There but for the Grace…

9 Apr

In recent days, I’ve read on Facebook and other social media proclamations of thanks and praise to God for escapes from potentially devastating circumstances—tornadoes that miraculously didn’t touch down, people who survived pileups on freeways, reports of remarkable recoveries from potentially terminal illnesses. I feel joy or relief for the people involved. I am indeed glad that whatever happened did (or could have but didn’t), but I must confess that I am bothered by the expressions of gratitude to the Lord above. They often come off as glib to me, thoughtless.

The late writer Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote, among other things, A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorite mid-readers, often held writing workshops. At one of them, attendees were talking about this very thing—expressions of thanks to Yahweh, God, Allah, the source of life, whatever name you attach to the mysterious and simultaneously transcendent and personally accessible presence.

L’Engle told a story about a wildfire in a California town that had destroyed several houses in a neighborhood and left several more completely unmarred. In the front yard of one of the unaffected houses someone had placed a sign that said, “Thank you, Jesus!”

A little girl and her mother, whose house had been destroyed, looked through the debris of their home for anything salvageable. On their way back out of the neighborhood, the little girl saw the sign. “Mama,” she said, “Does that mean that Jesus doesn’t love us?”

After that, Madeleine never wrote the phrase or anything like it again.

If I recall correctly, the actual discussion at the workshop started because someone had written the phrase “There but for the grace of God go I.” On one hand, the phrase does suggest a certain humility, an understanding that our narrow escapes are a function of something outside our control, but for those stuck in the idea that the universe is only and always transactional, it suggests the opposite—arrogance—and invites the question of why the grace of God came to the speaker but not to the person observed. How it’s heard depends on which one you happen to be.

I have no problem at all with gratitude expressed to God. I do, however, have a problem with it posted on Facebook, at least without a more explicit description of what one is thankful for. Otherwise, I feel like the little girl in Madeleine L’Engle’s story. In your heart of hearts, do all the thanking and praising you want. Send a private message. But however you do it, remember that for every tornado that doesn’t touch down, one does, leaving disaster in its wake for people God loves just as much. Remember that for every person who survives a traffic accident, there is one who doesn’t. Remember that for every cancer survivor, another dies, leaving a hole in the hearts of those who loved the person now gone. No matter how joyful we may be for every Ukrainian who has escaped, the unspeakable acts of Vladimir Putin continue—and thousands of people simply trying to live their everyday lives now lie dead on the streets. And I’m just getting started.

I understand the thoughts and feelings associated with great relief at the things that pass over us. And I have no doubt that there was a for sure time, back in the 1970s, when if Facebook had existed, I might have posted or said the same things. But I was mostly a teenager or young adult then, still viewing God a bit like Santa Claus. He was keeping a list, checking it twice, and determining if things would go well or not-so-well for me based on how closely I followed rules made, based on their beliefs and interpretations of life, by humans just as frail as me, and quite a while ago—before we discovered the earth isn’t flat and the sun doesn’t revolve around it.

Somewhere in the fifty years since, though, as I experienced more, I came to view things differently. (St. Paul said something about that.) For example, I no longer believe that “divine intervention,” another phrase I heard or read this week, ever involves punitive or capricious acts by God to save some and not others from the consequences of the natural law God himself created. As Jesus said, The rain falls on the just and the unjust. (As an aside, I have always been unsure that rain is a negative—ask a few farmers—but just in case the phrase is interpreted so, its corollary is equally true. The sun shines on the just and the unjust, too. The “prosperity gospel” preached by some mega-church evangelists is a bit suspect to me for that reason.) Why do bad things happen to good people? Because the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Bad things happen to bad people too. Summary: Bad things happen to people, no matter whether they’re just or unjust. Hint: You can usually tell the difference by who they blame.

Let me hasten to say that I am not at all saying that the people who wrote “Thank you, Jesus!” or “Praise the Lord!” are mean hearted in any way. I in no way believe that for the overwhelming majority, purposeful or accidental arrogance is involved. I just hope that the next time they are inclined to express relief to the Creator, that they remember that someone who isn’t so relieved—but just as faithful to and just as loved by God—may be listening in pain.

This topic is especially tender to me in that those of us of the Christian tradition now approach Holy Week and Easter, which is superimposed—co-opting in some ways—the Jewish observance of Passover, the remembrance of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt and the “passing over” of certain forces of destruction and suffering.

Fair warning: Another belief that has flown for me is that Jesus was the “Lamb of God,” or “died for our sins.” Why those ideas “flew” is a discussion for another day and, if you still hold those beliefs, I am not suggesting that I am right and you are wrong, but in my mind, the upcoming focus of the week between Palm Sunday and Easter is the fact that false accusations that Jesus was planning an insurrection, brought by the greedy-and-power-hungry “religious authorities” in charge at the time, resulted in his execution. Unjustly, the Romans believed them and killed Jesus, even sparing a robber thought to be more “deserving” of punitive death. And this despite Jesus’s alleged prayer prior to his arrest that, if possible, “the cup” would be taken from him. Evil would not, as we know, “pass over” him.

Instead, what I learned I learned not from his death, but from his resurrection—that death, no matter how just or unjust, how painful or peaceful, no matter how early or late when compared to the average life expectancy, no matter how fair or unfair we view it, is not, and never will be, anything but a natural event. I learned that loss, although sometimes extremely painful, is not an end point. In this life, as we keep going, we will suffer—we will lose people and relationships and jobs and money and life, as we know it. We will not be “saved” from the consequences of evil (although Jesus did say to pray to be delivered from it when it ensnares us) or “saved” from ever finding ourselves on our knees in grief or from mistreatment by greedy-and-power-hungry folks (and the people they exploit like the fearful folks who yelled for Barabbas) who still populate our lives today.

