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

In 2001 the darling and I attended the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. a month after Junior was coronated the first time.  I’m not sure how or why we got an invitation—part of an elite 4000 from around the world—but it was on official gold embossed stationery from (republican) Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee complete with eagles and spiritual quotes from Ben Franklin and George Washington and, on another page, the costs, which were not inconsequential.   But, hey, for a foray into the national religious scene I was willing to cough up the bucks, even fully aware that we were marching into the simultaneous victory party of The Other Side.  But after all, we were there to pray together for the country, to the god who transcends politics, right?  ‘Twas my (phantasmagorical) notion that we’d be shaking hands like two teams after a hard-fought soccer game, and get on with the prayer work at hand.

‘Course then it was also my desperate hope— ‘Please, God, let me only be paranoid’—that the newly-installed administration would not enact the policies called for by The Project for the New American Century, a sort of neocon manifesto declaring the divine right and responsibility of pax Americana for all the world.  The most terrifying line declared that only America can be trusted with nuclear weapons; actually, only America can be trusted to rule the world—and so should, our economic interests to be established and maintained militarily, if necessary, because we are good, ‘chosen by history’.  This evil national delusion was signed by Rumsfied, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl and the whole lot of them initially for George I, who himself had rejected it as extreme a decade earlier.  As history played out, of course, I was correct in my paranoia.  I hate it when I’m right.  (A prophet is not without honor—except in his own congregation.)

I pride myself on being an existential gourmet of the ironic and bizarre—alas, that’s been the tale of much of my life.  But not even I could have anticipated what we encountered there in the nation’s capitol.  It just got spookier and spookier, from all the political ‘brothers’ (no women, sorry!) huddled like a rugby team and waves of believers stretching arms and hands in a chain touch on the anointed—’anoint ‘im with yer spirit, lord! amen!  amen!’ to the college age free marketeers in their shirts and ties and pressed slacks consulting with me about bringing some poor kid from an even poorer country for an all-expense paid vacation to America for whatever, a week or a month, wouldn’t that be swell?  And then what?  Send ‘im home with a taste of how good America is.  How does this help him?  He’ll know how good America is.  We’re thinkin’ this is what Jesus wants.

Jesus.  Singing Dylan, ‘You know there is something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’

The darling—who, incidentally, had not yet learned the appropriate art of paranoia (she has since)—was as weirded out as I, so we bailed on it, rented a car, and drove to my childhood home in Johnstown, PA, where a snow storm led us into a refreshingly different reality.  We couldn’t wait to get out of Washington on that trip; the whole thing was too scary for us.  I remember thinking to myself at the time, man, this is the way nazis are made.  When we got home, I got my tit in a ringer with some folks at the church for an article I wrote about it.  The only way I could handle my own haunting was by mockery, which, natch, ‘offended’ certain types.  So it goes, as Vonnegut puts it; screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke, as some of us preachers say.  I filed the whole experience back there with my stint in a circus band after I got out of the army—memorable only for its weirdness..  (Incidentally, the referenced article is posted at my blogsite, titled ‘Bizarre’.)

This little drive down memory lane was initiated by Jeff Sharlet’s not-so-little book (400 pages, small print, no pictures) called The Family:  The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, having been clued into it while following the shenanigans at the ‘C-Street House’ registered for tax(free) purposes as a religious institution and, oh yes, the D.C. living quarters of all those family-values guys running around boinkin’ the babes. They pray together and counsel the boinker in his sin, like how to pay off the boinkee and her husband for their silence.

It ain’t, of course, the boinking itself that’s a big issue—coital monogamy has never been a natural human instinct, ’specially among men of power.  Martin Luther once got his own tit in a wringer by suggesting to the husband of a frigid wife that he find a boinkee in some distant village (drawing, as it were, a distinction between marriage and boinking).  And it ain’t just men, of course, ’cause for every boinker there’s a boinkee (some, actually willing).  I always figured that the national outrage at Clinton’s blow job had mostly to do with jealousy.  It took me not very long into the counseling side of work to become aware of just how much boinking was actually going on ‘among the people’ and then I became bored with the drama (though it did sparkle my fantasy life).  Besides, ‘use it or lose it’ has been my motto from the day I found it until my sanctification (being, um, this morning again in my baptism, a new, flaccid, self arising).

