Prodigal Prophet

I watched the GPB special on Margaret Mitchell the other night. It’s the 75^th anniversary of publication of Gone with the Wind this year, and I realized that though I have seen the movie an untold number of times and even own a special edition DVD, I never got around to reading the novel itself. So I downloaded a copy on my Kindle.

The Kindle version is based on a 1996 publication, and has a preface by Pat Conroy. I found it odd at first that what he wrote was designated a preface and not a foreword, as prefaces are generally written by the author of a book and forewords by someone else. But as soon as I’d finished Pat’s overlong and self-absorbed Scarlettine essay, I understood why. The wounds persist for both of us. There were many phrases that were almost ghostly in their similarity to things I’ve written as I’ve sought to reconcile the fragments of self with which many Southerners like me are afflicted, and try as he might, Pat hadn’t seemed to have succeeded in exorcising those demons 15 years ago.

You have to be truly Southern to understand. There is no way to adequately describe in words ancestral grief transferred through marrow, impotent rage denied its object and shared by those who were reared in the post-Civil War South. I’ve often wondered if the hawkishness of today’s Southern attitudes, if the eagerness with which we regularly choose war over compromise reflects the mitochondrial DNA of Scarlett O’Hara. At times it reminds me of the knight in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” who, though he has been deprived of his arms and legs and blood is spurting from every wound, continues to taunt his slayer. I am a fan of British humor, but I never found that scene particularly funny.

Don’t be mistaken. I speak from the heart of a girl who wanted to be Scarlett, to have a 17-inch-waist and draw men like magnets with grace and charm, but my body never cooperated and I never learned the art. And I speak, too, from the heart of a girl who sometimes despised the ground Scarlett walked upon.

I wish that I could claim total joy in the incredible beauty of the red clay of God’s creation, the culture of uniquely Southern art and music, the politeness of “Yes, M’am and No, Sir,” while simultaneously banishing the equally strong images of backs whipped, of nooses hung, of fire hoses wielded by the hands of those whose blood courses through my veins. I wish that I could think of the former without the other rising up from the depths, that I could save the latter to think about on a tomorrow that never comes.

But I can’t. It is the reason To Kill a Mockingbird, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary last year, is my favorite of Southern books instead of Margaret Mitchell’s tome. Scarlett had the “gift” of denial. Scout, on the other hand, did not.

Therein lies the chasm between my Southern “selves”—a divide that I, like Pat Conroy, haven’t succeeded in bridging. If you’re a Southerner, you must publicly choose to be one or the other but not both—one cannot be Scarlett and Scout, Rhett and Atticus. And yet, in the end, I think we have to be both to be whole.

As an aspiring author, I used to wonder how a meeting between Peggy Mitchell Marsh and Nelle Harper Lee might have gone, what knowing glances and fireworks might have passed between them had they had a chance to stand in the same room—these two Southern women whose literary triumphs would be both their firsts and their lasts. We will never, of course, know the answer because of a speeding taxi on Peachtree Street in 1949. Funny, though. After watching the documentary, I eased up on Margaret Mitchell a bit. You can’t judge a woman if you haven’t even tried walking in her shoes, which is the very point Atticus Finch makes to his young daughter.

When all is said and done, I will always dream of what it must have been like to walk into a room like Scarlett and have every male head turn, but I will always dream, too, of reconciliation. And if I have to choose one…I know what it will be. In the meantime, I’m off to read Gone with the Wind on my Kindle. And with any luck, this time I’ll see between the lines the struggle of two parts of Margaret Mitchell, and, just as I did when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird, I’ll know I’m not alone.

So here’s to you, Gone with the Wind. Happy Anniversary!

PS. I wrote a novel, too, about a woman looking back 30 years at the events that would change her life forever. It’s different in that the time she looks back to is now, but you’ll find the details vaguely familiar.

Click here to read more.

Andrew’s Eyes is available on Kindle, coming soon to Nook.com, and may be ordered in print at www.andrewseyes.com.

I accidentally read the new figures on unemployment claims today. I turned on my iPod touch to check the Indeed sites and there they were staring me in the face, in an article put out by AP.

