Ok, I published a new post on Monday but this came in this morning from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I wanted those who read this blog to see it too.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
Last year, you may recall, there was a lot of angst about putting "Christ back in Christmas," especially on the Fox Network. I don't know if the anxiety has been as high this Christmas, but the presence of Christ in the season is not in doubt, whether we say "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or something more "religious."
One way to read the incarnation is that the divine, or the elemental life force that animates the universe, is manifest in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. The story of the birth of Jesus is clearly a myth designed to show us how we are children of this elemental force and that our arrival is an occasion of hope and joy. Jesus stands in for each of us, as do his beleaguered parents and the poor and rich alike who seek enlightenment. The star is not out there but within. We can re-enact the birth scene, as St. Francis did (and as we imitate each year in pageants and creches), but we are limiting our understanding of incarnation if we insist on the historical "truth" of this birth story. Too many details are simply wrong; the story is not consistently told. But the myth is powerful because it gives us hope in our own future. And that has value in our difficult times.
In the United States, the Christmas story is one of economic success. For most retailers--and publishers, as I well know from my own work history--without Christmas there is no profit. If we did not have Christmas, we would have to invent another holiday that encourages people to buy. Christmas is the engine of our economy, one could argue. In that sense, the holiday is wholly (and holy) one of the Christ event, in which the incarnation finds its ultimate validity by disappearing into our secular lives. The near disappearance of overt Christian observance in Europe and in the UK is a sign of the complete success of the incarnation. We can no longer tell the difference between secular and spiritual life. They are one.
In other words, the season is not about god coming in and taking over.
The devout might protest that the secular has taken over, that the spiritual is gone. But that is a perspective that claims for the spiritual a separate sphere and meaning. By the myth of the birth of Jesus we in fact are shown the opposite: that the spiritual inheres in the secular and the less we insist on separating the two, the better off we will be.
But be careful: the message is not that theocracy is the answer. We have seen too often that theocracy is a death-delivering system that crushes human spirit and creativity. I am talking about secularism, humanism, whatever word you want to use, in which the sacred is part of and subservient to daily life. The arrival of Jesus, as the myth clearly shows, is about how the elemental force of life that drives all things is not a Ruler. It opens a way and steps aside.
Do I like the commercialism of the season? No. In fact, we aren't buying gifts this year. But we actually take this time, even in spending sprees that are meaningless, to say the words that express the deepest longings of our hearts: that we might have peace, that we might be good to one another, that we might be free of our fears. It might take a new HDTV to make those wishes manifest. The makers of the televisions receive their wages, as do the workers who sell them. When the Wise Men in one version of the myth show up with gifts, no one complains, even though as gifts they are on a par with that tie you'll never wear.
As my parents always said, and probably meant, "it's the thought that counts." Having thoughts of comfort and joy at a given moment of every year is good, even if we do not explicitly connect them with mythic events or a religion that often seems out of touch with what's really going on.
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
PS: Last week I identified some trees in Oregon as Birches, thereby showing my east coast roots and ignorance of local flora. A friend wrote to say that I probably saw Alders. I know that Frost writes in his poem, "Birches," that boys might have been swinging on them; I think boys could swing from Alders too. It might be worth a try.
One way to read the incarnation is that the divine, or the elemental life force that animates the universe, is manifest in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. The story of the birth of Jesus is clearly a myth designed to show us how we are children of this elemental force and that our arrival is an occasion of hope and joy. Jesus stands in for each of us, as do his beleaguered parents and the poor and rich alike who seek enlightenment. The star is not out there but within. We can re-enact the birth scene, as St. Francis did (and as we imitate each year in pageants and creches), but we are limiting our understanding of incarnation if we insist on the historical "truth" of this birth story. Too many details are simply wrong; the story is not consistently told. But the myth is powerful because it gives us hope in our own future. And that has value in our difficult times.
In the United States, the Christmas story is one of economic success. For most retailers--and publishers, as I well know from my own work history--without Christmas there is no profit. If we did not have Christmas, we would have to invent another holiday that encourages people to buy. Christmas is the engine of our economy, one could argue. In that sense, the holiday is wholly (and holy) one of the Christ event, in which the incarnation finds its ultimate validity by disappearing into our secular lives. The near disappearance of overt Christian observance in Europe and in the UK is a sign of the complete success of the incarnation. We can no longer tell the difference between secular and spiritual life. They are one.
In other words, the season is not about god coming in and taking over.
The devout might protest that the secular has taken over, that the spiritual is gone. But that is a perspective that claims for the spiritual a separate sphere and meaning. By the myth of the birth of Jesus we in fact are shown the opposite: that the spiritual inheres in the secular and the less we insist on separating the two, the better off we will be.
But be careful: the message is not that theocracy is the answer. We have seen too often that theocracy is a death-delivering system that crushes human spirit and creativity. I am talking about secularism, humanism, whatever word you want to use, in which the sacred is part of and subservient to daily life. The arrival of Jesus, as the myth clearly shows, is about how the elemental force of life that drives all things is not a Ruler. It opens a way and steps aside.
Do I like the commercialism of the season? No. In fact, we aren't buying gifts this year. But we actually take this time, even in spending sprees that are meaningless, to say the words that express the deepest longings of our hearts: that we might have peace, that we might be good to one another, that we might be free of our fears. It might take a new HDTV to make those wishes manifest. The makers of the televisions receive their wages, as do the workers who sell them. When the Wise Men in one version of the myth show up with gifts, no one complains, even though as gifts they are on a par with that tie you'll never wear.
As my parents always said, and probably meant, "it's the thought that counts." Having thoughts of comfort and joy at a given moment of every year is good, even if we do not explicitly connect them with mythic events or a religion that often seems out of touch with what's really going on.
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
PS: Last week I identified some trees in Oregon as Birches, thereby showing my east coast roots and ignorance of local flora. A friend wrote to say that I probably saw Alders. I know that Frost writes in his poem, "Birches," that boys might have been swinging on them; I think boys could swing from Alders too. It might be worth a try.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
To the Beach
My daughter Ruth is visiting for a few days, glad to be in the northwest instead of Philadelphia where, as in the rest of the northeast, the weather is at best cold and sloppy. Yesterday, we drove to Cannon Beach, a town on the ocean whose main attraction is Haystack Rock, which juts out of the surf like a bishop's mitre. Several of these startling behemoths guard the Oregon shore. They are lava formations (our major mountains--Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Ranier--are volcanoes, one not as dormant as the others). The temperature was in the mid-forties and, despite forecasts, the sun was shining or at least visible through a light cloud cover while we were in Cannon Beach.
Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."
Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.
During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."
Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."
Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.
Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.
A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."
After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."
Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."
Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.
During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."
Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."
Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.
Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.
A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."
After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."
Sunday, December 9, 2007
GodTubed
A friend of mine whose job it is to keep up with the world of the weird told me about GodTube last week. It is the "Christian" equivalent of YouTube, featuring videos with supposedly uplifting, mostly evangelical content. "Broadcast Him" is the tag line. There are music videos as well as playlettes showcasing the dangers of sin. And of course advertisements, one for Liberty University right at the top of the landing page. See it for yourself: www.godtube.com.
After a week in which Mitt Romney appeared on television to affirm his Christian credentials for Iowan Republican Evangelicals, it seems a kind of GodTube was everywhere. Those of you who watch TV probably saw endless replays of what he had to say, interminable discussions of what it means that a major candidate has to explain his religion, reruns of JFK defending his Catholicism, talking religious heads, etc. Religion was big last week. It will stay big throughout the election year, I think, because everyone running for office feels s/he has to pander to the Christian Right in one form or another. And you cannot be other than Christian if you want to be president. Imagine a Muslim trying to address the nation and concluding with a phrase other than God bless America. Allah, anyone? Or an observant Jew declining to mention the name of the Holy One at all.
The fact is, Romney really has nothing to say about religion. I am content that he is a practicing Mormon down to his underwear and that if he is elected president (he won't be, of course) he will behave no more badly than our current leader. He could hardly be worse. As governor of Massachusetts, he left the state about as liberal as he found it. Listening to him pontificate about his faith must be ten times more painful than reading his words. I hope the others don't follow suit. I don't want to hear Clinton talk about being a Methodist, nor Huckabee tell me about his personal relationship with the Savior and Redeemer of the World.
It is rhetorical nonsense. I was struck that some commentators were concerned that Romney did not argue for the inclusion of nonbelievers in the American civic landscape. Nonbelievers are doing just fine, thank you. The voice of Christopher Hitchens was heard, strident as always, last week in an article condemning, of all things, Hanukkah as a primitive throwback that Jews should repudiate. I also found an image of Santa on the Cross, which Landover Baptist Church (http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/33515) puts on t-shirts and mugs as a pro-Christian (put Christ back in Christmas) statement. The image here also decorates a thong on their website. These are some pretty rad Baptists.
Religion is dished up to us daily in a variety of repulsive forms. One of the most offensive is currently running in movie theaters. Perhaps you've seen it. The video is an advertisement for the National Guard. It features a band on a hillside singing with that breathy sincere sound while soldiers, in Iraq and our own Revolutionary War, rescue children and promise to be there whenever we need them. It is a religious message in every sense of the term, offering salvation, security, and really bad music to true believers (in the American military way). It is exactly the kind of music featured on GodTube, except it extols the citizen soldier instead of Jesus. Both of course are redeemers.
If you haven't already been subjected to the video at a movie theater, you can download the MP3 file and listen to it at http://www.1800goguard.com/movie/index2.php. When we first heard it a couple of weeks ago here in Portland, the audience began hissing before it finished playing. It's one of the reasons we like living here.
What's my point this week? We could use some serious, and less noisy, faith practice in this country (not more religion--we have too much of that). What we have now is a parody of faith: marketing, manipulation, and unbridled ego. Another example of religion as parody, and I'll finish with this one, is from the Episcopal Church, my favorite institution. A diocese in California has officially voted itself out of the church because it, the diocese, knows itself to be purer than those of us who sup with gays and take communion from women priests. The bishop in this diocese sounds just like Romney or any of our political candidates: unctuous, full of himself, and lacking in credibility. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
After a week in which Mitt Romney appeared on television to affirm his Christian credentials for Iowan Republican Evangelicals, it seems a kind of GodTube was everywhere. Those of you who watch TV probably saw endless replays of what he had to say, interminable discussions of what it means that a major candidate has to explain his religion, reruns of JFK defending his Catholicism, talking religious heads, etc. Religion was big last week. It will stay big throughout the election year, I think, because everyone running for office feels s/he has to pander to the Christian Right in one form or another. And you cannot be other than Christian if you want to be president. Imagine a Muslim trying to address the nation and concluding with a phrase other than God bless America. Allah, anyone? Or an observant Jew declining to mention the name of the Holy One at all.
The fact is, Romney really has nothing to say about religion. I am content that he is a practicing Mormon down to his underwear and that if he is elected president (he won't be, of course) he will behave no more badly than our current leader. He could hardly be worse. As governor of Massachusetts, he left the state about as liberal as he found it. Listening to him pontificate about his faith must be ten times more painful than reading his words. I hope the others don't follow suit. I don't want to hear Clinton talk about being a Methodist, nor Huckabee tell me about his personal relationship with the Savior and Redeemer of the World.
It is rhetorical nonsense. I was struck that some commentators were concerned that Romney did not argue for the inclusion of nonbelievers in the American civic landscape. Nonbelievers are doing just fine, thank you. The voice of Christopher Hitchens was heard, strident as always, last week in an article condemning, of all things, Hanukkah as a primitive throwback that Jews should repudiate. I also found an image of Santa on the Cross, which Landover Baptist Church (http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/33515) puts on t-shirts and mugs as a pro-Christian (put Christ back in Christmas) statement. The image here also decorates a thong on their website. These are some pretty rad Baptists.
Religion is dished up to us daily in a variety of repulsive forms. One of the most offensive is currently running in movie theaters. Perhaps you've seen it. The video is an advertisement for the National Guard. It features a band on a hillside singing with that breathy sincere sound while soldiers, in Iraq and our own Revolutionary War, rescue children and promise to be there whenever we need them. It is a religious message in every sense of the term, offering salvation, security, and really bad music to true believers (in the American military way). It is exactly the kind of music featured on GodTube, except it extols the citizen soldier instead of Jesus. Both of course are redeemers.
If you haven't already been subjected to the video at a movie theater, you can download the MP3 file and listen to it at http://www.1800goguard.com/movie/index2.php. When we first heard it a couple of weeks ago here in Portland, the audience began hissing before it finished playing. It's one of the reasons we like living here.
