‘Well, it looks like The Queen will be getting a cousin.’  Thus spoke Doc Boner with a studied casualness that barely contained the pride beneath (‘I’ve got big balls’) toward the end of the meal the darling and I shared with him  and his missus, Fire Hair Rayna.  ’Course, we were sworn to secrecy given that it had only been a few hours since she’d pissed on the stick or whatever it is they do these days to reveal the miracle.  (In our day, we had to wait for the dead rabbit.)  It became public with the first picture of who may be–according to divine providence–our next grandchild:  the white lima bean of an ultrasound video clip, ‘See?  There’s the heart beating.’  So we enter another Advent season of preparation and hope and fear and trembling and prayers that go way beyond words into the deepest recesses of our own spirits; into the abode of the generations.  This time Advent lasts until the end of May.

Good thing the kid has a decent job.  Nice, too, that he mostly enjoys it.

Too bad it isn’t in his studied and trained and accomplished calling, but there y’go:  the career of a musician even in the best of economic times is a scrambling crap-shoot, and in today’s times the dice are loaded against you.  Momma Deb can’t find a teaching position because the schools are cutting back–if you’re not already there, you ain’t gettin’ in.  Same’s true for a bass boner all over the country; and especially here in Houston, not exactly known as the music capitol of the world:  nobody needs ‘em.

However, they do need computer geeks, so that’s what he’s doing, something like cyber communications systems and networks and other hidden stuff that make the world go ’round, as it were.  Workin’ his plan, as he told me:  ’I always figured that computers would be my backup if I couldn’t do music the way I wanted to.  And after twelve years of moving around the country you get tired of the scrambling.  I want a settled life,  too.’  Okay, then.  You got it now, son.  Li’l Bone is even already now settling you down.  It’s an ontological shift in your life, y’know:  once you are one you can never not be a parent again.  Welcome to the land of terrors beyond imagination, the price of love, where personal aspirations are balanced on the new scale of Li’l Bone’s well being.  It’s cross bearin’ time.

The contemplatives call it a ‘liminal moment’–that threshold you cross going  from a familiar room with lights on to the darkness of the next strange room you’re entering, as Dylan has it:  ”you know there is something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’

Doc Boner and I mulled the shift from the doctoral heights of professional/academia musicianship to the everyday realm of computers; from the arcades of the university to the cubicles of the office building; from Carnegie Hall to dad’s den, occasionally weekly trying to fit the bone into ‘church-folk ‘guitar strummers, as well as teaching himself electric bass; both music style and bass are unfamiliar to him, and  when you throw in a vocal part it’s a system overloaded whine, ‘dude, I only ever had to pay attention to one thing at a time on bass bone.’  Makes me pathetically proud to musically better him in this, ‘yep. a hundred grand in school loans and you can’t even  read words, notes, and chords at the same time?’

His objection, however, was fairly taken–stepping into a new realm altogether, actually having to think about where the notes are on the instrument as contrasted with the visual/aural/muscle memory borne of a bazillion hours of practice and playing–the note and/or chord being sounded without much thinking about it, your chops doing their thing on their own, as it were; you are one with the music, grasshopper.  But nirvana ain’t reached in an hour; there is the awful beginning:  wrong notes, ugly sounds, spastic rhythms, cramping (and rebellious) muscles, and hours of tedious repetition.  So I said, ‘Hey, let’s do this up half a step,’ went to strummin’ and singin’ and watchin’ him stumble and sweat and frown in panicked concentration, and I giggled to myself in that pathetic pride of the old man not yet outdone by the egghead.

And then it’s his turn to take his horn on ‘just a closer walk with thee’ and I strummed and listened as he danced around the melody with lovely phrases from nowhere and it was of course no longer a matter of pride but of beauty and gratitude and wonder.  He got into a musical dialogue with my flat-pickin’ buddy from the old days who’d joined us and I could hardly believe what I was hearing.  I could have strummed all night.

(I have, incidentally, solved the issue of holding a flat pick between fingers with no sense of touch by grinding the point off a plastic thumb pick, sliding it around my thumb, and jamming the flat-pick between them.  It ain’t exactly the finesse of Segovia, but it gets the job done.  At least the pick doesn’t suddenly fly out of my hand.  I still, however, have a problem with the floppy finger.)

While all this nirvana was going on The Queen came toddling into the den hauling her pint-size padded chair, set it in front of us, and sat down and folded her hands primly on her lap with full-faced attention to the magic, and now we were doing a concert for a 19-month-old.

And the generations become the audiences of our lives.