We are saved from the everlasting despair that loss is the absolute end of anything, the thought that we are unloved or unlovable, the idea that we are more or less valuable than any other human, no matter what others think or say. If we “get” that, in the face of loss, we will, in due course, pick up our mats, and go on, with renewed gratefulness for what survives, ever watchful for new opportunities for joy in front of us. We’re saved from the abject loneliness we sometimes feel at not being known and accepted by another because a God who literally has experienced how humans feel—in good times and bad—will be with us on the journey from beginning to end, no matter what may delight or befall us in between.

To my Muslim friends observing Ramadan, I join you in the holy pursuit of ever-deepening spiritual awareness and closeness to our Maker.

To my Jewish friends, I join you in the sacred contemplation of your ancestral slavery in Egypt and remembrance celebration of the exodus to freedom.

And to my Christian friends, may the lessons of Easter remain with you from this day forward. Celebrate that some days we’ll be “passed over” by the painful experiences of life—and that some days, we will not. Most of the time, our suffering will not come at our own hands or even at the hands of others. It will have nothing at all to do with what we’ve done or not done, achieved or not achieved. And yet, even if we determine that our suffering is a result of our own foibles, life and love and joy persist. Death, where is your victory?

Thank you, God, that today, at least, the quicksand of grief passed over me, for your abiding presence with those for whom it did not, and for the eternal knowledge I have, because of Jesus, that on the days grief does not pass over me, your comforting spirit will be with me.

Yesterday and Today

12 Sep

In March 2002, six months after 9/11, two friends and I travelled to Ireland to celebrate one of our birthdays. One night, I was unable to sleep and went downstairs in our hotel to get a cup of tea and write. The night clerk, a young man in his twenties who was also in charge of the shop, brewed me a cup and went back to sweeping the floor of the small room, a task from which I had interrupted him.

“May I ask you a question?” I asked.

He leaned on his broom and smiled. “Of course,” he said.

“What did you think when you heard about the towers falling in New York?”

He paused. “Em…the first thought was sorrow, of course. There were quite a few Irishmen in the towers, too.”

I nodded. “What was your second thought?”

“Are you sure you want me to answer that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My second thought was, ‘Now they know,'” he replied.

I nodded again, but this time I said nothing. I was 44 at the time, and had lived insulated with an all too often smug sense of invincibility, perhaps even superiority, as an American. It would be a while, maybe days, before the full import of what he said struck me. Although much younger than I, he knew what it felt like to walk down the streets of Belfast during the conflicts between the IRA and England, never knowing if an explosion was just about to happen and life was about to irrevocably change for him.

I was strangely embarrassed.

Throughout the rest of our trip, we were welcomed with open arms. Ireland had suffered a major blow to its tourism, given that few Americans flew anywhere for a period after 9/11, and a good portion of their visitors before had been those of us who’d descended from ancestral clans and painted our rivers green on St. Paddy’s Day. Once, a couple from elsewhere in Ireland, on holiday in Killarney, on their way out of a restaurant where we had played with their infant who had persisted in crawling to us at every opportunity, stopped at our table. “We’re glad you’re back,” they said.

Although I had been to England and Scotland before, this was my first trip to Ireland. I had fallen in love with the place and six months later, I returned with one of my friends and a couple I was close to in celebration of his birthday on September 4.

We arrived at our hotel in a small town on the west coast and gone to our respective rooms. On each of our pillows was a card, advising us that on September 11, the hospitality industry across Ireland would pause for a minute of silence at 1:46 p.m., the moment one year before that the first plane had flown into the Twin Towers.

We met downstairs for a cup of tea and a bowl of soup soon after, and we talked, with tears in our eyes, of our memories of the year before and of the kindness of our hosts.

The week proceeded and we visited towns up and down the west coast before swinging down across the south before heading northeast for Dublin, from which we were departing the next day. We had lost a sense of the date until we stopped for lunch at a pub in Carlow.

It was Wednesday and the pub was filled with people—families, businesspeople, a few tourists like us. Voices in conversation and the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen made it feel much like a Sunday afternoon. Hungry, I had chosen roast beef and potatoes and carrots from a large buffet, and when I sat down at our table, I glanced up at a television above the bar. On it, I saw the face of President George W. Bush. He was in New York at the first memorial service and SkyTV was broadcasting. The recounting of the names of those who had lost their lives was soon to begin.

I had taken a bite when the bustling pub went completely silent and looked up to see a member of the wait staff, previously on her hurried way from one part of the pub to another, completely still, head bowed, hands clasped behind her.

For a full minute, I sat with roast beef in my mouth, unable to chew or swallow because of the constriction in my throat. I was not alone—my fellow travelers were equally unable to speak for several moments after the noises of this fine Irish pub returned.

I’ve wondered many times since, when terrorist acts have taken the lives of innocents around the world, when tragedies like the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, which took the lives of over 200,000 people, and more recently in the wake of now well over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, many of which may well have been unnecessary, the suffering of which has been dismissed as a hoax, a political exploitation of ignorance that leaves me incredulous. How many times have we stood as a nation, bowing our heads in silence in honor of those gone because of senseless violence and utter disregard for anyone else in the world?

Yesterday, at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, as they did twenty years ago, the Welsh Guard played the national anthem of the United States. I watched the video in instant tears at the sounds of the first musical phrase. I was instantly transported to that day in Carlow and the undeserved grace I felt as an American. Then, I found myself once again in a small hotel coffee shop in Killarney.