What's my point this week? We could use some serious, and less noisy, faith practice in this country (not more religion--we have too much of that). What we have now is a parody of faith: marketing, manipulation, and unbridled ego. Another example of religion as parody, and I'll finish with this one, is from the Episcopal Church, my favorite institution. A diocese in California has officially voted itself out of the church because it, the diocese, knows itself to be purer than those of us who sup with gays and take communion from women priests. The bishop in this diocese sounds just like Romney or any of our political candidates: unctuous, full of himself, and lacking in credibility. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom
A friend wrote to me this morning asking if were building an ark. Given the news about the weather in the northwest these past few days, his inquiry was not without merit. It has rained. But the suffering caused by a convergence of Pacific storms has not afflicted us much here in Portland. We are a hundred miles from the Pacific, and there is a coastal range between us and most of the furor. One town, Vernonia, just thirty-five miles away to the northwest was isolated by mudslides and residents had to be evacuated by the National Guard. Some people have died. So the fact that we were mostly spared in Portland is not the story.
It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)
We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.
In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.
A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?
That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.
At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.
But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.
We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.
Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.
Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?
It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)
We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.
In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.
A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?
That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.
At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.
But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.
We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.
Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.
Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?
Monday, November 26, 2007
Jesus for President
I have not used the powerful platform of this blog to advocate for a particular political candidate. But this weekend I discovered that there is an alternative candidate that the liberal media has not been covering. Even worse, this candidate, whom many of you know and love, has run before. If you Google the name of his movement, "Jesus for President," you will find that as long ago as 2000 (remember the turn of the millenium?), this good man was a candidate. He and his surrogates have been using YouTube as a medium for getting out the message (a problem for them back in 2000), and if you want to see more of the campaign and its message, go to YouTube and search for "Jesus for President." I think you will realize, as I have, that the answer to our nation's problems is right in front of us.
Here (below) is one of the most effective of the campaign's video spots. In it, the Son of God appears as himself, most surprising, perhaps, for his choice of clothing. It looks like a Christmas sweater from his mom. But the message is one we all need to hear, particularly the parts in which he corrects some of the misinformation in the Bible (which he refers to as a biography).
Bishop Ken endorses Jesus. And so do I. What about you? Will you put your politics where your faith is? Obama, Hilary, John, Rudy, Mitt, John, Fred, Harry, and Dave (just to make sure I have covered them all) are telling us that they pray. Well, why not go right to the top and elect the one to whom or through whom they pray? I have not heard the leaders of America's churches speak about Jesus' candidacy. I wonder why they are so quiet. Since the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is the one I look to for guidance, I will ask her directly (I know she reads this blog): When are you going to endorse Jesus? (And, by the way, I saw your performance as Kate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There" and I thought you were fabulous.)
Here (below) is one of the most effective of the campaign's video spots. In it, the Son of God appears as himself, most surprising, perhaps, for his choice of clothing. It looks like a Christmas sweater from his mom. But the message is one we all need to hear, particularly the parts in which he corrects some of the misinformation in the Bible (which he refers to as a biography).
Bishop Ken endorses Jesus. And so do I. What about you? Will you put your politics where your faith is? Obama, Hilary, John, Rudy, Mitt, John, Fred, Harry, and Dave (just to make sure I have covered them all) are telling us that they pray. Well, why not go right to the top and elect the one to whom or through whom they pray? I have not heard the leaders of America's churches speak about Jesus' candidacy. I wonder why they are so quiet. Since the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is the one I look to for guidance, I will ask her directly (I know she reads this blog): When are you going to endorse Jesus? (And, by the way, I saw your performance as Kate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There" and I thought you were fabulous.)
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Parish of Despair
I want to pause to note the passing of The Rev. Chad Varah, shown here (in a photo from Reuters) on what might be a precursor to the cell phone before miniaturization. You have to love this guy. He set up a hot line for the suicidal and founded Samaritans, a charity that worked to prevent suicides. Here are some of the other major reasons to love him (as indicated in the New York Times obit this morning, which I urge you to read in full for all of the juicy details):
1. The Samaritans was named from a headline in The Daily Mirror. Father Varah disapproved of the name for his organization because he believed that religious teachings, presumably including Bible verses and stories meant to be instructive, should be avoided in helping the desperate. Treat em don’t preach to em.
2. He chose as his parish one that had a single parishioner—the lord mayor, as it happened—which gave him the opportunity to serve, as he put it, “the parish of despair.”
3. Father Varah supplemented his undoubtedly meager income writing for comic strips, an avocation I suspect most priests are not irreverent enough to pursue. (I do know of one cartooning Episcopal priest, Jay Sidebotham, the exception that proves the rule.)
4. When called to testify in the obscenity trial of Linda Lovelace, who starred in the pornographic film Deep Throat (the one that started pornography chic), he was questioned about the commandment forbidding adultery (which he had previously made clear in writings for what the Times calls a “sexually frank magazine” he did not always condemn). His response was, “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?” You go, guy!
5. He retired at the age of 92—at which point he was still getting around on public transportation. He died at 95 in Basingstoke, England. The rest of the Anglican Communion must be relieved.
6. He once characterized Pope John Paul II as “an ignorant Polish peasant” for his condemnation of contraception. I don’t know if the late pope was either ignorant or a peasant (I have my opinion), but what you have to admire is Father Varah’s willingness to say what he thought in public and for attribution (another uncommon trait in clergy).
7. He believed in reincarnation.
Be careful out there. Father Chad Varah could return as a member of your congregation. You won’t like what he has to say if you’re an orthodox Christian (whatever that is). And for god’s sake don’t put him on the vestry.
1. The Samaritans was named from a headline in The Daily Mirror. Father Varah disapproved of the name for his organization because he believed that religious teachings, presumably including Bible verses and stories meant to be instructive, should be avoided in helping the desperate. Treat em don’t preach to em.
2. He chose as his parish one that had a single parishioner—the lord mayor, as it happened—which gave him the opportunity to serve, as he put it, “the parish of despair.”
3. Father Varah supplemented his undoubtedly meager income writing for comic strips, an avocation I suspect most priests are not irreverent enough to pursue. (I do know of one cartooning Episcopal priest, Jay Sidebotham, the exception that proves the rule.)
4. When called to testify in the obscenity trial of Linda Lovelace, who starred in the pornographic film Deep Throat (the one that started pornography chic), he was questioned about the commandment forbidding adultery (which he had previously made clear in writings for what the Times calls a “sexually frank magazine” he did not always condemn). His response was, “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?” You go, guy!
5. He retired at the age of 92—at which point he was still getting around on public transportation. He died at 95 in Basingstoke, England. The rest of the Anglican Communion must be relieved.
6. He once characterized Pope John Paul II as “an ignorant Polish peasant” for his condemnation of contraception. I don’t know if the late pope was either ignorant or a peasant (I have my opinion), but what you have to admire is Father Varah’s willingness to say what he thought in public and for attribution (another uncommon trait in clergy).
7. He believed in reincarnation.
Be careful out there. Father Chad Varah could return as a member of your congregation. You won’t like what he has to say if you’re an orthodox Christian (whatever that is). And for god’s sake don’t put him on the vestry.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Anniversary
As some of you know, I suffered an emotional collapse just over a year ago—All Saints Day, to be exact. It took me a few months to recover, with the help of an excellent psychiatrist and some medication, although it has taken this full year to begin to feel like myself again (whoever that might be). I no longer take meds. Leaving the New York City stress factory has helped my healing. Being able to retire as an Episcopal clergy has been a pivotal blessing: The Episcopal Church (or, to be fair, any church) is a petri dish for killer stress. Moving to Portland, Oregon, has revived my spirit and improved my vision. Everyone here is so positive—and, as those of you who know me know, I have to struggle to see the good news. But mostly I think I am just happy to be more than four thousand miles away from the east coast, where I lived all of my former life (although I miss many of you who live there, especially my [adult] children and my aging mother).
We have a surprising number of new friends here, most of them writers. I have been writing almost constantly since we got here in June. I have nearly finished a book critiquing the church (but also offering some reflections on what I see as a way out of the current Christianity quagmire). There have been several short stories (a new genre for me), a fistful of poems, notes for a new play, and the draft of the first third of a novel.
A couple of my older plays are being read by theaters—one of them, Enlightenment, is based on the last years of Thomas Merton; it has not been produced. It excites me to know that theaters are interested in it. The idea for the play was first suggested to me in the early 1980s by my agent at the time, Lucy Kroll. She was right that I should write it, but the play itself had to await the publication of Merton’s complete journals because of privacy issues. When the journals came out in the late 90s, I read them all and quickly wrote the play. It had been gestating for a long time and was ready to be born. After one staged reading in New York, however, the script sat in my desk drawer for seven years while I worked long, frustrating, and mostly fruitless hours for the church. Last month I completed a revision and sent it off to a theater here on the west coast. When it is produced—and I know it will be—I will let you know. Soon, I hope.
Perhaps the most unexpected accomplishment of these months has been the founding of my new publishing company, KenArnoldBooks, which will issue its first four titles in January and February of 2008. The launch party will be in early March. I will have much more to say about the publishing program as time goes on—but it should surprise no one who reads this blog that I am looking for books that are radical in their perspective, daring and provocative. I am not seeking to publish orthodox thinkers or writers. Nor am I only interested in religion—but insofar as I am publishing books with a spiritual bent, they will represent all traditions.
So, a year after a frightening encounter with demons, I am engaged with the work that has always mattered most to me: writing and publishing. And for the first time in my life I am doing both with as much freedom as we ever achieve. I can write (almost) whatever I please and publish only what interests me.
May you all know such freedom in your own lives. If you do, hold on to it; if you don’t, do something now. We so quickly run out of time. The demons are always waiting.
We have a surprising number of new friends here, most of them writers. I have been writing almost constantly since we got here in June. I have nearly finished a book critiquing the church (but also offering some reflections on what I see as a way out of the current Christianity quagmire). There have been several short stories (a new genre for me), a fistful of poems, notes for a new play, and the draft of the first third of a novel.
A couple of my older plays are being read by theaters—one of them, Enlightenment, is based on the last years of Thomas Merton; it has not been produced. It excites me to know that theaters are interested in it. The idea for the play was first suggested to me in the early 1980s by my agent at the time, Lucy Kroll. She was right that I should write it, but the play itself had to await the publication of Merton’s complete journals because of privacy issues. When the journals came out in the late 90s, I read them all and quickly wrote the play. It had been gestating for a long time and was ready to be born. After one staged reading in New York, however, the script sat in my desk drawer for seven years while I worked long, frustrating, and mostly fruitless hours for the church. Last month I completed a revision and sent it off to a theater here on the west coast. When it is produced—and I know it will be—I will let you know. Soon, I hope.
Perhaps the most unexpected accomplishment of these months has been the founding of my new publishing company, KenArnoldBooks, which will issue its first four titles in January and February of 2008. The launch party will be in early March. I will have much more to say about the publishing program as time goes on—but it should surprise no one who reads this blog that I am looking for books that are radical in their perspective, daring and provocative. I am not seeking to publish orthodox thinkers or writers. Nor am I only interested in religion—but insofar as I am publishing books with a spiritual bent, they will represent all traditions.
So, a year after a frightening encounter with demons, I am engaged with the work that has always mattered most to me: writing and publishing. And for the first time in my life I am doing both with as much freedom as we ever achieve. I can write (almost) whatever I please and publish only what interests me.
May you all know such freedom in your own lives. If you do, hold on to it; if you don’t, do something now. We so quickly run out of time. The demons are always waiting.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Rev. Ruth
I got a call from my daughter Ruth on Saturday, the first time we had spoken since she returned from Colombia, S.A., a few weeks ago. She had gone to Medellin in particular because that is the city where she was born twenty-seven years ago. We adopted her when she was six months old and suffering from malnourishment. I remember our time in Medellin as a nightmare of Colombian bureaucracy and poisoned air. The city sits in a bowl among mountains, and in those days the atmosphere was a barely breathable carbon monoxide soup. The day we were supposed to leave Medellin for Bogota to pick up her U.S. visa, we learned that the embassy would be closed in observance of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Say, what? I spoke with an official there who said that the closure was out of respect for the local customs and that she would ordinarily be glad to come in and handle the visa for us except that her daughter was being confirmed that day. A big party was planned.
Ruth tells me that Medellin is now a tourist destination, a pretty cool place. While she was there, I saw an article in the New York Times Sunday Travel section saying the same thing. The city has come a long way from the 1980s when the drug trade was about to take over the economy. There are still dangerous parts of the country, of course, because a civil war continues. I confess to having worried about her while she was gone, but every now and then I’d get a text message from her saying something like, “Spending the day at the beach. Having a great time.” She’s a gregarious young woman and met a lot of people, it seems, who took her around to see the sights. She was in good hands.
When she called, I asked her, “What’s up?” And she started to giggle. “I’m the Rev. Ruth Arnold,” she laughed. And what did that mean? I asked.
