My Nation’s Neuropathy

Facebook is populated by people and bots that immediately comment on every unsettling newsworthy event that they come across. More power to them, but I cannot keep up. They happen too fast for me, and I am reluctant to pass on things produced by others that I am not sure about myself. Readers do not need me to tell them about the latest horror from the universe according to Donald Trump. Even less do they need my largely second-hand opinions on those horrors. So I keep silent until something happens that pushes me over the edge.

For example, I continue to be horrified by the way our Federal government is interfering with the policing of select urban populations. Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s murders by ICE agents are particularly disgusting. Of course, moments after each happened my Facebook feed was stuffed with posts trying to tell me exactly what had happened, why it had happened, and who had been responsible. And that the victims were obviously either perfect saints or demented terrorists, and I had better know within seconds which they were.

The flurry of posts so immediately and profoundly cancelled out one another that I could only conclude that none of the posters really knew what they were talking about. Not really, whether from the President or from anyone else. By the time I figured out what I thought about Ms. Good’s death, I had been distracted into some new lunacy. It took me a lot less time to decide what I thought about Mr. Pretti’s death. Still, I had to be sure for myself.

One incontrovertible fact is that they were two American citizens, shot dead by agents of our--and their!--government. It is apparently in this government’s interest to encourage us to lose track of that fact.

It finally has occurred to me that, for me, what’s going on in our nation and world feels a lot like the neuropathy that afflicts my feet.

Neuropathy is a condition where your nerves no long react to stimuli. When my feet touch the ground—as they do most of the time I am awake—they do not send a clear message to my brain about exactly where are and what kind of ground they are on. So my brain becomes uncertain about what to do in order to keep me upright. That makes me feel unbalanced, as if I could fall over at any time. I get frightened of walking at all.

There is no cure for my neuropathy. I have to learn to live with it. A cane, sometimes a walker, helps. I also need to learn to pay closer attention to my surroundings, to focus on where I am and where I am going.

My neuropathy is called “idiopathic,” which means we do not know what caused it. It is also called “progressive,” by which the medical profession means that it will only get worse. Frankly, because I am progressive politically, I’d rather it were called regressive.

In any case, it strikes me that our nation and world are afflicted with a social neuropathy that is designed to keep us off balance and off the streets. Unlike my neuropathy, however, the cause of our neuropathy is well known. A far right-wing, undemocratic, racist, and hate-filled inflammation inflicts our body politic, and many of us—including me—are struggling to find our balance and discern a path forward, a path that we can walk.

If you think I ought to apologize for the words I just used to identify the sources of our nation's neuropathy, I will not. At one time I thought those charges too extreme, but no longer. In fact, there are others equally despicable that I could add to them, but the list is too long for good writing. Also, I am still a little bit polite.

It comes down to the fact that democracies everywhere are under relentless attacks from forces that want to remake the world it their own terrible images, reducing all but the richest and best-placed of us to peasant status. And those forces do not want us to know what is happening to us until it is too late for our democracies to regain their balance.

I have no pain associated with my neuropathy. That is fortunate for me, because many people suffer from such pain. On the other hand, I was not aware that I had neuropathy for some time, a time during which I might have fallen and hurt myself very seriously. Similarly, by focusing on immigrants and transsexuals and other vulnerable populations, while not seeming to threaten or hurt majority folks, the anti-democratic forces numb people like me to what is happening. Until it happens to me.

One of the things about neuropathy as I experience it is that a loud noise, or an unexpected flash of light, can upset my balance much worse than it would have just a few years ago. I am always on my guard lest I be taken by surprise and thrown down. There is no such thing as a relaxing walk. The only way really to relax is sit still, to stop moving, to give in to my dead nerves—to a lack of nerve, if you will.

The constant assault upon all that is good, true, and beautiful is no accident. Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during his last campaign, is, in fact, in full swing, and its noises and flashes unnerve and unsettle us moment by moment. We who believe in democracy and the intrinsic worth of every human being are constantly assaulted. It’s sensory overload.

