In Praise of the Laud

I just finished my annual listen to Respighi's Laud to the Nativity, and I was once again moved by how authentically it retells the story of Christ's birth and conveys the emotions of the people involved. To me, it truly says it all about who he is and why he was born.

I am grateful that I was introduced to it years ago by Sandy Willette, Director of the Southern Maryland Choral Society, when we performed it. And that Mel Unger conducted it early in my days as a member of the Singers' Club of Cleveland (accompanied by some beautiful women's voices). How happy when the unplanned circumstances of our lives intersect to enrich us!

"To a guilty world you have pledged yourself not out of duty, but because such was your pleasure."

In the wake of Interior Secretary Zinke's resignation...

If the Earth were only a

few feet in diameter, floating a few

feet above a field somewhere, people

would come from everywhere to marvel at it.

People would walk around it, marveling at its big

pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing

between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps 

on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very

thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the

gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures in the water. The

people would declare it precious because it was the only one,

and they should protect it so that it would not be hurt.  The

ball  would  be  the  greatest  wonder  known,  and  people

would come to behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge,

to know beauty and to wonder how it could be. People

would love it, and defend it with their lives, because

they would somehow know that their lives,

their own roundness, could be nothing

without it. If the Earth were only a 

few feet in diameter.

I found this today while going through some old files. It dates back at least to 2001 for me, but I do not know how old it is or who authored it. It becomes more compelling with each passing day.

Risky Gifts

While the commercial world rushes recklessly toward its version of Christmas, the church’s world, when its heart is right, prepares for the more sober, reflective season of Advent, Christmas joy to follow. This approaching Advent my spirit is struck by a new-to-me Christmas poem, Francis Chesterton’s, “Here is the Little Door.” I believe it was written around the First World War, though I haven’t been able to confirm that.

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift!

We need not wander more but enter with our gift;

Our gift of finest gold,

Gold that was never bought nor sold;

Myrrh to be strewn about his bed;

Incense in clouds about his head;

All for the Child who stirs not in his sleep.

But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep.

Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift;

See how his eyes awake, lift up your hands, O lift!

For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword

(Defend with it Thy little Lord!),

For incense, smoke of battle red.

Myrrh for the honoured happy dead;

Gifts for his children terrible and sweet,

Touched by such tiny hands and 

Oh such tiny feet.

I do not pretend to understand this poem completely, which is the way of fine poetry. But I think that Chesterton is getting at the risks inherent in giving and in receiving great gifts. Are we up to handling them?

The first stanza gives voice to the Wise Men and their gifts to the infant, sleeping Jesus–gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

The second stanza places gifts in the hands of a sinister and cynical Jesus, who seems to return those gifts to "his children" in drastically altered form. Instead of gold he gives a sword; instead of sweet incense he gives the smoke of battle. And Jesus gives myrrh to anoint the bodies of “the honoured happy dead,” not his own body. That strange pairing of words suggests something “terrible and sweet.” But I am not sure: are the gifts “terrible and sweet,” or are Jesus's children, who receive those gifts, "terrible and sweet"? What has his touch made of them?

It is not hard to imagine that Chesterton, writing in a time of war, was reflecting on how easily we succumb to misusing the gifts we give and receive. Like children, we turn gifts, including the gift of faith, into reasons to compare ourselves to others, and to prove either that we are more worthy than others or that we just have not been given what we are due. We fight to keep what we have or to get what we deserve.

Blogger Charlie Warren hears the poem as a caution against the “ever-present possibility for bold faith to be used in the service of deadly hate.” His warning resonates deeply in me tonight.

Fine gifts divide us. We’d perhaps be better off if there were no such gifts given, if we were just simply free to receive the tiny touch of the humanity that is our common gift.

The community choir I am rehearsing with these days is singing Herbert Howell’s sensitive 1918 setting of Francis Chesterton’s poem. It is the musical highpoint of our concert for me, and it haunts me as Advent begins. What am I to do with the Gift that I am preparing to receive? What is the world to do with it?

A Sin Too Deep?