Larry

Once a month I join the B’mont duffers in a ‘men’s bible study (and lunch).’ We’ve been stepping through the letter to the Ephesians, yesterday looking at the fourth chapter. Following New Testament Ray’s example, I’ve adopted a basic approach to it: provide necessary historical info then ask ‘whaddya hear?’ and ‘whaddya gonna do with what you’ve heard?’ It’s a pretty cool approach–’specially considering the amount of time I used to put in preparing seminary-type lectures–and I’m freer to jump in as one of the participants with my own take and questions about it.

‘Course I still have to prepare a bit, so on a whim spent a couple of hours Saturday reading the chapter in Greek. Well, actually reading it in my Greek ‘interlinear’ which has the English meanings printed exactly below the Greek text, to hell with English grammatical sense. I know just enough Greek to catch a sense of what’s happening in the translation, though not enough to ask ‘where is the bathroom?’ But I think it’s good to swim in foreign waters, as it were, being reminded that this stuff was spoken in a culture on the other side of the world 2000 years ago. Among other things this means that translation is a living process, equal parts scholarship, artistry, dialogue, and faith. And sometimes the results are funky, even in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) I use exclusively as holy writ. I was caught by these verses:

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

They have ‘lost all sensitivity’? What’s this–group therapy? They are ‘greedy to practice’? What the hell’s that? When I read stuff like that, I get a whiff of funky translation and on checking sure enough was proven right. Here’s what it really says: τινες ἀπηλγηκότες ἑαυτοὺς παρέδωκαν τῇ ἀσελγείᾳ εἰς ἐργασίαν ἀκαθαρσίας πάσης ἐνπλεονεξίᾳ. And everybody thinks it’s all about sex. Ha!

I took my questions to the duffers’ discussion–what’s this ’sensitivity’ business about?–and got exactly the silence anticipated, given the ‘insensitive licentiousness’ so many of us practiced in the good old days before lifetime commitments (dabblin’ around, as it were). So I read the Greek interlinear literal: who having put away remorse gave themselves to lewdness for practice of every impurity with (in) greediness. Geezers harrumphing–’well that’s a big difference! having put away remorse. Means a different thing. . . .Yup, yup, yup.’ In East Texas sensitivity blows, but we sure can understand remorse (being the topic, I’m pretty sure, of nearly every country-western song ever written, a la the Statler Brothers’ plaintiff ‘I’m sorry you had to be the one to say I’m sorry to me’). Not much discussion required there, so we knocked the funky translation about greed around a little bit–greedy lewdness? lewd greediness? what the hell?

I respect these guys enough to actually want to know what they hear in my sermons, so asked them about my, oh, probably weekly references to the poor and what came to their mind. ‘Panhandlers’ was the immediate and unanimous response. In fact, it was the exclusive response, though they support very active food pantry type of work and as well are involved with the global fair trade efforts. The knowledge of poverty was there, but the only face it wears are street bums. So we had to do a brief introduction to reality, the working poor, and then the systemic nature of poverty, including ‘who speaks for the poor when laws are passed?’ And that was kind of the show-stopper, ’cause we’d run out of time, though I did get a brief coda in on our ‘lobbying’ office in D.C., who are charged with doing exactly that (http://www.elca.org/Our-Faith-In-Action/Justice/Advocacy/Advocacy-Ministries.aspx). And now I also gotta think about how to incarnate the real poor in sermons. Rats. Stereotypes are a bitch to correct.

I woke up Monday morning still bothered by the funky translation so called Obe Wan Marlin who knows all things Greek, Chinese, and experiential, given his many many many years but he wasn’t in. I snagged New Testament Ray up there in Chicago just before he was headed to class who did a quick trip through his lexicon about the word funkily known as either ‘remorse’ or ‘insensitivity’ and he added ‘callousness’; which got me to firing off about ‘callous greed and self-indulgence, let us consider the fuckheads of finance who not only crashed the system but even now are getting higher bonuses than last year’s record and the health insurance corporations.’ We commiserated, but he had to get to class so wound things up with one of those classic NT Raylogisms: ‘if you turn your back to the things about which God is concerned God turns his back on you and you are left alone, driven by your own passions.’ Oh, right: without the spectacles of God you can’t see beyond your own bubble. And thusly enbubbled you are the helpless servant of fear and greed–the economists have at least that much right.

So it’s the vision thing: where are you going to look? At Sunday’s study the duffers said the whole God thing is lived out horizontally in our connections to others: God points to where we should look. My own comment was that I become more and more aware that I will take only human relationships with me into eternity.

