The Queen came by for our weekly yesterday so we spent the day watching the inauguration. Well, okay, we spent the day together with the inauguration playing in the background, given that at 11 months and almost but not quite walking she has more important work to attend to, including the display ‘watch how fast I can make grandpa get out of the chair by grabbing this wire’ to whatever angels she still sees while watching the reaction and laughing hilariously. She took two steps yesterday, realized it, and laughed so hard she fell down. She shows her impatience with diaper-changing ineptitude of grandpa 1.2 hands by twisting and crawling, which, natch, slows the process down even more. We have fun.
 
She was kind enough to kick back in my lap with a bottle and be rocked for the inauguration itself, falling asleep during the speech, nestling into me, changing, perhaps, the way I heard the words of our new president. She is one of the ‘post racial’ generation—her father is black (African/Filipino, I think), her mother is white (German/Slovak, as reported); she’s got a slug of uncles and cousins who are Latino. Her face is the face of the two million gathered in Washington to witness that the moral arc of history does indeed bend toward justice. She’ll grow up in a society where all of this—even a black president—is just part of the natural way things are. The wars and riots and terrorism and suffering it took to win freedom for slaves and voting rights and equal opportunities for all people will for her be an irrational history: ‘Why did people treat each other like that back then?’ I’m gratified that whatever other legacy my generation leaves (or saddles) her with also includes the possibility of this moment, when the darkest hypocrisy of the American revolution—that of slavery and racial humiliation—is finally repudiated by the election of one of the despised ones. The ground has, indeed, shifted beneath us.
 
Peacefully, for today. They call it ‘the peaceful turnover of power’ and, while we’re not the only country where it happens, we’re probably the most noticeable, and we shouldn’t take it for granted anyway. It’s one of those mostly unnoted miracles of the workings of our democracy. I watched the bigwigs of both parties parade around to join in this perhaps holy moment when power is relinquished from one to another, background banners reading “Thank You Mr. President” and “Welcome Mr. President” (Americanese, I guess, for ‘the king is dead, long live the king’). I’d already spent a couple of days thinkin’ ‘Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be the secret service guys working this’ and was genuinely thankful for them; while also thankful I wasn’t one of the two million to go through those security checks—I’m not a pleasant fellow when the jackboots are rifling through my stuff, as the darling and other fellow travelers can attest. I do, nonetheless, pray for them, acknowledging the reality of human brokenness that necessitates the work.
 
Mega Man Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Mega Church and author of mega-selling books gave the mega invocation—as per usual, a sermon dressed up as prayer. I’d do the same thing, probably, but nobody asked me, which would have been wiser since the inauguration committee fired quite the little tempest in a teapot amongst the civil rights for gays et al supporters by asking him to do it, given his condemnation of homosexuality and his participation in getting the hideous Proposition 8—repealing the rights of gays—passed in California (along with the Mormons, who dumped about $20 million into the effort). The argument—not without its merits methinks—is that it’s akin to asking an avowed bible-believin’ racist to do it. I’m actually sympathetic to that; but ambivalent ’cause you gotta talk to him, you gotta include ‘them’ somehow. We need to be done with excluding those with whom we disagree. Interestingly, I read a report that the web page at Saddleback has since changed, easing its language about homosexuality. Could it be a fact that inclusion and discussion really work? In any case, the mega pastor’s mega invocation wasn’t bad, given the crowd he comes from, though I was discomfited by his tacking the name of Jesus on it (personalized as the phrase was) and then launching into the Lord’s Prayer, thinking that’s the trouble with evangelicals (and other less enlightened christians): they can’t get over their own religious exclusivity of its Jesus or hell, so end up being trapped in it. He actually said some good things, but I had to leave the room when he started in on ‘our father’ ’cause some things are just too hard to watch, the utter christian inhospitality of using the prayer in this way being one of them.
 
Far more enticing to my ear was the mega benediction prayed by the 89-year-old Reverend Joseph Lowery, an ancient civil-rights leader who worked and suffered with Martin Luther King to end segregation in the south. I’m seeing a wobbly old black man stooped a little by the years and the battles standing in front of two million people and the whole world and prayin’ through the scars of his own suffering:
 
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.
 
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
 
For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
 
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
 
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
 
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.
 
We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.
Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
 
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right.
 
Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.
 
And the crowds roared ‘Amen!’ ‘Let it be so!’
 
As do I.

New Testament Ray is moving to Chicago for a semester or so to teach at the Lutheran School of Theology there (LSTC) as visiting guru or however they arrange those things. My last year in seminary our visiting guru was John Bright, a fucking brilliant Old Testament guy out of the thinking end of the Baptist tradition (yes, it exists), and a full-fledged Southern Gentleman, a beautiful demeanor and drawl like a light in the drab Minnesota nice that smiles while it strangles you. Dr. Bright (not ‘John’) was very proper with a dignified formality, announced two weeks before the end of the term ‘Ah’d lak to make some informal comments and reflections on the prophets’ and spent ten hours puttin’ it all together in an off-hand sort of way that held me spellbound and at the end elicited a standing ovation from all of us—the only one I ever encountered in school. So Ray’s in good company, though hardly could be considered as out of the dignified professorial formality school, being more like a kid in a candy store when doing the new testament thing; but he’s brilliant (in some areas) nonetheless, and the whole church will be enriched by his guruizing.

However, he’s driving to Chicago by way of Los Angeles—typical for an academic: nothing is ever direct—though the detour makes sense because of his lover out there, the (presumably) delectable Liz. So I offered to drive with him to Phoenix, and on Thursday zipped over to Austin where he was closing out his apartment. He picked me up at the airport (where I’d parked for the flight back from Phoenix) around 5:00, informing me that all the big stuff was out of the apartment and there was only about two hours’ work to finish it off, which, when I saw it, elicited ‘two hours my ass; we’ll be lucky to be done by ten’, and it was midnight by the time we showed up at Gentle Greg’s place for a free bed and nice (though brief) hospitality. The last three hours of work was to Ray’s mantric response to all of my inquiries, ‘fuckit, it’s too late, throw it out’, and I tossed whatever it was in the pile of shit he had to haul to the trash, the bin being some 200 yards away through apartments and parking lots. I made him haul that shit alone, because he’d already been at the moving business for 15 hours straight, and I knew he’d be useless as a turd in the car the next day. No sense in wearing us both out. We packed his gorgeous Audi for the trip and I came to know what John Glenn felt like when he was shoe-horned into that first space capsule.

We pulled out of somewhere around Austin about 8:45 a.m. on the Third Friday of Advent with NT Ray at the wheel and me wondering how long he’d last before nodding off. I’ve come to realize that I have a soporific effect on him, ala ‘I can relax around you, Larry’ just before the snoring begins, regardless of what it is we are doing, though we made it the several hours to I-10 without incident, where I took over and cruised that marvelous work of human engineering at an easy 88, leaving mere mortals in the rearview mirror with a tap on the accelerator—what a fine machine that Audi is. (At dusk, ‘hey, where’s the light switch?’ ‘Larry, it’s automatic; everything in this car is automatic—if you know German’ and peals of slap-happy laughter).

We breezed across the west Texas vistas, threaded our way through El Paso, and hop-scotched the semi’s going into Las Cruces, where we had supper. He slept a lot, talked with the Presumably Delectable Liz almost as much, and would occasionally thrill us both by looking up from a snooze and screaming ‘WATCH OUT!!!’ upon seeing the vehicle in front of us I’d been trying to pass for five miles. Dude, go back to sleep. After dinner he took us to Willcox (Az) where there was room at the inn, though mr. directions couldn’t find the bar in the place and it was too cold to keep looking, so we had a couple of sodas and called it a night. It was a three-hour trip to Phoenix the next morning through unbelievable traffic across a land that might have once been desert, but is no longer even that pretty, being littered with human junk. I caught the flight back to Austin; caught my pickup back to Houston; and the next day did the Sunday gig at Beaumont thinking I’m gettin’ real tired of I-10 and marveling that only two introverts could call spending that much time together and speaking maybe 19 full paragraphs a ‘great visit’. Man love doesn’t require a lot of words, ’cause it’s in our genes to be silent together while stalking the prey, y’know (a reality the darling still cannot conceive of in her interrogations of my times with others).

