“What is Happening to Me?”

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street UU Church, 

February 15, 2026

I used to live about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. My wife says that when I start out with something like that, I should give fair warning that I’m about to tell you an amusing anecdote about myself. But this isn’t amusing and as you’ll see I’m peripheral to the story. Like today, a lot of protests and rallies were happening in the Twin Cities. Most I attended were uneventful, but in September 2008 the Republican National Convention came to town. Joining about 10,000 others on the streets of St Paul, I took with me a young member of my congregation. Keith had been to some protests in his sleepy Wisconsin town but not a large gathering or one with a sizable police presence. I suggested to him before we got out of the car he should leave his backpack of cigarettes and jacket, phone, instruments, and homemade signs in the car. But he was sure he’d need them.

We joined the anarchist contingent, a part of which was the so-called “black bloc,” the masked protesters dumping trash cans, breaking windows, setting small fires. One group eventually set a police cruiser on fire. I didn’t join them. I believe destruction gets you nothing except bad publicity, but I understand also publicity has its place.

Keith and I got separated soon after arrival and later I saw him do a brave thing. There was a large group of protestors at one end of a street and on the other end a large group of police. Now it’s a common sight today to watch videos from Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle and see all these militarized, armed cops in tactical gear and helmets, but in 2008 it was new. I stood with a part of the crowd at one end of the street, observing the standoff, when suddenly Keith emerged from the crowd. He walked to a point about midway between the two groups and sat down on the street. He sat in the lotus position, opening his arms to the cops, miming “Why?” Believe it or not, this had an ameliorating effect on the cops. They were ordered back a few blocks and the protestors marched further.

I saw a lot of things, places being vandalized, tear gas unleashed. Famously, a police car was burned. One protestor who’d thought to bring his own gas mask put it on and was surrounded and pummeled by the police about 20 feet away from where I stood. I stayed upwind avoiding the group collecting on the Wabasha Street bridge. There’s a police tactic called kettling, allowing a group to herd themselves into an area, then cutting off the means to and from that area, effectively boxing the group in. Most of those on the bridge were arrested.

There’s more to this day I’d relate but I’m talking about Keith, so I’ll skip to the end. After his action on the street, I didn’t see Keith again and when I returned to the car at our agreed-on time, he wasn’t there. I waited another hour before I called his cell phone, and it rolled into voicemail. I left a message and then drove the streets looking for him. Many streets were blocked off, however, so I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t find him. About 10 that night I called his mom and reported I hadn’t found him and needed to leave, as I had an 8 AM class next morning. She said she and her wife and her ex-husband, Keith’s father, would drive over and start looking.

Here’s the story as I heard it later. The three of them drove around the now-opened streets of Minneapolis until 3 when they found him wandering one of the streets with a small group of other teens. He’d been arrested a few blocks away from where I’d last seen him while getting a lighter out of his backpack. I knew that backpack was bad business. He’d been pressed down so hard by the cop he had a boot indentation on his back. Somewhere I still have a picture of it. He’d been taken to juvenile and kept in lockup for at least 8 hours. Juveniles don’t receive the fabled one phone call and his cell had long since died.

The cops remained on the streets of Minneapolis for about a week. The image of at least 2 officers armed with semi-automatics and bulletproof vests on every corner became a daily sight.

Here’s why I’m telling you this story. As nasty as the 2008 elections were—you remember the election? Sarah Palin was a Donald trump without either the charisma or the cash. John McCain referred to Barak Obama as “That one” in the second debate but made up for it by interrupting his own supporters’ allegations to describe him as “a decent family man with whom I have some disagreements.” Leading up to the election and after, Obama was described as anything from a secret Muslim, a Kenyan by birth, to the Antichrist. During the crackdown on the protestors that lasted a week, dozens were arrested. Some were hurt. But no one was killed. Other than gas masks when they deployed gas, I never saw a masked cop. Every one of them had his badge on the outside of his gear; Keith’s family eventually sued the officer who’d used excessive force in arresting him and we knew who she was because someone had taken a picture of her and her badge. My court appearance on Keith’s behalf was the first time I’d worn my brand-new clerical collar. People were hurt. No one died. As messy as things got, as adrenalized as everyone was.

Rush forward 18 years and things have changed. We look at one another and at ourselves differently. In under a year we have gone from, well, maybe not a Capraesque Bedford Falls, but it’s hard to deny we’re living in some version of Pottersville. You might remember in Bedford Falls there was a sizable community of hardworking immigrants, but there are no visible immigrants of any kind in Pottersville.

