Prodigal Prophet

If you read my previous two posts, you will see the reason for the title of this one—since the tragedy in Tucson last Saturday and the internet war of “blame and defend,” I struggled to put my finger on what I was really feeling. Two things happened that sent me finally down the right road.

One was a comment on the second post—the other was watching the memorial service in Tucson. I missed the latter when it was live, but in my current cabin-fever-induced insomnia, I caught it in the middle of the night on C-Span.

The comment was from a friend of mine—it was the brevity and honesty of her words that slammed me. What she said first was that because of the “wrath and venom” of the past few years, she was “nervous.” And then she said it all. “I feel bombarded,” she wrote.

That was it! Off I went the rest of the day. While standing outside my apartment and scraping ice and snow off my car, while lying on my bed watching TV in the middle of the day (the reason for my insomnia…in addition to the coffee I drank at 11:00 pm…), while editing a book about the long-term effects of sexual abuse by those in positions of spiritual power, I thought about bombardment.

The irony was the fact that in the midst of a web-based argument about the use of gun-related images and the reference to killing and maiming those with whom we disagree politically, my friend, who shares many of my political opinions, had used a term that derives itself from military strategy.

It’s a good strategy in war, I suppose, if you have to be in war, but I hadn’t wanted to think of us as being at war—I naively thought we were in debate about how best to revive our economy, how to help our fellow citizens in need of healthcare and subsistence while working to be fiscally responsible at the same time. “Shock and awe” would not have been allowed as an acceptable strategy when I debated in high school, and I have no ready response.

I thought, I’m nervous, too. Not that the world may blow up at any moment, because I have no control over countries like N. Korea or Iran, just as our government doesn’t either. My prayers and those of my friends are sufficient for me in that regard. What I’m nervous about is the astounding lack of empathy displayed by those whose mouths are loudest, those who would bombard their fellow citizens as if they were enemies, especially those who wear their Christianity like armor.

And then I thought some more. If “love your neighbor as you love yourself” isn’t about empathy, then I’ve been barking up the wrong tree for most of my life.  If America isn’t about all for one and one for all, then I may as well move somewhere else. There’s plenty of everything that really matters for everyone—my success does not have to be at your expense. This is not war—but it isn’t a game, either. It’s our lives.

I went to bed and tossed and turned until I finally flipped on the light and turned on the TV in my room.

In the middle of the night, I saw some of the proceedings in the House of Representatives, where one by one, Republican and Democrat, stood and talked about Gabby Giffords—about conferences they’d attended together, committees they’d served on, recreation with each other’s families…followed by the replay of a memorial service in which the citizens of Tucson jumped to their feet in applause and cheering and tears in honor of those families suddenly in pain and the ordinary citizens who tackled this poor, lost kid and took away his weapon.

And I knew that empathy isn’t dead after all—it has just lain dormant under the bombardment. Civility is alive and well, just buried under the debris.

We can stop this, you know. And today I am hopeful that we will.

It’s been 24 hours since the news app on my iPod alerted me to the shooting rampage in Arizona yesterday, and I can’t say that the churning in my stomach has settled down much.

I’m not sure how I feel about the death of a nine-year-old girl, recently elected to her student council, who aspired to learn more about politics by going with a neighbor to meet Gabby Giffords at the local supermarket. I’m not sure what I feel about the assassination of a federal judge whose decision on the bench, born of his attempt to interpret the law—which is, the last time I checked, the responsibility of a judge at any level—necessitated 24 hour protection several months ago because of a talk show host’s incitement of the public to make threats on his life. I’m not sure how I feel about the death of a 76-year-old man who martyred himself to protect his wife from a madman, at a place where they had gone to exercise their democratic right to assemble.

But I’m very sure how I feel about what made this all possible. I’m disgusted.

I’m disgusted with Sarah Palin and her “PAC advisors” for the evocation of the idea of crosshairs in a political campaign. I’m disgusted by the fact that the first reaction of most commentators immediately after the shooting rampage was to wonder if protection should be increased for congressional members, when it should have been, “What did we do, what did we say in service of political theater, that might have informed the delusion of a 22-year-old schizophrenic?” I’m disgusted that not one of the popular talk show hosts who pump their ratings with vitriol (that they often do not genuinely feel) has to my knowledge even ventured forth to take any responsibility for the impact of what they say on the general public, which unfortunately includes the “Unabombers” and the Eric Rudolphs and the Timothy McVeighs.

And I’m disgusted with myself.

I’m disgusted that the first thing I said when I saw the news alert was, “Is Gabby Giffords a Democrat or a Republican?” Why did it matter? A 40-year-old woman had been shot in plain daylight at a supermarket. Wasn’t that enough to be mortified by?

