What World do you live in?

 The Word always creates.  And words always create.  
The idiot, by definition, is simply a man who has talked himself into a world all his own.

-Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about how and why people believe the things they do about the world. Watching the recent debates and the corresponding kerfuffle on the interweb it occurs to me that we are now living in a world where the different tribes actually seem to believe their own worldview.  At the dawn of this spasm of corruption and mendacity called the Trump administration, Kellyann Conway coined the phrase "Alternative facts," and we all chuckled.  But as The Smiths once said, "That joke isn't funny anymore."  Last night Mike Pence told Kamala Harris that she was entitled to her own opinion, but not to her own facts.  At which point I nearly lost my ever loving mind; it was hypocrisy of the highest order for a man representing an administration whose rejection of all kinds of facts has led to botched handling of pandemic, moving in the wrong direction with regard to climate change, the diminishment of our national standing in the world, and possibly significant erosion of our national security, not to mention the baseless accusations about election fraud throwing our very democracy out into fast moving traffic.

Now, in all humility (even though I'm not feeling particularly humble), I must admit that perhaps it is me who is the idiot who has talked himself into a world all his own.  Maybe it is Trump and his sycophants who are right about all of the things they seem so certain about.  Maybe all those pesky environmental regulations are not so much about clean air and water as they are about socialism taking our freedom away.  Maybe there is a reason other than racism to act with such callous disregard to all the black and brown people who are crying out in the street for justice.  Maybe the abortion issue really is worth sacrificing just about every other moral value in order to win what at this point will be mostly a pyrrhic victory.  I do have most of the scientific community on my side, including some parts of it that have never actually endorsed a political candidate before (Scientific American, The New England Journal of Medicine).  I have a large majority of the most reputable journalists, including some rather conservative folk, on my side.  And I have what is probably going to be a rather sizeable majority of the American voters on my side (but with the electoral vote situation there is still cause for alarm).  On the other side there is Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and a smattering of white supremacists, none of whom I particularly want to have a beer with.

Four years ago, we as a country made a choice between two worlds.  One was the politics-as-usual world that Hillary Clinton embodied.  It was pantsuits and empty promises.  Nobody loved it, some people resented it, but it still won a majority of the voting population.  Donald Trump represented a world of rich white guy power tinged by the orange fake tan of someone with boundless vanity and very little self awareness.  He also had a plan on how to exploit the narrow crack that opened in the door of the electoral college, the "blue wall" crumbled because Hillary didn't even look for the cracks.  For almost three years the experiment of Trump was annoying but not disastrous, and then nature came crashing through like the Kool-Aid man with little Corona virus stubby nubs all over him.  All of the sudden someone who had "alternative facts," wasn't just maddening, he was dangerous and deadly, to over 200,000 Americans at this point, including himself and most of his closest team.

Now we have a choice again.  Biden is boring, and Biden has been hanging around the government for pretty much his entire adult life.  Biden has some quirks, but they're normal old man quirks, not raging narcissist quirks.  Biden has been Veep, Biden has been a Senator, more importantly though, Biden has been through a crash course in humanity and compassion.  He is far from a Socialist, or even a Leftist, trust me, I know some Socialists and Leftists, they do not like him, or Clinton, or Obama, or pretty much any establishment Democrat.  The last six months should have taught us in stark detail that sometimes the boring adults need to be in charge.  It is fun to go to the zoo and watch monkeys fling poo at each other, but it is far less fun when they decide to throw it on you.

At this point the word is normal, please give us normal, enough with the novelty, enough with the constant barrage of unhinged and often blatantly false tweets, enough with the self-dealing and flexing.  I want me some boring normal Joe, and I'll take the first Black Woman VP as a little sauce on that.  Like that time when my gall bladder went bad and was making me sick, the doctor told me to go on the BRAT (bread, rice, applesauce and toast) diet until they took the stony little bugger out, we need to cool things down and all get back in the same world so that we can heal and start to live up to the standard of e pluribus unum, out of many one.

An Open (love) Letter

Dear Rural America,

I love you a lot.  I have been your son, your pastor, your biggest fan.  I have lived with you for years and been through a lot with you.  I know a lot about what makes you happy and what keeps you up at night, and that is why I love you.  But lately I have become a bit worried about you, because you seem to be buying something that is not good for you (and no I'm not talking about those deep fried twinkies at the fair).  I'm trying very hard to remember how good you are in your heart, so I'm going to start this with saying that I understand one of your greatest woes.  It is the woe that you sit at your kitchen table and lament, it is the woe that pervades your churches and your school boards.

It is quite simply the fact that your children are leaving you.  They are leaving you for the "big city," even if the "big city" isn't really big or even a city.  For the years I have spent with you I sympathized, I heard your explanation about jobs and opportunity, I listened with great empathy to the loss of a truly rural way of life that centered on growing and living things.  God knows I would want that too, if it really was the way you remember it.  I resonate with your Wendell Berry utopias where the people work the land and their labors produce all that they need.  That's straight up biblical, promise of God sort of stuff, I love that too. The fact that the sort of agrarian dream isn't really possible these days has been a long time coming.  Most farmers are far from self sufficient (except the Amish), they are perpetually in debt and rely far too much on subsidies (they don't like that one little bit either).  But look, that's not the only reason your children leave.

Your children leave because they have seen more.  Don't get me wrong, they all love the open fields and forests, the bonfires and the fairs, the animals and the natural beauty.  What they might also love though is the theater and sushi and art museums.  They might love these things because you provided a good education and some broader experiences than you had growing up.  You were good parents and gave them these things, probably not realizing that it would plant seeds in their souls that would grow like they did. On top of that, they have the internet and they see the variety of the world, and being young they don't fear it like you do.

