novel called marvel .1 and it was, I think, an attempt to provide some overview of the direction the company is taking. I'm relying on several-hours-old memory for this story, so forgive me if some of the details are wrong.

the conceit--whose title I don't know but it was written by nick spencer--is that the secret avengers, a splitoff from the regular avengers franchise devoted to covert operations, is going to extract a genetics expert who works for a.i.m., or advanced idea mechanics, a scientific crime organization I remember well from my comics-reading heyday. this scientist has worked for the organization for 15 years and had passed secret information to the government that helped it to avoid a chemical disaster along the lines of the release of sarin in the japanese aubway a decade ago. his cover has been blown and they are responsible for extracting him and his wife and 2 children safely.

they discover in which secret facility the genetics expert works. the superheroes split up and one group attacks the facility. there is a scene in which 2 of the secret avengers, war machine and ant-man, are on their way to the secret lab and are discussing how they'll gain access. another member of the team, valkyrie, will have arrived there before them and neutralized the guards. what this means, we understand from the action we see under their conversation and what they say (ant-man actually says, "you mean when we get there they'll all be dead?"), is that she will kill about a dozen people on entering the facility. this is confirmed when they arrive and valkyrie is standing over their bodies.

when they get there, however, on finding the person they've come to extract, they discover from the man that he is actually a cover and it's his wife who is the genetics expert who has been working in a home lab. she had sent the information under his name for reasons that aren't specified.

another member of the team, moon knight, races to the couple's home, but it's too late. in a panel shown immediately after his fight with the 2 a.i.m. operatives he finds there, we see a woman's arm and hand, both dripping blood, at the top landing of a set of stairs, and his response to steve rogers, the original captain america, who is in communication with the rest of the team, is that the operatives have killed her. we don't hear anything about the couple's 2 children.

the composition of the shot of the victim's arm and hand suggests we should feel badly that the team was too late to save her, and the panel is effective. I had an "oh, no" moment myself. how mature of comics to present the fact that not all stories have happy endings.

but that we are manipulated to feel badly for this woman's murder and not for the deaths of the dozen men (and possibly women since we understand that a.i.m. obviously has women working for it too) that valkyrie kills on her entrance, many of whom are also probably fathers and mothers, is staggeringly immoral. true, valkyrie is presumably operating in self-defense, but from the conversation between her teammates it's obvious she was going there with the intent to kill any opposition she met. the way they talk about it, it's even made light of, as ant-man bemoans his lost opportunity to impress anyone with his superheroics since they'll all be dead.

it's possible that we're meant to sympathize with the murdered genetics expert because when she leaked the salvific information to the government it was, as her husband reports later, "the right thing to do." but so what? she had worked for 15 years for this criminal organization--what did she imagine they were doing with that genetics information she provided for nearly 2 decades? winning science fairs? and who's to say that none of the dozen dead cannonfodder may have also leaked important lifesaving information to some government branch that simply hadn't been made known to the secret avengers? and even if we can assume that none had, isn't that just a byproduct of not being in a position to have damaging information in your hands (possibly that you, as the genetics expert, might have yourself developed)? and, let's face it, in the economy of the past decade, if someone offers us a job, say to guard a facility or a courthouse, that presumably pays good wages and benefits, wouldn't we take it, without being evil or even malicious ourselves? (after all, are we responsible for what the corportation we work for does?)

but so what? it's just a comic book. do I really expect a moral tale from a comic book? yes, I do. by the 1st decade of the 21st century, comics have become an art form that comments as much on realworld dilemmas and events as they do on the madeup problems of superpeople and for better and worse comics have become a method by which some people communicate how they think the world ought to be, and to make light of the deaths of a dozen people and then expect us to shed a tear for a single person who is at the least complicit in research that may have led to the deaths of many more, is an immoral act.

because there is bacon, there are eggs!

2011-08-31T17:59:00.000-07:00

I'd been rummaging lately to locate a college novel to read since this is about the time of year I do that. I'd been looking at a couple but yesterday I got the oddest urge to read horror and picked up this novel I'd bought 4 or 5 years ago. surprisingly, this one takes care of both yens. it takes place among victorian-era university graduates, 1 of whom (the narrator) is a professor at oxbridge, and the other teaches maths in the small fictional town of thurchester. it's an interesting read thus far and, unlike elizabeth peters, charles palliser has the patter of late 19th century prose down. I esp appreciated this dialogue:

"'I've heard that the chapter suffers particularly acutely from the usual conflicts between the ritualists and the evangelicals,' I said...

"'that's what lies behind the argument about work on the cathedral,' [austin] said with a nod. 'for some people it is nothing but a beautiful old shell and they want to preserve it unchanged because for them it has no significance beyond its material being.'

"I smiled to hide my irritation. 'is anyone who loves old churches to be regarded as an infidel?'

"'I'm talking of all those in this age who have made a religion out of things peripheral to, or other than, christianity: music, history, art, literature.'

"...'speaking for myself, I would say that I've retained the moral meaning of works of art like the cathedral but separated it from the baggage of superstition.'

"...he slowly repeated my words. 'the baggage of superstition. you and your ilk are the purveyors of baggage. what you have done is to put together a jumble of beliefs, to produce a new form of superstition that is much more dangerous than anything in christianity. and of less use. it won't help you with the great issues: loss, the death of those you love, the imminence of your own death.'

"'is that what religion should be? a comforting fiction? I'd rather choose the truth...however harsh it might be.'

"'there's nothing harsher than christianity.'

"'are you a believer now, austin? you used not to be.'

"'you're talking of twenty years past,' he said irritably. 'don't you think some things might have changed in the world outside the confines of a cambridge college?...as undergraduates we used to talk glibly of christianity as superstition...a superstition which had all but evaporated in the light of rationalism and whose final disappearance we confidently predicted. but now I understand that it is the other way around: that without faith, all you have is superstition. fear of the dark, of ghosts, of the realm of death which continues to frighten us, whatever we believe. we need stories to stop us being frightened...what I'm talking about is faith, belief, acceptance of the absolute reality of salvation and damnation. you--and others of our generation--lost your faith because you decided that science can explain everything. I believed that myself for a while but I came to understand that reason and faith are not in conflict. they are different orders of reality. although I understand that now, when I was younger I shared your error. I know now that because there is darkness, there is light. that because there is death, there is life. because there is evil, there is goodness. because there is damnation, there is redemption.'

"'because there is bacon, there are eggs!' I could not prevent myself from exclaiming. 'what poppycock!'"

--from the unburied by charles palliser

weeding

2011-08-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

weeding is a blessing and a curse, and another blessing again. it's a blessing because it's repetitive and in the silence of the garden where all I hear are birds, the lowing of nearby cows, and the hum from the distant interstate, my mind drifts and flows and I'm unaware of the hours passing. it's a curse because it has to be done so often; there is as yet no foolproof way to prevent grass and broadleaves and dandelions from filtering up through the mesh we lay down and mar what we take pains to sculpt. and it's a blessing again because for those hours all my problems and issues and insecurities are reduced to getting these plants out of this plot of land.

more mullino moore

2011-08-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

"in truth, people who have suffered much often find their greatest hope in jesus' suffering. is this because it justifies their suffering? I doubt it. yet, the suffering of jesus does honor and identify with their suffering. it is not strange, therefore, that in parts of the world where poverty and oppression are intense, so is devotion to the crucified christ. it is not strange that people in the early christian church crawled on their knees up the steps in rome that were traditionally thought to be the steps jesus walked to meet pilate. it is not strange that the holy sepulchre in jerusalem, where jesus is thought to have been crucified and buried, is shared by six churches--latin catholic, greek orthodox, armenian, syrian, coptic, and ethiopian. it is not strange that the same church is a pilgrimage site for thousands of people each year. people yearn for god when they suffer. they yearn to know that god is with them and suffers with them."