Teacher Son Saul showed up Monday morning while I was still unbending from the shape of car and plane seats. I’d agreed to play santa’s workshop elf in his project to build the Washers Box game (like horseshoes, but with washers in a wooden box) for gifts, a cool idea patterned on the one his grandfather (my father-in-law, rip) made for us a few decades back. ‘How many you do you want to make?’ thinking three or four: ‘Eleven.’ Thus we became full-timers in the garage those two days when the temps took a dive into the 30’s cuttin’ and poundin’ and cussin’ and making the requisite forty-seven trips to the hardware store after the initial parts list had been purchased. We were so busy we barely greeted my mother-in-law who had flown in from St. Louis for the week, and, true to Santa Keene fashion, finished the gifts about noon on Christmas Eve (and, by the way, in a real first for workshop Larry, without cuts and blood).

That left us time to clean up for the trip to B’mont where Doc Boner and his crew the Houston Slide Oil Company were playing for the service I was preaching, so the whole clan ended up journeying to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, albeit it different shifts, T S Saul volunteering to take the early drive with Pastordad, the rest following behind later, though Doc Boner’s crew was ahead of us on a different schedule. The service called for a children’s sermon and the Blessing of the Crèche or whatever, but there being no children among the geezers for the sermon, I grabbed The Queen who’d come with New Momma Deb and One L Wil, and warmed everybody’s hearts by praying with Her ten-month-old Highness before the manger; geez that ought to get me a raise. Afterwards we went in peace and dispersed like shepherds into the dark night, the journey to Bethlehem and back having run six hours.

T S offered to handle the drive home, so I kicked back with a smoke and not a thought about the traffic—I’ve driven roundtrip with him to Canada and trust his piloting in spite of his unnerving habit of cell phone text-messaging as he drives. We interrupted the silences with conversation, first as to the metaphorical nature of the Bible, ala Pastordad: ‘God is an energy. You can no more catch God in words than you can catch light in a net,’ which led into his expertise of literature, especially poetry, and an explanation of the ‘metaphysical conceit’ of John Donne’s work in, e.g. ‘The Flea’—’Dad, the poet’s trying to convince some chick to let him bone her’. He cruised me through the beauty he sees in it all—’the last three pages of Camus’ The Stranger are the best ever written’—and I bumbled in to mentioning that one of my favorite poems was that one by Yeats, which I can’t remember the title of but has the phrase ‘widening gyre’ in the opening line. Being, as he said, ‘not particularly familiar’ with ol’ W.B. it took him nearly five miles to come up with the title—”The Second Coming”—and another eight miles for the first three lines,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. . . .

I coughed up the final, claiming it to be the best line in all of Christian literature,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Then we fell into silence for awhile, approaching home. Geez, I love it that I raised brilliant kids.

The clan gathered again Christmas morning, all twelve of us: the darling and the mother-in-law; T S and Easy Laughin’ Cheryl; Doc Boner and Cat Lover Rayna; New Momma Deb and One L Wil; and, of course, The Queen, whose pile of gifts from doting aunts, uncles, and grandparents were the envy of all and the occasion, much later in the day after she’d spent hours manically dashing from one thing to another and finally, as all kids do, broke into the screaming squallies, of grandpa’s observation ‘it’s a symptom of affluenza—that peculiar insanity brought about by having too much,’ which, however, was not well received by the doters, this still being Christmas and all.

I got my bb gun for Christmas—a Red Ryder at that, and a bottle of 2400 bbs. After T S and Easy Cheryl left Doc Boner and I stepped into the back yard to try it out, whereupon I immediately plunked a squirrel in the ass who did a nifty mid-air summersault and hauled it up the tree, though then I felt bad ’cause he hadn’t been breaking any rules, so swore off plunking innocents for fun. We tossed a couple of cans out there and took turns trying to hit them, stabilizing on a table and getting all zen-like in our breathing, hitting about 60% on a good round. The mother-in-law showed up and being a gamester wanted her turn and on the second shot managed to hit the edge of the table four feet in front of us bouncing that bb back and terrifying Doc and I with the thought of eyes put out. In deference to her, however, we later discovered that the table blocked her view of most of the target; still, that it hit the edge and didn’t simply skim off the top is a million-in-one shot (the kind, undoubtedly, that always takes an eye out). The darling appeared wanting her turn then just stood there and aimed her shot while Doc and I chuckled to each other behind her knowing there was no way she could hit the can free standin’; she’d be lucky to hit the fence. The first plink amazed us; the second awed us; the third out of five started us thinking. One L Wil showed up, and the game was on, complete with rules and points and bonuses and scorecard. One L and Doc were equally chagrined and proud when the darling and I were tied for champion even after four or five shoot-offs, when the game was called on account of hunger. The champion debate continued over the meal with my claim of having shot the only perfect five for five round, she discounting it on the basis of me having 45 minutes’ practice before her, and besides you can’t decide bonuses after the fact, so it was a stand-off. Everybody won and we called it a day, more or less, fading into that Christmas night twilight of contented stillness.

We all gathered yet again the next day, though missing Cat Lover Rayna who was at work at the clinic loving cats, at T S and Easy Cheryl’s place so they could show it off to Grandma (being the great grandma—GG—of The Queen). T S had come down with the Houston Sinus Coughin’ & Sneezin’ Snotitis of the season and so over-grilled the brats, though doing a magnificent job with jalapeno poppers and hospitality. I enjoy watching my kids and their spouses having conversations that don’t include the darling or I—they occasionally do stuff together without inviting us; it’s nice to see they can have these relationships without and/or in spite of us, ’specially given the diversity of everybody’s uniqueness. Ever quick with the obvious insight it it suddenly dawned on me that we had raised three teachers—Boner at the college level (eventually), T S at high school, and New Momma in upper elementary (toss in the darling at the pre-K/early elementary realm and we could open our own school)—without any particular intentionality, each one being a natural teacher, as it were, like some genetic thing; and in different ways each of their spouses making that possible and how good that is for the world. I did not, however, bask for long in this self-congratulatory warmth as it became necessary to join the game and prove—eventually before them all—my awe-inducing side-splitting ineptitude at the Wii game; in spite of T S’s best efforts at coaching they were all stunned into hilarity earning ‘y’all can kiss my ass.’ The damn electronic game presumes you have sense of touch in both hands; so does everybody else. Since the saw chomping I have it in only 1.2 hands.

(An aside: the kids gave us a Wii for Christmas last year; they followed up this year with the ‘game’ called ‘Wii Fit’, which comes with a platform that looks suspiciously like a bathroom scale, earning Boner’s observation, ‘Yeah, nothing says ‘you’re fat’ like getting a Wii Fit for Christmas.’ Okay: ’since the folks won’t go to the gym, we’ll bring the gym to them’.)

I took yesterday off—jumping at the opportunity afforded by the local senior seminarian in town to visit his folks—’You wanna preach the Sunday after Christmas? Why sure, do the whole thing. I’ll stay home.’ It took me a good 15 years to figure out that there was nothing intrinsically noble about sticking around for the downer Sundays like after Christmas and Easter and Memorial Day weekend and so started pawning them off however I could. (I have never, for example, preached a sermon about The Slaughter of the Innocents [thanks mostly be to the Lovely Lynette at Messiah], that horrific story that comes a Sunday or two after Christmas. On the other hand, I always lost the battle about having church when Christmas falls on Sunday in spite of the services the night before, church councils insisting it must happen even though, no, they won’t be there either; what I call an exercise in piety by proxy—’I'll vote to make somebody suffer for Jesus.’) So instead of preaching I spent much of the day writing, eventually stepping out into sociability with whoever happened to be around.