This time, however, with hindsight I couldn’t have had that night, I responded to the young man.

“We haven’t learned a thing,” I said.

Epiphanies

19 Jan

I have visited Washington, D.C., a few times in my life and each time, I was deeply proud, awed at what far too many who live in the area likely come to take for granted as I have in the towns and cities in which I have lived—the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, Arlington Cemetery. Along with all the Smithsonian museums, there is even one to Albert Einstein. It is striking, I think, that the newer memorials, the National WWII Memorial, the FDR Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the Korean War Veterans Memorial…are all monuments that, notwithstanding Arlington and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, stir feelings of grief and loss due mostly to the violence of war. Even the newest, a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., a proponent of nonviolence, evokes great sadness for me, remembering, 53 years later, the breaking news of his death at the hands of a white supremacist.

Although I am sure that there were a few sermons preached on the following Sunday about it, I haven’t seen anything about something that stands out in my mind. The Capitol riot occurred on Epiphany, the Christian church’s celebration of the day the wise men first saw Jesus, traditionally thought of as the recognition by Gentiles of his arrival to save not just the Israelites, but all mankind. I dare say I had more than one epiphany this year.

I am, as an American, traumatized by the storming of the seat of our democracy by armed insurrectionists. But I am most in despair, as a follower of Jesus, about the apparent belief of some who identify as Christian that the actions of January 6 would in any way be sanctioned (in the positive sense of that word) by the founder of our faith—a belief spread by mendacious men and women who have taken the name of the Lord in vain. I think of the “parable of the sower” and wonder if those who genuinely pray for the overthrow of the government are the “seed [that] fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants” that Jesus spoke of, according to Matthew 13.

Of course, some would argue that I am describing myself. Aware of the fact that I am human, I am quick to introspection. For instance, in the story of the woman “caught in adultery,” I often ask myself if I’m her or one of the people throwing stones. I would not pretend that, as a seed, I have produced in the way of peace nearly as much as Jesus asked of us, but I have been among thorns. Forever scarred by them, I know what they look like. And, I have seldom studied from other people’s notes. As I write today, I’m “auditing” a year of EfM, a 4-year course I took a decade ago. I chose Year Two, which focuses on (and requires the re-reading of) the New Testament.

In Luke, Chapter 22, when Jesus is arrested, it says: 49 When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” 50 And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear. 51 But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

And, so, they didn’t. Then,

55 The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. 56 Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. 57 Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: 58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’” 59 Yet even then their testimony did not agree. [my emphasis]

Next, Pontius Pilate asked Jesus if he was the King of the Jews. Jesus responded by asking if that was Pilate’s idea or someone else’s. Pilate said, “Am I a Jew? Your own people have brought you to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” [my emphasis]

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. —John 10:27

The voice I hear is weeping.

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Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? —Matthew 7:15-16

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Waiting Again

5 Dec

We’ve entered the Christmas season, and I have been thinking about when I first suspected that the jolly man in the red suit who somehow, in time travel unlike anything we’ve been able to document thus far, delivers gifts worldwide in one night, might not be “real,” at least accessible to our five senses. My mother had taken me “to town” to visit Santa at one of the local department stores in my small south Georgia hometown and I had sat on his lap, discussing, I suppose, what I wanted him to bring me for Christmas.

There was something vaguely familiar about Santa that year. Because I adored my grandfather and had spent at least half my waking time following him around before age five (we lived with my grandparents), I had become well-acquainted with the sound of his voice, the contours of his face, the twinkle in his eyes when he looked at me, the bulbous nose that I would learn much later was a symptom of his lifelong alcoholism. On the way home, I leaned up from the back seat of our 1959 Studebaker and said, “Santa looks an awful lot like Daddy.” My biological father had abandoned us before I developed the capacity for memory, so I had hung the familial relationship moniker on him. When no real explanation or protest had come from the front seat, my belief in the man in the red suit had begun to unravel, and with him, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny.

I had already wondered about a host of other things, too. Like the fact that Santa was supposed to come down the chimney. We had one, but it had been closed in with bricks long before and an unvented gas heater installed in front of it. We still hung our stockings “by the chimney with care,” but on Christmas mornings I saw no evidence that a fat man had squeezed his way in. When I asked about it, I was told that Santa knew about the bricked-up chimney and just came in through the “front door,” which was actually the entrance to the closed-in “front porch,” which we almost never used. In retrospect, I think that was a good answer for a four-year-old—after all, that’s where our presents from Santa were always found on Christmas morning. We always opened our gifts from family on Christmas Eve before we went to bed—a tradition that we still maintain. I have no idea where the tradition came from, but it has worked well to allay tensions, once the next generation appeared and grew up, over how and with whose family the holiday would be celebrated.

I felt torn, too, even then, about the widening chasm between the religious source and icons of the Christian holiday and the cultural practices of the time. My grandmother was the adult Sunday School teacher at the small country church we attended, and each week, she sat at the kitchen table, “getting her lesson” together—diligently reading the Southern Baptist teacher’s guide and a set of commentaries that remained on our bookshelves until long after she was gone. I say that to explain how perhaps more aware I was at five of the “real” Christmas story. We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias and Mama Lois’s Tarbell’s Teacher’s Guides, and a host of bibles, mostly of the King James Version. An avid and early reader, I’d already spent some challenging hours with Old English, trying to “suss out” the meanings of the things I read when I wasn’t out with my grandfather in the garden, across the country road with him in the house in which he slept, or exploring the woods nearby with Spooky, the black cocker spaniel-Spitz mix who would be my first best friend.

