A Civil War?

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all authority; for it has been given to me, and I give it to anyone I please.  If you then will worship me, it will all be yours.

Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" 

-Luke 4: 5-8

When Christianity Today, published their editorial by Mark Galli, calling for the impeachment and removal of Trump, I felt a little like Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, after Vader turns on Emperor Palpatine and chucks him into the core of the second Death Star, "I knew there was still good in you." But I also recognize that such a stand by a conservative evangelical publication has a cost, and given the strictures of the publishing business, I hope we don't have to build a funeral pyre for CT soon.  Red Letter Christians, an evangelical group with whom I share much more natural affinity, has been on this bandwagon for a while, but they reiterated their disapproval of the mendacious scam of the last three years. 

Of course Franklin Graham doubled down on Trump, claiming that his Father, despite being bed-ridden and of anything but sound mind and body in November of 2016, somehow voted for Trump, a claim that was quickly twitter-slammed by other members of his own family.  Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham and their ilk are not going to abandon Trump any time soon, and are indeed still shilling the whole "chosen one" angle, which is quite frankly blasphemous and entirely contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

First of all, the actual "chosen one," Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, was given the opportunity to rule the kingdoms of the world, and he solidly rejected it.  The false teachers will tell you it was because he was too wise to trust Satan on such a thing, that he knew the promise itself was a lie.  But that's only partly true, Jesus also knew that power of the sort that was being offered was a lie in and of itself.  If you think you can accomplish the goals of the Kingdom of Heaven by using the tools of the devil you are actually not a follower of Jesus, you are a sorcerer, who arrogantly believes you can control the dark spirits of power and violence rather than have them overcome you.  Hate, does indeed appear to make you strong, (Star Wars' fictional religion does have some moments of truth).

What I hear from those who still, even after all this, support Trump is some version of a Faustian bargain: "I don't like him, but he gets things done," even if he demonstrably does not get much of anything done other than make a general mess of things.  Or perhaps it is the "lesser of two evils" argument: "he's better than Killary, or Nancy Pelosi," both of whom happen to be rather shrewd, successful and female, but it's not just that, it's (insert poorly disguised excuse for sexism here).  Finally, there are the people who actually do believe, probably thanks to Fox News, that Trump really is the strong leader they have been praying for, rather than a global laughing stock who traffics in fear and division at his own expense and to the detriment of our democratic republic.  The reason, I think they are willing to be so willfully blind is because they have let hatred infect them so thoroughly that not only do they disagree with "liberals," they deeply wish to "own the libs," and believe that without someone to defend them against the "lefties," they will be doomed to live under the rule of atheists and communists. Honestly, I pretended to be asleep while that conversation was going on, rather than try to argue with them.

The question that is on my mind lately though is, "Can we have this argument/fight/war in a civil manner?"  It seems to be devolving into shouting matches, and "call outs" at worst and arrogant dismissal of opposing viewpoints at best.  I have said many times over the past year that I really miss George W. Bush, because while I often took issue with his policies and his warmongering, I never felt like I was dealing with a cult.  Cheyney was unnervingly evil, but he was just the Veep and W. was honestly unlikely to be impeached for anything, or kick off early.

This is the bargain that has been made by a certain segment of the Christian Church in America, for the illusion of power they have abandoned Jesus, they have rejected his example, from how he resisted the temptation of the Satan to how he willingly laid down his life.  When did Jesus grab for power? Never.  When he was offered the kingdoms of the world, did he take them? No. When they tried to make him king, did he accept? Also, no, he dodged them.

I found a passage that comes from one of Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems, I used this as our prayer of Confession on the "low Sunday" that falls between Christmas an New Years:

Hate has no world.

The people of Hate must try to possess the world of love,

For it is the only world,

It is Heaven and Earth.

But, as lonely, eager hate possesses it, it disappears.

It never did exist.

And Hate must seek another world that love has made.

Jesus showed us the way that love must move through this world, as a stranger and an alien, it has no home in the world of power and violence.  The Kingdoms of the World are illusions and lies compared to the reality of Love.  If we love we know God, and we are in Christ.  If we think there is another bargain to be made, we do not know the truth.  What Wendell apprehends is that Hate cannot own, dominate or pollute Love, what he sees though is that Love will not even use the tools of Hate to defeat Hate itself, it simply disappears and remakes (resurrects) the world once again.

A Proverb

One who justifies the wicked and one who condemns the righteous

are both alike an abomination to the Lord.

-Proverbs 17: 14

I have not written here for quite some time.  Part of the reason for this is that I have been spending a greater share of my time exercising my body, and less time sitting in front of a computer.  But honestly, I could have found the time if I so chose, I just didn't choose.  The reason for this silence is in part that I just don't know if I have anything of value to say about the events that have dominated the past several months.  I have been following the inquiries and the testimonies, I have been watching the Tweets and posts, and it would seem to me that there is pretty clear evidence that our not-so-beloved leader is a corrupt person, but then again, I knew that in like 1998, this is not new information.

I have some measure of confidence that our Republic will survive the impeachment.  In fact, I have been given confidence in watching William Taylor, Maria Yovanovitch, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, and even in a strange way Gordon Sondland.  The thing that became clear to me was that these people, even Sondland, all had a clear sense that something was rotten in Ukraine.  None of them are what you would call liberal, let alone leftist.  Most of them, Sondland being the exception, are career government people, call them bureaucrats if you want, but they are professionals whose training and experience qualify them to deal in international affairs on behalf of our nation.  Even the lone Trump booster, Sondland, seemed to realize that the gig was up, they had been caught doing something that probably has pretty severe consequences and seemed to apprehend that lying to Congress was going to put him in the pokey with Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone (eventually).

What I am not so sanguine about is whether or not our commonweal will ever be what it was four years ago.  Trump has erupted with what George Will colorfully called "a Vesuvius of mendacity." The man just rarely tells the truth.  This is, of course, entirely consistent with who he is and who he has always been.  I spent a good deal of time being angry with people who voted for Trump, which includes some people I actually love very much.  At this point though, I feel sorry for them, because if they have an ounce of perspective and are paying attention to any sources other than Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, they must realize that they were conned.  They were conned the way that all the people who did work for Trump and didn't get paid were conned, they were conned the same way all the students at Trump University were conned, they were conned the same way that apparently the entire Republican Party is being conned.

In the process of duping his way to an electoral victory, Trump has had to up his game from simply sly mendacity to outright demagoguery.  Now that he is out there on that thin ice it is far too dangerous for him to back up or admit that he is a sham.  He simply must continue to erode our common conception of the truth.  And the thing is, he has help.  He has willing co-conspirators in his assault on objective truth.  I feel like history will not be kind to Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, or even Mike Pence (who might actually be President for a minute before January 2021).  They will be the Spiro Agnew and Gordon Liddy of this debacle.

This is what worries me though, their calculus in allowing themselves to be rolled up in this sewer sandwich is a cynical political decision.  They know that there are still enough MAGA hat folks out there to last them through the next election cycle.  And the worrisome thing is that I suspect they're right, which means that our collective sojourn in the land of lies and half truths is not over.  Even if Trump gets his orange posterior handed to him next November, even if we fire the firer in chief, there are a lot of people who have hitched their wagons to the engine of falsehood that has been pulling this manure wagon through our society.

Our collective sense of trust is going to take time to rebuild.  We can't have another Trump, or another Clinton, we need more politicians like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, people whose integrity is not in doubt, even if you disagree with their policy.  We cannot accept con men, even if you think they will get you what you want.  I know, this sounds unrealistic, but it is in fact the supposition upon which our Constitution is founded, that our rule of law would constrain the raw greed and self-interest inherent to our worst impulses and a search after a "more perfect union," would elevate us to be more than just savages who look out for number one.

Jesus said that a bad tree will bear bad fruit and a good tree will bear good fruit.  He was very insightful about such things, even if you're not a person of faith, you can trust him on that one. Look at the fruit: indictments, prison sentences, world leaders (even Boris Johnson) laughing at him, cruel policies towards the poor and the immigrant, and to top it off our modern equivalent of Scribes and Pharisees saying how he might even be the chosen one.  A good economy is not the only measure we should be taking of how things are going.  How does this feel?  To me it doesn't feel good, it feels like, well... an abomination.

I'm going to be quiet again for a while, sanity requires it.

Well, The Earth Died Screaming, While I Lay Dreaming

But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a child';

For you will go to all whom I send you, and you will speak whatever I command you."

"Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to protect you."