Your children leave because your world smothers them. Some of those things they see out there in the world seem right and true and beautiful, but your churches (mea culpa) and your politics tell them that those things are wrong or evil.  They have openly gay friends who seem well adjusted and happy.  They have been taught a much healthier mode of sexuality, free from so much of the shame and guilt that has plagued such things for generations.  They consider that abortion is something that might be rendered obsolete by proper education, support and contraception rather than something to be rendered criminal by the government.  Most of them would rather save their righteous rage for things like racism and sexism rather than tax plans and fighting over the scraps left to us by the robber barons of big corporations.  They want to save that natural world that they love so much thanks to you.  The science you taught them in schools says that the ecosystem is in danger, and they're not buying all the old white guys with options in oil companies who tell them it's not.

You taught your children things about honesty and integrity, good job.  The trouble is, now they expect you to live up to those lessons.  When they see you vote for "the lesser of two evils," rather than really engage and expect leadership out of our government, they feel that you're betraying your own values.  They see hypocrisy, even in the most utilitarian sense, as a betrayal of the sort of honest straight-shooting ideals that are the best of you.  You can tell yourself it's all about jobs, lattes and avocado toast if you want, but these are your children, you know them better than that.

They won't and maybe can't tell you these things in so many words, but that's what is really going on.  I know because I talked to them and I've heard the other side of the sappy facebook posts about how great country life is.  I've heard them say they need to get out, for reasons that they can't always put into words, but I can hear it, and I have felt it, it's the desperate feeling that they don't really belong there anymore.  They want to stay for the comforts of home and family and clean air, but they can't.  And a job is usually just the excuse to get out of dodge.

I love you Rural America, but you have toxic stuff seeping out of your souls like acid mine drainage.  Your young folks know, even if they can't quite name it.  So they leave and hope they don't get cancer down the line. You don't need to be like the city folk, you don't need to adopt every lefty idea that comes down the pike, you should just actually be the people you honestly want to be.  Many of you are Christian, and if you actually listen to what Jesus said and follow him for real, you'll be on the right track.  But even for those of you who aren't particularly religious, just be honest and live with integrity.  Some practical advice would be to stop watching so much TV news and read more.  Spend less time trolling facebook and read an actual book.

But most important think about the people your children are becoming and be the home that they can be proud of, rather than the place they just want to escape.

When someone shows you who they are...

 Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!

-Jesus of Nazareth (The Gospel according to Matthew 23: 23-24)

I have to tell you that I was rooting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to hold out in her battle against pancreatic cancer as strongly as I have rooted for just about anything in recent memory.  I am not at all surprised that the Republican Party is now engaged in one of the most shocking acts of hypocrisy in recent memory (and we have had some good ones).  What does surprise me is that they didn't even wait 24 hours to do it.  I saw the headlines that RBG had passed and the headlines that Yertle the Turtle had vowed to hold confirmation hearings for Trump's nominee almost simultaneously.  I am not at all surprised that the same man who solemnly defended the franchise of the voters to deny Merrick Garland even a hearing, is now flip flopping.  I just sort of thought he might wait a day or two to proclaim his galling cynicism.

I have found myself reading and re-reading Matthew 23 quite a bit over the last several years, because of Jesus' repeated use of the formula: "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"  There are not many charges that indict our current political system with as unavoidable a stain as that of hypocrisy.  The fact that our highest court full of people we actually call "justices" will now have two people who are there because of a miscarriage of justice in the form of a blatant and cynical political maneuver (Gorsuch who should be Garland, and whoever this might be), two people (Kavannaugh and Thomas) who were credibly accused of misconduct (at least in Thomas' case the matter was fully prosecuted rather than summarily dismissed), is a rather dire summation of where we are as a culture vis a vis actual justice being done.

I understand that the skillful practice of law sometimes involves pulling the strings in the books and finding the loopholes.  I get that justice might be somehow served in convicting Al Capone of tax evasion rather than any of the myriad acts of violence he undoubtedly had on his hands.  I get that winning a not guilty verdict based on procedural missteps by police and prosecutors may put the guilty back on the street.  I know that the practice of law can be messy, but when it comes to things like the Supreme Court of the United States, the symbolism and the perception really matter much more than they do at the Charles County Circuit court.  There is a certain austerity to the proceedings of the SCOTUS that stands us all in good stead, unless of course it becomes tainted by political machinations, which it already is and which will, unavoidably, be worse however this turns out.

If we could go back in time and stop the Borking of Robert Bork, would it help?  Maybe, but ones suspects there were many off ramps on the road to this place we currently stand.  Unless a Delorean pulls up with a pair of flaming tire tracks, or a blue police box materializes, I guess we can't really know.  The fact of the matter is that right now we have yet another case where the majority of the country is hoping that four Republicans will have the spine to stand up to Yertle the Turtle King as he barks orders from the top of his stack of turtles, which is imminently in danger of collapsing and tossing him into the mud.  Our founding fathers, as white, landowning males, feared the tyranny of the majority, they did not actually want the uneducated masses who worked their plantations and dug in their mines to actually set the agenda for their nation.  However, they had this high-minded idea of democracy, which was an untested experiment in 1776, which drew them to create institutions that might rule without a tyrant, and which might stand a chance of providing liberty and justice for all.

Even if we take their flaws into account, you have to admit we're letting them down right now, when we tolerate this sort of behavior from any of our elected leaders.  Without engaging in false equivalence I can say that if I ever see a Democrat displaying the level of hypocrisy that is going on in the Republican Senate right now, I will not vote for them, not because I would necessarily disagree with the action, but because integrity matters, consistency and constancy matter.  If they could be this cynical and hypocritical, they are not trustworthy to hold power.  The poet Maya Angelou said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."

I do, and I will not forget this.  However, I am also conscious of the fact that my anger in this moment is prone to lead me down the path of hatred, and that I will not forget either.  I will mock Yertle the Turtle, but I will not hate him.  He makes my blood boil, but I will not let him poison my soul.  I will root for his fall into the mud as much as I rooted for RBG to prolong her earthly sojourn.  I have some degree of confidence that it will come, because pride and arrogance have a way of biting their practitioners.

"Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation." (Mt 23: 36)

Sins as Scarlet

 I sometimes wonder if we will ever be able to transcend our history and become the thing our flawed yet visionary founders imagined.  The legacy that slavery has left on our society has been much talked about of late, but there is another legacy that is deep as well.  It is that peculiar form of religious and social fundamentalism we called Puritanism at the time.  On one level the Puritans are heroes of the colonial age, the bold settlers of New England who forged a new world where they could practice their deeply pietistic faith apart from the political intrigues of European religions.  On another level, they are the witch trial people.  As a student of Christian history I know that Puritans are actually rather more complex than either of the stereotypes we apply to them.  Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his fictional post mortem, The Scarlet Letter, on Puritan culture in 1850, about events that would be 200 years in the past at the time.

Cliff Notes version: Hester Prynne is an unwed mother and her baby is the child of the local minister Arthur Dimmesdale.  The townsfolk judge Prynne guilty, beyond a doubt, of adultery and impose a sentence of cultural isolation and the wearing of a large red A on her chest.  Prynne does not name the father, even though doing so would marginally improve her situation.  Dimmesdale falls ill due to his unadmitted guilt.  Anyone who read this classic work of literature in seventh grade has the sense that the real sinners in the story are not in fact Prynne and Dimmesdale, but the townsfolk who are so severe and hypocritical.  I daresay Hawthorne, along with the actual event of the Salem Witch Trials, are the primary reasons why if you call someone a Puritan or describe something as Puritanical, you are not being complimentary.

But the Puritan instinct runs deep within our DNA.  Anyone who has ever dabbled around in foreign cinema, or even watched TV commercials in Europe, knows that Americans have some more prudish attitudes about certain things than much of the developed world.  Beyond our inordinate tendency to be offended by naked human bodies, the puritan legacy has manifested itself in modern American Evangelicalism.  The high white collars and severe black clothing have been replaced by polo shirts and khakis, but the judgmental attitudes remain strong.  It is with this in mind that I almost feel bad for Jerry Falwell Jr. with emphasis on the almost.  I stop short of full sympathy for his plight because he is not a powerless victim of misguided justice like Hester Prynne.  He is a man who has used the language and the loyalty of Christianity to great and cynical advantage over the course of his life.

Background: Jerry Falwell senior was one of the primary architects of the "religious right" that profoundly aided the rise and rule of both Ronald Reagan and the Bush clan.  He was the pastor of a large and wealthy church and parlayed that along with his political influence into an empire of sorts.  To Jerry Jr. he left the reins of Liberty University, an explicitly evangelical Christian university.  We Presbyterians have been founding schools for centuries so why not?  To his other son he left the pastorate of the large congregation.  Even though the younger son is quite successful as a pastor, you probably don't know who he is (his name is Jonathan).  But you know Jerry Jr. don't you? Why?  Do you know any other President of a midsized university by name?  It's because Jerry Jr. has taken up his father's penchant for media whoredom.  He has become especially visible as an early and vocal supporter of one Caesar J Trump.  Despite not being a theologian, or a pastor, or a spiritual leader of any sort, Falwell has become one of the faces of American Evangelicalism.

Recently, Falwell posted and then promptly deleted a picture of himself with a young woman (not his wife) on a yacht, holding drinks, with their pants unbuttoned and their bellies exposed.  Far from being scandalous in the age of celebrity sex tapes, it seemed pretty mild to the casual observer and probably meant as a joke.  Assuming the audience had a sense of humor.  Assuming the audience has a sense of humor would be a mistake in the case of dealing with the likes of people who gave Hester Prynne the Scarlet Letter A.  The board of directors has asked Falwell, who for all his faults has made Liberty solvent and successful over his tenure, to step down temporarily, but one gets the sense that the temporary nature of it is only a formality.

I find this curious (and a little amusing in a schadenfreude sort of way).  First, this is the straw that broke the camel's back?  Really?  Not the pompous preening for the political crowd?  Not the obsequious behavior towards an immoral and illiberal leader?  Not the endorsement of anti-Christ behavior bent on violence and power (like brandishing a gun at a student assembly and daring any "muslims" to come get some).  Not the endorsement of policies that oppress the poor and the immigrant while rolling in mountains of personal cash and inherited wealth and status?  A picture that shows his tummy?  That's the thing huh?

An article in the Atlantic explains the dynamic at work pretty well and in some detail, but the long and short of is that the powers that be were tired of his nonsense and used this as an excuse to get rid of a burr under the saddle.  As someone who cares very little about what happens at Liberty University, I am much more interested in what this says about the state of American Christianity.  As one who appreciates Jonathan Edwards as a preacher and a theologian, I know what can be gained from the Puritans at their best. But I also know what has become of them at their worst, and I know they did not vanish from our society, they just changed their clothes.

They have always had a tendency to go hard at Hester Prynne, and let Dimmesdale languish and fester unannounced.  Falwell has been a Dimmesdale sort for years, playing the part of a righteous Pharisee and champion of well, Liberty.  He has expressed outrage of all sorts at those who would degrade our noble Christendom-like America.  All the while you sort of expect that a man who was handed so much by his father might make a mess of things.  All the while you might have expected the same sort of ribald vulgarity that engulfed Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart to lurk in the Falwell closet, or on a yacht.  Don't get me wrong, I'll take his word that it's just a joke, I'm not accusing him of adultery or even being lewd, just not funny.  So whatever sympathy I might have had is replaced by a sense that justice can be served even by imperfect mechanisms.  If it can cause the modern day puritans to stop handing our scarlet letters to every Hester Prynne that comes along, maybe it's for the good.

Unfortunately, Jerry Jr. is probably just another scapegoat for the disease that our puritanical roots have grown.  Interesting that "cancel culture" seems to operate just fine at places other than liberal bastions like Berkeley huh?