“Well,” she said, “my friend in Albuquerque” where she went to college “wants me to marry her and her fiancé next June and they said I could go on this website, Universal Life Church Monastery, and get ordained. So I did.” She laughed and laughed.
I looked up the website while we were talking, and there it was. I loved the headline, so reminiscent of the early McDonald’s burger stands: “Over 20 million ordained since 1959.” I should have known about this option back in the late 1980s when I was turning my life inside out to get the Episcopal Church to agree to ordain me. I noticed on the ULC website that I could still become a Doctor of Metaphysics, which has a certain appeal. (How many certified metaphysicians do you know?) But my daughter clearly loved the fact that she got ordained in fifteen minutes on line, whereas I had spent eight years in order to become a . . . deacon. She’s right. It’s pretty funny.
But, you might say, that’s different. You’re ordained in a real church by a bishop in Apostolic Succession, a direct line straight back to Jesus himself.
Right.
I’m going to fill out this application for my metaphysical degree. Won’t take a minute.
Uh-oh, I hear Bishop Ken stomping down the corridors of the other world heading my way. I’m in trouble. Hit “Send” now!
Ruth tells me that Medellin is now a tourist destination, a pretty cool place. While she was there, I saw an article in the New York Times Sunday Travel section saying the same thing. The city has come a long way from the 1980s when the drug trade was about to take over the economy. There are still dangerous parts of the country, of course, because a civil war continues. I confess to having worried about her while she was gone, but every now and then I’d get a text message from her saying something like, “Spending the day at the beach. Having a great time.” She’s a gregarious young woman and met a lot of people, it seems, who took her around to see the sights. She was in good hands.
When she called, I asked her, “What’s up?” And she started to giggle. “I’m the Rev. Ruth Arnold,” she laughed. And what did that mean? I asked.
“Well,” she said, “my friend in Albuquerque” where she went to college “wants me to marry her and her fiancé next June and they said I could go on this website, Universal Life Church Monastery, and get ordained. So I did.” She laughed and laughed.
I looked up the website while we were talking, and there it was. I loved the headline, so reminiscent of the early McDonald’s burger stands: “Over 20 million ordained since 1959.” I should have known about this option back in the late 1980s when I was turning my life inside out to get the Episcopal Church to agree to ordain me. I noticed on the ULC website that I could still become a Doctor of Metaphysics, which has a certain appeal. (How many certified metaphysicians do you know?) But my daughter clearly loved the fact that she got ordained in fifteen minutes on line, whereas I had spent eight years in order to become a . . . deacon. She’s right. It’s pretty funny.
But, you might say, that’s different. You’re ordained in a real church by a bishop in Apostolic Succession, a direct line straight back to Jesus himself.
Right.
I’m going to fill out this application for my metaphysical degree. Won’t take a minute.
Uh-oh, I hear Bishop Ken stomping down the corridors of the other world heading my way. I’m in trouble. Hit “Send” now!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Justa!
“Justa, Justa. Come quickly.”
I was working quietly in my new home office here in Portland this morning when Bishop Ken interrupted, as he has a habit of doing, by calling to me imperiously from the other world. [For those of you who missed last week's post, Bishop Thomas Ken was active in Britain in the 17th century; he has begun to visit me, Deacon Ken, from the beyond, attracted, I believe, by the similarity of our names. A friend wondered if the bishop speaks to me from the radiator. He does not. He speaks to me as all bishops do, out of nowhere and in a loud voice.]
“I’ve told you, my name is Ken,” I said.
“No, no,” he chortled. “Justa. As in, Justa Deacon.” He laughed uproariously. “S'blood, I crack me up.”
“What do you want? I’m busy.”
“Did I ever tell you about how I refused to allow the King to park his trollop, Nell Gwyn, in my residence? You see, I was Royal Chaplain to King Charles and he thought maybe he could hide his mistress in my apartments and escape notice. Well, I can tell you I wasted no time in sending His Royal Highness a pretty sharp rebuke.”
“I’ve read about it. Very courageous of you.”
“But did you hear what I wrote? ‘The Royal Chaplain shall not double as the Royal Pimp.’ Pretty good, eh what? Anyway, that is how I came to be appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells. The King reportedly declared—I have this on the highest authority—‘None shall have this bishopric save that little man who refused lodging to poor Nellie!’ And when he died, the King that is, it was I he summoned to be with him at the end. Not that I’m actually such a little man, mind you.”
“That’s great,” I said, putting a Charlie Parker disc on the Bose. “But no one cares about King Charles and his mistress anymore. The church has more important matters to attend to than who’s sleeping with whom.”
“Ah,” Bishop Ken sighed. “I could have been executed for my stance. For what are your bishops prepared to die?”
“Church property and pensions.”
There was a knowing silence from the other world.
“Oh, dear, Justa. I’ve run out of tobacco. Be a good lad, will you, and fetch some for me.”
I turned up the volume on “Salt Peanuts.”
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Bishop Ken Speaks
It has come to my attention that the author of this blog, whatever that may be, hath written calumnies against the Church, and yet being a deacon hath not attached himself as he should to a Bishop upon whom he may rely for counsel. I, Bishop Ken, have offered myself in Christian Charitie to tutor this wayward deacon in the ways of his calling. I may therefore on occasion intercede for him here and correct his lack of knowledge (but he being but a deacon is not charged to know anything but rather to do as he is told).
First, it is to be acknowledged that my half-brother-in-law, Izaak Walton, angler of some fame, who with my half-sister Anne did rear me from my birth in 1637, has informed me of Deacon Ken’s prowess as a fisherman, a sport of dignity, which alas I never learned from Mr. Walton. I know not what became of my natural parents. Nonetheless, it is a good thing to spend time in the country among rivers and the fishes and I commend the deacon for his attention to God’s creation.
However, and second, the goodly deacon, as I understand his wife Constance is prone to call him, for reasons unclear, has on occasion spoken sharply to bishops, admonishing them in their behavior. I hereby order him, in love and charitie, as his new bishop father in Christ, to desist from such speaking. The bishop is the sole keeper of the Word and it is his office to admonish, not the deacon’s. The deacon's office is to be admonished.
Deacon, I command you to attend upon me in the morning with my tea and toast and prepare to dress me for the Lord’s service, after which you may eat and take communion to the poor and sicke, whilst I attend to higher things.
Hold it, Bishop. I just want to point out that you challenged the king in the matter of the Declaration of Indulgence and were imprisoned in the Tower of London. And then refused to take an oath to William and Mary and were relieved of your office as a result. Like you, I think that there are times when leaders in the church have to speak out against those who abuse their power. For example, we have a regime in this country that tortures prisoners, denies health care to children, murders the innocent citizens of other countries, lies to its citizens, deports and mistreats the strangers in our midst....
Ah, Deacon Ken, it is true that on occasion one must refuse illegitimate power. In telling me, your bishop, of these terrible acts, you are doing your diaconal--and indeed Christian--duty. I commend you for it. What benighted country is this that you speak of? Its leaders are behaving shamefully if what you say is true. Perhaps you could tell me the name of church leaders to whom I could speak about these deplorable conditions. I wonder that they, your bishops, are silent on these matters. They too, by their inaction, abuse their authority.
First, it is to be acknowledged that my half-brother-in-law, Izaak Walton, angler of some fame, who with my half-sister Anne did rear me from my birth in 1637, has informed me of Deacon Ken’s prowess as a fisherman, a sport of dignity, which alas I never learned from Mr. Walton. I know not what became of my natural parents. Nonetheless, it is a good thing to spend time in the country among rivers and the fishes and I commend the deacon for his attention to God’s creation.
However, and second, the goodly deacon, as I understand his wife Constance is prone to call him, for reasons unclear, has on occasion spoken sharply to bishops, admonishing them in their behavior. I hereby order him, in love and charitie, as his new bishop father in Christ, to desist from such speaking. The bishop is the sole keeper of the Word and it is his office to admonish, not the deacon’s. The deacon's office is to be admonished.
Deacon, I command you to attend upon me in the morning with my tea and toast and prepare to dress me for the Lord’s service, after which you may eat and take communion to the poor and sicke, whilst I attend to higher things.
Hold it, Bishop. I just want to point out that you challenged the king in the matter of the Declaration of Indulgence and were imprisoned in the Tower of London. And then refused to take an oath to William and Mary and were relieved of your office as a result. Like you, I think that there are times when leaders in the church have to speak out against those who abuse their power. For example, we have a regime in this country that tortures prisoners, denies health care to children, murders the innocent citizens of other countries, lies to its citizens, deports and mistreats the strangers in our midst....
Ah, Deacon Ken, it is true that on occasion one must refuse illegitimate power. In telling me, your bishop, of these terrible acts, you are doing your diaconal--and indeed Christian--duty. I commend you for it. What benighted country is this that you speak of? Its leaders are behaving shamefully if what you say is true. Perhaps you could tell me the name of church leaders to whom I could speak about these deplorable conditions. I wonder that they, your bishops, are silent on these matters. They too, by their inaction, abuse their authority.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Cycling to St. Paul
Last Friday, I went cycling with Mark, a new friend here in Portland. He drove us to Champoeg Park (pronounced “shampoo-ee.”) twenty miles or so out of the city. Because I don’t have a car, I bike mostly in and around the city, which has miles of paths and bike lanes. It was good to get out and see some of the Oregon country, which is flat where we were riding. Along the road were fields planted with firs of various sorts, mostly Christmas trees, I think, and a couple of large hickory nut groves (around here, the nuts are called filberts). The nuts turn up in creative restaurant dishes around town. You can buy them fresh in the open air markets. The nuts were lying on the ground along the road we were traveling.
We decided to go to St. Paul, a town that hosts a somewhat famous rodeo on July 4th. The town itself is not much. Not far from the Willamette River, which also flows through Portland, it is a Roman Catholic hot spot. The church is located centrally—and I did not see any other denominations represented there, just the brick RC Church and the high school, also Catholic. Street names like Mission Road, Convent Avenue, Church Avenue gave away its identity. We rode into town by the church and out again into the countryside, noting on the way a couple of coffee shops we might visit. We decided on Banker’s Cup, which had a porch and pretty good coffee. Mark and I sat on the porch, looking across the parking lot at a couple of sheds that stored farm equipment (or something else, I couldn’t tell what). On the side of one of the sheds was an old billboard advertising the rodeo. On the bumper of an SUV in the parking lot was a sign reading: “You can’t be Catholic and pro-choice.”
“I told you it’s a Catholic town,” Mark said.
The sky is wide open in Oregon and out there on the plain you could see its great expanse. There were some puffy clouds behind the sheds. Not much was happening and we were happy to sit there drinking coffee.
Mark told me he had been raised Catholic but by the time he was twelve or thirteen he and his friends had figured out that the religion was essentially bogus, even as they went through the motions. When they skipped religious classes, they spent a lot of their time talking about the “theology” of avoiding the priests and their increasingly doubtful view of reality. They understood, he said, that it all rested on the veracity of the priests, whom they knew to be untrustworthy. Once their authority was in question, the rest of the infrastructure fell with them, all the way up to the Pope. He was talking as much about Christianity in general as Catholicism in particular.
I said that, indicating the expansive sky and clouds in front of us, many people I know in the church would talk about the beauty of God’s creation and describe how their emotions reflected God’s call to them from and as part of that creation. Mark responded that he saw the natural world as it is, and that is good enough.
Knowing that I am ordained in the Episcopal Church, I think Mark was curious to know how I would respond. And basically I had to agree with him. These days, when I look at the world I do not see a deity, nor do I hear a deity’s call to creation. What Mark had abandoned was a belief system—Christianity’s doctrines—that no longer reflected what he saw around him or what he experienced. And the argument for abandoning the system is a strong one.
I think a lot of people feel the same way. The Christian creedal world does not speak to them, except as a framework for control or denial, and they want none of it. Around here, in Portland, I’m told that about ten percent of the population attends church.
“People want meaning,” I said. “The church for the most part doesn’t give them a sense of meaning. It explains nothing. If the church is going to survive, it needs to figure out how to do that again.”
I still have an interest in the church's survival, but it's a hard position to maintain.
For me, the natural world has meaning, but it isn’t Christian meaning. The Buddhist explanation of reality resonates more strongly with me these days, but there is something missing there too. Its explanation of the origins of things makes more sense—all arising in mutual dependency out of the void—and its rejection of a theistic deity also sounds right. But that does not answer the twenty-first century yearning for meaning, which for most people is found more often in the company of another, whether a friend or a family member or a lover, or in a book or in music.
We had a good ride. On the way back we talked about some books we both like, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the fiction of Haruki Murakami, for example. Sunday morning we plan to ride again, this time along the Columbia River.
