DO THE BEST THINGS IN THE WORST TIMES

 A Sermon given September 21, 2025 

At High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

Macon, Georgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends, we are in the ditch. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nous Sommes les Lapins

 The first heavy casualties of the French Revolution were rabbits. On March 10 and 11, 1789, the villagers of Neuville formed themselves into platoons, armed with clubs and sickles, and searched meadows and woods for their prolific little enemies. What dogs they had accompanied them, and the shout of "Hou, hou" signified to the rest of the hunting party a satisfactory kill...Disregarding the game laws that had protected birds and animals, and the brutal "captaincies" that enforced them, hobnail boots trampled through forbidden forests or climbed over fences and stone walls. Grass was mown in grain fields to reveal the nests of partridge and pheasant, snipe and woodcock; eggs were smashed or fledglings left to the dogs. Warrens were staved in, hares rooted out from behind rocks. In daring villages, pit traps were even set for the most prized game, which was also the most voracious consumer of green shoots: roe deer. The most spectacular assaults were on those chateaux in miniature: dovecotes, from which the peasantry had seen aerial raiding parties launched against their seed, returning in absolute safety to their seigneurial compound. They were, said one cahier, "flying thieves."...It could hardly be called poaching since there was nothing furtive about the onslaught. In some cases, the slaughtered game was hung from poles like trophies and paraded about the village...[There] were simply too many determined peasants who, with their winter crop destroyed by the climate, were not prepared to see their spring crop turn into rabbit fodder. In some places...villagers simply ignored the laws and hunted at will. When they ran into gamekeepers...they shot them dead on the spot.

From Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Think carefully on this. At first, it is almost comical, the notion that the Revolution began in earnest with the killing of previously protected game. It may even seem justified, said game having been allegedly responsible for depleting the stores of the farmers. This description occurs on pages 322 and 323 after Schama has spent considerable time explaining the economics behind what became the bloodiest revolution in modern history, and it is not hard, after all that, to mentally cheer on the proto-citizens as they explode in violence after so long being oppressed. 

But it doesn't take long to see a problem here. After all, soon (Schama dates it to less than 3 weeks) the rampant killing moves from birds and game to the gamekeepers. These people were, after all, not only keeping the law but their families fed and cared for.

In little time one of the cahiers (meaning "a list of grievances" but better understood today as a broadsheet explaining actions to the general public and written by pamphleteers) "insisted that it was 'the general will of the Nation that game should be destroyed...and this is the intention of our good King who watches over the common good of his people and who loves them.'" 

Most of us think of the French Revolution as breaking the backs of the monarchy and nobility, and there's justification to it as they were the people who famously paid with their lives. The King referred to here as being the motivator of the uprising is the selfsame Louis XVI guillotined with his wife, Marie Antoinette, just a few years later. 

But while we think of the Revolution as being an anti-elite whirlwind force that swiftly swept up innocents and guilty alike, robbing all of them of their most basic rights, it began with people who thought they were doing the (unacknowledged) will of the King. When I began reading Schama's book I did not expect to identify the initiators of the Terror with the followers of trump; in fact, I assumed contemporary Neuville villagers would be the ones stamping out, not woodcocks and rabbits, but rethuglicans. 

But instead, as we often find, history doesn't quite repeat as it slant rhymes. The contemporary Neuvillier is likelier to see immigrants as the doves of today, the "aerial raiding parties launched against their seed" (metaphorical today, given the far right conspiracy of replacement both in citizenship and jobs) and more than happy to smash eggs, stave in warrens, set the dogs on fledglings because it is what their King expects them to do. In Schama's words, "It was as though...the people had produced the assumption that the King now licensed what had been unlawful...Killing game [and gamekeepers] was not only an act of desperation, it was, by the lights of 1789, Patriotic." 

Is it difficult to see that trump's blanket pardon of nearly every January 6th offender is in that same line of thinking, at least to those who follow him? Do I exaggerate? I hope so. But Schama's recitation of greater and greater chaos finally devolving into blood does not encourage me. But for the immediate future, I fear we are the rabbits.