Nifty as the duffers are, we’re still in East Texas, bubba, and the crowds weren’t exactly high-fivin’ it over the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to President Obama, with my guns n flags n Rush brothers whining ‘what has he done to deserve it?’ Which actually is a good question, though I have my doubts about the utility of a rational answer, but went searching for one anyways, and discovered that the Nobel Committee is unrepentant in acknowledging it as a political statement: it’s a peace award, whaddya expect? Peace is intrinsically political. Oh, and the award is only given to living people who in the committee’s estimation have had the most impact in working to bring peace to the world during the year. Obama has changed the way the world talks, with his ‘politics of decency and mutual respect’ as I’ve heard it put.

It’s the vision thing, with which as a preacher I am very cool, and as a citizen I rejoice after the rank pornography–the remorseless licentiousness of greed and war-making that has been the vision of politics since the beginning of this century. We have been led through a vision of filth, so, yeah, gimme decency and mutual respect among nations and their politicians. And then we can deal with aberrant behavior.

Of course the irony is that at this moment the Noble Peace Prize award-winner is considering sending another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Still the vision awaits its time. How shall we live it?

Larry

The lineage goes like this:  there is my darling and cosuffering life mate, The Queen Mother.  The Queen Mother begat our daughter, Her Princessness, who through her marriage to One L Wil morphed into New Momma Deb though ‘New’ is no longer appropriate, given that at 18 months she’s driven that car off the lot, so to speak.  Her daughter The Queen spends a lot of time at our house–over the summer, essentially a couple hours every day.  Which is very cool except when I have to write a sermon, because I’d rather be hangin’ with her.

An unintended consequence of this, by the way, is that I can imagine ever more existentially the darling’s hideous isolation those four years in Winters at home with the three infants and no family in a thousand miles, nor even, actually, a car, since we had only one.  ‘No wonder,’ I said in admiration while chatting with Northlands John yesterday, ’she was such a bitch when I got home.’  I once was blind, but now I see; how overwhelming it must have been.

‘Course, I was overwhelmed by my own shit as a freshly-minted seminarian moving into a public position in a tiny town, the size (3000) of which I had no experience.  She, of course, didn’t have a clue about my end of the world, either.  We danced to ‘you got your troubles, I got mine.’  I’ve always taken great encouragement from the fact that our Lutheran wedding vows being, as it were, minimally hypocritical, never include the promise of love, only the promise to stay together, which is hard enough in itself.  Lowered expectations bring their own freedom.  I beg your pardon, huh? I never promised you a rose garden.

The Queen and I have our own special routines.  She likes looking at pictures, both on the walls and in the computer, ’specially calling for ‘Dadee’ and getting all excited when his picture comes up.  I love seeing how much she loves her Dadee.  ‘Course, Momee gets not quite so much hoopla, given that Momee’s with her most of all of the time, and is thus assumed.  It’s special when Dadee comes home.  Makes it a little tough for Momee, eh?  She’s there with all the drudgery day after day, and Dadee walks in and is worshipped like the messiah.  And based in my own experience, Dadee usually doesn’t have a clue as to what Momee’s feelin’ nor how much he is loved by his children.  Because he’s busy thinking he is, in fact, the messiah.  Had the darling simply acknowledged the obvious, we would have saved a ton of money on marriage counseling.

After we feed the birds The Queen and I will often go for a walk with her wagon, a huge plastic thing with seat belts (for real).  Sometimes she rides–sans seat belt–but more often she wants to pull it.  It’s a sweet picture, this 18-month-old child pulling a red wagon the size of a Mini Cooper down the street on our cul-de-sac.  I walk beside her, a little behind, strolling at ease with my hands held behind my back.  Yesterday she got tired of pulling it so I did, and she strolled along with her hands held behind her back.  It’s awesome to behold.

She’s beginning to garner the meaning of language–the organization of sounds into reality, or maybe the organization of reality into sounds.  Whatever.  It’s that point at which she’s beginning to connect with the power inherent in words, though, natch, with limited vocabulary and ability to form the sounds.  But she knows, for example, that ‘mo’ might get her more of whatever she just had, be it the yogurt she loves or the amount of bird seed we’re putting out. She can ask for what she wants, and when asked if she wants ‘mo’ she can say no.  It’s pretty miraculous, I think:  with the language comes the birth of the autonomous self in its power to influence her own life.  I suspect that’s why she likes to pull the wagon, to be able to learn her power to control (some) things.

Hence, the word ‘no’.  As in:  ‘It’s time to go in the house, now.’  ‘No.’

Of all the words a kid hears in her first 18 months of life the word ‘no’ must easily stand out like the U.S. defense budget compared to the rest of the world, that being six times the amount of all of them combined.  And perhaps for the same reasons of security, who knows?  At least that’s the case in this household, fed by the darling’s generational inheritance of no-sayers as well as her occupational necessity in all these years of herding pre-k kittens.  The only time ‘no’ has never been the first word out of the her mouth was when I asked her to marry me.  It’s been ‘no’ ever since; immediate, instinctual, and unconscious.  And maybe it’s a spiritual gift given that actually makes her so good at teaching.  I don’t know about our kids, but it’s tough on me, being as I am more naturally inclined to yes or why not and dreaming of great adventures.

