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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.

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

Gettysburg and Charlottesville

20 Aug

Long a fan of all things Lincoln, I was excited to visit Gettysburg for the first time. Stopping there on our way to tour Fallingwater, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in western Pennsylvania, my best friend and I spent two days there.

It is, indeed, an awesome, awful place. Gettysburg is a little town with a massive cemetery in the middle. Thinking souls cannot escape the heavy reverence of the place, even in the midst of school groups with young kids running and jumping around.

If you stand at Seminary Ridge, looking out at what historians have called the High Mark of the Confederacy, the Union General Meade sits astride his horse a few yards behind you looking in the same direction. Two miles away you can make out another figure on a horse facing you across the divide. It is General Lee, of course.

I don’t know who was charged with the task of placing the monuments at Gettysburg. I think I understand why he did what he did. The positioning of the monuments is certainly quite effective in demonstrating what it was like on those fateful three days. Monuments for the Confederate states are placed in a line to the right and left of Lee’s statue, all the way across the field, I suppose in an approximation of where the companies were camped. Gettysburg is a place where the monuments serve the purpose they should—to freeze the reality of a moment in our history that no one should forget.

A Southerner by both birth and choice, I was oddly uncomfortable until we had driven to the other side and stood with Lee, looking from his vantage point. I did not feel welcome on the Union side. We climbed a tower not far from the Georgia monument and gazed back across at Meade in the distance. Surveying the field from either direction, you see nothing today but a sea of grass—but you cannot escape the heaviness of 6,000 souls who died in the space of half an hour. One of them was a great-uncle of mine, buried in Ellijay in a small country churchyard.

There’s a story told that when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Grant did not take his sword, nor the side-arms of any of his officers. Celebration over victory was quelled among the Union army. Col. Chamberlain, the college professor turned Civil War volunteer who had also fought at Gettysburg—commanded his troops to stand at “carry arms” as the Confederate soldiers, some 25,000 of them, laid down their rifles. Forty years later, Chamberlain would record that tears streamed down the faces on both sides.

After Lee had returned to his troops, Grant rode out to the front lines of his former enemy to see how the laying down of arms was proceeding. Having not anticipated this, Lee had not warned his front line of such a thing, and when he heard of Grant’s approach, he jumped on his horse and galloped to meet him. There is a story that when they came up side-by-side, astride their horses, Grant tipped his hat to Lee in salute, and in unspoken acceptance of this magnanimity, Lee allegedly responded in kind.

As I stood there on the tower, I couldn’t banish the feeling that something was wrong with the picture—it rattled in my brain long after we had gone. And then it came to me. There’s a monument missing in Gettysburg. There should be a statue of two soldiers, Confederate and Union, hats off, hands extended. We memorialize the fighting, the loss, the violence, the winning and losing. We do not honor the sacrifices, whether noble or frivolous in retrospect, of the thousands who died; we do not rise up to demonstrate respect for each other’s humanity.

 

Since last week’s tragedy in Charlottesville, I’ve read a couple of articles about people “outed” as neo-Nazis, white supremacists in their hometowns—people who’ve lost their jobs, found themselves the recipients of anger from people they once counted as friends, and now, in shock, cry that their lives have been destroyed.

I wonder if it will occur to each of them that they now live what for some is an everyday experience, except that they never did anything to draw such ire except to be black or Jewish or Muslim.

I wonder if it will occur to them that even now, this painful experience of theirs doesn’t approach the horror of those who have stood shaking with terror for their lives, watching as hooded men burned crosses on their lawns, people whose families—but for our mendacity—would never have been here, would never have been torn from their families and communities, chained and dragged onto boats, sold on docks in Charleston and elsewhere like bags of meal. I wonder if it will occur to them that the experience is but the tip of the iceberg compared to the six million who less than 100 years ago were stripped of their property, branded with numbers, crammed onto trains and transported to “camps” where they would be incinerated like garbage.

I wonder if it will occur to them that even now, unlike all of those, for them there is still a fair measure of hope. They will be uncomfortable for a time, but they are free to move to another state, another place, and be safe because of their ability to blend in.