A couple of days ago as we drove through Zelionope PA, I noticed a sign at a car wash that warned, “Thick mud not permitted.”

Feels like a ready-made sermon illustration to me.

Adventures in Downsizing

What do I do with a career-worth of sermons?

Of course, I cannot do much about the sermons themselves, not as they were preached. They have long been absolutely free of my ability to retrieve them. Like all spoken words, once they were said they could not be taken back.

But the manuscripts and/or notes from which I spoke them are in several large cardboard file boxes stowed in our attic. Being who I am, I’ve kept them all. The earliest are from my college days (mid-1960s). The latest is from two weeks ago. All neatly stapled along with the worship bulletin for that service, which usually includes announcements about life in that congregation. In a way all of this paper is not only a record of my preaching, but of my whole ministry.

What do I do with a career, perhaps even, if I dare, a calling?

It has seemed too hard to me to simply pitch the whole lot of them. I guess I have too much invested in how I spent much of my time on this earth. But I know I will never go through them all, Sunday by Sunday, in order to learn what I can about me and my ministry from their witness. I certainly do not want anyone who survives me to have to decide what to do with them all, although it would probably be easier for them to decide to pitch them than I want to admit. And publishing some of them, as some have most graciously suggested? Nope…too much work, too little pay-off.

So I came up with a grid whereby I select four sermons from each year in an ordered yet random way, one from each quarter of each year, but from different Sundays in each quarter. That’s the best I can explain it. This method most likely leaves me with a mix of the good, the bad, and the indifferent. In order to allow myself some freedom of choice, if I see a title or topic that somehow sticks in my memory as worthy of saving, I keep that one. But then I move forward according to my pre-ordained plan.

I’ve culled my sermons through 1996, so only a couple more decades to go. A very small box holds the blessed remnant of 32 years of my pulpit wisdom. I feel good about that.

It’s been a worthwhile process so far, reminding me of many things I’d forgotten. I’ve found some memorable correspondence from folks and some interesting articles I saved filed between the manuscripts. It’s been a quick review of my career, of my calling. And in some ways going through all those boxes is clearing space in my brain and heart for the writing I am doing these days.

But I haven’t yet pitched all the manuscripts my systematic approach has determined I shall not keep. I moved them back into the attic, until… And I know all of the sermons from the 90s on are saved in my computer, so what about them? They are sadly easy to keep. And what will become of the invaluable but small box or two of the saved sermons that I will likely want to carry to smaller quarters one day? What do I really expect anyone to do with them? Who will have to decide about them if I do not?

A career-worth of sermons is no small matter to me.

For Kindness Day

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

And, BTW, I Am Not the Antichrist…

If you support President Donald J. Trump because you believe he has been ordained by God for his office, then I assume you are voting for candidates who hitch their wagons to his star. Permit me a word or two with you.

You are wrong.

Donald Trump was not ordained by God to be President of the United States. He was elected by enough citizens to win the electoral college. It’s as frustratingly simple as that.

The idea that political leaders are somehow specially sent and put in place by God was once known as “the divine right of kings.” There was a war fought in North America back in the latter part of the 18th century that many think pretty well buried that notion. The leaders of that war of revolution were convinced that political leaders served at the will of the people, not because God had designated them to lead. A person who is “godly” in some ways might well be elected and serve, and that’s okay. But he or she is not in that position because God put her or him there.

The idea is popular in some circles that Mr. Trump is a new chosen one of God destined to save the United States from something, I’m not sure from whom or from what (impoverished trekkers in Mexico perhaps). The particular God they have in mind most often sounds as if they are thinking of the Christian God. They defend Mr. Trump in terms that sound vaguely Christian. I recently saw a picture of him holding up a “Holy Bible” – that is, a Christian Bible.

How do they make this connection? Because of Mr. Trump’s exemplary personal life, a life so morally and ethically beyond the reaches of “sin” that he is a Christ-like model for the rest of us? I cannot see this as remotely close to being true of Mr. Trump and his life.