I’m disgusted that I didn’t say, when Tea Party acquaintances of mine spoke of our being oppressed and the need to “take back America” from our socialist oppressors that I was offended by the narcissism of it. Oppressed? Get a grip! While we sit in our heavily-mortgaged homes, bemoaning the fact that this year, we couldn’t buy a Wii for our children or a Lexus SUV (nobody wants a smaller Christmas present…), you think we’re oppressed?

I’m disgusted that I didn’t say, when a fellow Christian told me that I couldn’t be a Christian and vote the way I’d planned, that she should mind her own spirituality. Despite the misguided opinion of some of my friends and neighbors, democracy and Christianity are not, alas, synonymous, and quite often are at odds with each other.

Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, said Jesus. Love your enemies. I figure we’d best figure out just who those enemies and neighbors really are. I know that today, for me, they’re one and the same. As Pogo said 40 years ago, we have met the enemy and it is us.

God bless the families of Christina Taylor Greene, born September 11, 2001; Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Dorwin (Dory) Stoddard, 76; Dorothy Morris, 76; Phyllis Scheck, 79; and John Roll, 63. God bless those who watched as 20 of their neighbors were shot in front of them. God bless the state of Arizona and its leaders. God bless America and the Congress. And God bless us, every one.

In February, two new editions of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn will be released, “expurgated” versions published by an Auburn University professor who has always had a problem with saying the “N” word himself.

On some level, I liken this to making Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird just shot in the leg when he tried to escape. It’s certainly easier to live with that way—denial always is. That’s its point.

Sure, I wish that I had not learned the lessons of loss, of betrayal, of humankind’s propensity toward inhumanity as early as I did. I wish that I could have escaped the fact that my father abandoned his family, or seeing my grandfather die virtually in front of me at age nine, that I’d never seen JFK’s caisson on television, that I’d not known Vietnam as a daily presence in my life, that I’d learned about Selma and Birmingham and Philadelphia the way I learned about the Jewish holocaust during WWII—through stories from my grandparents and documentaries—because it happened before I was born.

But I didn’t.

That’s probably why I came to love Mark Twain, a wounded child himself because of the things he saw as a boy and a wounded and bitter man at his death because of the losses he sustained throughout his life. I’m sure it’s why, though a Southerner, I have always been unwilling to pretend that I never saw the black people in my town enter the theatre from a door on the street or felt the sting of disdain as a girl because I couldn’t be a minister because I was missing a required appendage.

I’m fairly sure my early acquaintance with grief and the harsher things we do to each other is why my “take” on the Bible was from the get-go a bit different from the average reader, too. I loved Jesus because he “called a spade a spade,” a phrase I worry about the origin of, because he confronted the mechanisms of our human denial, forcing us to look at the cruelty with which we treat each other.

He might have yelled out, “Look at me!” as he hung on the cross, “Look at what you’ve deteriorated into!” But that would probably have been heard by those around as a battle cry to go kill the SOBs who’d nailed him up there, and I’ve never been able to accept it.

I do not believe Jesus was God-sent as a sacrificial lamb to die for the sins of the world. The sacrifice occurred when God took on human form in the first place, limiting the unlimited capacity for love by encaging it in flesh. In so doing, God showed us the possible, and still we don’t see it. I imagine Jesus wept more than once.

A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s grave in Elmira, NY. It was an accident—I’d assumed he was buried in Hartford. My friends and I were in the area because we’d gone to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and were driving around on our way back to Rochester. I remember standing there after I’d visited the museum housed at Elmira College and stood in the “gazebo” in which he penned Huckleberry Finn one summer while visiting his sister-in-law (she’d built it out on the edge of a cliff for him so that he’d take his cigar smoke elsewhere). I thought of him looking out over the valley, trying to “expurgate” the demons of what he had seen as a boy from his soul.

I left there that day feeling sad for him—sad that those around him had separated him as a child from the God who understood everything that he’d experienced, the God who could have wrapped him in her arms. But mostly I felt proud of him, because he was willing to tell the truth about the human condition, about his pain, his mistakes, and his disappointment.

It’s a fact. African-Americans were once called the “N” word. It’s hard for me to hear, no matter who says it, and I can’t bring myself to say it either, just like the Auburn professor. But let’s not pretend it never happened and doesn’t happen today. Let’s own up to it, along with the host of other slights and atrocities we’ve committed against each other. Let’s beg each other and God for forgiveness at our inhumanity.

That’s something I’d be proud for our children to see.

Here’s the link to the broader article that appeared today in the Christian Science Monitor.