We decided to go to St. Paul, a town that hosts a somewhat famous rodeo on July 4th. The town itself is not much. Not far from the Willamette River, which also flows through Portland, it is a Roman Catholic hot spot. The church is located centrally—and I did not see any other denominations represented there, just the brick RC Church and the high school, also Catholic. Street names like Mission Road, Convent Avenue, Church Avenue gave away its identity. We rode into town by the church and out again into the countryside, noting on the way a couple of coffee shops we might visit. We decided on Banker’s Cup, which had a porch and pretty good coffee. Mark and I sat on the porch, looking across the parking lot at a couple of sheds that stored farm equipment (or something else, I couldn’t tell what). On the side of one of the sheds was an old billboard advertising the rodeo. On the bumper of an SUV in the parking lot was a sign reading: “You can’t be Catholic and pro-choice.”
“I told you it’s a Catholic town,” Mark said.
The sky is wide open in Oregon and out there on the plain you could see its great expanse. There were some puffy clouds behind the sheds. Not much was happening and we were happy to sit there drinking coffee.
Mark told me he had been raised Catholic but by the time he was twelve or thirteen he and his friends had figured out that the religion was essentially bogus, even as they went through the motions. When they skipped religious classes, they spent a lot of their time talking about the “theology” of avoiding the priests and their increasingly doubtful view of reality. They understood, he said, that it all rested on the veracity of the priests, whom they knew to be untrustworthy. Once their authority was in question, the rest of the infrastructure fell with them, all the way up to the Pope. He was talking as much about Christianity in general as Catholicism in particular.
I said that, indicating the expansive sky and clouds in front of us, many people I know in the church would talk about the beauty of God’s creation and describe how their emotions reflected God’s call to them from and as part of that creation. Mark responded that he saw the natural world as it is, and that is good enough.
Knowing that I am ordained in the Episcopal Church, I think Mark was curious to know how I would respond. And basically I had to agree with him. These days, when I look at the world I do not see a deity, nor do I hear a deity’s call to creation. What Mark had abandoned was a belief system—Christianity’s doctrines—that no longer reflected what he saw around him or what he experienced. And the argument for abandoning the system is a strong one.
I think a lot of people feel the same way. The Christian creedal world does not speak to them, except as a framework for control or denial, and they want none of it. Around here, in Portland, I’m told that about ten percent of the population attends church.
“People want meaning,” I said. “The church for the most part doesn’t give them a sense of meaning. It explains nothing. If the church is going to survive, it needs to figure out how to do that again.”
I still have an interest in the church's survival, but it's a hard position to maintain.
For me, the natural world has meaning, but it isn’t Christian meaning. The Buddhist explanation of reality resonates more strongly with me these days, but there is something missing there too. Its explanation of the origins of things makes more sense—all arising in mutual dependency out of the void—and its rejection of a theistic deity also sounds right. But that does not answer the twenty-first century yearning for meaning, which for most people is found more often in the company of another, whether a friend or a family member or a lover, or in a book or in music.
We had a good ride. On the way back we talked about some books we both like, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the fiction of Haruki Murakami, for example. Sunday morning we plan to ride again, this time along the Columbia River.
Monday, October 1, 2007
New Church, True Church
I understand that the dissident Episcopal Churches meeting in Pittsburgh last week intend to move forward with the formation of an institution reflecting a “more unified orthodox Anglicanism in North America,” now that the House of Bishops has failed to accede to the demands of the Anglican Primates A joint statement from the Anglican Communion Network affirmed: “We, with others gathered in Pittsburgh for the Common Cause Council of Bishops, are committed to remaining within biblical Christianity even as The Episcopal Church once again has chosen to continue on its own tragic course.”
Good idea. I know that the leaders of the Episcopal Church are trying to keep the dissidents from leaving by creating special arrangements for Episcopal visitations and so forth, but I think that the church should encourage those who disagree with the direction the church has taken to leave. This position is contrary to the long-cherished Anglican desire to keep everyone together by following, as a church, the middle road, the way of compromise. The problem is that the differences between those who believe that the Episcopal Church is on the right path and those who disagree reflect completely different religious perspectives.
The dissidents espouse a faith based on the notion of a Sky God who hands down immutable laws, found in the Christian Bible, to priests and bishops who are authorized to speak authoritatively for this God. The myth on which their faith is built describes the sacrifice of this God’s son for the salvation of sinners, who may receive this grace by repenting of their sins (as described in the above-noted immutable laws) and returning to righteous ways (as described by the above-identified priests and bishops).
The Episcopal Church opposed by these dissidents actually believes pretty much the same thing when it comes to official doctrine (see, for example, the Nicene Creed), but is nonetheless struggling with the idea that a church might be born that is about a path of spiritual maturity following the way of Christ as opposed to a set of orthodox beliefs required for admission to heaven. The House of Bishops made statements opposing the war in Iraq and racism (good, good), as well as affirming its support for justice and dignity for gays and lesbians (very good).
These two branches of the Anglican Communion are not speaking the same theological language. Two churches are already in place. Why not allow them to be formally established? Some suggest that this approach does not reflect Christian virtues of love and community. But on the contrary, we Christians have always found our way along the path of Christ by stepping out of the existing institutional structures. The reformation must be ongoing or the church will simply whither and die. I believe that the Episcopal Church that seeks justice for gays and lesbians is going in the right direction, but I do not want to stand in the way of those, like Robert Duncan, who believe otherwise. We should support his and his fellow orthodox believers in finding the way back to their true faith.
Good idea. I know that the leaders of the Episcopal Church are trying to keep the dissidents from leaving by creating special arrangements for Episcopal visitations and so forth, but I think that the church should encourage those who disagree with the direction the church has taken to leave. This position is contrary to the long-cherished Anglican desire to keep everyone together by following, as a church, the middle road, the way of compromise. The problem is that the differences between those who believe that the Episcopal Church is on the right path and those who disagree reflect completely different religious perspectives.
The dissidents espouse a faith based on the notion of a Sky God who hands down immutable laws, found in the Christian Bible, to priests and bishops who are authorized to speak authoritatively for this God. The myth on which their faith is built describes the sacrifice of this God’s son for the salvation of sinners, who may receive this grace by repenting of their sins (as described in the above-noted immutable laws) and returning to righteous ways (as described by the above-identified priests and bishops).
The Episcopal Church opposed by these dissidents actually believes pretty much the same thing when it comes to official doctrine (see, for example, the Nicene Creed), but is nonetheless struggling with the idea that a church might be born that is about a path of spiritual maturity following the way of Christ as opposed to a set of orthodox beliefs required for admission to heaven. The House of Bishops made statements opposing the war in Iraq and racism (good, good), as well as affirming its support for justice and dignity for gays and lesbians (very good).
These two branches of the Anglican Communion are not speaking the same theological language. Two churches are already in place. Why not allow them to be formally established? Some suggest that this approach does not reflect Christian virtues of love and community. But on the contrary, we Christians have always found our way along the path of Christ by stepping out of the existing institutional structures. The reformation must be ongoing or the church will simply whither and die. I believe that the Episcopal Church that seeks justice for gays and lesbians is going in the right direction, but I do not want to stand in the way of those, like Robert Duncan, who believe otherwise. We should support his and his fellow orthodox believers in finding the way back to their true faith.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Trumping the Gospel
Last week, an estimated 60,000 people descended on Jena, Louisiana, to protest the unequal treatment before the law of whites and blacks in that town. Mykal Bell, a black seventeen-year-old, had been tried as an adult for attempted murder; his conviction was overturned by an appeals court. But Bell remains in jail. Who knows why. Oh, yes, he’s black. Dangerous. More dangerous than the white boys who hung nooses on their tree in the school yard as a warning to blacks who sat under it.
Earlier in the summer, I wrote about this case, at a time when little attention was being paid. Last week, the plight of these young men was all over the news. The media finally woke up to what was happening in Louisiana (not my doing but the work of many others). The church remains asleep, as events in another part of Louisiana demonstrate.
The Bishops of the Episcopal Church happened to begin their semi-annual meeting in New Orleans last week just before the protesters arrived in Jena from all over the country. Before the bishops is the earth-shattering question of how they should respond to an ultimatum from the rest of the Anglican Communion that could result in a split between the Episcopal Church and the others. Readers of this blog know that the issue revolves around whether homosexuals can be bishops and whether they can be sexual as priests and bishops and whether they can be married. Yawn.
A couple of days after the Jena Six protest the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, preached at a Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans that included the blessing of the hand-built "Elysian Trumpet," dedicated to the memory of all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield played "Amazing Grace" on the it. I do not doubt that this event was moving and appropriate to memorialize the victims of Hurricane Katrina (or, rather, the victims of governmental incompetence, beginning with the inadequate attention given to levees affecting the African-Americans living in the Ninth Ward and continuing with federal mismanagement of the aftermath--but that wasn't mentioned).
So far as I can tell, no bishops joined the Jena protest. They were in church.
The issue before the Episcopal Church is whether it will continue to be a church of hierarchy and privilege. That is what is really at stake in Louisiana. A new church might come into being, one that is wholly inclusive and one that is marked not by meetings of men and women in fancy clothes counting angels on the head of a pin, but rather by men and women who go to places like Jena and put their bodies on the line for justice. (I note that the bishops did put on work clothes and build houses or something like that. There were a lot of photos taken. Praise them in their plaid shirts and blue jeans, praise them for their hammers, the nails....)
Be not afraid, however, the old church is firmly in command, according to dispatches from Louisiana. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who came to listen, rejoices that the bishops are “passionate” about the Anglican Communion. Passionate. Bishop Katharine spoke passionately and eloquently about “trumpeting the Gospel” in her sermon. She imagined an inclusive procession of all God's people (going I'm not sure where). It really was good, beautifully written. Hearts beat faster as she preached. But as usual it was mostly talk--sound and fury, signifying nothing. The church at its best in ceremonial display and eloquence.
The real split the bishops should be concerned about is the one that is already killing the Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the Christian Churches: the split between those who are tired of what one writer called “the narcissism of small differences” and the clueless who are parsing doctrine in Louisiana this week.
The Gospel is being trumped, not trumpeted.
Earlier in the summer, I wrote about this case, at a time when little attention was being paid. Last week, the plight of these young men was all over the news. The media finally woke up to what was happening in Louisiana (not my doing but the work of many others). The church remains asleep, as events in another part of Louisiana demonstrate.
The Bishops of the Episcopal Church happened to begin their semi-annual meeting in New Orleans last week just before the protesters arrived in Jena from all over the country. Before the bishops is the earth-shattering question of how they should respond to an ultimatum from the rest of the Anglican Communion that could result in a split between the Episcopal Church and the others. Readers of this blog know that the issue revolves around whether homosexuals can be bishops and whether they can be sexual as priests and bishops and whether they can be married. Yawn.
A couple of days after the Jena Six protest the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, preached at a Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans that included the blessing of the hand-built "Elysian Trumpet," dedicated to the memory of all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield played "Amazing Grace" on the it. I do not doubt that this event was moving and appropriate to memorialize the victims of Hurricane Katrina (or, rather, the victims of governmental incompetence, beginning with the inadequate attention given to levees affecting the African-Americans living in the Ninth Ward and continuing with federal mismanagement of the aftermath--but that wasn't mentioned).
So far as I can tell, no bishops joined the Jena protest. They were in church.
The issue before the Episcopal Church is whether it will continue to be a church of hierarchy and privilege. That is what is really at stake in Louisiana. A new church might come into being, one that is wholly inclusive and one that is marked not by meetings of men and women in fancy clothes counting angels on the head of a pin, but rather by men and women who go to places like Jena and put their bodies on the line for justice. (I note that the bishops did put on work clothes and build houses or something like that. There were a lot of photos taken. Praise them in their plaid shirts and blue jeans, praise them for their hammers, the nails....)
Be not afraid, however, the old church is firmly in command, according to dispatches from Louisiana. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who came to listen, rejoices that the bishops are “passionate” about the Anglican Communion. Passionate. Bishop Katharine spoke passionately and eloquently about “trumpeting the Gospel” in her sermon. She imagined an inclusive procession of all God's people (going I'm not sure where). It really was good, beautifully written. Hearts beat faster as she preached. But as usual it was mostly talk--sound and fury, signifying nothing. The church at its best in ceremonial display and eloquence.
The real split the bishops should be concerned about is the one that is already killing the Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the Christian Churches: the split between those who are tired of what one writer called “the narcissism of small differences” and the clueless who are parsing doctrine in Louisiana this week.
