August 17, 2005
Tarbaby
We’re fighting this war overseas, we’re told, so that we won’t have to fight it over here. Of course, it’s no longer a war, it’s a struggle, and we’re not anymore contending against terrorists, but extremists. But whatever the political two-stepping, just don’t let it get it too close to home.
One other way, of course, to do all that is to tell folk to go out and shop and leave the sacrificing to our boys (and girls) over there having the time of their lives, many for the last time. Other ways are to keep the flag-draped coffins away from the press, ignore and avoid the funerals, take long naps and vacations so to get on with your life, tell folk you think about them every day, read a book about the history of salt, and whatever else it takes to shut it all out and try to figure out a way to get unstuck from the tarbaby.
Trouble is that whatever moat one tries to build around the castle or boiling oil one pours over the walls, war by whatever name and by war’s very nature as a conflict between losers will ultimately rear its head. Sometimes it’ll even pitch a tent just on the other side of the moat.
Marie Antoinette had a similar problem and got quite annoyed about it. So, she just baked a cake. Of course, she’d have done better had she just kept her head about it all.
August 16, 2005
Ultimayhem
Just so you’ll know that I didn’t ask for it or, heaven knows, pay for it, my laptop came equipped already with a diversionary tactic whose name has a rather teleological ring, maybe even rapture to it. It’s called “Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire.” Its goofy little elfin icon is always at the ready on my desktop. So when the muse wanders off (as may be more noticeable at some times than others), I can apply my out-of-reach creative skills and double-click my old pal Ultimate.
Unfortunately, and as a something less than comforting symbol of this techie age, the game reveals one’s stats. Currently, I’ve played 629 games for a total of 48 hours — two whole days of the rest of my life! — (and that’s just since my last computer crash when the counter goes back to zero). I’ve won only 52 times, a striking record of 8.2%.
My current “streak” is four losses, my best is two consecutive wins, and my worst losing streak is 57. My quickest win was 00:04:26, and my average time is 00:04:35 which suggests that Ultimate’s stats are not all that trustworthy.
Of course, you’re right. Like our culture’s currently rampant malady, it’s all about power and addiction. I don’t really have to “play” this “game,” be assured, but I’ll be accursed if I’m going use the Twelve Steps for everything.
August 15, 2005
Forgiven
Jesus said that anybody who is forgiven little loves little (Lk 7.47b). I wish he hadn’t said that, but he did, and I’ve never been all that sure what he meant.
I wonder if he means that if you don’t make any mistakes at all, or, like some folk in high places, you can’t even remember ever making any, then of course there’s nothing to forgive or nothing you know about that needs forgiving. If that’s the case, that is, if there’s nothing to forgive, then I suppose you can’t qualify as a lover, or, as they say, even a compassionate conservative, let alone be one. Come to think about it, that explains a lot.
This gets really bothersome, though, when there’re a lot of people involved, like a corporation or a nation or an orthodox church, for example. I can’t imagine how Jesus or anybody can go about forgiving, say, an energy company or an HMO or an army of preemptive warriors. Or, for that matter, if he did know a way, then I can’t imagine the FBI, for example, loving anybody.
There’s plenty of evidence that they all make mistakes and need forgiving, but if they can’t actually love, they could maybe be instruments of justice which, it seems and as some have suggested, might be thought of as love at a social or institutional level.
Maybe if we find a way to forgive these big power houses, say, like the Supreme Court for the Dred Scott decision and for meddling in presidential elections, that is, let them off from all their debt to society, maybe then we can expect justice to abound. Lots of it. That’ll be a day.
But being in politics, and that’s what this is all about, is for some folk like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important. How can Jesus possibly forgive anything like that? I know. Don’t tell me.
August 12, 2005
EGBDF
Together with her fellow soprano Sarah, CP’s coaching the children’s “choir camp,” a four-day extravaganza in our parish this week. Some twenty members of our Angel (sic) Choir attend the late afternoon sessions learning hymns, anthems, descants, music notation, and more or less how to get along.
I was pleased to learn that their superb, patient, but demanding kappelmeister still uses Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE for teaching the treble clef like when I first took up the cornet. But I guess I never knew before that the treble clef is also called the “G clef” because the symbol at the beginning of the staff (a stylized letter “G” — so that’s where that symbol came from!?) encircles the second line of the staff. This also serves to establish the pitches of the notes placed on the lines and spaces of the staff.
Scott Peck wrote in The Road that basketball teams and jazz bands were good examples of community as he understands it. All the players have a pretty good idea of their own and their neighbor’s capacities and limits and act accordingly to accomplish a satisfactory end. He didn’t mention church choirs, but there’s always hope and no better place to start than with the angels.