No, it isn’t the boinking that is the main issue—in spite of the pain and humiliation inflicted on the boinked families—but rather the demonic in the hypocrisy of it.  It’s far more sinister than the moralist getting caught in his own peccadilloes, because these guys have the power to—and do—destroy lives.  From The Family:

Uganda, which following the collapse of Siad Barre’s Somalia became the focus of The Family’s interests in the African Horn, has been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual anxieties.  Following the implementation of one of the continent’s only successful anti-AIDS program, President Yoweri Museveni, the Family’s key man in Africa, came under pressure from the United States to emphasize abstinence instead of condoms.  Congressman Pitts wrote that pressure into law, redirecting millions of dollars from effective sex-ed programs to projects such as Unruh’s (of the ‘purity’ movement—lsk).  This pressure achieved the desired result:  an evangelical revival in Uganda, and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them so severe that some college campuses held condom bonfires.  Meanwhile, Ugandan souls may be more “pure,” but their bodies are suffering; following the American intervention, the Ugandan AIDS rate, once dropping, nearly doubled.  (p.328)

How’s that for family values?

And The Family’s interests?  To spread the gospel of what Sharlet calls ‘American fundamentalism’ around the world.  Now, this ain’t your typical camp-meetin’ come-to-Jesus fundamentalism we normally think of with a bit of enlightened sympathy for the adherent and christian disdain for the preacher.  Indeed, The Family eschews the label ‘christian’ as carrying too much baggage, even while they claim to follow Christ:  ‘Jesus, plus nothing.’  Yeah, we all say that to some degree, but I have never before encountered the Christ they claim.  Their Christ is the raw power of being one of god’s ‘key men.’  Like Jesus; though without the ethical responsibilities, Jesus plus literally nothing.  Hence in a presentation by its current leader, Doug Coe:

Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men.  Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere.  Actually emotional and mental problems.  Prisoners.  From the streets.  But they bound themselves together in an agreement and they died together.  Two years before they moved into Poland these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop, dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then start on the rest of Poland.”

It worked, Coe says; they killed 6 1/2 million “Polish people”. . . .

“These three men by their decision alone.”  What he’s trying to explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship:  between man and Christ, between brothers in Christ (p.254).

Wow.  Kinda sheds a whole different light on the old gospel tune ‘There’s Power in the Blood,’ eh?

The Family (sometimes, too, The Fellowship) is the current moniker of a network of True Believers begun back in the 30’s by an immigrant fundamentalist preacher named Abram Vereide who experienced a call from god to minister to the fabulously powerful, thus, natch, ushering in god’s fundamentalist kingdom.  So he developed a ‘key-man’ theology, in the tradition, maybe of ‘christ as ceo’.  In his universe god selects and anoints particular ‘key men’ with both spiritual and worldly power in order to bring the whole world under god’s reign.  Doug Coe inherited his leadership mantle back around the 60’s.  These are god’s elite leaders—like Jesus—in the world, and as such they are not accountable to human rules, but only the Christ who gives them daily marching orders.  Nor do they hold one another accountable in their cell group bible studies there in D.C. and around the world; thus Coe could maintain ‘bible study fellowship’ with Indonesia’s Suharto—a dictator whose reign was as brutal and murderous as Pol Pot’s—and not confront him about it.  About the 600,000 he slaughtered one of The Family’s devotees says, “If not for Doug, maybe Suharto would have killed a million” (p. 252).

The presence of Christ.

‘Course, all this burdensome power doesn’t come without a cost—nothing less than the total relinquishment of the self to god, though that process happens not in the eternal internal struggle with the Old Adam, no siree.  It happens instead by receiving your literal daily marching orders from god, and so you are not morally accountable for what happens.  Vereide’s theophany is described this way:

“What did God say to you?” Buchman asked Abram when their Quiet Time was completed.  Abram believed he had heard God’s voice several times in his life, and even had considered the possibility that he might be a prophet, but he had not yet been exposed to the idea that God spoke to men regularly and in detail.  “He didn’t say anything,” Abram confessed, disappointed.

Well, Buchman replied, God had spoken to him.  “God told me, ‘Christianize what you have.  You have something to share.’”