“The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose by the most in a month,” it said, “signaling growing weakness in the job market.” After plowing through a recital of statistics and an “expert” opinion or two, I reached another paragraph that began, “The economy needs to generate at least 125,000 jobs per month…”

At that point, I closed my iPod touch and got another cup of coffee. Not very uplifting for someone who’s been unemployed for going on 15 months.

As a student and practitioner of psychology, I was a specialist in statistics and their use in psychological tests. As a corporate manager and non-profit marketing director, I plied my trade in the study and interpretation of statistics with respect to buying and giving behavior and motivation.

Back in my psychology days, I used to laugh with colleagues at articles in the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity, a “magazine” that poked fun at poorly designed experiments and studies that touted meaningless statistics as “signaling” the absurd. My favorite was a psychological report describing the paranoid delusions of one “Klaus, Nicholas J.,” who believed himself able to fly one day each year. A close second was a fake journal article, written in crisp APA style, called “The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood,” which, based on the all-too-true statistical observation that taller children score higher on standardized intelligence tests, concluded that height and intelligence were strongly correlated. (Never mind the fact that 4^th-graders have always been taller than 1^st-graders…) Another conclusion was that a common characteristic of this “illness” called “childhood” was a condition described as “legume anorexia,” or the disinclination to eat vegetables, opting for peanut butter sandwiches and hotdogs instead. I thought it was pretty darn funny.

But when I read the article this morning, I wasn’t laughing. The fact that the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose by the most in a month doesn’t necessarily signal a growing weakness in the job market. The only thing we know for sure is that the number rose, period. Why it rose and what it signaled is an entirely different question. And then there’s that thing about the economy having to generate jobs. I don’t think so. Economies don’t make the decisions to lay people off, nor do they make the decisions to hire them. People in positions of power generate jobs and eliminate them for a number of reasons, as we all know too well.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an economic “expert” to understand the way the basic cycle is supposed to work. If people have jobs, they have income. If people have income, they spend it. If they spend it, businesses make money. If businesses make money, they hire people, who then have…jobs. Conversely, people don’t spend money if they don’t have jobs. And, even in they do have jobs, if they’re afraid, they don’t spend it. (FDR was quite right when he said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”)

To look with wisdom at the core of our distress, seek to soothe that fear and push up one’s sleeves and make decisions that affect the fewest of those on whose backs they stand is an exercise for tall people who eat their vegetables.

So, tell me…do the unemployment numbers signal a growing weakness in the job market? Or do they signal that an awful lot of citizens, primarily those who operate small-to-medium sized businesses (and in good times have always been responsible for the majority of the jobs in America), are tired and scared and discouraged or maybe not very wise? Or do they signal that we have allowed ourselves to be distracted from common sense by initially well-meaning, but almost instantly self-serving people whose primary concern is making us afraid of their political opponents so they can keep their jobs?

Wait! Did I say jobs?

You know, I may have been going about this job search thing all wrong. Maybe I should be doing “pick-and-choose” research about the last person in the job, and in my cover letters, calling him a socialist or a neo-conservative, denigrating his religion, downplaying anything he might have done (even if it benefited me) and trying to convince them that he’s the reason their sales numbers are down, despite the fact that they’ve been down since the last guy was there and the one before him. That way I can distract them from the fact that I don’t have a plan, and won’t until I get there and have a look around to see what I’m dealing with.

It has almost always worked in the past. Remind me. Who is it that they work for?

Since Pentecost Sunday, I’ve been thinking on and off about gifts. (For those of you whose church doesn’t follow the Revised Common Lectionary for scripture, the epistle was from 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, the one about the variety of gifts given to different members of the church.)

For about 10 years, I was a corporate trainer, specializing in team-building. The primary focus of the seminars was on individual gifts and how, when they were put together, each contributing through his or her areas of unique talent, the outcome was often exponentially greater in impact than any one of the individual members could have produced alone. During that part of my career, I had the incredibly awesome experience of being the advisor to a number of teams—from senior executives developing strategic plans to computer programmers debugging a software program—and seeing breakthrough performances—stellar results on time and under budget. Unfortunately, I had the incredibly discouraging experience of watching other so-called teams fail to coalesce into a unified group, even though all the gifts defined by the instrument I used at the time were present. I’ve been a member of teams of both ilks, too. I’ll bet we all have.