 

 

Shane MacGowan Wishes You a Merry Effing Ho-Ho

 

[Shane MacGowan died and he was much too young, although at 65 maybe he was also too old. In memorium, and because 'tis the season, I repost this essay I wrote a decade or so ago, a sample for my research classes examining the then-recent development of traditional (read: vanilla) Xmas songs clogging up pre-Thanksgiving radio. This was pre-satellite radio with its devoted channels and the year-round slogfest of a dedicated Hallmark Channel. Shane, we only wanted you to live.]

 

            I was driving my usual commute during the first week of November.  I hit the “scan” button on my radio and various music and talk shows faded in and out.  My attention was caught when dulcet tones sang, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

            I knew those dulcet tones.  That was Perry Como.  When I was a kid my folks were avid listeners of what’s now called Adult Contemporary Music but in my childhood was simply referred to as Elevator Music.  Perry Como, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Kate Smith, Rosemary Clooney.  I’d learned to know those singers in the first couple notes as a child by repetitive play on the stereo.  But the novelty of hearing the late Honeyed Voice in the Sweater on the radio was soon overtaken by the realization that I was listening to a Christmas song.  On the radio.  The first week in November.

            Now, when I was a kid, Christmas was my favorite time of the year.  I didn’t have to come up with excuses not to go outside if I didn’t want to, and the cold nipping at my exposed nose on waking was neat.  Plus it was wonderful to lie on my belly and read a junk novel by the bottom lights on the Christmas tree with a plateful of cookies and some hot chocolate.  I’d start playing Christmas albums around September and not cut it out, despite firm requests from my family, until about the first week of January. 

            But that stopped when puberty kicked in.  Here were adults—Professional Adults!—programming Christmas music when everyone’s Halloween candy was still fresh.

            Rather than ranting and raving about it, I decided to look into the reason for this.  There had to be a reason.  There were several.

            No radio station exists as an island.  Every station, whether owned by a conglomerate like Clear Channel or Fred over at the Fish Shack, exists as part of a market.  The market can be as small as a city and its environs—the Twin Cities, for example—or as large as a region—the Iron Range, which is the full upper third of Minnesota from Bemidji to the Canadian border (excluding Duluth).  There is an unwritten agreement between radio stations that one station, generally the Adult Contemporary or Lite station, within the market will provide twenty-four hour, seven-day-a-week Christmas music starting in November.  On December 24^th, every station is welcome to play as much Christmas music as it chooses. 

            The reasons this agreement came about are diffuse.  Some argue it is because, well, someone has to do it, so it might as well be the station whose listeners are accustomed to listening to Easy Listenin’ Music.  If the station is an oldies station, whose listeners are accustomed to the sounds of the classic Christmas songs from mid 20^th Century—Patti Page, Mitch Miller, the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, Sinatra, Como, Torme—so much the better.  It should come as no surprise then that the most often played Christmas song is Nat “King” Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” but what should surprise us is the number of popular songs with at best a tangential connection to Christmas, often merely a mention, that also pop up regularly in rotation, such as Joni Mitchell’s “River,” the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” and DanFogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” (this last divorced not only from the holiday but from reality:  how hard is it to find an open bar on Christmas Eve?), while ignoring several more controversial ones with secure roots in the holiday, like the Kink’s “Father Christmas” and ThePogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”

            The difficulty may come when a market has only, say, country and rock stations.  One of them will likely take on the duty, but this will often be a choke for regular listeners, since there are comparatively few Christmas-themed country or rock songs, and certainly not enough to program twenty-four hours a day for nearly sixty days.

            This is the interesting part to me.  While it’s been a given of every generation to bemoan how quickly the Christmas season begins, as if its generation could wait longer, and while I thought I had some memory that this was an omnipresent condition, radio stations starting earlier and earlier until we’d finally reached saturation point with Halloween, that isn’t the case.  While some stations make a practice of starting earlier—KOSY in Salt Lake City, Utah, is apparently the earliest, beginning its Christmas rotation Halloween night [although this has changed only this past January]—the practice used to have as a common starting point the day after Thanksgiving. 

            Until 2001.  Yes, 9-11 changed everything.  That was the year George W. Bush asked us to help America remain solvent by spending money, and one of the ways gleaned by merchandisers and radio programmers in tandem was to begin the Christmas season early, two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The practice has simply escalated and the dates fallen back since then.