In my instance, I’ve come to see myself differently than before. I’m angry sometimes, at nothing in particular or at nothing I can identify. I avoid the news, and when I don’t I doomscroll. I brood. I don’t brood well. My brooding is less Heathcliff on the moors and more Charlie Brown reflecting on his team’s 156^th consecutive loss. “Rats.” I snipe at people whose only crime is being related to people who continue to support trump. I don’t think of myself as depressed, rather as echoing the poet of the Biblical Book of Lamentations who writes, “My eyes! My eyes! They stream with tears! How far from me is anyone to comfort, anyone to restore my life. My children are desolate; the enemy has prevailed.”

In his “autobiographical sketch” of his childhood, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Richard Wright’s there was a clear distinction between the Black and white children. Among other things, Black children threw clumps of railway cinders at one another in play, while white boys were allowed to throw broken bottles at them. Young Richard catches one of these projectiles in his neck, requiring three stitches.

When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her…I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then slapped me.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh always fightin’?”

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight in any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again, and they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t kill me.

What’s happening to me, at least partly, is my disheartening realization that this self-identification with the authorities like Richard’s mother is something we have already seen. Hispanics, Blacks, and women have all joined the Border Patrol and ICE and are, maybe not unilaterally, but sufficiently content with their orders and their targets. My fantasy solution is suggested by the line of a song by The Devil Said Jump. These MFers are gonna “Make Me Buy a Gun.” So far, it remains fantasy because I’m really too much the coward and pacifist to do that. But I will admit I’ve looked up the price of high-end long-distance slingshots. My rationale around that is to echo that of the pastoral character Shepherd Book of the TV series Firefly. When the ship is attacked by government agents and along with everyone else onboard he picks up a gun to fight back, he is asked, facetiously, whether there isn’t something specific in the Bible about killing, he answers, “Quite specific. It is, however, much fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.”

My point is it can be done, it has been done, without people dying or being maimed. We can’t support a government that acts out of the barrel of a gun. We will not support such a government, we will not forgive such a government, we will remember the government that did this and the people who cheered it on or who, at best, ignored that it was happening. People point out, rightly, if we, by which I mean the predominantly white liberal community, had refused to allow the government to behave this way with Black citizens, Asian citizens, Native Americans, we would not be dealing with the government treating people this way now. Yes, 20-20 hindsight and all that, but there’s at least a salt lick’s worth of truth to that.

I quoted Lamentations earlier. Now I quote the Psalms: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” We can surely use some of that certainty, can’t we, the surety of UU minister Wayne Arneson who wrote “Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.

It may be time, may be past time, to cut loose MAGA from political thought. Remember the John Birch Society? There’s an argument to be made that Bircherism is echoed by contemporary Trumpism. Long thought dead, it declined in membership from a high in the 1960s of 100,000 to somewhere in the hundreds. It isn’t just numbers. More Americans profess belief in UFOs than voted for Trump—yes, I looked that up—and we don’t take them into political account. They have set themselves outside society. It’s time to metaphorically vote them off the island. I remember during the first trump administration coming across the comment that the only things that would separate most of his supporters from him would be finding a dead woman or a live child in his bed, and there was some question about the dead woman. With each day revealing more evidence, it is obvious the live child makes no difference either.

Am I suggesting we drop those people from our lives? In so many words, I am. It’s possible to love someone and hate his actions. I used to teach in the Minnesota prison system. I liked my students. They were personable. I didn’t ask anyone what his crime was because, a, that’s not something you ask a person, and b, I wasn’t so certain I’d like them after finding out. They looked forward to class days and did all the work because it was a way, as one inmate put it to me, “to remind me my life isn’t just punishment.”

One of my best students and a favorite of mine insisted one evening on telling me why, in his early 20s, he had a life sentence. Without putting too much of a spin on it, he told me he’d raped and killed a young girl in his mid-teens. I had to sort out for myself whether I wanted to keep him in class. I had that kind of power, to drop anyone from class if I felt their contributions ran counter to it. It was a week of some soul searching, and I decided that despite how I felt about his crime, he had earned an opportunity to better himself. It is the same kind of self-questioning anyone with a father, brother, mother, sister, cousin in prison must ask themselves.