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August 11, 2005
Change
Jesus’ story of the widow’s two copper coins keeps us mindful that the gospel’s Good News is not only about change, but also about small change (Mk 12.38-44).
In this story, Jesus warned about the scribes, not only because they were guilty of bad doctrine and wrong-footed politics, but because they were mean, and they were small. They trivialized their positions of respect in exchange for small favors. At a time when people needed large and noble spirits, they were petty. It remains a not uncommon phenomenon in today’s high places both in church and state.
Widows in Jesus’ time were south of anybody’s poverty line. Widows in our time, so we’re told, own a major portion of the country’s wealth. But as impressive is this coin story, it’s not about widows, it’s about giving.
Money is the eighth sacrament. It’s the lever that turns our society. That churchers are using it one more time in an attempt to control and protest is only an embarrassing symbol of how disoriented can be our stewardship and how illiterate can be our telling of the Good News.
Jesus’ widow hadn’t the foggiest whether she dropped her coins in the fountain of healing and service or down the drain of ecclesiastical arrogance and greed. But Jesus knew.
August 11, 2005
Turning
Pentecost 13/15A Mt 15.21-28
“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.”
Charlotte Whitton, one of the 20th century’s most colorful and controversial women, spoke these words. When she did, she paused and added, “Luckily, this is not all that difficult.”
Had she been alive today, she may have been thinking of Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-yr old son was killed in Baghdad, and who is now camped out on the road near a ranch over in Crawford, Texas. And she may have thought of the many women reportedly coming in from all over to join her. But she could have, as well, had in mind the Canaanite woman in this morning’s gospel.
Again and again in the saga of the Way, it is women who so often provide the major turning points. It began for us with Mary’s commitment to God’s wish even in her frightfully young life on the very edge of her womanhood. That other and later Mary exemplified for Jesus the contemplative life. The importunate widow set the pattern for spiritual endurance with the unjust judge. The Samaritan woman at the well became the first evangelist. And finally, Mary Magdalene became the apostle who gave the wake-up call to the apostles-to-become.
It has often been a bone of contention whether God — or even Jesus — ever changed his mind. I don’t know why, for even a casual reading of Scripture — both Old and New — can demonstrate that reality quite easily.
This Gentile woman with the possessed daughter should leave us with little doubt. Here she is, pleading with Jesus. She even calls him Lord and Son of David to make it altogether clear she knows to whom she is speaking. For her reward, first, she’s stonewalled with silence, then shunned by the disciples, then twice insulted by Jesus. Only then does he realize something new is afoot. Accepting it fully, he has only to recognize and affirm her faith for her child instantly to be healed.
“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” said Charlotte Whitton, “but luckily, this is not all that difficult.”
In this simple and maybe not all that uncommon encounter, there comes a major bend in the history of the gospel and of Jesus’ ministry — and, of course, in ours. His way is not only an ethnic religion’s fulfillment as Jesus may once have thought. It is far more, for it is now seen as the redemptive Good News for all people everywhere. Without this moment, one cannot even imagine such a ministry as Paul’s to the Gentiles, ironically, the Canaanite woman’s kin. And without Paul’s ministry, it would be next to impossible even to conceive of the bulk of the New Testament as we know it.
But maybe there’s at least one more equally important and vital thing especially for us.
As a child growing up in the wilds of west Texas, I remember being fascinated by and not a little confused by the term “melting pot.” It seemed somehow to be associated with people, especially with immigrants and always with the Statue of Liberty. As I look back, I had a vision of some humongous cauldron that was surely located in New York City, wherever that was. I suppose I never worried about the unbearable heat implied by such an image, rather only the intense and purposeful mixing and blending of radically different peoples that might and could and would take place there.
Now, even if I know better and have a somewhat improved appreciation for metaphor, the image is no less vivid. At its outset, this great land of ours was conceived as a vast and inclusive undertaking. And further, this remarkable political experiment and concept welcomed in its Declaration of Independence not only the audience, but also the judgment of the whole world to this daring venture as a new nation state — under God. “To prove this,” said our founding mothers and fathers, “let (the) Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
Not the least of the reasons for this unique aspiration for fundamental human inclusiveness, civility, and collegial justice and for the compensating checks and balances at its very heart is human being as the gospel conceives it. Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination that such a wild and crazy notion first caught fire in that encounter with the woman from Cana?
Of course, I do not mean even to imply that I believe this to be a Christian nation. Its frequent moral imbalance, moral complexity, and moral confusion in high places, its ambient puritan stigmata, its embarrassing and shameful treatment of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, let alone the plurality of its many religions are evidence enough never to entertain such a notion.