I received an email this morning from a friend—one of those “send this to 12 people, including me” kind of emails. I shy away from those generally, unless they’re funny, and I almost never send them to the right number of people.

Ye old chain letter has always been just an annoyance to me. But I’ve begun to find myself more than annoyed of late, because of the religious tones of the emails that come around.

Today’s said, “This is a test. Do you put God first in your life? Then send this email to…”

It frankly pissed me off.

Whose test? Who started the email? What—by not forwarding a chain letter that somebody somewhere sent out, I will demonstrate that God isn’t first in my life? To whom exactly will I demonstrate this? But more importantly, should I care what you think?

Facebook users have started to irritate me too. If I don’t “repost” whatever it is, then I’m somehow unpatriotic, or ungodly, or against motherhood and apple pie.

Here’s a news blast.

God doesn’t send me chain letters and doesn’t need a fan page on Facebook. We are just fine on the communication plane, even when I’m not near a WiFi hotspot.

If you say a prayer for someone else and you want them to know, tell them. If you want to share a prayer of your own, share it. If you want someone else to pray for you, ask them.

But don’t presume to make it a test of my faith or my commitment.

My faith is in God, and God only—not in the accuracy of your judgment.

Nor should you have faith in mine. Of such is idolatry.

I’ve heard the phrase misused a thousand times–co-opted innocently enough to state the very opposite of what the author of the poem from which it comes intended his work to convey, but I never ventured to correct the misuse, except to rant and rave in my own journaling. Once, I started to use it in a piece for a nonprofit I worked for, but decided against it.

But a couple of days ago, I was disappointed to find the phrase quoted in an essay by a man I read regularly as a part of my daily spiritual practice, and I realized I couldn’t let it pass this time without writing about it myself. It wasn’t that Buechner misused the phrase as much as quoting it out of context.

The poet to whom I refer, the great Robert Frost, obviously needs no defense from me or anyone else. It’s those of us who, for various reasons, have found ourselves in lifelong and often disappointing searches for people with whom and places where we feel fully known and loved who need protection from the callousness of the misinterpretation.

To what phrase do I refer?

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

The poem in which it appears, “The Death of the Hired Man,” was written by Frost in 1915. Almost a century later, its lesson is no less applicable–perhaps in some ways more now than ever, especially to Christians.

This phrase is most often quoted as if it stands alone as truth, and yet if it is embraced as truth, it is the coarsest of lies. If those who take you in do so because they “have” to, or because they think it’s the moral thing to do, or because they believe Jesus or the preacher or the rabbi or the teacher said to take you in is the thing, it may be a good thing, but it has nothing to do with “home.” If pity, or self-righteousness, or a sense of obligation or good-deed-doing enters into the picture, any similarity to what the “homeseeker” is in search of disappears. The prodigal son of this version would have returned, not to the unconditional welcome of his father, but to the life of slavery for which he initially prepared himself when he made the decision to turn back.

But, he didn’t. Instead, he came walking toward a dream. Though expecting — even hoping — to get off with serving the deserved consequences of his behavior (the ones conservative Christians often self-righteously feel authorized to enforce), he was met instead with open arms, bright smiles, and the erasure of his debt — imagined or real. His father took him in because he loved him, not because he had to.

You never have to go home — home is where you cannot help but go. And home is not where they have to take you in — home is where the thought never even crosses their minds, where they run to meet you on the road.

For those unfamiliar with “The Death of the Hired Man,” it is the conversation between a husband and wife, sitting on the front step of their house. Warren, a farmer, has come home to find his wife, Mary, waiting for him there — waiting to tell him that she found the hired man Silas in their barn and convinced him to come in, but she couldn’t get him to lie down. She tells Warren that there’s something different about Silas from the last time they saw him, that he’s not well.

Warren is disgruntled that Silas has returned, and doubts his motives. He’d told Silas the last time he’d done work for him that if he left in the middle of haying season, not to come back, and of course, Silas had gone anyway.

But alas, he’s back. We pick up the story here. Mary is speaking:

“Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk, 
And nothing to look backward to with pride, 
And nothing to look forward to with hope, 
So now and never any different.” 
 
Part of a moon was falling down the west, 
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw 
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand 
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves, 
As if she played unheard the tenderness 
That wrought on him beside her in the night. 
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die: 
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”
 
“Home,” he mocked gently. 
 
“Yes, what else but home? 
It all depends on what you mean by home. 
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more 
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.” 
 
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 
They have to take you in.” 
 
“I should have called it 
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Warren — justifiably hurt and angry with Silas, whom he tried to help; Warren, skeptical; Warren, a good man who loves Silas in spite of himself — is the character who speaks the phrase quoted so often. But it is what Mary says in response, the part we never seem to quote, that tells the truth about home.