I am angry. There is a large part of me that says, “Hey, karma is hell, isn’t it?” And then I wonder what Jesus would do if he were standing here with me. And then I’m ashamed of myself because I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

He would meet them on the road and the light shining about them would be as bright as the sun, rendering them temporarily incapacitated—just as looking at the eclipse without filters tomorrow will do. He will guide them to the end of the road—not the road to Damascus but the road to Montgomery, Richmond, Gettysburg, Dachau, Auschwitz. There they would find spirits like those who met Saul—the very spirits he had persecuted, lorded over, murdered. Groups like the families of the victims of Mother Emanuel, who would care for their wounds, show them their scars, and yet murmur with great compassion, “Now you know.”

Could I do it? I don’t know. The thought makes bile rise in my throat. I must admit that it wouldn’t come easy, but I’m pretty sure that Jesus calls me to that task. And I’m also pretty sure that only that will accomplish anything of substance, of value. Neither tearing down statues nor denying the reality of the atrocities we have committed will weave us together as a people our founding fathers, endowed with feet of clay just like the rest of us, dreamed of. There will always be those who, mistreated, mistaught as children, will find nothing about themselves on which to hang their own sense of value except things that they had nothing to do with—skin color, gender, the faith traditions of their families, the patch of land where they were born.

No, the first step to healing the divide—counterintuitive as what most of Jesus’s pronouncements and actions were—is obvious. If no one else, Grant and Lee and Chamberlain understood.

When you meet humans on the street, in your car as you pass at an intersection, in the line at the grocery store, in the halls of your church or synagogue or mosque, in the library at school…regardless of their outer appearances, in honor of their pain and yours…

Tip your hat.

A New Mind in Salem

21 May

7gables-smallWhen I was in college, I sang for three or four years with a group named “A New Mind.” The name, which preceded my involvement, was taken from a line from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (12:2): “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

I loved the name of the group — both it and St. Paul’s words echoed what I believed Jesus meant when he told the Pharisee Nicodemus that we must be “born again.” I believed then, and now, that the reason Jesus chose to use the idea of birth in the statement was that he knew that to renew our minds would require the abandonment or at least suspension of everything we’ve become so sure we know — returning to a place where we view the world and each other with the eyes of innocent curiosity and loving trust, drawing wholly new conclusions. I’m reminded of a story I read on Facebook where a young boy was so excited about getting his hair cut in a buzz because he looked forward to his kindergarten teacher’s being unable to tell him and his best friend apart. Cute enough because of his excitement, the story was quite convicting when we discovered that our young boy was white and his best friend black. I hope against hope that his teacher played along with the joke.

My best friend and I recently spent some vacation time in Salem, Massachusetts. Its notoriety, of course, whether current-day citizens are happy about it or not, is that it’s the site of the 1692 witch trials. We visited a couple of museums that presented the story of how the whole idea of witches came about and the particulars of the actual trials, one of the clearly most disturbing episodes of our history. In my mind, the story is second only to the much longer period during which those of us of Anglo-Saxon ancestry diminished an entire group of humans to the level of property — all for the purpose of propping up an economy that promised to make a few opportunistic individuals incredibly wealthy. (Sounds familiar for some reason.)

As it happens, I have a tie to both — a lineage that tracks all the way back to Salem and participation in that bloody war just 150 years ago. And I descend from folks who were on the wrong side of history in both scenarios — a couple whose testimony contributed to the eventual hanging of Sarah Good, and those who fought, often with no understanding at all until much later, for the “right” to treat other human beings as a commodity.

Oddly, however, it wasn’t all the witch stuff per se that would be central to what I took away from Salem. It was the difference between the response of those Salemites and that of my other ancestors 170 years later. The survivors of the Puritan massacre, started by the ungodly mix of spoiled children and an opportunistic out-of-his-league young minister, were much quicker to see the error of their ways and the iniquity of their actions.

I imagine the fact that my own Salem ancestors soon left and their progeny gradually found their way south in the next century may have had something to do with their need to distance themselves, to forget their connection to what had taken place there. The move would certainly be consistent with the response of those Southerners who, unable to physically remove themselves, retreated instead to denial about their own inhumanity and focused instead on the perception that they were the persecuted. Distance is as distance does, I guess.