Fortunately, moral perfection is not a requirement of serving in public office. But I do think moral honesty is quite necessary. Moral honesty of the Christian sort is absent from a person who claims, as Mr. Trump has, that he is not sure he’s ever asked God for forgiveness because he’d rather just move on and make things right. That way of dealing with moral failure perhaps has merits, but it’s not particularly Christian. Besides, Mr. Trump has given us little reason to think he’s done much to “make (moral) things right” in the two years he’s been in office.

I am pretty sure that many Christians feel Mr. Trump is called by God to the office of President for two big reasons. First, that he seems to be with them on the so-called “social” issues of abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc., which they see as the main issues that define being Christian. And second, that he promises to restore the USA’s pre-eminent place among the nations, which is to them where the USA belongs because of the “exceptionalism” that has been granted us by God.

I respect other Christians’ right to understand the “social” issues in ways far different than I understand them. But as Americans together, I resist their attempts to force their particular understanding of such issues upon us all based upon their reading of our Bible. And I am deeply opposed to the idea that our nation is in any ultimate and decisive way “exceptional,” especially when that notion is used to justify militarism, racism, xenophobia, and the like.

Back to Mr. Trump himself: Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” What “fruits” has the Trump presidency produced? The Christian scripture’s fruits of love, peace, justice, patience, truth, and the like? I do not see them on his tree. Rather, I see hatred, distrust, threats…the list goes on. Currently, in his violent rhetoric against immigrants and asylum seekers, he is gleefully and disdainfully rejecting the many biblical commands to welcome the stranger. Mr. Trump did not invent the rotten fruits he is producing. But in his words (and words DO matter) and in his actions he surely has made it okay to practice them publicly.

You may be among those who like what Mr. Trump has done policy-wise, and therefore are willing to overlook the way he’s accomplished those things you like. So, the end justifies the means, is that what you are telling me? “We had to destroy the village to save it,” as they sometimes said in Vietnam? In time, wrong ways employed in the pursuit of supposedly good ends eat at the heart of a person or a nation, and can destroy both from within. When you have to tell lies to get what you want, when will the lying end?

If Donald Trump’s kind of moral and ethical output is what you like and think is good for us as a people and for the world, go ahead, support him, and vote for his defenders. You and I are still Americans together. But don’t you ever call it Christian, or pretend the results it is producing reflect the life and ministry of Jesus. You cannot get there from here. And in your heart, you know it.

Good Reasons Not to Vote

One of the truly GREAT things about America is that you do not have to vote. There are no fines, no penalties, no jail time…nothing to harm you or hold you back you if you do not vote.

In fact, it’s no shame if you do not vote. Truth is, it’s kind of cool not to vote. Like, voting is so much trouble and just shows that you are bit hung-up on doing things that take effort. That’s not cool. Old people vote, and who wants to be in that bunch? You’ve got better things to do with your life than vote, and your friends respect you for the way you live your life. Why bother to vote?

You know that in some parts of the world people are so desperate to choose their own leaders that they risk even their lives to agitate for their right to vote. Polling places themselves might be dangerous – bombs and the like. You feel kind of sorry for people who live in places like that, but it’s not your worry. You live in the good old USA, and you’ve got the right not to vote, and by golly, you are going to exercise that right!

You’ve heard that some people – mostly Republicans – are trying all kinds of tricks to make it harder for some people to vote. You do not know if they are targeting you, but you really don’t feel like finding out if they are. It doesn’t matter anyway because they’re all crooks, whatever their party. Vote the Democrats into power, they’ll pull something out of their own bag of tricks. You don’t want to be responsible for that.

What’s really the problem is that you haven’t heard of any candidates you can really get behind. You’re told this person or that person has some ideas you like, but then you don’t agree with them on one thing, so how can you be expected to know whether to vote for them? Plus there are stories about their personal lives that are kind of creepy. So long as there are no candidates who think exactly like you do, and who always are admirable in their behavior, why should any of them expect your vote? You’d rather keep yourself and your ideals far away from such imperfect people.

Besides, politics these days is all about money. And you don’t have any money, so forget voting.

So, go ahead, leave worrying about politics, and voting, to others. Someone will fix things so they’ll come out okay and you can live your life on your own terms. It’s the American way, and America is GREAT, isn’t it?