Post Script: 14 days later a story broke about a love triangle between the Jerry and Becki Falwell and a 20 year old pool boy, that's going to be harder to play off as a harmless prank. I'm not Hindu, but the whole Karma thing really does seem to be a real force of nature.  Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone," that was to protect the stone throwers as much as the target I think.

Quinceanera

If a Latina had been born on July 23, 2005 she would be celebrating what is called a quinceanera, her fifteenth birthday.  In Latin America and in Latinx culture this is a big deal.  Fancy dresses and a big old party are in order, except probably not right now.  Today my family "celebrates" the quinceanera of my brother Jonathan's death.  Like a lot the experience of many young Latinas this year, this is now primarily defined more by absence than by whatever used to be.  The reason a quinceanera is significant is that 15 is seen as the gateway to adulthood. As the father of a nearly 15 year old girl, I'm not cool with that, but let's roll with the thought.  The idea of my brother's absence in our lives has grown up now.  It's not new and raw anymore.  In fact, most of the time I can see some very constructive and perhaps even good things that have grown out of a field that is covered in the manure of grief.

Sort of like I cannot imagine a world without my daughter Cate, I also increasingly cannot imagine a world with my brother in it.  For a while I felt this sharp sting of absence when people would do things with their brother, or when I would consider the things I used to do with Jon.  Now I can't feel that unless I really try at it, and even picking at that sore spot seems a bit dishonest at this point.  I have no idea what an almost 40 year old Jon would be like.  I don't know if we would be close, I don't know if we would still get on each other's nerves, or if we would be all grown up about everything.

I guess that's how I know this absence has come of age.  I just don't really wonder that much about things like that anymore.  I suppose one aspect of maturity is that you learn to accept certain things as simple reality instead of whining about how unfair things are.  I've done my share of whining over the years, now I guess I'm just marking the spot where something significant and irrevocable happened.  Is it really just that simple, the balance of the only perfect statistic: one birth, one death, for everyone?

I think the thing about being truly and fully human is that you learn to mark significant things and both grieve and celebrate them.  Whether it's a happy thing like a little girl turning into a young woman or a sad thing like a young man turning into a memory, the way we hold these significant things is what makes us human.

The value of it is particularly salient this year, because today, at least, I can think about something other than a virus and the incompetent morons in charge of our government.  It's sort of like Ash Wednesday, a stark reminder that all of us are dust and to dust we shall return, but with everything that's been happening, it feels like a genuine reprieve to think of something else.

So happy resurrection quinceanera Jon, hope you're growing faster there.

Another Outrage

But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be 

(let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains;

-Mark 13: 14

There are lots of scriptures I could apply to the photo of El Presidente in front of St. Johns Episcopal Church up the road in DC.  But the one that came to mind was the rather cryptic verse from Mark chapter 13, about the desolating sacrilege.  Partly because people aren't exactly sure what Jesus was talking about.  Perhaps it was the pagan destruction and desecration of the temple that took place during the exile, maybe it was more of a prophecy about the coming destruction of the temple at the hands of the Romans (less likely).  But on a gut level it feels like it absolutely applies to anything that attempts to usurp the holy spaces with something profane.  We know that Jesus was outraged by the greed and falsity that had taken root in the Temple in Jerusalem, it was the thing that led him to his only real eruption of violent protest.  I'm not going to draw any connections between a specific church building and the Temple in Jerusalem.  Church building are ultimately just buildings, it doesn't make me angry when an old church is turned into a restaurant after the worshiping life of the people who made it sacred has ended.

No, it's not the building, it's not the Bible that Trump held up like some sort of bowling trophy, it's not any of the physical details of the moment that make it a desolating sacrilege.  It is rather the very notion of the moment and the details of its execution.  He had peaceful protesters, including one of the attending clergy at St. Johns tear gassed to clear the way for his little stroll across Lafayette square.  He did not pray, he did not read from that book he held up.  He had just made a very Caesar-like proclamation that all the state governors needed to get much tougher on the protesters, in case any of them really wanted to be more like Pontius Pilate.  As a Christian, I felt very violated by that picture, and I'm not a super sensitive sort when it comes to ritual sacredness.  I don't mind when the youth want to play hide and seek in the sanctuary of the church or when someone wants to hold a secular meeting in our building. My list of rules is pretty short when it comes to who can use the church facilities and for what.

A man who has done pretty much nothing in the past several months except foment division among the nation about a very serious health crisis and now about our old mortal sin of racism standing in front of a church waving a Bible is just a little too much to take.  I felt desolate, and I knew that this was really the meaning of sacrilege: a public display of absolutely empty pretense that is meant to seem like a statement of faith.  Did he do it to assure people that God was in control?  No, he did it to prove that he was in control, and didn't even manage to land that punch.  He doesn't look in control, he looks scared and small, which is what he is.  He is holding a book that he reportedly loves while everything that he says and does shows that he has absolutely no idea what is in it.  He is standing in front of a church that he thinks shows his point about how lawless and profane the protesters are because they vandalized it, when he has just tear gassed one of it's priests who was out working with the Black Lives Matter medical attendants.

Whatever Jesus was talking about when he told the people of 2000 years ago about the desolating sacrilege, I'm pretty sure he was also talking about what happened yesterday as well.

And Here We Are Again

The rich and the fortunate can well keep quiet,

nobody wants to know what they are.

But the destitute have to show themselves, 

have to say: I am blind

or: I am about to become so

or: nothing on earth works out for me

or: I have a sick child

or: right here I am being pieced together...

and perhaps even that won't suffice.

...

But God himself comes and stays a long time

whenever these maimed ones bother him.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Voices

I want to talk about George Floyd, but I can't bring myself to do it, so I will just say his name and let the injustice of his death speak for itself.  If you can watch that video and still equivocate, deny or somehow justify it, if you think, after all examples that have hit us in the face over the past decade are still just outliers and aberrations, there isn't anything I can say to you anyway.  I've been over this too many times in the course of writing this blog, the fountain is dry.