In any case, it’s no wonder that The Queen has grasped the power of ‘no’ so early in her life (though the darling said she’s right on schedule), given her experience and genes.  She can express her mind about things and maybe affect the outcome.  She can exercise her will and define herself, though it seems oppositional.  It’s a magnificent sight to see, this newborn image of God now given the power to create a world through a word, ‘And The Queen said no, and it was so.’  The power to say no is an essential and fundamental element of what it means to be human, at least as God has created us.  This power is a Very Good Thing.

Once you learn how to use it.  Which, of course, ain’t accomplished right out of the shoot at 18 months.  Rather, with the discovery of the power of no comes also the hideous frustration of having that power vetoed by The Big People.  Hence, tantrums; ’cause where else does that uncontrolled power have to go?  Tantrums are The Queen’s way of saying fuck you to the forces that overpower her and oppress her absolute will, having bought her own pr that instead of being wonderful because she is loved, she is loved because she is wonderful.  So the parental question is how best to respond to what has escalated to an uncontrollable (though not necessarily irrational) fit.

The darling and I’ve found mockery and ridicule to be the most helpful.  Not, of course, for the kid–the tantrum has to run its course–so much as for us:  better to laugh at ‘em when they’ve thrown themselves on the floor and are squalling and pounding their fists than kicking them in the head–somebody’s got to be the adult, eh?  So we practice tough love by hooting ‘what a big boy/girl’, both indoctrinating them into that special family sarcasm which will (as we’ve seen) come to full fruition in their adulthood and clueing them in to the response they deserve when making asses of themselves.  It’s my theory of child-raising: you can’t reason with a pre-rational kid so you gotta provide an emotional experience for them of the consequences of the behavior.  The kid breaks away and runs into the street.  You don’t fetch and then rationally explain the danger.  You make him experience the danger through terror; creatively convince him he’s gonna die.  You can explain why later, but in the meantime you protect him by creating a sense of fear near traffic.

Same thing with tantrums and ridicule:  you wanna behave like that publicly, here’s what you can expect.

‘Course the only way you can pull this off doing only minimal long-term psychic damage (to both parties) is to demonstrate your love ever more deeply (love covers a multitude of screw-ups, eh?).  When the tantrums have ended and the emotions have cooled comes the time to set things back in order, ‘Come, let me hug you.  I love you.’  The Queen has actually been pissed enough to say no and turn away.  And you gotta let her have that no because the hugs and kisses of love cannot be demanded, only invited.  (‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’ being the roll I played so often with my own kids after chastising them.)  Love empowers her.

And besides, after a little while we’ll be hugging and cooing and rubbing our heads together at her desire.  On the list of The Greatest Things My Now Adult Kids Ever Told Me was Soccer Saul’s confession, ‘I’d sit in my room after a big confrontation and think about how much I hated you and wanted to get out of here.  Then you’d knock at the door and come in and we’d talk about it and half the time got to laughing about it, even when I still had to face the consequences.’   And, yeah, buddy, I waited in my own misery of yearning for you to open the door in the meantime.  But, as they say, true love waits.  And hopes.  And mine has never been disappointed.

I watch The Queen’s birth of self-awareness in her power to say no and think about the Garden of Eden (Hebrew, y’know, for ‘delight’) and the myth of The Fall.  It matters to us preachers, because how you understand the human condition is foundational to everything you preach, including God.  The quick take on it is that Adam and Eve were having them a delightful time there in the garden until they rebelled against God and fucked everything up, thereby pissing off The Father world without end amen.  But in His equally infinite mercy Our Father kills his only-begotten Son instead so Tammy Faye can have orgasms of rapture thinking about the agonies of the cosmic whipping boy, singin’ ‘He suffered so I don’t have to’ and bleeding glycerin tears through non-smudge mascara.

In professional parlance we call it The Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement.  I now call it Jesus the Whipping Boy myth and/or depending on my mood, God the Abusive Father, though during my seminary Christology class (formal studies on what in the hell did the existence of Jesus mean, anyway?) I did buy in on P.T. Forsyth’s insights on it as ‘Jesus the perfume that sweetens the odor in the nostrils of God from within the whole shitpile of human existence’, though that’s my paraphrase.  But the whole thing begins with an emphasis on the shitpile of sin, started by The Fall there in the Garden that somehow God’s sense of righteousness has been offended and needs to be appeased (as if righteousness were a category devoid of relationship).  ‘He suffered for me.’  He was The Sacrificial Lamb God demanded.  In His Divine Justice God Our Father demands an innocent victim:  ‘Gimme a virgin!’