The Gospel is being trumped, not trumpeted.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Water in the Desert
Last Friday evening, I was sitting at a bar in the Ramada Plaza Hotel at JFK Airport in New York, eating my fish and chips, as the Lou Dobbs nightly program began. Some of you may know that Lou Dobbs has been especially tenacious about the “problem” of illegal immigrants (especially those pesky Mexicans) in the US. Dobbs himself was away, but his substitute (whose name I missed, but she’s also a regular) continued to read from the same script. She decried the renewed efforts by those pernicious Democrats to resurrect the “amnesty” proposals that have already been twice rejected by congress. “When,” she wanted to know, “will they understand and abide by the will of the people?” The Russian woman behind the bar brought me a glass of Cabernet.
Well, I don’t know about the will of the people. In this administration, and in some media environments, it is hard to separate information from manipulation. But clearly the attempt to demonize immigrants and particularly Hispanics, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is going forward. Migrant workers from Mexico are an easy target, as are “towel heads” and other undesirables. It has been a part of our history since its beginnings, that the foreigners are the cause of our problems. Never mind that we are all foreigners.
I referred in my last blog entry to a migrant workers’ aid program in Arizona supported by my aunt’s congregation, First Christian Church in Tucson. The program is called Humane Borders. Its ministry is to migrant workers crossing the desert from Mexico into the US who do not have food or water for the journey. Many of them die. Humane Borders maintains water stations in the desert, presently over eighty of them, with the help of 8,000 volunteers. The program has been underway since 2000.
Humane Borders also advocates for legislative change. There are six actions the group recommends (see their website, www.humaneborders.org for information on the group and its work): (1) legalize the undocumented now living and working in the US; (2) begin a responsible guest worker program by issuing work visas directly to migrants so that they are not tied to any one employer or sector of the economy and allow workers to be organized; (3) increase the number of visas for Mexican nationals; (4) demilitarize the border; (5) support economic development in Mexico; (6) provide federal aid for local medical service providers, law enforcement and adjudication, land owners and managers.
The program Humane Borders recommends sounds like a reasonable one to me, more so that the Dobbs approach, which is to nail up the doors and windows. This xenophobic reaction is increasingly common in this country. One of the Humane Borders workers, Sr. Elizabeth (a Franciscan, I believe), was in Minnesota for the summer. Speaking to the media while she was there, she described her work as ministering to Jesus in the desert. The group’s newsletter, “Desert Fountain,” remarks: “You’d have thought she was giving guns to terrorists. . . . In a matter of days, over 500 emails were compiled by the St. Cloud newspaper.” The emails did not applaud the analogy or her ministry.
Take a look at what Humane Borders is doing. It is a worthwhile model for faith-based action, prophetic and sustainable.
Next week I will talk about the New Sanctuary Movement, which is aimed at supported immigrants facing deportation. It too is prophetic and essential, but a lot more dangerous. You don't have to ask Lou Dobbs what he thinks of either of these responses to the reality (not the problem) of human need among migrant workers and immigrants.
Meanwhile, I note that the Episcopal Church House of Bishops meeting begins September 20. Apparently the most important question on the agenda has to do with how the church will respond to demands from the "traditionalists" in the Anglican Communion that it become less inclusive and adhere to myth-based doctrines forbidding sexual relations between people, or perhaps even animals, of the same gender. What is there to discuss?
One group of Christians is giving water to people in the desert. Another is consumed with its own existence as an institution. How sad for the Episcopal Church. Perhaps Humane Borders can show the Episcopalians where to find living water before they (we) die of thirst in the desert.
Well, I don’t know about the will of the people. In this administration, and in some media environments, it is hard to separate information from manipulation. But clearly the attempt to demonize immigrants and particularly Hispanics, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is going forward. Migrant workers from Mexico are an easy target, as are “towel heads” and other undesirables. It has been a part of our history since its beginnings, that the foreigners are the cause of our problems. Never mind that we are all foreigners.
I referred in my last blog entry to a migrant workers’ aid program in Arizona supported by my aunt’s congregation, First Christian Church in Tucson. The program is called Humane Borders. Its ministry is to migrant workers crossing the desert from Mexico into the US who do not have food or water for the journey. Many of them die. Humane Borders maintains water stations in the desert, presently over eighty of them, with the help of 8,000 volunteers. The program has been underway since 2000.
Humane Borders also advocates for legislative change. There are six actions the group recommends (see their website, www.humaneborders.org for information on the group and its work): (1) legalize the undocumented now living and working in the US; (2) begin a responsible guest worker program by issuing work visas directly to migrants so that they are not tied to any one employer or sector of the economy and allow workers to be organized; (3) increase the number of visas for Mexican nationals; (4) demilitarize the border; (5) support economic development in Mexico; (6) provide federal aid for local medical service providers, law enforcement and adjudication, land owners and managers.
The program Humane Borders recommends sounds like a reasonable one to me, more so that the Dobbs approach, which is to nail up the doors and windows. This xenophobic reaction is increasingly common in this country. One of the Humane Borders workers, Sr. Elizabeth (a Franciscan, I believe), was in Minnesota for the summer. Speaking to the media while she was there, she described her work as ministering to Jesus in the desert. The group’s newsletter, “Desert Fountain,” remarks: “You’d have thought she was giving guns to terrorists. . . . In a matter of days, over 500 emails were compiled by the St. Cloud newspaper.” The emails did not applaud the analogy or her ministry.
Take a look at what Humane Borders is doing. It is a worthwhile model for faith-based action, prophetic and sustainable.
Next week I will talk about the New Sanctuary Movement, which is aimed at supported immigrants facing deportation. It too is prophetic and essential, but a lot more dangerous. You don't have to ask Lou Dobbs what he thinks of either of these responses to the reality (not the problem) of human need among migrant workers and immigrants.
Meanwhile, I note that the Episcopal Church House of Bishops meeting begins September 20. Apparently the most important question on the agenda has to do with how the church will respond to demands from the "traditionalists" in the Anglican Communion that it become less inclusive and adhere to myth-based doctrines forbidding sexual relations between people, or perhaps even animals, of the same gender. What is there to discuss?
One group of Christians is giving water to people in the desert. Another is consumed with its own existence as an institution. How sad for the Episcopal Church. Perhaps Humane Borders can show the Episcopalians where to find living water before they (we) die of thirst in the desert.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Big Three
Three issues are occupying my attention right now. Perhaps they are important to you too. One of my goals for the month is to become more engaged in each of them in some way.
The first and most immediately pressing is the war in Iraq. On the weekend we saw a movie I commend to all of you: No End in Sight. It is a documentary that explains clearly (and for me for the first time) how policy decisions in Washington and the Green Zone led to the insurgency and our almost certain defeat in Iraq. It is a compelling and horrifying film. Despite the continuing chaos and government floundering (and I include here the Democrats as well), too many Americans are silent. The churches are virtually comatose. There is a vote coming in Congress about the future of the war that will be based on the success of the so-called “surge”—escalation by any other name—which has clearly not been successful in bringing about political stability. I am joining with PDX Peace, a Portland-based group, to apply pressure on local senators and representatives in a series of Wednesday vigils to collect signatures opposing the continuation of the war. Please be in touch with your own congressional delegations. The lack of pressure from the public is translated by government officials as support for the status quo.
The second is an issue that I have discussed before: sex trafficking, particularly in the United States. There is an article by Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times that talks specifically about the situation in Las Vegas, where the sex trade is booming under the leadership (if that word applies here) of the present mayor, Oscar Goodman. Herbert describes the situation facing teenagers, some as young as fourteen, who engage in prostitution at widely advertised sex clubs. When I was in Vegas three years ago for a meeting of the National Episcopal Council of Clergy Associations, hosted by the bishop of Nevada, Katherine Jefferts-Shori (now the Presiding Bishop of the church), I saw the billboards hauled by pickups through the streets advertising the services of young women who could be delivered to your hotel room. Although prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas, the mayor would like to make it so. Meanwhile, the sex trafficking business is alive and well in the city. It is hard to know what to do about this situation since the sex trade is a routine part of our cultural life. We ignore it and the impact it has on young people. I know it must be part of the Portland, Oregon, landscape: we have more strip joints per capita than any other city in the country. And therefore I assume young boys and girls are being trafficked through here. After all, the city is a major international port. I wonder if the Presiding Bishop might like to return to Las Vegas and make a public statement about the sex trafficking business there. I’m sure she knows Mayor Goodman. Maybe a lot of us would be willing to go with her. Meanwhile, I’m sending this blog to Bishop Itty here in Portland asking if he’d like put together a group to tour some sex clubs to see about how many dancers are under age.
Third, the situation for illegal immigrants—and legal immigrants—is growing worse. When some young people were executed in Newark, New Jersey, not too long ago, a couple of the killers turned out to be of Hispanic origin. I thought at the time that some politician would use that information to suggest that Hispanics are dangerous. And, sure enough, that’s what happened. There is a modest sanctuary movement growing in the country among churches that are concerned that the Hispanics will be targeted next as the newest cause of all American ills. It appears that some Republican candidates for President are already talking about the immigration issue in terms previously used by Bush the First when he abducted the image of Willie Horton to race bait the country. My aunt is a minister in the Disciples of Christ Church in Arizona, and her congregation is engaged in a simple ministry, providing water to immigrants as they make their way across the desert. What might other churches do to support the men and women who do so much of the work that supports our social structure as they come increasingly under attack by the government? I don’t have an answer.
I offer these issues as those of primary importance to me right now. Naturally, I hope that some of you are working on them and perhaps have some ideas to pass along about what we might do to end the war, end sex trafficking, and end discrimination against Hispanic immigrants. Perhaps you could also share with us what is of deepest concern to you. The question is what we do to make a difference as individuals and as members of faith or action communities. Prayer is good, of course. Now what?
The first and most immediately pressing is the war in Iraq. On the weekend we saw a movie I commend to all of you: No End in Sight. It is a documentary that explains clearly (and for me for the first time) how policy decisions in Washington and the Green Zone led to the insurgency and our almost certain defeat in Iraq. It is a compelling and horrifying film. Despite the continuing chaos and government floundering (and I include here the Democrats as well), too many Americans are silent. The churches are virtually comatose. There is a vote coming in Congress about the future of the war that will be based on the success of the so-called “surge”—escalation by any other name—which has clearly not been successful in bringing about political stability. I am joining with PDX Peace, a Portland-based group, to apply pressure on local senators and representatives in a series of Wednesday vigils to collect signatures opposing the continuation of the war. Please be in touch with your own congressional delegations. The lack of pressure from the public is translated by government officials as support for the status quo.
The second is an issue that I have discussed before: sex trafficking, particularly in the United States. There is an article by Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times that talks specifically about the situation in Las Vegas, where the sex trade is booming under the leadership (if that word applies here) of the present mayor, Oscar Goodman. Herbert describes the situation facing teenagers, some as young as fourteen, who engage in prostitution at widely advertised sex clubs. When I was in Vegas three years ago for a meeting of the National Episcopal Council of Clergy Associations, hosted by the bishop of Nevada, Katherine Jefferts-Shori (now the Presiding Bishop of the church), I saw the billboards hauled by pickups through the streets advertising the services of young women who could be delivered to your hotel room. Although prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas, the mayor would like to make it so. Meanwhile, the sex trafficking business is alive and well in the city. It is hard to know what to do about this situation since the sex trade is a routine part of our cultural life. We ignore it and the impact it has on young people. I know it must be part of the Portland, Oregon, landscape: we have more strip joints per capita than any other city in the country. And therefore I assume young boys and girls are being trafficked through here. After all, the city is a major international port. I wonder if the Presiding Bishop might like to return to Las Vegas and make a public statement about the sex trafficking business there. I’m sure she knows Mayor Goodman. Maybe a lot of us would be willing to go with her. Meanwhile, I’m sending this blog to Bishop Itty here in Portland asking if he’d like put together a group to tour some sex clubs to see about how many dancers are under age.
Third, the situation for illegal immigrants—and legal immigrants—is growing worse. When some young people were executed in Newark, New Jersey, not too long ago, a couple of the killers turned out to be of Hispanic origin. I thought at the time that some politician would use that information to suggest that Hispanics are dangerous. And, sure enough, that’s what happened. There is a modest sanctuary movement growing in the country among churches that are concerned that the Hispanics will be targeted next as the newest cause of all American ills. It appears that some Republican candidates for President are already talking about the immigration issue in terms previously used by Bush the First when he abducted the image of Willie Horton to race bait the country. My aunt is a minister in the Disciples of Christ Church in Arizona, and her congregation is engaged in a simple ministry, providing water to immigrants as they make their way across the desert. What might other churches do to support the men and women who do so much of the work that supports our social structure as they come increasingly under attack by the government? I don’t have an answer.
I offer these issues as those of primary importance to me right now. Naturally, I hope that some of you are working on them and perhaps have some ideas to pass along about what we might do to end the war, end sex trafficking, and end discrimination against Hispanic immigrants. Perhaps you could also share with us what is of deepest concern to you. The question is what we do to make a difference as individuals and as members of faith or action communities. Prayer is good, of course. Now what?
