July 31, 2004

Blue MOoN

On a dare, a colleague of mine and I wrote a country music song. We called it “I Wish They Gave Green Stamps for Heartaches.” It wasn’t exactly Rodgers and Hart, but it got us accepted into a BMI amateur songwriters workshop. (What are green stamps? Ask Google.)

It’s not all that easy writing songs, but writing them under assignment is something else again. One of our tougher tasks was to write a love song without using the word “love.”

Rodgers and Hart had a similar problem when they wrote songs under contract to MGM. One melody they wrote went through at least four different titles and sets of lyrics before it got to be “Blue Moon” and become a standard in the mainstream jazz repertoire. (One of its titles, of all things, was “Prayer.”)

We get a blue moon tonight because it’s the second full one inside July’s boundaries. Full moons come every 29.5 days, so to fit two into a calendar month is not all that common. But they’re not all that blue, either. The Rodgers and Hart color was from melancholia, but the astronomic color apparently has more to do with long times than long faces.

Anyhow, even the tune confirms Julian of Norwich’s famous assurance, “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” After lots of moaning and groaning, it sings, “And then there suddenly appeared before me / the only one my arms will ever hold / I heard somebody whisper, ‘Please adore me.’ / And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold!”

Take a long look tonight, then hug somebody and quit your mooning. (Not that kind, silly!)

July 30, 2004

Storage

Pent 9.13C (Eccles 1.12ff,2.18-23; Lk 12.13-21)

A few years ago when CP and I remodeled a major part of our home, one of the things that had to go was the garage. It never was much of a garage anyway when it came to cars, but when it came to stuff and getting things out of sight and out of mind, it was a splendid example of ingenious irresponsibility

It’s now a handsome kitchen and library of which we’re also irresponsibly proud. But then, without the old garage, there was still all that stuff which it had previously contained quite handsomely.

The rich man in the parable this morning brings all this to mind. Certainly not because of his wealth, but mainly because he got rid of his surplus by building a barn, and we got rid of ours by building a shed.

He stored his plentiful crops. We stored our plentiful stuff. You know — the mower, the backhoe, the old paint cans and plant food, the Christmas tree stand, assorted old tools, and, of course, the box of my favorite rocks.

The propers this morning are altogether discomforting for pack rats. That old cynic who wrote Ecclesiastes thought everything is just blowing in the wind. But still, he’s accumulated a lot that’s very valuable to him, and he’s anguishing over whether it will be inherited by a wise person or a fool. He knows surely that it’ll be a fool and got by somebody who didn’t work for it at all, let alone work as hard as he did. I worry like that a bit. But I figure that most of my stuff will just be thrown out.

It’s not all that easy to get rid of stuff and even harder to think that somebody else might not appreciate it at all and might not want it around as much as we do. We churchers can learn a lot from that, not just about our own personal rat-packing, but about the incessant need some of us have to live in the past and to turn the church into a kind of religious and institutional warehouse with one of these pods on every corner.

All this is not to belittle the past. Far from it. John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath has a character ask an important question, “How will we know it’s us without our past?” We need to remember and to be reminded always that we are the children of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Isaac and Rebekah, and of Jacob and Leah. There is no way to live into, appreciate, and understand our Christian heritage without that past, no way to keep track of who we are. But neither is there any healthy way merely to live with it only, for to do so is to lose track of who we can become.

Paradoxically, if all we do is live in the past, there will be no past for us. It will merely turn in on itself in a kind of moebius strip of being, one of those two-dimensional bands with no beginning and no end. We’ll not be creating our past. Our past will be creating us.

Our faith tradition says of human being that we are imagined by God to be free to choose: to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Such imaginative choosing creates the past. But such choosing, as well, opens us to the future. That perceptive Roman Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister put it this way, “Nothing we do changes the past. Everything we do changes the future.”

The church will only die if, like the cynic in Ecclesiastes, it doesn’t trust the future. And like the rich man storing up his past, it will simply commit suicide from overdosing on itself. Rather must the church see in these stories today the truth also seen by the Zen poet who wrote: “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of those of old. I seek the things they sought.”