-Jeremiah 1: 7-8

By now you have probably experienced the moral Rorshach test that is Greta Thunberg.  She is the sixteen year old Swedish girl who started going on strike because of our abuse of the environment.  She also has Asperger's which is now technically classified on the Autism spectrum.  Greta sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in a solar powered boat to address the UN in New York City on the subject of climate change.  She is quite frankly pissed off, and I for one do not blame her one little bit.  I sometimes wonder why my children aren't more angry about what we have been doing to the planet they will have to live on.

My political leanings are primarily motivated by an interest in two main pillars: the first is human rights, the foundation for this is my understanding of the Gospel imperative to love your neighbor.  I am not so much interested in left/right, liberal/conservative, platforms as I am pursuing a just society that upholds the dignity and commonwealth of all humanity.  Both political parties routinely let me down on this front.  The other pillar is environmental stewardship, which while it certainly does have a Gospel component of loving neighbors, goes even further back, to the very beginning when God created us to be caretakers and stewards of a good creation.  This is primarily the reason why, in the middle of the George W. Bush era, I switched my registration from R to D.  Because climate change denial was becoming frankly insane.  We were starting to see the effects, the science was mounting up.  If you attach the label "conservative" to yourself you should be interesting in "conservation." The party had plenty of cover and reasons to get on the right side of the environmental debates, they have overwhelming support among outdoor types (there is overlap with gun rights) and farmers, whose very livelihood is tied to care for our living biosphere.  This should never have become a left/right battle, but there is this little thing called capitalism that means money rules, and fossil fuel companies have a lot of it.

I could go on for a rather long time with details of how our addiction to burning things for energy has corrupted us.  The disastrous politics of the Middle East, human rights catastrophes and even the more moderate estimations of the long term effects of climate change should inspire any actual conservative to the same kind of anger that Ms. Thunberg demonstrated in the UN when she glared at world leaders and said, "HOW DARE YOU!"

We need to listen to Greta, she has no reason to lie to us, and her personality and disposition means she has no interest in being anybody's sweet little eco-princess.  Yet, again we choose up sides and start sniffing armpits and a bunch of full grown people with pretty solid educations decide that this little girl, sorry young woman, is somehow a threat to them, and they go on the attack.  That's because she's a prophet.  I have no idea if she's religious, probably not, but she's a prophet.  I talk a lot about prophets in this blog because I think they're important, and because we don't have enough of them.  Prophets don't have to have the solution to the problem (though sometimes they do), they don't have to be the perfect messenger, they can be broken and faulty people themselves, all they have to do is speak what the Lord gives them to speak.

I believe that whether Greta knows or believes it or not, The Lord has given her that message, "HOW DARE YOU!" She is not a puppet or some kind of apparition ginned up by the lefty tree huggers.  Tomi Lahren is what happens when a political ideology manifests in a well decorated incarnation.  Greta is what happens when the Spirit of a Loving Creator decides to speak through a human being.  God never picks the "perfect" messenger.  Abram and Sarai were too old, Moses stuttered, David was an adulterer, Jeremiah was too young and a bit off (sort of like Greta), Amos gave zero junk, Hosea married a prostitute, Jesus was from Nazareth, you get the idea.

Listen, you that have ears.  Observe the reaction from the system, you that have eyes.  No matter what happens from here on out, a message has been delivered concerning our performance as stewards of God's creation, and it is an angry voice saying, "HOW DARE YOU!"

Twenty

On September 18, 1999 Michele Jackson and I got married at Merchantville Presbyterian Church in New Jersey.  The world was a different place then, we got hitched just before the end of the millennium, and a lot of people were stressing about a thing that was just called Y2K.  It was based on the idea that all these new-fangled computers wouldn't know what to do with themselves when all of the sudden they faced a double zero in the year column.  People predicted that electrical grids would crash and we would be cast back into the age of analog because all of our technology would basically have a nervous breakdown because of the impending double zeros.
As it turns out, it didn't end up doing much harm, if any. I guess one of the things that life has taught me in the last two decades is that the things you worry about are rarely the things that are really dangerous or difficult.  When you get married, you pledge to live your life with another person, to share in whatever comes down the pike, "for better or worse, for richer or for poorer...".  That's a bold promise to make and is usually only possible for people who are in a delusional state called love.
Sure you probably have some idea that there might be struggles.  If you actually have a professional clergy-person (such as myself) performing the ceremony they will probably have insisted that you get counseling of some sort prior to the event.  The primary purpose of this counseling is to let the people, who are living within the pleasant delusion of love, know that this thing called marriage can be difficult.  While they may, especially if they are young, assent to the sensibility of what you say, they will not really believe it, because surely they are different than everyone else and their love is oh so much stronger.  They will hear your admonishments that they need to learn to forgive and be forgiven, they will listen to whatever conflict management pyscho-babble you throw out there, and they will still walk down the aisle blissfully ignorant of anything that is going to happen after the reception.
In my line of work, I not only perform weddings, but I am in a position to observe marriages at all phases of life.  I see young parents trying to keep their toddlers clothed and reasonably quiet during church, I see families with teenagers trying to deal with monosyllabic "conversations," I know people going through fertility problems, people who have lost children, I have seen people married for longer than I have been alive dealing with the illness and death of their spouse.  Every one of those challenges, and the deep and meaningful variations on those challenges is a struggle that you cannot possibly be ready to face.
And yet, you do.
In the process, you change what you call love.  Love is no longer a pleasant delusion, it is a rock solid reality.  Marriage, if you stick it out long enough, clearly becomes an act of faith.  This is why churches, synagogues, temples and holy orders have been involved in something that is really on the surface just a civil arrangement. Faithfulness or fidelity is the core of what holds people together.  It is the promise of love.  Infidelity is the only grounds for divorce that Jesus recognizes, but that in and of itself, is a bigger idea than we generally recognize.  When you say the word "infidelity" in the context of a marriage you immediately envision "cheating," but that's far from the only way one can be unfaithful to a marriage.
You become unfaithful when you lose your faith in what you are together.  Sometimes it's stress that does it, one of those myriad challenges that we face as we go through life.  Other times it is just the numbness that comes with time and familiarity, people find themselves taking the other for granted, feeling easily aggrieved and set upon by the demands of another actual person, and absent of the pleasant delusion it becomes untenable.  The way to stay faithful is to take a minute to recognize the uniqueness of the one you Love, and to appreciate the Love they have for you as well. Acknowledge that both of you deserve to Love and be Loved, and what you were really doing way back when was promising to make that happen.
It has been twenty years since Michele and I made that promise.  We're still working on it.  When she changed her last name to mine, she kept the middle name her parents gave her rather than just bumping her maiden name back a space.  After twenty years I can't think of a better word to have in the middle of everything.
I love you Michele Faith Gaskill.  Happy 20th.

Travels in America

John Steinbeck once set out on a journey across America in a custom pickup truck camper named Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and his standard Poodle named Charlie.  Last week I set out on a less quixotic journey in my Volkswagen with my wife and two teenagers.  Still, when you travel you almost can't help but learn things, experience things and come back a little different than you were when you left.  Steinbeck's overwhelming assessment was that America was so very full of good people, but our publicity is terrible.  Travels in America with Charlie, was written in a seemingly different age, but it seems to me that America retains a very similar character.  We are better than we look, we are kinder than we sound, and we are more welcoming than you might imagine.
Our little family covered quite a bit of ground, Pennsylvania, to a little town that was our home for ten years, all the way across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and then into Wisconsin.  We stayed in a place on the edge of a tourist destination, skirting around the water parks and amusements of the Wisconsin Dells, never actually getting very close to them.  Then we went to Chicago, the second city and seemingly ate our way through that town like a hungry caterpillar.  Finally, we spent a night in Cincinnati, an act which inspired curious consternation among all who heard of it. Then we took the scenic route home through the hills of Kentucky, the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia and back home to the tidewaters of Maryland.  In between those places were the vast miles of interstate highway, across flat lands that reminded me of the Meseta.  The sky was the landscape and the clouds were all there was to see.  But of course this was America, and so there was advertising as well.  Advertising for food, for lawyers, for God himself.  The advertising for God was striking, and unsettling, to a traveling preacher.  It sent me back with a sermon illustration at the very least, but also I think, with a bit of a prophetic vision of something that needs some fixing.
The lectionary texts for yesterday were from Isaiah 58 and Luke 13.  The Isaiah text describes the way that God's people are supposed to change the world for the better, to have their "light rise in the darkness," to be "repairers of the breach."  Luke tells the story of Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath and invoking the predictable wrath of the religious folk because he broke the rules.  In the Gospel, the masses of people seem to have the good sense to rejoice in the healing and grace of God, it is the synagogue leader(s) who are shamed by their own hypocrisy.
Out there in America, I have seen so many little churches, who I do not doubt are doing good things, working to help their neighbors and create community and common good.  Then there are the billboards that seem to be trying to get people to be scared of God, and Hell and proclaiming judgment.  It produces a sort of cognitive dissonance that is becoming all too familiar.  It is not new, it was one of Steinbeck's major observations on his travels: America is more than what she seems.
Maybe it's just that old truism that Yeats pointed out:

The best lack all conviction;

The worst work with passionate intensity.