One example: earlier this week the USA pulled out of the World Health Organization. Once that would have been big news. But now, who even noticed it? Same thing with the suggestion by the head of the Immunization Committee that polio and measles vaccinations might not need to be required. Ten years ago, that would have gotten a lot of attention. But not now.

Consider the annual meeting of rich nations and people in Davos, Switzerland. They call it the World Economic Forum, which it could only be if poor folks and nations were represented there as equals, which they are not, so the Forum is not for or about the world.

President Trump gave a speech at Davos, a brief part I accidentally heard. He was bragging about how rich he was and how rich he was making everyone listening to him, especially Tim Cooke, and that good times were ahead for everyone who did as he directed. The NY Times reported that although political leaders received his remarks coolly, the “financial titans” there gave him a warm welcome.

Well, duh.

For one thing, and based solely on that snippet of Mr. Trump’s speech, it’s hard to believe that anyone could still confuse him with Jesus. Jesus had virtually nothing good to say about worldly wealth or its pursuit. But some professed followers of Jesus still confuse the two men, a sure sign of how off-balance they are.

The larger point is that a world forum about economies should ponder what will make all of us at least well enough off the claim life’s basic necessities. Instead, rich folks are considering how to feather their own yachts (excuse the mixed metaphor) even more luxuriously. I am certain they enjoyed their flights back home on their private jets.

So how do we regain our sense of stability in order to move ahead?

One way is through solidarity with others. I get a sense of such solidarity in the diverse church where we worship and sing. I am with people who are not just like me, and the D.E.I. of the congregation is filled with joy. We hear good news, and resolve to live as people who bear good news for everyone.

Another thing Americans can do is to hang on tight to our founding documents and vision. Here I take issue with some of my progressive fellow-travelers. I believe that many of us have grown so accustomed to listening to and affirming fact-based critiques of these United States that we didn’t realize when being critical became an unexamined habit. We would rather hear negative assessments of our nation than positive ones because they confirm our assumption that we aren’t there yet, wherever “there” is, and never will be. I note that Martin Luther King, Jr. often held up the ideals of America while condemning our failure to live up to them, angering people on all sides of the political spectrum.

(Since I drafted this essay, the Trump administration has removed sign boards about slavery from Independence Mall in Philadelphia. It also wants us to suffer from national amnesia.)

I think we need to speak up. I considered writing a blog last week about the President’s obsession with owning Greenland (and he is obsessed because he thinks if the US owns Greenland, he himself owns Greenland!), but I decided to shoot off quick notes to my Republican representatives in Congress. Only one has replied to me so far, perhaps because deep in their hearts (I dare hope) they know how dangerous and crazy Mr. Trump is about Greenland and don’t know what to say so they say nothing. Oh well, no matter, it’s all fixed now. Because of tariffs. Or not. Who knows?

See what I mean about not being able to maintain balance and keep upright?

We also need to identify clearly the real players in this whole mess, most of whom were not elected by us. For example, presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who believes only in brute, amoral, power, and who uses it. And then there’s our Supine Court, victim of convenient legal theories that take no account of real people and how we live in the real world in 2026. And a silent Congress, endlessly intent on proving that January 6, 2021, was just another day of  shuffling tourists in the U.S Capitol. Trump might go out of office, but the just-behind-the-scenes actors would likely still there, pulling the strings. I doubt a President Vance would get rid of any of them.

What else can we do? I haven’t mentioned reaching across the barriers that divide us in order to seek the elusive common ground. In theory, that’s where we need to go and what we need to do. But I am not sure how productive a conversation I could have with someone who still thinks Biden did not fairly win the 2020 election, or that keeping us constantly off our balance is not an intentional priority of the second Trump administration.