I like to think he took some comfort in that, that as bad as he had made his life he could read and talk about good books. I would rewrite the benediction of Reverend Arneson from “Take courage, friends” to “Take comfort.” Where do I take comfort? I take comfort in the love of my family. I take comfort in my animals, the dogs and cats who make up my pack. I take comfort in my work, helping people. I take comfort in my daily walk around my neighborhood, greeting the dogs and cats, and yes, even my neighbors who wear red caps. I take comfort in my activism, in showing up to rallies and protests and marches. I rarely help to organize these and less often speak at them, taking my comfort instead by being a part of the crowd, a quiet body standing in solidarity with like-minded people. It reminds me I am not alone. I take comfort in the words of fellow Unitarian TheodoreParker, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But if we would see justice come in our lifetimes we must lean on one end.

Speak Boldly

 

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity."

These lines from William Butler Yeats "The Second Coming", written over a century ago and describing a world on the brink after and before world wars, remain relevant to our situation. We aren't talking like we should. We should be howling from the rooftops that we are lost and our leaders are behaving the way we were taught were ways associated with the Soviet Union and its satellites. That is, what we have is not to be shared among a just and wise people but hoarded for the few and their favorites. 

There is a cautiousness to our speech today, as if we aren't sure what we believe is believable or that we want to put ourselves out that far to where we could be swatted down. Some individuals are making themselves heard--folks in Minneapolis angered at the death of Renee Nicole Good and people in other cities reacting to the kidnapping and spiriting away of citizens, documented and not, by a trump-anointed militia given the go-ahead to make things as untenable as possible to unloose that mere anarchy so to avoid justice and accountability--and these are good things. 

But what I'm talking about is individuals talking among themselves at the post office, the market, on the street. It is as if we've all agreed to avoid the discomfort of saying something that will somehow offend our listener. Unless of course we are MAGA, and then we can't shut up.

I am as guilty of this as anyone. I am passionate about the criminality of this administration but don't bring it up in regular conversation. There is a weirdness to my conversations. It's a day-to-day unwillingness to comment on the things happening directly in front of us unless we are already certain we're in a safe space, a church group, a protest, a meeting, where we are all basically agreed that this is a bad place to be. 

It isn't as if we're afraid to speak on these things because someone is listening. That's Orwellian enough. But we're self-censoring because we're not certain we're not imagining the illicitness of it all, that we're the ones who are crazy. 

We aren't crazy. We are awake and we see what's going on. For the sake of our future and our communities, we must say so. 

Just Another Bad Joke

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

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

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

Uncomfortable Places I've Slept In

Not the actual van. Duh.

A Nonworking Van in Someone's Driveway, Rural Minnesota

I used to get around everywhere by bike. I loved my late 80s white Specialized Stumpjumper, bought for about $200 brand new and lovingly obsessed over for a decade by me. I especially enjoyed the feel of speeding down hills on roads, sitting straight up evoking the sensation of time whipping past me.

I took several bike trips after I'd moved to Minnesota. This one was the cycling tour I took to visit my soon-wife while she was doing a radio internship in the small Wisconsin town she'd grown up in. I rode several days from Mankato where we were students on the Sakatah Trail and then began riding back roads east across Minnesota to the Mississippi. 

It may have been the third or fourth evening of the trip. I was on a road bordered by long lines of trees with occasional houses. Back then I used a slim backpack US atlas where I traced my travels with markers, including stars at places I'd spent the night. But I've long since lost that, so my best guess is it was along one of the rural roads between Northfield and Prescott. A storm was brewing that I expected, having heard about it on a radio playing at the McDonald's where I'd had breakfast that morning. But by midafternoon I didn't need a weatherman to tell that. The sky had been a milky grey before covering what was left of the sun by 4 or 5.The wind, which had been pleasant through most of my trip, picked up so I was pressing the pedals as hard as if I'd been riding through a river flowing in the opposite direction. 

I didn't have a watch--I haven't worn one since the mid-80s--so my estimate of the time of day is really a guesstimate. But I was certain it was darker earlier than it should be. I'd started looking for someplace to set in for the night, hoping my tent would weather it but worrying it wouldn't. So I was searching for a place under trees where, even if I was at risk of a limb falling on me, would afford better protection than being in the open. 