Those families who stayed in Salem, although eventually exploiting the horror for economic reasons, were forced to reflect on what could be learned and how to recognize and stop such hysterical behavior in its tracks. They’re still doing it, by the way. After 300 years, historians have finally come to some measure of agreement about the exact location in town where the accused women and men were hanged and dumped into a ditch. A new park will be constructed on “Gallows Hill” in the next year or so, designed to promote reflection.

Not so in the South, I’m afraid. Now, I heartily agree that the Confederate flag and monuments to those who used their ill-gotten gains to build schools and institutions should be removed from places central to the everyday lives of today’s inhabitants. I agree that, for a time, they should be replaced with monuments to those who did the unpopular things even when their actions ran them out of town, both literally and figuratively. Charleston, S.C.’s recent honoring of Judge Waties Waring is such an example. A native of Charleston whose ruling would set the precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. The Board of Education, he would live out his final days in New York. But as in Salem, I support the continued display of our misguided ancestors, elsewhere, in a much quieter place, an ongoing reminder of and place of reflection on what the mendacity of bearing false witness can do.

Hawthorne-smallBut back to Salem. Like many, I had frankly forgotten another of Salem’s claims to fame, someone whose statue inhabits a mall of sorts. I remembered Nathaniel Hawthorne as an author, of course, but not having re-read any of his works except The Scarlet Letter in close to 40 years, I did not recall that the actual “house of seven gables” on which his novel was based was there. I also didn’t remember until visiting Salem that one of the “hanging” judges during the witch trials was actually an ancestor of Hawthorne’s, a Judge Hathorne. (I didn’t misspell his name, by the way, nor was the change due to a misrecording. No, Nathaniel himself inserted the “w” into his name, in an overt attempt to distance himself.)

After visiting the house, which is thought to be the oldest still-standing wooden structure in New England, I decided it was high time I re-read the book, so I downloaded the e-book and started reading it on my phone that night. Within just a chapter or two, the general plot came back to me, but I so enjoy the structure of Hawthorne’s sentences, I endeavored to read it in its entirety. In a description of the daguerreotypist Hargrove, I came across one of those sentences: “As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.”

I have no idea if Nathaniel Hawthorne knew anything of Romans 12:2 or Jesus’s admonition that following in his steps required being “born again,” but I can tell you that young Mr. Hawthorne met a kindred soul in me. In the midst of our long-suspended lives, our minds need a kind of new creation, indeed.

May it be so.

Curious Connections

30 Apr

A man named Pavlov was studying the digestion of dogs when he noticed something—that one of his dogs salivated when he rang a bell. That something, when paired with philosophy, gave rise to what we now know as the field of psychology.

A man whose job had been oversight of responses to epidemics overseas noticed that neighborhood violence seemed to multiply according to the same patterns as diseases. When he suggested that similar strategies to those he’d used for a decade be applied in the neighborhood, crime dropped by 75% in six months.

A medical researcher learned about how the HIV virus took over healthy cells and wondered if a person’s T-cells could be altered in such a way that they’d attack cancer cells instead. His curiosity resulted in an experimental treatment that has now seen children with recurring leukemia go into and remain in remission.

I love stories like that. I guess I’m a reductionist of sorts because they suggest to me that everything in our universe is connected in a way we can’t even imagine, that there are only a few absolutes in our world and that if we discover them, we will have the key to solving almost anything.

Jesus was a reductionist, too, given what he said in answer to the question, “What are the greatest commandments?” St. Paul took it another step in a letter to the community of believers in Rome:

The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you love your neighbor as yourself, you will do him no harm, says Paul in the next verse. (Romans 13:9-10 NIV, my emphasis)

I remember thinking when I was a psychotherapist that my job wouldn’t exist if the church, as I understood it, did its job. What I had learned in psychology—from Maslow to Erikson, from depth psychology to object relations theory—only supported what Jesus said: 1) If we recognize that we are each loved and known by the Creator Abba, then our only response can be to treat each other as holy siblings, and 2) Love is to be offered and experienced in respectful, supportive relationships with each other.

Knowing both personally, and as a therapist, that what every one of us most longs for is to be known, to be genuinely cared about, to be completely ourselves without fear of rejection or abandonment, I saw no conflicts at all between what Jesus seems to have known about human nature and what psychological experiments and my days in the counseling chair seemed to suggest. And although it’s been years since I left the counseling profession, I still see no conflicts. In fact, the evidence has only grown, in my mind. Here’s what I mean.