It's tempting to believe that, but I don't think the best lack conviction at all, they're just not interested in billboards, marketing schemes and branding.  This is why social media has become such a toxic sludge, because the good and the wise have learned to disengage from it.  On some rare occasions, a prophet arises who can use the tools for good, a Shane Claiborne or a William Barber III, masters the art of dancing on the cess pool without sinking, but it is more miracle than skill.

Too much of our public discourse has been taken forcibly by those who shout the loudest.  But America is a decent place that deserves better publicity.  We are not a nation of backward, bigoted, angry people, even if our figurehead wannabe emperor is exactly that. I'm not looking at this thing through rose tinted lenses either.  I saw the good, the bad and the ugly on our little jaunt through the Rust Belt and the Midwest and the upper south.  I saw lots of places where people still make things and I saw the new, clean, renewable technology that harnesses the wind to make us go.  I saw some really poor places and some ostentatious signs of wealth as well.  I saw signs of strip mines that had scoured the tops off of beautiful mountains, and I saw those mountains slowly turning green again.  We stayed in a neighborhood that was bustling with people who spoke Spanish and worked on a tricked out low riding van parked in the street, we smelled some really good things being cooked as we walked down the street.  They didn't seem like people who didn't belong here, they seemed like people who were the reason this country is great.  We also stayed in a neighborhood that is on that precarious turn from decay to renewal, and may either become something really vibrant or may simply gentrify.  We saw quite a bit of this country, and as glad as I am to be home, I am also rather excited to go see some more, because I need to be reminded more often that we are better than we seem on the news.

Here We are Again

Then they are again as before all suffering

and sleep deep sleep and have no glory

and their souls are white as silk,

and from the same longing both tremble

and are frightened by their heroism.

-Ranier Maria Rilke, Martyrs

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen; 

your hands are full of blood.

-Isaiah 1: 15

It's gone deeper America.  A few years ago, you may have been able to solve this problem with laws and regulations: more thorough background checks, reasonable regulations on what kinds of guns people could own, better mental healthcare. You might still try those things, but you would be like one of those medieval doctors trying to treat cancer by bleeding the patient with leeches, it might seem like the thing to do, but it's not going to cure anything.  The rot has gotten to the bone.  We have been denying our fear and hatred for too long, even the ones who preach love, we have been too easily duped into thinking that this problem of our violent hearts could be settled with rules and scraping around on the surface.

I should have known, when someone shot up an elementary school and nothing happened that it had gotten that bad.  Our laws could use some fixing, but until we change our hearts this is just going to keep going and there will be more and more martyrs to our violence and hatred.  Let's face it, the thing that motivates people to kill crowds of strangers, whether they use bombs, guns or airplanes is the idea that those strangers are their mortal enemy.  Yes, it takes a certain derangement to make the leap from a stranger to an infidel or an invader, but derangement never seems in short supply. The desperation that afflicts many who are young, poor and disenfranchised can easily be twisted to violence with some well placed propaganda, all the better if they have been raised to believe the world owes them something better than what they have. Stir the mix with a leader or leaders who confirms and legitimizes what often seems like a natural born fear of the other, and plays to the notion that they are the true victims, and the toxic cocktail is nearly complete.

Then it's just a matter of the tools for the job, which is the place where we usually take up the debate, but that's not good enough, not now.  Now is the time for lament, to rend our hearts and not our garments.  Now is the time to admit that we don't have a solution to the real problem, but not to ignore that there is a problem and what it is.  The problem is that we are taught to believe that there is not enough to go around, not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough freedom, not enough security, not enough dignity.  There is a fundamental flaw in the human heart that never trusts that there is enough, even though all our most "enlightened" teachers from Buddha to Jesus tell us that there is, in fact, enough.

The politicians, the emperors, the tyrants and the fascists will all tell us that there is not enough and we need to fight for our share.  The mystics and the holy people (if they are truly holy) will tell us that we need to cooperate because we're all connected and this fighting over "our share" is what creates all this suffering and pours innocent blood into all of our hands.  Even those of us who would "never" consider mass violence are guilty, because we believe the fundamental lie of scarcity instead of abundance and that lie prevents us from truly loving our neighbor let alone our enemy as Christ commends.  Indeed if the ones who desire to hold power do not want us to realize that true power is in being free of the fear they use to hold us in their thrall, the best thing they could do is to keep us focused on symptoms rather than the disease.  Offer us panaceas, or convince us that nothing can really change; sell us the notion of sweeping reform, or inviting us into the slow futility of incremental and shallow changes, or tell us that nothing really can be done; the grip of the principalities and powers tightens around our throat.

So what's the solution?

First of all, refuse to be afraid, and if you are afraid practice courage.  Second of all, refuse to hate, and if you are tempted to hate practice love most powerfully in that very place.  Third of all, be kind to one another, especially when you feel justified in meanness.  Each step builds on one another. I began with a poem and a prophecy, I will end with a similar pairing:

For God's sake, be done

with this jabber of "a better world."

What blasphemy! No "futuristic"

twit or child thereof ever

in embodied light will see

a better world than this. though they

foretell inevitably a worse.

Do something! Go cut the weeds

beside the oblivious road. Pick up

the cans and bottles, old tires,

and dead predictions.  No future

can be stuffed into this presence

except by being dead. The day is

clear and bright, and overhead

the sun not yet half finished

with his daily praise.

-Wendell Berry, The Future

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;

cease to do evil, learn what is good;

seek justice, rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord;

though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow;

though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land;

but if you refuse and rebel,

you shall be devoured by the sword;

for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

-Isaiah 1: 16-20

-Spoiler alert, that is the sermon text for Sunday

Divided We Stand

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves;

It is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles 

yet not sink to the bottom.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

One of the most troubling aspects of our American life over the past three years has been the failure of our common identity.  Our Constitution aims towards a "more perfect union," we hold the motto: e pluribus unum,  "out of many, One."  These are noble goals, and thankfully, while they may seem to wander like that rudderless ship, they, we, have not yet sunk to the bottom.

Over the weekend, as Donald Trump went on another one of his divisive tweet fests, this time with the entire city of Baltimore and its representative Elijah Cummings, I was struck by the response of Larry Hogan, the Governor of this State of Maryland that I have called home for over six years now.  Hogan is a Republican, but he is the sort of Republican that seems to be vanishing from the national scene at the moment.  As a "Red" official in one of the "Bluest" states, Hogan has had to learn to come together with people to seek the greater good of the community.  Hogan has been critical of Trump, but not in the bombastic and overheated ways that many, including libertarians and conservatives of the pre-Trump/never Trump style, seem to favor.

Hogan, in my estimation, recognizes that Trump is a symptom of a greater problem, not the cause.  I'm not sure precisely when it happened, but somewhere in my lifetime we have lost the ability to disagree without declaring the other side evil.  Now, when one argues over issues that one considers to be matters of moral decency, like say the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, or the protection of unborn children (to cherry pick one cause from each side), it is tempting to label those who disagree as cruel racists or baby-killers.  However, down this path lies madness in a nation that is trying to succeed in the grand experiment of democracy.

The difference between a Larry Hogan and a Donald Trump, is not so much their policies, but their character.  In a Chief Executive at any level, I would say that character matters much more than policy (which is why I did not love Bill Clinton, even though my centrist politics jived pretty well with his).  Hogan's response to Trump's attack on Baltimore (the largest city in Hogan's state) was not to call out Trump's racist dog-whistling or even to staunchly defend Baltimore (plenty of people are doing that), but to lament the divisive spirit of our times.  I have heard him do this before, and it is usually not warmly greeted by either right or left, but it remains the right response to this age.