But it is, I believe, true that we’ve inherited a residual pattern and keenness of desire that just as in Christ, there is here, as well, “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal 3.28) in whatever figurative way we can bring that to pass.
I don’t know much if anything about Australia, but in the wake of some of our recent confusion about the sex and religion, I’m mindful of an Aussie’s comment on the internet. She said how grateful she is that in the distant past, the United Kingdom sent their prisoners to Australia and their Puritans to the USA. We might even in some strange way be grateful for that, ourselves.
August 10, 2005
Newspeak
In the novel “1984,” Newspeak is the official language devised to meet the ideological needs of the governing political system. Its purpose is not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the Party, but to make all other methods of thought ultimately impossible.
Its vocabulary is so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This is done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly through eliminating undesirable words by stripping any that remain of all unorthodox meanings whatever.
Now that this is perfectly clear, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” recently did a great piece on this change of language and pointed out how much more nuanced it is. For example, a “struggle” is much more noble than a “war.” It also cannot be won or lost, so you don’t really have to strive to bring it to an end. A struggle can go on and on and on justifying all sorts of things that a war cannot justify. And then there is “extremism,” a word so much broader than “terrorism” and permitting so many more targets.
Just as it has been said that the present Party doesn’t ever intend to lose another election, they also don’t intend to give up on fear, the best PR device they’ve ever had for gaining and holding onto power. The “global struggle against extremism” engenders fear ever so much as the “global war on terrorism,” but it is just likely to have better legs and be far more lasting.
August 10, 2005
Laurence
Laurence, the Deacon, was a third-century martyr apparently careless about his spelling and whom I remember today mostly because I use a calendar that takes note of such things and says to. The persecution that got him on August 10, 258, was aimed primarily at clergy and laity of the upper classes, the kind who in our time generally go scot-free.
Valerian, his emperor at the time, was enviously nervous over the church’s mounting wealth in real estate and other treasures. So he rounded up Pope Sixtus the Second and seven of his deacons and summarily dispatched them. Somehow, that first sweep overlooked Laurence who apparently was thought maybe to have some useful information about the begrudged resources.
When the authorities caught up with him and demanded the account numbers, Laurence, in reply, assembled the sick and the poor to whom he had distributed the Church’s funds. Then he presented them to the inquisitors and said, “These are the treasures of the Church.”
We need the saints if for no other reason than to remind us to stop goofing off.
August 8, 2005
Change
Jesus’ story of the widow’s two copper coins keeps us mindful that the gospel’s Good News is not only about change, but also about small change (Mk 12.38-44).
In this story, Jesus warned about the scribes, not only because they were guilty of bad doctrine and wrong-footed politics, but because they were mean, and they were small. They trivialized their positions of respect in exchange for small favors. At a time when people needed large and noble spirits, they were petty. It remains a not uncommon phenomenon in today’s high places both in church and state.
Widows in Jesus’ time were south of anybody’s poverty line. Widows in our time, so we’re told, own a major portion of the country’s wealth. But as impressive is this coin story, it’s not about widows, it’s about giving.
Money is the eighth sacrament. It’s the lever that turns our society. That churchers are using it one more time in an attempt to control and protest is only an embarrassing symbol of how disoriented can be our stewardship and how illiterate can be our telling of the Good News.
Jesus’ widow hadn’t the foggiest whether she dropped her coins in the fountain of healing and service or down the drain of ecclesiastical arrogance and greed. But Jesus knew.
August 6, 2005
Figures
One might say that Weight Watchers is in the transfiguration business. But so are the shape shifters in Star Trek and tragically, the suicide bombers everywhere. Depending on how you look at it, transfiguration is not all that uncommon.
What is uncommon is how you look at it. Peter, James, and John had got out of the fishing business and gone to transfiguring themselves, themselves. So much so, that they began to wonder about their compulsive career change and were getting distracted from the business at hand.
This was just one more mountain (real and parabolic) they’d had to climb with Jesus, and maybe they were getting tired of it all. No wonder they drifted off only to be awakened by a brilliance greater than left field in nighttime at Yankee Stadium. But what they saw rather made it worth the trip, Jesus passing the time with, of all people, Moses and Elijah. So they thought maybe this was it and that it would be worth their while to stick around permanently, and they suggested precisely that.
Not so. Pay attention and listen, said a James Earl Jones sound-alike. As it turned out, there was a lot more work to do back down the mountain where the world was having another of its fits and spasms and probably not its last if all the current short-memory nuclear swaggering has anything to do with it (Lk 9.28-43). Go figure.