Prodigal Prophet

I was going to talk about the tense situation in Egypt today, but when my friend Barbara Crafton hit the internet waves with her Almost Daily eMo, I reposted her words on Facebook, and decided to go in a different direction. Her words today are too well-spoken to be responded to, added to, or otherwise messed with.

Speaking of Facebook…

I am, as I said in an earlier post, generally not one to re-post, unless I come across a wonderful YouTube video or news item or something like that. I’m a “liker” and an occasional commenter on other people’s posts.

But a week or so ago, I came across a post by one of my friends that questioned how many of our FB friends were actually people who knew us, and invited us to comment by saying where we met her and then to repost the same request, inviting others to comment on ours. A lifelong student of social psychology and marketing—which in business, is social psychology with a purpose—I did.

I expected to see a variety of responses on my and other’s posts, reminding me of the variety of places I’ve been in my life and things I’ve done that I might have forgotten. I wondered, because I have a host of high-school friends, college friends, and more recently developed friends, all neatly segregating into groups with few overlaps, who would see the post and who would take the time to respond. A market researcher to the core, I already knew some of my friends’ patterns with respect to FB—I know pretty much who gets up, pops on and then goes to work, I know who works at home and could pop up at any moment, I know who is currently unemployed and can be found on FB virtually all the time. I even know who has gotten disgusted with FB and abandoned the whole thing.

But what happened stunned me, and I was a little embarrassed—certainly humbled. Whereas I’d followed  what I’d understood “the rules” to be and posted brief comments on others’ pages like “Wesley Foundation, GSC” or “Christ Church” or some other geographic description of when and where, the timber of what I saw others write actually gave me pause.

The comments not only said when and where, but their first impressions or what they remembered of me in general—funny things, good things, things they would never have said at the time or couldn’t have. We humans are funny that way.

As I read, I remember thinking that I wished I’d known then how some of my college friends felt. (They, by the way, ended up the biggest group of responders…) Back in those days, I did far too good a job of putting up a confident facade, protecting a scared kid who never thought she was anything particularly special, a kid scared that if they only knew…they’d run the other way—a scared kid who is still alive and well in all of us.

I started that day feeling down, but by the end, I was bolstered by the warmth, the teasing, the memories. I thought about all the people I’ve short-changed—through the years and yesterday—people who could’ve used a kind word, people who don’t know how much I love them because I’m too busy or preoccupied to stop and tell them or I assume they know or I’ve decided that the fact that I love them doesn’t matter a whit. The old “you know who you are” isn’t necessarily true.

It’s the memories of time spent with friends—funny things done and said, comfort offered in times of grief, the ones who show up unexpectedly because they just “know” how something will affect you and they want to make sure you know that they know how you feel—that sustain us through hard times. Not the friends you necessarily see on FB, but you just might—the ones you somehow know you’ll see in your mind’s eye when you’re sitting in that rocking chair at 90.

You know. They’re the ones that make life worth living at all.

The link below is to a friend’s blog, a meaty offering for how to intervene (and more specifically, how not to) in that “simple” cycle of economic development I spoke of in my last blog.

Here’s that cycle again:

1.       If people have jobs, they’re making money.

2.       If people are making money and feel confident about the future, they are not draining safety-net resources—they spend it, they save it, they put it in banks, they borrow it and pay it back with interest, they give to it charitable organizations, they pay taxes on it to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.”

3.       If people spend money, well-managed honest businesses selling sought-after goods and services thrive and grow.

4.       If well-managed honest businesses thrive and grow, people have jobs.

It’s an ideal cycle, of course, which assumes two things: 1) that those who manage in business know what “well-managed” looks like in terms of the utilization of human and financial resources and the raw materials they employ and 2) that outside influences, like well-intended but tragic governmental interventions, don’t cripple those who do. Unfortunately, they are assumptions. And we know what assuming does, all too well.

The link:

http://lmma.posterous.com/stop-campaigning-and-start-governing#

Thanks, Pat. Here’s hoping they are able and that business managers today have a clue.

Theoretically, principles of a sound economy are quite simple. Simple but not easy.

1. If people have jobs, they’re making money.
2. If people are making money and feel confident about the future, they are not draining safety-net resources—they spend it, they save it, they put it in banks, they borrow it and pay it back with interest, they give to it charitable organizations, they pay taxes on it to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.”
3. If people spend money, well-managed honest businesses selling sought-after goods and services thrive and grow.
4. If well-managed honest businesses thrive and grow, people have jobs.