Let me bring it down a level, and speak of what I know better than state or federal politics, let me talk about church politics, because as the pastor of a church I know what it is like to lead a group of people who do not always agree.  I am also familiar with the dynamic that emerges when moral ideas come up for debate.  The reason why church arguments become infamously toxic is because they happen within a community that is supposed to be a united body.  To say that the United States was founded on Christian principles may not be entirely correct, but they did lift perhaps the most crucial principle of unity from the writings of the New Testament, particularly the pleas and entreaties of the Apostle Paul to the church to be of one mind, the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Even as Paul practically begged people to love each other as brothers and sisters, he also had to continually correct them and teach them that being different was not the problem, not loving each other was the problem.

So, even now, in the church, which has been learning these hard lessons for two thousand years instead of just over two hundred, we can still get wrapped up in partisan debates and start labeling those with whom we are supposed to be One Body, as enemies, heretics and apostates.

You could make a solid argument that, in fact, the church is in decline due to this failing.  Indeed, it may be on the way to dying.  But as Chesterton said, in The Everlasting Man, the church has died several times over the course of her history, but we serve a God who has managed to find his way out of the grave.  The dangerous thing for a nation/empire, is that God finds them exceedingly disposable.  The Church stands rooted in history and, despite my fears, I have faith that she will continue to stand, even if her form changes radically.  Our baby nation however, I am not so sanguine.

Over the past decades we have lost our rudder. We may be worse off than simply a house divided, we very well may have become a den of thieves.  Donald Trump is definitely a thief, he is a con man and a swindler at that, perhaps a worse sort of thief than even a common thug, because he brings into doubt the judgment of those whom he defrauds.  He has deliberately presented a "platform," if you can even call it that, which is entirely founded upon fear and division.  He clearly delineates the world into "good" people who support him and "love Trump," and evil people, who are "very unfair," any time they criticize him or even call him on what George Will colorfully named a "vesuvius of mendacity."

In my world, I have experienced the travails of trying to seek a middle way, to find a compromise on issues where there is stark disagreement.  You usually don't make anyone happy, and then you end up getting shot at from both flanks. I believe that we need leaders like Barack Obama and Larry Hogan (they can come from both sides), who recognize our commonweal is more important than winning whatever skirmish is happening at the moment.

The alternative is to move farther apart.  In a church argument, often times the pastor becomes a casualty of one wing or another, and usually that wing bullies their way to a position of power, then they pick the next pastor, who is more "like-minded."  In the process, the "losing" wing feels disenfranchised and often leaves or fades away.  This is not good for the whole body, because part of it is now missing, even if you win, you lose.

That is where we are as a nation, Trump has sold himself (fraudulently in my opinion) as a winner.  He perpetually panders to his base and has pretty much rejected any strategy of reaching out to his detractors.  His approval ratings hover in the low 40's which is where they were during the 2016 election and where they have steadfastly remained.  His sales pitch is still working on many of the people he duped, I mean convinced, in 2016. His success has precipitated a crop of Democrats who use his same tactics: get hit, hit back harder; they yell, you yell louder; they tweet, you tweet more.  While I am having a hard time getting on the Biden bandwagon, I now see the danger in my darling Bernie.  What I am hoping for in 2020 from the blue side is a return to normalcy.  I would like someone of character that is willing to stand on the middle ground, because I believe (maybe it's a vain hope) that the middle ground still exists.

So far, I do not see an Obama among the Dems, and I doubt Hogan is going to run a Quixotic primary campaign against the Donald, but we are still a long way from election day 2020.  In some ways I want it to get here faster, in others I am hoping that the arc of history has time to bend back towards e pluribus unum, before then.  This rudderless ship has been lucky so far, but I don't trust our luck that much longer.

Fourteen

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

-Wendell Berry, Sabbath 1998.VI

I keep telling myself that this will be the last year I do this.  I thought Ten years seemed like a nice round number, but I guess not.  July 23rd comes and with it thoughts that are beginning to seem like a well worn stone that I carry around in my pocket.  I thought perhaps I could leave it at the foot of Cruz de Ferro on the Camino, but I did not.  Sometimes I think I have laid it down or lost it, but I have not.  Sometimes I almost panic when I think it's gone, because it is all I really have left of my brother.

But it always comes back on this day, I can still remember the defeated sound of my father's voice when he said, "We lost Jonathan."  Tears still come when I think of that moment, the shock comes back again and again and again. Grief is that smooth stone.  The rough edges are gone, and it has become familiar and even comforting in a strange way.  Jesus did say, in his famously puzzling way, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."  At times it's hard to believe that, other times it seems like a truth that should be entirely self-evident.

This is why I know better than to ever assume I'm just going to "get over it." And it's why I try very hard to give others the space they need to grieve.  So much of our approach to stuff like this wants to rush in and help, to try and smooth out that stone quicker, but it's not possible, and it wouldn't be healthy even if it was.

I guess that's why I keep doing this year after year, because it's not for anyone but me.  If it helps someone else, so be it, but chances are it will not, their stone will be their stone, I can't give them mine, but I can tell them about mine.

Here's one of the last rough spots on my stone: this day the anniversary of Jon's passing, July 23.  It comes in the middle of the summer, when everyone and their brother is going on vacation, many of them are literally going with their brother.  People my age are usually teaming up with siblings to get a beach house or something like that.  I don't know for a fact that we would do that.  I don't know how broken or healed Jon would have been by the time he was pushing 40. It's the unanswerable nature of that question that jags me in the feels.  A wash of sentimentalism comes over me like a crashing wave.  I hear Bruce Springsteen's song Highway Patrolman, "Nothing feels better than blood on blood."

I don't know if you can understand that, I don't know if I'm adequately expressing what exactly plucks that heart-string.  Maybe I'm just whining at this point, after all I look at my daughter who was born less than a month after Jon died.  She's in high school now, her entire life happened in the wake of this disruption of our family.  My son has only pictures of his uncle holding him to even know that they met. In my better moments, I hope that this stone somehow makes me a better father to them, but I know that it has definitely cost them something too.  I have used it as an excuse not to do certain things, not to go certain places.  I have pointed to it's incontrovertible existence as a reason for many things, some good, some bad.  But sometimes I wonder if they really should have even known it existed from the time they were old enough to understand the word death.

These questions have no answers, and these ramblings have no end.

Still, I keep coming back to them on July 23.

Ripening

This is what the Lord God showed me - a basket of summer fruit.

-Amos 8:1

I don't much care for the stifling heat and humidity of summer, but I do love the produce: tomatoes that are actually red, zucchini the size of a baseball bat, sweet cherries, homegrown peppers, stuff that is locally grown and sold out of barn stalls and roadside stands.  But you know that stuff has a shelf life; it can go from good and ripe to rotten and moldy in a matter of hours.  I consider it to be a private little miracle when I manage to eat an avocado at exactly the right time, when it has just gotten a little soft, but not too soft, but it is a pretty tricky deal.

What I like about Amos' visions is that they are vivid without getting weird.  The plumb line and the basket of fruit, are pretty straightforward in their meaning, yet they pack enough of a visceral punch that you can't just breeze on by them. I think a lot about the plumb line, but lately I have been feeling like the basket of summer fruit, just on the verge of rotten, applies to a lot of what is going on in our nation. There are some people who seem to think it has gone past a point of rottenness, and others who think it may be fine.

In my family we have differing opinions about bananas.  My wife likes them on the green side, my daughter just a bit riper, and I like them when they start to show a little bit of brown.  None of us are wrong in our preference, and that, in normal times, is sort of what our political life amounts to, reasonable people on a spectrum between left and right, liberal and conservative, dovish to hawkish.  Much ink has been spilled over the fact that things "suddenly" seem to have gone rotten.  Now it seems someone one disagrees with has to be not only wrong but evil.

In my better moments, I want to believe that people who disagree with me are acting and thinking in good faith, even if what they say seems wrong, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have been trying really hard to do that for Donald Trump, but he is just not giving me much to work with.  His latest twaddle fest, where he tells certain un-named U.S. congresswomen to "go back where they came from," even though three of the suspected four were born here, just does not strike me as something that reasonable people can disagree upon.  It is racist, in fact it is one of the earliest brands of racist speech that I can remember, before I ever heard the N-word, I remember certain kids on the Elementary school playground telling a black kid to go back to Africa (the black kid was not surprisingly as much of an American as we were). I also remember teenagers on the street shouting at Hispanic men to go back to Mexico (very dangerous stuff if they happened to be Puerto Rican).

The racist tone of these taunts was never in question, even before I really knew what racism was, I knew these things were despicable.  So, even though I do indeed question Trumps judgment sometimes, I have to assume that he has at least the intellect that I possessed in the third grade.  He knows they are despicable and he has chosen, not just to say them, but to stand behind them, to belligerently re-iterate them.