At twilight time I recalled the video conference (via webcam; I’m so technomacho) with NT Ray on Christmas Eve. He was ohmygosh a ‘little tired’ having pulled into Presumably Delectable Liz’s place Saturday night just in time to go hoofing it off on ‘the Posada’ (Las Posadas), a Christmas tradition of the poor latino community in which P D Liz is a pastor. It’s a sort of an enactment of Mary and Joseph looking for a room at the inn—going to from house to house being refused until finally finding the place, the inn, so to speak, where the party is held. This goes on for nine days—a moveable feast in the name of Jesus. Ray caught the last four days of it and was approaching psychic and cultural overload, like some hallucinogenic mind-blower at the Fillmore back in the 60’s: ‘I’m a little tired, but I feel good; just wish people would stop sliding off the wall.’

Think about that: we of white European descent took the birth of Jesus and turned it into the penitential season of Advent—gettin’ ready for Jesus by feelin’ bad for our sins. The friggin’ Mexicans took it and turned it into an extended party.

I’m pretty sure they got it right.

I’m pretty sure that the presence of Jesus is a moveable feast, wherever the door of hospitality is opened.

My final year in seminary was brutal, juggling more balls, living in more stress—sometimes not even due to my own folly—than happiness; more demands than energy. I dreamed about checking out of it all, but, obviously, held on ’cause there weren’t really other choices (echoing John of the Northlands’ comment that what appears to be noble from the outside might in reality simply be a lack of options). In any case, in those days the person that kept my spirit going was Martin Luther (sorry, Jesus). I learned all I could about him and his times, and read his stuff like a thirsty man at an oasis. Sucker could write. ‘Deed, I once had aspirations of reading all his works, but then discovered I already had a life.

I did a lot of reading about and by Luther, but for the longest time could find nothing about his participation in social reform beyond the theological thinking that usually comes to mind, e.g., ’saved by grace’ as if it were a theological affirmation which brings about our salvation in the ‘after life’. Let it be said that The Reformation was not merely some church argument, but a whole movement of social reform. New Testament Ray tells me that 50% of Europe lived at subsistence level or worse in those days; other sources suggest that ’serf’ was just another word for ’slave’ then. Thing of it is that Luther and all those other guys were just as concerned about social reform as theological reform. Think about the sale of indulgences, that church-wide fundraiser offering the promise of eternal security for a buck or two, raising the money to pay Michelangelo and the other artists in Rome. Eternal salvation for you and your whole family for a price. So shall I the serf spend the buck on feeding my child or saving her soul? That’d be a Luther question.

It was an economic system applied to the spirit; holy capitalism (Batman!) in which eternal goods are traded for material goods. Them that’s got gets. So Luther (a lá Keene): “If the pope is the Vicar of Christ and holds the keys to the kingdom, why doesn’t he open the doors for the poor, too? Why does anybody have pay? Jesus never charged for his services” which, natch, pissed off the pope, though it wasn’t merely the pope, but the whole socio/politico/economic mindset of the day, of which the pope was one of the bigger power guys, given that his office handled the commerce of the spirit, as it were, raising big bucks through religious rites: “by the sixteenth century, the upper classes in many northern German cities were endowing altars and anniversary masses for the dead in such great quantity that the priests were having difficulty keeping up with the demand.” Toss in the veneration of relics, and you have a good thing going there, the pope’s monopoly on heaven.

Luther and the Hungry Poor

So I have learned from a marvelous little book called Luther and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments by Samuel Torvend (‘Ah,’ says Duane the Red when I mention the book, ‘my old college roomate’, bringing it to three degrees of separation). He drolly summarizes the spiritual/material economy of the Middle Ages: “Thus, we come to the difficulty, the terrible difficulty with such a spiritual economy: in the competition for ‘goods and services’—either spiritual or material—the privileged always benefit while the poor and needy usually lose.” The final oppression, perhaps, that declares to the poor man that he is of no value even to God.

Be that as it may, I really just wanted Torvend to tell the story, so will share a sentence I enjoyed and a lengthy quote worth snuggling into. The sentence:

“What Luther accomplished was something medieval preachers never attempted: the dissolution of the Neoplatonic presupposition that required the material to be placed in subordination of the spiritual…. For Luther, the life which daily bread sustained was good in itself, a gift of God given even to the wicked.”

I struggle with that very same thing when preparing sermons, asking myself, ‘how do I dispel that old Neoplatonic presupposition?’ “Faith is to be made manifest in works of love directed toward then welfare and well-being of one’s neighbor.”

Yeah, the grace of God incarnated in hospital living. The long part from here out is the section called “Christ’s Invitation to Parents and Political Leaders”. Quotes of Martin Luther are italicized:

We do not need to search far to find persons in need of food and shelter: they reside in our homes. The first duty of every parent is to ensure that his or her child receives food and drink, clothing, shelter, and proper medical care. The home itself is a ‘hospital,’ a place in which we practice ‘hospitality’ toward the most vulnerable: needy children dependent on their parents for both physical and spiritual nourishment.

If parents rightly train [their children] to God’s service, they will indeed have their hands full of good works. For what are the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the alien if not. . .your own children? With these God makes a hospital of your house. He sets you over them as a hospital superintendent, to wait on them, to give them the food and drink of good words and works. . . .How many good works you have at hand in your own home with your own children who need all such things as these like a hungry, thirsty, naked, poor, imprisoned, sick soul. . . .What use is it if [parents] fast themselves to death, pray, or go on pilgrimages? God will not ask them about these. . . .on the day of judgment, but will require of them the children entrusted to their care.

The feeding of one’s child or children is not be exercised when it suits the needs or schedule of mother and father. The parental office is not a matter of pleasure or whim but a strict commandment and injunction of God that will hold parents accountable for the welfare of their children on the Last Day. While Luther presented the honor and obedience children are to offer their parents in this, his explanation of the Fourth Commandment, he was also quick to point out the social dynamic: parents hold power over their children. This right to govern, however, is not to be exercised in such a way that the parent elicits the homage or brute obedience of the child. Rather, this office or power must be exercised in service to the welfare of the child or children, a service that is guided by the invitation of Christ to care for the most vulnerable in one’s home.

What obtains in the home is to be mirrored in the state: the ruler is to care for all people by insuring that the necessities of life, especially the food supply, are secured and maintained. While Luther found justification for his claim in the story of the pharaoh who ordered Joseph to supervise the Egyptian food stores, he also praised his own prince, Frederick of Saxony, who not only provided for public barns and granaries and the preparation of field storage trenches but also ensured that grain and wine were stored in ample amount in the event of drought or pestilence. Where there is manifold need, the ruler or political leader is to be ever watchful so that no one goes hungry and that ample stores are maintained to prevent food shortages. It becomes the princes to provide for the poor, and especially those who are in their earliest years, lest they perish from hunger. If the home can be imagined as a ‘hospital’ that cares for children, so too can the princely region be likened to a hospital—a place of civic hospitality—in which the prince as a political ‘patron’ supervises the governmental projects that respond to the basic necessities of life. It would therefore be fitting if the coat-of-arms of every upright prince were emblazoned with a loaf of bread instead of a lion or a wreath, or if a loaf of bread were stamped on coins, to remind both princes and subjects that through the office of the princes we enjoy protection and peace and that without them we could not have the steady blessing of daily bread.

Just as parents are to feed their children and provide them with clothing, housing, medical needs, and an elementary education, so the prince is to ensure that peace is kept so that fields and orchards may produce food, that food storage centers are maintained for the people, and that food is distributed to persons with genuine need (the poor, widows, the sick) and to anyone suffering during a time of war, drought, or pestilence. Ensuring that food is available for people in need, especially those in their earliest years, is the responsibility of the individual Christian, of parents in their home, or Christian communities, and of the ruler, not one or the other. It is a political duty, for Luther, inspired by the example of virtuous rulers in the Bible and Christ’s invitation to all Christians, including Christian leaders, to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, to welcome the stranger and care for the sick. To imagine the home or political society as a ‘hospital’ is to focus parent and ruler on the support of life. There is no greater praise of hospitality than that in Matt. 25:35: ‘I was hungry, and you gave Me bread.’