Dry truth, delicious lies

Poet Claude Wilkinson pictures a serpent whose
        ... tongue was split
with a few dry morsels of truth
and many delicious lies.

When I read those lines this morning I thought of our politics and our whole social contract. That’s what we have on our tongues, so sure of the delicious lies (or at least partial truths) that we savor that we do not taste the dry truth, or truths. So eager to believe what we want to hear that we disregard all the rest that doesn’t taste good to us. Even suppressing dry truth when we want to denigrate even the most worthy and honest of those who see things differently than we see them.

And no, it’s not Donald Trump’s fault. It is ours.

Grieving John McCain

I keep trying to wrap my head around the way many are reacting to John McCain's death.

Apparently today's far right is not willing to grieve for him at all, which underlies President Trump's flagpole insecurity. I guess the less-far right is willing to grieve for him a bit since he is a military hero and supported most of our military endeavors, as well as for other reasons.

From the other side of the aisle (as they say) the left is, as usual, torn asunder. Far, far leftists see no good in him ("war-monger," and the like). I am offended by the vitriol. Others on the left give him credit for his integrity, even when they disagreed with him.

Given our current cultural divides, none of this is surprising. Disappointing, but not surprising. We can and will politicize anything for our own purposes.

What really mystifies me is the near deification of McCain by progressives I know. It is as if they've forgotten they disagreed with him on many things because they thought he was simply wrong about them. Where is this coming from?

I fear it is John McCain's opposition to President Trump that is driving the hyperbole from progressives about him. McCain articulated a clear and principled challenge to Trump, for which he is to be honored. But to remember him with unqualified approval because of that one, admittedly important, quality mystifies me.

It is very hard to remember clearly people we've known at the time of their deaths. Our grief blocks our objectivity. I know this because I've winced at many a funeral, and likely have caused wincing in others by what I've said about the deceased.

John McCain was a man to be admired and honored for many reasons, not the least of which being that he was a man who served our country to the very best of his ability. I honor him for who he was. But I didn't vote for him.

Being a true leader John McCain could not serve everyone's interests just the way they thought they ought to be served. To truly honor him we have to come to that elusive place we call "the center" where no political stand is beyond questioning. Not enough of us are willing to go there these days.

Sneezing and Smoke

Hard-core climate change deniers must be working overtime to protect their positions in the face of the daily and abundant evidence that the predictions of climate scientists about what a changed climate will look like are coming true.

Today’s Plain Dealer reports that the date of the onset of the ragweed allergy season is advancing. We will be sneezing longer. If we lived in California, sneezing would be the least of our breathing problems. The fire season is starting earlier, lasting longer, and being more devastating. Fire and smoke are more dangerous to most folks than is pollen.

Last week I read a 2016 report called “The Rockefeller Family Fund Takes on ExxonMobil.” (Let not the irony escape us!) It is part of the Fund’s explanation of why it is divesting in the fossil fuel industry. It details how ExxonMobil has marshaled and focused its resources to influence public opinion and political players into believing that if climate change is taking place, it’s not that bad, and in any case human activity is not responsible for it.  It compares ExxonMobil’s activities to the long-successful attempts by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse effects of smoking on health.

In both cases, the deliberate confusion caused by corporations’ manipulation and denial of scientific data means death to many. Deaths by smoking will look nothing compared to what deaths by unmitigated climate change may well look like.

One of the arguments deniers mount against the massive evidence for human-caused climate change is that it is the result of a conspiracy on the part of climate scientists. One can hardly imagine tens of thousands of scientists working on every continent pulling off such a hoax. If you think it would be easy to organize such an effort, you don’t know science and you don’t know scientists.

Which is, of course, my point.

It is a major tragedy in the making that our federal government is pulling back from even the modest advances we’ve made so far in the fight against climate change. Of course, denial of science (and of truth in general) is not new to these people. How long will the American public let them determine humanity’s future?