            And here we come to the dirty secret why radio stations, especially Adult Contemporary and Oldies stations, fall all over themselves to be the first to begin the Christmas season:  Stores and shops generally play Christmas music for their customers, the better to suggest “buy early and buy often.”  A few stores, like Walmart and Kmart, have their own radio systems, and some big chains, like Best Buy and [late, unlamented] Circuit City, use piped-in Muzak.  But aside from the big boxes, the majority of stores and shops rely on the good old fashioned free radio signal to accelerate buying habits.  Naturally, the mix of garlanded shelving and spruce-scented spray with tchochkes and knickknacks with the background fuzz of Herb Alpert and His Tijuana Brass and their version of “Sleigh Ride” is a marriage made in Retail Heaven.  Most importantly, these stations are played at least for the operating hours for the store and occasionally simply left turned on for the cleaning crew.  This is a bump in Arbitron ratings for a station, sometimes as much as three points.  Arbitron ratings are an important part of a station’s profile.  The place each fits on the scorecard for its market determines how much it can charge advertisers for 10, 20, and 30 second spots.  In a market of ten stations, getting bumped from number 6 to number 3 for the year can mean a bump of tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. 

            It doesn’t matter, of course, if anyone actually listens to this stuff.  The stations provide “ears” to the advertisers, and they’re selling potential sales.  It isn’t important if the employees end up by the third week of November muttering x-rated versions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on its tenth play of the day.  What is important is that at least ten times that day, different customers have heard it and their desire for, say, another twenty dollar stocking stuffer for Jimmy has been pricked. 

 

 

Works Cited

• Arbitron Radio Ratings and Media Research Information.  2007.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://www.arbitron.com/home/content.stm
• “Christmas Music.” 2007.  Wikipedia.  Last accessed November 26, 2007, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_music
• Ho, Rodney.  2007.  “Bull Goes All Christmas.”  The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  November 23:  B1. 

·         Virgin, Bill.  2007.  “On Radio: All-Christmas format is a ratings gift for KRWM-FM, boosting it to first.”  Seattlepi.com.  Last Accessed November 25, 2007, at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/300965_radiobeat25.html. .

Just One of Us

There's a debate between Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne on Irish tv in which Byrne askes Fry what he would say to God if he arrived at the gates of Heaven. “I’d say: ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?'" Now Fry, as a roundhouse humanist who doesn't play around, continues, demanding of God "'How dare you! How dare you create a world where there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I’d say.”

It's a good question, and as any religious student knows, it's the basis for the study of theodicy, the fact that there is evil in the world and how do we respond to God's role in it. If God is an omnipotent force for good, why do so many good people receive punishment in this life, while so many bad people flourish?

There are, of course, all kinds of answers relying on an afterlife and one's soul, but putting those aside, to say "It's part of God's plan" just doesn't cut it. It shouldn't, because by letting God off the hook, we let ourselves off as well. As an old adage goes, "I dreamt I asked God, Why is there suffering? And God said, I was just about to ask you."

Earlier this week while I was walking, I was singing "One of Us", a Joan Osborne tune I especially like because of the inclusion suggested by it. And there's a wonderful lyric that says, "What would you ask [God] if you had just one question?"

I'm not as pugnacious as Fry, so I'd leave out his How dare you! But my question would be almost word for word: Why do children die painfully from disease?

God's answer, I would hope, would be "I don't know." Which both horrifies and relieves me. Horrifying, because while I've long cast off notions of an all-powerful God, there is enough left in me to say, You mean, no one's in charge?

But my relief would manifest more powerfully. I believe that nothing is outside or not God, and that includes cancer and pain and horrible death. I don't accept the bumper sticker theology "God is good all the time," because God can't be. No one who has read the Bible and paid attention to the annihilation, murder on a whim, child-head-bashing, enforced slavery, and straight out genocide its writers attribute to God, can. My relief would stem from the idea that terrible death is not a part of God's outline, that it doesn't mean God has some ending in mind that requires, for instance, that babies die alone when left in the forest by desperate families hoping to reach a better life. Cancer and hunger and rot and mental illness are not evil. They simply are. To look at them any other way is to accept that God is a cruel son of a bitch who has stacked the deck against us. While I don't believe God is good all the time, I also don't believe God is evil. By answering "I don't know" (assuming God did; I don't have a secret conversation to share), God accepts there are some things even outside God's understanding. Far from meaning there is something greater than God, this is my understanding of God's Mystery. 