I ain’t buying it anymore.  That theology is a vestige of Christendom and its empires–a god of violent reprisal except for his chosen ones us, however it is we get to be chosen.  It oppresses, hence controls, the spirit through the demand for perfection, the threat of punishment, and the sense of shame, singing week after week ‘what a fuck up am I but how good god was in killing Jesus instead.’  I cannot believe that God shows his love for us through violence toward another regardless of who it is.  (Oh, and besides, it ain’t in the Bible, according to NT Ray).  Violence is a human thing, not a divine thing.  That’s what Jesus showed us.  The violence done to him was done by the powers and principalities in this world that oppose God, not by God’s offended ‘righteousness’.

The Queen appears to be losing enthusiasm for her tantrum, so I’m returned for a moment to Eden, where I see not so much I rebellion against God as the birth of human consciousness, the dawning awareness of a me; the ability (if not necessarily the wisdom) to say no.  The created image of God; NO vs no.  Without the little no, there is no image of God.  There’s a tantrum in the Garden.

And now she’s standing up and toddling shamelessly over to stand in front of me, snot drooling over her lips and tears running down her raging red cheeks.  I pick her up and she buries her head in my should and wipes her sniffles on my neck, and we sit and rock and comfort one another.

Don’t tell me God needed Jesus to die for my tantrums.

Larry

Just before she started back for what we hope will be her last year of herding pre-kindergarten kiddies the darling was working the phone on her end of the desk while I sat in my corner doing my usual morning read of the news/blogs, though only with half a mind as I was also listening to her end of the conversation.  She was working her way through the health insurance labyrinth to question a $375 bill she got for a bone scan that had never been authorized; undertaken, apparently, at the whim of the tech.  ‘Course settling this was no simple thing, requiring as it did the work of a sleuth through byzantine administrative offices with each new contact necessitating yet another encounter with the recorded menu like bashing through the line of scrimmage at a football game.  She’s a wizard at doing this, having learned first from her sister who worked as the insurance gal for some doc clinic, then gaining immeasurable experience with my ongoing encounters.  She knows the language, the right questions to ask, and the proper attitudes to cop, and she is relentless–she’ll keep a $20 discrepancy going for months (‘why the hell should they get it?’).  I’ve never wanted to be the guy on the other end dealing with her.  She has saved us at least thousands over the years.

But it takes, as mentioned, a degree of knowledge–there’s a corporate language there that’s every bit as esoteric as sailing lingo, and if you don’t know it you’re in trouble.  You gotta know the process, too, and have the courage to say I want to speak to your supervisor with the discipline to stay calm.  Not to mention that it takes an enormous amount of time.  Of the five hours I spent in surgery on my hand following the saw encounter, she spent three on the phone arguing with the insurance company about the hospital where the surgery was currently underway.  Her most recent settling of the phantom scan took two hours, but she’s not certain it’s over.

And we’re fortunate:  we have fine health insurance, provided by the ELCA Board of Pensions–for whom I have come to have tremendous respect–contracting with (currently) Blue Cross.  The BOP folks maintain a patient advocacy office or something like that to assist when the insurance company is pulling the old razzle-dazzle.  They’ve straightened things out for us innumerable times, and are even polite and pleasant in that Minnesotan brogue (yah).  I’m really grateful for this.

And I grieve for those who don’t have it; or who thought they had it and were paying for it and discovered when it was needed that by some prestidigitation of the insurance company they didn’t.  Sue and I are highly educated people, and even we need help getting through it.  What about the poor sap with a high school education just trying to do the right thing for his family with no knowledge, time, nor advocate to stay at it?  How badly have these folks been plundered by the rapacious greed which is the standard of the industry?

Following my heart bypasses surgery in 93 it took me a year and a half to clear up the medical bills which included dealings with debt collection agencies about wrong billings, etc and eventually work with the credit ratings people ’cause the debt collection people had screwed with me there, so that I was nearly as stressed out when it was over as I was before I had the surgery.  Then I tended to shrug it off as morally meaningless, one of those gordian knots human systems tie themselves in.  I assumed that businesses and corporations essentially desired to behave ethically, at least out of free-market self-interest if not actual laws.  And I thought the fuckups were aberrations.