My favorite version of the Christmas story was the one in the Gospel According to Luke, no doubt the result of its being the primary source—and structure, I learned only recently—for the Christmas carols we sing at church. I couldn’t get my young head around the fact that Joseph and Mary were so poor that they ended up in a barn stall like the ones that were just across the road on our property and that we celebrated with a decorated tree and colorful packages. No matter how many times I reread the story, Jesus never got a bicycle or a B-B gun or a “Susie Smart” doll or a “Mystery Date” game. There was something, yes, about gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but I was sure I wouldn’t have chosen them from the toys in the Sears or J.C. Penney catalog I perused in the months before, even if they’d been there. I’ve written elsewhere about not being motivated to be good so I could live in a mansion on streets of gold—I suspect that idea derived itself from my skepticism then. I am quite sure, too, as I look back, that it was then that the seeds of my rejection of the idea of God as a wrathful, rejecting parent prone to watching me with a pen in hand and a book in which every misstep would be recorded took form. Reminded me far too much of the guy who’s “making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”

Thankfully, in those years, although there was definitely the retail hustle and bustle of buying and wrapping gifts, there was nothing of what we see today. There was still time for those who desired thoughtful reflection—not squeezed into a timeframe—attendance of an afternoon pageant or a Christmas Eve mass planned around whether one could still get to the stores for that one last forgotten gift or home before the turkey was burned to a crisp. There was still time, at least in our house in those days, to consider the true Christmas story, to experience the quiet reverence of it all, even as we watched the twinkle of Christmas lights on the tree. We anticipated the coming of Santa, yes, for the children around us, but the real anticipation was the coming of one who could soothe our ache for peacefulness and show us how to claim it for ourselves.

I was oh, so fortunate to have grown up in the country, where light pollution still doesn’t interfere with a look at the stars. Although there was never snow on Christmas in southern Georgia—there was hardly any snow at all—it didn’t bother me that the scene I saw was unlike many of the covers of Christmas cards that came in the wooden mailbox at the end of the driveway. I’d looked up Israel in the World Book encyclopedia, and it looked mostly like what I saw around me, different flora and fauna aside. Maybe a little more hilly.

I would sit on the concrete back steps of our old farmhouse on stilts and gaze up into the sky, searching for the North Star, the Big Dipper, other constellations I can no longer name from memory, and wonder what the shepherds in the field, the wise men from the East must’ve seen, and marveling that, almost 2,000 years hence, I was looking at that very same sky, those very same stars.

Years passed. I now lived in the Atlanta metro area and I was a practicing psychologist. I had left the “organized” church and, having no children, had no reason to rush to a Christmas pageant or mass. I had still been reduced to shopping for gifts the week before Christmas between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m., when the big-box department stores expanded their hours, because afternoon and evening appointments were always the most in demand.

One of my clients in the early 1980s was a young Jewish woman. In our check-in one December about her thoughts and experiences in the week past, we talked about the season and how hectic it had become. I asked her what she’d thought, growing up, of being out of school for a religious holiday not practiced in her family. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Actually, I love Christmas,” she said. “It may sound crazy, but I intentionally go to the malls at Christmas and shop. The sales are always good. And, then I sit down on a bench somewhere and watch the faces of the Christians crowded at checkout stands, snapping at each other, stressed beyond belief.”

That night, I got into my car to go home. I had stayed late to finish my client notes and close the office, so the traffic on I-285 was light (yes, suburban Atlantans, there once was a time when such a situation was common) and I was alone with my thoughts, remembering what my client had said. I switched on the radio and backed out of my parking place. I tended to avoid stations playing Christmas music in those days, but on this particular night, I decided to leave it tuned to one of the stations that did. The DJ announced Mannheim Steamroller’s Stille Nacht, an arrangement which, although I was aware of the group itself, I had never heard. It continued throughout my drive across the “top” of Atlanta on a clear, dark, starlit night, coming to an end just as I pulled into my driveway.

As the last bars of the recording faded, from somewhere deep within me rose a grief at the loss of the reverence of Christmas, the hopefulness for a new year that would be less stressful for me and those I loved, the promise that the kingdom of heaven, in which people treated each other with respect, where justice prevailed and forgiveness was offered and accepted when one violated the boundaries of another, where loving one’s neighbor as oneself was a matter of everyday principle and neighbors were simply those who showed others mercy—was just a thin veil away. I sat in my car and wept.

It’s been almost 30 years since I stopped practicing psychology. Today, I live in Asheville, N.C., where the skies are sometimes as dark as they were in south Georgia so long ago. The passing years have taught me that no matter what, each year will always bring something that will delight, something to celebrate, something to be proud of. But each year will also always bring something to grieve, something to fear, something to repent.

I still weep…and wait. And I still hope. And, on silent nights, I once again look up at dark starlit skies and wonder.

Because of John

18 Jul

The following was derived from the foreword I wrote for a book called WasWillBeLand by Frederick Baus, an allegorical poem about the journey through grief.

“Despite the variety of ways we experience loss, the core experience of grief for all humans is the same. What we really lose are our hopeful visions of the future, the people and certainties we were sure would be there, and the expectations we had for our lives in that future—the imagined future that was but isn’t anymore.

“Loss is painful, but it isn’t something that can be avoided. It will be processed in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously. Even if the loss involves positive things, e.g., new babies who must become the centers of our attention; children who graduate from college, get married, and move to a city 1,000 miles away; new jobs with higher salaries—adjustment to our “new lives” takes time. It involves the letting go of what was—old dreams and comfortable routines—and the discovery of new possibilities, often ones we would not have sought without the loss, the re-envisioning of what will be for us.”