Blander words no Sunday school teacher ever spoke, but to Abram they seemed like a revelation.  God had told Buchman not to join Goodwill, but that didn’t matter.  What was important was the discovery that God should be consulted not just on broad spiritual questions but on absolutely everything.  This, Abram decided, was what it meant to die to the self:  to turn all responsibility over to God.  That such a transfer meant the abdication of any accountability for one’s actions, that it provided justification for any ambition, did not occur to him (p.127).

And for the benefit of my preacher pals, another sermon story, this time of Sharlet’s conversation with his pal Bengt, as they shared a training week at The Family’s posh retreat in D.C.

“Bengt,” I said, “I don’t understand.”

“You know,” he said, “I don’t either.  That’s what I’ve kind of come to realize.  The thing is, I don’t need to.  I can just trust in the Lord for my directions.  He’ll tell me what I need to know.”

“A voice?” I said, surprised.

“A prayer,” he answered.  The voice he heard was his own, his prayers, transformed by his inverted theology into revelation.  What he wanted was what God wanted.

“Absence?” I said, realizing that what he’d meant by the absence of doubt was the absence of self-awareness, the absence of an understanding of his thoughts as distinct from God’s and thus always subject to—doubt.  But I did not say this.  Instead, I just repeated myself.  “Absence,” I said, without a question mark.

“Totally, brother.”

He half smiled, satisfied with this alchemy of logic by which doubt became the essence of dogma.  God was just what Bengt desired him to be, even as Bengt was, in the face of God, “nothing”  (p. 51).

Nice, eh?  Self-deification via the immolation of self-awareness—that’s the conversion experience.  ‘I am a powerful man, and therefore a key man appointed by god to run things and I’ve dedicated myself to this, and so whatever I think is what god thinks, and all these people in the fellowship help me keep my head straight about that.’  So you got this all-powerful Christ who never suffers the doubts spawned by the inconvenient thought that there might in fact be two wills at work here; ‘not mine but thine’ is overcome by the denial that I even have a will.  A doubtless Christ accountable only to the god he hears speaking to him alone; certainly not to the rulers—or the rules—of the world.

Power—with neither doubt nor accountability.  Just given by god.  Jesus plus nothing.  Swell.

The historian in me recognizes this as the theological structure of the Imperial Cult of the Roman Empire dressed in contemporary flags and faces (Christ standing in for Zeus), the establishment of the sacred social pyramid with god at top giving his power to the emperor and key men to rule the masses ‘beneficently’.  Later it was called the divine right of kings.  It is the theological structure of every caste system in history; god chooses an elite few to which he gives his absolute power over the lower little ones.  The divinization of the leader:  it’s a terrific theology, if you happen to be the guy in power.  That this is the theology that the new testament in fact opposes is only an inconvenient reality to be ignored as much as self-awareness.  Caesar remains Caesar even if you dub him ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ.’  In the words of Doug Coe:  “We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t” (p. 121).

The bummer is that according to Sharlet this is the official unofficial religious cultus operative among the political, corporate, and military leadership in Washington and other power centers in the world.  (Certainly explains their jaw-dropping lawlessness we call hypocrisy:  I’m a key men and therefore beyond the regular laws; say, ‘If the president does it, then it’s not illegal.)  He documents the rise of The Family from its beginnings in the 30’s, through the Cold War—which it was both formed by and formed, to its predominance today—they ‘all’ (as it were) participate in cell/prayer groups, and if not, at least pay political homage to The Family.  Thus it was that Zack Wamp lived at The Family’s C-Street house, himself a member of The Family, who’d sent us the invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast, which is The Family’s only public event, and which is intended, of course, for networking and recruiting.  Presidents and senators and powerful people from around the world attend, even if they’re not part of the official Fellowship.

And from which, as you may recall, the darling and I fled those years ago.  Then we did not know the spirit of the thing, only that we were frightened by it.  After reading his book, I can now at least name it.

But it don’t make me feel any better.  If it’s this Jesus plus nothing, I’d rather have nothing.