Monday, August 27, 2007
Books You Haven't Read (Maybe)
Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle blog (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-sellers-books-that-just-keep.html) lists ten best-sellers you have probably never heard of or read. Here's the list with sales or in-print figures:
1. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (614,000 copies sold)
2. Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. (325,000 in print)
3. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (close to 600,000 in print)
4. Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (83,000 sold)
5. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (over 200,000 in print)
6. How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland (over 50,000 in print)
7. Best Friends. by Martha Moody (over 500,000 in print)
8. I Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (130,000 sold)
9. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl (782,000 paperbacks in print)
10. Interventions, by Noam Chomsky (nearly 25,000 in print)11. Honky, by Dalton Conley (90,000 in print)
A couple of the authors are familiar. But what’s fascinating about the list is what it says, or doesn’t say, about American culture. The Best Seller lists are in themselves interesting indicators, but at the same time the books that make it there are (somewhat) understandable. The authors are famous; the titles are provocative; the buzz has been generated and we salivate and buy. But the ten books in the NBCC list are just weird.
What are these books doing here? What does it mean that the biggest seller is a first book mystery story (The Dante Club) about a group of nineteenth-century Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who gather to translate the Inferno and find themselves on the trail of a serial killer? Who are these 700,000+ readers?
Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir by a Hmong immigrant—and is one of the most-often assigned books in freshman college courses. Did you know that?
Take a look at the other books. Read about them on Amazon.com. One of the fascinating aspects of this list is how intelligent most of these these books are, unlike so much of what is normally on the best-seller lists. Rigoberto Menchu? I remember when this book came out—and I also recall that it was later thought to be a fraud, not written by the presumed author at all. (I don't know if that was ever proved or not.) It’s a radical critique of colonial US culture. Best Friends is another first novel, this one about college chums.
What’s my point here? (I'm trying to find one.) Those of us who are interested in contemporary culture and what makes it go find helpful direction in the book world. What are people buying and reading? (Why was Mary Gordon's book about her mother and Roman Catholicism reveiwed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review yesterday?) Does it mean anything that people are buying these ten books and not ten others of perhaps equal value? (Maybe they are and those books are on someone else's list.) What about the fact that many of these titles were initially reviewed tepidly or even negatively. Pearl’s was recommended only for the largest library collections by Library Journal—ie, too dense for most people. In publishing we used to say that a negative review is just as helpful as a positive review.
There are no books with “religious” themes here. The list is obviously eclectic, however--not at all "scientific" or representative. It is not meant to reflect any particular reality except that of the blogger who thought this was an interesting collection of best-sellers most of us haven’t heard of. We know that The Left Behind series of books outsells everything, except maybe The Purpose Driven Life and the Harry Potter books.
We also know the Holy Bible outsells everything. The Koran anyone?
Well, I thought you might find this list as interesting as I did. If you are still looking for something to read this summer, maybe one of these books will attract your attention.
I'm not reading any of them. Right now, my leisure reading of choice is Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the Library of America series. I'm halfway through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich from that collection. Dick is one of those writers being recovered by American readers. All of a sudden. Who knows why? It's kind of like this list of books.
Professionally, I'm reading Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. It definitively takes apart the Intelligent Design argument, but it also raises some pretty serious questions about the whole idea of a created universe for those who think of themselves as Christian and evolutionists. Really? Have you thought that through? Can you explain how the Creator God who is interested in us personally also made/makes the universe and all of its suffering so that we might worship him/her/it?
Ok, I've slipped from frivolous end-of-August space filling to something serious. Sorry. Go back to reading Danielle Steele.
1. Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (614,000 copies sold)
2. Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. (325,000 in print)
3. Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (close to 600,000 in print)
4. Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (83,000 sold)
5. Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (over 200,000 in print)
6. How the Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland (over 50,000 in print)
7. Best Friends. by Martha Moody (over 500,000 in print)
8. I Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (130,000 sold)
9. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl (782,000 paperbacks in print)
10. Interventions, by Noam Chomsky (nearly 25,000 in print)11. Honky, by Dalton Conley (90,000 in print)
A couple of the authors are familiar. But what’s fascinating about the list is what it says, or doesn’t say, about American culture. The Best Seller lists are in themselves interesting indicators, but at the same time the books that make it there are (somewhat) understandable. The authors are famous; the titles are provocative; the buzz has been generated and we salivate and buy. But the ten books in the NBCC list are just weird.
What are these books doing here? What does it mean that the biggest seller is a first book mystery story (The Dante Club) about a group of nineteenth-century Bostonians, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, who gather to translate the Inferno and find themselves on the trail of a serial killer? Who are these 700,000+ readers?
Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a memoir by a Hmong immigrant—and is one of the most-often assigned books in freshman college courses. Did you know that?
Take a look at the other books. Read about them on Amazon.com. One of the fascinating aspects of this list is how intelligent most of these these books are, unlike so much of what is normally on the best-seller lists. Rigoberto Menchu? I remember when this book came out—and I also recall that it was later thought to be a fraud, not written by the presumed author at all. (I don't know if that was ever proved or not.) It’s a radical critique of colonial US culture. Best Friends is another first novel, this one about college chums.
What’s my point here? (I'm trying to find one.) Those of us who are interested in contemporary culture and what makes it go find helpful direction in the book world. What are people buying and reading? (Why was Mary Gordon's book about her mother and Roman Catholicism reveiwed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review yesterday?) Does it mean anything that people are buying these ten books and not ten others of perhaps equal value? (Maybe they are and those books are on someone else's list.) What about the fact that many of these titles were initially reviewed tepidly or even negatively. Pearl’s was recommended only for the largest library collections by Library Journal—ie, too dense for most people. In publishing we used to say that a negative review is just as helpful as a positive review.
There are no books with “religious” themes here. The list is obviously eclectic, however--not at all "scientific" or representative. It is not meant to reflect any particular reality except that of the blogger who thought this was an interesting collection of best-sellers most of us haven’t heard of. We know that The Left Behind series of books outsells everything, except maybe The Purpose Driven Life and the Harry Potter books.
We also know the Holy Bible outsells everything. The Koran anyone?
Well, I thought you might find this list as interesting as I did. If you are still looking for something to read this summer, maybe one of these books will attract your attention.
I'm not reading any of them. Right now, my leisure reading of choice is Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the Library of America series. I'm halfway through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich from that collection. Dick is one of those writers being recovered by American readers. All of a sudden. Who knows why? It's kind of like this list of books.
Professionally, I'm reading Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. It definitively takes apart the Intelligent Design argument, but it also raises some pretty serious questions about the whole idea of a created universe for those who think of themselves as Christian and evolutionists. Really? Have you thought that through? Can you explain how the Creator God who is interested in us personally also made/makes the universe and all of its suffering so that we might worship him/her/it?
Ok, I've slipped from frivolous end-of-August space filling to something serious. Sorry. Go back to reading Danielle Steele.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Instructions: A Poem
No music, please
Only silence such as I have entered
only the ambient squall of traffic
airline passengers in falling flight
the shuffling of impatient feet
a chair
and let me be hidden from the congregation
congregated for me
neither in vessel nor box
but truly somewhere else than where they are
not out of disrespect for them
and grief
but my necessity
I am gone
let that be clearly known
by darkness and the silence
by the emptiness I have gathered
let no one pray or bark a word of praise
let there be no story telling
of the time I did or did not do whatever
nor retelling of the jokes I never told so well
let no one that I’ve loved come near
the stage of my departing
you know why
you know what I have been and done
as others do not know
this is your chance
to forget
I send you these instructions having seen
the beyond not far from any
there is no point in explaining
it is not what you expect
do you remember walking on the shore
of Oregon to Haystack Rock between
the clouded heads at either end
of Cannon Beach
and families in recumbent bikes
like crabs escaping withering tide
but circling back and back
the overcast above the rock crackled
by the gulls and chilling rain
the goofy dogs erupting from the waves
without a clue
torpedoed us
where I am is nothing
for god’s sake don’t say anything
to give my life away
Only silence such as I have entered
only the ambient squall of traffic
airline passengers in falling flight
the shuffling of impatient feet
a chair
and let me be hidden from the congregation
congregated for me
neither in vessel nor box
but truly somewhere else than where they are
not out of disrespect for them
and grief
but my necessity
I am gone
let that be clearly known
by darkness and the silence
by the emptiness I have gathered
let no one pray or bark a word of praise
let there be no story telling
of the time I did or did not do whatever
nor retelling of the jokes I never told so well
let no one that I’ve loved come near
the stage of my departing
you know why
you know what I have been and done
as others do not know
this is your chance
to forget
I send you these instructions having seen
the beyond not far from any
there is no point in explaining
it is not what you expect
do you remember walking on the shore
of Oregon to Haystack Rock between
the clouded heads at either end
of Cannon Beach
and families in recumbent bikes
like crabs escaping withering tide
but circling back and back
the overcast above the rock crackled
by the gulls and chilling rain
the goofy dogs erupting from the waves
without a clue
torpedoed us
where I am is nothing
for god’s sake don’t say anything
to give my life away
Monday, August 13, 2007
God Is Dead, OK?
Ron Currie, Jr., is not a writer I have encountered before. A couple of weeks ago in Powell’s bookstore here in Portland I spotted the title of his book, God Is Dead, and thought, “Well, that’s old news.” Flash back to the fifties and the “God is dead” theology that famously made the cover of Time. I picked up the book and was hooked by the first sentence: “Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.” I bought the book.
The Dinka woman, aka God, is killed by the Janjaweed, and word of his/her death spreads quickly. The end of the Supreme Being is catastrophic….or is it? This is the implicit question in Currie’s clever and horrifying fiction.
The world of the first chapter is all too familiar and includes a hilarious and outrageous appearance by Colin Powell who tries to rescue the Dinka woman, in spite of official consternation that he is taking an interest in this lowlife woman. She changes Powell, who suddenly begins to tell the truth. In a riveting telephone call with President Bush, he calls the President a “silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker.” All right.
God apologizes to a young man she has asked Powell to find for her—not actually the one she asked for but an imposter:
“Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as [anyone] of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer.”
As God lies awaiting death, he closes his eyes and wishes “for someone he could pray to.”
That’s the first chapter. What’s an author to do next? Currie describes a world sunk in chaos and war, horror and cruelty. It seems like a cliché—God is dead and now everything, as the philosophers used to say, is possible. Morality flies out the window. As one character says, talking about violence in the world, “there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.” Martial law is declared; the National Guard moves into every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy rises to an epidemic scale. Looting of Little Debbie snack cakes escalates. Serious shit.
But then the cliché begins to turn on itself. Feral dogs that fed on God’s corpse begin to speaking a “mishmash of Greek and Hebrew and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.” It's a story straight out of supermarket tabloids. Temples are built to them. But among people braced for the end of everything, a gradual realization dawns: nothing has changed. “God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.”
Needing something to revere in place of God, the people of the US begin to worship children: “God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.” Since, as the author observes, Americans virtually worship children already, the step to actual worship is easy. Evolutionary Psychologists try to break Americans of this idolatry, but it is not easy.
When war erupts between the Postmodern Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychological forces, the Evo Psychs threaten invasion of the United States. All hell really is about to break loose in the name of absurd ideologies.
What we realize as we read the evocative and unnerving stories Currie has written is that the world after God is the world we already live in. Time was right. God Is Dead is a fable of our own times and our own culture, our idolatry and indifference, our cruel warrior mentality, our false religions. Despite our high rates of religious observance and our national assertion of belief in God, we Americans in fact behave exactly as we would if we knew for a fact that God does not exist. We simply worship what makes us feel good and secure. For all we know or care, a Dinka woman eaten by dogs in the Sudan might well be God.
What’s the Sudan thing again? I mean, like, whatever.
Currie has written fiction but it is, like all good stories, simply the backside of our daily lives.
The Dinka woman, aka God, is killed by the Janjaweed, and word of his/her death spreads quickly. The end of the Supreme Being is catastrophic….or is it? This is the implicit question in Currie’s clever and horrifying fiction.
The world of the first chapter is all too familiar and includes a hilarious and outrageous appearance by Colin Powell who tries to rescue the Dinka woman, in spite of official consternation that he is taking an interest in this lowlife woman. She changes Powell, who suddenly begins to tell the truth. In a riveting telephone call with President Bush, he calls the President a “silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker.” All right.
God apologizes to a young man she has asked Powell to find for her—not actually the one she asked for but an imposter:
“Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as [anyone] of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer.”
As God lies awaiting death, he closes his eyes and wishes “for someone he could pray to.”