I woke today with fresh grief for the death of John Lewis, piled on top of loss I have been processing and responding to for years now about the state of our country and feelings of warmth I once had for many I once knew. I began the process of grieving the day I learned of this gentleman’s cancer (read that as the two words it comes from—gentle man), a signal that he might not be long for this earth. Part of my “pre-grief” involved imagining what life without John might be like and now I will find out if my imaginings approximate reality.

I learned to “pre-grieve” when the specter of loss arose because I am, as the English translation of an ancient Hebrew prophet wrote, acquainted with grief. From the time I was nine until I was 17, I would suffer the loss of eight people who figured in some important way to my sense of well-being and expectation. The last of that period was the unexpected death of my father, a man I never knew. With him went the expectation that I would someday hear from the horse’s mouth why he walked out when I was an infant, leaving a wake of despair behind him that included a child’s wondering why her birth seemed to coincide with his escape from responsibility.

From my vantage point as a white Southern woman in her 60’s who has never been consciously or subconsciously racist—I make that distinction because I am quite sure I have been unconsciously racist in not recognizing some of the mechanisms of discrimination that have operated in my world and the privileges I have enjoyed as a result of the luck of being born Caucasian—I have often wondered why I never thought people of color or different ethnicity or language, by virtue of their skin tones or other surface characteristic, were less in importance, less deserving of liberty, less in any way. I have come to think that it was a function of my early experiences of loss, of grief for undeserved mistreatment or ignorance.

In our country, at least, no subset of humans has been so mistreated. The fact that I am a woman who until 100 years ago could not have voted, the fact that in 1959, my mother couldn’t get a mortgage, the fact that although I was “gifted” with a fair amount of intellectual curiosity and an apparently large memory, I cannot to this day be a senior pastor of a church in the “Christian” denomination in which I grew up simply because I have two X chromosomes and no Y—all pale in comparison. We as women have surely been oppressed via the mendacity of similar lies told for centuries, many of us convinced that our worth is confined to our abilities to bear children, by a “male” god imagined by men. But, I’m sorry, ladies—our grief does not compare.

Let me hasten to say, though, although I grieve much these days, I still hope for the “new life” full of opportunities for goodness and justice we have not yet seen or accepted as the virtuous aspirations they are. Why in the world is this so? Because a young man whose skull was fractured simply because he dared to walk across a bridge in 1965 became a member of Congress and stood for 30 years as a beacon of that hope and a standard for the character sadly missing in too many today. Although his footprints will be forever huge, I look with anticipation to see another young person step up to take his place, and I wait in anticipation for the day—most likely from another vantage point beyond the veil—when the kingdom of God as truly described by a person of color from Nazareth finally appears on earth.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

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What I Mourn Today

25 May

This Memorial Day, I have many thoughts wandering around in my head. The hope that I will soon be able to safely visit the Georgia National Cemetery in Canton, Georgia, and hear the new carillon play. That makes me think of my first visit to Arlington and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for me an experience that left me speechless then and still does, my ears ringing with the profundity of the silence. It reminds me of the late Judge Sam Lowe, who spent 11 months in a POW camp in Germany.

It also brings to my mind two other men—my great-uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Weyman Major, and my now late friend, Captain Robert “Punchy” Powell, who devoted the last years of his life to ensuring that the 352nd Fighter Group, which escorted bombers from England to Germany, and its remarkable men would be remembered.

I can go straight in my mind to Uncle Weyman’s funeral in 1967. It was the first time I saw a 21-gun salute and heard Taps played in person by a lone bugler. When he knew he was going to die, he asked to come home and be buried in a small cemetery in Cordele, Georgia, a momentous event for our small rural town. Three months before he was due for promotion to full colonel, Uncle Weyman, my grandmother’s youngest brother, died of leukemia at age 48, evacuated from his last post in Anchorage, Alaska.

Uncle Weyman enlisted in World War II and served under Gen. Mark Clark in north Africa and Italy. (Gen. Clark would later become the commandant of The Citadel in Charleston.) Uncle Weyman remained in the Army, rising as a non-commissioned officer to serve in a variety of places across the U.S. and around the world, including a mission in Korea in 1961, when the Cold War was full on and our involvement in Vietnam was first beginning. I have no evidence to support the idea, but I’ve wondered if his blood disease, unseen in anyone in my grandmother’s family before or since, was connected to one of his apparent specialties—biochemical warfare. Just a theory—we’ll likely never know.

I was only 10 when Uncle Weyman died, but from that moment, I would hold every lost soldier in my heart, according each the same sense of somberness and honor of the sacrifice—whether I agreed or not with the agenda of those who sent him or her into harm’s way.

I never got to talk with Uncle Weyman as an adult about his knowledge of things we will likely never know or his opinions of the judgment of his superiors. But, I was privileged, while working with Punchy Powell to publish a book of stories and interviews from the 352nd, film a video tour of the museum he once kept in his basement, and provide technical support for him when his sight failed him, to talk with him about a wide variety of things. I proudly drove him, along with one of his 352nd compatriots, Don Bryan, to and from the airport in Atlanta when they made their last visit to Bodney, England, the site of their airfield they flew from in 1943-44. Bless you, my beloved West “by Gawd” Virginian.

When I first met Punchy, I was a younger woman in my 40s, politically independent, but leaning left (still am). At the time, Punchy was in his mid-80s, and a registered Republican. He was an Eisenhower Republican—of no relation to the ilk of the Republican Party today. Punchy and I debated any number of issues during the hours we sat beside each other at his computer. I learned much about things I had not been taught in history class and I think he learned that the world looked somewhat different to me, a member of the generation of his children.