Larry

I put a cheap new ’stereo’ unit in my pickup one night a few weeks back after the temperature had plummeted to just shy of 85 around 8:00 mosquito time because I’d become frustrated with the fm transmitter that plugged into the lighter supposedly to play my new ipod on an unoccupied fm station on the old stereo after the discovery that there are no unoccupied fm bands in Houston.  So I put in a unit already decked out for the ipod, relegating the fm gadget and the old stereo to the pile of useless electronic gear accumulated over the years in some closet.  Ah, technology:  an unending and expensive effort to stay usefully relevant.

Consider:  I have a bunch of 78 rpm ‘vinyls’ of 40’s-50′ jazz bands—which I remember playing as a kid—but have no way anymore to play.  I also have about a hundred 33(& 1/3) vinyls, for which my loving children bought me a turntable a couple years back that converts them into cd format, but upon trying it I discovered I could not abide the scratches and pops and scrapings also delivered by the needle vibrating in the grooves.  There are as well a bunch of cassettes stashed away somewhere from those days, though I have none of the reel-to-reel tapes left from when that was necessary.  And, natch, there are random stacks of cd’s currently sitting all around the place.

Then there are the various and necessary playback machines.  My brother had an under dash 45 rpm player in his car, which was the bitchinest thing around in the San Fernando Valley of the early ’60’s.  By the time I had a car it was eight-track players, but since I had a vw bug, which couldn’t be used to make out in, I didn’t bother getting one, though I eventually got a cassette player.  Things continued to progress, each time requiring new players and the transfer from one medium to another, ’til I finally gave up trying altogether.  Silence was better than the effort it took to listen to music.  Besides, I like silence.

But you can get too much of a good thing, ’specially when part of your soul’s been created in music.

So I asked Soccer Saul to find me an ipod and (house) player.  I asked him because he’s always had a more utilitarian approach to recorded music than Doc Boner the real musician, who would have me paying hundreds, if not thousands more for sound subtleties I’m incapable of hearing, especially with the pickup whizzing at 75.  Soccer Saul’s a bit more pragmatic when it comes to those things, so he brought it to me and showed me how to work it, and I started downloading cd’s like a fool and then discovered I could also get the vinyl recordings online for, natch, a fee, being about the same as I paid for the vinyl originally, and so got a bunch of them, too, until I decided I’d spent enough (this go around) and should take some time listening to them.

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been motoring immersed in the big band excitement of Buddy Rich and his guys doing a West Side Story arrangement.  The album—’Swingin’ New Big Band’ (yep, they had titles like that, with the additional benefit of having been true at the time)—came out in ‘66, but I didn’t hear it until 1970 when I was stationed in Hawaii following Vietnam.  The first time I heard it I was at a lifers party at somebody’s military housing on the base at Ft. Shafter (Shafner—?) in Honolulu.

‘Lifers’ was what we called career military guys, though carefully when they were around, ’cause it usually wasn’t a term of affection, and normally carried a sort of unsavory adjective before it.  The lifers were of course a rather exclusive group both by choice and probably insistence from the draftees who, resenting their situation, wanted as little to do with them as possible.  I got invited for a while to their parties for a couple of reasons:  Joe and I had struck up a deep friendship in Vietnam in spite of his lifer status, and it continued in Hawaii.  The army band was allotted a whole lot of stuff, like a state-of-the-art recording/rehearsal studio, but they were never allotted a clerk’s position, that is, the secretary of the unit, the forms and records meister, the typist for the pricky c.o.  That required the work of someone volunteering to stay and do it after, say, rehearsal or performance hours when everybody else was done.  Normally those volunteers came from the lifers looking for rank advancement, though Joe, who was a staff sgt might have been required to do it, and he asked me to pick up a particular side of it.  So I did, thinking also of rank advancement (when I made spec 5 my income about doubled)—and as well, extra duty passes, and such, and I enjoyed working with Joe.

That’s why I got invited to lifers parties, ’cause they thought I wanted to be one of  ‘em, though the topic never came up until well into the bottle of the third or fourth party, when I responded—complete with a glissandoing tongue—’are you. . .out of your (hic). . .ffffffffffucking minds?’  After that I didn’t get invited anymore.