There's a lovely meme attributed to Adi Da Samraj running around Buddhist circles that says, "Relax, nothing's under control." I'm all right with that and I like to think God, for all the mystery, is too. 

What Matters is It is Done

 Song

Alvin Chea “Lift Every Voice and Sing”

Scripture passage

Galatians 3:23-29

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.  Therefore, the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Homily/Meditation

[Spoken: Roberta A. Drury]

This is an important day. It’s a Sunday, which for a lot of us, not just Christians, is a day of rest, a Sabbath, a time when we, in the best of circumstances, lean back, drink a third cup of coffee, maybe reflect a while on the previous or the coming week.

[Spoken: D. Morrison]

But it’s an important day for another reason too. June 19^th is also known as Juneteenth, the longest commemorated day in American history. While it’s only been a national holiday for a year, it’s been celebrated in various parts of the country since 1866. Today is the 156^th anniversary of that first celebration.

[Spoken: Andre Mackneil]

You might not be aware of the celebration or its origins. Here’s where it comes from. America’s Civil War, a bloody, fierce, nearly-America-ending conflict, finally came to an end April 9, 1865. That’s the day official hostilities were done. But not everyone knew. One hundred fifty years ago the world was a different place. Communication happened haphazardly in some places. The new telegraph didn’t reach everywhere, and even where newspapers were produced, not everyone could read.

[Spoken: Aaron Salter]

When the War ended, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued New Year’s Day two years before, became the law in the state’s that had rebelled. It took from the war’s end in early April until mid-June for the Union Army to reach Texas, the furthest Confederate state, and announce General Order 3 which extended to the slaves still held in Texas the freedom they had in other states. In the words of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, there was no longer slave or free. You can probably imagine the reaction folks had. Their boisterousness can still be experienced in contemporary celebrations.

[Spoken: Geraldine Talley]

The great American writer Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called Juneteenth. This is how he describes such a celebration.

“Juneteenth,” he could hear Daddy Hickman saying. “And it was a great occasion. There had been a good cotton crop and a little money was circulating among us. Folks from all over were in the mood for prayer and celebration. There must’ve been five thousand folks out there that week—not counting the real young chillun and the babies. Folks came all the way from Atlanta, Montgomery, Columbus, Charleston and Birmingham, just to be there and hear the Word. Horse teams and mule teams and spans of oxen were standing under the groves of trees around the clearing, and the wagon beds were loaded down with hay and feed for the animals and with quilts for the folks who had come in from the far sections, so they could sleep right there. All those wagons made it look as though everybody in the whole section was waiting for the Word to move on over across Jordan. Or maybe migrate West, as some later did. The feel of those days has gone out of the air now…And the shape of our minds is different from then, because time has moved on. Then we were closer to the faceless days, but we had faith. Yes, and ignorant as we knew we were, we had more self-respect. We didn’t have much but we squeezed life harder and there was a warm glow all around…But you remember how it was…In the daytime hot under the tent with the rows of benches and folding chairs; and the ladies in their summer dresses and their fans whipping up a breeze in time to the preaching and the singing. And the choirs and the old tried and tested workers in the vineyard dressed in their white uniforms. That’s right. All the solid substance of our way of doing things, of our sense of life. Everything ordered and in its place and everything and everybody a part of the ceremony and the evocation. Barrels of ice water and cold lemonade with the cakes of ice in them sitting out under the cool of the trees, and all those yellow cases of soda pop stacked off to one side. Yeah, and at night those coal-oil flares and the lanterns lighting things up like one of those county fairs…And the feasting part, you must remember that…There was all those ladies turning out fried fish and fried chicken and Mr. Double-Jointed Jackson, the barbecue king, who had come out from Atlanta and was sweating like a Georgia politician on election day…supervising sixteen cooks and presiding over the barbecue pits all by hisself…” Hickman laughed, shaking his white head; then pushing back in his chair he held up his great left hand, the fingers spread and bending supple as he counted with his right index finger. “Lord, we et up fifteen hundred loaves of sandwich bread; five hundred pounds of catfish and snapper; fifteen gallons of hot sauce, Mr. Double-Jointed Jackson’s formula; nine hundred pounds of barbecue ribs; eighty-five hams, direct from Virginia; fifty pounds of potato salad and a whole big cabbage patch of coleslaw. Yes, and enough frying-size chicken to feed the multitude! And let’s not mention the butter beans—naw! And don’t talk about the fresh young roasting-ears and the watermelons. Neither the fried pies, chocolate cakes and homemade ice cream. Lord, but that was a great occasion. A great occasion…I’m not just talking about the eating. I mean the communion, the coming together—of which the eating was only a part; an outward manifestation, a symbol, like the Blood is signified by the wine, and the Flesh by the bread…Ah yes, boy, we filled their bellies, but we were really there to fill their souls and give them reassurance—and we filled them. We moved ‘em!”