The reason for failure was always the same, though it showed itself in a variety of forms—micromanaging supervisors who gave lip service to creating an environment where all were free to do their jobs in the way they were most likely to succeed but gave poor performance reviews for not doing it their way, team members who judged the talents of other team members as inferior to theirs, others afraid that they’d get stuck with the grunt work if their talents were revealed, still others who devalued their own talents by comparison. A lack of respect for the gifts of others.

Basketball is, to me, the quintessential example of a sport in which the aim is for people to work together simultaneously and equally to achieve common goals, the operational definition of teamwork. It’s also the one that can demonstrate how beautiful and how devastating the result can be. The wisest of coaches recruit players with different talents—the point guard who handles the ball and never misses a free throw, the center who’s a great shot-blocker and rebounder, the forward who can strip the net from anywhere on the court, the guard for whom the Red Sea parts on his way through the lane. But building a team doesn’t stop there.

In the best of circumstances, everybody on the floor knows and values his own talents and those of everyone else on his team. During a game, you’ll see picks to free up the forward to take a shot, bounce passes “magically” threading their ways to the player driving the lane, “alley-oops” arriving just at the right time in the right spot so the center can jump up and drop the ball through the hoop. It’s truly beautiful to watch.

And excruciating to watch when things are awry. Players get double-teamed and nobody comes back to them for a pass. The pure shooter arrives by design in the “perfect” place and nobody bothers to pass her the ball. A prima donna, more intent on individual glory than team success, “hogs” the basketball, and everything disintegrates. Morale plummets, nobody scores and the team goes down in defeat.

Diversity in alliance has the potential to make us infinitely and meaningfully more productive and a formidable adversary of evil in the world, but we don’t “get” it. Instead we judge those of different political opinions, colors, genders, religions, denominations, ages, sexual orientations, national allegiances, and all too often, gifts…as dangerous to our narrow self-serving agendas. When daring to change our paradigms—viewing things from another’s different perspective—is very often a catalyst for growth, breakthrough solutions to problems, pathways to peace. The disconnect happens all the time—in the government, at the office, at school…and most disturbing, within the church.

Imagine for a moment that your right arm suddenly decided it was by far the most important limb and refused to cooperate with the left. Or that your left eye proclaimed that the right eye was evil, its vision not to be trusted. What if your heart got fed up with listening to your stomach and pancreas fight over whose job was more important to digestion and just up and left?

Crazy, huh.

Maybe not. The church isn’t called the “body of believers” for nothing, you know.

Anybody seen our head lately?

Four of us were sitting in a restaurant a while back and one asked, “Who do you think was the most courageous President of the past 50 years?”

I thought for a moment, passing through the series of Commanders-in-Chief that have been in office in my lifetime, and internally argued for one vs. the other until I settled on, perhaps, a most unlikely candidate. Gerald Ford.

Some remember his wife Betty’s outspokenness, her admissions of addiction, the clinic which still bears her name, more than President Ford. Others remember his occasional faux pas, preserved in time by Chevy Chase in SNL’s early days. Still others remember his singular attribute as a President, one which I hope remains his alone—the only President never elected.

It’s that last fact that sealed the deal for me. It is the reason I think he was most vulnerable to the out-of-nowhere governor of Georgia.

You see, I believe that Gerald Ford made a decision—an unpopular decision but the right one—fully conscious that making it would guarantee that he would not be re-elected. He pardoned Richard Nixon.

I’m sure his fellow party members who were privy to his thinking begged him not to. They knew it was the “people’s mandate” that Nixon be crucified for what he and his cronies had done.

I don’t know what drove Gerald Ford’s decision, but I like to think that he recognized that the “people’s mandate” for vengeance is not always wise, that as another friend once said, the Achilles heel of democracy is that there is no guarantee that the majority knows what’s best for it.

I think, also, that Ford was among the last politicians to practice empathy, to recognize, as Atticus Finch told Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary last year—that you can’t judge another fairly until you try to walk in his shoes and live in his skin. Ford told a joke on himself not long before he died, or maybe it was just a lesson he learned back then. He said in an interview once that when he’d been on Capitol Hill (for those who don’t know your history, he was the Speaker of the House, who ascended to the Vice-Presidency on Agnew’s resignation, and then to the Presidency on Nixon’s), he was often among his fellow Congressmen and women, railing at the sitting President, saying to himself, “How could he be so stupid?”