That’s the first chapter. What’s an author to do next? Currie describes a world sunk in chaos and war, horror and cruelty. It seems like a cliché—God is dead and now everything, as the philosophers used to say, is possible. Morality flies out the window. As one character says, talking about violence in the world, “there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.” Martial law is declared; the National Guard moves into every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy rises to an epidemic scale. Looting of Little Debbie snack cakes escalates. Serious shit.
But then the cliché begins to turn on itself. Feral dogs that fed on God’s corpse begin to speaking a “mishmash of Greek and Hebrew and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.” It's a story straight out of supermarket tabloids. Temples are built to them. But among people braced for the end of everything, a gradual realization dawns: nothing has changed. “God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.”
Needing something to revere in place of God, the people of the US begin to worship children: “God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.” Since, as the author observes, Americans virtually worship children already, the step to actual worship is easy. Evolutionary Psychologists try to break Americans of this idolatry, but it is not easy.
When war erupts between the Postmodern Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychological forces, the Evo Psychs threaten invasion of the United States. All hell really is about to break loose in the name of absurd ideologies.
What we realize as we read the evocative and unnerving stories Currie has written is that the world after God is the world we already live in. Time was right. God Is Dead is a fable of our own times and our own culture, our idolatry and indifference, our cruel warrior mentality, our false religions. Despite our high rates of religious observance and our national assertion of belief in God, we Americans in fact behave exactly as we would if we knew for a fact that God does not exist. We simply worship what makes us feel good and secure. For all we know or care, a Dinka woman eaten by dogs in the Sudan might well be God.
What’s the Sudan thing again? I mean, like, whatever.
Currie has written fiction but it is, like all good stories, simply the backside of our daily lives.
Monday, August 6, 2007
A Redwood on the Streetcar
Connie and I discovered a nursery in Northwest Portland last week at the end of NW 18th Street by the railroad tracks, about as far north as you can go in Portland before you fall into the Willamette River. Peter, who runs the nursery, is a copper-haired Belgian who works alone among hundreds of plants. He likes to talk to visitors and seems mostly unconcerned about actually selling much of anything. On our first visit, we bought three potted Begonias and two Dogwoods (small) for our 5 by 8 foot terrace. There was already a small Butterfly Japanese Maple there.
A lot of foliage for a small space, admittedly; and we also have a breakfast table and two chairs. But it’s cozy not crowded. A place of joy. We added along the front of the balcony some Mums and a couple of other flowers whose names I lost. Then we returned to see Peter: we wanted an evergreen of some sort in front of the living room window that overlooks the terrace. He showed us around on a 90-degree sunny afternoon. A freight train pulled up alongside the nursery, its engine throbbing rhythmically.
Most of the conifers we looked at were too large, the pots half the size of our terrace. Or they were too small, ornamentals we would not be able to see from the living room. Then he showed us a Redwood. Sequoia. It was about four feet in height with a dogleg left or right depending on your vantage point. It was exquisite.
“It grows to be the tallest tree in the world,” Peter said. “It’ll reach 500 feet.”
“We could angle it over the street,” I suggested.
“Cut a hole in the terraces above us,” Connie offered.
Peter said, “It will stay small if you leave it in a small pot.”
We could put a Redwood on our terrace?
We paid Peter the $29 he insisted was the price and we squeezed our Redwood into our blue shopping cart and walked it back to the streetcar and rolled it on. We got a seat. The Redwood stood.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said one man, “a tree on the streetcar.”
The tree made everyone smile, especially when we told them it was a Redwood. Then an infirm woman boarded, young but crack-addict skinny, and I offered her my seat. She smiled with teeth that went in all directions and bowed a gracious thanks. I angled the Redwood over her head, “to give you some shade.”
She smiled up at me. “Well, thank you, sir.”
The streetcar hummed along 11th Avenue past the library, the Redwood branches swaying over her head, and she looked cool in the shade of the tallest tree in the world, which now sits on our terrace in front of the living room window.
A lot of foliage for a small space, admittedly; and we also have a breakfast table and two chairs. But it’s cozy not crowded. A place of joy. We added along the front of the balcony some Mums and a couple of other flowers whose names I lost. Then we returned to see Peter: we wanted an evergreen of some sort in front of the living room window that overlooks the terrace. He showed us around on a 90-degree sunny afternoon. A freight train pulled up alongside the nursery, its engine throbbing rhythmically.
Most of the conifers we looked at were too large, the pots half the size of our terrace. Or they were too small, ornamentals we would not be able to see from the living room. Then he showed us a Redwood. Sequoia. It was about four feet in height with a dogleg left or right depending on your vantage point. It was exquisite.
“It grows to be the tallest tree in the world,” Peter said. “It’ll reach 500 feet.”
“We could angle it over the street,” I suggested.
“Cut a hole in the terraces above us,” Connie offered.
Peter said, “It will stay small if you leave it in a small pot.”
We could put a Redwood on our terrace?
We paid Peter the $29 he insisted was the price and we squeezed our Redwood into our blue shopping cart and walked it back to the streetcar and rolled it on. We got a seat. The Redwood stood.
“I’ve never seen that before,” said one man, “a tree on the streetcar.”
The tree made everyone smile, especially when we told them it was a Redwood. Then an infirm woman boarded, young but crack-addict skinny, and I offered her my seat. She smiled with teeth that went in all directions and bowed a gracious thanks. I angled the Redwood over her head, “to give you some shade.”
She smiled up at me. “Well, thank you, sir.”
The streetcar hummed along 11th Avenue past the library, the Redwood branches swaying over her head, and she looked cool in the shade of the tallest tree in the world, which now sits on our terrace in front of the living room window.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Jena Six Update
Thanks to the work of a lot of people, there has been a development in the Jena Six case. According to a friend who is following it closely, the sentencing of Mychal Bell has been postponed to 9/20, and the FBI is going to Jena to investigate civil rights abuses! For those of us who have become somewhat cynical about these matters, that does not mean as much as it might. But at least the sentencing has been postponed.
There is still work to do; pressure on local authorities and church leaders needs to be maintained, even increased. Please contact anyone you know who can help bring this issue to light. The New York Times has yet to cover this story. One of you must know someone at the Times.
Deacon Ormonde Plater, who is in Louisiana, has written eloquently on the Jena Six. See http://oplater.blogspot.com/2007/07/jena-six.html.
I am also told by The Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Louisiana that the church leaders are aware of and looking into the situation. That’s good to hear. Please encourage them and offer your support.
This morning I read an article by a British atheist who described the Church of England as a dog mostly concerned with scratching its own fleas (which he named, by example, as gay marriage and women’s ordination). His point is that the church (and I include now the Episcopal Church) is too often only concerned with its internal affairs, many of which are not as important as the church makes them seem. Here is a matter of considerable concern to people of faith who believe that God is a God who asks us to do justice. In Jena, Louisiana, there are no Episcopal churches. All the more reason for us to be there.
There is still work to do; pressure on local authorities and church leaders needs to be maintained, even increased. Please contact anyone you know who can help bring this issue to light. The New York Times has yet to cover this story. One of you must know someone at the Times.
Deacon Ormonde Plater, who is in Louisiana, has written eloquently on the Jena Six. See http://oplater.blogspot.com/2007/07/jena-six.html.
I am also told by The Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Louisiana that the church leaders are aware of and looking into the situation. That’s good to hear. Please encourage them and offer your support.
This morning I read an article by a British atheist who described the Church of England as a dog mostly concerned with scratching its own fleas (which he named, by example, as gay marriage and women’s ordination). His point is that the church (and I include now the Episcopal Church) is too often only concerned with its internal affairs, many of which are not as important as the church makes them seem. Here is a matter of considerable concern to people of faith who believe that God is a God who asks us to do justice. In Jena, Louisiana, there are no Episcopal churches. All the more reason for us to be there.
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Case of the Jena Six
A friend of ours has told us about a case in Louisiana that is shocking and I hope some of you will look into. There is some urgency: on Monday a black high school student could be sentenced to decades in jail for . . . well, it’s not clear. What we do know is that some of he black students in Jena High School (Jena, Louisiana, central part of the state) sat under what is known there as the “white tree”—where the white students sit. That led to a fight and an seriously injured white student. The six black students are charged with attempted murder. Oh, I didn’t mention that the day after the black students sat under the white tree three nooses were found hanging from it.
Local officials call the nooses a prank. An all-white jury convicted 17-year-old Mychal Bell after a two-day “trial.” He will be sentenced on Monday.
To learn more go to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml
Also: www.demoncracynow.org
You can find an online petition at : www.petitiononline.com/aZ51CqmR/petition.html
For information on faith-based social justice groups you may want to contact, see http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=get_connected.directory (Sojourners). Actions are planned around the country.
There has not been much national coverage of this case (there are five other young black people yet to be tried), but some of us have tried to stir up interest.
Please do what you can to bring pressure to bear on the Louisiana officials involved. The Executive Director of the Louisiana Chapter of The American Civil Liberties Union calls the case one of obvious racial discrimination. The area, he says, is a racial powder keg. Does anyone know of Episcopal or other leaders in Central or other parts of Louisiana who can look into what’s happening?
Local officials call the nooses a prank. An all-white jury convicted 17-year-old Mychal Bell after a two-day “trial.” He will be sentenced on Monday.
To learn more go to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml
Also: www.demoncracynow.org
You can find an online petition at : www.petitiononline.com/aZ51CqmR/petition.html
For information on faith-based social justice groups you may want to contact, see http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=get_connected.directory (Sojourners). Actions are planned around the country.
There has not been much national coverage of this case (there are five other young black people yet to be tried), but some of us have tried to stir up interest.
Please do what you can to bring pressure to bear on the Louisiana officials involved. The Executive Director of the Louisiana Chapter of The American Civil Liberties Union calls the case one of obvious racial discrimination. The area, he says, is a racial powder keg. Does anyone know of Episcopal or other leaders in Central or other parts of Louisiana who can look into what’s happening?
Monday, July 23, 2007
Torture Is Us
Among the ways we are being “cooked by the culture” (the title of last week’s post) is our acceptance of torture as national policy. As Christians, of course, we are against it and in various public utterances have even called on the Bush administration to publicly renounce torture. The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in March passed a resolution condemning the use of torture and “the practice of extraordinary rendition” and called upon the US government to comply with “The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment”; the resolution also, somewhat astonishingly, stated: "That members of the Episcopal Church, including military chaplains, commit themselves to supporting U.S. military and civilian personnel who refuse to obey orders to practice torture or engage in extraordinary rendition or who face discipline for exposing such illegal conduct."
Good for the Episcopal Church. That is an exemplary commitment to support those who might engage in civil disobedience. It's the kind of action the church should be taking. I for one would like to know what has been done to implement this policy. Perhaps Bishop George Packard, the Bishop for Military Chaplains, or the Secretary of Executive Council, The Rev. Gregory Straub, could make a public statement of the church’s position, loudly and clearly, and tell us and the other religious leaders what we are doing to support those who refuse to engage in torture.
A group known as the Evangelicals for Human Rights has issued a statement on torture that I hope leaders of the Episcopal Church and other denominations will support. You can read it on the HRE website, www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, and take the time to sign the statement. I think it is particularly important for non-evangelicals to sign. The truth is that some of the evangelical organizations have been more active on social justice issues than the mainline denominations (as in, for example, Darfur). The HRE website also had a list of resources that are worth looking at (including a link to a sermon by Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge).
The statement from HRE is stronger and more grounded than the one from the Episcopal Church Executive Council. It concludes forcefully:
“The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.”
I urge the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as others in church leadership positions, to sign this statement. And to make it known that the church is in solidarity with evangelicals on this issue. And to make public its own actions to communicate our support to those in the military who might be forced to engage in torture.
And one more thing: could Bishop Packard tell us what the nature of that support is? Is it more than moral? More than prayer? Do we offer sanctuary? Legal defense?
We are cooked by the culture when we make statements for the sake of appearances and do nothing to back them up. I wonder what the Evangelicals for Human Rights plan to do now that they have expressed their opposition to the policies of the US government on torture. (How hard is it to be opposed?)
What is to be done? Who will lead?
Good for the Episcopal Church. That is an exemplary commitment to support those who might engage in civil disobedience. It's the kind of action the church should be taking. I for one would like to know what has been done to implement this policy. Perhaps Bishop George Packard, the Bishop for Military Chaplains, or the Secretary of Executive Council, The Rev. Gregory Straub, could make a public statement of the church’s position, loudly and clearly, and tell us and the other religious leaders what we are doing to support those who refuse to engage in torture.
A group known as the Evangelicals for Human Rights has issued a statement on torture that I hope leaders of the Episcopal Church and other denominations will support. You can read it on the HRE website, www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, and take the time to sign the statement. I think it is particularly important for non-evangelicals to sign. The truth is that some of the evangelical organizations have been more active on social justice issues than the mainline denominations (as in, for example, Darfur). The HRE website also had a list of resources that are worth looking at (including a link to a sermon by Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge).