I would like to talk about the protests though, because there are things we need to mark very carefully in the midst of the chaos.  And there are judgments that are probably best left until we find out all the facts.  At a glance though there are honest protests taking place, there are moments of beauty where the police take off their helmets and shields and march with the people.  There are crowds that insist upon and enforce among themselves an ethic of peacefulness that seems practically superhuman in the face of such injustice.  There are instances of looting and vandalism, there are sinister implications that extremist groups may be infiltrating the protests and turning them into riots.  The left says it's the white supremacists, the right says it's Antifa, the scary thing is they very well could both be correct.  There is never a shortage of opportunists who would like nothing more than to increase the violence to serve their own ends.

We need to resist the bait we that is being dangled by those with an agenda other than the needed cry for justice.  But these protests need to happen, even if they get messy, because we cannot even pretend we have listened to the people whose blood has been running in the streets.  We are showing them, from Ferguson to Minneapolis that we will only pay attention when they shout and march in the streets. We will only take them seriously when it's time for tear gas and rubber bullets.  If they kneel in protest, we say it's inappropriate and our rich white man gangs (like the NFL owners) ban them or blackball them.

White America, we have left them no choice, but to do this.  To put more black bodies at risk, from riot police, from a COVID outbreak, maybe even from people in the crowd who are there to work evil instead of justice.  I believe that Christ is present in these protests, and I believe Christ will remain present much longer than the attention span of white Americans. I certainly acknowledge that Jesus himself was darker skinned than we generally imagine, but I know, right now, if Jesus were walking the streets of America, he would have a black face.

How followers of Jesus can remain ambivalent or even take the side of the oppressor is beyond me.  I'm out of things to say.  My outrage has been running in the red for too long, and I'm white. To try and feel what it must be like for black folk is to truly understand why you might just want to burn it all down.  Especially if it turns out that there are people, white people, in your very midst who are actually pushing you towards violence to discredit you or simply push the envelope of chaos.  I see your protest, I feel your anger, and I know it's justified.  In as much as you can keep it peaceful and be beautiful, I admire you more than I can say, but even if it goes sideways I absolutely know why you have to keep going.

When I can do something from my end, with my voice, with my vote, with my money, with my time, I will do it.  Even tasting your outrage through the filter of my empathy, I know it tastes like fire.  I pray that it is holy fire.  Christ be with you all.

The Cult of Ignorance

Just over a month ago, as Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic primary, I shared this quote from Isaac Asimov:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

That seems like a long time ago.  Over the past several days, and generally in the response to COVID-19, our commitment to ignorance has been on full display.  I'm not talking about honest ignorance either, not knowing something is no crime and all of us have had to address some things of which we were perhaps blissfully ignorant: like how to run a Zoom meeting or how to film a sermon and post it to Youtube.  Teachers have had to adapt to teaching remotely.  All of us have had to change our perceptions of things like social distancing and face masks in the grocery store.  There were so many things we were not aware of on the leading edge of this pandemic, but I'm not talking about that ignorance.
I'm talking about the kind of ignorance that is willful and stubborn, and refuses to become anything other than ignorance.  This is the ignorance of our President and his "Liberate (name of state with stay at home order and a democratic governor here)" tweets.  This is the ignorance of the people who violate the isolation policies with flags, swastikas (which they claim are "ironic") and openly carried weapons.  These people are taking their cues from the aggressive ignorance of our current chief executive.  They are the bullies who never learned that the smarter kids in the class might actually be of help to them in understanding their biology assignment and instead chose to shove him into a locker or throw her pile of books down the hall.
Trump is their hero, because that's who he is, the big blustery, let's not think too much sort, who tries to be the main man while the nerdy expert (Fauci) facepalms in the background.  It has been a temptation for me to simply ascribe evil motives to Trump and his cadre of sycophants, but this crisis reveals him to be nothing more than a particularly dangerous ignoramus with a narcissistic personality disorder, in other words, a garden variety bully.
He is not alone.  This morning I saw this picture of a nurse in scrubs blocking a vehicle protesting the stay at home orders:

That man is standing for his own life and the lives of his co-workers and his family. The people in the truck are out there for the sake of fear and greed and no small amount of anger, which masquerades as patriotism.  It occurred to me that the picture reminded me of something else:

The opponent in this picture was actual tyranny.  The "re-open America" protesters think they are this man, but they are nothing of the sort.  If the tyranny they think they're protesting was real, it would have been police in riot gear instead of a nurse in scrubs confronting their little shenanigan.
This comparison is both alarming and oddly hopeful though, because there is some evidence that the ignoramuses are losing their grip on our hearts and minds.  Trump's approval rating is low, even for him, and most of the people I know (even the ones who voted for him) are starting to tune him out. The loony hanging out of the pickup truck window is not being hailed as a patriot or a hero, and thankfully our government did not make her a martyr. 
If we learn anything from this I hope it is that our cult of ignorance is too dangerous to continue.  I have the distinct feeling that this pandemic will not be the last one we face.  We cannot continue into the future pretending it is not possible.  COVID-19, as the ignoramuses like to point out, is not too different from the flue or a common cold, a lot of people with it will survive.  What if there was a more catastrophic disease, like Ebola, that manifested similar contagion patterns and latency?
It is a possibility that we should not try and ignore, because doing so could lead to an extinction level event akin to the black plague or the what happened among Native American populations in the immediate aftermath of European contact with the New World.
We have a choice to persist in our cult of ignorance, or to learn from what this has to teach us.  I suggest the latter course, no matter what political tribe you belong to, we are all part of the human race.