Then, by either cruel fate or divine intervention, he’d found himself on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where a regular utterance heard about the leaders in Congress (the same group from which he had come) was “How could they be so stupid?”

I think, if not before, he certainly came face to face with what Atticus was talking about. You just never know what another is thinking, but it’s worth imagining what it feels like to stand in their shoes before you go shooting off your mouth.

In the end, Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon was a most unselfish one. He went against the “people’s mandate,” knowing it wouldn’t bode well for his political future, like a wise parent who holds his ground against the “everybody’s doing it” that always renders its head in adolescence.

I read of our new Congressman’s alleged response to a Dacula constituent who asked what she should do because she worked for a corporation that didn’t, or couldn’t, pay a pension. “When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?” he said. Funny, but I think he decided that long ago…

Don’t get me wrong. I suspect he is a nice enough guy. I don’t know him personally, but I find that response to be incredibly telling, incredibly demonstrative either of a lack of empathy or just plain incapacity to stand in the shoes of one who, trying her best to take care of herself, made a decision to work for a corporation that didn’t pay a pension because there was a promise, a promise that now threatens to be broken, that if she paid a part of her salary for at least 40 quarters, matched by her employer, into a system, she’d have a paltry sum to depend on, even if the economic tide swung in the direction it has. And, that promise threatens to be broken at a time when she, unlike our relatively young friend, probably doesn’t have time to recover, and no real options to do so anyway.

I bet he goes to church every Sunday. I’ll bet he’d tell you that he’s a Christian, and that he believes that he is, though I’m not sure what particular teaching of Jesus he would call on to defend his position, unless he has conveniently placed himself in Jesus’ shoes instead of the shoes of the stone-throwers—the ones, if we’re honest, we all wear. To love one’s neighbor as oneself doesn’t require that you martyr yourself, but it sure does require a capacity for empathy far beyond what Rob Woodall’s statement implies he has.

There is no doubt that we’ve got a hornet’s nest of trouble in Washington, and that we need major change in our fiscal policies. There is no doubt that we need to take strong measures to balance the budget, to stop the climbing debt, to stimulate the economy. But I can assure you that it doesn’t take much empathic thought to realize that to break the spirit, the backs of those who carried us thus far, the promise…isn’t the way. You can’t pay taxes if you don’t have income, you don’t have income unless you have a job, you can’t get a job if nobody’s hiring, and you can’t give a charge to the economy unless you have money to buy something or trust that if you do, there’ll be more coming in, even if it’s a Medicare reimbursement.

Hmmm…trust. In what exactly? That leaders like our young Congressman have our best interests at heart?

If Gerald Ford had asked, “When do I decide I’m gonna take care of me?” he would have chosen his chance for re-election over what was best for the country. But he didn’t. He was unselfish, and courageous, and empathetic.

We needed the likes of him then.

We need the likes of him now more than ever.

I laugh sometimes at my self-described agnostic friends. The laughter isn’t always “ha-ha” funny. In fact, it seldom is. It’s tinged with sadness, because I sometimes think I’ve learned more about living a Christ-like life from some of them than I have most of those I’ve run into who attend church on a regular basis.

The sadness isn’t for me, though. It’s for them. They’ve been so discouraged by what they’ve seen and heard that they don’t know the “truths” I see them live every day were once talked about by Jesus a long time ago. Might’ve saved them some time.

Gandhi was reported to have said, “I might have been a Christian except for Christians.” Unfortunately, I think I know what he meant. Though I’ve been a follower of what I interpreted Jesus to say since I was a child, the greatest emotional wounds I’ve received have been at the hands of people who call(ed) themselves Christian, yet could not step outside themselves to evaluate their own utterances and behavior and see how vastly discrepant they were from the teachings of Jesus, even if they believed that the King James Version was channeled by God instead of dictated by a Scot appointed by Queen Elizabeth I to succeed her. (And that despite the fact that she had cut off his mother’s head.)