Pundits have theorized that perhaps this is just some grand political scheme to make "The Squad," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Ihan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, the "face" of the Democratic party.  The theory goes that if Trump has to run against a moderate that doesn't inspire the hatred and fear of "middle America," whatever that means, he is doomed to be a one term President.  He is so desperate to avoid this, either for egotistical reasons or possibly to avoid criminal prosecution, that he is willing to wade into the cesspool of white nationalism and racial antagonism.  This is, frankly, the only explanation that gives Trump an excuse that does not make him a stone cold racist, but it makes him pretty much a moral failure all the same.

Look, in my youth I know that I, trying to fit in, engaged in some reprehensible talk with people who held racist, sexist, homophobic and any number of other abhorrent attitudes.  I know what it's like to feel like you need to "pander to the base."  I do not look back upon those times as proud moments.  I was a teenager, or younger, by the time I was 18, I had developed a firmer grip on what was good and righteous, now at almost 45 I can speak carefully and tactfully and without deliberately offending people if I choose.  Donald Trump is in his 70's, what is his excuse? Senility? Perhaps, but I think it's deeper than that, he may not, as he says, "have a racist bone in his body," but his tongue is not a bone, his brain is not a bone (well maybe it is ossified), and the muscles that guide his metacarpals over the twitter keyboard have been acting pretty damn racist.

More troubling than the single case of Donald Trump, is the rottenness that this reveals in our nation.  No, it didn't happen all at once, racism is in some very real ways an ingredient of who we are, but we don't have to let it be our primary flavor. We can grow up instead of rotting.  Or we could continue on the path we're on, but in that case I suggest you read Amos chapter 8 past verse one, see if you like the results.

Growing Pains

If you have not been reading David Brooks columns in the New York Times, I suggest you start.  He is, in my opinion, one of the people we most need in our culture right now: a conservative who has not either lost their mind or decided to hide until the current wave of maniacal tribalism subsides.  That Brooks (along with Michael Gerson, George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and a few others) often sounds like a progressive is merely a testimony to how off-center our public discourse has actually become.  Brook's column for today is not merely a commentary on the dominant headlines, but also a crucially useful history of the word Liberal.
In seminary, I was fortunate to have a Church history professor who had decided that the best way to teach history, particularly Church history, was as an evolution of ideas rather than just dates.  You can quickly look up the date of the Council of Nicea or the Diet of Worms and the names of those involved, but to understand the theological and philosophical assumptions that brought about those events is much more valuable.
Brooks does a good job of defining Liberalism, not just as a political point on a spectrum between left and right, but as an underlying assumption that is in fact responsible for much of what we count as human progress over the past thousand years. If you know your history of ideas, you know that Liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment, the age where humanity began to put reason and logic ahead of superstition and magical/mythical understanding.  The Enlightenment brought us out of the dark ages and into what is sometimes called the Modern world.  The Protestant Reformation was the religious child of the Enlightenment, only a Liberal mindset could have dared to challenge the nearly all-powerful Roman Catholic Church.  Martin Luther, John Calvin and their ilk had that deep sense of humility, which at times bordered on paralytic doubt, which kept them from truly wanting to be revolutionaries.  The reason those two particularly have become more commonly associated with the Reformation than say Ulrich Zwingli, is that they both thought that changing the church from within could ultimately be possible.  It took the Roman heresy trial and the attempt to kill Luther and it took Farel's emotional manipulation of Calvin for them to clearly become revolutionaries more than reformers.  Still they held on to the idea of reformation rather than destruction.
Conservatives/reactionaries prefer the status quo or even a regressive movement towards a past they thought more ideal.  Radicals/progressives want the utter inversion of a revolution where the low places are lifted up and the mountains are brought low.  Liberals, as Brooks explains so well, want the existing system to work at its best; if that requires change they lean towards the left, if that requires stability they lean to the right.  Thus they are frustrating to both left and right, because they seem to waffle and prefer to work for incremental, slow and steady change, and are not afraid of compromise or taking a few steps back.
Liberalism obviously has its own set of weaknesses, and those weaknesses have been on full display of late.  Around the world we seem to be pulled towards illiberal regimes.  Figures like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are representative of Liberalism.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were also representative of Liberalism, a fact which eludes many who have come to see the word as a synonym for left-leaning.  Reagan and Thatcher operated in a world where the assumptions of Liberalism were fully in tact and thus were able to engage their right leaning agendas in a very effective way, both of them would be absolutely awash in the current milieu, even though they played a large role in creating what exists now.
What exists now is not healthy, it is essentially the adolescence of what we call Postmodern thinking.  Remember that Liberalism and Modern thought are inherently linked, you can't have one without the other.  Postmodern thought therefore is also in some sense Post-liberal, but obviously this new age has not yet grown up, the tantrums and fits of extremism are symptoms of that, as are the sullen pouts and whining about things not being fair.  Can you tell I live with two teenagers?
One hopes that the Trump era, like the teenage years, ends without irrevocable damage to the psyche of this nation.  In Freudian terms, what we are seeing is the ascendancy of the Id, mercenary lying to suit any purpose, political hedonism, actual hedonism, lack of moral direction, raw self interest, profound narcissism, all things that one associates with adolescence. The Super-ego, that mature part of the psyche that hopefully takes charge in a mature adult, is basically a skinny nerd that the Id easily shoves into a locker at the current moment.  Right now that Liberalism that has been the Super-ego of the world for centuries, now sounds like Jiminy Cricket or a nagging mother, or a Father who says, "of course life isn't fair, nobody ever said life would be fair."
For all the rowdy, Id-dominated chaos of Twitter, it is good to be able to read actual professionally vetted journalists.  I appreciate the Liberal institution of Newspapers (even though I read them mostly on line), more now than I ever have in my life. I really do hope and pray that they survive, they may be our best hope of growing out of this.

Twaddler = Twitter

When at last the right one comes along, to set fire to this wilderness that is the asylum of all twaddle, all illusions, all clever tricks, he will, no doubt, already find there before him a company of twaddlers - a crowd.

***

Everything depends upon getting rid of the crowd, for all the crowd does with its hearty sympathy is to eradicate the real seriousness from the cause.

-Soren Kierkegaard, What Says the Fire Chief? (from Attack Upon Christendom)

Sometimes a stupid, inane thing clarifies something rather serious.  In the past week that stupid, inane thing was a mermaid, specifically a "Little Mermaid."  In the vast world of entertainment, where there is so much money to be made from the direly under-engaged and over-stimulated, the giant media corporations have determined that re-making old properties rather than taking risks on new things is a sure bank account booster.  That's why they're just doing old movies over again, that's why they can release a Marvel universe movie every three months and still make major cash, that's why Star Wars is still the biggest deal out there, even though most of us true believers have had to drastically adjust our expectations downward to avoid being angrily disappointed.

But this state of the entertainment industry is not my point, my point is that, in Disney's upcoming remake of the Little Mermaid, Ariel is going to be black.  My first reaction to that was... never mind, I didn't really have a first reaction to that, because I didn't know it was a thing, because my daughter has sort of outgrown Disney-princesses and because our family has thankfully graduated to movies where the characters use profanity (not saying that's great, it's just a step you take in life).  What I became aware of first was that there was a "backlash," maybe... sort of... well at least someone imagined that there was.  I mean there was a hashtag: #notmymermaid, so these days that means there must be something real right?

Question though, do you know anyone who is really, honestly upset by a re-rendering of a classic character as a different race? I bet if you do, it's more of a, "why did they have to do this at all?" sort of puzzlement.  That's sort of what I feel about the re-boot of Ghostbusters, it bothers me not at all that they made the 'busters female, I just wonder why they had to remake that movie at all.  The original had Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver and was already about as perfect as you could make such a ridiculous film.  Thus I think, as one who came on the scene of a "fire" already in progress, a lot of the people who were upset about a remake of The Little Mermaid, seemed to be in that boat.

But the Twitter-verse did not take it that way, oh, not at all.  This cause was immediately taken up by the most virulent twaddlers (thank you Soren, I am going to add that old word back into my vocabulary) on both the left and the right.  The racists on the right never seem to need much ammunition to add to their arsenal of cultural grievances.  This was clearly an attempt by the liberal elites in Hollywood to erase the white race from yet another beloved cultural institution: an animated movie about singing fish.  On the left the thought police were in full swing: "how dare you be angry about the attempt to simply increase the representation of brown people in media, you horrible racists you!"