July 29, 2004

First Ladies

There in the midst of the raucous ambiance of the big political convention up in Boston this week, it suddenly appears that First Ladies may finally be becoming First Women. And it’s about time.

“Lady” — and “gentleman” — are terms presumptuous to a fault, anyway, but lady often seems especially a manipulative putdown only once removed from the vapors and the fainting couch. Maybe this apparent and refreshing change will be one more step — and a big one, at that — toward a sensible parity more consistent with this “perfect union” that our country’s supposed to be about.

For example, it’s time men quit assuming the know-it-all privilege of making all the laws and other decisions about women [and about marriage and about wars] in which women have little or no voice, but only an excessive and inordinate burden. Some want and some fear this to mean that women should become more like men, but this is to take it all in the wrong direction.

What we truly need is for men to become more like women, to join in the nourishing and the caring, the compassion and the strength that is of the essence of a vital family, of an inclusive society, and of wholesome community in general.

If we’re uncomfortable with a woman telling a nosey reporter to “shove it,” maybe we might quit talking that way ourselves or, simply, just get a life.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Mea culpa: A dear friend and professional bassist has gently informed me that the story about violinist Itzhak Perlman reported in a recent OoN, as lovely and homiletically useful as it might be, was merely an urban legend.

For another and surely more accurate perspective, please see “Three Strings and You’re Outre” at ]

July 28, 2004

Huntington

William Reed Huntington was the author of the 1886 Chicago Quadrilateral that was incorporated into Resolution 11 of the 1888 Lambeth Conference (cf BCP pp 876ff). Yesterday was his “lesser” feast. A thoughtful friend (and reader of OoN) reminded me of that and suggested that these words from Huntington’s book “The Church Idea” (1870) seem altogether relevant for today.

“If our whole ambition as Anglicans in America be to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians and to offer a refuge to people of refinement and sensibility who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere; in a word, if we care to be only a countercheck and not a force in society; then let us say as much in plain terms, and frankly renounce any and all claim to Catholicity. We have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity about us and walk quietly along in a seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb. Thus may we be a Church in name, and a sect in deed.

“But if we aim at something nobler than this, if we would have our Communion become national in truth, in other words, if we would bring the Church of Christ into the closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people, then let us press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance (which ill befits those whose best possessions have come to them by inheritance), but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.”

July 27, 2004

Music

A story is told of the violinist Itzhak Perlman playing a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. Just as he finished the first few measures of the work, one of the strings on his violin broke.

When it snapped, the sound was like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what happened. There was no mistaking that Perlman surely must replace either the string or the violin.

Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes, and signaled the conductor to begin again. Then he played with a passion and a power and a purity as never before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. But that night, Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.

When he finished, an awesome silence filled the room. Then people rose and cheered with an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. Everyone was on their feet, screaming and cheering to show how much they appreciated what he had done.

He smiled, wiped his brow, raised his bow to quiet his audience, and then said in a soft, pensive, reverent voice, “You know, sometimes it is simply the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

July 26, 2004

Imagination

If I remember correctly, our forty-first president neither knew what is a barcode nor did he like broccoli. Forty thought catsup was a vegetable. Forty-two was probably paraphrasing Hamlet when he raised questions about whether “is” is “is” or not. Forty-three reads as little as possible, all the while bragging about his “gentleman Cs.”

The 9/11 Commission went over easy on how bright are our leaders, but did stress that they missed the boat for their lack of imagination. The Commission didn’t comment on whether that might result from a preoccupation with image.

On the other hand, if We, the People, expect an imaginative leadership, we might try ourselves using more imagination, the kind our Founders had in abundance, the kind God used when she created us.

July 23, 2004

Listening

Pentecost 8/12C (Gen 18.10-53; Lk 11.1-13)

I’ve only had one for-sure audience with God that I know of. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but it was good enough for me at the time. It happened quite a while back on I40W at about 75 mph, ten mph over the speed limit.

I was praying. Suddenly, I was startled to “hear” myself say/ask, “Why you’re the very same God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!?” “One and the same,” said James Earl Jones (the voice God was using that day).

If anybody rates audience with God, it ought to be Abraham. Heaven knows what he (and Sarah) gave up to become God’s advance man (and woman) and to whelp all of us grains of sand and stars. And then there was the thing with Isaac and the ram, enough to give any kid a complex.