Obviously, I don’t believe that the King James Version was channeled by God. If I did, if I “took the word” of those 17^th Century translators who lived in a feudal system (which dissolved into the classism we know today), then I would have to believe that the masculine-only God of their persuasion played a mighty cruel joke on me. He made me sensitive and smart, expressive in word and song—all wonderful things—and then promptly rendered me mute, unable to use those very gifts to His glory.

Why? Because I am a woman.

Fortunately, I don’t take the word of the 17^th Century scribes. Or the fundamentalist denominations. I don’t even take the word of the 1^st and 2^nd Century guys who quoted what “they” said that “they” said that “they said” Jesus said (whoever “they” were), unless it makes sense to me in the context of my life and the experiences I’ve had two millennia later, in a time they couldn’t even have imagined. (It’s as close to the horse’s mouth as I can get, though, so I have read what they said.)

You see, I don’t have to take their words. And neither do you. I don’t think a man who reportedly said, “Lo, I am with you always,” quit talking in 33 CE. I agree wholeheartedly with Gracie Allen, who once said, “Never put a period where God has placed a comma.”

What God says to me may resonate with you. And it may not. But, if it does, there will be two of us, gathered in Her name.

They don’t know it, but those agnostic friends of mine have been right there with me many a time, and there in the midst of us…

And then again, maybe they’ve known it all along.

I passed by a church yesterday and on the marquis, it read, “What can one person do?” I assume the church leaders were talking about outreach, as in “What can one person do about homelessness?” or “What can one person do about children without fresh water?” or “What can one person do to spread the gospel?”

It got me thinking.

In the whole of the Gospels we read each week, if you add up all the miracles and speeches Jesus was reported to have done or made 40-100 years after the fact, you won’t come up with 100 things. If we go with the estimate that after he appeared on the scene his ministry lasted three years before the Romans executed him, that means he walked in Jerusalem and Galilee and surround for just over 1,000 days, according to our calculations of the length of a year. What was he doing on those other 900 days?

Why in the world did crusty fishermen who’d grown up and into prescribed lives—men who probably couldn’t read a lick, men who complained every day about the oppressive government or heat and how the costs for a new net or boat had skyrocketed, men who groaned every time when the tax collector came by that the taxes didn’t go for anything good for them—why would they have just dropped everything and gone with a fellow who “didn’t have a place to lay his head,” had apparently just up and quit his carpentry business, and made no promises about ending taxes or the immigration of the Samaritans or getting rid of the beggars down by the pool or raising an army to impose the tenets of the Hebrew faith on the wretched Romans?

Imagine this. You’re sitting at your desk typing an email, or you’re in the warehouse driving the forklift, or you’re holding the “Stop” and “Slow” sign on the highway being repaired. You’re doing what you’ve always done, day after day. There’s a family waiting for you at home, or a bunch of guys at the bar where you watch your favorite sports teams play, or maybe even a church supper scheduled that night.

And then this man (or woman, God forbid) comes strolling by and says, “Forget what you’re doing—come with me.”

What would have to be true about that person for you to ditch everything and get up, with your co-workers watching and your family and friends waiting at home, and leave with him or her? He didn’t say, “Meet me on Sunday and we’ll go knock on doors and pass out tracts.” He didn’t say, “Come join the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Catholic, fill-in-the-blanks church.” He didn’t say, “Come with me and we’ll feed the masses,” although they did it once or twice when the situation demanded it. And he most assuredly didn’t say, “Come with me or God’s gonna strike you down like a dog with a tsunami or a tornado or a flood or a nuclear accident.” He didn’t perform miracles for them to get them to come with him—that came later, and started because his mother told him to. He didn’t show them his bag of denarii, He didn’t even sport the newest travelling robe and walking sandals. He just said strange things like, “Come and I’ll make you fishers of men.”

And the strangest thing is that they did!

Though we’ll never really know, I have an idea about why they dropped it all to follow him. He talked about it often enough, but he didn’t just talk about it—he lived it. Every single day of that 1,000 days and every day since. “Love God, love your neighbors, love one another as I have loved you.”

Sure, that means the people in Africa and Equador. Yes, it means the people in the unemployment lines and the homeless shelter. But that’s not all it means.

It means the person who sits across the aisle (or with you) at services, your son or daughter, husband or wife. It means the woman at the drycleaners, the guy who’s late to work and in danger of losing his job and accidentally cuts you off on the freeway, the person on the other side of your cubicle, the person in the warehouse. Me.