Like Kierkegaard's hypothetical fire chief, I began to consider that perhaps the "crowd" really is the problem here.  Is our country "haunted" by racism? Yes, it is.  Do we have a long way to go before we reach true equality in thought as well as law? Yes, we do.  But I was really trying to figure out who was actually upset by a black mermaid, and as far as I can tell, it was all pretty much secondary outrage.  Someone, maybe what the old timers called a muckraker, tweets something critical of the idea and because Twitter is what Twitter does, the twaddle commences in earnest, and the flames get higher and higher.

I am trying not to be a cranky old man about these social media things, I understand that they do a lot of good, but they're also becoming increasingly toxic, and leaving all of us with a sour taste in our mouth.  The immediacy and reach of Twitter especially allows every little spark to become a full blown structure fire, and we don't have the ability to sort out what is really dangerous and what is just twaddle.  By the way, I'm going to post this on Twitter, but I'm not using the hashtag, because I don't want to get too close to the flame.

Shameless

Gather together, gather,

O shameless nation,

Before you are driven away

like the drifting chaff,

before there comes upon you

the fierce anger of the Lord,

before there comes upon you

the day of the Lord's wrath.

-Zephaniah 2: 1-2 (NRSV)

I thought of a lot of things I might start with this morning, but this really seemed like a time for a Prophet.  I was scrolling through the usual stuff on social media.  Reading arguments about whether or not we should call them detention centers or concentration camps.  Looking at vulgar rhetorical smackdowns from both sides of the left-right divide, and yes, even the ones I tend to agree with are vulgar, because they do not convince, they do not heal, and most importantly they do not alleviate the suffering that is taking place at our southern border.

There should be no argument that what is happening to people in those facilities is unacceptable, but the unacceptability goes very deep indeed.  The depth of this problem is such that you can't even lay all the blame on Trump, these places and practices existed under Obama as well.  Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric has not helped issues, and his America First foreign policy that has led to actually decreasing foreign aid to crumbling Central American countries, as well as his bombast about a wall and his bullying of pretty much anyone who gets in his way are just festering boils on the surface of the problem.  But he didn't start this fire, he's just throwing kerosene on it.

The fact of the matter is that we have become shameless when it comes to our responsibility as human beings.  Whether it is our environmental impact, our complicity in heartless policy decisions, or our general ignorance of reality, we feel no shame.  If we're honest, we must admit that our appetite for cheap goods, illicit drugs and our governmental penchant for meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations, has led to a toxic situation in Central America.  Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are on the brink of becoming failed states (some would say over the brink).  Our "War on Drugs," has been lost on almost all fronts, and the most tragic consequences of that ill advised strategy has left cartels richer and more powerful than governments.

The people who are arriving at the border seeking asylum are distinctly different than the migrant workers who were the face of undocumented immigrants a decade ago.  It is my belief that we should have been more kind and open to those migrants, mostly Mexican, mostly here to make some money that they could send home.  It was a "problem" that didn't need to be called a problem. Yet, it bred resentment and fear.  It led to people becoming irritated by non-English speakers and having to "press one for English" on phone menus. Seriously, is it that hard? That vague and mostly unwarranted resentment, led us to harden our hearts and close our minds and to shut down our compassion. If we could not open our hearts to people fleeing simple poverty, working in our fields and cleaning our hotel rooms, it was only a matter of time before our hearts atrophied even further.

Now we have massive numbers of people who are fleeing horrific violence and crushing poverty, we have mothers with young children, families of people who feel they have no other hope than these United States.

I am humbled by the fact that, for all our mistakes and our complicity in the creation of the nightmare from which they are trying to wake, they still have some hope that this nation of ours will also be the solution. I am grieved and ashamed that we are letting their children sleep on cold floors and deeming basic hygiene supplies "unnecessary." I am ashamed that we spend our time arguing over what to call this atrocity, rather than simply working to end it.  I am ashamed that we have become such a shameless nation. I have heard people declare that God is going to judge our nation for everything from being too nice to gay people to allowing our kids to play too many video games, but if you read the Scripture with any seriousness you will notice that how we treat strangers and immigrants is actually a really major point, I offer the following examples, but please know this doesn't even scratch the surface: 

Exodus 23: 9 : You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt. The basic premise of Israel's treatment of outsiders.  Repeated early and often, usually right on the heels of the Ten Commandments.  Seriously, this is all over the books of the Torah.

Deuteronomy 23: 15-16 : Slaves who have escaped from their owners shall not be given back to them. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.  Particularly salient on how to deal with people who are fleeing oppression, even though slavery was not considered the abomination it is to us.

Isaiah 58: 6-12, Just look up and read the whole thing.

Luke 10: 25-37, You guessed it, the Good Samaritan.

Matthew 25: 31-46, Seriously, is the shame kicking in yet?

D-Day

I went to Normandy in High School, on a trip with my French class.  We spent most of our time in France doing pretty typical tourist stuff: castles, chateaus, the Eiffel Tower, even a winery.  The day we were going to go to Omaha beach was cold and rainy.  Our tour guide was a little french woman, who actually looked exactly what you would expect a French tour guide to look like, and who much to the delight of a bunch of adolescents pronounce the word beach like "bitch." She was standing up in the front of the bus saying things like, "when we get to the bitch, we are going to have about two hours to walk around and see the bitch." The boys in the back of the bus chuckled, because we were 17 and idiots.
When we did get to the bitch, I mean beach, the laughter stopped abruptly.  The bus stopped in a parking area where you could see the gray expanse of the North Atlantic and a couple of bunkers atop a cliff, but the thing that immediately yanked your eyes and shut your stupid mouth was the white crosses and stars of David that covered the landscape, thousands of them.  We got off the bus silently, pretty much for the first time in a week that we were really quiet as a group.  I walked down to the cliff, looked in a few bunkers and meandered along the coastline, I saw the iron beams still rusting away in the surf, I saw the sheer impossibility of landing on such a narrow strip of sand with machine guns perched in those concrete pill boxes.  I began to get a sort of choking feeling in the back of my throat.
I turned up the hill and started to walk among the graves, looking at the names.  It dawned on me that a lot of those names were probably not much older than me when they piled out of the landing vehicles and went into the meat grinder.  Saving Private Ryan was still a few years off, so at least I didn't have that vivid visual to go with it.  I wondered if they had been sitting out on the ships before the invasion, laughing at rude and inappropriate jokes just like my classmates on the bus.  They probably had, in fact it may have been worse.  The shadow of the gallows tends to bring out the blackest type of humor.
I sort  of lost track of time, we were supposed to be there for two hours, but the grim Normandy weather had apparently altered the deal with most of my classmates, as I came within sight of the bus, I noticed that it was beginning to move, I was about to be left in a graveyard in a foreign country, but all I could do was laugh.  The sobriety of the past hour or so made the prospect of actually getting left behind by my tour bus, just not even that big of a deal.
Fortunately for me the bus stopped, my seat mate had done his job and told the teacher that we were one idiot short.  I saw my teacher pop out of the door of the bus, scan the terrain and start waving and yelling at me to get down there pronto (huite, huite). I did, and I got back on the bus, and back into the world of high school kids making fun for almost getting left behind.  I looked back on all those white markers that were actual kids who were going to stay there forever. 75 years they have been there, having given everything for the sake of humanity (that war was more about that than most people realized at the time).
Even the ones who survived are leaving us now. This is not a political statement, just a reality that all of us need to deal with: we should be worthy of what they did, and what they gave us at the cost of their lives, that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan where Ryan asks his family if he was worthy of the sacrifices that were made for him, is something we all need to ask ourselves.  Remember them yes, but more importantly let's work on getting to be the country they were fighting for rather than a bunch of idiots who get distracted by stupid things and shiny objects.

Pure Products

Selected lines from Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963):

The pure products of America

go crazy ----

***

peasant traditions give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags -- succumbing without

emotion 

saved numbed terror

***

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flocks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

I guess the reason why the blues is such an American form of music is that we are probably the first nation/empire in the history of the world to realize just how crazy we actually are. Songs and poems about the desperate and downtrodden seem like our real national hymns, much more apt to our nature than soaring anthems about glorious battles.  I think the founders realized that in their audacious democracy they would either succeed grandly or fail utterly.  For at least the first century of our existence, many in Europe thought our foolish rebel experiment would surely implode.  There were chances to be sure, we may be in the middle of one right now, but maybe not.