How embarrassingly naive was my trust on that score, eh?  Turns out it’s been the intentional and standard policy of the health insurance industry to addle and delay and deceive and deny and delete in order to maximize profits, as it’s been called, ‘death by spreadsheet.’  Healthcare is rationed by profit:  if I can’t make a profit off of you, you ain’t gettin’ it.  The three hours Super Sue spent on the phone while wondering (yet again) if I’d make it through surgery were not with medical personnel but hireling apparatchiks trained in and rewarded for their success at denial tactics, the specific rubric in this case being ‘out of network hospital.’  Not to mention as well the number of times she’s initially been denied ambulance payments because she didn’t use the right one (‘So you’re telling me when the hospital emergency room determines to transport him to a more appropriate emergency room I’m first supposed to go to your website and find the right ambulance company?’).  That’s why we gotta have an advocate’s office.  It’s like intentionally planned evil, and that amazes me.  I feel like Pollyanna in a whorehouse.

It depresses me that as a nation we don’t understand the moral imperative of establishing decent health care as a basic right of citizenship.  In fact, the conversation doesn’t even start there; it starts with ‘making health care affordable.’  Why ‘affordable’?  And what does that mean, anyways, when two-thirds of personal bankruptcies are brought about by medical bills (with 80% of them having–they thought–health insurance at the time), so that even solid, middle-class folks are being plundered and destroyed by the system?  It gags me as a Christian:  “Then Jesus reached out his hand to the hemorrhaging woman who’d spent all she had trying to get well and said ‘I’ll take a credit card and your house.”

That the U.S. has the best health care in the world is, of course, a myth, though we might have the best trained medical personnel and the most lavishly equipped temples for their priestly work; certainly they’ve kept me alive, and the private hospital rooms come with room service, a far cry from the barracks sick bay I spent ten days in when I collapsed during basic training from some brutal virus with 50 other guys in the room being whistled out of a feverish stupor into a line by some nco every couple of hours to go fetch our kool-aid.  But in terms of our society, we rank somewhere in the thirties compared to other countries in the world; so, for example, we rank 37th in terms of infant mortality.  37th.  I’m not even sure I can name 36 other countries, and we’re worse than all of them.  What we of course best the rest of the world in is the astronomically higher costs, in a kind of walmartian inversion:  pay more, get less, but the difference still goes to the obscenely wealthy and powerful .01% of our population.  Regardless of the number of actual human lives sacrificed, profits must be driven ever higher.  I’m thinking of Leonard Cohen’s line in “The Story of Isaac”–’you who build these altars here to sacrifice these children, just according to whose plan?  A scheme is not a vision. . . .’   Just according to whose plan is America the best health care system in the world?

The commercial stakes in the national debate are unfathomably (at least, to me) enormous.  And the commercial interests are big and powerful and fabulously wealthy with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not for the sake of the people of this country, of course, but for the sake of profits.  They use their vast wealth to buy off members of congress at both the federal and state levels.  They use their coffers to develop publicity campaigns, first, denying a problem, then admitting some glitches, then wheedling a plea to ‘do better in the future,’ while at the same time carrying out a disinformation campaign that would put the Father of Lies to shame though parentally proud of it.  They spend millions rounding up the most ignorant lunatics in the country to attend local town halls not to participate in the discussion but in the name of free speech to destroy the civic dialogue processes of democracy itself by screaming down and bullying and intimidation.  They stir up the basest most primordial instincts of the prehistorically tribal reptilian brain.  It’s like peeling an onion of shit:  every insane filth uttered by their mouthpieces becomes a mob mantra and leads inexorably to a next level of shit.  Their republican leaders–who hold the greater burden–won’t disavow their behavior but in fact pander to it.  The democrats run around like tiny keystone kops trying to lasso jabba the hut.  And the media inadvertently or not legitimizes this shit by giving it more air time than it deserves.  Before the town halls started in August, tv reporters were told that the only stories that would be aired would be of conflict and disruption.  So that’s all good ol’ Joe Sixpack sees on the news and gains the impression that the whole country is exploding when the real case is that they were aberrations, like cockroaches in the daytime.

This is the work of evil:  to sow fear and discord and confusion and hatred.  And that’s what we see as the business ethic of the health insurance industry.  It’s all a diversionary tactic to maintain the deady grip of the industry over the American people in service to greed.

‘Course, most of the folks working in the industry are not themselves aware of it.  That’s how evil systems work:  they hide themselves from their participants.  I was fascinated by an interview Bill Moyers had a while back with Wendell Potter, who left his successful career as head of Public Relations for Cigna–one of the nation’s largest health insurers–to speak out against the industry.  (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/profile.html) He enjoyed his work and joined with the rest of the industry in fighting off threats from the likes of Bill Clinton and Michael Moore because he believed his own myth about the best health care in the world.  On a whim while visiting his father one weekend he drove over to a little nearby W. VA town to see their locally advertised ‘health fair’, expecting to see blood pressure stations and such as that.  What he saw instead was a full-fledged medical/dental clinic using the horse stalls of the local fairgrounds as treatment rooms where plastic tarps kept out the rain in which people stood for hours waiting to get treated.  His astonishment–’wait!  this is America!’–led to the realization that he could no longer be part of that system, but had to oppose it.  His bubble had burst, for as he said, ’til then he’d seen health care only in terms of dollar signs and profits and never in terms of human faces:  ‘When yer gettin’ ready to talk to the investments firms, you’re not seein’ people but numbers.’  After awhile back at work, he could no longer see the numbers without the people, and that ended it for him.