It was at one of those parties that I first heard the album, because in spite of the fact that they were lifers, most of these guys knew what was happening musically, especially in jazz, ’cause most of ‘em had played in the major big bands along the way, then finally settled into a decent livelihood in the military.  The jazz band was easily the best of the numerous ensembles of the whole group because of this.  I got to play in that group with some of the finest musicians of their day.  One of them had in fact played with Buddy Rich, and that’s why the album was playing just a bit louder than the ice clinking in drink glasses to a listening audience and keene the undiscovered non-lifer kicked back in the corner of a golden couch wishin’ there was some—any—single woman around.

But even the glasses stopped clinking when the brass announced the fanfare to West Side Story and from then on we were each taken to private places within the living music, listening as musicians alone together, hearing our instruments, the tightness of the band, the beauty of the arrangement.  We listened reverentially.  And from nowhere came a trombone singing ’somewhere,’ with Jimmy Trimble blowing it and melting my guts with his soulfully hopeful lament into a nearly out of body experience of breathlessness.  No need for a single woman when Jimmy Trimble’s playin’.  We played it three more times that night, and the album has accompanied me ever since.  I don’t care whatever else Jimmy Trimble did with his life, because that one solo made it all worth it (from my perspective, anyway; never met the guy).

So I’ve been saturating myself with it like a returning lover and suddenly was given to think, ‘Jimmy Trimble, you prick.  Had I not heard your solo I might have continued to believe I could be a hot trombonist.’

There are these moments when there are subtle but seismic shifts in the foundation of the soul, sudden flashes of insight perhaps or a whispering of the spirit, sorry, Larry, this won’t be you.  The beauty of his playing condemned me as I listened.  I asked Bill, a really decent lifer and fine reed man who’d done the big band scene and now directed our jazz band if he thought I could ever play like that.  He mulled it over a bit then said, ‘I’m afraid not.’  So I crawled back to my corner and drank the fifth of tequila I’d brought alone, coming to the next morning, though remaining blind until the evening, which is why (as you can imagine) I no longer drink tequila.  The truth, as they say, hurts.

‘Course I still continued to do music (as did Salieri behind  Mozart).  It wasn’t until I headed out to seminary that I fully nixed it as a profession.  I continued to do as much as I could in church, but as the congregation grew my involvement with musical performance dwindled nearly to nothing.  I was aware of having to make those decisions at the time, and bummed by it—musical performance has been part of my spirit (say, spiritual health), but that was part of the price of buildin’ a church.

I’m not given to regretting things:  I play the best I can with the cards I’m holdin’.  Life—so far—has been deep and wide and full of the simple grace of being and love (as well as the other side).  I never wish that things had turned out differently ’cause it’s a waste of time and energy:  things turned out the way things turned out, you ain’t gonna change that.  Instead of judging what’s been, I choose to savor it.  That’s not to say I don’t sometimes lament the road not taken.  Nor do I mind reminding the Great History Being, ’see what I’ve given up for you.’

And that, of course, earns nothing but the ol’ cosmic incredulity:  ‘are you kiddin’ me?  Look at all I’ve given you in return, even to the extent, musically, of Doc Boner.  And you’re whinin’?  Why the very fact that you played well enough to recognize the unique beauty of Jimmy’s solo is a very special gift from me to you.’

Oh, yeah—that prick Jimmy Trimble showin’ me up again:  god’s gift, my jealousy.

And in spite of that I’m listening again and again he’s taking me somewhere.  I’m sitting in the band, with the bones, holdin’ my own in the second chair.  We’re in the middle of the sound, lifting horns, breathing together, exploding into chords, tonguing into phrases, listening to yourself and them all to be at one in music and spirit and then we melt away while Jimmy sings his solo.  And I hear the things deep in my soul.  I remember and savor.  I remember and grieve.  I remember and lament the road not taken.  I listen and am recalled into beauty and grace.  And I give thanks.

Especially for that magnificent prick, Jimmy Trimble.