Treat me kindly, in a way that tells me I’m special. Out of the blue send me an email telling me you’re thinking about me. Let me know that you know I’m doing the best that I can. Don’t judge me—don’t talk disparagingly about me behind my back or certainly not in front of me. Don’t assume that I talk about you and try and exact revenge. Talk to me when nobody else will. Listen to my jokes and laugh. Listen to my sorrows and cry with me. Expect the same from me, not the perversion of what you’ve come to expect.

Delight in me and everyone you meet, knowing we are all your brothers and sisters, all children of the Most High God.

Do that and I’ll follow you anywhere.

One person 2000 years ago thousands of miles away from here, and today billions still remember his name.

That’s what one person can do.

I started to blog the morning after the news of bin Laden’s demise, but I found myself conflicted—frustrated and angry, excited and vaguely glad, all at the same time. Couldn’t resolve it, so I reposted a friend’s posting of a rabbi’s response instead.

Part of my disgruntlement lay in the fact that I didn’t feel like rejoicing at the news. Had I been in DC, I wouldn’t have been on Pennsylvania Avenue, nor would I have gone to Ground Zero if I’d been in New York. It’s the same paradox I’ve found myself embroiled in before. I’m intensely proud of the Navy Seals, steely-eyed missile men who went, with only a few humans knowing, into harm’s way, fully aware their lives might lie in the balance. And I’m profoundly sad that once again, a brother of ours lost touch with his own humanity to the point that killing him was the only option we believed we had. I just didn’t feel like waving the flag or shouting “USA” in the streets. I felt more like falling to my knees and begging for the Spirit of God to come in force and save us, because we are surely unable to save ourselves.

In the middle of the night, I remembered something that a wise professor once said to me when I was ranting about a psychotherapy client who wouldn’t do what I wanted her to do for herself. I couldn’t get her to see.

“She’s doing the best she knows how,” he said. “Just as we are. She doesn’t know any better…yet.”

I remember being stunned by the remark. It was as if scales fell from my eyes. My professor would have rolled his eyes if I’d said something like that. He wasn’t a religious man in any sense of the word—religion had played a wounding role, not a healing one. I remembered it, though, and it has informed my perspective in these paradoxical times.

We’re all doing the best we know how. The woman at the grocery store, embarrassed when her debit card is declined, the Wall Street mogul in his Armani suit, the Muslim boy who straps explosives on his back. The Samaritan woman at the well, the diminutive tax collector in the tree, the blind man at Bethsaida, Mary and Martha, Judas Iscariot. You. Me.

We never know what has shaped the views of another. We can’t know fully what our very own children perceive, much less those born in another place, in another neighborhood, another culture. We don’t know what they know and what they don’t know, what they’ve seen and what they haven’t seen, how they’ll act toward us as a result of all that and how they won’t. Unless we have experienced life in a remotely similar way, without dialogue, we can’t even imagine with any precision at all. But we do know one thing.

Whatever they see, whatever they feel, whatever they’ve experienced…they’re doing the best they know how, just like us.

God knows that. And despite the limitations of his humanity, I’m convinced that Jesus knew it, too. “Love others as I have loved you,” he said, in one version of his final words.

Help our unbelief, Lord. We’re doing the best we know how.

At the end of a previous blog, I posted a link to Matthew 25:14-30, which obviously stirred something in my friend Susan Carson. If you aren’t blessed by this, you’re not listening. VMS

Matthew 25:14-30 is the story of the master who gives ten, five and one talent to his three servants, and commissions them to care for his property while he is gone. You know this parable: the servant who is given ten talents and the one given five both double the investment and are praised highly by their master upon his return, while the servant given one talent buries it and returns it, intact but un-multiplied, to his master, who berates him and throws him out “into outer darkness.”

I don’t know about you, but this parable makes me a little nervous.  I see myself as a very average servant, mostly doing just a fair-to-middling job of staying between the lines in life, trying to live in God’s world in what my understanding of what I was raised to believe is the  “right” way (it occurs to me that right there is a fallacy worth exploring, but I will forge ahead for now).  I try to be a kind, honest soul; I pray every day—several times a day, actually—try to listen carefully to discern what God would have me do in any given situation, and generally try to ease the burdens of those around me where I can. But is that enough? Actually, does any of that even necessarily count (it is, after all, the most basic of what is asked of us as Christians)?