--from teaching as a sacramental act by mary elizabeth mullino moore [her emphases]

moore's reasoning is solid here except that she glosses over a very important aspect of suffering and xianity: what about when the church itself or xianity itself is the cause of peoples' suffering? I'm not only talking about historical suffering--the murders and massacres of early and later churches, from the rooting out of heretics to crusades to witchhunts--I'm also talking about more recent aspects--the ease with which xianity found itself explaining slavery as god's will; the use to which missionaries put deutoronomy 13 to justify having natives who would not convert put to death by their newly xian neighbors (or, in the case of amerindians, killed by xian settlers); the xian mine and business owners who used the words of romans 13 to justify unionbusting and busting the heads of unionized workers and their families; the alleged cozying up by the catholic church with nazi authorities in rome and berlin and occupied nations; the xian pastors and priests who sat on the fence (at best) or defended the actions of bull connor and such men (at worst) during the civil rights movement; and the xians who find it all too easy today to preach hatred of gays and lesbians, or of immigrants, or of muslims or jews, and the xian prosperity movement that blames the poor for their own situation.

my point is not that mullino moore's point is wrong or offbase but that there are numerous examples in which xianity or xians are the cause of others' suffering. and it is of this suffering mullino moore is silent. while it is wrong to criticize a book for what it is not, this is a topic that she should at least have mentioned in passing. failure to do so is an implicit suggestion this suffering does not exist. this decision spits on the graves of people who suffered this way.

an indistinguishable part of a single pulse

2011-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

"a hermeneutic of wonder is the art of dwelling on one another (a text, person, sunset, or tree) with full attention to its wholeness, its complexity and simplicity, its intricate patterns of relationship. whether we focus on [walter] brueggemann's abiding astonishment, [abraham] heschel's radical amazement, or [howard] thurman's deepest things, we see the power of this hermeneutic. practiced in dramatic and simple moments, it uncovers 'blessings so intimate, so closely binding, that they do not seem to be blessings at all.' such blessings are important in themselves, but they also build a life of wonder, awakening people to moments that delight, annoy, and teach them about god and god's world.

"whether approaching a biblical text or walking in the woods, one may actively seek wonder (through biblical criticism), practice disciplines of sillness (lectio divina), or contemplate in silence. the result may be a sense of communion with the forest or the text, which transcends the obvious and reveals god in the commonplace. 'one becomes an indistinguishable part of a single rhythm, a single pulse.' these experiences are treasures, and while they do not happen in every moment, they can potentially color the rest of our lives..."

--from teaching as a sacramental act by mary elizabeth mullino moore (her emphases)

I shy away from using words like hermeneutic, praxis, gestalt, and sacramental, partly because I'm never enitirely certain what they mean, and mostly because there are other, better, simpler words I can often use (why say "sacramental" when you can easily use "sacred" in the title of this text?). still, this is a good quote that takes an awful lot of words to say something that e.m. forster said better and more simply: "only connect." connect with your text, connect with your forest, connect with your community. or more exactly, be open to those connections because we are never certain when or if they will come. I walk in the woods daily with my dogs and I'd have to say my moments of connection (and they are often only moments despite or maybe because of my concentration) would barely add up to 5 minutes if strung together consecutively. it's only the memory of those touches of connectivity, reflected on at leisure, that make sense, not the original experiences themselves.

all these places have their moments

2011-08-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm fond of abandoned places, houses, factories, barns. I stayed in a lot of them over the years living in my car. I could never call myself a squatter because I never stayed more than a night or 2 and tried to make my presence as lowkey as possible.

I've been itching to do another mashup and a friend's posting yesterday of a number of photos from the abandoned building where we attended middle school gave me the impetus to do so. this is what used to be roeliff jansen school in hillsdale, ny. the school district left it in 1999 and it's currently up for sale and renovation.

teach naked

2011-08-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't done this before but this blog entry from mock, paper, scissors is worth posting a link to. it's a pretty accurate and unsentimental reflection of what a lot of us who have been turned out by states where anti-government starve-the-beast policies have gained sway are experiencing. similarly, I'm also feeling the loneliness of the 1st day of school with nowhere to go...

"life was a war"

2011-08-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

earlier this year I realized that, aside from a couple chapters in high school french class, I'd never read victor hugo's massive les miserables. so I picked up a well-worn copy off the free book table at one of the local libraries and began picking my way through it bit by bit. I've reached somewhere in the 100s--looking at it on the table right now about 1/25th of the way through. the description of jean valjean from book 1 is too contemporary to pass up. (again, my emphases.)

"he was an untutored man...but that is not to say that he was stupid. there was a spark of natural intelligence in him; and adversity, which sheds its own light, had fostered the light slowing dawning in his mind. under the lash and in chains, on fatigue and in the solitary cell, under the burning mediterranean sun and on the prisoner's plank bed, he withdrew into his own conscience and reflected.

"consituting himself judge and jury, he began by trying his own case.

"he admitted that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished. he had committed an excessive and blameworthy act. the loaf of bread [he had stolen] might not have been refused him if he had asked for it, and in any event it would have been better to wait, either for charity or for work. the argument, 'can a man wait when he is half-starved' was not unanswerable, for the fact is that very few people literally die of hunger...he should have had patience, and this would have been better even for the children [for whom he'd stolen the bread]. to attempt to take society by the throat, vulnerable creature that he was, and to suppose that he could escape from poverty through theft, had been an act of folly. in any case, the road leading to infamy was a bad road of escape. he admitted all this--in short, that he had done wrong.

"but then he asked questions.

"was he the only one at fault in this fateful business? was it not a serious matter that a man willing to work should have been without work and without food? and, admitting the offence, had not the punishment been ferocious and outrageous? was not the law more at fault in the penalty it inflicted than he had been in the crime he committed? had not the scales of justice been over-weighted on the side of expiation? and did not this weighting of the scales, far from effacing the crime, produce a quite different result, namely, a reversal of the situation, substituting for the original crime the crime of oppression, making the criminal a victim and the law his debtor, transferring justice to the side of him who had offended against it? did not the penalty...become in the end a sort of assault by the stronger on the weaker, a crime committed by society against the individual and repeated daily...

"he asked himself whether human society had the right to impose upon its members, on the one hand its mindless improvidence and, on the other hand, its merciless providence; to grind a poor man between the millstones of need and excess--need of work and excess of punishment. was it not monstrous that society should treat in this fashion precisely those least favoured in the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of chance, and therefore those most needing indulgence?

"he asked these questions and, having answered them, passed judgement on society.

"he condemned it to his hatred. he held it responsible for what he was undergoing and resolved that, if the chance occured, he would not hesitate to call it to account. he concluded that there was no true balance between the wrong he had done and the wrong that was inflicted on him, and that although his punishment might not be technically an injustice it was beyond question an iniquity.

"anger may be ill-considered and absurd; we may be mistakenly angered; but only when there is some deep-seated reason are we outraged. jean valjean was outraged.

"moreover society as a whole had done him nothing but injury. he had seen nothing of it but the sour face which it calls justice and shows only to those it castigates. men had touched him only to hurt him; his only contact with them had been through blows. frm the time of his childhood, and except for his mother and sister, he had never encountered a friendly word or a kindly look. during the years of suffering he reached the conclusion that life was a war in which he was one of the defeated. hatred was his only weapon, and he resolved to sharpen it in prison and carry it with him when he left."

do the best things in the worst times

2011-08-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

this morning I served pulpit supply--was the guest preacher--at 2 ucc congregations in colby and athens, wi, where I was welcomed and treated well, but I don't expect I'll be asked by either of them to return. the sermon below is what I wrote for them. I was somewhat at a disadvantage since I only had to write a 5-6 page sermon but I didn't have time to do that so I wrote an 8 page sermon that I hacked and slashed down to 6 and a half. this is the result.

Psalms 133 Sermon

“Do the Best Things in the Worst Times”
A Sermon Delivered to The 1st United Church of Christ,
Colby and Athens, Wisconsin, August 14, 2011,

I looked it up and you folks weren't part of the recall election last Tuesday. You missed a great election. I live in the 10th district where there are particularly harsh feelings about our state senator and what she has and hasn’t done for the people of her district in the last decade. We’re gearing up for yet another in other districts next week. In this last election, as elections are wont to do, some people came away happy and many came away angry. That’s as it’s always been. From the perspective of an American voter in the early 21st century, it certainly looks like the country is as divided as it’s ever been, maybe more so than at any time in American history. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, these positions are miles apart, aren’t they, seemingly irreconcilable. It’s never been this divisive, we’ve never been as separate before, certainly not in our lifetimes.