Larry

Matchmaker Don came by Saturday night for barbecue and gunshots, it being the Fourth of July and this being ‘Texas, my Texas, hail o woeful state’, or however the patriotic hymn goes—I never have learned it, but I have seen it bring tears to people’s eyes.  And I’ve been afraid.  However, the holiday itself was only coincidental to our meat-searing—my nod toward patriotism being the drinking of the beer (which, ironically, was German)—because we needed to catch up on our various travels:  while I was going aground in Belize, he was bouncing around Israel for a couple of weeks with most of the usual suspects—New Testament Ray, Spaghetti Jim, Silent Col, Radio Tim, and Marlin the Merlin of our weekly pastors’ bs round table to name a few (‘course, the knights and knightesses of this particular round table look like a Monty Python scene).  I was sorry not to join them, but the mucho cost of the trip was outweighed by the fact that I get no continuing ed funds so have to foot the whole thing myself joined to the reality that I’ve never been particularly interested in visiting Israel anyway, even if it is the ‘holy land’, just as I’ve never been particularly interested in seeing Europe, a holy land of a different sort.  I’d rather go to the Galapagos.  Gimme the (naturally) fierce landscapes.

But they went to the Holy Land, and these eight or ten ELCA pastor types were shown around Israel by a—wait for it—Palestinian tour guide.  That brought some interestingly uncomfortable social dynamics, including the experience of overt rudeness because of the ethnicity of their guide.  Matchmaker saw the wall the Israelis are building around the Palestinians:  ‘It’s as hideous as the old one in Berlin.’  In the ironies of history, as hideous as the Warsaw Ghetto.  Or the one along the Rio Grande:  ‘Yikes!  Keep ‘em away!’  Or better:  keep ‘em trapped.

We sat out on the deck sweating in the simmering dusk while explosions went off around us and gun smoke settled like an L.A. smog.  We listened in silence and watched the upper structure of the deck shake in chaotic rhythm with the unbalanced high speed of the overhead fan until the darling rejoined us with the brownies.  Then Matchmaker launched into the tale of, oh, something like ‘Daffy Does Gerizim’ in honor of Daffy Duck.  And the Samaritans of Jesus’ days.  The Samaritans were kissing cousins of the Jews, having been part of the same religious family until the time of the Exile (ca 586 BCE), after which they went their separate way following (I think) an argument over ‘true Judaism’.  Their holy place was on Mount Gerizim.  Being kissing cousins, the Jews and Samaritans naturally came to despise each other.  Generally, the most we know about Samaritans is that there was one good one, thanks to Jesus.  You never hear about ‘em after that.

But apparently there are about a thousand of ‘em still around, in a little village on the hill to Mt. Gerizim.  Matchmaker and the crew thought it would be a terrific idea to go to the temple on Mt. Gerizim and, since it was the sabbath, maybe catch them at worship, so they loaded into the van, headed out across the desert, drove through the village and right up to the temple gates.  They were locked, with nobody about.  Nobody was about, that is, until they loaded back into the van and began their return trip through the village, where they were greeted by several dozen men coming up the road toward them looking angry and carrying rocks, generally not a sign of welcome.  In a terrific contemporary incarnation of Jesus’ tale, the local Samaritan rabbi/priest dismissed the men to their homes and invited the Daffies into the ‘parsonage’ courtyard where he explained Samaritan ways and invited them to return for another visit, ‘but not on the sabbath’ when it is forbidden to drive cars (among other things).  The crew wins The Daffy award for cross-cultural oblivion, stormin’ a Samaritan village on the sabbath, heads completely up their christocentric asses:  ‘Huh?  You mean there is an actual Holy Day around here?  Set apart from the rest?’

On the other hand, stoning seems a bit of an over reaction to what was at worst an unintentional insult to either them or their god, though for mobs there is no differentiation, calling for the abject apologies offered by the Daffies, followed by some appropriate response from their victims, I’m thinking something short of violence and destruction.  But there you go:  christocentrics aren’t the only ones with heads up their collective ass; so it is with samaritans and all the rest—’offend our god Us and we will kill you.’  But this time the Good Samaritan won:  his hospitality worked mercy.  ‘Please come back.  But not on the sabbath.  Meanwhile, I’ll chain the dogs ’til you’re safely out of town.’

So they beat their chastened retreat and on their way got to thinking about god and violence and asked their Palestinian tour guide—who himself should have known better than to haul them into that village on the sabbath—if he thought there would ever be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and he said that yes, he thought there would be noting his hope:  ‘The younger generation isn’t as religious.  Most of the violence has to do with religion.’