But one thing was the same—we both held each other in great respect. I dare say that Punchy came to love me. I certainly loved him.

Unfortunately, these men are not all I mourn today. I mourn that the very ideals they fought for are disintegrating in front of my eyes, that some large contingent of Americans—large enough to continue to defend a president who doesn’t have a clue to what respect and humility and sacrifice even mean—apparently can’t or won’t read the Bill of Rights for themselves and have the perverted sense that what all these men fought and died for was the “right” for them to have anything they want, irrespective of whether their desires impede other equally valuable, equally important citizens from getting what they need or want for themselves.

Nor do they apparently “get” the concept that if as a citizen something is their right, it is also the right of every other citizen, even those—especially those—who speak with an accent different from their own, subscribe to a different set of man-made interpretations of what “God said” or “God thinks,” have darker (or lighter) skin, or have a different set of reproductive organs—despite the fact that our brains and hearts aren’t found in our vocal chords, skin, or genitals. (Thank God that I figured that last one out early on—I had a hysterectomy in 2001 and if I’d depended on one of them to help me make the decision, I might have feared I would be undergoing an elective lobotomy.)

I can assure you that Punchy and Uncle Weyman and all of the men and women who have fought and died in dangerous parts all over the world didn’t fight so you could buy an AR-15 and parade it through a restaurant with no regard for others there. They didn’t fight and die so you could refuse to wear a mask during the epidemic of a virus for which there is neither a cure nor a vaccine. They didn’t fight and die so you could demand that Target or Walmart or Lowe’s be opened (with your AR-15 along) so you can buy a new grill to flip your hamburgers on today.

Yes, they did fight for a country whose highest ideal is freedom of personal choice, but with that freedom has always come responsibility to others. Most of them never dreamed they were dying so we could make choices with no regard at all for the impact those decisions would make on others—especially those who have no choice or ability to get out of our arrogant way. The Declaration of Independence ends with the statement, “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” What else, pray tell, does that mean? We mutually pledge the risk of our lives, our money, and our dignity as human beings to each other. It’s mutual—you don’t get to demand my pledge to protect your rights without making the same pledge to me and vice versa.

So, today, I mourn not only for those brave humans now gone, but for the loss of the America they fought and died for. I am hopeful that those who share with me the drive to create new alternatives for living in peace and safety and liberty together will link arms together this fall and remove those from power who couldn’t give a damn about anything except themselves, many of whom I suspect would find it difficult to prove they even took a course, much less learned anything about civics or accounting or economics or administration. And leadership? Please.

But today, I am less hopeful than in years past. I am no longer as assured as I once was that we as a people are capable of achieving that outcome, because it requires a commitment to an American ideal that I have discovered even some I once knew apparently, to my despair, don’t and perhaps never shared—that when compared to the lives and safety of those around us, an annoying inconvenience is a small price to pay.

Otherwise, we spit on the graves of those who paid the ultimate price.

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Polio On My Mind

6 May

I woke up this morning thinking about polio(myelitis) and spent my first cup of coffee poking around the internet about it. If you’re around my age (which isn’t yet old enough to sacrifice myself for the good of the young, as some of you seem to think), you’ll remember getting your polio vaccine(s) as a child—via a shot in the arm and/or sugar cubes soaked in drops of the virus. The sugar cube was clearly more enjoyable. The shot left a unique scar—one I still have as you can see in the light square in the picture to the right.

There were plenty of people who, as today, either dismissed the polio virus, blamed it on some group of people somewhere, or were convinced because of some combination of ignorance and a narcissistic confidence that the God of their own faith tradition would place an invisible shield around them. I am also sure there were many willing to try anything to protect their children, who—unlike the COVID-19 virus, thankfully—seemed to be most vulnerable to polio.

What made me go looking are the increasing groans from some that it could be as much as 18 months before a vaccine for COVID-19 is created and tested. And the indignation of those inclined to dismiss the danger of a novel virus and demand that we go back to “normal” immediately, bringing their handguns and AR-15s to legislative buildings like the mobs they are. As if we could return to a time when over 70,000 (and rising) of us in the U.S. alone were alive.

I get it. We humans feel best when we have a sense of control, of power over the negative consequences of things we encounter—large or small. It’s why people—ignorant by virtue of a lack of access or understanding of the advances of science—reach for their holy books in search of cut-and-dried rules or follow equally ignorant leaders in their pulpits or governments.

I use the term “ignorant” here, not as an epithet as it is too often used in our political discourse, but as it was basically and originally defined: lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing. We are ALL ignorant about thousands of things. I know a fair amount about a few things—psychological testing and statistics, programming and computer software, book editing and publishing—but I am ignorant when it comes to everything from the laws of thermodynamics to how to identify which snakes are poisonous to how the engine of my 2015 Hyundai Elantra works, much less how to fix it. I am eternally grateful that I live in an age where, for virtually everything that touches me that I know nothing about, there are people who do—and that, for the most part, I can tell who they are and who they aren’t. I am a walking example of the old adage: “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.”

I do know this: It was scientific research—most notably that of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the shot and the sugar cube vaccines, respectively—that ultimately tamed the polio virus. And it will be scientific research that will tame this one and the host of other novel viruses that may erupt in the future. But these days, it will take up to 18 months, not six decades. (The first recorded polio epidemic in the U.S. was in 1894.)

We must listen to our experts in public health, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. They are telling us how to begin to take control, not only to curb and reduce the sickness and death, but to speed up our ability to safely reopen our businesses and put people back to work.