"Ideas of value always shun verbosity"

“When the door of the steam bath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escalates through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good. Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a welter of confused thoughts to anyone it meets, as it no longer has the Holy Spirit to keep its understanding free from fantasy. Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less that the mother of the wisest thoughts.”

Those are the words of Diadochus of Photiki, one of the Church’s “Desert Fathers” of the fourth and fifth centuries, CE. Henri Nouwen quotes them in his little book, “The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry” (1981).

I recently came upon them and was startled to read them. Nouwen was concerned about the over-abundance of words in his world…in 1981! It is difficult to fathom his level of concern if he were alive in today.

As a retired preacher and amateur writer/author, words are my business. So I am mightily tempted to comment upon Diadochus, which would no doubt do little more than demonstrate that I had missed his point. 

Keep off the translator!

Forcing, or even expecting, the translator to reveal what was said at the Trump-Putin summit feels akin to blaming a messenger for the bad news he or she brings. It’s making the lowest person in the pecking order the fall guy/gal for the bad behavior of those whom they serve. I am sure President Trump would love to see the focus shift from him to someone who was just doing their job, and who, so far as anyone knows, did it the way it was supposed to be done. It is, after all, the way corporate America works, and we are eager to run this government like a business, aren’t we?

No President, beginning with this one right now, should ever be able to hold such an important meeting as that was with no one else present in the room. This is not Donald Trump’s country for him to do with as he pleases. It is OUR country, and he is there to serve ALL of US, as is everyone who works with him. His advisors should say “no” next time he tries something like the summit with Putin, and if he won’t take that advice, they should resign then and there.

Democrats and others: get ever this one. Leave the translator out of it.

Words Matter

Years ago I read a sentence that has stuck with me, as if, so it seems, to prove itself true. That sentence went something like this, “Words matter, not because of what they say, but because of what they set in motion.”

I fear for what our words–our many, many words–are setting in motion in our nation and world. Specifically, I fear for what words of hatred and distrust and division are releasing into our future. They threaten to drown out words of love, of hope, of human community. Words founded upon our fears threaten to overwhelm words grounded in hope.

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision on the administration's “ban” on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. That decision and the dissents it provoked were stated in carefully-wrought words intended to justify very different points of view on the matter.

Giving the majority the benefit of doubt, I believe it really believes that what it said faithfully interprets the Constitution and the law in the only way possible.

But I also believe the majority deliberated in a kind of vacuum. The five justices read the President’s Executive Order and the Constitution and the appropriate laws while wearing blinders and ear plugs, as if the documents exist apart from daily life and political and social realities. They did not consider what their words have already set into motion: more distrust, more despair, more injustice, more anger. “The law’s the law; it doesn’t matter when it opens the door to making things worse than they already are.”

About the same time, Representative Maxine Waters urged confronting government leaders and officials personally wherever we see them, and Representative Steven King darkly hinted that we may be looking at another civil war. Loose talk, but talk that can set into motion dire events that will lead to no good end and certainly not strengthen our democracy. 

I struggle to find words that might set good into motion, that might release the power of love and compassion and justice into the world, that might channel my outrage over this current crisis into messages that point to a better way. I am not sure I know how to do this, but somehow I must.

Suffer the little children to suffer

Our daughter told us last night about trying to explain the meaning of life to our 7-year-old granddaughter in response to a question she had asked.

My doctor this morning proudly showed me pictures of his 2-month-old grandson, happily snuggled in the arms of his loving parents (and grandfather). Years of questions to be faced!

All children are born with a basic human right to tender and responsive parental love. Sadly, not all parents are capable or available to give it. That void is never, ever the child’s fault.

But when our government denies that fundamental right to children because they belong to a class of people then the fault is only the government’s. It will have to answer in the court of human decency. 

I am ashamed of and angry about this mess foisted upon us by a dysfunctional political system and a cynical and heartless administration. Yesterday’s Executive Order does little to address the current situation, and even threatens to make it worse. We should be, we can be, we must be better than this, even while securing our borders and doing justice.

Has America grown weary of making even the feeblist attempts to do right by all people? Are we choosing to inflict suffering upon the most vulnerable because our fear of the future has overwhelmed our desire to do good? Is that what the 2016 election was really all about? Today, it surely seems so.