Grace alive in hospitality, eh?

My granddaughter The Queen is an ethical genius. Oh, she’s doing the regular things nine-month-olds do—galloping all over the place like some midget pony and poking her nose into everything and pulling lamps and shit over because our house is not (yet) kid-proof (again). If she has any concept of the word ‘no’ she either does not have the accompanying impulse control and/or has already started that ’screw you I’m gonna do what I want’ response that will come to full and open expression in her teen years, until she learns to mask it with subtlety. It’s not this that makes her an ethical genius.

What makes her an ethical genius is that she’s already sharing, even without being asked. She came down with her first cold last week and shared it with Grandpa and undoubtedly a host of others, though I don’t really care about the others, only myself, because I’ve felt like I’m possessed by Sigourney Weaver’s alien, a little monster inside that periodically and unpredictably breaks out in paroxysms (verily) of hacking, sneezing, spitting, and drooling, and it ain’t gonna be over ’til it’s over, bubba. It’s real irritating, making laughing a physically risky endeavor and, oh yeah, stopping the liturgy for just a little spell yesterday, whereupon I realized, alas too late, what an invisible treat I was handing out to especially the geezers at communion, ‘the body of christ and the aliens of The Queen given to you.’ There ain’t nothin’ holy ‘bout sneezing into the communion cups. I at least had the smarts to back out of the Thanksgiving service later in the day.

My darling declares ‘It’s your own damn fault’ in her godlike way, as if it took Sinai to reveal that, as if fixing the blame cures it. But I, like (New Testament) Paul, am not ashamed. I lack impulse control, specially when it comes to love. So when The Queen showed up with that veritable niagara of snot pouring forth out of her nose down over lips and chin I kissed her in spite of it. I should say: I kissed her through it, sharing and tasting her snot, later on thinking, ‘the snot kiss. what a great image of god’. Marvelous metaphor.

Stupid practice, though. Next time, darlin’, I’ll kiss your ass before I’ll kiss your snot. In the meantime I’m sharing your misery and thinking of the ancient poetry that comes up in the church around this time of the year ‘by his wounds we are healed’ and wondering if that has anything to do with a snot kiss. The old widows over at church tell me how lonely it is not being touched; the old men don’t mention it. Sometimes the only hugs these people get are in church. No wonder they spend so long passing the peace.

And the maid o’ the mist smiles behind the everlasting flow.

Snot kisses heal.

I got home from Beaumont a bit after 8:00 Sunday night drained to the marrow, ripped off the uniform for my comfortable garb, and collapsed into the recliner comatosely, which was too bad, given that the darling had cooked up a beautiful roast and I could only nibble at it (though one man’s nibble might be another man’s feast, as Lazarus lay begging at the rich man’s gate). The reason behind this wholistic emptiness lay in my decision on Wednesday to preach about the ’spiritual meaning of the election’, though I didn’t come up with that phrase until the terror of writing the sermon itself forced it out of me—’Call it spiritual, Keene, and maybe it won’t be heard as partisan’. Theology is done, as they say, in the trenches. My current trench is in a town that experienced the violence of the civil rights fight firsthand; the mentality—and occasional behavior—of the kkk still exists in some of the little outlying burgs. The geezer portion of the church was raised when segregated drinking fountains and the like was the way god wanted society; they’re still scratching their heads over what they’ve been through. ‘Course the oil industry brings in people from all over and some of ‘em ended up in the church, so the congregation itself has a pretty good global awareness. But they’ve also been through a bruising civil rights battle among themselves, though dressed up in theological garb called ‘the issue of homosexuality’ which resulted in about half their members leaving, rupturing precious friendships and even family ties just a couple of years back. I announced my preaching intent at the midweek pastors’ bs session, earning their shock and awe: ‘Jesus, Keene. You’re out of your fucking mind.’

To which I wholeheartedly agreed, even echoed, as I stepped into the pulpit on Sunday.

But there y’ go. We’re held hostage by what we fear to speak out loud; by what we’re afraid to name. That’s why confession—identifying as it were the demons—to another person brings freedom; by naming them they are no longer hidden, they lose the power of secret darkness by being exposed to the light of day, to the eyes of all. You don’t get anywhere as a preacher by ignoring the obvious. History was made with the election of Obama, say, the incarnation of the Emancipation Proclamation; there’s no way not to preach about it, just as there was no way not to preach about 9/11. Here I stand; I can do no other; I gotta call a spade a spade, though aware that one man’s spade is another man’s fucking shovel, humming ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’

I don’t care for church parades, preferring to visit among the congregation until somebody tells me it’s time to start. Chatted a bit with the retired submariner who’s trying to raise two autistic boys on his own while mourning the death of a third and working full time at the post office, and with whom I occasionally have breakfast. He told me he was planning on getting a gun because he feared for the safety of his kids. ‘Do you have it with you?’ ‘Haven’t bought it, yet. Why?’ ‘You’re gonna love this sermon.’ There are times when I experience what I call ‘free-falling….into the arms of Jesus’ ’cause ya just gotta let go and trust you’ll be caught and so it was when I stepped into the pulpit and thought about the heart nitro I’d left in the pickup (like always, actually). I preached the sermon while watching for suspicious activity among the flock, dancing, as it were, on a highwire. Said I thought it was evidence of the work of the holy spirit throughout human history in lifting up the oppressed and creating a shared human dignity begun when the Israelites were led out of slavery in Egypt and such as that. (If you want the actual sermon, email me.)

In our worship liturgy, a few rituals after the sermon comes what’s called the ‘passing of the peace’ in which folks wonder around and catch up on the news from the people they had coffee with thirty minutes ago and share recipes and sometimes even the peace as well. I’ve learned to pay attention to the tone of that time, so I do a quick up and down the aisle peacing on them and then go back to the pope’s chair to watch for a couple of minutes. I headed out on the hand-shakin’ gauntlet and it came to feel like a victory lap, with folks thanking me and clapping me on the shoulders and even my gun-toter-to-be buddy telling me how much he appreciated it. I wobbled back to the throne and watched what I thought was a bit more joy, maybe even more openness expressed than normal but it might just have been my relief at still being alive. Later, at the meal I have with the fifteen or so folks working on the church’s transition, they talked with a new sense of enthusiasm for their future; the meal meeting ended in a kind of impromptu celebration.

I’m pretty sure it was not the mere content of the sermon—they’re used to brilliance by now anyway. But preaching is a community event. The manuscript (which I always use) might be flint against the stone, but it ain’t the whole fire. Without the community nursing it into flame it’s a fart in a windstorm. You can enjoy reading a sermon, but it ain’t the same as being there. I’ve changed my approach to preaching considerably under the example of New Testament Ray’s professoring, understanding especially the gospels as part of a huge occasionally rabid political debate within cultural/tribal Judaism about what it means to live under a conquering empire as the people of God; essentially, how, then, shall we live? Now my preaching is done more in the tone of ‘well, let’s think about this’ than in the proclamatory style of great oratory held up to us as models in seminary when Christendom still existed and the biggest job we had to do was to get people’s theology straightened out. I asked a fella once, ‘What was your last pastor’s preaching like?’ He rolled his eyes, ‘Same old thing, Sunday after Sunday: God loves you.’ Shook his head, ‘Big deal. Now what?’