[Spoken: Celestine Chaney]

Ellison is probably describing a Juneteenth celebration of the 30s or 40s, the period of greatest expansion of the influence of Juneteenth moving from the backroads and shanty towns to the bigger towns and cities. This is when James Wheldon Johnson’s song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which I played for you at the start, became known as the “Negro National Anthem” and twinned with Juneteenth. The song is a celebration not only of the freedom singing loudly gives people but of the ability of people to make something good out of their lives. To see beyond their individuality to community and, finally, universality.

[Spoken: Heyward Patterson]

So why should you care about Juneteenth if you aren’t Black? I mean, calling something the “Negro” or even Black National Anthem, identifying a holiday as something celebrating the freeing of a people, kind of sets it off as unique to them, doesn’t it? Makes those people separate, right? Gives others a sense of “this is our holiday, you go find your own?” It would leave them kind of segregated, wouldn’t it?

[Spoken: Katherine Massey]

I hope not. We don’t think of Martin Luther King, Jr Day as just a black people’s holiday, do we? Most of our presidents have been white men, so is President’s Day only for white men? Is Christmas and Easter only for Christians? Is Thanksgiving intended only for people who can trace their families back to the original Puritans? No, we all celebrate those to one extent or another. We all consider celebrating them a part of being an American. Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man, isn’t a great Black American novel. It’s a great American novel, it doesn’t matter who’s reading it. Like Thanksgiving, Juneteenth is meant to be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates good food and being together with those we love.

[Spoken: Pearl Young]

Now what about these names I’ve been reeling off. Who are these people? Because of the needs of Sunday services here, I’m recording this a month before you see it. Less than a week before today, these people were the victims of a self-described fascist white supremacist at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He drove over 200 miles from his small predominantly white town to a predominantly Black neighborhood with the intent to kill as many people as he could.

[Spoken: Ruth Whitfield]

You people in the future may not remember this incident. That’s something we do, we Americans, we tend to remember the good things, like Daddy Hawkins remembers an earlier Juneteenth, but to forget the things that are uncomfortable or damaging. The things that leave us feeling like crap. But it’s important that we do. As painful, as uncomfortable as it may be, it’s important that we remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 25, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me…[and] whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” What matters is not who is doing the good thing or who is receiving it, what matters is it is done.

Prayer

Spirit of Life, If ever there were a time for a candle in the darkness,
this would be it.
Using a spark of hope,
kindle the flame of love,
ignite the light of peace,
and feed the flame of justice. Melanie Davis

Song

Beyonce “Freedom” 

 

What I'm reading

The book that changed my direction toward the moments described best by poetry is one I happened to begin a couple weeks ago, Danse Macabre, a biography of Francois Villon by French historian Aubrey Burl. I vaguely remember reading Villon many years ago, mostly because I was reading a lot of erotic or bawdy poetry then as much of my own poetry was focused there. 

But Burl writes of him

Villon was born in an age of turbulence, a time of vast contrasts in wealth and poverty, in piety and villainy, in barbarity and artistry. It was a period of change during which he rejected the sterility of [common] verse in favor of sharply realistic poetry...Villon was himself a contrast...Many of his verses are remarkable descriptions of the decent delights and indecent depravities of the Paris that he knew so well: bishops and brothels; priests and prisons; clerics and criminals; Te Deums and taverns; ladies of the nobility and ladies of the streets. This empathy with everyday life and his awareness of its brevity enabled him to write poetry so ingeniously crafted that it seems to speak without art, person to person, to his readers.