Which leads me to the idea that perhaps we ought to pass a law that says that for every million after the first million in salary the big bucks guy’s gotta spend one week living and working among those who have to stand in the rain waiting for care in horse stables so he can catch the company jet home.

At least he’d meet Jesus.

Larry

So the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) came together last week in Minneapolis for our biannual assembly to handle the business, worship, prayer, and policy decisions dealing with our 11,000 congregations and agencies and mission endeavors and such as that.  A lot of important–even profound–work gets done there, but what grabbed the headlines (such as they were) was the decision to revise our policies to provide for the ordination/rostering of homosexual clergy in faithful and monogamous relationships at the direction of the needs of the mission in each of our sixty-five synods, as we call it, ‘the local option.’

There are times when I’m so proud to be a pastor of the ELCA I could just shit (other times, of course, not no much), and this is one of them.  So I bounced into the pulpit on Sunday and spent the last third of the sermon talking about it being one of those fools who rush in where angels fear to tread, explaining to the B’monters–who’d been hammered by a nasty fight over it a few years back–that what you’re afraid to speak of gains power and holds you in bondage.  I told ‘em I was pleased with the outcome, and had worked as I could to help bring it about (nothing particularly startling there, since I’d shot my mouth off about it at our local synod assemblies over the years).  Said I figured my gay friends over at Grace with whom I worked for four years would be having a big celebration, feeling, perhaps, like orphans finally invited to the table (a reference to earlier in the sermon talkin’ about the spiritual meaning of food ‘n Jesus).  I didn’t bother ballyhooing the divinely incarnated justice of the decision ’cause there are people sittin’ out there who believe that the decision will take us straight to hell, and nothing good is served by taunting them.

Besides, as impressive as that victory was, it was made possible by an even more impressive (to my mind) decision beforehand which won’t make the headlines, to wit, first, the public admission that ‘this church’ is not of one mind on the matter and no position can claim the absolute will of God; and, second, that we’ll pledge ourselves to learn to live together with respect for our profound differences beyond the immediate policy decisions made.  Once this passed with a 75% majority the way was cleared for debate and discernment on the current social statement on sexuality–which passed with exactly the 2/3 required of it, and then the policy decisions, passing with 55% the simple majority needed.  I am in awe of our Presiding Bishop Mark ’stop it ‘n pray’ Hanson and all the leaders and ecclesiastical apparatchiks who have shepherded this thing for the last decade and a half, not to mention a deep respect for the work done by the glbt folks themselves, who know the steep price of justice.

‘Course, we ain’t the only denomination–or religion, for that matter–to be ravaged by the question.  But I’m thinking that we might be unique in framing the issue not in the usual zero sum morality of winners and losers which devolves into slap ‘em down power politics, but framing it rather in terms of ‘moral hospitality’ (that’d be a keeneism), with the ultimate question being not so much ‘how shall we live?’ as ‘how shall we live together?’  And we said ‘we shall learn to live together with humility and respect.’  And that’s very, very cool ’cause ‘organized religion’ doesn’t exactly have a reputation for moral humility.  But wow.  Here you’ve got the 4.5 million member Body of Christ actually tryin’ to live like Jesus.  And I are one of ‘em, singin’ ‘proud to be a luth-er-an’ to a country western guitar with a be-woppity-bop rhythm section.

I was chagrined to discover on the drive home that the be-woppity-bops were not an aural imagination, but a physical sensation playing out in my chest.  Every so often the be-woppity-bops would break out in a riff.  I spent 100 miles thinkin’ dude what the hell is that?  And, too bad I left my nitro at home; where, eventually, the darling and I discussed ye olde hospital run (conveniently, three miles).  But I figured they’d keep me over night, and I wanted to grill chicken.  Besides, the be-woppity-bops were an unfamiliar thing to me and I figured if they were angina related they’d go away after some nitro hits.  Which, natch, they didn’t, so that by 8:30 I was sitting in the exam room reacting to the er doc’s report:  ‘goddamn it.  I hate it when I’m right.’  Being hospitalized just pisses me off.