Petrichor

For someone who does as much walking outside as I do, I very seldom find myself caught in the rain.  Maybe it's because I have access to several weather forecasting apps on my phone, or because I tend to pay attention to the rather obvious skies above Southern Maryland.  Today I had planned to go out kayaking on the lake, but the aforementioned weather forecasts contained a marine warning about possible thunderstorms and strong winds.  I had no desire to be out on the water in the event of such weather, so I did the sensible thing and just went for a walk.
About halfway around the lake, I felt the first drops and heard a distant roll of thunder.  Time to speed up the old dog.  It quickly became obvious that we were in for a bath.  Instead of getting in a hurry though, I actually took a moment to slow down as the rain began to intensify I got to experience that unique scent that has its own special word: petrichor.  The definition is that smell when rain starts to hit dry earth.  The woods are dry because the leaves aren't yet out and the warm sun bakes everything to a crisp much more quickly than it does in the summer when things are shaded.  I don't know exactly what causes petrichor to happen only at the beginning of a heavy rain, but as I gratefully soaked in that unique odor I felt that it might be perhaps more mystical than a scientific explanation about water mixing with minerals.  It seemed like the earth was breathing out, the way you might before inhaling a deep breath to dive to the bottom of a pool.
I had one of those nature moments, where paganism suddenly makes a lot of sense. In a world where everything seems alive and connected, of course there are spirits in the trees and gods in the soil. Things seem particularly alive, and if you let yourself, you feel connected to that life in a way that is deeply significant.  As the storm got a bit more intense the petrichor moment vanished and it was time to hurry again, it would be a real shame to do all this social distancing to avoid COVID-19 only to get zapped by lightning.
Back in the world of non-pagan spirituality I am thinking about what we're missing during this Holy Week spent in isolation. What would we be doing and thinking during this time absent the pandemic? This week is the petrichor moment, the breathing out of the last breath, but with a purpose that surely has life at its core.  Jesus often taught about the necessity of dying and laying things down in order for the new life of the Kingdom to take hold.  I think that's a pattern in nature as well: the breathing out of the dryness with an unmistakable moment of petrichor, ready to receive the water that brings life out of seemingly dead things.
On the cross, Jesus says, "tetelestai," it is finished and then surrenders his spirit, he breaths out his last, giving up what is destined to fade and go away, so that something new can inherit that space, so that new life can come. Death is a part of the cycle, as is dormancy; light is necessary, as is darkness.  That unique and beautiful petrichor is not something you encounter all the time, only after a period of dryness will the mere anticipation of water set it in motion.

From a Distance

I have been dealing with a lot of thoughts about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a pastor.  There have been some difficult decisions to make for sure.  At the end of last week, I asked the Session to vote to suspend all "in person" activities of the Church.  They agreed unanimously, for this I was grateful, because as of that moment we were ahead of the curve on this issue.  Our Presbytery had given us a recommendation, but as of the end of last week government had not provided the leadership we really need in moments like this.
Over the weekend I kept feeling more strongly that our decision had been the right one.  Every time I saw a doctor or an epidemiologist say that this "social distancing" practice is the only way we currently have to prevent the pandemic from becoming an event of tragic proportions.  There is no cure, there is no treatment really, we don't even have adequate testing capability (again thanks to denial and an attempt to minimize this crisis by our almost unbelievably inept administration).  The only thing we can do is to bring everything to a screeching halt in the hopes of physically preventing the transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
I often joke that my undergraduate education served only one function: to give me a piece of paper that was necessary for admission to Seminary.  However, in the past week the things I know about biology, and (Lord help me) statistics were pretty useful in analyzing what data we have available.  I know what an exponential growth curve looks like on paper, and in instances of contagion like this one, you get to see it in full horror-show mode.  The science of this thing was pretty clear a while ago, unfortunately we have made rather a habit of ignoring science when it comes to areas where we hold certain pathological "beliefs."  Our economic interest has been strangling our scientific response to climate change for 20 years.  COVID-19 just raised our temperature in a much more immediate and undeniable way than greenhouse gasses.
Even though it is not terribly scientific, it was the cancellation of the NCAA tournament that really snapped me out of the "keep calm and wash your hands" mentality.  It was the notion that something that stood to generate revenue in excess of one billion dollars would just be flat called off that made me think that maybe this wasn't just another chicken little moment.  I will admit that when it comes to weather events and other such impending doom I tend towards skepticism.  I was going down that road with this one too, but thankfully something told me to avoid that trap.
This virus has actually weaponized our own ability to keep calm and carry on against us.  It uses our greatest strength as a species: our social nature, as a tool to propagate itself as surely as the virus hijacks our cells to procreate.  Most of our strategies for survival involve banding together into communal structures and institutions that can give us the collective resources we need to surmount challenges.  This requires that as well, but somehow we must figure out how to do that from a distance.  So while in the face of wars and famines the church has often been a place of sanctuary and rallying together, in this crisis we have to tell people to stay away.  It seems wrong, but it's not.
The word pastor is derived from the pastoral role of a shepherd.  Everything in a shepherd's world would indicate that keeping the sheep together is the best way to keep them safe, except for in this case that's the opposite of the truth.  In the face of this, some new things are necessary, and maybe they have been necessary for a while.  We need to learn to use all the communications tools we have available, we need to consider what community really looks like in the face of a challenge like this, because something tells me this won't be the last time we face a problem like this.