Only if “our lifetimes” don’t include the protests against the war in Vietnam when it seemed not a week went by without some violent demonstration, counterdemonstration, the bombings at the University in Madison or the police responses at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and Kent State. We have yet to experience many political conflagrations, certainly not like Norway, for instance, has. And for some of us, “our lifetimes” include the Great Depression, during which them what had went to whatever lengths they felt necessary—up to and including hiring private police forces who infamously used clubs and revolvers and set fires at mines like Ludlow, Lattimer and Columbine—to keep them what hadn’t who were beginning to unionize. And while none of us can count it as happening in “our lifetimes,” certainly today’s divisions are as nothing compared with the period of 1840-1865 when slavery and freedom were such contentious issues the country took up arms against itself to settle the matter.

None of us is immune to the wish-fulfillment of blame. Just the other day I told my wife I’d been thinking that afternoon about leaving her and moving out into the middle of the woods with no phone and no car and no internet and spending my days standing at the end of my driveway and shaking my fist at everyone who passes. She reminded me that if I left her I’d need to take three of our animals and their upkeep would surely cut into my fist-shaking time so I might as well stay home.

Some people blame President Obama for the country’s divisiveness and some people blame Republicans as if somehow one side or the other wants to govern a divided, off-kilter nation. Some blame public religion or the lack of public religions as if churches and synagogues and mosques don’t all have their own schisms and issues going on. Something has left us feeling like there’s something between us, as if there’s, not a wall exactly, but a sense of disconnect. We’re missing one another, walking past each other, even though we’re saying “Hi” and shaking hands, as if the other person somehow isn’t quite there.

The Psalm we read this morning seems almost to comment on this disconnect. “How pleasant it is,” the psalmist writes, “when kindred live together in unity!” Had that been written today I’d suspect the author of sarcasm at the least, dismay at the worst.

Because we don’t live in unity, do we? I mean, well, we might here in this church and even here in this town, but as a state? As a nation? No, sir, not a bit of it. We’re constantly yelling at one another over the radio and the television and the internet—you always know someone doesn’t trust his words WHEN HE TYPES OUT HIS MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS—and sometimes at the family barbecue and at work. Some of us are frustrated because we’re working two and three jobs and some of us because we aren’t even working one. Sometimes it seems the single difference between the uprisings going on this year in some Arab nations or Great Britain and the US is that no one here has thought to start heaving bricks at cops. That may change. After all, this is America, where we have more handguns available than bricks.

But the psalmist isn’t being sarcastic. He or she isn’t being ironic. He or she is quite sincere. How can that be, since the psalmist was living in a wonderful age when everyone was closer to god and thought of god all the time, paid attention to god and followed god’s laws to the best of his or her ability, or at least wasn’t actively fighting god and religion the way some people seem to do now? I'm not a believer in a golden age but think on this. A mere 2 years ago we saw an incredible outpouring of relief and hope—I felt it and I’m certain many of you did too—when Barack Obama, whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. We've lost that hope somewhere between then and now. We have moved from the radical notion that "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

This is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. Of sharing. Of helping one another. Of community. We have entered a time and political place when a majority of citizens seem to feel the motto of the US ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

Has it ever been any different? Well, sure, right there, Psalm 133. That’s certainly a golden moment when everyone was looking out for one another. If only we could resurrect that time, go back to everyone looking out for his neighbor and there wasn’t all this infighting and backstabbing and calling one another names.

As Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “It’s pretty to think so.” The truth is there’s never any golden time, never a silver or a bronze age as compared with our contemporary lead one when people had one another’s best interests at heart and truly loved their neighbors and had one another uppermost in their thoughts. Scholars don’t know when individual psalms were created or even written down but the book as it comes down to contemporary readers was probably anthologized during the 4th Century BCE, the period after the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persians whose king, Xerxes—you may remember him as the villain of the movie 300—allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland and helped in the restoration of the Second Temple. Some of them predate the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the Temple. The transcriber of 133 is writing at a time when the people of Israel have come together out of a century—for the Jews of the northern kingdom, two centuries—of exile and second-class citizenship in a foreign land. To be sure, not everyone was moved out of what was once Israel and Judah, only the nobility and the most important citizens. Thousands of others were left essentially leaderless and without protection, victimized by anyone who might have happened along with a superior weapon and nothing to lose.

When we think about exile today we think of refugee camps, of malaria and stagnant water and death by diseases easily cured in less-crowded places, and it was like that in those times too. The book of Psalms is divided into several types, the most common of which, you might not be surprised to learn, is the individual lament, the crying out to god for help for oneself. There are also communal laments whose tragedies reflect contemporary experiences in the Sudan and Somalia:

"My days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin…All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink, because of your indignation and anger; for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass."

There are also songs or psalms of trust, of individual and communal thanksgiving. “O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” There are paeans to divinity and creation, songs of celebration and liturgies, psalms of kingship and royalty and celebrating the lineage of David (many of these were written during the times when Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms, were kingdoms ruled by David’s descendants). There are psalms celebrating Zion and pilgrimage and there are songs about wisdom. There are songs of immense beauty and trust: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” And there are songs of great cruelty and vengeance: “Happy shall be they who pay [Babylon] back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash their brains against the rock!” The Psalms are a repository for nearly every emotion, good and bad, a people in exile felt.

But in 133, subtitled a song of ascent, one which people sung as they made pilgrimage up the hills of Jerusalem, the people are coming together again after being apart for so long and they sing about the pleasure of being with one another as a community and as a people. You must understand, in this time and place, if you had no people and you had no land, and no way to make certain other people recognized those two things, then you were the equivalent of an unbranded steer in 1870s Abilene, Texas. Free to be owned and done with by anyone who took the trouble to acquire you and with no more access to redress than that steer had. It was a blessing to be with one another again. To be one people. To be a single, unified group.

Our Muslim friends and neighbors are currently celebrating Ramadan which takes as its initial offer that, like Gandhi said, we should be the change we want to see in the world—Surah 2: 183 and 185 of the Qur’an reads “O you who believe, fasting is decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, that you may attain salvation…Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast…GOD wishes for you convenience, not hardship, that you may fulfill your obligations, and to glorify GOD for guiding you, and to express your appreciation”—and adds to it the idea that we should all do it together. This is communal experience at its best, acknowledging the shared hunger for something outside oneself and then coming together to expunge that hunger as a community.

African culture reproaches us to remember, “I am because we are.” Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reminds us that we have an obligation “to keep the world from falling apart.” To do this we must come together to, as author Richard Gilbert puts it, “do the best things in the worst times.” We do this to bring about what my denomination, Unitarian Universalism, calls the Beloved Community and what Christians call the Kingdom of God.

What is this hard work we should do, what should this community look like? I don’t exactly know and for each of us it might be a little different. E.B. White, author of children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, admitted he woke each morning “torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world. This,” he notes, “makes it hard to plan the day.”

But this I do know. Take a moment to look to the left of you, and then to the right. Take a moment to smile at the person you see. Take his or her hand. Feel the warmth of their hands, the pulse just fluttering beneath the surface, the strong life that is there. How good it is when we are together. These are the companions you are to do this work with. You will find no better.

the us must claw money back from the top 1%

2011-08-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

"My analysis is quite simple and follows the apocryphal statement attributed to Willie Sutton. The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious policy program must begin by clawing it back.

"If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.

"In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010. By contrast, in a society like that of the 1950s and 1960s, where most people could plausibly regard themselves as middle class and where middle class incomes were steadily rising, the big questions could be put in terms of the mix of public goods and private income that was best for the representative middle class citizen. The question of how much (more) to tax the very rich was secondary – their share of national income was already at an all time low."

--economist john quiggin quoted in "income inequality is bad for rich people too" by yves smith from the august 12 edition of salon magazine (my emphasis)

*the above map is available here.

people are political animals

2011-08-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

aristotle said it 1st but it bears repeating. wherever 2 or more are gathered, so there will be a caucus.

here on the rim we went through another seismic shakeup that wasn't, with a result similar in 1 district to another seismic shakeup-that-wasn't just in april. (I've begun to be asked when voting to provide identification which the state republicans, in a solution in search of a problem, insist will counter voter fraud, but seems to have no impact on actual voter fraud.) the democratic party won 2 seats in the recall--and there is reason to see hope in that--but lost the other 4 by margins that the gop will surely consider an electoral mandate. there will continue to be no compromise on the part of the state ruling group.