I have written a lot in this space about the gut-wrenching feeling that no one is driving the car, that we lack leadership or that the moral fiber of our leaders has failed, perhaps fatally.  In order to maintain my sanity, I try to spend at least a little time each day leafing randomly through some of the books in my office, not looking for sermon illustrations, not reading for any purpose whatsoever, just looking for something to sort of float out of the ether of humanity and divinity that is contained in the collection of old fashioned actual paper books.  I realize I spend too much time reading electronically, searching for exactly what I want to see and think about or simply following the algorithms that google and facebook feed me (it seems to destroy me).  Today I came across William Carlos Williams who wrote in the first half of the 20th century.  The line that grabbed me was: The pure products of America go crazy.  That's often how it is with poetry and me, I don't much have the ability to sit and just read through a poem unless something grabs me, but when something does grab me it's like a tractor beam on the Death Star, pulling me in. For the purposes of this reflection, I trimmed and edited pieces that followed, something that I would be critical of if it were scripture, but  it's not and I didn't feel like re-typing the whole section.  Read the entirety if you want, it's good.

But what I want to focus on are not the dire sounding warnings but the glimmer (even if it is just a glimmer) of hope that by that last stanza: 

It is only in isolate flocks that

something

 is given off

No one 

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

You may focus, if you want, and Lord knows I often do, on the absence of a driver, which we are almost certainly experiencing again and not for the first time.  Or you might, as I found myself doing, focusing on that "something" that is given off by the "isolate flocks."  The communities of this nation of ours are not anything like the catastrophe of mendacity, polarization, mistrust, racism, xenophobia, class anger, and general misanthropy that you might imagine if you just look at the headlines.

Don't blame the media though, there really is no one to witness, because what is there to see? Broken humans somehow being kind? People who should fear one another learning to trust?  How should a reporter in New York find out anything about a group of people fighting for fair housing in Southern Maryland? More to the point, why would they?  Even up the road in Washington DC, would they care?  Maybe they should, but it doesn't make economic sense for them to write about normal people from little places doing good things.  The absence of a driver seems much more pressing.

The hope comes from the back pages and the back streets, where the products of America aren't quite so pure.  They're not red white and blue nationalist and pure capitalism, those are the "peasant traditions that flutter and flaunt sheer rags."  The people that we must learn to trust are the products of America, but not so pure that they can't question the wars we wage, or the values we hold, because if you don't question yourself, you do end up going crazy.  If you cling to purity too tightly you end up with nothing and you "hunger until you eat filth." 

Still, the sanity comes back from something, somewhere, the idea that people are not as vile and delusional as the fools they have elected king.  Maybe it's better that there is no ONE to drive, maybe that too is a product of America.  Maybe the best of what we are, and our best hope, is to really embrace the reality that we need no king and that we can survive a demagogue, and praise the wisdom of our founders for knowing that was going to be necessary.

In the meantime, read more poetry.

Of Endings and Abstention

This is marginally about Game of Thrones, but I don't think I need to give spoiler alerts, because I'm not actually going to talk about the finale or anything specific in the final season.  I'm going to talk about the reaction to the show in general. The Twitter and Facebook world that we live in now gives us the "opportunity" to hear about what our friends think about things, which is good... sometimes. 
But the thing is, as we get more and more immersed in this constant stream of tweets and status updates, it seems as though the quality of our "sharing" goes down proportional to its frequency.  Social media "experts" (which are a thing I guess we just have to live with now) tell us that your "presence" needs to be constant and consistent in order to stay on the wave of follows and threads.  Which is why we get daily tweets from the orangutan in chief (sorry that's disparaging to orangutans, forget I said that).
The thing I have noticed over the past month, since the final season of GOT descended upon us, is that posts about the show went in one of three directions:

1. Posts about what might happen, which have been common since the show became something of a cultural phenomenon.  Fan theories, critiques etc. This is what one sort of expects with anything that tickles the collective geek bone of our mass media immersed culture.  Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, various forms of anime, the ubiquitous Marvel Universe and various other superhero stories all generate quite a bit of thinking, talking, hoping and dreaming.  Mostly this is good, relatively normal (at least as normal as geeks get) talk about the world of imagination and how a story effects those who love it.
2. Posts about how what actually happened was wrong, or disappointing or even morally problematic. These people seemed to forget that Westeros, and the Starks, and the Targaryens, and Jon Snow and Danerys, and Tyrion Lannister, are in fact fictional people, and that the narrative told by GOT is a story, not a historical account.  While it does in fact present certain moral lessons and brings us to question certain assumptions, an HBO series should not really carry much authority when it comes to defining right and wrong, justice and tyranny.  This crowd, I suspect, are the micro-aggression police that give Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson such job security. I will maybe go into this phenomenon some other time.
3. The third category are the posts by people who proudly proclaim: I have never watched GOT.  I have never read the books.  I don't give a fruit about your stupid TV show. I get the impulse, especially if you just read one of the posts from category number two, but you do realize that self righteousness is not an admirable quality right?

I guess the reason why this last group of folks annoys me is because I am a natural geek, I get into things and I like to know a lot about the things I like.  I have read the books, I have watched the show, I have paid attention to a lot of category one stuff over the course of the last decade. It doesn't mean I'm obsessed with GOT, I'm not going to sign the petition about a redo of the final season.  I'm not bitter that George R.R. Martin is taking forever to finish the Winds of Winter.  I like stories about dragons and armies of the undead.  I also enjoy space operas with laser swords and will get into theological debates about Yoda.  I can watch the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings pretty much any time I have about 5 hours of down time.

If you don't like those things, fine. I'll bet you like something I could ridicule if I want to, but I'm not going to try and do that, because why?  What does it help?  Are you going to convince a GOT fan to ditch the series finale because you're too cool to have gotten involved? Look, I'm not sure I would recommend the series to everyone, it definitely puts a dark spin on human nature and what power does to people.  The thing I find redeeming in the end is that the numerous and dire abuses of power are not the last word (not going any further, like I said, no spoilers).

But even if you don't feel like putting up with the story, or don't see it's value, why do you have to hate on those who do? There's too much of that going around, and yes, I understand that writing a blog where I just hate on the haters is possibly an example of irony, but I'm not saying you were wrong to avoid GOT, I'm not even saying that there's something wrong with you if you haven't watched Star Wars, but maybe just keep that to yourself.  Someone who loves to knit is not better or worse than someone who loves to play the piano.  Someone who likes Sushi is not better or worse than someone who does not.

I feel like this culture of "haterism" that infects the internet is not doing good things for us. So just like put on the brakes. Watched it? Cool.  Didn't watch it? Cool.  Watched it for a while and then quit? Cool.  Liked it? Cool.  Loved it? Cool.  Hated it? Cool, you have a choice and so does everyone else.  Sometimes we like things, sometimes we don't, people are different that's what makes the world interesting and that's why our stories are important, whether we like them or not.