About 10 years ago, I read a journal article about a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of different psychotherapy techniques. The study had looked at thousands of other studies and recorded measures of improvement based on patients’ responses to surveys. Was psychoanalysis or insight psychotherapy more effective? How about implosive therapy? Cognitive therapy? Behavior therapy? After all was said and done, none of the techniques had turned out to be better than others. In fact, there had been only one factor of significance in the improvement of clients across therapy techniques—the clients’ beliefs that their therapists had cared about them.

Then, a few years later, I happened onto an article about addiction by a young man named Johann Hari, who has since written a book called Chasing the Scream. Having grown up in a family of addicts, he’d decided to find out all he could about the subject, and what he found is that nothing we think we know about addiction is true. Stay with me, because the recent explosion in opioid addiction is related. Hari’s premise is anchored in studies in the 1970s by Dr. Bruce Alexander, professor of psychology at the University of Vancouver. Dr. Alexander had re-examined studies that still form the basis of our public policymaking with respect to addiction—studies that suggest that the key to “winning” the war on drugs is separating those who use the drugs from the drugs themselves, forcefully if necessary. Those original studies involved putting rats in cages with two bottles – one with water and one with heroin-infused water. The majority of rats quickly came to prefer the heroin-infused water to the extent that almost 100% of the rats overdosed on it and died.

What Alexander noticed was that in those studies, the rats had been placed in the cages alone, and he wondered if that had affected the results. So, he ran experiments of his own, experiments that included the same two bottles, but also a veritable amusement park for rats—with cheese and wheels and most importantly, other rats. In Alexander’s experiments, none of the rats overdosed and died. In fact, most of them lost interest in the water bottles altogether. At the time, Dr. Alexander noticed something else, too—that although 20% of U.S. Vietnam veterans had used heroin with regularity while in Southeast Asia, the majority had walked away from the stuff when they came home to people who loved them and the social connections they depended on.

Mr. Hari recorded a TED Talk about his research, and at the end of the talk, he says something rather curious: “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” Click here to watch it.

Then, just a few months ago, I listened to New York Times’ columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s book Thank You for Being Late, in which he presents his argument for why we find ourselves in the current social, cultural, and political upheaval we experience daily. Citing 1) “Moore’s law,” that technology since the mid-1960s has essentially “obsoleted” itself every two years, 2) the fact, whether man-induced or natural, that we’ve seen a trend in which every year has been warmer than the one before, and 3) rapidly-expanding globalization of the market for goods and services, Friedman argues that our biggest problem is that our ability to adapt has not kept up. He makes a good case, I think, but I wondered what he thought we could do about it. After all, thinking people know that the acceleration of change in technology, of rising temperatures and their fallout, of the globalization of markets isn’t going to stop.

I would not be disappointed. What Friedman suggested was awfully familiar. From Chapter 14:

“…I have been struck by how many of the best solutions for helping people build resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations were things you could not download but had to upload the old-fashioned way—one human to another human at a time. … How interesting was it to learn that the highest paying jobs in the future will be “STEMpathy” jobs, jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? … Whoever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? … We are the most technologically connected generation in human history and yet more people feel more isolated than ever… the connections that matter most and are in most short supply today are the human to human ones. …”

See a pattern? So do I. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Maslow said that except for physiological needs of food and shelter and safety, our need to belong, to feel we’re important to someone, is most important to our motivation to learn and grow. The most important factor in whether psychotherapy clients improve is a belief that their therapists care about them. Addiction may very well be an attempt to fulfill an instinctual need for connection. The great pathology of our lives today is isolation—just when we need each other more than ever before to survive and thrive in a world that threatens to mow us down with change.

The church of which Jesus spoke, as never before, has an awesome opportunity. The news we all need in this time of fear and anger and change is the same news we were charged with telling the world but have failed miserably to do. Will we who hear the call of the Christ to genuine, loving connection to each other finally do our job?

I hope so.

Vally

Proud to Have Marched in D.C.

24 Jan

I was—for me, as many can attest to—relatively silent about my general feelings during the run-up to the recent presidential inauguration. I started several times to blog but changed my mind, struggling to put into words the roiling of my emotions, which have ranged from peaceful observation to mourning to anger to an almost daily consideration of what I would accept in silence and what I would speak out against.