And Then There Were Two

Elizabeth Warren just dropped out of the democratic primary.  We are down to Bernie and Biden, two almost eighty-year-old white guys.  I have been reserving my energy on this election cycle until it really matters, out of a need for sanity and spiritual survival.  But I have to say Liz dropping out makes me sort of sad, because I have felt like she was the smartest of the bunch for quite some time.  I feel like at least some of her inability to get traction in the primaries was a result of her unabashed intelligence.  There is a strong current in American culture that despises true intelligence. Isaac Asimov described it well:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I have this sneaking suspicion that that tendency becomes even more vicious when it comes to women.  At this point, I'm sort of thinking that our first female president is going to have to come from the right, ala Margaret Thatcher, because she will have to be an "iron lady" that adheres to the take no prisoners sort of political tactics that the Republicans have mastered since Reagan.  We have already seen an inveterate politician (Clinton) and a brilliant and qualified organizer (Warren) fail because the American people couldn't find them "likable" enough.  Meanwhile male candidates can be deeply flawed, even dangerously so, as is the case with Trump, and still garner wildly irrational support.
Only time will tell if it was actually Warren's extensive "plans" that scared people off.  If they end up choosing Bernie Sanders, I think that will be proven false, because Bernie has even more "socialist" ideas with less clear details than Liz.  If they choose Biden, it will just be a case of the establishment going with the "safe" bet.  I get that impulse. I saw someone on Twitter say that the best campaign slogan for any of the Democrats would be, "If I'm elected president, you won't have to think about me every day."
Which is where I have been since this whole thing started.  I just want the Trump era to be over, it makes me feel sick to my stomach far too often.  I think that Liz Warren would have been a great president, she probably would have gotten maybe a quarter of her plans to see the light of day, even if she got eight years.  Most of the wildest dreams/nightmares like Medicare for all would have been DOA, but she would have made sure to put back some of the regulations that protect us from the most rapacious aspects of capitalism.  Unlike the current chief executive, she actually knows what those regulations he has been shredding like cheese were there to do.
I don't know, out of that whole raft of plans she had, which ones would have actually gotten implemented, but I do know that when our nation confronted a crisis she would have brought that intellect and that undeniable sanity to bear upon it, instead of just tweeting out of an irresponsible level of ignorance like you know who.
Maybe it's just the desire for some semblance of peace, but I think I'm coming down on Uncle Joe's team for right now, but I can't think of another single person that would make a better VP than Liz Warren.  I mean if Joe put her in charge of pretty much anything I would feel pretty good about that.  I mean a lot better than putting Mike "I don't believe in science" Pence in charge of a global pandemic response.
I guess I have always wondered if that isn't democracy's biggest flaw: we elect popular people.  It was true in School, it was never the brains that got elected class president, it was the kids that could schmooze the best.  I guess I always hoped that, like so many other things that change in adulthood, things would be different out here.  Sorry Liz, I wish I had the chance to vote for you.

The Pale Rider

When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature call out, "Come!" 

I looked and there was a pale green horse! 

It's rider's name was Death; and Hades followed with him; 

they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, 

famine and pestilence, and by the wild animals of the earth.

-The Apocalypse of John 6:7-8

A while back it was Ebola, before that it was SARS, and of course we have had the specter of AIDS with us for most of my life.  Now it is the Corona virus. Plagues and pestilence are nothing new to humanity, the Black or Boubonic Plague is perhaps the most famous (because it happened in Europe), but there is good evidence that there have been multiple ravages of human populations over the course of history.  Diseases were probably responsible for destroying the massive pre-colombian civilizations before we white folk ever started showing up on this side of the Atlantic.  What happened to the Aztecs? The Maya? The Incas? The Lenape?  European settlers played a part, but it probably had more to do with microorganisms than it did with Conquistadors. That doesn't make it less tragic, but our violent colonial impulses to wipe out the natives were mostly just a rear guard action.  Diseases did most of the work before most of our scurvy ridden ancestors stumbled off the boats.
History gives us some grim warnings about the way diseases can crack our heads but good.  In our globally connected world, we really do need to give some thought to how a virus that started in Wuhan China now has people in New York City wearing those little white masks.  The potential for a pandemic is not a laughing matter.  You can argue all day about the virtues and dangers of globalism, widespread contagion being a big hit on the minus column, but the fact of the matter is, we're probably not putting that genie back in the bottle and regressing to isolated tribal society.
While I'm not generally given to interpreting Revelation too literally, I think John of Patmos was actually a fairly astute observer of human society.  Those horsemen really are pretty accurate symbols of our greatest perils, and they have been for a very long time.  I know, that's not comforting, but what I'm going for here is that the humility it brings us can and should be a good thing on the whole.
Our collective response to crises like this is actually improving, even if it still leaves something to be desired.  The world rallied to face the threat of Ebola even though a pretty short time ago most of the world would have just clucked their tongues and said, "too bad it happened, but at least it was far away from here."  AIDS kicked us hard and left us with a bunch of bigotry and hang ups to sort through, but sort through it we did, and Magic Johnson is still hanging around.
I'm not saying that the Corona virus and other pestilence is here to teach us a lesson, viruses and bacteria don't have any purpose other than self-propagation.  But pay attention to what things like this are teaching us about what it means to be humans in this world.  We are learning that our connections might bring vulnerability, but connection is also what helps us solve the problems we encounter.  It's pretty obvious that we can't get those riders back behind the seals, they're out there and doing their work.  New and stronger diseases keep coming at us, new ways to kill and destroy are always coming down the pike, because they're getting better at what they do; we need to be doing the work of being better humans.

Team Meeting

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger,

The speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

And satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

Then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

-Isaiah 58: 9b-10

Alright liberal types, it's time for a team meeting.  I would like to call particularly on those who identify as Christian, and those who hold the Hebrew Scriptures sacred, but honestly we need our atheist and agnostic folks on board as well.  We can all agree that Donald Trump is a big, obnoxious, ignorant, orange bag of lies, but that, unfortunately, is not going to get us much of anywhere over the next nine months.  I think we can also agree that every single Democrat has some strengths and weaknesses, but that pretty much all of them would be a significant upgrade in the humanity department from our current chief executive.

We have two choices going forward, we can either keep hammering at how despicable Donny and his gang of corrupt, spineless sycophants are, (which feels good, I admit) or we can do something that will actually get rid of them.  Unfortunately, stringing together all the insults in the world, even erudite and clever ones, is just playing right into his hands.  Trump has demonstrated that calling someone a big stupid head on Twitter is as effective in winning over his base as calling them a "Vesuvius of Mendacity" as George Will called him in an editorial in the Washington Post (that's my personal favorite). In fact, Trump actually gets credit among his tribe for being vulgar and un-complicated in his taunts and in pretty much everything else.  MAGA world does not know what 'mendacity' means, nor do they much care; to them it's just more elitist snob talk aimed at making them feel inferior.  Never mind that George Will is a pretty conservative type guy, he still uses too many big words to be trusted.