I really want to believe that what I’m doing, in general, multiplies God’s love in the world I live in (for that’s what I read “talent” to mean in this parable—love).  But how do I know?  There is this tiny corner of me that wonders if he one day will call me to him ,  point to the path of life I didn’t take (pick one of any number of life or career paths over my lifetime) and say, “That’s the one I intended for you, weren’t you listening??”  How do I know??

The fact is, I don’t know, haven’t really any clue if I’ve been on the right track or not at this very late point in my life.  Whatever it is that God might have planned for me otherwise I have no idea, but here I am.  I look around and take a survey of what I’ve been up to so far, and hope that God will, indeed, at least honor the intention of how I’ve lived. I have to admit though, I’ve done better sometimes than others, and I’ve often gone my own way, picking across a rocky trail off the path instead of sticking closely to the markers.  Oh wait, there were markers? Darn.  See what I mean?

The most I’ve been able to discern about living life in God’s world is that it seems to me we’re here to help each other along the way, whatever path we’re on.  There are lots of ways to do that, and some are, let’s say, “showier” than others—but those are the things I didn’t do.  I haven’t had the means to be a philanthropist, and my early years were spent rocking babies instead of marching for civil rights.  I didn’t hand out sandwiches or ladle soup in homeless shelters; my time was spent feeding toddlers and gathering book bags and homework for my children and a few neighbor children who I “kept” during the week, and helping out at church where I could, when I could.  But since life is messy I’m afraid I wasn’t very consistent with that, either. 

What I hope, what I pray is true, is that things like the time I helped that confused elderly lady find her car in the Rich’s parking lot counts for something in the larger view; that talking the runaway teenager into calling her parents and helping her bridge the communications gap with them when they came to get her, is something I was meant to be here to do; that God intended me to be the one to offer that thin rail of a teenage boy with the mohawk haircut (one of my son’s shadier but so-needy friends) the bowl of soup that he shrugged off so carelessly but then devoured with obvious need.  The smile at the grocery store clerk; a pause in traffic to let someone in; waving thank you to someone who has done the same for me…those were little things.  Yes, little things, so insignificant, and yet, what would the world be without them?  Where would I be without the large and small kindnesses like these done for me?

If there is a connection to the “return with interest” part of the parable we started with, it’s that little things done with love grow and multiply into something bigger than ourselves.  Each tiny act of kindness, done with the love of God at its center, makes up part of a larger whole, and that whole is the body of Christ, poured out for us, in us, through us.  Please God may I be even a small vessel pouring out your love in my tiny corner of your world, as you were Love itself, pouring yourself out for all of us.  It is a small return to make for what you gave us, but it is all I have to give.

It was 1991, the first year the Atlanta Braves went to the World Series. The “chop” had taken off – they even did a take-off on it on Saturday Night Live that year – and because I had been one of the faithful few who’d gone down to Atlanta-Fulton Co Stadium even when 7-8000 people was an average crowd, I had tickets to the Series. Those of us who are rabid fans will remember the extra inning game in which Mark Lemke played the role of “goat,” which sent us into extra innings, but came through with what would be the single that scored the winning run.

I was standing in my seat, chopping and singing the “chant,” when for some reason, I stopped. Looking around the stadium and listening for a moment, I was suddenly covered in goose flesh. In almost perfect tune and motion, 52,000 people were one, 52,000 white, black, Asian, male, female, young, old…

I couldn’t help thinking that on the street, any number of us might have passed by one another without a thought. In another setting, perhaps we would have gotten into an intense political argument, maybe even come to blows. We were probably of so many religious persuasions or moral opinions or ethnic origins, that respectful dialogue was out of the question. But for one moment, as Lemke came up to bat in the 12^th, none of the differences between us mattered.

I am saddened every time I see Christians get in a brawl with other Christians and people of other faith traditions over what will, in the grand scheme of things, not matter a whit when all is said and done. I hunger for those moments of communion, when what seems almost serendipitous occurs – the unexpected joy of oneness, the alignment of hearts. But, alas, they don’t happen very often these days.