I'm not a believer in a golden age. but a mere 2 years ago there was an incredible outpouring of relief and hopefulness when barack obama, a candidate whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. we've lost that hope somewhere as we have moved from a political culture of "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

this is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. of sharing. of community. of helping 1 another. we have entered a time and political place when a majority of voters--as opposed to a majority of citizens--feel the motto of the us ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

decades ago, after I'd graduated from college the 1st time but was still hanging around new paltz, word got around that the student senate had voted to cancel spring weekend. this was a special time for people in the area, a weekend when a major bands were brought in to play free concerts in the rear fields of the campus, a place dubbed "the tripping fields" by grace slick when jefferson airplane and the who played there in 69. it was an incredibly unpopular decision but the senate had good, solid reasons for doing so: every year the senate, which footed the bill from student activity fees, lost money because of injuries, arrests, vandelism to the property and cleanup. I'd attended for years and the place on monday morning looked like parts of britain currently look.

a guy I knew from my time as sports editor, marty, was on the senate and he and a small coterie of senators had spread the word that there should have been public discussion of the decision since it had an impact on a huge number of people. the following week a special session of the senate was held and the meeting, which normally took place in one of the smaller rooms of the student center, opened in the auditorium, which had been outfitted with bleachers and stacking chairs. it was packed, and by the time I got there a half hour before the meeting, it was standing room only.

to call the meeting contentious would be an understatement. it was raucous and loud and the senators tried valiently but in vain to keep the crowd from interrupting proceedings. it soon emerged that the senate was overwhelmingly against footing the bill for a drunken orgy every year.

but the noise and the tumult was democracy in action. soon the senate voted to hold its meeting in executive session, which meant only senators present, a vote that was immensely unpopular with the visitors. marty led the effort to rescind that vote, listening to the hundreds of people who'd come to make comment on the decision. there was 1 guy, I never knew his name, but he was among the loudest and most adamant that spring weekend ought to continue as it had and that he was there to make certain that it did. marty seemed to look on him as an ally in the crowd.

1 by 1 the senators recanted their votes on the executive session and the noise when they reappeared in the auditorium was deafening. 1 by 1 people stood up and addressed the senate and the group and it was obvious that springweekend, whatever the cost, was a popular and extraordinarily well-received tradition. 1 by 1 the senate votes changed until, at about midnight, the vote stood at a plurality of senators in favor of continuing the practice, damn the cost.

the place erupted in applause. and almost immediately emptied out. but the meeting wasn't over yet: there were still a number of issues to consider like a possible rise in student fees to cover the costs, new rules for student organizations, additions to the campus code of conduct and others.

I remember marty standing in the center of the room saying vainly, "stay and have a voice about what to do with these issues too." but everyone swarmed out of the room, and I remember marty addressing the guy he'd seen as his ally and the guy saying, "I got what I wanted." soon, there was no one in the room except the senators and about 12 people, including me, and I left soon after because it was getting late and the bars would close soon.

is anyone to blame?

2011-08-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

because I have failed to see these quotes from the actual s&p report in most news media--with the exception of thom hartmann, rachel maddow, and susie madrak at crooks & liars--I think it's important to keep a record of them. the report lays out, quite explicitly, why s&p downgraded the nation's credit rating and the parties it feels are responsible. the emphases are mine. the full report is here.

"We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process...

"Our lowering of the rating was prompted by our view on the rising public
debt burden and our perception of greater policymaking uncertainty, consistent
with our criteria...Nevertheless, we view the U.S. federal government's other economic, external, and monetary credit attributes, which form the basis for the sovereign rating, as broadly unchanged...

"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year's wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently...

"Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating and with 'AAA' rated sovereign peers...In our view, the difficulty in framing a consensus on fiscal policy weakens the government's ability to manage public finances and diverts attention from the debate over how to achieve more balanced and dynamic economic growth in an era of fiscal stringency and private-sector deleveraging...A new political consensus might (or might not) emerge after the 2012 elections, but we believe that by then, the government debt burden will likely be higher, the needed medium-term fiscal adjustment potentially greater, and the inflection point on the U.S. population's demographics and other age-related spending drivers closer at hand...

"The [2011 budget control] act [amendment] calls for as much as $2.4 trillion of reductions in expenditure growth over the 10 years through 2021. These cuts will be implemented in two steps: the $917 billion agreed to initially, followed by an additional $1.5 trillion that the newly formed Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is supposed to recommend by November 2011. The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them...

"We view the act's measures as a step toward fiscal consolidation. However, ...[even]
assuming that at least $2.1 trillion of the spending reductions the act envisages are implemented, we maintain our view that the U.S. net general government debt burden (all levels of government combined, excluding liquid financial assets) will likely continue to grow. Under our revised base case fiscal scenario--which we consider to be consistent with a 'AA+' long-term rating and a negative outlook--we now project that net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 79% in 2015 and 85% by 2021. Even the projected 2015 ratio of sovereign indebtedness is high in relation to those of peer credits and, as noted, would continue to rise under the act's revised policy settings...

"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now
assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012,
remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority
of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise
revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act..."

also, as a notatall academic exercise, compare this map of nations which retain s&p's aaa+ rating with this map of nations with universal healthcare.

you're not worth my time

2011-08-06T17:57:00.001-07:00

likely because we had tickets to the science museum of minnesota's king tut exhibit--which, despite their cost, we did not end up using because my wife developed a debilitating migraine, and I'd rather eat $100 than have her in misery for an afternoon--I grabbed an elizabeth peters mystery on my way out the door to an errand that involved sitting for an hour and a half. it was called the hippopotamus pool and it was execrable.

I should qualify that. the 1st 50 pages were execrable. the rest might be spectacular but I'll never know. I give any book an hour and if it doesn't make me want to keep reading after the 1st 50 pages I give it up. I noted on my facebook page that peters is an exceptionally bad writer but that's not really true. she's a very clever writer who probably can write well, perhaps for her more contemporary mysteries or her supernatural novels under the name barbara michaels, but she tries to make her amelia peabody novels a pastiche of the writing prevalent of the time in which they take place--the turn into the 20th century--and she gets some things right but the spirit wrong. as a person who reads a lot of novels from that period I'm familiar that there's a certain feel to the writing that readers come to expect, a certain verbosity and ornateness and unwillingness to name unpleasant things for what they are. I'm not certain attempting to write in that style by contemporary authors is necessary, although some--nicholas myers, laurie king, alan moore, julian barnes, anne perry, and of course george macdonald fraser, among others--do it very, very well.

it is usually sex that leads to trouble in these things and peters has made an especially unhappy attempt to invoke it, at least here. it's not a bad thing to want to go against the received wisdom that proper victorians were not the sexless prudes we've imagined them--indeed, frank harris made a cottage industry debunking that--but it is bad to suggest it with a fist made of ham and pork, which is the case here.

"I now make certain that the buttons on emerson's shirts are sewn with double thicknesses of thread, since they were always popping off when he disrobed in haste or when he expanded the impressive breadth of his chest. this was an old shirt; the buttons slipped handily out of the holes, and as he extended his arms to their full length, quite a large expanse of his person, smoothly tanned and artistically modeled, became visible.

"'really, emerson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,' I said. 'if you think you can distract me from my maternal obligations in that crude, unsubtle fashion--'

"'unsubtle? my dear peabody, you don't know what you are saying. now if I had done this...or this...'

"leaving the cat anubis to the sitting room, we retired to our own."

this book is not worth my time.

a world of infinite complexity

2011-08-03T04:59:00.000-07:00

"I learned, to my surprise, that most of the radical ideas my friends and I were suggesting had already been thought of, considered, analyzed, and had problems in their implementation that we had never dreamed of. I learned to respect many of the men who worked in huge bureaucracies, who limited their own freedom, and who made it possible occassionally for the radical ideas of others to be implemented. I learned that the difficulty with many radical ideas lay in the fact that so many varied interests played a role in government, and that most of them were legitimate interests. it was a big country, and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the hudson. I learned, in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was: in a world of infinite complexity, some things had emerged and survived, and if the country was in many ways better than it might be or had been (just as in many ways it was much worse than it might be or would be), then something was owed to its political institutions and organizational structures."

