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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| It is New Year’s Eve, 2022. Written this way, the evening belongs to the New Year and to the old year at the same time in the same way the word “and” belongs to the beginning of the sentence and the end of the sentence at the same time. Today serves to tie time together into a continuous thread. I do not know if I like that. This year, 2022, has been full, full, full of challenges I never imagined possible. They were not new to 2022 as they all started in previous years. For example, the right wing of the Republican party, which was once the right wing of the Democratic Party, has its roots tangled in the roots of feudalism which is the root of slavery. I don’t know if it is growing directly from a root, from a stump or from a seed, but it is most certainly growing and will branch enthusiastically into 2023. Then there is pandemic. The Bible tells us Jesus said the poor will always be with us. He could have just as easily said the sick we will always have with us. People go a little crazy during pandemics. If you read the history of the bubonic plague, you will encounter an astonishing amount of craziness. Of course, they really didn’t know what was causing it or how to stop it. But look just 104 years ago and you can read about the flu pandemic. People did know how it was spread and how to protect oneself and one’s neighbors by wearing masks. The same thing happened then as happened now: the craziness was expressed as anti-masking. Of course, the anti-maskers thought the maskers were crazy, too. Look at the politics of Trumpism. So many of us have been comfortable with our democratic ways of doing things it was unimaginable there could be a coup here in the USA. But we watched it on TV. Then we had to talk about what we saw, a lot, in order to decide if it was really a coup. Some people still think it was just a normal demonstration. Who would have thought we could see that with our own eyes and still disagree about what we saw? In fact, we have seen it over and over and over and we still can’t agree. As I see it we are lucky that democracy doesn’t require total agreement. It simply requires enough agreement that plans can be made to deal with consequences and reduce vulnerability to such things in the future. Of course, those who disagree will continue to dramatize how much they are suffering and to work at drawing more people to their perspective. This is sometimes unpleasant and unwelcome and sometimes, I find myself in that minority. There are many things in the burden we carry forward over which we feel little or no control like the war in Ukraine, our deliberate helplessness over guns, and looming extinctions and weather events related to global warming that come now, no matter what we do about the problem in the future. This is just to say, we carry an enormous burden of unresolved issues from this year to the next. We use language to do so by saying Happy New Year! on both sides of the moment the ball drops. However, at that moment, we let language hold it all while we dance, laugh, cry, or sleep across the divide between 2022 and 2023. May your moment of transition be unburdened as you celebrate or sleep the night away and may you all find yourselves ready and willing to greet the challenges of the New Year with optimism and creativity. |
| Little Elizabeth in the pink cotton dress her mother made just for her standing bravely on the top chancel step, her hands clasped at her waist, recited the familiar tale to the whole congregation. The words fell into the rhythm of the donkey in the story, step, step, stepping along the dusty road, carrying a young mother to a special place, where all the animals would come and breathe their steamy breaths curious to see what would happen next. Elizabeth imagined the soft pink nose of a brown cow nuzzling the new baby, like her baby brother the day he came home wrapped in a soft blue receiving blanket. She pictured gold halos over the mother and baby, like in the picture book from which she had learned the story, like the halos around candles that burned on the sills of all six stained glass windows in the tiny church. When finished, she returned to her seat leaning her face against her Father's pinstriped wool chest as he wrapped his strong arm around her and whispered "I'm proud of you." She knew then she had a halo too. |
| I am reading The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. This is a difficult read because it describes distortions of American Constitutional guarantees and of Christianity that make both unrecognizable. As I am not finished with the book, this is not a book review. It is a response to a particular statement on page 94 attributed to Gloria Alvarez, a Libertarian, when speaking to a gathering of Hispanic Christians she hoped to recruit to her point of view: “Have you ever asked yourself why the US is a country with much more freedom, much less corruption, and is much more prosperous than any of our countries in Latin America?” Alvarez asks in a rapid-fire tone. “The answer lies in the American belief in having limited government. Why? Because a more limited government, the less corrupt it is. And the more limited the government, the more you will have individual freedom and personal responsibility. And given those things, along with hard work and talent, you can accomplish your life’s goals.” This is a libertarian message. According to the author, Katherine Stewart, the religious nationalists are happy to combine with the libertarians, even if they are atheists, because of the growing power of the libertarians. The author sees the religious nationalists as attempting to draw people away from humanism to get them to stop voting for Democrats. As I understand the author’s point, people who call themselves Christian are willing to abandon core values of