It’s been 20 years since that magic run of the Braves began, and this very morning, I got up and tuned into a link on Ustream sent to me by a friend last night. A camera focused on an eagle’s nest in Iowa is showing a 24/7 feed of three eaglets born just over a week ago, and the loving attention and protection of their parents, a couple who’s been together now for three years. These are children 9,10 and 11 for the pair. Dad lost his first mate in a freak snow storm four years ago.

When I got on this morning, 87,000 viewers were on the air, 23,000 communicating in a “social stream.” People from all over the country started piping up, and then Canada, and then I saw one from the UK. Some have obviously been watching on and off for three years. Others discovered it this morning, as I did. I, along with several others, shared the link via email and Facebook.

As I write this, at 1:00 pm, there are 132,308 viewers “on air,” whole offices and pediatric wards and school kids and soccer moms mesmerized by the sight of the most peaceful, most caring, most natural demonstration of the glory of life.

I got goose bumps again. If we can do it for a silly baseball game and civic pride, if we can do it over an 80-foot-high eagle’s nest in Decorah, Iowa, we can do it and transform the world.

Will we? Twenty years is a long time between goose flesh.

And yet, I think we just might.

http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

I’ve been applying for non-profit development jobs, among others, for over a year now. Some of them require experience in raising money for endowment funds. You see that a lot in the university and private school setting especially, but sometimes on the charitable side, too.

On the for-profit side, I think of endowment funds as similar to the market capitalization accounts for companies selling shares in the stock market, there for the purpose of providing capital for new ventures and as fuel to keep the operation solvent when the economy is tough and sales are down. The good thing about non-profit endowment funds is that most times, you don’t have to watch the value of the money decline because of individual whim—people don’t take their charitable donations back. It’s only when the endowment funds are invested in a risky place, as happened with Bernie Madoff recently, that the money disappears for no good reason.

But the analogy I’m interested in today is a personal one—we have endowment funds, too. Fueled by love, the currency of our emotional support, we are empowered to expand our own loving influence, and have the resource of past experience, past donations to our endowment fund, if you will, to depend on when we suffer the inevitable blows to self-esteem that the world is famous for providing.

Because of that, I’ve never much liked the chagrined slogan of some sales people—“You’re only as good as your last sale. What have you done for me lately?” It implies that there is no endowment fund at all. When faced with a layoff, what you’ve done that wasn’t perceived as valuable or what you’ve accomplished in the past isn’t considered, and that’s counterproductive to loyalty and passion.

I’m not proposing that we rest on our laurels—it is true that you have to keep producing in order to fill the till under normal conditions. When things are going reasonably well for a company, the endowment fund is replenished so that when the next challenge comes, you can weather the storm again. Just as sales people need to always search for new customers and customer types, the diversity of people and the variety of donations we seek in terms of the richness and quality of our experiences are crucial to increasing our emotional stability and sustainability in the long run. Just like companies with a diversified portfolio, we should view the donations we receive—whether in the form of a smile on another’s face or public accolade or a bonus check—as deposits in our endowment funds.

That way, when we sit back toward the end of our lives, we have more than enough to draw on—memories that actually refuel us. It’s the reason the winning shot that strips the net at the buzzer in high school can still make you feel great at 54. And the reason those of advancing age begin to recognize and accept donations made, even when those who make them aren’t aware they’ve even made one. That’s the “magic” of the smile on the face of one to whom you gave your time, the gift of your presence—a deposit is made in both endowment funds.

Let the reserve funds get too low, and, in our own despair, some of us assume that our donations are inconsequential, and so we don’t make them. Likewise, in a hurry or in tunnel-visioned focus, we sometimes fail to see and acknowledge the gifts given to us by others. We don’t go out of our ways to say “thank you” for those things others do for us out of their own love that warm our hearts—the email or letter or phone call that says “You’re important to me,” the hand on the shoulder that reminds us that someone “sees” us, the unexpected “showing up” when we are in the midst of grief.

And yet, it is those moments, and only those moments, that sustain us. Because it is in those moments that we see, with startling clarity, that our endowment accounts all have the same account number, the same never-ending Source of funds.

And that as children of God, we have all been given a checkbook and are expected to use it.

Matthew 25:14-30