‘Now what’ is the fucking shovel I named on Sunday in a desperate attempt to try to find a language that gets beyond partisanship while aware that I myself am partisan (and a mouthy one at that), a way to speak that recognizes differences and transcends them to the shared humanity and personal dignity that is expressed through them. ‘Ah, Keene,’ the answer came. ‘Call it ’spiritual’, that way, nobody will know what you’re talking about, though it sounds good.’ And it has the added advantage of being true. What mattered and was appreciated by the folks was the attempt to do it. Because with all the screamin’ and shoutin’ and spittin’ at each other that’s gone on over these recent years there is this desire to find a way to speak peacefully to each other even in profound differences. The attempt to do that is a vehicle of grace, freeing people from the fear of mentioning it, overcoming walls of suspicion and hostility with respectful speech. But the ability to do that is learned through blunders; so for the public guy to take the risk of the blunder encourages others to take their risks At least, that’s what I think today.

It wasn’t however quite enough that I’d decided to take on the election as a sermon topic, because coming up later in the day was the monthly “Prayer in the Style of Taize” service which, this time, was marking the anniversary (since it was) of Kristallnacht—that night before WW2 that the Nazi government officially unleashed public and national violence against Jews which would result in the Holocaust by destroying their synagogues and businesses all over the country; gangs rampaged and terrorized the Jews while police stood back and watched. I’d also been asked to offer some reflections about that. So I spent my three-hour break dozing and reflecting on the horrors of the time, sliding between dreams formed by the way too many books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen about it and waking to wonder what can be said. Let me observe: there is no lightness of being, as it were, to be found in reflecting on the Kristallnacht horror; it ain’t a happy time of walkin’ and talkin’ in the garden with Jesus. Matter of fact, ain’t no god to be found around anywhere; just the godless savagery of human nature which leads only to a kyrie, a plea for mercy, which is how we ended the service, after I mumbled through some comments beginning with the human arrogance of religious uniqueness and rambling from there for a few minutes, glad when I could end it, oozing into a metal chair to let them carry the songs and the prayers to the end ’cause there comes that point where there’s nothing left. You don’t go from the tightrope-walking high of the morning’s spirit to the utter desolation of genocidal evil without paying a price. You reflect on that, and it sucks the life out of you, just as they do of their victims. I started the trek home hoping I could stay awake; but there was heavy traffic and I was as usual the designated target poking along at 75, so that kept me alert.

Monday was, natch, a day of no energy, what I’ve come to call a ‘nothing day’ because I have nothing to give, no hospitality of the spirit, especially not the energy to extend a charitable thought. I know from experience that this is the time I’m most apt to take things the wrong/negative way, and thus should be cautious about sending out huffy responses. But it being a nothing day, I also had no energy to resist the impulse, so fired off a pissy response to Pennsylvania Dave about a comment he made.

Now, PA Dave is a childhood chum with whom I ran the streets of our neighborhood and the halls of Moxham Lutheran Church the last year or two before my family went to CA in 1961. He’d only been a childhood memory of Johnstown (western by god redneck Pennsylvania, the home sweet home of John Murtha) until we got magically reconnected a few years back, during a time of strange parallelism in our lives: both of us had been through heart surgery, and both of us had just left our jobs following a bruising (as they say) political battle, him as a teacher. We’re both family men, too. But whereas I bopped around the country, he stayed there; even still goes to old Moxham Lutheran. It’s the bends in the road which make all the difference as the poet puts it, I guess. When I was up there visiting a couple of years back he caught me up on the history of the place and we cruised the city and the country roads and the forests catching up on our lives in his red Jeep with an NRA bumper sticker, and that’s a pretty good sign of where we might differ. My worldview/politics makes him crazy, and vice versa, so that our reacquaintance time has also been marked by bouts of political snarling.

Which was why he had to calm me down on Tuesday with the gracious assurance that the quip was only a jest; in fact, now that I recall it, having recuperated from nothing day, it was really clever and funny. (Alas, too late does he get the punch line.) It took a few emails to smooth all the feathers, but the final words were no matter how difficult the blunders, we gotta keep talkin’. Our common humanity is expressed through our vibrant differences.

Copping to an old spiritual, ‘He ain’t redneck, he’s my brother.’

Thus defeating Kristallnacht.

The Queen sleeps! And now her faithful attendant can write.
 
The Queen of course is the 7-month-old granddaughter Ryan, whom I tend 1 – 2 days a week while her folks are at work. Get this: I offered to do it. In one of those commonplace miracles everybody tells you about but can’t be known until it is experienced I’ve come to savor the gramps gig. I look forward to spending the day with her—feeding her and playing with her and rocking her to sleep. I watch her and marvel at the incarnation of God in her, and at that incarnational alchemy that turns puréed bananas into foul, eye-watering gobs of shit, which she undoubtedly thinks doesn’t stink, grinning toothlessly and kicking her legs flingingly, like the happy sower in Jesus’ parable, a regular Johnny Appleseed of shit, during diaper changing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; perhaps this foul incense is received in the heavens as the perfume of the life they created, cherubim high-fiving behind olfactory tears—”Yo! We did it”—though also recalling Ernest Becker’s comment in The Denial of Death that the fundamental human paradox is that “man [sic] is a god who shits”. It’s even more exciting here on earth because—obviously—I’m out of practice with this, having, for example, forgotten how fast they move when the diaper is released, like some excited pup suddenly unleashed. Then, too, back in the day, I had 2 hands, compared to my current situation thanks to the table saw encounter of 1.55 (no sense of touch). So things get exciting. But even when the moment’s shitty, we have a great time together.
 
Excursus: I thank you God for disposable diapers with tape instead of cloth diapers with ’safety’ pins, which is all we had back then; gotta rinse those bastards out in the toilet, then dump them in the diaper soaker, then try to stop the bleeding. O Lord, you have blessed us with disposable diapers; though were a little slow about it. And this tardiness cost him/her/it a missionary to Africa when the call came back in my senior year of sem with a diapered kid at home and two more on the way. Somebody Big And Important asked me to consider global missions—as I recall, Cameroon—since I had such a ‘natural fluency for foreign languages’. It was both flattering and exciting: study in France for a couple of years, head off to the Dark Continent for Jesus. I was ready to go. ‘Course the call of God ain’t just inner and personal; there’s also the outer, confirming one, not only by the church but most particularly the beloved life mate given to me by God him/her/itself, the mother (and mother-to-be) of our children. It was a brief conversation, beginning, as I recall, with an incredulous ‘are you serious?’ by She Who Only Ever Wanted A Regular Life and ending after some heat with ‘well go ahead and enjoy playing Albert Schweitzer. I ain’t spending my days beating no diapers against no rocks’. I knew instantly that it was, as they say, a game-ender. We were caught in the classic Beckerian human paradox between God and shit. Shit won.
 
The Queen and I have a great time together. And then hoorah she goes away. I love seeing her happiness when Mom and/or Dad show up, jerking in excitement. Me, too; I’m excited, too, clapping with her, ‘Yahoo, Mommy n Daddy’re here! Yahoo! Yahoo!’ eagerly handing her over.
 
We’re starting to develop our own unique way of being together, special games, special rules. Gramps lets her gum the neck of his beer bottle, to the scorn of her mother. Her mother makes her keep her hands still while being fed; gramps lets her grab the spoon and Johnny Appleseed all that puréed shit on its way to her mouth; ‘though really, it’s not so much that I allow her,’ as I explained to her mother when she demanded to know just how the food got on the back of her head, ‘it’s that I have 1.55 hands and she has eight. Now hand me that sponge so I can get this stuff off the wall.’
 
When Doc Boner was somewhere around 18 months—walking, but still an only child—the darling and I hoofed it non-stop from St. Louis to the Grand Canyon, spent twenty minutes there oohing and aahing, then took off to find a campsite, discovering one about halfway to Flagstaff around 3:00 in the afternoon. We were relieved to be there because we’d spent something like 42 hours in the car. We set up the campsite, I kicked back, and she decided to give the kid a bath. Then she told him he had to stay in the tent. She became increasingly irritated and the warnings become more dire as he kept trying to get out. The whole thing was disturbing my communion with nature. So I asked her gently ‘are you insane? do you really expect him to stay in the tent?’ Like flint to tinder it was, sparking with ‘well you don’t have to wash the clothes’ glowing into a full flame of my utter failure as mate and father in the midst of which the boy and I thought it would be good to go for a walk through God’s peaceful forest, and look there, there’s a little pond, oh boy. The darling had calmed considerably by the time we got back, even acknowledging that she might have had a bit of a brain fart there. Then she looked at me with a knowing and superior smirk as I cleaned the mud off his shoes and she threw his clothes in the dirty bag and gave him another, necessary bath. Moms care about cleanliness; gramps cares about fun.
 