--from "on being deradicalized; or, the confessions of nat glazer" by nathan glazer in the october 1970 issue of commentary; quoted in intellectual skywriting: literary politics and the new york review of books by philip nobile. (emphasis added)

is it evolution if, in 40 years, conservativism's primary message shifts from a 1sthand appreciation for the efforts of government and government workers (glazer, a 50s radical, came to conservatism after having worked in the kennedy administration; as a founder of the public interest, his neoconservative credentials are pretty solid) to a wish to drown them in the bathtub?

the debt ceiling is an anachronism

2011-08-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm not terribly up on financial stuff--that's for my wife, who translates financial legalese into moreorless general conversation for a living after all--and although I did spend a semester studying economics before receiving my 1st adjunctship, it's something I'm happy to leave to her gentle mercies. but this explanation of the debt ceiling from a recent new yorker comes heavily recommended by her and it's understandable even to a money neophyte like myself. the lesson I come away from it with is that, like most gun deaths, the debt ceiling is something wholly within our political power to eradicate or at least to seriously curb and it's only lack of willingness or, as surowiecki puts it about ceiling talk regressivenenss, because "the republicans seem to be more willing than the democrats to let the country default" (read: "more willing to accept collateral civilian deaths") that our summer has been wasted with this irrelevent topic. as surowiecki also points out, "when some tea partiers said they wouldn't vote to raise the ceiling under any circumstances, they became irrelevant to the conversation." to our shame and discomfort we did not let them remain so.

to be both in the world and of it

2011-07-31T16:37:00.001-07:00

I haven't felt terribly well lately, thinking it was connected somehow to vague feelings of depression I've had about both the state of my employment and the state of society. (why does it seem as if when we are ourselves not doing well we apprehend that much of our neighbors are not doing well either?) it gathered force today like a snowball on a hill and hit me with the force of hot, uncomfortable nausea. my wife is feeling it too--she ascribes it to week-old cheesecake we ate for breakfast--and we have spent the day alternating between lying on the bed and on the couches.

in the throes of such a thing, the only thing really to do is read, and I've been doing that. just in the past 12 hours I've read from intellectual skywriting: literary politics and the nyrb by philip nobile, cosmopolitan crimes: foreign rivals of sherlock holmes collected by hugh greene, god is not 1: the 8 rival religions that run the world--and why their differences matter by stephen prothero, a lengthy review of economic books by anatole kaletsky, glenn hubbard and peter navarro, and robert reich by jeff madrick in the nyrb called "how can the economy recover?", and dozens of pages online (including a new facebook page just started called "your [sic] probably from hudson, ny if...").

but the reading that's got me writing now is from roger shattuck's forbidden knowledge: from prometheus to pornography.

"up through the middle ages, christian theology incorporated and imposed on the faithful a dark suspicion of secular nature. our proper devotion should be to the divine order of grace. st paul and st augustine warn us continually to distrust the original curiosity of adam and eve in a satan-haunted world...well into the 17th century, secular knowledge and natural philosophy represented 'a distraction or seducement' from true spiritual living. 'to study nature meant to repeat the sin of adam.' nevertheless, like a slow-moving glacier, christian theology trundled along within it some unassimilable boulders. in 1336, petrarch, celebrated for his love poetry in italian, climbed mount ventoux in provence just 'to see what so great an elevation had to offer.' he said he almost lost his soul at the summit 'admiring earthly things,' like the view. years later, he wrote an astonishing letter to record the pleasures of that excursion into nature. petrarch came to value the secular world as highly as dante valued the spiritual."

I remember learning in 1 of my earliest american lit courses the puritan appreciation for their being in the world but not of it, of being alive as humans but at the same time remembering that they were destined for a more transcendental existence. (there is a wide streak of this all through unitarianism from the transcendentalists and the utopians, a streak that modern uus have more or less tried to ignore but really should come up with an alternative to instead.) this struck me then as an interesting but failed policy to live by: one can prove one's present existence but can only take on faith any existence beyond that. to hold off enjoyment and appreciation of the now in favor of some potential good that we have no proof we can ever acheive doesn't seem like an efficient way to spend our time.

I remember too a lovely buddhist story someone told me about an early karmapa. this fellow was walking along a path and came across a tiger who gave chase. the karmapa ran until he reached a cliff and crawled out along the limb of a tree that gave way and dropped him flat against the cliff for a minute. below him, the karmapa could see a lion at the bottom of the cliff. as the tree limb gave way he noticed a wild strawberry plant growing in the cleft of the cliff just at the level he was at with a single perfect berry. he plucked it and put it in his mouth, exclaiming, "how delicious!" as the limb gave way and he dropped.

e.m. forster was correct

2011-07-26T19:05:00.001-07:00

I spent last friday afternoon at the library at uw-river falls, reading newspapers and doing crosswords--I love to think of someone reading the nytimes or the chronicle of higher education and coming across a puzzle I've penned out and marveling that someone takes the time in these days to do crosswords in public papers, and without benefit of google--and while there I flipped idly through a graphic novel I'd heard of called daytripper, an interesting take on possibilities in an individual's life. I came across a bit of dialogue something like this: 1 character is speaking to another via longdistance call, "well, I have the money and the great job and the girls but I feel like I'm not really having an effect on anyone, like I'm not really enhancing anyone's life." (my approximation) and I didn't have anything like an epiphany, cuz I've known this for quite some time, but it left me reflecting on how my life, especially the past couple decades, has led me to recognize that while I don't have any of the external things (although I did have the great job until recently--que sera sera) I have had tremendous impact on other people. students have not been shy about the impact I've made on their lives, and I was surprised recently when someone reappeared in my life after nearly 30 years and the 1st thing she relayed was how appreciative she'd always been for a kindness I'd genuinely forgotten about. e.m. forster, it seems, was correct: what we need do is "only connect."

alternatives to church

2011-07-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

as part of my seminary training, I interned at 2 uu congregations in the south metro area from september to june, and so spent every weekend at church. since that ended I've been at only a couple services at different denominations, mostly to experience different forms of worship, but this was the 1st sunday I'd intended to go to church but opted not to at the 11th hour.

the occasion was a visit from a friend of ours who lives now in atlanta and who we see only rarely. he had come north with his partner to attend a cousin's wedding and to visit my wife's father, who is in hospice care at home and who is dying. yes, we are all dying, but he is doing it a little faster than most.

it was a good day. people trooped in and out of my father-in-law's room and he even managed to get outside to visit the female couple next door who'd just come home. another friend we rarely see anylonger but who recently returned to the area also came over and it was a lovely opportunity for my wife and the others to relive, in some small fashion, their teen years when all three spent most days together. now with adulthood pressing in, with jobs and bills and mortgages--not oddly, none of them has had children--and death of course looming large, there was a different sense to it than I suspect there was 30 years ago.

there was a wistfulness to the conversations, a sense that there were so many things to talk about but so many things not to bring up simply because to do so was to start a conversation that couldn't be finished in the few hours they had. when we stood outside and said goodbye, each of them said, "I wish we could live together," in 1 way or another. I've heard other people say that too, usually friends who're in the process of finding new places and new ways to live.

watching them was a good way to spend a sabbath. their time together was holy.

the shrinking wateringhole

2011-07-21T15:01:00.001-07:00

I know it isn't original to her, but I was reminded today of something I heard a teacher I know say at a union meeting last year: "as the waterhole gets smaller, the animals get meaner." this comes through more and more clearly as the political landscape, never a place for those with faint hearts or weak stomachs, becomes more a spot where the nastier aspects of our human nature get acted on. when did we return to a culture in which cost benefits overrode basic human benefits? there was an important shift during the great depression when it seemed to dawn on people, ironically at the prodding of a member of the moneyed class who never went for want himself, that it was time to act out the good things we had said for a century and a half that we believed about ourselves: that we were interested in the health and welfare of the other guy and were willing to take less for ourselves or even do without so he and his could get some too. this wasn't some pieinthesky phony altruism, it was a recognition that what was good for the community, and by extension good for america, was good for us. I suspect a lot of us still feel that way but we're afraid to say it out loud and even more afraid of acting on it because we'll look weak and may be the next to fail. the thing we hide from ourselves is that we will fail, it's nearly inevitable that each of us will at some point be in need and it is in our best interests and those of the people dearest to us that we stop imagining that we can't afford government social benefits. the response to "we can't afford it" must be "yes, we can." those are, in fact, the things we can't afford to be without.

teach naked

2011-07-17T17:39:00.000-07:00

"When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

"But...the move to part-time labor is already an old story. Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass—and yet as far back as 1993, such positions already constituted the majority of new appointees. As of 2003, more than a third of full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. By the same year, tenure-track professors—the 'normal' kind of academic appointment—represented no more than 35 percent of the American faculty.