Jesus taught about it in the story of the prodigal son. Robert Frost knew. Buechner knows, too. And so do you and I if we’re honest with ourselves.

Home is something we somehow don’t have to deserve.

Sounds like the kingdom of heaven to me.

If you should like to read all of “The Death of the Hired Man,” click here.

And whatever you do, wherever you are, be at home this year.

I have an app on my iPod called “23,000 Quotes.” When you open the app, a daily quote is randomly displayed on the screen. Today’s was attributed to Lao-Tzu, a Chinese philosopher who lived about 500 years before Christ. This “quote of the day” was one I’d heard before:  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

That’s straightforward enough for me. What I think about when I read it is that no matter how large the goal, the task, there is a time when thought must cease and action begin if we are to accomplish something of substance.

From another vantage point, I read it as a comforting statement. The thought of a thousand miles is a lot to me, overwhelming even, especially if you’re walking. But if you break the “giant” into small pieces, a step at a time, it seems less insurmountable, whether you’re talking about recovery from a major illness, grief over the loss of someone close, or a life goal. All good thoughts we can take into our hearts and remember when facing a mountain of sorts.

As a matter of habit, after reading the daily quote, I usually scroll through other quotes by the same author. I flipped through a few more of Lao-Tzu’s and landed on this one: “The journey of a thousand leagues begins from beneath your feet.”

At first glance, it seems to be the very same quote, but at second, not so. In the first place, leagues are greater than miles in distance; we’re not sure exactly how much longer, however—it depends on what country of origin the person who submitted the quote is from and when in history the quote was first translated into English. The term “league” has been used to describe a range of distances, from 1.5 Roman miles to the current estimate of 3.8 miles, if you go with the 5,280-foot version.

But that doesn’t change the meaning of the original quote as much as the last part: “…begins from beneath your feet.”

The latter quote suggests nothing of action to me—it speaks instead of heart, of motivation, of courage—not of the journey itself, but the journeyman. It speaks of intent to act, the decision to act—not the action itself. It speaks of the push of God, not the pull—the nudge from within, not the attraction from without.

Which did Lao-Tzu set out to communicate? We don’t know—we can’t even be sure that he said it. One thing is clear—he would never have said it in English. The language didn’t exist when he lived. And the quotes were obviously submitted to the company who owns the iPod app by two different people, with two different takes—two quotes that traveled independent 2,500-year paths. I wonder if they’ll ever get together just to argue over which of their quotes was most true of Lao-Tzu or if they’ll go on with their lives, with no thought of the other, certain that each knows what Lao-Tzu was really talking about.

You know, Jesus didn’t speak English either, didn’t write anything down himself, as far as we know. Next time we tell someone “what Jesus said,” perhaps we should keep that in mind.

Been thinking of the Arizona immigration debacle.

When I’ve traveled abroad, I’ve carried my passport everywhere I’ve gone and submitted to the immigration authorities when I arrived and when I left. I attempt, if I don’t know the language, to learn enough phrases to maneuver. I don’t have a problem with trying to preserve our safety in general and the privileges of citizenship in our country. I don’t even have a problem with establishing English as our national language.

But I do have a problem with the idea of accomplishing any of those things in ways that remove or restrict those privileges without cause on the basis of something I can’t control, like the color of my skin, or my gender or my age or my political or religious preference, all of which at one time or another has stirred great emotion and hatred in some other citizens of our populace.

My problem is the same as the one discussed in my opening blog, the one I have with the contention of the Bible’s inerrancy. We humans, with all our frailties, do not have the perfect knowledge of good and evil. For me, that is the sin, the original sin — that we raised ourselves to believe, like God, we could evaluate absolutely, without fail, the behaviors and motivations of others and deem them good or evil, just or unjust, moral or immoral. And on top of that, we could and should PUNISH others for those behaviors and traits WE deemed evil. We’ve made some rather public mistakes in those judgments. I think of well-known incidents in our histories — big ones like the Crusades and the Salem witchhunts, the Japanese-American internment during WWII — and then I think of little things, like the fact that I’ve been advised in my internet job hunt not to put in the date of my college graduation because it will “give away” the fact that I’m over 50, a crime for which I stand guilty.

The problem for me is that the judgment of others makes us prone to keep secrets. And those secrets make us sick. I know that well, from personal experience, and from the years I spent as a psychotherapist, confessor to some of those secrets, and I know that if we are forced by judgment to spend the majority of our time guarding those secrets, we are prone not to notice the sheer privileges of life and love and relationship and the satisfaction of working hard and working well and seeing our efforts result in something good.