I'd decided to start looking for an abandoned barn but while they were plentiful in that part of the state the only ones I could see were all in use by cows and horses. I was beginning to wonder if I could ask some family if I could cower on their porch when I passed a house with several vehicles in the driveway. My eye was caught by a van up on blocks. It looked like it was unlikely to suddenly be dragooned back in use. I stopped just past the house, listening to the sounds of people inside it, determined they were unlikely to hear or see me--it was the kind of place built into a hill where the ground floor on one side was actually the basement with no windows and the living was done on the next floor--and without giving it another thought opened the back of the van, popped my bike and gear inside, and closed it behind me.

The sharp smell of disuse and gasoline intoxicated me. The floor was a collection of tools, laid out where they could be grabbed easily from the door, and beyond them it was comparatively clear. I laid out my mat and mummy bag and read by what thin light was still available; when I decided it was safe,  I used my tiny reading light for a while until I gave in to exhaustion.

The wind had been pretty steady while I'd read and for the initial part of my sleep until the sound of a train barreling down the tracks at me shook me awake in a panic. The wind had  become a behemoth during my nap, a massive dragon snuggling up to my shelter and buffeting it enough that the sides shook. 

But I felt safe. The van had stood on those blocks for a long while and through many storms. Nothing was going to pierce those walls, not the harridan wind or the rain that hit the roof and windows sounding like stilettos. It probably went on for hours but I had little trouble, once I determined there was nothing coming into the few holes I noted in the van's floor, sleeping the sleep of the just plain tired. 

Despite my referring to it now as uncomfortable, it actually was pretty warm and secure and, most of all, dry. I slept close enough to one of the holes the smell of gas didn't bother me. When I woke the sun was just cresting the horizon. I usually spent the first minutes of my day brushing my teeth and splashing water on my face, but I didn't want to be caught by my unknowing saviors, so after a quick gulp from my water bottle, I opened the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into a brilliant aqua-tinted world. Everything looked washed clean by the storm. Even the air seemed like it had been spiffed up. I took my bike out, closed the door just as quietly, walked it to the road and hopped on it without looking back. Tree limb after tree limb had been flung to the road and huge puddles were easy to navigate away from. Reaching the next town I heard it'd been a severe thunderstorm with sub-Category One winds, only(!) reaching speeds in the 60s. I was dry and safe and celebrated with a full breakfast at the diner. 

Try the Best You Can

 

Much of my time lately has been given over to reading rather than writing. But I did produce a service for my facility folks. It was initially meant to reference May 8th but because of misunderstandings at work among the chaplains, it will actually play this coming Sunday. As a result, I removed most references to the 8th being Mother's Day. That version playing at the facility also is a little different in that I produced essentially a slideshow for during the service that meant I didn't need to appear onscreen. (One of the changes I foresee in sermons is the lessening of the preacher's physical presence and the greater emphasis on his or her voice.) 

Service for May 8

 

Song (“Everybody Hurts”) 

 

Welcome. Welcome to this place where we have nightmares, but we also have dreams. Where we feel confused, but we also understand. Where we are afraid, but we also find courage. You are welcome. Together we make it a holy place.

 

Scripture passage

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. ² He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters, ³ he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. ⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley,^[a]  I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. ⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶ Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

 

Homily/Meditation

 

          Let’s take that video I showed you by the group REM as a metaphor for what most of us are experiencing. Gridlock. Impasse. Jammed up. For a lot of us, that’s the way life feels often, like just a moment ago we were cruising down the superhighway, windows down, enjoying the swiftly moving air and the excitement that comes with speed. And a moment later, Bam, we’re locked down in traffic. Nowhere we can go. Hundreds of cars in a single boundaried space, like we’re water in a hose and someone has his thumb on the nozzle, just a trickle leaking out so we move forward by inches, a foot an hour.

          The solution for the people in the video is to get out and walk. You see them suddenly, as one, opening their doors and walking together, alone, in pairs, holding hands some of them, in the same direction, like they all know where they’re going. Wouldn’t we give anything to solve our sense of gridlock like that? To just step out of what’s holding us back and walk?

          In reality, of course, even one person getting out of their car and walking away will only make it worse for everyone else. For a solution like this you need everyone deciding beforehand this is how they’ll handle things, and outside a music video there’s not likely to be many people who’ll do that.