That's the mindset we are confronting here, and we need to do so with some level of empathy, or else we will be exactly what Trump accuses us of being: clueless, elitist, and determined to destroy all that red state folks hold dear.  These people have a deep feeling of estrangement from people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, from places like San Francisco and New York respectively.  They read and hear about political correctness run amok and the rise of cancel culture, and to them those are the "existential threats," not Donald Trump and his ham-handed bullying of Ukraine or his boundless self-dealing.  He tells them he understands them, even as he is tweeting from a gold toilet, and by God, he might actually just understand them.  He seems to be able to keep their loyalty and maybe even their love.

I'm not naive enough to believe we will be able to win back the MAGA crowd by November, but we absolutely need to win back the folks on the edges, and we will do so most effectively if we don't go full on Lefty-Liberal.  As much love as I had for Bernie four years ago, this time around he's starting to look like four more years of Trump.  Primarily because he is what Trump would be if Trump had decided to go left instead of right.  My belief is that if we play Trump's game, fight fire with fire so to speak, we will lose.  We will lose if we lose and we will lose if we win.  We will lose if Trump gets four more years in frightening ways, but we will lose even if Bernie gets elected because he will never get any of his stuff done.

Even if we flip congress, the Democratic party is never going to fall into the kind of lockstep it would take to ram through something like Medicare for all.  There will be no bipartisan support for it at all, and we will probably even lose a bunch of Dems who already put their necks on the line for the ACA and aren't about to bail on it now that it's stable.  That's the pragmatic reality, but the spiritual danger goes even deeper.

The spiritual danger is that we will continue to dig our ideological trenches deeper and pull further back into our echo chambers and tribal identity cliques.  Each side will continue to regard the other as a dire threat to all that is holy (in their own mind), and instead of "forming a more perfect union," we will be feeding the chasm of hatred that now separates us.  Trump did not create that chasm, he has simply decided to party naked on his chosen side of it.  After four years of watching that with disdain, I cannot ignore the consequences, and I don't want us to make the same mistake on this side.  We need to start building bridges across, not spitting at the folks on the other side. It's hard work, because the stakes are high and power has a way of making a convincing argument that winning is the only thing that matters.

I guess my hope for this season of political primaries is that the person who runs against the Donald turns out to be someone who can heal and unite us.  I hope we can really be better than we have been over the past four years, being this nasty is really wearing me out.

The Beating Drums

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

-Mark 13: 7-8

For fairly obvious reasons, this Scripture has been running through my head for the past few days.  Trump finally did something that wasn't just bluster, he actually took out an Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani with a drone strike.  This has generated all sorts of pearl clutching and honestly more diverse reactions from all over the political spectrum than most of what the Donald has done in this three year farcical collage of a presidency. Ross Douthat has an interesting analysis in the NY Times today about the differing paradigms of foreign policy if you want some political science in your day.

My interest is more along the lines of the moral and spiritual impact of things.  While I lean towards a pacifist interpretation of the Gospel, as a child of the 20th Century, I grew up with far too much evidence of the damage that unrestrained evil can cause.  While mutually assured destruction did seem like utter madness, I suppose you have to say that the idea prevented us from turning the earth into a charcoal briquette (we are just taking the slow cooker approach). I still find it hard to "not be alarmed" at wars and rumors of wars, and in a very real sense I do wish we could all lay down our swords before we die by them.  However, it is a fact that men like Soleimani and Donald Trump are pretty much destined to be the ones pulling the levers of power.  Even when we do get a thoughtful diplomat like Barack Obama, things like Libya and Syria still go down, and the measured, grown up reactions that I admired in Obama, do actually turn out to have been mistakes.

I guess that has always been an appeal of Trump, he is a bully, but if he's on your side, it would seem, he can help you fight those other bullies.  Iran is definitely a bad actor, on many levels.  Hopeful analysis from inside tells us that the Iranian people are yearning to breath free and rid themselves of the Mullahs that control the rather brutal and restrictive Islamic, Shiite theocracy.   But so far, there has been no Persian Spring, and even if there were, the Arab Spring has not left us much reason to hope that things would really change that much.

Our own track record with Iran is pretty dismal, we toppled a primarily democratic state that had many signs of actually becoming a modern society on par with say France or Spain, and set up the Shah, who proved to be a despot whose inept rule provoked a revolution that brought Khomeini to power. For those of you who don't remember Khomeini, that's this guy: 

That's right, Mr. Death to America himself.  Ronald Ray-gun brought down the USSR, but he couldn't do jack spit about the Ayatollah Khomeini.  We hated and feared this old man so much that we supported a certain Iraqi named Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.  Hindsight is 20/20, and we really should have stayed the hell out of a 1000 year old war between the two major sects of a religion that really only agree on one thing: we (the USA) are the devil.  That's right boys and girls, the one thing that unites two disparate groups of Muslims that split right after the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 CE (no I didn't forget the first digit), is their dislike of our decadent western behinds.

The thing that really scares me the most is that President Donald J. Trump seems to lack even the basic 7th grade social studies understanding that I just laid down right there. At my most cynical I believe that he is actually trying to "wag the dog" by starting up a hot conflict to distract from his impending impeachment (that's a good punk band name right there). But even if I give the Donald his due, which is hard on a spiritual level, and say that he actually did get a bad guy who totally deserved to get himself bombed into the next life, I just can't imagine how this is going to end well.

That's why I need me some Jesus.  He saves me from myself. I am still worried about the members of our armed forces who might bear the casualties of what would invariably be a really awful conflict.  I am still worried about the millions of Iranians, who don't necessarily think we are the Great Satan, but who happen to live in a country that is governed according to the standards of an essentially medieval religion.  I have this hope that, somehow, a new and better world might be born out of this mess, but I'm not really looking forward to going through labor.