The writer Fritz Buechner has spent his prolific life writing about, in one way or another, the effect on him of keeping his father’s suicide a secret. The opening quote in the popular book Eat, Pray, Love, is simple but profound. “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.” This isn’t new — Shakespeare’s plays are filled with lines about secrets — “This above all, to thine own self be true…thou canst not then be false to any man.” and the final line of King Lear, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Be real, Jesus said. Get the barrel off your light and let it shine. Help others get the barrel off their lights. Don’t judge, cause you’re just gonna get judged back.

I get that. So, what, pray tell me, is more anti-Christian (or more illogical) than to, by our imperfect judgment, force others to withhold truths about themselves because they will be punished for the answer?

And how can we, with straight faces, proclaim to have a God-given right to draw lines in the sand on strips of earth that belong to us only in our misguided minds?

Just a thought.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to start this blog — not the “how do you set one up” question, but the “what does one say in the very first one” question. Then, of course, I realized that you have to jump in and just do it — choose a topic close to your heart that has risen into consciousness for some reason and say what you think about it. So here goes.

Though until late 2007, I hadn’t set foot in a church of any kind for over 30 years except as museums, or for weddings and funerals, I am a follower of Christ, and always have been. Raised in an old country Baptist Church in the deep South, the Christian tradition was mine by default. But, though I am now Episcopalian by technicality, I do not seek safety in numbers in a spiritual sense by lumping myself in with those who publicly profess any particular man-made creed or dogma. I don’t believe what any pastor, priest, rabbi or yogi says just because there are letters after their names, or a prefix denoting them as clergy, anymore than I believe that my masters degree in psychology trumps the wisdom of a lifetime lived. And I can’t say that I believe everything in the Bible or any other “holy book,” because they were written by humans.

As a former psychotherapist, and more recently an author and editor of other people’s words, I am too aware of the nuances of human motivation, the power of language, and the impossible task of communicating anything with these little man- (and woman-) made alphabetic symbols without the spectre of misinterpretation arising. I can’t bring myself to blindly accept the literalness of words written yesterday, much less those written two-thousand-plus years ago in a different time and context from that in which I am steeped, so I am left with the aspiration of doing the best I can, through the filters of my own experience, to interpret the meaning of a sentence spoken or written by another. In writing this blog, I venture out in trepidation for the same reason, knowing that my words are no longer mine once they leave my pen, virtual or otherwise, and they will be imbued with meaning and inflection and motivation that may or may not have been mine — projections from the experience of those who will read, and hopefully, respond.

I left the church because, though I longed as a child to see the principles I’d heard about — compassion, authenticity, life lived in abundance — applied in everyday life outside the church, I frankly didn’t. Born into what would become a “broken family” because of my father’s abandonment and our subsequent homelessness, I grew up in my grandparents’ home during the time of the civil rights movement, the equal rights movement, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and Bobby, the Vietnam war, and the resignation of a sitting President, and though I cannot say that I personally was treated with unkindness by church members there, I saw far too much cruelty displayed and disdain shown toward people because they were different in some way — skin color, denomination, gender. Feeling “different” myself because of my family composition, the problem was compounded when I was met in the first grade with the question “What does your father do for a living?” (I had no idea what to say) and the apparent shock that I was better at math than the boys in my class (I’m a girl). I hung in there with the church through my teenage years but eventually changed even my major in college from math to psychology in an attempt to reconcile the chasm between what I’d thought I read and heard and what I had seen well-intentioned, good-hearted people say and do to each other.

In one way or another, I’ve been looking to bridge that gap all my life. And I still am, even though I’ve fallen hard into the chasm more than a few times. I guess, though I will soon be 53 years old, I still believe with the naivete of that six-year-old that it is possible to close the chasm that renders us unable to embrace ourselves and each other as children of the same God, even if we don’t employ the same words to describe it, even if we don’t share the same political or tribal views, even if our life experiences are so vastly different that we cannot fathom what it is like to walk in each other’s shoes.

The fact remains that, as Simon, the Siamese cat who inspired my first book once said, “We all want the same things — enough to eat, a bed to sleep in, a chance to play a little, and a reason to raise our tails high.” Those inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” described in the Declaration of Independence aren’t affected by majority voting. They don’t apply only to the subset of Americans of which we are part — black, white, hispanic, asian, Republican, Democrat, gay, straight, rich, poor, you name it. They don’t apply just to Americans, period.

And, whether the idea scares us to death or not, they don’t just apply to Christians, either.

Remembering those things, let’s talk. Let’s argue, let’s pray, let’s do everything but filibuster….

Let’s live what we say we believe…and build a bridge.