For most of my adult life, I have had no problem discerning what I saw as my responsibilities as a Christian and those as an American citizen. Fortunately, they have not often come into conflict with each other, but the course of recent events have presented many opportunities to do battle in my head over what I consider to be “right” actions and what I consider not to be. Because I am Christian first, and will always be no matter where in the world I pitch my temporary tent, the first question I ask is how, if at all, I see the thoughts and actions of Jesus applying to whatever is happening around me, and then I try to think about things the way he would and act in that way. So, when the march came up, I asked Jesus what he would do. How would it look through his eyes? What would he be looking at? And what, if anything, would he do, based on that vision?

Let me hasten to say that, in asking the question, I am not inviting you to chime in with your version of what Jesus would do because what you think Jesus wants me to do is not even remotely relevant. Nor is what Franklin Graham or Pat Roberson or Mike Huckabee or the Bishop of Western North Carolina, the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope says. I can read and think and talk for myself—I’ve never studied from other people’s notes and it has turned out well for me. If Jesus had any message to the fellow 1st-century members of his tribe, it was that they didn’t have to go to the temple and follow what the priests said about buying doves and lambs to find out from the priests what God said or wanted them to do. (As an aside, that’s why Caiaphas and his lieutenants conspired to have Jesus killed by the Romans and told lies about him, e.g., that he was engaged in a jihad against the Romans.)

For me, to “believe in Jesus” as yet another bottleneck to reach God flies in the face of that message. For me, “I am the way, the truth, the life,” Aramaic idiom that it is, means that emulating the life that he lived, assuming the mindset through which he viewed himself and those around him, and treating myself and others as he treated himself and those around him would bring me peace and set me free. Not from the experience of pain, but from ever thinking God wouldn’t love me if I didn’t follow a bunch of cockamamie rules made up by someone else.

Now, what does any of this have to do with the fact that I marched in the Women’s March on Washington this past Saturday? Well, when asked how to tell a false prophet from a true one, Jesus said to observe the fruit of his labor. And I have.

For starters, the Jesus I’ve read about and talked to and tried for most of my life to think and act like never once “grabbed a pussy” whose owner hadn’t consented for it to be grabbed. He was poor, apparently by choice, as we assume his earthly father Joseph had involved him in carpentry but he’d chosen not to stay in the family business and stiff the people who helped him build it. (He also said something about rich guys having a really hard time entering the kingdom of heaven, too, so I suspect he was avoiding the temptation of wealth.) He gave up being a homeowner in Nazareth, rode in other people’s boats, and developed a nasty habit of eating with people who might easily today wear rings in their noses and dye their hair blue or whatever styles you or I might think despicable. And, God forbid, he even ran around with people who took tax money and gave it to the government or other people and sometimes even kept it for themselves (think Matthew and Zaccheus).

He dared to intercede to keep a single pregnant woman (How exactly do you think they caught her in adultery? I doubt they blasted into another man’s compound and dragged her out of bed) from being stoned to death (the baby would have been killed too) and he dared to suggest that a Samaritan (translate Mexican or Muslim or libtard or alt-right, for our purposes) was the true neighbor in a story — not the priest or the “pure” assistant to the priest (Levite). He mocked none of the disabled he met constantly along the way. And when unjustly arrested because of the lies some of the Pharisees and Sadducees told, he didn’t “hit back harder,” and then justify his behavior with Orwellian “doublespeak.”

So, in the face of that, when I said to Jesus, “What should I do?” he said, “Stand up for love.” I asked him if he’d be there, and he said yes. For the record, he also said he had upcoming engagements in south Georgia because a big storm was coming where he would be needed, with some Syrian refugees in Turkey, in the hospital where a young couple was about to lose a pregnancy, and at a bar in Green Bay where someone was just about to bet all of his family’s rent money on a football game.

If you have a problem with that, you’ll have to take it up with Jesus.

John 21:18-22. 18 Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” 19 Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!” 20 Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?”) 21 When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?” 22 Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? …”

Vally

P.S. I can’t tell you who spoke at the march or what they said. I can’t tell you how many groups supporting god knows what there were. But I can tell you that for a few hours, I stood with the kindest, most polite, most diverse group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience and got a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

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