The far right wants us to descend into utter chaos so the few can take over and make the rest of us what it wants us to be. (Far left regimes often use the same tactic.) Always for our own good, of course. It’s as if the nurses on the ward want their patients to become so dependent upon them that the patients no longer feel any desire to make any decisions about their own well-being. Recall “Big Nurse” in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Another essay?)

So, I think that “we, the people” are dangerously off-balance, and that such is what our current leadership needs us to be. It wants us not to feel where we are, in case we’d begin to regain our equilibrium and get back on track toward becoming a nation where all are created and created to be equal. Until then, our nation and our democracy are at grave risk of falling flat on our faces.

And getting shot in the back.

More Sermons Than Anyone Could Possibly Want

For many, a single sermon is one sermon too many. For me, two thousand sermons were two thousand too many.

I figure that, roughly, I preached approximately two thousand sermons in my ministerial career. I almost always preached from a manuscript—typed or word-processed—and I kept a copy of each one of those sermons. Too lazy to count them all, I used gross arithmetic calculations to come up with two thousand of them.

They were stored in a dozen or so cardboard file (“banker’s”) boxes in our attic in Orange Village. Sweltering in summer’s heat and frozen by winter’s cold, through our family’s happy times and sad, above our heads and looming over us were scores of my sermon manuscripts. They began in my college days when I thought I was up to the task of preaching, and ended well into my retirement days when I was no longer sure I had ever been up to it. Preaching the word of GOD! is awesome business, as awesome as God.

I had kept them all, (1) because I thought I might preach some of them a second or third or more times; and (2) because I thought I’d re-read them one day to see how I’d grown (or not) in my preaching skills; and (3) because I thought my daughters might want them and be deeply disappointed if dear old dad denied them their gift.

But I over the years realized that that, (1) I always found it more difficult and less satisfying to rework old sermons than to create new ones; and (2) that I never found time to review my preaching career; and (3) that my heirs were doing much more productive things with their lives than reading Dad’s sermons.

As we were beginning to downsize for our move to Breckenridge, I came up with a scheme to cut down the number of sermons—a scheme that would result in a random selection of four from each year, one from each quarter of each year. I wanted to include samples from all seasons of the church year, without regard to any particular sermon’s merits or lack thereof. This numerical scheme saved me from having to read them, which I now knew I would never do. I ended up with two boxes of sermon manuscripts, and threw the rest away.

Honesty compels this caveat: all of my sermons from 1998 on are stored in “the cloud.” But they are not as real to me as their printouts stored in cardboard.

Those two boxes now sit in a closet in our garage, patiently awaiting my return to them. They are surrounded by several more boxes of things I’ve hardly touched in six years, but which, when we moved, I was sure I’d get to, some day.

The question for all who are winding up their lives is why do we keep all that stuff? Once we are gone, why will it all be to anyone else other than something they have to make a decision about—a decision we should have, and could have, made ourselves?

But the thing about my sermons that makes them so hard for me to give up entirely is that they are from me, of me, and in some ways, me! They represent a calling that I gave the best of myself to for some five decades. They are about how I celebrated that calling and how I struggled with it and how I invited those who heard me to consider it the calling to follow Jesus themselves.

Sermons, of course, are not be be about the sermonizer, but about God and Jesus and love and trust and ethics…about things that are bigger than and in fact beyond the ability of the preacher to fully comprehend or live up to. But they are also about the preacher because they come from the mix of those big things and the time and space-bound orator who dares, Sunday after Sunday, to stand behind a pulpit and open their mouth.

No wonder I have held on to at least a few of them; they are my Icarus-like attempt to fly on melting wings.

Honoring Martyrs in the Service of Love and Peace

Our choir sang these words for our diverse congregation this morning; then everyone sang "Dona Nobis Pacem." This is the music of the way of living together that Jesus announced and commends to all.

Though I may speak with bravest fire,
and have the gift to all inspire,
and have not love my words are vain
as sounding brass, and hopeless gain.

Though I may give all I possess,
and striving so my heart profess,
but not be given by love within,
the profit soon turns strangely thin.

Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control;
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed;
by this we worship and are freed.

A Reflection on Real Power

 “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

It would be a wonderful thing if, this weekend, every preacher/speaker/leader of a worshiping community addressed this comment. It was uttered by Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump, in response to questions from CNN anchor Jake Tapper about the United States’s designs on Greenland.

It is possible to understand Miller’s contention as actually true. If, as I learned in school, power is “the ability to get things done,” then it seems self-evident that greater strength, force, and power will eventually win out over lesser manifestations of the same, if that greater power is able to sustain itself indefinitely.

But I suspect, given the context and the behavior of this administration, Miller was talking about little more than economic and military power, the only power our country now seems to understand and is willing to wield.

The reason I’d like to hear religious leaders speak to this statement is that it is a good springboard for considering the kinds of power most faiths espouse: the power of law, of love, of justice, of righteousness, of…yes…God. Is power an end or a thing in itself, answerable only to its own will?

I believe that the power of God to destroy is constrained by the power of God to love. God could wipe us all out, but doesn’t because God loves us. The creator God’s annihilating power is both seen in and kept in check by God’s love.

Law is an important component of many faith traditions. Law allows us to live together in ordered societies by placing guardrails around our individual and group behaviors. What and where those guardrails are can be endlessly debated, but rare is the religion that does not include expectations of behavior consistent with its beliefs.

Power alone does not define correct behavior. I am quite sure that that truth is not much emphasized in the rush to train I.C.E and the other militaristic enforcers of this administration’s policies. And just because we have the power to spirit away the leader of another country does not mean that we have done right. Nor do guns give cops or criminals the right to kill.

The ultimate test of power is what it wants to get done, and how.

You do not have to be religious to challenge Mr. Miller’s statement. But you should, it seems to be, have some sense of social responsibility and contract. The framers of our constitution believed that giving unrestrained power to any one person, or collection of persons, was dangerous. Unconstrained power, even in what seem to be “right” hands, can easily become authoritarian dominance over persons or groups not in its favor.

If the United States can “take” Greenland simply because it has the military and economic power to do so, then the world is at the mercy of armies and wealth. “Dog eat dog” guides our living, and before long only the biggest dogs will be left. They will, of course, then turn on each other, until only one dog is left…to die, because there’s nothing more to be consumed.

For Christians who are mindful of the church calendar and who use the lectionary, the January 11 readings can be powerful counter texts to Mr. Miller’s view of reality. Justice and righteousness play significant roles in them all. They force us to acknowledge that the power followers of Jesus are to pray and work for is the power to create just societies built upon right relationships among all constituents. Only such societies can rightly claim to be “great.”

For good reason, Christians unceasingly pray to God, “your kingdom come, your will be done” and “yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

My Family, Music, and Christmas, 2025

 

Christmas is not Christmas without its music. The community choral group in which my wife and I sing presented its annual Christmas/holiday concert a couple of weeks ago. And we both sing in our church’s choir, which draws extra duty every Advent and Christmas season.

But as Advent wound its way toward Christmas, 2025, I had the unique opportunity to witness two family members of different generations express Christmas through music.

We heard daughter Rebecca as one of three soprano soloists in multiple performances of choral music by German composer Michael Praetorius (1571-1621), and entitled “Praetorius Christmas Vespers.” Jeannette Sorrell, the artistic director of Apollo’s Fire, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, had created the Vespers from a number of Praetorius’s works for the season. Rebecca is a professional singer, and she performed beautifully, as did the entire ensemble. The performance was in Cleveland’s magnificent Trinity Cathedral. As we walked back out into the world that night, I felt I had just heard all of the Advent and Christmas music I needed for this year; that anything more would be superfluous.

And we watched granddaughter Keira dance the challenging “Dance of the Reed Flutes” in the annual Nutcracker performance by the Fokine Ballet Company of Oneonta, New York. Under the direction of Donna Decker, this company of children and youth students (supplemented by professionals from the Dance Theater of Harlem in key roles) presents a complex performance with remarkable skill. Ninth-grader Keira tackled her 2 1/2 minutes alone on the big stage with a focused commitment, and danced beautifully.