"The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment...

"Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

"Sure, lots of people have it worse. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap...

"It isn’t just the sciences that matter; it is also the social sciences and the humanities. And it isn’t just the latter that are suffering. Basic physics in this country is all but dead. From 1971 to 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by 20 percent, but the number awarded in math and statistics declined by 55 percent....On the work that is done in the academy depends the strength of our economy, our public policy and our culture. We need our best young minds going into atmospheric research and international affairs and religious studies, chemistry and ethnography and art history. By pursuing their individual interests, narrowly understood, departments are betraying both the values they are pledged to uphold—the pursuit of knowledge, the spirit of critical inquiry, the extension of the humanistic tradition—and the nation they exist to serve.

"We’ve been here before. Pay was so low in the nineteenth century, when academia was still a gentleman’s profession, that in 1902 Andrew Carnegie created the pension plan that would evolve into TIAA-CREF, the massive retirement fund. After World War II, when higher education was seen as an urgent national priority, a consensus emerged that salaries were too small to attract good people. Compensation soared through the 1950s and ’60s, then hit the skids around 1970 and didn’t recover for almost thirty years. It’s no surprise that the percentage of college freshmen expressing an interest in academia was more than three times higher in 1966 than it was in 2004.

"But the answer now is not to raise professors’ salaries. Professors already make enough. The answer is to hire more professors: real ones, not academic lettuce-pickers."

--from "faulty towers" by william deresiewicz in the may 23, 2011, issue of the nation (my emphasis added)

an excellent article that I could have written, since all the information, sans the supporting evidence, was known to me by personal experience (and that he entered graduate school the same year I did, and heard exactly the same spiel I heard, both excites me because it proves I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's, and depresses me because I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's). I suspect almost anyone who's looked hard the past decades for a college teaching position without the magical phd (or abd, which according to deresiewicz is preferable as they are "people who have [already] entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar's life" and will accept less pay with the lure, which is increasingly disappearing, of a steady lifetime gig, one that often never materializes) could have written much of this. it's a depressing sight, postsecondary education in the 21st century, and less and less alluring. in the course of the article he covers a dozen books, some of which I'm going to have to read.

unions make us strong

2011-07-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

"Workers can't pay rent, pay the mortgage, get a credit card, find a job, buy clothes or schoolbooks for their kids or retire. They face increased divorce rates as family tensions rise, and they have lost their sense of dignity. They don't care about labor law reform, and they don't care about unions (at least in their current form). They are in despair, and unanswered despair quickly becomes either fertilizer for the fearmongers or the reason to not bother showing up at the polls.,,

"Rather than posting links to the websites of housing groups, how about starting direct worker-to-worker conversations about occupying mortgage company headquarters across the country until the banks stop foreclosing on their members' homes? Rather than suddenly calling for members to picket banks or take seemingly random militant actions, how about sitting down with union members and talking about what actions everyone can take to force solutions to the housing crisis—solutions such as making banks revalue mortgages to the actual value of homes and creating lines of credit so workers can move to places where they might find a job?

"Unions need to start connecting with workers face-to-face through house parties and worksite and home visits to ask what's keeping them up at night. Then unions should plan direct actions with workers that respond to the issues facing them. How about taking over the offices of big credit-rating agencies and occupying them 24/7 by the thousands until they agree to erase all the bad credit heaped on anyone who has made a late mortgage payment because they lost their job or their hours were cut back? The housing crisis ties directly to the wage crisis, which ties directly to the jobs crisis. People in this country are screaming for a fight, but the only people offering one have been from the right wing. All these issues have been staring labor in the face for several years. Why hasn't any union turned the crisis facing workers into a crisis for capital and the political elite?"

--from "making unions matter again" by jane mcalevey in the december 20, 2010 issue of the nation

why not? excellent question and I think I have a part of the answer. I've asked students, who you would think would be most interested in making tomorrow better and making a revolution in the workplace that could do nothing but benefit them, variations on this question for years. and the answer has come back every time: things are too good. things at work might be bad, they may be making less money than their parents--indeed, they may be the 1st generation since wwii to do poorer than previous generations--but so long as their life outside work remains relatively attainable (television, games, alcohol, gas, entertainment) to the majority of them, they will do nothing to upset the applecart. in fact, many of them have an outright disdain of unions, especially government unions, for being able to wring concessions in the past that they themselves are unable to get. (as I explain to them, for not having joined a union; their response to that is usually that they don't want to pay dues or be beholden to some shop rep, thereby ensuring things will never improve at their worksite.) most haven't a clue about the employment laws already guarenteed them--10 minute breaks and separate lunch spaces and automatic overtime and not needing to find their own sickday replacements--and their employers certainly aren't about to make them aware of them.

in what family are members sold off like cattle?

2011-07-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

I recognize the lateness in commenting on this, given that bob vander plaats has reportedly removed the offensive passage from his family leader "marriage vow." the offender was the following:

'Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American president...'

however, since all the brouhaha caused by michelle bachmann and rick santorum signing the pledge in its original form, I've come across this passage in a review of mightier than the sword: "uncle tom's cabin" and the battle for america by david reynolds that answers it nicely:

"[harriet beecher] stowe took pains not to demonize all southerners, or beatify all northerners. in her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. but her story was effective because it directly assaulted southern pretensions. pro-slavery southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family...stowe's novel exploded this myth of the south as a land of paternalistic slaveholders. her description of tom's sale down the river to the deep south was an expression of slavery's core reality. the historian steven deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the upper south or the lower south between 1790 and 1860...without this domestic trade, the institution of slavery would have collapsed. more slaves were sold south than arrived on the north american continent via the infamous middle passage. they did not suffer the horrors of a transatlantic ocean voyage packed tight in a ship. but they did suffer the anguish of lost mothers, fathers, children, siblings, husbands, and wives. in what 'family,' stowe's book asked, were members treated this way, sold off like cattle by their supposed 'kin'?"

--from "the persuader: what harriet beecher stowe wrought" by annette gordon-reed in the june 13 & 20 issue of the new yorker

it does not take an advanced degree in semiotics to recognize that family leader's wording in its vow owes a considerable amount to the continued existence of a pro-slavery narrative.

we must make our garden grow

2011-07-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

it's primary day here on the rim. it was scheduled earlier this spring as a recall election for 6 republican senators who voted with governor scott walker and his brouhaha against unions and workers this winter, but the republicans, recognizing the bad taste they've left in people's mouths would likely result in landslide democratic victories, placed trojan candidates--officially they're called "protest candidates"--in each of the races, forcing the races into primaries rather than elections, thereby giving them a 5 month opportunity to help people forget what they've been upset about. it's obvious that it's not something they're really behind--here on the rim I haven't seen a single sign mentioning isaac weix (I even had to look up his name) but many with the name sheila harsdorf, the republican senator up for recall--and if I were 1 of their sacrificial lambs I'd be plenty angry about that.

but it's legal and while it may not be right, politics isn't about "right." short term results show all the protest candidates going down in flames (although as I write this polls have only been closed for an hour so results may vary), but their careers weren't really the point anyway. I drove over to town hall to vote for shelly moore, the "real" democratic candidate as she's been touted, and came home to drink beer and appreciate my backyard.

I've just returned from about a month's vacation and spent the morning and afternoon working on the gardens and lawn. I weeded 2 of the gardens yesterday and the largest 1 this morning, then mowed about a third of the lawns. it was an allday project. the above photo shows the largest garden after weeding (with another garden just visible in the rear). we used to have 6 gardens, including vegetables, but I am naturally lazy and the others dropped away 1 by 1 until only these 3 flower and shrub gardens are left.