The statement from HRE is stronger and more grounded than the one from the Episcopal Church Executive Council. It concludes forcefully:
“The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.”
I urge the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as others in church leadership positions, to sign this statement. And to make it known that the church is in solidarity with evangelicals on this issue. And to make public its own actions to communicate our support to those in the military who might be forced to engage in torture.
And one more thing: could Bishop Packard tell us what the nature of that support is? Is it more than moral? More than prayer? Do we offer sanctuary? Legal defense?
We are cooked by the culture when we make statements for the sake of appearances and do nothing to back them up. I wonder what the Evangelicals for Human Rights plan to do now that they have expressed their opposition to the policies of the US government on torture. (How hard is it to be opposed?)
What is to be done? Who will lead?
Monday, July 16, 2007
Cooked by the Culture
My daughter Ruth was born twenty-seven and a half years ago in Medellin, Colombia. My former wife and I adopted her just twenty-seven years ago next month. Yesterday, she flew to Medellin on her first trip to the city where she was born. When she was twelve, we went to the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, but Medellin was too dangerous then. The drug cartel was in charge, and her city was at the heart of it. Yesterday's New York Times ran an article about how Medellin is now a place of optimism; the new mayor is trying to make it lively, attractive, safe. Ruth told me before she left that Medellin is now safer than Philadelphia, where she lives. There is still a guerilla war going on in Colombia; some parts of it are definitely dangerous. She knows that. But she plans to travel around the country she left so long ago, taking care but not shirking the realities of her own life. She will be there about a month, returning close to the time she came to this country as an infant.
When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.
Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.
I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.
Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.
And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.
I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.
I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.
As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.
When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.
Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.
I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.
Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.
And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.
I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.
I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.
As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.
Monday, July 9, 2007
A Kairos Moment
The present reminds me of the Nixon administration and the years leading to the end of the war in Vietnam and the president's resignation. I am sure I am not alone in having this sense of deja vu (and those of you who follow the New York Times Magazine are reminded weekly of this connection to our past in Megan Kelso's "Watergate Sue"). It is all depressingly familiar. This morning I was reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in connection with a new book I am writing, and was forcefully reminded of how irrelevant the institutional church is in today's crisis. Our religious leaders have very little to say to us as the war drags on, as people are losing their homes and their lives, as so many suffer from the lack of compassion in our government: no, make that our own lack of compassion. The rich get richer and we just don't care very much as long as we get our share.
Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.
Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.
The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).
Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:
"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"
He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."
What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"
The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.
Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.
But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?
We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.
Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.
Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.
Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.
The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).
Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:
"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"
He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."
What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"
The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.
Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.
But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?
We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.
Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sick on the Bus
The Number 17 Bus stops a block away from our apartment in downtown Portland and goes thirteen miles out to Sauvie Island, which is a rural paradise in the Columbia River. You can pick your own berries there. I rode my bicycle out to Sauvie Island Saturday morning but was not quite up to another ten miles around the island itself. The ride out was along an industrial area, not exactly beautiful, but I could have taken the bus and just cruised the island. Portland buses have bicycle racks on the front. Portland buses are amazing.
We can ride the 17 to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where we went to church yesterday morning. It is located in the northwest section of the city, near the Pearl District, where the arts are concentrated.
We caught the bus at about 9:25. I asked the driver the nearest stop to 19th and Glisan (pronounced Gleeson) and she smiled, "19th and Glisan." "Close enough," I said. The bus drivers here are incredibly friendly and helpful. A few stops along, she turned and said to an elderly man seated behind her and said, "This is your stop." But it the ride became even more remarkable.
Soon after we turned on Glisan, somewhere around 13th Avenue, we stopped at a light. A homeless man--or at least he looked homeless, and not at all well--had gotten on a stop before. He had that grizzled look of a hard life, a crusty white beard, sunken cheeks, pants gathered at his waist with a long belt. He shuffled as he walked. There were not many people on the bus. He sat somewhere behind us. At the light, he scuttled to the front and spoke to the driver.
"You have to be sick?" she asked. "Ok, go out. I'll wait."
The man got off the bus and threw up on the dirt at the base of a tree. He came back and thanked the driver.
"That's ok," she said. "Let me know if you have to be sick again."
He started back to his seat but, before the bus began moving, returned quickly.
"You have to be sick again," the driver asked. He nodded. She opened the door. He got out, doubled over. You could see that he was holding vomit to avoid throwing up on the bus. He spewed a yellowish liquid at the base of the tree and returned to the bus, which had been standing at a green light, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.
The driver said, "Ok now?"
"Yeah."
"Medication?"
"Yeah."
"Ok. Let me know if you have to be sick again. I'll stop. We'll wait for you. And thanks for not getting sick on the bus. I appreciate that."
We all did.
This was definitely not New York City or perhaps any other city in the country. The man was considerate of the rest of us. When he vomited, it was not on the sidewalk. The driver was concerned for his well being and acted on that concern. No one in the bus got upset at having to sit through two lights while a homeless man was sick.
We went on to church, but we both felt that we had already been there. On the bus.
We can ride the 17 to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where we went to church yesterday morning. It is located in the northwest section of the city, near the Pearl District, where the arts are concentrated.
We caught the bus at about 9:25. I asked the driver the nearest stop to 19th and Glisan (pronounced Gleeson) and she smiled, "19th and Glisan." "Close enough," I said. The bus drivers here are incredibly friendly and helpful. A few stops along, she turned and said to an elderly man seated behind her and said, "This is your stop." But it the ride became even more remarkable.
Soon after we turned on Glisan, somewhere around 13th Avenue, we stopped at a light. A homeless man--or at least he looked homeless, and not at all well--had gotten on a stop before. He had that grizzled look of a hard life, a crusty white beard, sunken cheeks, pants gathered at his waist with a long belt. He shuffled as he walked. There were not many people on the bus. He sat somewhere behind us. At the light, he scuttled to the front and spoke to the driver.
"You have to be sick?" she asked. "Ok, go out. I'll wait."
The man got off the bus and threw up on the dirt at the base of a tree. He came back and thanked the driver.
"That's ok," she said. "Let me know if you have to be sick again."
He started back to his seat but, before the bus began moving, returned quickly.
"You have to be sick again," the driver asked. He nodded. She opened the door. He got out, doubled over. You could see that he was holding vomit to avoid throwing up on the bus. He spewed a yellowish liquid at the base of the tree and returned to the bus, which had been standing at a green light, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.
The driver said, "Ok now?"
"Yeah."
"Medication?"
"Yeah."
"Ok. Let me know if you have to be sick again. I'll stop. We'll wait for you. And thanks for not getting sick on the bus. I appreciate that."
We all did.
This was definitely not New York City or perhaps any other city in the country. The man was considerate of the rest of us. When he vomited, it was not on the sidewalk. The driver was concerned for his well being and acted on that concern. No one in the bus got upset at having to sit through two lights while a homeless man was sick.
We went on to church, but we both felt that we had already been there. On the bus.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Summer Views of Mt. Hood
Friday morning I decided to ride my bike into the western hills of Portland where the Japanese Garden is located. It's only three miles from our apartment but the road to the Garden is steep. I've been biking along the river on the Springwater Corridor, a multi-use path for bikers, runners, and walkers, which is mostly flat. It was time to tackle the slopes. The only way out of Portland is over the hills.
We became members of the Japanese Garden as soon as we settled in. At just over five acres it is small but the design packs in a space- and mind-expanding array of plants and paths, two dry gardens, a pond busy with carp, a tea pavilion, and borrowed scenery that includes the Cascades. Even when there are crowds, it is possible to slip off into a corner behind a Japanese Maple and be alone.
Jefferson Street, where we are located, turns into Canyon Road just as the serious climb begins. I got about two blocks before I had to stop to breathe. I looked ahead; ahead was still up. Stopped again at the top of the next hill, I was panting when an elderly woman asked if I needed help. Yeah, I gasped, I'm lost. Where's the Japanese Garden (near by, I hoped)? Oh, she said, go up to the corner and turn left. You'll see the signs. I stood and pedaled to the top, turned left, turned right. Stopped to breathe. Not a walk in the park.
And so it went for another couple of endless hills. The scenery, by the way, was gorgeous, conifers of all sorts wedged among maples and a dozen varieties of green (I have to learn more about these trees). The clean air made my screaming leg muscles almost glad. At the top of the penultimate hill to the Garden, you can keep biking up the steepest incline or pick up your bike and climb the steps cut into a hillside. I picked up my bike. The switchback steps ascend a couple of hundred feet--not too bad given how far I'd come.
The Unitarian-Universalists were in town for their annual convention. I met a few coming down as I was heading up. You could tell they were UUs, as Connie and I call them, because they were wearing t-shirts with a flame on the chest. I felt like a sterling example of Portland culture hauling my bike on my shoulder up to the Garden. Grinning. Yeah, I do this all the time. Clean air, clean living.
There was an art show in the main pavillion, showcasing northwest artists who had created images based on the Garden. I bought a small collage by a resident of Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, and stuck it in my backpack. I went out to the graveled space in front of the pavilion and looked out across the city of Portland to the Cascades, which gently framed the city's modest skyline. Mt. Hood was not visible.
Hood looks like Mt. Fuji, just as this view from the Garden reminded me of a similar view I recalled from one of the Imperial Gardens overlooking Kyoto, Japan. On clear days you can see Hood from almost any part of the city, including our apartment terrace. I have begun writing a series of haiku, "Summer Views of Mt. Hood" (derived from the printmaker, Hokusai's, series, Views of Mt. Fuji). Here are a few of my haiku.
1
Extended wings
balancing a crow on a high spruce twig
fold carefully
2
Dawn silhouette
floating snowcap at noon
faded in evening marshgrass
3
Against darkening skies
at morning
the white cone advances
4
Pasted on the window
of the Wells Fargo tower
the mountain’s face
5
Crows call to crows
summer light rises
with the mountain
6
The eastern hills
edged in sharp pines
rain clouds shroud Mt.Hood
We became members of the Japanese Garden as soon as we settled in. At just over five acres it is small but the design packs in a space- and mind-expanding array of plants and paths, two dry gardens, a pond busy with carp, a tea pavilion, and borrowed scenery that includes the Cascades. Even when there are crowds, it is possible to slip off into a corner behind a Japanese Maple and be alone.
Jefferson Street, where we are located, turns into Canyon Road just as the serious climb begins. I got about two blocks before I had to stop to breathe. I looked ahead; ahead was still up. Stopped again at the top of the next hill, I was panting when an elderly woman asked if I needed help. Yeah, I gasped, I'm lost. Where's the Japanese Garden (near by, I hoped)? Oh, she said, go up to the corner and turn left. You'll see the signs. I stood and pedaled to the top, turned left, turned right. Stopped to breathe. Not a walk in the park.
And so it went for another couple of endless hills. The scenery, by the way, was gorgeous, conifers of all sorts wedged among maples and a dozen varieties of green (I have to learn more about these trees). The clean air made my screaming leg muscles almost glad. At the top of the penultimate hill to the Garden, you can keep biking up the steepest incline or pick up your bike and climb the steps cut into a hillside. I picked up my bike. The switchback steps ascend a couple of hundred feet--not too bad given how far I'd come.
The Unitarian-Universalists were in town for their annual convention. I met a few coming down as I was heading up. You could tell they were UUs, as Connie and I call them, because they were wearing t-shirts with a flame on the chest. I felt like a sterling example of Portland culture hauling my bike on my shoulder up to the Garden. Grinning. Yeah, I do this all the time. Clean air, clean living.
There was an art show in the main pavillion, showcasing northwest artists who had created images based on the Garden. I bought a small collage by a resident of Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, and stuck it in my backpack. I went out to the graveled space in front of the pavilion and looked out across the city of Portland to the Cascades, which gently framed the city's modest skyline. Mt. Hood was not visible.
Hood looks like Mt. Fuji, just as this view from the Garden reminded me of a similar view I recalled from one of the Imperial Gardens overlooking Kyoto, Japan. On clear days you can see Hood from almost any part of the city, including our apartment terrace. I have begun writing a series of haiku, "Summer Views of Mt. Hood" (derived from the printmaker, Hokusai's, series, Views of Mt. Fuji). Here are a few of my haiku.
1
Extended wings
balancing a crow on a high spruce twig
fold carefully
2
Dawn silhouette
floating snowcap at noon
faded in evening marshgrass
3
Against darkening skies
at morning
the white cone advances
4
Pasted on the window
of the Wells Fargo tower
the mountain’s face
5
Crows call to crows
summer light rises
with the mountain
6
The eastern hills
edged in sharp pines
rain clouds shroud Mt.Hood
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