The only reasonable debate, in my opinion, is where in that cycle, when things have gone awry, intervention or correction should best begin. I used to think that the differences between our major political parties could be traced to that. Not anymore.

The problem is that people are involved. Terrified, scared, depressed, angry, greedy, apathetic, smug, self-righteous, arrogant, gluttonous, kind, caring, sensible, competitive, giving, God-loving, black, white, Asian, African, European, American, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindi, atheist, emotionally mature, childish, jealous, pompous, aggressive, passive, blaming, accountable, “yes, but,” “I told you so,” forgiving, humble, responsible  and sometimes, thankfully, reasonable people.

Last night, I watched part of a favorite television series that aired in the late 70’s, based on a novel written by Lillian Rogers Parks, My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House. Lillian and/or her mother Maggie worked as maids and seamstresses at the White House from 1909 until 1960, and were privy to many private thoughts of our Presidents through the years.

This collection of episodes started at Harding and ended with Calvin Coolidge. Tonight’s will pick up at Hoover and go through WWII and FDR. Coolidge, VP to the bumbling rowdy Harding who likely died from the excesses of his life and the stress of the Teapot Dome scandal, was a bright and personally frugal man who, according to Parks (at least in the TV script), elected not to run for reelection in 1928 because he could find no way through the detritus of WWI and the inflation and fraud he had inherited from his predecessors. Having lost his younger son to blood poisoning while in the White House, he was discouraged in more than one arena.

Of course, we know what happened next. Hoover took office in March of 1929, and seven months later the stock market crashed, banks failed almost unilaterally, and we were thrown into the Great Depression. It took FDR’s WPA and CCC, the galvanizing effect of another World War that lost half a million Americans, and the grace of God to put enough Americans back to work, but the economy eventually recovered. I owe my existence to that recovery, along with my 70 million boomer compatriots.

Today, I read the results of a poll from the National Association of Business Economics, conducted between the end of December and the beginning of January that finds economists more hopeful about overall economic growth, the job market and demand for companies’ products and services than they have been since the start of the Great Recession.

Are they whistling in the dark? Or are the signs, though slower than we spoiled instant-gratification-driven adolescents would hope, predictors of recovery?

Is President Obama the 21^st Century Coolidge or the counterpart to Roosevelt? A little of both or neither?

I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure. People haven’t changed. I just hope we don’t have to have another world war to get back on track.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” –Albert Einstein

Just after 9/11, a group of us were talking about our fear and the impact the event had had on our lives and an African-American gentleman in the group was strangely silent. I asked him later why he had not participated in the discussion.

A sad smile appeared on his face. “Black people in general aren’t saying much,” he said.

I realized that what he’d said was true, so I asked why, and he answered. “As a whole, we’re not afraid of what happens from outside the US. We’re more afraid of what happens from within.”

Still confused, I asked him to explain. He chuckled. “It’s obvious you’ve never had a cross burned in your front yard.”

“Oh,” I replied, finally beginning to get it. “I didn’t think about that.”

A few years later, I sat in a committee meeting where we were discussing how much to charge for an event we were having. Somebody suggested that we charge more for single tickets and less per ticket for couples. As a marketing professional, I understood the logic—it wasn’t quite “two for one” but it did seem to be an incentive. The price for two, even with the discount, was more than the price of a single ticket. As an unmarried woman who wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, though, I felt punished, and I suspected a few widows and other single friends would feel the same.

Later, when I mentioned it to the leader of the group, she said, “I’ve been married for so long, I didn’t even think about that.”

This morning, in honor of MLK, I reread the letter he wrote from the Birmingham jail. The same part always gets me, and it always will, no matter how many times I read it:

“…when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…”

I suspect at least one of the clergymen to whom he wrote the letter, one who had a little girl of his own to whom he might one day have to explain some inhumanity shown to her, read that and said to himself, “Ooh…I didn’t think about that.” At least I hope so.

“You have to be carefully taught,” says the song from the musical “South Pacific.” That’s true, in part, but there’s a lie in it, too. It implies that the teaching occurs explicitly—that everyone sets out, with malice, to teach their children that those with different skin or religious beliefs or political opinions are bad, inferior, less than.

I don’t think so. Instead, I believe we have become so self-absorbed, so closed, so focused on our own lives that we never even think about the pain we may cause others in our obliviousness. Until, that is, someone incredibly innocent, incredibly undeserving, is caught in the crossfire of blame for another’s rage, another’s fear, another’s frustration.

Perhaps it’s time we thought about that.

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.