Christianity to build political power. Jesus taught that we are to love our neighbors and if they ask for your coat, you are to give them more than your coat. This is also a humanistic ideal: if a person’s basic needs are met, they will be more productive and contribute more to the society. This speaker makes no mention of the Gospel, because, according to the author, Alvarez describes herself as atheist. I know of no evidence that smaller government reduces corruption. With fewer people, fewer people will be corrupt, but there will also be fewer people to stop the corruption. I can understand Ms. Alvarez, a Cuban immigrant, seeing other countries in the Americas as being more corrupt than the USA. She left Cuba because she was disenchanted with Cuba, and she came to the USA with the idea that things would be better here and she describes the USA as better. However, she describes current USA government as if it is dominated by libertarian thinking. I worry that this sort of argument is heard as representing Christianity when it actually represents a political/economic perspective that has nothing to do with Christianity. The leaders in this “movement” seem very nationalistic. It appears to me that people who do not value Christianity are using Christian resources to attain non-Christian ends. They see a large population that they ask to support their nationalistic perspective. According to this author, the church is encouraging this because they want resources from the state that they can’t access unless they follow state regulations. To get the resources, they need to motivate the church to oppose separation of church and state. I like separation of church from state as it protects the church from the state, and it allows diversity of religious perspectives. Christian nationalism does just the opposite. |
| The groundhog stood on his haunches and munched my kale obviously preferring it over chard, peas, beans, and tomatoes as he had to get past them to reach the kale. I don’t mind sharing my produce. In fact, it is flattering if someone likes it, but it was a groundhog. I don’t know that groundhog or his address or his kin, and he didn’t ask permission. I don’t even know if it is a male or female, though it is one huge groundhog making me suspect for no reason I can think of that it is male. Perhaps it has something to do with calling God Him all my life— the unknown is by default male. Meanwhile, I had decided my younger lovebird was female because s/he didn’t act like a male and now, at age three years and two months, he is acting male. There is no magic to understanding what is male or female, but I am attached by habit to these distinctions. In the case of the lovebirds, it has everything to do with reproduction. I think I am about to become grandmother to a flock of lovebird babies. When it comes to people though, we care. When I was a child delivering newspapers in winter wearing my brother’s leather bill-cap with earflaps and the leather jacket he had outgrown and a pair of his blue jeans, and a canvas sack hanging off my shoulder full of newspapers, strangers would call me sonny. I would feel indignant and correct them. It really mattered to me then, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be taken for a man now. Of course, no one could possibly mistake my curvy body for a man’s body. Still, I know it matters to people. I also know it is a social construct rather like time and race and ways of talking about the unknown and the heavens. We make these agreements and teach them to the next generation and encourage them to define their lives in the same way that we do. It seems to me we are going through a period of redefinition. Who knew that could happen? Some folks work to stop the change. They might as well stand in a field in Kansas holding their arms out to stop a tornado. Change is rolling on through. What if that groundhog would one day look at me and say I am female? I would simply say, okay. Thank you. Sorry for the mix-up. But if some person I know to be female says I am male or a male says I am female it goes against my socialization, it confuses where they fit into my world. If they change their name, my only struggle is to remember the new name, but I don’t find myself easily saying, okay, no problem when they change their sexual identity. It feels almost as if my identity is destabilized in some way, though I know perfectly well it is not. I remain who I am no matter what choice they make. Rational thinking pulls me through if I use it enough times- practice as it were. But, if I get careless and just go with my feelings, I am tempted to go stop that tornado. Back in the 1960s, we women decided we no longer wanted to distinguish ourselves as married or single and came up with "Ms." which is standard usage now. We have developed words, trans, fluid, bi, gender neutral, androgenous and more that have no pronoun, so, we struggle with pronouns. Now I find an occasional form asks me for my pronouns. I don’t like any of it. I don’t like people making assumptions about my body or identity at all, but I don’t like them asking either. I certainly don’t want to wake up to an awareness that I am different than I always thought I was. That would be simply too confusing and uncomfortable. I don’t know what I would do. But it is possible that I am different than I thought I was and that is probably the problem. I just hope that the people around me who seem just as confused about all of this as I am, will talk about it with curiosity and respect, and oh yes, I hope they will share their kale. |