An Answer

The rain was coming. You could feel it in the forest, the trees knew it. I was just past halfway on the familiar loop around the lake at Gilbert Run.  Zeke was taking a long drink in his favorite little watering hole, a little culvert that passes under the trail.  I stood still and looked up at the canopy in the full vibrant green of spring and the grey clouds roiling in the small windows of the forest's vaulted cathedral ceiling.
I had been thinking about a conversation I had with a friend of mine who has lost his faith and who is now agnostic.  I was wondering on the first half of my walk, how I might convince him to come back to the fold.  As I went through that pastor-ish mental exercise I came to the distinct impression that I was in a state of futility, I was trying to figure out again, despite knowing better, how to sell God.  And God was laughing at me.
As I stood still and actually listened to the sound of the wind in the trees and felt the expectation of the living things all around me, I realized that in my pursuit of a reasonable argument or even a sales pitch for God, I too had lapsed into agnosticism.  I had forgotten that the "proof" of God's existence can be felt any time and any where.  Perhaps I have been reading too much Richard Rohr (in fact, I know I have), but the strength of contemplative practice became evident right then and there.  My contemplative prayer is peripatetic, which means it involves walking.  The Camino and the struggle against type II diabetes have something to do with this, but really walking has been part of how I settle myself for most of my life.
On this day, I found I was not at all worried about the rain, in fact I was expecting it with the forest and the living things around me, welcoming it even as the trees do with their upturned leaves.  I wondered to myself, why would anyone want to deny the joy of this sort of communion?  Then I thought to myself, how often do you feel this way in church?  My answer, honestly, is almost never, I'm too busy in church to feel this way.
I suspect that people who lose faith, as in the case of my friend, haven't really lost faith in the divine presence, they have just lost their sense that religion has anything to do with it.  The problem is that without a religious approach to God you will eventually just become a mad pagan chasing after the spirits of the trees (which is quite appealing at certain moments).  My madman in the forest (the proper word is mystic) moments are tempered by the teachings of Jesus and the theology and ethics that grow out of that.  The emotional connection of that moment is great, but it's like water in your hands you can't hold it for very long.
Not even three minutes later, Zeke, as is his wont, was overcome by some olfactory delight at the trail's edge and lunged suddenly with full force towards whatever his nose detected, despite being firmly tethered to me by his leash.  This jerked me suddenly out of my feeling of peace and connection and made me momentarily very angry. I pulled back hard on the leash and yelled at the dog, he was, as usual, sorry and fearful.  I immediately regretted my outburst at the stupid dog, he is an idiot and he is likely to remain that way for the rest of his days.  He is also a teacher to me, he is a reminder that love does not need to be worthy.  He is stubborn and borderline neurotic, yet he is friendly and loyal as dogs usually are.  He can annoy the living daylights out of me on a daily basis, and yet I do care about him.  Instead of letting my anger continue, I knelt down and gave the idiot a hug, and it was the right thing to do, if not for him, for me.
The vague feeling of connection to God would have been utterly lost by that momentary jerk of the leash and a flash of anger, which is why paganism, while persistent and attractive, doesn't have the same historical solidity that the monotheistic religions have.  Feeling that connection is good, really good and close to the heart of God, but without some framework to get you past the challenges of life (stupid dogs in this particular occasion), you will always be on a quest for something you cannot find without grace or keep for very long.
I needed to forgive and be forgiven, and that was the work of Christ in me there on the trail.  As soon as I felt that, the forest breathed around me again and life reconnected with my spirit, and I was back in that place as a beloved creation, full of a divine Spirit.  This, for me, is what the life of faith looks like. I can't imagine not wanting to feel the life of the world and feel connected to creation.  I understand that religion gets frustrating and tiresome at times, but at it's best it gives us a way to put the stones of these spiritual realities together into something like a work of art rather than just random rocks that we happen to trip over.
I'm not really sure how to parse out the sequence of events.  I know I have felt that connection with the creation for pretty much my entire life, so I'm not sure I've ever really "lost faith." I do know that I didn't always connect that God experience with Christian faith.  In fact, the moment when my faith journey really took a turn was when that vague feeling took on the specific character of Jesus.  It is still working that way.  Then all he asked me was to recognize him, as the Gospel for this Sunday says, "my sheep know my voice."  The more time goes by, as I walk more, it's not just recognition but discipleship, following him, doing what he does, loving the way he loves.  Now the mystical moments of connection with the divine have a trinitarian character to them (honestly it's the only time I think I really understand the Trinity).  The Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer are all a part of that ineffable and barely describable moment where I know beyond all reason and beyond all doubt that God is there.

Lend Me Your Ears

What makes a man a sophist is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.

-Aristotle, Rhetoric

We are, as a nation, and perhaps in the Western world in general, at a crucial moment in terms of our development from a world of tribes, clans and nations into a world that is more global.  There is great potential for us to finally recognize that all of humanity is bound together and that our collective well-being may very well be dependent on how we deal with that reality.  This moment has created anxiety, as such moments always do.  It was this way in the days leading up to the enlightenment when those who began to develop a proto-scientific approach to the world were labeled sorcerers and heretics.  It was this way when an obscure sect of the Judaic faith began to openly challenge the Roman declaration that Caesar was Lord with the contrary assertion that, in fact, a Jewish man who had been crucified as a rebel, Jesus of Nazareth, was Lord. I imagine it was probably this way when the first band of roaming nomadic hunters discovered that they could settle down and raise crops and livestock.

Anxiety is a fixture in much of human history, it is rooted in our fundamental drive to survive, animals experience anxiety too.  Humans, who are able to reason and also use written and spoken words to persuade others, have a unique (as far as we know) ability to actually track the ways that our anxiety works itself out through history.  In this technological age, we now have the ability to actually watch as our anxieties work themselves out in real time, on the internet.  I'm writing this morning to appeal to you, my fellow human beings: we need to get our stuff together, this mess is not pretty.

As you may be aware, we have an election coming up next year, and no matter what side of the current political divide you happen to occupy, and especially if you find yourself somewhere in the middle, all of us very much need to learn some things from the deep history of the art of rhetoric.

The ancient Greeks considered Rhetoric to be one of the three great "arts," with grammar and logic, in fact, it was the art that synthesized the other two, it applied the rules of grammar towards expressing the work of a reasonable mind and expressing it in such a way as to convince others of something that we call truth.  As you may have noticed, of late truth has been orphaned and wanders alone in a wasteland of ill-formed opinions and poorly reasoned emotional reactions.  True rhetoric is the last shred of clothing this poor wraith has left and false rhetoric circles her like so many vultures and carrion crows.

While we may disagree across the political spectrum on what exactly the Mueller Report implicates with regard to the cultural gut check that is the Donald, one thing is clear: rhetoric is being used against us with some terrifying implications.  The power of rhetoric has been known for thousands of years, it's like a loaded gun just laying around for anyone to use.  One of the principles of Rhetoric is the idea of Kairos, which any of you Greek freaks will know concerns time.  The effectiveness of rhetoric is deeply dependent on timing, whether you are telling a joke or making an inaugural address.  The rhetoric of fear, anger and anxiety hit this nation at just the right time, and it was aided by a government that is clearly hostile towards our nation.  It's not all the Russians, but their timing was impeccable even if it was accidental.

This loaded gun of rhetoric has been picked up by some bad actors, the forces of xenophobia and separation, the corrupted mongers of war and greed. They have found that the internet creates a "target rich environment," in which they can maximize the lethal impact of their weapon, and they have loaded up on the ammunition of logical and rhetorical fallacies.  So my fellow citizens, we need to learn to take away their bullets.  The gun of rhetoric, much like our 2nd Amendment totems, is not something we can simple do away with, we need to learn to use it, and how to defend against it.  Unfortunately, like an unarmed populace we have not been trained well.  If you were to hand one of those dreaded AR-15's to a person who has never handled a gun before, they would probably have a hard time loading it and firing it at all, much less in an effective manner.  So it is with rhetoric, and it is not a one-sided problem.

Here's the fun thing, I have friends who occupy both ends of the political spectrum, and I see what they share on Twitter and Facebook, and most of the time I simply hang my head, because they have obviously been victimized by someone using one or more of the rhetorical fallacies with deadly effectiveness due to their own confirmation bias.  As far as I can tell, no faction on the current spectrum (including my own) is immune.  I find myself daily having to sort out what truth actually is, and wishing, somehow, someway, I didn't have to do so much for myself.

I have this cognitive dissonance that sometimes grows very loud: I know most of these people, and I know they're too smart and thoughtful to actually believe the crap that they're sharing, yet they do share... often they share a lot.  They share hateful ad-hominem (against the person) attacks, they share straw man fallacies by the score (that's setting up your opponent to be exactly the sort of sinister idiot that you can easily dismember). I feel like the world of social media has become a disaster of epic proportions because it is precisely like that metaphorical loaded gun, but it's actually perceived like a loaded gun in a video game.  We don't think of the internet as the real world, and the people we attack and vilify there we do not consider real people.  I have never felt a pang of guilt for shooting someone while playing a video game, but I am sure that if I shot someone with an actual gun, even if it was justified and even righteous, I would certainly feel remorse about it at some moment.  The problem is that the rhetorical bullets that are being shot in the cyber-world are having actual consequences in the "real" world.  The line has been blurred and maybe even disappeared.

I think one of the elements of rhetoric that the ancients always had to assume was the presence of the other, the interlocutor, the dialogue partner, you had to face your adversary or even your friend and know that you both had the same tools and were playing by the same rules.  If you lied they were going to call you on it if they could, in internet arguments the rules of rhetoric simply don't matter, which is why they end up being mostly futile.  I have had a few social media discussions over the years that stayed on the rails, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

It may be the case that the work of philosophy and theology is irrelevant to the post-modern age.  It may be the case that the "Arts" of grammar, logic and rhetoric are nothing but relics of a by-gone era, and if that is so I hope humanity finds some other framework for... well, being human, but I am not sanguine about the possibility that other systems are able to possess the moral foundation that the old ways have.  Without a moral foundation, as Aristotle implies, we will be utterly at the mercy of sophists and charlatans, which is a great danger to our very civilization.