another lousy intimation of mortality

it's not as if I need reminders of my mortality. but yesterday I woke with a tremendous gutache that took over my day and left me sleeping on the couch for roughly 12 hours. not a big deal, I knew even then, something that would take up my time for a while and then drift away, which it did.

but then I went to sleep & at 1130 my wife woke me, crying. she had yawned and heard an audible "snap" in her jaw and couldn't close it again. I thought she was waking me to tell me someone had died, she was crying so. voila, my stomach pains were gone. I jumped into clothes that smelled almost as badly as I did after a day of no showering or brushing my teeth, and we zoomed to the local rim emergency room where she was told her jaw had been dislocated. she was put on morphine and then given traction to her jaw. the sound of bone against bone was the same sound you might hear with concrete scraping together just under the water's surface, but the morphine was so potent she fell asleep during the procedure. we left there after 3 hours and today she's exhausted but healing.

between my mother's birthday a few weeks ago, my father-in-law now in his 7th month of hospice, accompanying a resident to her mother's funeral last month, visiting a friend 2 weeks ago at mayo after he'd smacked his head on a cement floor doing something very stupid that, even though we know is stupid, we do because we're human, the admission to actively-dying status for a favorite resident at the facility where I continue to fill in for chapel services and listening, and the pair of ulcers that have appeared on the right eye of 1 of our dogs (probably courtesy of 1 of the cats), it would seem I don't need any more reminders of my own frailty.

still, of course, it's not about me, and as I preached in chapel last week, it's about the resiliance of the human body and not about its susceptibility. we bounce back sometimes until sometime we don't . these are moments in people's lives that remind us or should that we are mere meatsacks reliant on a simple skin sheath to protect us from the dangers and discomforts of life. the sheath can take small pricks and big holes, although sometimes a small prick is all it takes to bring the whole edifice crashing down. if my own experience of this weekend is anything to go by, we need the occasional 12-hour crash in order to avoid the bigger 1. that's as it is.

take it easy, slow it down. death comes in its own time and we shouldn't hurry it along.

what do we do about libya?

I want to admit to something. I admit I am confused on how I feel about the bombing on libya.

I know how I ought to feel. I ought to be outraged that obama has reneged on what we took to be his promise to be more thoughtful and cautious in putting the us into war mode again--and say what you will, opening a 3rd warfront when you don't have a handle on the other 2 is anything but thoughtful or cautious. my knee-jerk response is that war is wrong--nearly all war--and the bombing strikes on tripoli don't satisfy what I think a just war ought to condone, namely that it is pinpoint strategic in its retaliation (and it ought to be retaliation rather than first-strike) and fought on as level a field as possible. this is neither.

but I also ought to feel compassion for the people being killed by gaddafi's forces and I ought to understand that fighting against evil is never a neat and peaceful thing. that gaddafi has been allowed to rule libya far too long is something I couldn't argue against--as I couldn't argue against the assertion that robert mugabe has ruled too long or that kim jong il has ruled too long or another dozen names. paraphrasing barry goldwater, "inaction in the face of injustice is no virtue." when a leader kills his people--whether saddam hussein, slobodan milosovic, augusto pinochet, fernando marcos--he loses the diffidence awarded any leader and becomes a doer of evil whose regime must end as quickly and as humanely as possible.

thus the conundrum I face: attacking gaddafi to bring his leadership to an end is a good, bombing his people to accomplish it is not. hence I become that unusual creature, a person with opinions who admits that, in this case, I simply do not know yet what my opinion is. I do not deny for a moment I am lucky to have that luxury.

the apple from the tree

I've spent much of the past couple days visiting family that I'm unlikely to hear from except when I'm here. it's been really good: I saw my dad's younger brother and his family, including his daughter who I remember as a 4 or 5 year old and who's now celebrating her 17th year in the air force; spent time seeing his elder sister who's 90-something and has dementia and who thought I was her dead brother-in-law; ran into my cousin who works for the post office in vegas; we stopped at the longterm care facility my dad's surviving sister-in-law lives at and spent time with her (when she was still alive my mom visited her every other day and my dad drives up to feed her twice a week); and today we picked up my cousin who lives in wellsville and the 3 of us had thanksgiving dinner at a tiny restaurant in genesee, pa.

I want to talk about that place for a moment. it's called the genesee hometown restaurant and has been there about 3 years, but the woman who owns the place and does the cooking says she has been a restauranteur since she was 6. her name is audrey kio and her place doesn't have a spot on the internet (except this listing) and it's likely that when she dies, which won't be that long since she's in her 90s, the place and her name will disappear, be subsumed by the weight of everyday life of everyday people. the place is staffed mostly by family and they had set up a buffet of turkey and ham and potatoes and salads and pies and such, mostly for her family to come by to eat since she didn't advertise. the food wasn't exceptional but there was plenty of it and the dinner plates were the size of some towns. genesee itself is a little pimple on the raised back of the pa-ny border with a gas station and a post office and a library open 3 days a week. but we were there and in my sweater and black sneaks I was probably the best-dressed. mostly the people there were farmers and hunters in bibs and boots and caps, people who smelled and spend their lives sweating.

audrey sat down and like it was the most natural thing in the world talked to us about her childhood and her upbringing and her family. her husband died some 6 years back and her family is all she has left now (which is true for most people, I guess) and her granddaughter is in jail and her greatgrandchildren want to stay with her but they can't for some reason I never heard. my dad sat there and listened and commisserated. this is what most of our week has been was him sitting on someone's couch or on the edge of a chair and listening to her pour out her life in spurts and fits and I realized this is where I get my sense of ministerial calm. I haven't felt bored and I suspect if he hadn't been a banker my dad would have been a preacher in some postage stamp town. I suppose I'd known that but it was brought more forcefully to me the past few days. my wife made a comment to me earlier today on a different topic that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. I guess not, although I hope I don't end my days in the thick.

air force pagans, druids and wiccans have a place to worship

this is a good thing. too often there seems to be a disconnect in folks' minds between the ability of people to worship as they want and the opportunity to participate in a physical way that makes a difference to them. in prisons, at least out here on the rim, there's a big move toward granting american indians access to sweat lodges for ceremonies, and here in wisconsin there was a big issue a couple years ago when one of the state's prison chaplains turned out to be a pagan. but as with the victory won a few years ago by the families of pagans as well as military pagan groups to have their religion denoted both on their dogtags and on their military graves, this is hard fought and worthwhile. too often, we only think of the abrahamics--judaism, christianity, islam--as the sole religions worth taking into account. but there are so many more faiths of which most of us aren't aware, and one of the unacknowledged benefits or curses of globalism is that our religions as well as our economies become less provincial. (there is nothing saying, of course, that the christians could not also benefit from this worship space, given some recent research.)