          Psalm 23, which I read to you after the video, may be one answer to that. It’s said to be, after The Lord’s Prayer, the most recognized poem in Western literature. Surely its description of comfort resonates with most of us, a sense of bucolic ease and transcendence, imagining us as sheep looked over by a caring shepherd or parent figure, a mother who will refresh and guide us through the harshest, most dangerous terrain, and back into safety and food.

          Pastors often talk about the pastor as the shepherd in this and other psalms. To shepherd also means to guide, and in relation to today, to mother. It’s ironic that the word “shepherd”, has come down to us as a synonym for pastor. Shepherd comes down to us from Old English, as does sheep, two of the few words that have, and a thousand years ago shepherds were buried with wool in their hands to prove their vocation and explain why they hadn’t been to church on Sundays.

          And consider the use that the word sheep has come down to us to mean. Gentle. Oblivious. Obtuse. Stubborn. Most of us experience sheep behind a fence as we zip by on the road. There they are, chewing intently on grass, ignorant as cows. In fact, in the way the portmanteau term “sheeple” has come to us, meaning docile, silly, easily fooled or led, as a derogatory political term for voters on the other side, I don’t think any thinking person would want to have the word sheep associated with them. In a word, sheep are dumb.

          Minnesota sheep farmer Catherine Friend deplores my ignorance. She writes, “Sheep are just steady, reliable, unchanging. Today’s sheep is much like the sheep of 10,000 years ago. They do an excellent job of being exactly what they are…Sheep understand food. They understand danger. They understand caring for their babies…Sheep aren’t born with an understanding of gates or tractors or the knowledge that if they don’t get themselves into the barn right now the farmer will miss the kickoff for the Super Bowl.”

          I want to assert right here that you, by which I mean me too, all of us, can be sheep. Because this is what happens when sheep run into that gridlock I spoke of earlier.

 

Sheep have two flight zones, shaped like cones, that serve as brilliant protection. One cone spreads backward from its head. If you approach a sheep directly from behind or from slightly to the side, you’ll step into this flight zone and the sheep will surge forward…

The sheep has a second flight zone, this cone reaching from its head forward. If you approach a sheep from the front and step inside this zone, will the sheep turn around and run in the opposite direction?

No, she will not…That sheep is going to do the last thing you’d expect. If you step into that forward flight zone, the ewe will shoot straight toward you, a white blurred streak that passes within inches of your useless hands, leaving you standing there, mouth agape. You will both look and feel stupid. You will understand that even though you have more brain cells than a sheep, you have the reaction time of a slug.

         

          We’re all sheep. I don’t mean that as a put down. I’m not talking about sheep as passive but as squirming, lively, noise-making beasts in flight from the problems we’re experiencing, the issues we have, the fears chasing us. There’s no effective shepherd as we’re too fast, too agile, too often do the unexpected thing when we run.

          And boy, do we run. Always running, as babies we hit the ground running, like sheep. And while we may be unable to articulate it, and that’s legitimate because you’ve been running too hard to find words or a definition of what you’re running from or what safety you’re running to.

          Be patient with each other. Breathe. Focus. Be with other people as a nursing mother tending to her children. Walk away from the gridlock however you can and toward one another. Do the best things in the worst times. Try the best you can. But be patient. We are sheep and we are running to find where we belong.

 

 

Prayer

We pause in the stillness to rest for a moment, to quiet ourselves so that we can feel what stirs within us. Each breath draws us closer to the pulse of life and with each exhalation we make room for something new. May we find in this gathering the comfort of those who care. May we encounter patience along our growing edges and compassion in our most tender spots. Here may we find the inspiration and encouragement we need to face our challenges and nurture ourselves. And in the presence of suffering across the globe may we redouble our efforts to practice kindness where we are, with the hope that the light of our actions travels like the light of faraway stars. May our gestures of compassion and generosity seed possibility. May we travel humbly with one another, choosing reconciliation over resentment as we try to live right-sized. When life presses in and shifts us off balance, when pain assails us, when frustration mounts, may the rhythm of our breath steady us and bring us back to a place of gratitude.

 

Benediction

Take comfort, friends. The journey is long. The path is often difficult. And the future is uncertain. But take comfort. Deep down there is another truth. You are not alone.

 

Song (“Optimistic”) 

My favorite Bly poem

 Well, Robert Bly is dead. I can't say he has been my favorite poet but he is certainly one of them. I've read and appreciated him for decades but I don't think his forms show up in my poems except in our shared sense of the poem as a Polaroid of a particular moment. So in that light, here is probably my favorite Bly poem. 

DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time. 

The Holiness of Lift and Drop

 

Two months ago I was asked to be part of a service celebrating the holiness of work. Most people assumed I would talk about my pastoral or chaplain work, but I wrote this about a dull, plodding job that I discovered had its own holiness. This is the five minute version I went with. I wrote a longer version to get the story out and may turn that later into a longer essay. 

THE HOLINESS OF LIFT AND DROP

    I used to work short-term jobs, most of them through an agency. There was a plant in Mankato, LMH Quality Packaging, that put together candy bags for local businesses. I rode my bike there one day and was put on the assembly line, checking bag seals. But after a little bit I was called into the foreman’s office and told, because I looked like someone who didn’t mind harder work, I would be moved.

I was taken to a room that was pretty big although there was only one table and one man in it. The fellow was a little shorter than me and what he was doing was walking around the table, which had sides about a foot tall, with a shovel. There were different candies inside and he’d dig into them and then drop them again before taking another shovelful. I was handed a similar shovel, a short-handled grain shovel, and left in the room.

The guy, whose name was Gary, told me what the work was without stopping or slowing down. What we were doing was mixing candies for the assorted candy bags you get around Halloween or party treats. About every hour someone else come along, take the table which was on wheels, and bring in an empty one. Then a half dozen other people would bring in about 20 10-pound bags of different candies—Sweet Tarts, Skittles, Peanut Butter Cups, Tootsie Rolls, the kinds of candy were always different—and dump them into the table. Our job, he explained, was to walk the length of the table and then around, dipping the shovels into the candies, and then turning the shovelful over. Every 10 minutes we’d change directions.

That was it. Not a very hard job. But shortly after starting, I was bored and my arms ached, especially my shoulders. My legs were sore from the walking and pivoting. My forearms ] jolted each time I dug my shovel into the box and it connected with the bottom. Sometimes the hard candies broke or the softer ones mushed and then I’d have to reach in and dig them out. And I was bored. God, was I bored.

At our first break, Gary gave me pointers. “Angle the shovel gently so you don’t hit the table bottom. Let the momentum carry the shovel just above the pile and then let them slide off to one side. Keep your legs bent at the knees and your legs won’t hurt as much. Stay exactly opposite me and you won’t have to hurry or slow down, just keep the same pace.” I did that and it was easier but no less boring. I hollered over to him “How do you deal with being bored?”

He said, “Bored? I never think about it. I just focus on one thing: the shovel lifting and dropping. That’s it. Everything else just gets in the way.”

I was surprised, given my experiences with Zen and meditation, I hadn’t caught onto it sooner. It was kitchen work, simply the repetition of movements without haste or worry about it’s being done. The job would never be done I realized, more tables with more candy would come in, and it would always be done by the end of the day because another two guys would take the shovels for second shift.

The rest of the week passed by with aches of course, and some foot sores. I learned to wear sneakers instead of boots, to ease the shovel because it didn’t matter how much I loaded on the shovel, it would always be added to by Gary. And I drifted, letting my mind wander away from monkey-mind, and let thoughts come, go, stay, whatever they felt compelled to do.

The work was holy, by which I mean there were people who enjoyed those candies and enjoyed the variety available. Even if no one bought the bag and it ended up in the landfill, the insects and mice would eventually eat the candy. It might not be good for them nutritionally—it wasn’t good for you or me nutritionally—but it added a little sweetness and pleasure to their lives, and I could hope for no more than that.

What is done in the dark will be brought to the light

Over the weekend I was asked what the trial of Derek Chauvin, and the potential if finding him guilty of 2nd degree unintentional murder, 3rd degree murder, and 2nd degree manslaughter, might change anything. And it's to my shame I said, "Nothing."

It isn't exactly true, of course. For Chauvin and his family, for George Floyd's family, for many of the protesters and arguers on both sides of his guilt and complicity, much will change if he's found guilty. But in general nothing will change. It may be jaded but I've lived for 60 years and the number of innocent and guilty people killed by guns has ebbed and flowed but never stopped completely. As a nation, we are too enamored of our weapons to ever give them up. As long as they exist in our homes and garages, they'll get brought into our schools, our churches, our stores and post offices. And they don't need to leave those homes to kill our most innocent or guilty. 