Uh oh. The Queen has announced herself.
 
Being an attendant to the Queen means that any other life is lived between naps; the day revolves around her. So I don’t plan much on getting anything done other than being with her. I can do this gig because I have the time; I’m not exactly in demand on a daily basis. Matter of fact, when the depressive energies are running I have to ward off the emotional assaults of mockery ‘you’re only good for baby-sitting,’ with the intellectual insistence that this moment with this child is of intrinsic worth. Beyond everything else, here is where love is lived and learned. What’s more important than that? What’s more valuable? That’s rhetorically obvious, of course, that’s what we all claim; but it’s an existential dialectic in my experience: reason (and the reasoning of theology) have to trump the emotional surges; just ’cause you feel useless doesn’t mean you are. (Nor does it mean that you have to rush out and get all crazy committed to relieve the angst, either.)
 
In one of the few decisions we didn’t argue about, darling Sue and I agreed from the get-go that she would postpone her teaching career in order to raise the kids at home, Ozzie-n-Harriet style. We’re glad we did it that way, but it was a bitch, both financially and psychically. Nowadays she can talk about how isolated and worthless she felt then, ’cause, you know, she was ‘only’ a mom. Other women who followed a similar trail have told me how they felt infantilized in social settings, as if being ‘only’ a mom they had nothing to offer conversationally. After I’ve chased her and played with her and read to her and babbled with her and watched her and fed her and changed her diapers and am rocking the Queen toward a squirmy sleep I ponder how it must have been for the darling day in and day out nursing two kids with a third one hauling ass all over the parsonage and continuing to do this day after day after day and I can’t get my head around it. It’s amazing to me. No wonder she responded to my amorous desperation in those days with a less than enthusiastic ‘go ahead if you have to.’ There’s that Beckerian paradox again: it’s impossible to be a sex goddess when you’ve spent the day in shit.
 
Ah. The Queen beckons.
 
The gramps gig has its dark side: gramps was the old guy who died when I was a kid. My own dad didn’t get past his grandkids’ first years in school. Nor, in fact, did my brother in his grampshood. I wonder what this moment might mean when I am but a dim memory. I hold her and rock her and watch the Queen slowly relax to the embrace and let herself slide into the nap and I remember that the dark mystery of life from which she has been born and in which she now dreams is the same dark mystery of life to which I shall return. In the Land of Naps we are formed and grown, and to the land of Naps we shall return and meet each other again for the first time.
 
Our lives are lived between the naps.

I sold my sailboat in December, after accepting the fact that the price it would fetch would leave me with a net loss of just a bit more than the 12 – 13 grand I spent learning about the currency market and what gifts I have not been blessed with. While awaiting the arrival of Ike I was grateful not to have to worry about that, recalling the miserable trip Gracious Gerald and I made down to the marina in preparation for Rita (or somebody) to get caught in the evacuation traffic on the way home, though sitting around after Ike I observed ‘dammit. The boat was insured for four times what I got for it.’ It’s all in the timing.
 
The darling and I are fiscally conservative people, in spite of the cost of the adventures I undertake to her rolling eyes, though she’s come to trust that I’ll not put the family future at risk in doing so. I’ve knocked around the idea of buying a nice catamaran for at least four years and spent hours, nope days and weeks, shopping on the internet. In one sense I could afford one. But I never became easy with how it compromised future finances—credit, of course, being a form of indentured servitude, learned about the hard way—so I don’t see owning one in my future, short of divine intervention. Fiscal discipline has been something we’ve had to learn over the years. Fortunately we were blessed by teachers—an angel of a financial advisor who taught and coached me over decades, and—get this—Jesus, who is forever (like, almost every Sunday in the readings) challenging the place of material things in my life and warning about becoming enslaved to the ‘ownership society’; as well as the spiritual discipline of the necessary professional pastoral integrity of tithing, which is, for you heathen, giving 10% of your income for the work of Jesus—you can’t very well preach about Biblical giving if you aren’t trying to do it yourself. It was particularly tough during the early years of minimal income, and, despite how much God claims to love a joyful giver, undertaken with the grumpiness of a diet. But after a spell it became a way of life, part of our self-identity. In the process we had to learn how to handle our money ever more wisely (she thinks I’m a financial genius, and I think she’s saved us bazillions), AND we’ve been comforted with the thought that should we ever get into really deep shit financially, here was a big wad available for the crisis. And actually, we’ve come to enjoy giving money away (within bounds, since the giving is also disciplined); hence, the ‘economic stimulus’ check from the IRS is going to the World Hunger Appeal, who need it more than we do. Something will be going out for hurricane response.
 
Back in my BVIG days when I had to deal with church finances and ’stewardship’ (fund-raising) programs I eventually realized first, that you can’t expect much help from new members, because if they happen to know anything at all about giving, they have no room to do it because they were living, thanks to credit, on 110% of their income. Then I learned it wasn’t just new pagan members, but the majority of the congregation. Then I realized that it wasn’t greed so much that drove them as ignorance—they had not a clue as to handling their finances. So I browbeat a stewardship committee into doing financial education classes, ‘Geez, if you’re gonna raise money in the name of Jesus, let’s at least learn how to handle personal finances in his name, too.’ It took some courage from the stewardship folks ’cause, you know, as much as people claim that all the church ever talks about is money, any real, truthful, and personal discussion of it is off limits; the topic–like the name of God in the Old Testament—was too holy to mention. Fixed that: I just laid out our personal finances and giving in a sermon occasionally. (Book title: The Preaching of Keene: Too Stupid to Ignore It.) So we did the classes, brought in experts and such for a number of years, and a number of chaotic families were put back together financially.
 
Didn’t help the perpetual budget shortage much, though, and the interest eventually played out. But I always thought that financial education and planning ought to be part of our new members’ class. ‘Nother idea received like a fart in a pup tent.
 
I turned 60 last week, celebrating another step on the banana peel to the grave by among other things checking out my retirement accounts, that money we’ve been putting aside these past 30 years for our dotage. Happy birthday! You just lost 20% of all of it. ‘Parently those wise and unbelievably well-paid stewards of our economic life fucked up. The house of cards they’ve been building is crashing down; their prestidigitation uncovered as mere illusion, along, I suppose, with my 20%. Oh, plus whatever I and my children and their children have to hand over as tax-payers to clean up the shit-pile they’ve made of people’s lives–once again using the poor and marginalized raped by the sub-prime loans—under the banner of the free market (‘what so proudly we hailed at our profit’s last gleaming’): ‘Gimme that old, razzle dazzle—razzle dazzle ‘em’ sings the lawyer (Richard Gere) to a nifty soft-shoe shuffle in “Chicago”.
 
And then as if out of some Twilight Zone incarnation they come shuffling over to Washington to the tune of ‘give us, oh, whatever, 700 billion to a trillion bucks and absolute authority on how to use it, and we’ll clean things up.’ Trust us. We’re the guys who got us into this; we can get us out. They take umbrage at the suggestion of oversight; they are incredulous at the mention of no bonuses for their performance. They oppose helping those poor bastards who were suckered into obscene mortgages in a 21st century rerun of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where the poor are bilked into handing over their meager life’s savings for razzle-dazzle fraudulent deeds. What moral universe do these people inhabit?
 