Cardio Wiz Nirm who has attended to the matters of my heart since they first popped up in 1988 popped in the next morning to announce that stress tests were useless, let’s just do an angioplasty and I’ll fix what I can while I’m in there.  Sounds good to me.  We’re gabbin’ and he says, “I just do not understand how you can still be alive,” which, while not a particularly comforting thing to hear from your cardiologist, does lead to a brief discussion about God.  He’s a Sikh from India; says it must be God keeping me alive.  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘God working through you.  So don’t fuck it up.’  CW never quite knows what to do with me, ’specially given the holy men stereotypes of his tradition; it’s an experience in religious cognitive dissonance.

When you go into the hospital as a heart patient who also smokes you get in addition to the forms and needles and other gadgets and shit to run the gauntlet of moral approbation.  Everybody dressed in scrubs–which nowadays includes the guy with the mop–feels not only a right but a perfect duty to scold.  I’m tryin’ to find out what’s happenin’ with my body while fending off comments like ‘don’t you know what that stuff does to you?  how can you still do it?’  Because when I hold that cigarette between my fingers straight up in the air, it’s my way of telling you to fuck off.  ‘Course you can’t say that when they’re shaving your groin;  you just gotta hope that when she lifts your leg to shave down there you fart.

It gets worse if somebody lets the cat out of the bag about you being a pastor and then, say, announces it to everybody in the cath lab holding area (what confidentiality, eh?).  Thus the jive nurse shaving me hollers to Eunice, the senior white-haired nurse with a bun and librarian’s glasses at the tip of her nose watching the ekg on the other side of the bed, “My my my my my Eunice, this man say he a preacher.  Now how can you be a preacher and smoke?  How can you pray to God?  I know, my husband’s a preacher. . . .”  Eunice grumbles about the waste of some procedure and I jump on that, thinking to shift attention, ‘yeah, that’s why health care costs so much, eh?’

That backfires, in that she goes off on the real costs of health care being those people that use the emergency room for their doctor’s office when they got free clinics they could just as easily go to, and I know ’cause I used to work in an emergency room, and blah, blah, blah, until I managed to end it by announcing that I’d been treated at Ben Taub (county hospital for indigents among others) and earned her wonder.  From there she wanted to know how I felt about what the Lutherans did about homosexuality, and I gave her two thumbs up with a big grin saying I’m real happy about it, and suddenly she had work in another area to tend to.

Then I was glad when they said unto me, ‘let us go into the lab of the cath.’

The heart cath lab and its procedures are familiar to me, so there’s no big sweat in that, except for when he stabs me with the xylocaine needle in the groin which sends me into a howl, Jesus.  CW tells me the next day ‘there’s so much scar tissue there that it’s hard to get through.’  ‘Well, why didn’t you use the other side, which is still virginal?’  ‘Eh,’ with a shrug, ‘decided to save it for the next time.’  He only goes as far in the procedure as the pictures, then consults behind a window with the technologic fixers, one of whom returns with him and is introduced as I thought Dr. Ahmadinajab but on second listening was Dr. Almondine.  Eventually a buddy of his also showed up, and the two of them worked on me like a couple of teenagers working on an engine:  ‘Hand me the hockey stick, wouldja?’  ‘Right.  Gimme the whisker.’  Technical names for medical instruments, I learned upon inquiry.  Here’s the deal:  they were putting a stent in another stent I’d received some years back, now plugging.  And while it is a marvelous thing what they do, I’m pretty sure stents inside stents is not the sign of an improving condition.

The paralyzing terror doesn’t strike until I get home.  As I said, while in the hospital I’m angry, even if outwardly polite (in the Keene sense).  Thus a hospital mantra comes by way of Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gently into the night; Rage, rage against the dimming of the light.’

It’s a different story, however, when you’re home and alone and thinkin’ about what just happened.  In the silence you can hear the soft confident chuckle of death like a leaf rustling in the forest night.

Matchmaker Don threw a clot while out walking one night a few weeks back so ended up in the hospital via ambulance with a pulmonary embolism.  I went by to comfort him and welcome him into the club of those who’ve been tapped on the shoulder by a smirking death, with invocation by t.s. eliot, “I have seen the eternal footman hold my cloak and snicker.  And in short, I have been afraid.”  You gotta learn how to live with the snicker, buddy.  You gotta learn how to tell ‘im, fuck you.  Seelsorge is my business.

And yes it means yet another engagement with the balrog of tobacco, having already warned the darling about the edginess and sullenness which accompany the effort for awhile.  I’ve been through this before–I gotta be left alone.  Because every inquiry well meaning or not, every prayer I hear about it or encouragement I receive just enflames that bastard ever more brightly and I gotta tackle ‘im again.

It’s a drag, but I’d rather dance my life to a tune other than the be-woppity-bops.

Larry