| BOOK Kalanithi, Paul, When Breath Becomes Air, Corcovado, Inc. Random House, 2016, (Kindle edition) I encountered a list of 4 books with the headline 4 books Bill Gates read twice. I looked to see if I had read any of them and I hadn’t. Curious about what Bill Gates might find important, I decided to read the first one on the list, a memoir of a person with intelligence, ambition, and every possible educational opportunity who finds he is dying at age 36 of lung cancer. As a college student, he wants to understand the mind and wants to know what makes life worth living. He sets out to study literature, but when he realizes that the mind resides in the brain, he also embarks on the study of biology and neurology. He was an earnest student but realized there is more to life than study. He wanted to learn about relationships. If the unexamined life is not worth living, is the unlived life worth examining? He asked himself. He wrote, I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains shielded in centimeter thick skulls, into communion…it was the relational aspect of humans—ie. “human rationality”—that undergirded meaning…There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts and heartbeats. This curiosity led him to complete a master's degree in history and philosophy of science and then to enter medical school. He discusses aspects of his medical training and of his relationship with his wife, and then, the experience of feeling ill, getting no diagnosis, continuing to deteriorate, and finally receiving the diagnosis of cancer, which he knew would be terminal at some point. He is advised by his oncologist to find meaning in his life. The writing of the memoir is part of that process. As he wrote, he came to ponder science vs. religion and wrote clearly and meaningfully about that. Then, he wrote about dying. I don’t know what Bill Gates found important about this book, but I do know it is interesting, thought provoking and very well written. I read it basically in one sitting while sick with COVID. I suggest that it be read when the reader is healthy. |
| I took a trip to Albuquerque for Thanksgiving. The last time I was there, I experienced my first symptoms of lymphoma. This time, about 4 days into my time there, I had a dream that I had to have one lung removed and part of another to save me from cancer. I thought it was about remembering what happened before. However, when I arrived home, I had a terrible cough and lung congestion. I took a COVID test and it was positive. It seems as though the dream was really telling me my lungs were in distress with the onset of COVID before I started to cough. The experience reminded me of another experience that happened in the early 1980’s. I was working in a medical clinic as a social worker. An older gentleman, probably in his 70’s came in grieving the death of his identical twin brother. I thought the grief was the problem, but he corrected me. He said he was dying and didn’t want to die alone, so he wanted admission to a nursing home. The problem was his lack of symptoms. The doctor could find no evidence that he was dying. Nevertheless, he was sure that was the case. I talked it over with the doctor and we decided to honor his request, since he could afford to pay his own bill at the nursing home and insurance rules were not a barrier. He was soon admitted. Three weeks later, he died of a brain bleed. As I look back, I also remember that three or four months before I was diagnosed with lymphoma, I became concerned about the heirlooms in my home. I wanted them returned to my family who lives more than eight hundred miles away. I talked to a niece about it and we made a plan that I had not yet completed when the diagnosis came. However, my concern had continued and I couldn’t organize my thinking about my estate. I remember reading from On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kuebler Ross that she routinely told patients that they had more control over their bodies than they had any idea. At the time, I interpreted that to mean that when dying, one has some control over when they will die. I am thinking now that the meaning is broader than that. One type of control is simply knowing before symptoms turn up that something is happening in one’s body. I believe that anyone can notice, but it is easier if one is not in the habit of worrying. When one approaches life with curiosity, they can plan. I learned a long time ago that worry is simply planning with anxiety. I learned that anxiety is not inevitable, that we can choose to be anxious or not to be anxious. I choose not to be anxious because I hate that feeling. It is, however, very important to be aware of my situation and the signals in and around me. It is important to focus long enough on signals to understand them and to make decisions that include the information therein. I think this experience of having the dream came out of that habit. I recognized that my dream was my body talking to me, but I connected it with a past experience rather than the present. I hope that I will remember this and stay in the present next time. |
| Cleaning out his closet, Starla found three chess pieces; queen, rook, and knight, all carved of black marble. "Why a rook and not a castle? Makes me think of birds." Carefully, she put the pieces on the bureau, beside her mother’s wooden lamp with a pale pink nineteen fifties shade. Over the years, she faithfully dusted the trio, sometimes wondering why. One Christmas, she received a candle from a friend. Lighting the candle to honor this event or that hope, she arranged the pieces around the candle: "A pleasant arrangement." As time passed and the candle burned away the chess pieces seemed more and more like sentinels. With age came losses, friends, family, health. Her doctor referred her to the nursing home. She knew she would never go home. The chess pieces went with her. Sometimes, an aide would ask about them. She would say “They have been with me a long time,” moving them closer to her. When, finally, the end came, her caregivers found the chess pieces; the queen in Starla’s right hand; rook and knight in her left. No one came for her. The nursing home people, the doctor, and the funeral director decided to leave the pieces in her hands on her way to the crematorium. They gave specific instructions. When her remains returned, the marble chess pieces, lay intact on top of her soft, grey ashes. After the nursing home manager did as Starla had asked with her ashes, she placed the chess pieces on her shelf and dusted them faithfully, sometimes wondering why. |