It was deeply gratifying to witness these two engaging with music. Rebecca has been at it for years, building upon singing before she could speak words. She has accomplished far more than her mother and I ever dared dream. Keira is still near the beginning of what could be a career in ballet, but at this point there is no predicting where she will find purpose in her life. One thing for sure: she will never forget all it takes to make a dance come to life.

As a father and grandfather, I have had a good seat from which to watch Rebecca and Keira nurse and nurture their artistic gifts into artistic accomplishment. I have not witnessed the hours of study and lessons and practicing that their achievements have required, but I have heard the trials and triumphs of learning an art, and seen exceptional results. Inborn talent is one thing; developing that talent into artistic success requires just plain hard work.

Given their parents’ and grandparents’ interests, it is not surprising that Rebecca and Keira have chosen to pursue arts that are outside the popular mainstream. Michael Praetorius and The Nutcracker belong in the realm of classical music, hardly known to most Americans, if known at all. But that is where we are.

Now, allow me an abrupt detour to the gospel of Luke, the first couple of chapters of which are better known. I do not know how the writer of Luke felt about “the arts,” but they certainly seem to have known the value of song, poetry, and drama when they fashioned their book’s birth narratives. Luke’s telling of the birth of Jesus exists in that place in art where things become true whether or not they happened just that way. They are true because of what is universal in them—their joys and their fears, their hopes and their tears. Luke’s telling of Jesus’s birth touches the heart as Christmas Vespers and The Nutcracker do, whether that heart is fully formed or still in training.

To witness our daughter and granddaughter working so hard and accomplishing so much in pursuit of their arts’ truth have made my heart sing this December. They and their colleagues have elevated my celebration of Christmas—both religious and secular—in ways I do not fully understand, but which are true. I am overwhelmed with humble, grateful awe.

Healing Web

364 days after our first appointment, my dermatology specialist pronounced me clear of psoriasis symptoms. I could finally end my twice-weekly phototherapy sessions.

I had first met with her a couple of months after my regular dermatologist had started treating me for the bright red scaly spots that were taking over large areas of my skin.

I am grateful to them both—to the first for referring me to the specialist, and to the specialist for what finally worked. This essay is about gratitude.

But first: “healing” is probably too strong a word for where I am right now in relation to psoriasis. Psoriasis is an auto-immune disease in which the body’s immune system, thinking there’s a threat to the skin, attacks the skin. The triggers for auto-immune diseases, as I understand them, can lurk in our bodies long after discernible symptoms disappear, waiting for the next opportunity to assert themselves.

Plus, although I am done with phototherapy for now, I am still injecting my thigh with a biologic medication every twelve weeks. It got at or near the source of the psoriasis, and the creams and ointments and phototherapy treated the symptoms, visible and itchy on my legs, torso, and arms. The injections, the substances that I (and my wife) applied to my skin, and the light box I am where I am today.

Fortunately, the rash never erupted on my face or hands, so most people did not know about my psoriasis unless I told them. That made for a slight credibility problem when I had to schedule appointments around the frequent phototherapy sessions. I did not wear shorts while we were on a Caribbean cruise last February for fear I’d be regarded as one who had broken out of a leper colony. Fortunately by summer’s hottest days, the spots were faint enough that I no longer had that worry.

The prompt for this piece springs from my ruminating on the question, Insofar as I have been healed of psoriasis, to whom or what do I owe thanks?

As a Christian believer, I reflexively begin with thanks to God. But even as I write those words, I want readers to know that I write them with a palpable sense of mystery, and no sense of personal pride or superiority. I thank God for my good outcome because I believe that, despite the theological tension between the notion of a good supreme being and the reality of evil in the world, God is ultimately the source of healing. That’s a statement of faith. I can do little more than just put it out there. And I trust I would say it even if my psoriasis not gone away.