I did a pretty diligent job of weeding before leaving and it still took me from 9:30 until 12:30 to make this 3rd garden presentable. it's true of course that weeds are just plants we don't want in our gardens, but it's also true that, as candide puts it, we must cultivate our garden. (this is not, as it was taught to me in the 80s, a panegyric to solipsism, to focusing on the self to the exclusion of others, but a stress on improving things, on bettering life. this is how I taught that lovely little final line in candide for several years until I realized, to my bitterness, that no matter what I did no one was reading candide and I let it go the way of all things.)

now, imagine what it would have looked like if someone during my time away had been actively destroying my garden while I was away under pretense that he was improving it--sowing grass and nettles and boxelder saplings. it would take, naturally, much longer than the 3 hours I toiled at it. yet, to expand this metaphor into politics, this is what barack obama has to deal with: 8 years of willful destruction of the economy and government services by the bush administration. I am not sympathetic to critics lambasting him for not having turned the economy around yet or returning employment and wages to their upright positions of the late clinton years. it will take more than the 2 years he has had, and may frankly take longer than 2 terms, particularly with a republican opposition whose every position is reducible to a single phrase.

it is too grandiose to imagine obama as the contemporary political equivalent of candide but I think I could be forgiven for presenting him as the weeder-in-chief, and it is this activity we have to give support and patience.

johnny thunder died for your sins!

2011-07-10T04:45:00.000-07:00

I wonder sometimes if the true descriptor for humanity might be homo nostalgia, "nostalgic man." all it seems to take, at least for me, is a substantial downpour to lead me to the window to stare outside and think about the way things were. well, that and some ian hunter. it's not a bad thing and I don't think the nostalgia is necessarily a wish for things to return to the way they were. it's more as if we look out on the world as it is and the rain wipes it away, giving us a chance for the moment to reimagine it configured the way it once was, for both good and bad. there's a sense too of accomplishment, of pride in having lived so long and so interestingly that there is room for reflection. our nostalgia has a sharp edge to it, becomes a scalpel with which to slice open the past and extract--something. lessons? regrets? appreciation? yes. this is why we continue to celebrate bloomsday and why ulysses remains in print and on our shelves. yes.

words surrounded by rumbling diesels

2011-07-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of things in my times and travels, but 1 thing I can say I've never seen before: a bookstore located at a truck stop. and I mean a book store. not a news shop. not a portion of a store given over to books. I mean a store devoted entirely to books, and set in a small truck plaza between the travel centers of america and its affiliated motel (along with a barber shop).

well, okay, maybe it offers a little more than books ("now offering baked goods!" reads the signjust offcamera, and the line across the photo is the tail of a balloon that reads "open!"). but the focus is on books, hundreds of thousands of paperback (and a few dozen hardcover) books, neatly arranged into romance, science fiction, adventure, horror, western, mystery, war, children and miscellaneous. the romance section is obviously the top selling brand as the 1st several rows of floortoceiling shelves are nothing but romance, divided into authors like janet daily and danielle steel and others. but the western section was nothing to sneeze at either; at an average 125 books per shelf and maybe 30 shelves devoted to them, that's a lot of horseshit.

it's not a place for people looking for rare finds or for a maven of the odd like me. there was nothing weird or unusual. it was a place that caters directly to its clientele: bored and lonely truckers and travelers and their companions who want something to read. I'd guess nearly every book has been read at least 1ce, if not finished, and there were a number of volumes with bookmarks from places like lansing and atlanta and san diego and thunder bay, some with phone numbers and notes scribbled on them. they are exclusively novels, with a few selfhelp and history volumes thrown in.

I picked up 3 books I didn't really need but didn't have and want to read--neuromancer by william gibson, parable of the sower by octavia butler, and dangerous angels by francesca lia bloch (this last a collection I'd already owned and read in the originals but given away years ago to a friend, saying "you need to relax, this will help"). they put me back $12, more than I'm usually willing to pay for used books, but I wanted to help this place in a practical way. I was astonished when I asked the owner how long she'd been around: she'd only bought it a year ago but the store itself had been there for 30 years. who knew there was such a niche market? if kerouac and cassidy had been around then, flying facefirst through the long american night, I could picture them cocking an eye there and be comforted by what it means, the existence of these mounds of paper and ink among the burping trucks.

walking in cuyahoga

2011-07-08T05:37:00.001-07:00

on the drive between austin and elkhart, indiana, where we set down for the night, we made a stop at cuyahoga valley national park. it was a sweet little spot off interstate 77 between akron and cleveland. there were sikhs meeting there yesterday and apparently their denomination has a gathering place further into the park. we got out and meandered a trail leading off down the road from the 1st parking lot , called riding run on the map), we came to. it was a gentle wander with a single ascent and descent on the so-called overlook trail (so-called because we could see nothing from its apex--perhaps, I ventured, it was an overlook only in the winter). then we followed a couple other routes to ponds that were primarily mosquito feeding grounds this time of year. but we wandered for 45 enjoyable minutes and it was a good reason to get out of the car and a good use of our legs for something besides pumping the gas pedal. we agreed we would stop there again someday when we had more time to explore.

14th summer of reading

2011-07-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

the summer I was 14 my parents had a 24-ft long camper that sat in the backyard and which I moved into for a few months. officially, it was to force me to get over my fear of the dark (which was true), but for me it was a greater opportunity to have some alone time. it may seem having only a set of parents and a younger sister in a 13-room house and surrounded by several empty acres would have given one some sense of isolation, but that is to reckon without my mother whose image is the illustration to the term "helicopter parent." sparking into my teens I needed some alonetime.

what I remember best is the amount of reading I did that summer laying on the cushions in the rear of the machine. I don't think I have ever read as voluminously as I did that summer, or at least as variously. at 14 I'd graduated from action, comics-inflected novels to more adult ones, and I had a gymbag stuffed with paperbacks, most of which I'd gotten at flea markets at a nickel or a dime apiece. I pulled a book from it nearly every day, such was my rate. I don't remember all the books from that summer, but I do remember reading these:

the harrad experiment by robert rimmer
flashman and royal flash by george macdonald fraser
the hot rock by donald westlake
going all the way by dan wakefield
the sting by robert weverka
spock must die! by james blish
the prisoner by thomas disch
hell house by richard matheson
runway zero-eight by arthur hailey
portnoy's complaint by philip roth
the stepford wives by ira levin
m*a*s*h and m*a*s*h goes to maine and m*a*s*h goes to paris by richard hooker
elephants can remember and the abc murders by agatha christie
the reincarnation of peter proud by max ehrlich
slaughterhouse 5 and cat's cradle and breakfast of champions by kurt vonnegut, jr.
my darling, my hamburger by paul zindel
rubyfruit jungle by rita mae brown
the lord won't mind and one for the gods by gordon merrick

of all these I don't have a single copy any longer, having given them all away.

tuesday afternoon reading

2011-07-05T17:22:00.000-07:00

"what can I tell you about nathan myrhvold's modernist cuisine, the forty-pound encyclopedic survey of the pseudo-art form of which ferran adria is the presiding 'genius,' with its 1.1 million words spread across 2,438 pages, its 3,216 photographs and 1,522 recipes? well, I could tell you that I found some of the images--such as a series that shows a row of eggs at the instant a bullet passes through them--to be the most high-octane examples of the food pornography required to titillate the jaded palates of the developed world. I could inform you that being instructed to understand the revolution of modernist cuisine by analogy with impressionism, and talked through a sophomoric analysis of that development in painting, was a destabilizing experience. one expects in life to be talked down to from time to time, but to be patronized by a cookbook? and I could aver that for sheer self-indulgent daffiness, myrhvold's own account of being pulled a 'god shot'--the ultimate and sprititually transfiguing shot of espresso--by daniel humphries of victrola coffee at a seattle trade fair, takes the proverbial biscotti.