I don't claim, as Burl also writes, "artistic brilliance" as a condition of my writing, although there was a period when I wrote formal poetry. It made me appreciate the work that goes into that. Here is a bit of Villon.

When I consider the dry bones 

In charnel houses, skulls lacking name, 

Which were the poor or the wealthy ones?

Masters of Requests, men of fame

Or common porters? Now the same.

King's man, merchant, soldier, baker, 

To this none-ness they all came,

Bishop like a candle-maker.

My other primary read, or rereading, is Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Soviet dissident poets by Olga Carlisle, with her husband half the team known for translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This 1970 paperback was the place where I'd first found the Anna Akhmatova poem I quoted in my last post, and it has remained with me since at least the early 80s when I bought it for the .25 cents penciled on the cover. Aside from Akhmatova the other poet I remember best from this book is the controversial Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose opening to "Babi Yar" still haunts me.

There are no monuments on Babi Yar, 

A steep ravine is all, a rough memorial. 

Fear is my ground--

     

 

 

 

"By Way of Introduction"

I've wanted to note what has been going on in the world for quite some time but find myself in the position of someone trying to write history as it's happening, trying to write about the events as if they've ended only to discover a new ingot of information that explains or confuses the situation further. Finally, I've decided the medium I need to use is poetry. 

I used to write a lot of poetry and for a long time. It's hard to say I gave it up; rather that I found prose was better for what I was writing. I'm returning to verse because it's the vehicle in which I can identify a moment. 

For my inspiration, I am looking to the resistance poets of many periods. But my model is Russian poet Anna Akmatova, specifically "By Way of Introduction."

In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent

seventeen months in the prison lines at Leningrad.

Once, someone recognized me. Then a 

woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold,

who had of course never heard of me, woke up from

the stupor that enveloped us, and asked me, whis-

pering in my ear (for we only spoke in whispers):

"Could you describe this?"

I said, "I can."

Then something like a smile glided over what was

once her face. 

The company is good

I don't remember where I got this book, but I do remember looking at it several times before actually buying it. I finished reading it last night after several years of picking it up, reading a few chapters, and putting it back down. That's often how I read novels nowadays, in short spurts that add up. 

I wasn't always impressed by the writing--too thick in places, like an overfilled pastry, where what I want is simpler, smoother--but when I was I was deeply impressed. 

<Faith spreads the blanket over the piano. At the woodpile, she balances a log on the chopping block and hoists the ax over her head, her belly pushing her off balance. Then a contraction comes and she drops the ax. Has Ray ever said the word love? Has he ever praised Faith's beauty, or has he ever held her and whispered with his lips against her hair? How could he say those things to her last night? How could he say all the things he ever said to her? 

Balancing the wood, bringing down the ax, she stops crying and gets furious. Over and over, she thinks, He has no right. She leans into the chopping, panting, fierce. The effort seems to lessen the pain. He has no right. The words fit with the rhythm of her chopping. Ugly words, from the very start. You can watch TV if you fuck me first.>

This is the author, Goldberry Long (I may have finally chosen to buy this book simply for its author's name), describing the titular character's mother, hugely pregnant with Juniper's brother Sunny Boy Blue who will, in the first sentence of the book, throw himself off a ferry on its journey between Seattle and Bainbridge Island, setting in motion the frantic, furious memories and flight of the narrator. Sunny called information from a bar on the wharf, written her number and the name Juniper Tree Burning, on the wall next to the payphone, and then thrown himself into the spray. That last sentence above is the way both she and runaway husband Ray remember as the first words he said on meeting Faith. Juniper, now living under the name Jennifer, a medical student and newly married, has a last memory of Sunny that's damaging: Sunny Boy Blue, the Backward Boy, full of cigarettes and vodka and a constant hack, kidnapped her from her own wedding for her gifts. A book of photographs and gasoline-soaked tennis balls, lit and dropped into the Rio Grande. 