The propers this Sunday are anchored in Abraham and topped off in Jesus. (There’s surely no better combination available.) Abraham takes on God in the interest of Sodom and the possibility that there might be a righteous few in its generally obnoxious population — and wins. Jesus doesn’t necessarily recommend Abraham’s presumptuousness, but he does tell us how to speak to God in a manner perhaps more fitting to our place and assures us God is willing to act in response to our needs.

The beauty of these two tales is the magnificent declaration that God listens. We can intercede for others. We can intercede for ourselves. Nothing and no person is excluded from the agenda — especially not our deepest needs and longings.

God has canceled the bond against us, not for the sake of any shreds of righteousness that we might hold on to, but for the grace that makes us alive in.Christ Jesus our Lord. Pray, then, courageously. Trust the goodness of God. (But don’t presume on it. Remember Isaiah’s caveat to “seek the Lord while he wills to be found” [Is 55.6]. And for heaven’s sake, observe the speed limits.)

July 22, 2004

Magdalene

Mary Magdalene’s feast this year is stuck on a Thursday over here in the tag-end days of July. It’s almost as if the Kalendar Kids somewhere down in the distant past didn’t quite know what to do with her but only knew they couldn’t do without her.

Neither can we. The apostle to the apostles-to-become got short shrift then and has been left out of their succession ever since. Such gospel irony always exposes this kind of pretense and shows us the understated persons who appear to be less than they are.

The hero on the other hand is the larger-than-life figure who appears to be more than the human condition will bear. The apostles did great things and laid a wall-to-wall carpet on the floor of our church’s history. But their treatment of the Magdalene was not one of them.

All of Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom is like this, the paradox that the extraordinary is like the ordinary, that it is a tale told through stories of the earth and earthy people, not through grandiosity and puffery.

We’d look a long way, you and I, before finding a better emblem of a life on the Way more like our own. A life whose remembering is not mounted up and out of reach on the liturgical year’s promontories, but a life whose day is parked off in the shank of summer, a life that understood the sin, the forgiveness, the reconciliation, and the utter surprise by joy to which we all might well aspire.

July 21, 2004

Culture

Our town takes pride in its self-proclaimed moniker, Music City USA. After all, what else might you call the home of the Grand Ol’ Opry? But if you also happen to have a full-scale copy of the Parthenon in the middle of your downtown park, you might also try Athens of the South.

Country music and Greek mythology don’t always pop into one’s mind simultaneously, but when they do, we’ve got the answer. It isn’t exactly Michaelangelo, but “Musica” is our new sculpture of the muses, forty-feet tall and buck-naked, dancing in a round-a-bout down on Music Row. (The fact that we’re also sometimes known as the Buckle on the Bible Belt doesn’t exactly distract attention from the new work of art.) When negotiating that intersection, however, it’s best to be a passenger if you want to get the full, anatomically correct view.

Nevertheless and not to be daunted, one of our many resident wannabe composers has, of course, come up with just what the Chamber of Commerce feared. The latest hit (and it’s all over the internet, I’m told) is, you guessed it, “Hillbilly Porn.” The chorus — “If it makes you think dirty / go ahead and honk your horn / Oh, the mayor done bought us some hillbilly porn.”

(To hear the whole song, go to and enter keyword MUSICA. To get the whole view, y’all come visit.)

July 20, 2004

Stardust

The Establishment was (and still is, only a lot better now) a 21-piece big band in the mode of 1940s swing/jazz. The band was composed mostly of amateurs who plied other professions — law, medicine, religion, et al — hence, the name.

We played for dances, concerts, benefits, but mostly for ourselves. Any money made went for scholarships at a local university music school.

The older folk in our audiences were usually overjoyed to hear tunes from the great American Song Book. This pleased us, for it meant that our arrangements were actually recognizable. The younger folk were simply puzzled.

But some in our audiences who might have known better were not always so sophisticated as we might have wanted about the history and place of certain of the classic standards and their composers. We were playing one night for a dance at an annual convention of submarine veterans of WWII. A patron approached the bandstand and asked, “Can you guys play ‘Stardust’? You know, that tune that Willie Nelson wrote?”