| Malachi 4: 1-2a. *See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. After my initial reading, I wrote my first thoughts. I imagined how it would sound to a child of 10 or 12: In the night, a flash kindles a fire, a burning bed fueled by dread of being found out. Ruthie dreamed she awakened to charred stumps for legs and a future of torment. After all, isn’t that what the Bible said? “The arrogant and evildoers will be stubble..." She was still a child and already, she was doomed. She had been arrogant. She had demanded that her friends follow her rules. She told them she knew rules they weren’t following. They told her they didn’t like those rules and if she didn’t stop, they wouldn’t play. She stood her ground, and they all left her alone. Each of her friends had gone a different way and had not stayed together after the argument. They each remembered the incident too. For some reason, it left them feeling confused and uncomfortable. They had abandoned their friend. They had ended what had been a very good day playing together and had ended it in anger. The next day in Sunday School, Ruthie brought it up and they discussed the problem with their teacher. Ruthie shared about her problem with the passage from Malachi. They read the passage together and the teacher advised the students to look up some of the words in the passage. Definitions: Arrogance – overbearing pride; exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner 2: showing an offensive attitude of superiority Righteousness – acting in accord with divine or moral law: free from guilt or sin 2a: morally right or justifiable b: arising from an outraged sense of justice or morality Revere – to show devoted deferential honor to or regard as worthy of great honor Let us leave the class discussion as we take a look at the context in which the book of Malachi was written. The first thing I noticed was its location in the Bible. It is the last book of the Old Testament. It is the last of the collection called “the minor prophets.” I quote Ingrid E. Lilly who writes in the Women’s Bible Commentary, “With Malachi, we enter a world of relational dynamics where love, hate, honor and shame operate to distinguish insiders from outsiders.” The book comes from Jerusalem, a small struggling city, after return from exile and the temple has been rebuilt and Jerusalem serves as the administrative center to the vast Persian Empire. The exile has disrupted traditions, rituals, and devotion to the covenant of Moses. The Malachi prophecy seeks to rejuvenate confidence and challenges the priesthood to reform. Consequently, it includes a lot of social criticism followed by a presentation of hope of God’s return to the temple. I think we can identify with the situation the people of Jerusalem faced. As the impact of globalization bringing us all into contact with people of other cultures, and as we try to include more people who were previously seen as unacceptable and redefine them as deserving the same respect as everyone else, we find ourselves in conflict. In other words, we are struggling with who is us and who is other. It seems that the responsibility to administer the Persian Empire is a bit like trying to create a sense of one from millions of immigrants from various cultures all over the globe. And then there are the rest of the eight billion people we interact with in trade and travel. We humans are pretty good at forming small, cohesive groups, but the bigger the group, the more problems appear that require attention for the enterprise to succeed. I take you back to the problem my imaginary character, Ruthie, and her friends. I feel confident that we all have experienced what Ruthie and her friends are feeling. We have all been there in one way or another and probably several times. The more important the relationships, the more painful the experience of unresolved conflict. Malachi describes the experience vividly: burning like an oven, left as stubble. Ruthie pictured it clearly in her dream. I remember a time I was in conflict with a family member that felt like that. It was so bad, I thought healing would be impossible. My father said to me “I remember that happening with my sisters.” I found that very helpful because I knew them to love each other. Malachi creates the painful scenario, then offers this: “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” In the next paragraph, he goes back into his imagery of the wicked being stomped on and becoming ashes. This is confusing. Are we supposed to stomp on people who disagree with us so that we can be redeemed? I certainly don’t want that to be the case. I don’t want to stomp on anyone even when we disagree. However, I have been known to fly into a rage, to yell, and to stalk away from someone who doesn’t agree. Then I feel like the lowest piece of rotted plant in the compost heap. I have trouble finding hope of ever feeling okay again. The thing I feel like stomping on is my anger, my rage, my decision to walk away. The thing I want rid of is my own behavior. I am the person who is not faithful. The other person was never my issue. Something that happened between us triggered my internal turmoil and I want it to be theirs so I can leave it behind like the kids who left the game thinking the problem was Ruthie’s behavior. As it has happened so many times in my life, once I see that the problem I need to deal with is inside me, I start to feel some hope that I can heal. I can grab hold of hope and weave it into my thinking and emotions to settle myself and face the problem