"still, I wonder if there's any point, because modernist cuisine, despite its $625 price tag is riding high in the amazon charts, and nothing I say will dissuade the gadarene swine from charging over this cliff-size tome. nothing perhaps except for this: one human constant you read little about in these books concerned with cookery is hunger. gabrielle hamilton is an honorable exception, admitting [in blood, bones & butter] to a fluctuating blood-sugar level that can precipitate her into dreadful tantrums. but even hamilton's hunger is foodie hunger: 'I do not get vague or generic appetite, which will be satisfied, more or less, with just anything that is handy. I will skip a meal rather than eat the corner joint's interpretation of eggs benedict...I don't eat that kind of shit.' this is alien to me--and I imagine to the bulk of humanity as well. surely the tastiness of the food is in direct correlation with the extremity of the hunger: when you're starving you will, indeed, eat any old shit."

--from "gastronomania: the beatification of our daily bread [a review of modernist cuisine: the art and science of cooking, by nathan myrhvold, chris young, and maxime biler; blood, bones & butter: the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef, by gabrielle hamilton; and ferran: the inside story of el bulli and the man who reinvented food, by colman andrews]" by will self in the july 2011 edition of harper's magazine

this strikes me as the second most singularly wise thing written about food. this is the first.

paperback writer

2011-07-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

a couple brothers rent the house across the road from my dad, and while no one seems to know much about them--they're computer wizards, they work for a local lumber company, their mom pays their rent for them as well as financing their cars, none of which information is mutually exclusive--it is known that 1 of them spends most of his days and at least some nights in an upstairs room writing a novel. in an internet age when anyone worth his salt has published at least 1 autobiographical or semiautobiographical piece somewhere on the interwebs, this is still cause for comment here in the thick, with everyone mentioning it at least 1ce in conversation, in the manner of, "don't that beat all, he just writes."

I've never heard any guess as to what it is he is writing about, but I like to think it's a science fiction/fantasy hybrid in the mold of john norman's misogynistic gor novels. I've got no basis for this--I've only swapped "hi"s with either of them--but the writing brother, who has not cut his hair or beard for years while his brother trims his, is a pictureperfect stringy uncomfortable with women type who I suspect is less likely than his brother to have spoken with anyone female other than his mother and maybe a cousin and an aunt.

the story runs, and I know this part is true, that a window popped out of an upstairs window and sat on the porch roof for 4 years before it blew down onto the lawn, where it sat another year until 1 brother, I suspect the 1 who trims his hair and beard, got up the gumption to step outside and pick it up where he leaned it against the house on the porch. it remains there. but the uncertain aspect of the story is that the only reason the screen was eventually picked up was that their mother insisted on it, or she was going to ask my female cousin, who rents to them, to come by and tell them it needed to be moved. presumably, the prospect of a woman besides their mother at the house was enough to prod them to action.

44-55

2011-07-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

"does driving these winding roads make you feel as comfortable as they make me feel anxious?" my wife asked as we zipped along us 15 that zooped the crests of ridges and around the edges of mountains. "yes," I answered, because the truth is that I am left feeling--in control, I suppose, even as my eyes grew heavy and started to droop.

the day before, driving to elmira to meet her plane, I annoyed her by texting as I whipped along the upsanddowns and edging of narrow places that have no shoulders or whose shoulders dip 20 feet before ending in scree and rock. when I visited the eastern end of the state, driving the shawangunks and along rte 9, I was reminded how much I miss these narrow passes with treeline and shrubs humped up on each side so that one can legitimately call them "shoulders," and of how envious I've always felt by people who lived in houses abutting such places. back home on the rim the roads are wide and getting wider by the day, the fields are pressing back but losing the fight as asphalt takes the place of hay. it is like riding in a windup car on a kids' racetrack; in contrast, driving some roads in the east can be like hugging the bottom of a huge canyon with very definite boundaries. such a thing leaves my edges sharper; in all my decades, through all my drinking and driving, nodding off and driving, being drugged and driving, I have never collided with bumpers to the right or vehicles to the left.

my favorite of these roads is 44-55 leading from new paltz to kerhonkson and specifically the above photoed curve, infamous as the spot where bob dylan had his lifeanddeath crash in the mid 60s. I've always been curious why there is no marker there, but I suppose dylan is appreciative that there isn't--who among us would want such a moment commemorated for tourists?

I've stayed in worse

2011-07-01T05:46:00.001-07:00

we stayed in this motel last night in painted post, ny, since my wife flew in at the elmira-corning airport. it reminded me of the dives I occasionally checked into for a shower and tv time, but back then it cost $20 a night. that's 1/4 what the place charges now, and I don't see much has changed. except there were more workers drinking and grilling in the back parking lot than there used to be.

along the southern tier

2011-06-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

I think one of the most interesting, and one of the most dismaying, things I have noted on this trip, especially as I've traveled the noninterstates, is the number of abandoned houses. there are, of course, a lot of homes up for sale, but you can always tell which are those because the lawn is mowed and free of ornament.

but the abandoned places are often goodlooking places, or places that were at one point goodlooking, sometimes with trees growing through the porch, sometimes the windows boarded up, sometimes a part of the roof caved in, almost always with the grass grown 3 0r 4 feet high and the lawn reaching all the way to the road.

this afternoon I drove 23 west from hudson to oneonta to connect to 88 south to 17 west to the corning inn where my wife had gotten us reservations for the night--and what was borne out to me over and over again was the number of abandoned places. perhaps 1/3 of the places I passed on 23 were abandoned. and as I drove along I couldn't help wondering if so much of the homeless problem could be solved or alleviated by relocating people into these abandoned places. what would such a thing take?

"snitches get stitches" II

2011-06-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

yesterday I was chitterchattering with ron who runs the local museum and who filled me in on some of the backstory to the recent murder.

the kid who lived in austin, it turns out, practically did move around town incognito as ron says almost no one ever saw him except as he was driving his dad and mom to the post office on a daily basis. "the only thing you ever got out of that kid was 'good morning' and 'hello' and 'sir.' seemed like a fine kid if a little lonely. but boy, the local kids saw a whole different side to him." [my mistake, too, on mentioning his assertion he was a crip on his facebook page; I was going by memory and as you can see on the link he very much identifies as blood. both are, of course, fantasy.]

as to the kid who is accused of having pulled the trigger: he, it turns out, is the nephew of a woman whose bed-and-breakfast my wife and I stayed at some years back. the boy's father and he moved out from salt lake city where, the father told him, "he had a run with some bad associates." the kid was almost immediately in trouble with the local law and had to put in some community service. ron took him on at the museum. "he was a pretty okay kid, I mean he did the stuff he was supposed to do and he did a good job, mowing the lawn and painting the porch. but you couldn't tell him he did something good. he'd do something and I'd say, 'great, that's a great job,' and he'd just look right through you or look at you like you'd kicked him. he just finally stopped coming by a few months ago and I had to tell his probation officer, 'I just don't know where he is, he hasn't been coming here.'"

and as to the 15 year old girl: her mom was a physician's assistant and doing pretty well until she started using the drugs she was supposed to be prescribing, and then she lost her license and did time and nothing's been the same since. ron had much to say about that story too as it turns out he's related, like almost everyone around here is, to that family. "I feel for her grandmother, but her grandfather, her father, they've been in and out of prison for molesting their own kids, and her brother, when he got out, he was making to do it again and this guy whose son he'd molested just came up and put a gun to his head and now he's due to get out in a couple years. there's just nothing but bad news for that family, and it's not even the whole family just the family in that 1 house. all of them, just makes the whole family hurt."

"it is just 1 big mess," ron says, "and it hurts whenenver something like this happens. it just hurts the kids and it hurts the people around here and makes it harder to grow up here. it's just bad news all around. no one escapes it."

a palestinian gandhi

2011-06-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

"some people think that satyagraha is weakness; they believe that the angrier you are, the stronger you will be. this is their great mistake.

"causing someone to suffer the same price you have paid will never ease your pain. it doesn't help much to be right. you damage your right by just being right. one usually wants to be right only because he or she can't be honest. give me a solution...where my right is in harmony with my humanity and their right is in harmony with their humanity. nonviolent protest is where you invest your pain, a place where this pain becomes active in accordance with your humanity. you cannot practice nonviolence without listening to the other side's narrative. but first you have to give up being a victim. when you do that, no one will be able to victimize you again. I don't want the world to feel pity for me; I want the world to take responsibility, as I do."

--ali abu awwad quoted in "salt march to the dead sea: gandhi's palestinian reincarnation" by david shulman in the june, 2011, issue of harper's magazine