Later, when she leaves her husband in a panic, Jenny kidnaps her own jilted bride, Sarah, who will become her best friend, her sparring partner, and eventually, in some ways, her salvation. Together, like some mix of Runaway Bride and Thelma and Louise, but sans the violence or abuse, they are in search of...something. It's never really clear. But the drive is picturesque and the company good.

There are issues, of course, many of them. Much of the novel is told in flashback, sometimes from Jennifer's and sometimes Juniper's perspective, while much of the present is in present tense, sometimes by Jennifer, sometimes Juniper, sometimes an insistent third person narrator. None of that is an issue, and frankly I think Long did a good job with her self-determined unreliable narrator. 

But there are questions we end up with: The above-mentioned thick writing, so winning in places, slows down the reading of the last chapters, when Jenny/Juniper is actually moving very fast and very chaotically, and I found myself skipping large patches of text to match my reading with the action. How did Sunny Blue Boy develop from terminally coughing, sickly, piss-smelling child to often drunk, chain-smoking, world-traveling, charming speaker of several languages? In addition to Sunny, Juniper's hippie parents, disappointed mother and dissolute father, show up to the ceremony and, except for figuring heavily in the flashbacks, then disappear from the narrative. Granted, the time in the present is only a few days, but she doesn't call or even think of them in the present. And Maggie, bar-owning mechanic, where does her incredible anger toward Jennifer come from? 

But here is what Long gets right. First, there's a happy ending, and novels just don't often have happy endings any longer. (No, it doesn't involve Sunny. He remains dead.) And then this, which I didn't read until after finishing the book but which explains to me why I stayed with it for years. Not a part of the narrative, but a Note From the Author tacked onto the Reading Group Guide in my edition: 

It seems to me there are many fine books about the angry young man taking his journey of self-discovery across the American landscape. There are few, however, about the angry young woman.

Now that was worth the getting through. 

 

"And I'll be there with you"

This must not be lost down the memory hole. We risk this violence becoming the norm--as the Senate managers say, "our future"--if we do nothing or minimize it. While it's a certainty, given the numbers of Rethuglicans already on record as saying they will not vote to convict, that trump will not be held to account for his months-long incitement that led to it, his actions and his words must be remembered and their result become infamous.

We will survive

I have long thought of myself as a basically optimistic person. The ascension and glorification of the trumpian model for government has made a considerable dent in that, as does this authoritative analysis sounding contemporary civilization's death knell. But I feel that optimism reborn while reading this essay.

It's true, we do have a history as a species of resilience and adaptation in the face of near-total destruction. While it's tempting to think of the responses by the majority of a populace to allow problems to accumulate until there's nothing left to be done, there are a lot of other people who, in the author's words, "use the meager acknowledgement of our knack for survival as a launch point for innovation and change," from the development of biodomes to electric cars to more resilient crops. She's right, we aren't starting from scratch. We have thousands of years of experience to draw on to counter "fluctuations in climate that [left] humans and animals...to deal with...droughts, floods, extinctions, and collapses of entire civilizations." 

One book I read some time back serves me as a reminder of the 7th Generation Principle of the Iroquois. Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture reminds us that, as the Dark Ages flowed crepuscularly around whole societies and cultures to finally drag all of Europe back to a period of malignancy and savagery, there were small clumps of individuals, most of them monks of one kind or another, who carved out little niches (sometimes literally) to keep learning and acquired knowledge from disappearing. And there are earlier examples, from the Rosetta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls, of groups caching important works for future, less reactionary generations to find. 

This should give us positive pause, the recognition that the billions of lives on Earth are ourselves the descendents of adaptive groups. And each time we seem to have gone on to, if not always better, newer times.

#36 on the list

So funny that The New York Times & The Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage (100% NEGATIVE and FAKE!) of Collusion with Russia - And there was No Collusion! So, they were either duped or corrupt? In any event, their prizes should be taken away by the Committee!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2019

When the history of this incredible--and not in a good way--administration is written, this will be just one among a list of various acts trump somehow thought he could order. What an incredible present!