Oh, yeah, the “self-regulating” free market: leave ‘em alone and they’ll naturally do what’s best for humanity; hey, there, Bo-Peep, leave ‘em alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind ‘em (though in reality these guys strut like roosters in a barnyard). The free market as intrinsically moral. What utter nonsense. The only “morals” driving the markets are fear and greed; that’s common knowledge in the markets themselves. I spent that 12 grand learning that intellectually, and living it personally, discovering my own inner fear ‘n greed (far more exciting than sitting with a therapist). Fear ‘n greed. And, oh yeah, the herd instinct. How can a herd driven by fear ‘n greed stop its own stampede? So we’ve been given the old razzle-dazzle for the past eight years–a secretive, militaristic administration using fear (oh, and torture) to cover (and occasion) their greed and corruption. I read somewhere that fascism is the result of the union of government with corporate interests (ala, maybe, Mussolini’s Italy); say, corporations with military power. Whatever.
 
The bible movie playing out in my mind is the golden calf scene a la Cecil B.DeMille: everybody’s dancing and having a lasciviously good time around the golden calf god they have built themselves in Moses’ absence, and we’re living right in that moment when Charleton Heston shows up and delivers the judgment of God. The shit is hitting the fan. “We’ve” been nailed in this idolatry; worshiping at the golden calf of a human creation called the free market.
 
Not that there’s anything wrong with the golden calf itself. It was—and is—a beautiful human creation. It’s a way of commerce by which we share our lives with each other. We can tend to our material lives. I put a little of this day’s efforts aside in the form of investments, anticipating that they will accumulate and earn interest; that is, as a corporate friend once pointed out to me, “make a profit”; going on to explain that doing so was an ethical responsibility to we pension plan shareholders in the company. Part of the elegance of the design. I’m cool with that; I’ve enjoyed a nice life through it.
 
But when profit becomes the only ethical imperative—or the one by which all other ethical decisions are measured—then it has usurped its position. When profit alone is the measure of greatness, the elegance of the design turns hideous, because profit and greed are kissing cousins if not incestuous siblings. When profit is a sole measure of a corporate—as well as of course personal—life, then our human artistry becomes the god bowed to; the greediest of them are seen as the greatest (via, also, my interest earnings). The tool we created to use becomes the god we are commanded, enslaved to serve. That human institution which we created for the betterment of all is distorted to an end in itself, and thus becomes demonic, destructive of human life, as I recall Walter Wink sort of putting it in his book about the spiritual powers (and it seems to have a whiff of Paul Tillich, too).
 
And the universe ain’t gonna put up with it for long. God will not be mocked. Shit’s gonna fall apart. The razzle-dazzle’s gonna be revealed to be exactly that, with the song coming to an abrupt end. Which, natch, has just taken place in the supreme irony of these proud free-marketeers, these bastions of self-regulation and personal responsibility, these priests of the golden calf to come shuffling into Washington begging for a handout like a gambling addict crying ‘we got a plan! we got a plan!’ These guys, who despised “we the people” in our organized form (sorta, i.e., gov’t) now come to “we the people” to help ‘em. I’m thinking that God almost always judges through historical irony. (Cynically, one last good screwin’ before Jr gets gone; the final assault on a date by a fraternity thug.) As per Luther, it is God’s ‘cold wrath’ that does it: okay, follow your own god and see what happens. Listen to the universe chuckle like the mechanic at the garage, ‘Hey Charlie, this guy tried to fix it himself.’
 
And following the cartoonish behavior of our leaders in the week since I started this, especially Fibber’s mad dash to D.C. charging in with his minions like the Keystone Kops and creating as much chaos, it appears that “we the people” might have some say in how they behave Certainly “we the people” are covering their losses (with an attendant new phrase: privatized profit, socialized risk). So perhaps “we the people” could engage them in discussion if not enforce them by laws about corporate citizenship in the world. Perhaps another ethical imperative might be added to the list; are we the shareholders willing to accept lower returns? Am I willing to check my own greed for that?
 
Sparking, of course, a fresh round of razzle-dazzle.
 
‘Cause, you know: the soulless forces of fear ‘n greed are always at work out there. It is only we the people who can do compassion.

World-famous golfer Lee Trevino famously quipped after being hit by lightning following a two-iron shot, “I should have used a one-iron. Not even God can hit a one-iron.”
 
So here I sit, following the one-iron shot a couple weeks back called Gustav which, like any long-iron shot I’ve ever taken, sliced dramatically at the last minute to miss New Orleans and bounce on up into the woods, as it were, of Texas, but not before yelling ‘fore’ and messing with Fibber McGee and Molly’s gathering on the green, waiting for the current storm of the century called Ike, leading me to wonder about hurricanes and Republicans (in the historic, not the personal sense, given that some of my best friends. . .). It’s getting to be a real regular thing around here, people evacuating and public-service minded oil companies jacking up the price of gas locally. Nothing says the spirit of America like price-gouging which, here in the land of the Free-Marketeers is not illegal; supply and demand, bubba, community be damned, there’s money to be made, shoutin ‘drill baby drill’ like a college stag party; answering t.s.eliot’s question in Choruses from The Rock:
 
When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’
What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together
To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
 
But I digress, perhaps out of profit-envy, since every time the divinity farts like this I can’t get over to B’mont to preach and such thus earning my daily—in a quite literal sense, since I get paid by the day—bread, in the more figurative sense of that word, in terms of both shekels and communal presence; I like being among them—though at the absolute max of two days per week; anything beyond that, my mouth would get me killed. (Recently had one of those sudden silences in the midst of yukking it up with the boys with that ominous ‘you ain’t from around these parts, are you boy?’ tone with a bald kid playing a banjo in the background.)
 
I went out yesterday to do my normal fill up in preparation for the now non-existent drive to B’mont, and was suddenly deja-vu’d into the 70’s looking for a station that has gas without long lines, so hung out in a line and watched with fascination as we all scrambled. Then I stopped by the hardware store to pick up some screws to finish the swing frame I was making for Queen Ryan only to be told ‘we’re out.’ ‘You’re out of screws?’ ‘We’re out of everything, duck tape, ice chests, you name it.’ Geez. The darling reported on the madhouse when she stopped for bread and frozen pizza. Being a good neighbor I replaced the mantles in the gas light out front, which lights up the whole street when the electric goes out. I zipped down to the stop ‘n rob this morning and saw homes with boarded up windows. Are you kidding me? We (being me) are 55 miles from the coast, with downtown Houston in the way. Geez. Besides, I’ve seen too many blow-hard apocalypses to get much excited. As I emailed Northlands John, ‘we’ve got chips,soda, and ammo, so we’re ready.’
 
It’s gettin cloudy. Hot diggity dog, the foreplay begins.

You better not be some kind of aural slouch when it comes to worshiping in the Lutheran tradition, particularly when we come around to the Bible readings, of which there are four “assigned” by some ecumenical coven of liturgical gurus hidden deep in the bowels of Christendom for each Sunday, beginning with the cleverly-named ‘First Lesson’, followed by a chunk of a Psalm, then, surprise, the ‘Second Lesson’ and then hoorah the Gospel reading. For the liturgical illiterate, the first reading is usually something out of the Old Testament (with respect, ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’), which is also where the Psalms are to be found. The second reading is something from the New Testament, but not anything from the four gospels, the reading of which is reserved for, you guessed it, the Gospel Reading (for which we also stand and give a holy hip-hip-hooray for Jesus). Now, these readings may or may not have anything to do with each other. Or two of them might be connected while a third travels its own route, as in, recently, the second lesson has been a Cliff’s Notes read through of Romans. I pity the poor worshiper who actually tries to make sense of them as a whole, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I’ve thought about axing a couple of them over the years, but decided I needed to trust the work of our liturgical wizards; toss it all out there, maybe something will stick. And besides, they provide a near infinite number of sermon themes. Give me four readings to choose from and I can preach about anything.

Which, let it be known, is a problem, because most of us preacher types can get lost to the wonderful universe of our own minds, thinking our grandiloquent thoughts. Left to our own devices, we are brilliant at theologically justifying whatever it is we feel like. Left alone, we are bedazzled by our own bull. That’s why we gotta hang around the company of preachers; we stay in tune and sort of accountable for our preaching. So for about a decade I’ve been part of a weekly pastors’ coffee klatch and lectionary debate. They keep me accountable through challenge. And vice versa.