with resolve. It never happens that the healing of that incident prevents all future incidents. Don’t you agree? Don’t you just wish it would? How nice it would be if I could resolve a disagreement with someone and never disagree with them again. How happy this world would be if… Wait a minute. I am doing it again. I am saying the world is my problem. When Jesus faced crucifixion, he didn’t say the Romans or the Jews were his problem. When he prayed in Gethsemane for God to “take this cup from me,” it seems clear to me that his struggle was internal. And so it is that Malachi says a lack of faith disrupts relationships and faith brings us together. Let us get back to the Sunday school class with Ruthie and her friends. Let us imagine together that after these children tell their story to their Sunday School teacher and she listens carefully, she tells them what she has seen and heard in their story that represent faith. She asks them how they might draw on their faith to solve the problem. What would they do? How would they organize what they want to do? What do you bet that by this time the children are relaxed with each other and ready to talk rather than fighting? I can tell you it really does happen that way, at least with people who want to remain friends. When people are steeped in “self-righteousness” fueled by fear, separations can become so uncomfortable that they seem unresolvable. That is where a third party becomes a resource: a third party with faith, who is invested in growing seeds of faith in others. I think that is what Malachi wants us to do. I think that is what Christ did. I think that is what the Holy Spirit will help us do. All we need is to ask each other to listen as Jesus would listen, without arrogance, but from a place of righteousness and faith. We need to ask ourselves to listen in the same way to ourselves as well as others. So, let us listen to Malachi one more time and think about the whole passage rather than one line without the other. “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.” May this lesson open our hearts to your gifts, oh Lord, and to each other. Amen |
| BOOK Jackson, Richard and Robert Vivian, Traversings, Anchor and Plume, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2016. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to write creatively back and forth with someone for a year or so, not sharing news, but just sending each other poetic ruminations. Richard Jackson and Robert Vivian did just that and turned it into a book. They are quite different from each other. Richard Jackson sees concrete details around him and wonders about the nature of these things. He gives voice to his environment in a way that helps the reader attach to the experience R. Jackson describes. Robert Vivian writes more often from somewhere in the spiritual realm or the realm of imagination. The reader gets to sail in whatever direction R. Vivian has chosen for himself. Despite these differences, the work, which consists of pages alternating between the two writers, has them clearly playing off each other, taking the core idea or image from the previous work of the other. Richard Jackson gives agency to nature: "The early mountain snow creates a fresh canvas where each creature will write its own new story." Later in the same piece, "Our words are probes that will never reach that receding edge of stardust, but we write them anyway, not to escape whatever fearful stories the snow will record, but because, like the mockingbird flinging itself again and again against the glass of this invisible window, we want to believe there's another world beyond the frayed edges of this one." and it is quite true that I want to believe in the world described by these two creative men in their distinct ways. Reading the book makes this possible. Robert Vivian responds to the quote above: "How many ache and never find home but look for it in a string of words, a hum or melody, a moan that would be king or queen in the valley of the little birds." These prose poems celebrate the life of communication, of thriving in words that bring the reader a world that sings, that thrives, and invests in our happiness without even trying. I loved this book and read it slowly, going back over each few pages before moving ahead. I have been a fan of Richard Jackson for some time and always read his work this way. This is my first extended exposure to Robert Vivian. The reading and re-reading approach works equally well with his writing style. I encourage you to read this, or anything by these gifted artists. |
| BOOK Beer, Nicky, The Octopus Game, Carnegie University Press, Pittsburgh, 2015. Poetry Who would even think of writing an entire book of poetry about cephalopods? It seems this is nearly what Nicky Beer has done. When I picked up the book, I expected a poem or two about an octopus or a squid, but not half of the book! Ms. Beer describes them in the loveliest ways: "a heavy-lidded proprietress who is all raised hem and no flirt." Occasionally, she digresses into discussion of humans, as in "Please indicate the total number of sexual partners (male and/or female) ____." She imagines "them in her third-grade classroom." Then, a couple or so of poems about this or that but the talk of the octopus resumes, once as a showgirl in a side-show. The "game" seems to me to be about adaptation and resistance to adaptation. Her imagery is fresh and sometimes startling: In "Marlene Dietrich reads Rilke on the Lido, 1937," she writes "The latest La Stampa is crumpled at her feet like a cheap towel, a crab dozing on Stalin's mustache." She ends "Black Hole Itinerary" with "Today, love will be like starlight; when it arrives, whatever it comes from will have already collapsed." Her use of language is rich and substantial and luscious. I hope you will choose to read this delightful book. |
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