October 17, 2006
Zing
Coming out of the navy only a few months after the incidents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki murdered thousands to set thousands more free, I began to intuit the vocational “What nows?” The answer repeatedly said, “Write.” So I became a geologist. By good fortune, I drew a graduate professor later who was not only a geologist, but also a writer. It’s a rare combination.
But it was not until some years out of seminary [I had the vocational What nows? a lot] and by even more good fortune that I came under the leadership of a bishop who was, indeed, not only a writer, but a mentor of writing. It was then that the rubber hit the road, only it was his blue pencil on my scribblings.
Where is this coming from I wonder on this fair morning? It’s coming from my sadness over learning of the death of my fellow writer Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist whom I never knew or never even read and who is light years beyond anything I’ve ever done. The paper says that she put just one too many burrs under President Vladimir Putin’s saddle and got herself shot with a pistol — in the body and then, just so there’d be no doubt, in the head. They say that’s what the cops and the criminals over there call the “controlling shot.”
Some time ago, I was asked to write a regular column for our diocesan paper. It was around the time when Barbara Harris became our church’s first woman bishop, and the baddies had immediately jumped on her case for never having finished college. I pointed out that neither had the seventh bishop of Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, the chairman of our diocesan Department of Communication fired me, said my writing lacked “zing.” Later and together with a colleague, we started our own vanity press, the Covenant Journal [a somewhat grandiose title of our alternate and occasional paper] and started looking for some zing. We found some.
The current bishop of Tennessee accused me and the Journal of being the cause of the coup d’eglise currently affecting our diocese and leading to our inability to elect his successor, what some have begun to call our “electile dysfunction.” I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that his charge made me a bit proud, even if all I did was tell folks what are the real causes, a fact the diocesan newsletter regularly overlooked.
It’s against the law in Tennessee just to out and out shoot people, though the law’s not all that often respected. The diocesan office did just happen to lose all my insurance records and subsequently terminate my coverage. Wheh asked why, it was because they “couldn’t locate me.” I’d only then been canonically resident about thirty-five years.
Dear Writer Anna, wherever you are, please forgive my pretense.