It was my turn to vice versa last week in the midst of a rousing debate of Peter’s Wiley Coyote routine when he saw Jesus walking across the water in the middle of a storm; so excited became he that he jumped out of the boat and was four steps across the sea before he realized it, which, of course, by then was too late: a mad scramble to Jesus with a heavenly xylophone bonkety-bonking in the background. It was a loud and dandy argument, but I got tired of the male pronouns for the divine, thus shooting off my mouth after yet another ‘God. . .he’: ‘Hesheorit.’

The interrupted pontificator: ‘What?’

‘God. . .he, she, or it. Hesheorit.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ with a roll of the eyes.

Of course we all know that God is beyond gender, but language matters—language defines. You use only male references to God, and in spite of whatever intellectual move you make, you end up with a de facto male God, the ‘Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. I hope my pals are more careful in their sermons than they are in the heat of the debates; but if we’re not called on it, few of us preachers can pick up our blind spots. I got into a whole jag where I was just slovenly about pronoun use, and since nobody called me on it, I continued it too long. So: Hesheorit, even in my sermons.

I know, bubba: it’s the whiney sensitivity of friggin political correctness. But I’ll only accept the charge of (minimal) sensitivity, because it’s a spiritual matter to my mind: people are deformed by deformed images of God. And I gotta observe that God the Father ain’t gettin’ very good press these days; you know, that Higher Father to whom Georgie Jr. announced his accountability just before starting the war on Iraq; the loving Daddy demonstrated by the RC ‘fathers’ while accosting their children (and the ‘Holy Father’s’ unwillingness to take action against them); the ‘Fathergod’ of the Right who justifies misogynistic male domination of women’s bodies; the ghastly father of Mel Gibson’s passion movie who, enraged and insulted by us sinners, turns his violent abuse on his own son (‘yahoo! Jesus died for me’ being essentially ‘I’m glad Dad beat up my brother instead of me’). Yeah, to whom do the victims of this god turn?

Besides, what god does my daughter see at work in her womb creating her daughter Ryan? What god does she look to to see her own life as she mothers this child? ‘The father of our Lord Jesus Christ’? Gimme a break. I know enough about women to understand that while we may inhabit the same space, we do not live in the same world (a lá an ancient prayer, ‘I thank you, God, that you have not created me a woman’). So it seems that simple justice if not also compassion requires me to attend to that. For if God is beyond gender, we are free to talk about him as her, and, indeed, should as much as possible. Hence: Hesheorit.

God the Mother. The birthing one; the nurturing one; the life-giving one; the fertile one, growing creation. God the Mother to whom the children can turn who are more worried about today’s food than yesterday’s sin. God who sings her children lullabies and coos at them while cleaning the shit from their bottom and delights simply in their being, divine ecstasy breaking out when the smile is returned. God the Mother. God the Wife (the Bible never gives marital advice written by women, just men like Paul). God, whose heart is a feminine tenderness (and mystique, eh?), caring not a whit about her own honor but tending to the life of her children, marking not their perfection, but their growth. It’s good to worship God the Mother.

So long as we never forget who holds the real power.

Folks who wonder about in the contemplative realm use phrases like “listening another into being” and “hearing another into life”. Goofy-sounding stuff that nonetheless tries to get at something that is true, at least in my experience of having been the recipient of this actively silent grace: listening to the trauma , du jour of my life; being present to my current horror (trauma being, according to Seattle Suzanne, defined by the traumatized). This kind of listening, incidentally, requires some training and discipline in patience, respect, and especially self-awareness. Thus Steve and I were buddied up some decades back in such training where one must talk for 45 minutes and the other must listen—no talking!—and pay attention, doing any communication with the eyes. It’s pretty difficult on both sides, given the listener’s overwhelming urge to say something, and the opposite pressure on the talker; but I discovered that the longer one talks, the more self-revealing he (in this case) becomes. Of course, you maybe can’t do this all the time, because then there is no dialogue, just a monologue. But these days I get a greater delight in listening to other stories than in telling my own (which I do in writing; that way nobody can interrupt me).
 
In any case, I’ve been reading a marvelous little book called, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and The Search For What Saves Us. It’s written by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, both of who’re Methodist pastors and academics and (eek!) feminists. The book is autobiographical more than academic, and I ran into a tale which gave me a twofer—both sermon and Kwikies—as I noted to She Who Loves Me while imploring her to do the typing right after we made up from two days of snarking at each other. Here it is from Rebecca’s part of the story:
 
*****
 
One afternoon, I paid a pastoral call on Maxine and her husband. They had moved to a retirement home and she’d just had surgery. Their new apartment was a corner room that looked out across Elliot Bay, with the Olympic Mountains in the distance. It was good to see them in a place with so much beauty. The years were wearing on them now. His eyesight was almost gone. She wasn’t as strong. They couldn’t do as much at the church anymore.
 
Maxine was reading a letter when my knock interrupted her afternoon tea. She laid the letter down by the worn Bible and devotional pamphlets that rested on the end table, in easy reach of her armchair. She filled a flowered china cup for me, offered me lemon cookies, and picked up the letter.
 
“My brother Lyle is writing from Southern California. He says the farm workers appreciate the food and blankets they have been able to bring this trip, but they wish they could do more.” I knew about the volunteer work that Maxine’s brother, a farmer from Iowa, did. He and his wife drove to the Mexican border each winter to help out with the basics: food, blankets, repairs. They offered practical assistance and friendship to people struggling with the debilitating effects of poverty and harsh working conditions. Maxine and her sister Doris enlisted the women of our congregation to send money and supplies to help as well.
 
“You know,” Maxine mused, “we never thought Lyle would be the one to do something like this. We thought we’d lost him.” As I listened, Maxine told me about her brother. In 1945, Lyle came home from the war, the only veteran to return alive to the small town in Iowa he left to go to the Western Front. The day he arrived home, the whole town came out to meet him. When the train pulled into the station, the band played. Family and friends waved and cheered, and the mayor stood ready to greet him. But the man who climbed off the train was not the cheerful, high-spirited boy who had gone off to war. The man who climbed off the train was a ghost. In response to the music and cheers, he stared back, mutely. His blank face did not register recognition of anyone—not mother, sister, or friend.
 
They took him home to the farm. He sat in the rocker in the parlor. He wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t sleep, and he would barely eat. No one in that town knew what was wrong. They just knew that Lyle’s soul was lost somewhere.
 
Maxine told me she decided to keep her brother company. Whenever she could she’d sit in the parlor with him and talk. She’d tell him the news from the hardware store in town, or about the potluck at church, who was there, which dress each young woman wore. She’d tell him how the clean laundry had blown off the line and into the tomatoes that morning. When she ran out of things to say, she’d just sit with him quietly, snapping beans or mending socks. Lyle was like a stone. No expression on his face. Rocking.
 
It went on like this for days that flowed into weeks and on into months. Then one night, late, after everyone else had gone to bed, Maxine was sitting with Lyle, quietly knitting, when the eyes in Lyle’s still face filled with tears. The tears spilled over and began to run down his face. Maxine noticed. She got up and put her arms around her brother. Held in his sister’s embrace, Lyle began to cry full force, great gusts of sobbing, and Maxine held him. Then he began to talk. He talked of the noise, the cold, the smoke, the death of his buddies. And then he spoke of the camps, the mass graves, the smell. He talked all night. Maxine listened.
 
When the morning light came across the fields, she went to the kitchen and cooked him breakfast. He ate. Then he went out and did the morning chores.
 
*****
 
According to the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> (April 18, 2008), there are 300,000 veterans from Iraq suffering the numbness of violence called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And violence is, of course, far broader, and often more hidden than war and even crime.
 
Who shall listen the shattered ones into being?