Although I am a “high risk” person for COVID-19, over the age of 60 and diabetic for starters, I am not unconcerned about the economic fallout of extended “shelter at home” ordinances. In the recent Great Recession, I lost, as did many, the financial security of a lifetime of work that I will not likely recover. But we cannot protect the majority of those who are vulnerable and return to any level of normalcy until every municipality, every county, rural or urban, Democratic or Republican, can test everyone. Neither random sampling nor testing only those with symptoms, although better than nothing, won’t do the job with any speed or efficiency.

If we can mobilize businesses to create ventilators and masks, we can mobilize laboratories across the nation to create test kits for “Do you have it?” and “Are you now immune?” and PPE for health professionals to administer them. We can use the census data from 2010, notwithstanding the current census in process, to know exactly how many test kits to send where. Databases exist to store everything from what you just ordered on the internet to the details of your last tax return. And we have airlines, delivery services, trucking firms and the U.S. Post Office, that could mobilize to get them to the ends of the earth. The ship of “containment” has sailed, but the ship of protecting as many as possible—both workers and customers, who are the only true drivers of the economy—hasn’t.

I am chagrined that in the United States of America, which produced the scientists who stopped polio in its tracks—scientists who were, by the way, both of Hebrew ethnicity, one the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the other an immigrant himself—has apparently disintegrated into a ship of fools, pitied by friends who once looked to us for leadership, and led by—at the very least—an ignorant man who, like the emotional infant he is, craves and demands praise for cleaning up the very messes he has made while blaming them on everyone but himself.

And yet, amazingly, I am still hopeful. Most of us will survive and a new morning will come—because thinking people who know what they know and know what they don’t know will continue to do what they have to do to move through and on. I may be among those who survive. I may not. But no matter what, until the new Salks and Sabins appear, I will practice the three “W”s. I will wear my masks, I will wait six feet away to peruse the meat counter in the grocery store until the person already there is done, and I will wash my hands.

And, if you can’t do the same while waiting for 18 months to see something our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents waited six decades for, all I can say besides, “Please stay away from me,” is “Bless your heart.”

Thank You…COVID-19?

3 May

Intrigued by the title of a book by the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, I read it when it came out in 2016. An occasional reader of Friedman’s column because I’m interested in technology and globalization, I wondered what Thank You for Being Late could possibly mean.

In short, the title came from an incident in which someone with whom Friedman was scheduled to meet didn’t arrive on time. On this particular day, rather than huff and puff at the offending friend’s disrespect for his time—which is a more common response than most of us are willing to admit in our previously over-scheduled days—Friedman had used the time to pause and reflect on the possibilities and dangers inherent in the chaotically accelerating speed with which new technologies were becoming available and globalization of the marketplaces was becoming further entrenched. The possibilities are mind-boggling, but the dangers too. The evidence is that humans have not evolved as quickly, i.e., are not cognitively or emotionally equipped to adapt with equal speed to the changes. The title, as well as the content of the book, was a call for us to slow down for a moment ourselves and contemplate the meaning and purpose of our lives in the midst of the malaise.

Having grown up in a rural community attending a small Southern Baptist church largely populated with the farming families, I immediately thought of the wisdom of the Sabbath. It was easier in those days—I’m old enough to remember when shopping on Sundays was virtually impossible because store owners took their Sabbaths as well. Except for mom-and-pop shops in both rural and suburban towns, and folks like Truett Cathy, whose commitment to Sabbath is still demonstrated by the closure of Chick-Fil-A restaurants on Sundays, the adoption of the custom has disappeared from the landscape largely. Until now.

Predictably, as with the full transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, which Friedman estimates took 30 years, we humans aren’t built for ongoing, ever-increasing change. Although Moore’s law of technology (which basically codified a rate of technological advances that rendered new discoveries obsolete in 1.5 to 2 years) continues—what number iPhone or Android are you carrying now?—it still takes humans about 15 years to move from the “early adopter” stage to full integration of new products and services.

We can’t keep up the pace, blindly moving forward and struggling to hold on to the tail of the tiger. Nor should we want to. We need time to think, to process, to determine if the tail we have wrapped our white-knuckled fingers around indeed belongs to the right tiger for us.

I don’t know why we have to have an event like 9/11 or a worldwide pandemic to bring us to a screeching halt. But here we are, and in many ways, I’m thankful. The coronavirus, like Friedman’s colleague late to the meeting, has forced us to stop. We can use it to panic, to demonstrate our inherent selfishness like those who early on hoarded toilet tissue and now some, with even guns in hand, who suggest that they are the centers of our universe—and that our First Amendment rights include the right to go to Target, their favorite pawn shop or tavern, or in-person church service, no matter whose inalienable right to life is violated in the process.

Or we can take a breath, assess our surroundings, and reflect. In the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I’m convinced it was a double entendre. I’m sure he probably meant us to pray for guidance in securing our basic needs for food and water, but I don’t think he was just talking about “Nature’s Own” or “Sara Lee” or the goods from the bakery downtown. After all, he’s the one who, according to the story of his time in the desert, also said, “Man does not live by bread alone.”

We have a chance here to reevaluate what we’ve been focusing our time and energies on, to reconnect on a personal level with those we love and even with those we used to just pass in the hall at work with—via amazing technologies like Zoom and its peers that were little more than ideas less than 15 years ago. And an opportunity to revisit the tigers whose tails we’ve grabbed.

Despite the fact that we were brought to this place kicking and screaming, together, we can be the change we desperately need.