My shame is not the jadedness of that belief of mine but that I have done little to change that long line of murdered dead. The litany of people killed by police is too long to post, even if I wanted to limit it to those killed this weekend, this month, this year. I don't know how long flags have been at half staff this year, but it seems it's been continuous since last summer. It may be that we haven't gone more than a week without flags at half staff. Surely, that's a condemnation of us. Surely, it's a reason we are being cut down. 

The Red-Monster

I certainly wasn't his best friend. And although I knew him for a long time and we stayed in touch as well as we could, I couldn't call him a close friend. But he saw me, in his wife's words, as "a good shit." I would have said the same, and for a lot of us, that's about as good as it gets.

We were in grad school together, his first time and my second. He was part of what another friend described as "the Raymond Carver crew," writers in the 90s who felt the power of the word lay in saying things plainly, without flowers, without elaboration. Back then he only wrote fiction, so that when I found out years later he'd published a chapbook, I wondered when he'd started writing poetry.

He married, had kids, found steady work that was meaningful and often frustrating. If I hadn't kept in touch with him on Facebook, I wouldn't have known him if I'd passed him on the street. He went from a Marky Ramone shaggy mullet to a hairline rivaling Patrick Stewart's for brevity. When he died a couple weeks ago, it was a shock. He hadn't been sick, had stopped drinking a long time before, didn't even smoke or eat much fried food. I heard it was his heart and I like to think it surprised him too, so he didn't feel anything more than the snap of an artery.

He was the kind of good shit that, when a lot of us got together last Saturday to remember him, the words said more often than any others were, "I'm gonna miss him." We told a lot of stories about him, and I wrote this one down for his wife and kids. He might have told them, but maybe it's mine to tell.

This was back before I knew him, back when he was still drinking and living the sort of life he would write about. "I was in jail in St. Peter, on a DUI charge. The judge gave me a choice, I could stay in my cell during the day or go to college. I chose school because I'd been in cells before. There was a school in St. Peter but I couldn't afford that, and Mankato is about 12 miles south, and they accepted me.

"They took away my license and my car, so I had to bike the distance. I took classes every day so I didn't have to stay in my cell. It was dead winter, and there I was biking there every morning and back every afternoon. I did that my whole sentence. I was about 7 weeks in when I realized I must be getting something out of it."

258 candles-days 158-160

An important element of the American experiment is our dedication to the contributions by immigrants and our celebration of the diversity they bring to the melange of American society. Back in the hub where I used to live, there's been a battle for the opportunity to represent a Minneapolis district in the state legislature. The incumbent, Phyllis Khan, has been in office since 1972. Two challengers, Mohamud Noor and Ilhan Omar, were given little chance at replacing her. However, in the August 8 primary, Ilhan Omar won.

This is significant, not only for Omar and her potential constituents, but for what it means to America. She will not be the first former refugee to become a legislator or the first Muslim, but if she wins she will be the first Somali to serve in a legislative role in American politics, and in a landscape where we ask  whether we have a responsibility to, say, Syrian asylum-seekers or whether the so-called War on Terror is a euphemism for a War on Islam, that is an important voice. This is what makes American culture not only a fascinating experiment but one that's worthwhile as well.

258 candles-day 132

The morning after yet another black man has been killed in an otherwise routine traffic stop--this one back in the hub where I used to spend my days, a situation that has become almost as ubiquitous as mass shootings--I seek out something to make me feel better about people. These bright spots can be found and celebrated. Today I celebrate Tim Wong and his butterfly reclamation. 

258 candles-day 59

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: "Hello, Mr Hartman."

258 candles-day 56

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I'm more sympathetic, I think, than many other people when it comes to Jehovah's Witnesses--I abide their visits because I understand their focus is not on conversion but on witnessing--and while I share with Prince the childhood Seventh Day Adventist church, I can't say I understand his decision to join the JWs. However, this is a good exploration of their beliefs in the light of the death of their most-famous member, and an attempt to explain exactly that attraction for him.

eulogy for a homeless father

About a week ago I was contacted by a friend on behalf of his friend whose homeless father's body had been found in a park in the hub. Both his death and his homelessness was a surprise to the two families he had left behind: other than sporadic phone calls, no one had heard from him in fifteen years and had no idea where he was. His son had contacted my friend, a Lutheran minister, for a suggestion of someone to perform the funeral who was "not too religious." My friend suggested me because of my own bout of homelessness.