Makes sense to me.  Every major religion has peace as its declared core—peace with god and peace with the neighbor.  And every major religion in the world justifies their violence as the will of this peaceful god.  Makes perfectly good sense to me why people would see less religion as a sign of hope.  That’s why as a professional religionist I’m always on the defensive.  I can’t claim that my christian tradition has proven to be any different, thrilling to ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ under the banner of the prince of peace.

Texas, of course, is a Christian State:  according to the only statistic I found, 89% of us claim to be following Jesus (‘christians’).  And it shows, doesn’t it?  After all, Texas is the home of born-again Bush, and if you want to hold any political office down here you better be born again yourself, though some Catholics are acceptable.  An old friend, the truly compassionately conservative Bill got axed by the local Republican leadership to run for the newly-created state rep spot because he didn’t condemn homosexuals to hell—’an abomination in the eyes of God,’ as the guy who was chosen put it.  The chairman—until his recent firing—of our state board of education is a creationist and has been trying to get ‘intelligent design’ into the textbooks; there’s speculation our governor, Air Hair Perry will find another just like him–’gotta preserve the honor of God,’ you know.  Everybody knows we lead the country many times over in our execution of criminals, even though it costs about ten times as much to kill ‘em as it does to keep ‘em in jail forever—’gotta uphold the law of God’, you know.  And if our political life isn’t evidence enough, there are all the big-time renowned preachers, like John Hagee over in San Antonio gloating over the impending Rapture and lascivious violence wrought by the returning victorious prince of peace.  Even the less rabid sing, ‘Texas, my Texas, hail oh godly state.’

The godly state of Texas ranks 50th of all the states of the nation in how homeless children fare, according to a study by the National Center on Family Homelessness.  Some fun facts  (http://www.homelesschildrenamerica.org/state_detail.php?state=TX):
·    The report defines as homeless any child age 18 or younger living with at least one parent or caregiver in such places as emergency shelters, motels, cars, or campgrounds due to economic hardships or losing their own homes. It does not include runaways or abandoned children.
·    More than 337,105 of Texas’s children experience homelessness each year. . . Of the 2,129,000 children living in poverty in Texas, four out of every twenty-five (16% ) are homeless.
·    The child poverty level in Texas is 23%, compared to 18% nationwide.
Ages of Homeless Children:
·    Under 6 years                 141,584
·    Grades K–8 (enrolled)      164,086
·    Grades 9–12* (enrolled)     31,435
·    Total Homeless Children 337,105    (These totals do not include approximately 1,620 homeless, unaccompanied youth.)
Ethnicities of poverty:
·    46% hispanic
·    40% white
·    13% black

Economics:
·    A two-bedroom unit priced at the Fair Market Rent (FMR) falls outside of the financial reach of a full-time worker earning minimum wage in Texas.  One wage earner earning the state’s minimum wage ($6.55) would need to work 92 hours per week for 52 weeks per year to afford a two-bedroom apartment at FMR.
·    Even with two full-time minimum-wage earners, affordable housing is not attainable in most places in Texas.
·    The average wage-earner in Texas fares much better. One wage earner earning the state’s average wage for renters ($14.94/ hour) would need to work 40 hours per week for 52 weeks per year to afford a two-bedroom apartment at FMR.
·    For a typical homeless family, which consists of a single mother with two children, housing is even more difficult to attain:  the average monthly income for a single mother in Texas who receives public assistance is less than $713, or less than 50% of the Federal Poverty Level.  This family can afford to pay $214 per month in rent, leaving a deficit of $567 from the amount needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment at the state’s average FMR.
State ranking by areas:
·    Extent of child homelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
·    Child well-being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
·    Risk for child homelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
·    State policy and planning . . . . . . . . . . .Inadequate
·    Overall Rank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50  (States ranked 1-50 with 1 being best and 50 worst.)
There’s more, of course, but the point is made.  I wonder how Texas comes out last, when we love our families and children so much and are christians to boot.  In any case, if a society is indeed judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members we’re in deep shit.

Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And they will say, ‘But, Lord, we thought their parents were irresponsible freeloaders too lazy to work for a living.’  But these will go away into eternal punishment, and the righteous into eternal life.”

Larry