Palm Sunday Musings

5 Apr

When I lived in Atlanta, I was an “epistler” in my local Episcopal congregation. For those unfamiliar with the term, that means that I was one of the lay members who, in the Sunday service, read an assigned passage from a “letter” from the New Testament. That usually means a passage from a letter from St. Paul to one of the early Christian congregations, but it includes other letters as well.

During the time I was there, the Palm Sunday service included a processional replete with palm fronds and a dramatic reading of the Passion of the Christ performed by various members of the congregation. For three years, I had the honor of being the narrator, which means I stood behind the lectern looking out on those in attendance.

As is often true when multiple people are called on to perform extemporaneously in public, something unexpected happens, and during one of my days as narrator, it did. Just as the gentleman who’d been assigned the part of Jesus began to speak one of his lines, his cell phone rang. While people in the pews glanced around, I watched as he dug into the pocket of his sport coat, fumbling and finally turning it off, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud. He regained his composure, spoke his lines, and we proceeded with appropriate solemnity, at least until I returned to my seat. A parishioner known for his occasional irreverence was sitting behind me and when I sat down, he leaned up and whispered in my ear. “I almost yelled, “Jesus! Answer your phone!” he said. I felt like Mary Tyler Moore at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown.

The humor of the moment didn’t change my sense of solemnity with respect to the occasion, however, nor, truthfully, does it ever. The messages of this remembrance stay with me throughout the year. Toward the end of the Passion Narrative comes the exchange between Pontius Pilate and the crowd, when he offers them the choice between Jesus and Barabbas: Which will he set free? Whom will he crucify? The “crowd,” made up of the whole congregation, stands and responds together, yelling for Barabbas to be freed and Jesus to be crucified.

From the narrator’s spot, it is a daunting experience—watching and listening as people who entered the nave just moments before carrying palms in celebration of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem stand and scream for Jesus to be crucified. I imagine it was the same for Jesus. And yet, I think he knew what was coming, even as he rode the donkey and people spread palm fronds in front of him.

I’ve thought of this experience many times in the past several years in relation to our current political environment. These days, I try to listen more often than I engage in the noise, but I don’t always succeed. It’s easy to get caught up in the fever, no matter which sides of which issues you find yourself on. In time, when we look back, will we wallow in the certainty that we yelled for Jesus to be freed?

I will leave you with this part of a poem by Dr. Lois Cheney, author of a book I have loved since I was 12, 50 years ago: God is No Fool.

Would we crucify Jesus today? It’s not a
rhetorical question for the mind to play
with.
I believe
We are each born with a body, a mind, a
soul, and a handful of nails.
I believe
When we die, no one ever finds
any nails left,
clutched in our hands
or stuffed in our pocket.

Have a blessed day and stay safe.

V

An Old Feeling Reemerges

4 Apr

Yesterday, I was standing on my back porch looking at the creek that runs behind where I live when a sense of déjà vu descended on me. But, unlike true déjà vu, it wasn’t a brief feeling. It stayed with me.

I scoured my brain for when I had felt that way before and finally, it came to me. I had felt this way hundreds of days during summers long ago when I was growing up in Cordele, a small town in south Georgia not far from the current coronavirus hot spot of Albany.

I assumed then that I was unlike most of my classmates. Why? Because I was never elated to see the end of the school year come. Some of you who knew me then will probably think it was because I was a straight-A student that I loved going to class and studying and taking tests and writing reports.

True, I did love to learn new things. I still do. But visits to the Carnegie library once a week and riding down the dirt road on my bike and exploring in the woods around my house in the country didn’t change the feeling. Because it had nothing to do with school.

I suspect that a lot of you had no idea. Many of you lived in neighborhoods in town and saw at least some of your friends. You went swimming at the local pool or, when we were older, cruised up to the Dairy Queen or Carter Burger’s or on some days went with friends to get a hot dog from the window at the pool hall. Then again, perhaps I imagined it all. That’s what you do when you’re lonely.

Except for a couple of special friends who attended the little church in my community out in the country, I saw nobody during the summer. Thank God for JoAnne Mathis (Birdsall) and Lisa Adkins (Houston) and Gina Harris (Agosto). I was always thrilled to “go home with one of them” after church to play for the afternoon, after which I was returned to my family at the Sunday evening service and sentenced to wait until the next Sunday, hopeful of another round.

Left: Me, Lisa and JoAnne; Middle: Me; Right: Gina, me and Lisa with my sister Rhonda.
Left and right c. early 1960s; Middle, 1972/1973

No, the reason I hated the end of school—and got increasingly excited as September got closer—was that I missed my classmates, my basketball buddies. All of my peers of those days—all my classmates. I hope you all know who you are.

That group of classmates has, of course, expanded dramatically over the years. Although I am an introvert and work from home so that not too much has changed for me, I am compelled to reach for the phone and meet friends for coffee or lunch or dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in downtown Asheville or drive down to Greenville, S.C. to meet with friends there. For a moment, everything’s all right. And then I feel that punch in the stomach, that thud of reality setting in.

As it was for me so many years ago, during this time of forced separation from friends, you are always on my mind. In the meantime, I’ll be listening to experts—and not media personalities or government officials who are unwilling to take responsibility for their actions. I’ll be wearing a mask when I go outside (as soon as I find or make one), I’ll be washing my hands until they crack, I’ll be standing at least six feet away from those I encounter on “essential” visits to the grocery store and such, and I’ll be wiping down my car with extra fervor before racing inside to Zoom.

I primarily looked forward to being with you at the end of summer, but I enjoyed school too, and I paid attention in science class, especially biology and life sciences. I hope you did too. I’ll protect you. You protect me. And we’ll get through this.

See you in “September.”

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