So having thanked God, I must say more. I have experienced freedom from this ailment because I am inextricably part of a web of life that sometimes brings me good and other times brings me ill, over which I have little control and to which I can only give witness.

I am grateful to two fine, caring, persistent, and completely professional doctors, who did did not come out of nowhere. They are products of fine educations that drew upon generations of attempts to heal psoriasis as well as upon the latest medical discoveries and technologies.

One of those two partners with another dermatologist in a small, independent practice; the other works in the immense Cleveland Clinic complex. Both are backed up by and tied into offices and labs far beyond the tiny exam rooms in which I saw them. Both had access to treatments that are the result of years of research in governmental and private institutions and clinics, research conducted by people who would not give up on any even slightly-promising avenue of study until they had wholly exhausted its possibilities.

Push it even further back: what natural substances went into the products that were finally developed so they could help me? Who found them and recognized some medical or other possibility within them through basic research justified only be, “because it’s there”? Who knew what might come to be out of someone’s mere curiosity?

I am grateful that my phototherapy treatments were available a ten-minute drive from home, and that I did not have to schedule them around work. Shockingly, the phototherapy appointments have to be scheduled during daytime, Monday through Friday. What does the average working person with psoriasis do?

One more thing for which I give thanks: I could afford the therapies I was offered. Not that I could pay for them all myself—hardly! This was a costly bout with illness. Some of the medicines I’ve used are by far the most expensive that have ever entered my body. (One costly lotion was actually made in India.)

Crucially, I have good health insurance because generations of Presbyterians have, through our Board of Pensions, made affordable, comprehensive insurance available to me, as part of a generous pension plan. And honesty compels me to write that family inheritances helped make it easier to pay what I had to pay.

I could go on, but I think my point is clear: I did not get through psoriasis on my own power. The thanks that I offer to God does not blind me to the reality of the web of nature and humanity that made restored health possible. I have been able to welcome my reprieve from psoriasis because I am part of a universal network that I did not create nor can fully understand. I certainly cannot claim any such healing as “my right,” as if other human beings do not have exactly the same right, as if I somehow earned it, or as if I am owed it.

The fantasy of being self-made—or even of being dependent upon few beyond immediate family and friends—is a fantasy because in this world no one, no nation, no culture can go it alone and survive in other than the most basic of ways.

Bound together as we are on a web we share with untold numbers of other animate beings, everything we say and do benefits or harms the web and those on it with us. So long as we live, we cannot escape where we are. Never knowing this web’s outer limits, we must make the moves we make on it with caution and all the wisdom nature and nature’s God give to us. And never forget to be thankful.

Cruel, Uncalled-for, and Un-Christian

 

This headline is so creepy that it makes my skin crawl. Our president and his administration not only deny food to the hungry but also take aim at states that try to respond to their needs. This is one more cruel, uncalled-for, and (for those who claim Trump is some kind of a latter-day Jesus) un-Christian action on the part of the Trump administration.

Meantime, the same administration is looking for every way it can to enable wealthy individuals and corporations get even richer. (Which Jesus do they cite for that?) And the President is busy managing the White House ballroom’s construction and welcoming rich syncopates to a tawdry Halloween party at Mar-a-Largo. Gives new meaning to “fiddling while Rome burns.”

If President Trump is going to deny supporting anyone financially during this shut-down, it ought to stop paying congress. On top of that, it should fine the House Republicans for failing to show up at work for weeks, with a double fine imposed upon Mike Johnson. It would be a sweet violence, rightly-earned.

The violence that’s been visited upon immigrant-appearing populations is now being visited upon the most vulnerable Americans. If we think that’s as far as the violence against our own people will go, we are fooling only ourselves. Next thing we know, it will be our turn, if we dare share a contrary opinion at all.

It is—every bit of it—cruel, uncalled-for, and un-Christian.