On the necessity of our bastards

I have never been a fan of the gay, right-leaning columnist Andrew Sullivan, although I have read individual things he's written and agreed with him. This is one of them. It's a well-written, well-thought out, well-argued and ultimately disturbing examination of what it means to look past your own blinkers to seeing the timber in your own eye. I'm just as guilty, maybe even more so, as anyone else of counting myself on the right side of history (especially when I admit my liberalism is in some ways a distinct counter to William F. Buckley's definition of conservatism as "stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop").

Of course, it's possible to read Sullivan's column as his own attempt to place himself on the right side of history, since he made his name in the late 90s as a Clinton scold (having been himself, earlier, a Clinton advocate), and the whole both-siderisms of the 2010s leading to the current imbroglio of accusations, denouncements, Me Toos, apologies (and non-apologies) coming together in the wash to give us such an Interesting Time as the contemporary one. His essay was published the day after the accusation made against Al Franken but was obviously written before that, because he makes no mention of it, and it would have been an interesting spanner to throw in the work.

Be that as it may, even discounting every reason he gives for why he comes to the conclusion that he does--"No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on 'the right side of history,' or on the right side of a battle between 'good and evil,' is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the 'good.' These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time"--his conclusion is nonetheless correct. Considering yourself on the right side of history is dangerous precisely because it's so seductive, and because, like evil itself, it's the easy way. 

This is why it troubles me. I hold Trump and Roy Moore in utter contempt for their actions and their allies' easy way of denying, attacking, and ignoring their accusers. I am a little more forgiving of Bill Clinton and Al Franken's misbehaviors because both have since owned up and apologized (in Clinton's case, after far too long a period, during which I found lots of reasons why it couldn't have happened; and in Franken's case, immediately). If I look at these cases objectively, am I any different than the worst of Trump's and Moore's attack dogs?

I don't know. That seems too big a question for me to answer, maybe for anyone to answer. There are certainly important differences, and in my mind those differences lend favor to the Democratic perpetrators. But maybe that's what it means to live in Interesting Times, to have events demand responses that are just too big to try to answer then. 

As if in response, Sullivan writes "No party is immune from evil; no tribe has a monopoly of good. If these bipartisan sex-abuse revelations can begin to undermine the tribalism that so poisons our public life, to reveal that beneath the tribes, we are all flawed and human, they may not only be a long-overdue turning point for women. They may be a watershed for all of us." He is right about that. But there is another consideration.

And that's this. A major difference between the Republican and the Democratic responses is that one side denies that the events happened and that the accusers are in it for the fame, for money, or out of pure evil. The other side admits (maybe a bit later than we'd like) that they did happen and that the accusers have told the truth. There have been well-intentioned calls for Franken to prove Democrats are the more responsible party by stepping down from his seat. The rub in that, of course, that there's no demand by the other side that their offending member step down (although there are some who note that Moore should step aside, mostly to avoid controversy tainting the election). 

The thing here is that this is a purity test, a Shibboleth, that only one Party is party to. Democrats and liberals held their candidates to a purity test last year which is partly why we're in the situation we're in. The opposing side, for all its bluster, for all its talk of American and family values, is not going to withdraw itself from power or influence. To whom might Democrats prove they are more responsible? To future historians? To themselves? Because it is not to the other side, and certainly not to anyone who is somehow undecided between these two parties. 

I had a friend who was a realtor and he was my realtor in two house purchases back on the rim. He had a tendency to bend if not break the rules, to go back on promises he had made that weren't written down, and to find all kinds of reasons for the buyer or seller, whichever he was representing, to receive better deals (and inflate his commission). In one instance, on the morning of our signing, he negotiated the buyer to pay upfront costs, and then had the gall to demand an extra few thousand added to the already negotiated cost. He had talked with us about doing this the day before, saying, "If it works, you're ahead. If it doesn't work, you're out nothing." The buyers, who had already sold their previous home and needed the new place, accepted the new negotiation. We looked like bastards. My realtor friend is a bastard. But he was my bastard. He worked on my behalf. Bill Clinton and Al Franken may be a lot of things, but if they are bastards they are our bastards, and if we are going to admit we are on the right side of history--and a lot of things, from abolition to desegregation to women's rights to gay rights to trans~ rights, are unambiguously on the right side of history--then we need to keep our bastards. It is, as Sullivan suggests, a slippery slope, but sometimes the future requires that you slide rather than march into it.