After a couple meetings, we held the memorial yesterday in the son's apartment. The two families--a first wife and her adule children, and a second and her teenage children--came together for the first time in a decade and a half to mourn the death and celebrate the life of a man none of them knew what had become of.

I'm not only a minister but also a member of several online homeless and vagabond Facebook groups. I put to their members what they, as people for whom exactly this situation might happen, thought I should tell the families. Their responses, numbering a couple hundred, inform the following eulogy.

We don’t know what the last hours or days or even years of Jonathon’s life was like. We do know some things. That he had multiple health problems, including heart and lung issues, that he was addicted, at least for a while, to alcohol, that he was fending for himself in a losing battle against the entropy all of us are heir to, to the extent that this man, a mere 49 years old, could be discovered dead and that it could be considered a natural death. It is fitting that the person who discovered Jonathon’s body was also probably homeless. In the final analysis, each of us has only each other. 

It’s easy to mistake pride for self-sufficiency. As most of you are aware, I was myself homeless for several years, so I feel comfortable telling you that while it might be tempting to think of Jonathon’s last years in terms of unremitting pain, depression, and desperation, that isn’t all there was to it. Those elements were there, certainly, but just like we can’t subsist entirely on a diet of charred toast, his life was undoubtedly leavened by the sweetness of life. Gratitude at the kiss of warm sunlight on his face when he least expected it. Appreciation at the gifts of money and food and shelter offered him. Warmth in his belly at the taste of liquor or cigarettes, the delicious succulence of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The sweet release of lying down to rest, the wonder of dreams. He felt love, perhaps a little ashamed at the families he left behind, but also perhaps relief in, in his mind, rescuing them from the burden of his deterioration.

Enough with idle speculation. What we do know is this: he was ill his last years, he lived on the streets here and maybe spent time in shelters, he died from the combination of his diseases and exposure, and he did not reach out to anyone here for help. Those are hard, uncomfortable truths. Perhaps they should be. Not that anyone should feel bad at not having provided help or feel anger with Jonathon because he didn’t ask for it. They’re hard because people, like life itself, are complicated. For whatever reasons, to conquer whatever demons, Jonathon made the decisions he did and accepting them and him is the final dignity we can give him.

Loving him in death is the best we can hope for. Or, if not love, acceptance of the way he chose to live his last years. We are all each other has got, and trying to change anyone, in death as in life, only leads to frustration. Jonathon’s life and death, for all the ways it hurts us, has dignity to it, as all life has dignity. We are born, we live, and we die. A single known sandwiched between two portals to the unknown. Buddhists tell the story that the earth is made up of ocean and a single ring floats on it. Every thousand years an ancient tortoise crawls from the bottom mud and rises achingly for a breath of fresh air. He breaks free of his resting place, journeys to where the sky can be seen, gulps a single lungful of air, and descends rest again in the mud. They say as often as that tortoise crests the surface with his head in that ring during each thousand year event, just as often are we born. To be born is rare and lucky. It must be honored. Jonathon’s life was no more or less dignified than any of ours. You are lucky to have known him, to have loved him.

In my faith there’s a ritual we sometimes perform at the death of a member of our community. Will you gather in a ring and take hold of the hand of the persons next to you. We sing the words but since you don't know the tune, we'll just say them together. Please repeat after me: “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.”

 [Prayer] God of tears and the mysterious silence, God of suffering and God of hope, you have made for everything a season. This is the season of our sorrow, of our grief, and we pray for grace to deal with what seems impossible to deal with. We remember the promise made to those who mourn, yet too often it seems that comfort is beyond our grasp. We know that we cannot bear this burden alone. Should we pray for our grief to be transformed or, is the purpose of our grief to transform us? Will our sorrow lead somewhere unexpected? Might it lead us back to life if we follow it? Is it a reminder of the precious reality of life and love? The death of Jonathon has created a vast, empty space within our lives, a great longing within our hearts. Can it ever be filled? Can it be healed by the sacred memory that makes Jonathon forever a part of us?

So many questions, O God, and so much silence. May we be patient toward all that is unanswered in our hearts. And may others be patient with us, with our sorrow, our anger, our fear and our questions. We are those who mourn. We seek the comfort that we can offer each other and the blessings of divine love and grace. Amen.

[Benediction] Take courage, friends. The path is never clear, the end is always in doubt, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. Deep down, there is a greater truth: you are not alone.