The Final Chapter in Clare and Lulu Myers's Family

My Aunt Marjorie died recently, thereby closing the book on my father’s nuclear family. Her passing has touched me not only because of who she was, but also for what it represents.

Clare and Lulu Myers raised their six children on a farm a couple of miles north of Beaman, in southern Grundy County, Iowa. They had been born in the 1890s, and their children were born between 1915 and 1929. My dad, Keith, was the oldest, and Marj was #4, born in 1925. There were four sons and two daughters.

All of my memories of grandparents Myers are good ones. They were hard-working, honest, caring people who were deeply involved in the life of their small community and its Methodist Church. They were remarkably aware of the world beyond their corner of it. My grandfather had a little college and I believe hoped to be a teacher, but family obligations took him back to the farm. Grandmother was an avid reader all of her life.

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine how they raised their children as successfully as they did. The decade before the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s saw the agricultural depression and droughts of the 1920s. Then came World War II. Fortunately, their farm was on some of the most productive land on earth, and their hard work as a family assured their children of food and shelter and basic clothing, if not much else. I do not remember my father ever saying they went hungry, but he often said they were poor but didn’t know it because everyone they knew was in the same boat. They would not understand being considered “privileged.” They would smile modestly if you recalled that they had “fed the world” during and after the Second World War.

Each of the six children knew traditional measures of success. They all married (only one marriage ended in divorce), they all bore children (a total of 16, 12 of whom are still living), and they all achieved the comforts and benefits of middle class American life. So far as I know none of them ever crossed the law in any but the most minor of ways. They all made their communities better places, and some made contributions that were felt beyond those communities.

Five of the six were Iowans to their deaths. Many of the next generation have also remained in Iowa, but several live out of the state. Only two of my fifteen cousins are farmers today, and both those families have supplemented their income in other careers.

My generation, transitioning into old age itself, treasures later memories of the mature Clare and Lulu Myers family. We remember family gatherings with our grandparents and their six adult children and their families. Our children only know about those if and when we tell them about them. Their children will not likely know any of their names or where and how they lived.

History tends not to take special note of families like that of Clare and Lulu Myers. For the most part they will be remembered, if they are remembered at all, as names and perhaps bland notations in old government records. But the rememberers of the memories that matter–of life and laughter and death and despair in that little farmhouse and the land around it–are now silenced. The emotions and passions that went into living in that place at that time can no be longer felt exactly as they felt them then. We have some pictures and some written first-person accounts, but no one will be able to say ever again that we were there ourselves.

They are the kind of people and families, of all classes and careers and nationalities and races, whose work and devotion made us who we are today. They made our life as a nation better than they could ever have imagined. How quickly, and how sadly, we forget and try to move on.

Honest Abe Rolls Over in His Grave

President Trump gets along well with dictators, and finds it easy to make deals with them, although it's often hard to understand what those deals are.

He does not get along well with democratically-elected leaders, and demonstrates little interest in dealing with them in any but the most superficial way.

President Trump does not understand or accept how "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" works. I fear he feels himself above democracy, including our own.

The people will pay the price.

Denying Science in the Name of Jesus

Interim Pastor Jerl Watkins of Arcadia Baptist Church in Santa Fe, Texas, customarily preaches a sermon honoring high school grads each spring (sounds like a long interim). An article posted by USA Today reports that this year he had to modify his message substantially, for obvious reasons. It would be a tough one to get right.

It also reports that Pastor Watkins always includes a denial of evolution in this annual sermon, perhaps wanting to take one last shot at putting what he thinks the Bible teaches in front of the young ones before they are set loose in the big, bad, unbelieving world. He does this, according to the report, because “as a former chemistry student, he wants future college students to know there is no scientific evidence backing evolution.” He found time to include his warning against evolution this year. “‘That’s why they call it a theory,’ Watkins said, which prompted a few of the Santa Fe congregants to yell out ‘That’s right!’ and ‘Amen.’”

There's a host of ways to counter Pastor Watkins’s words, some of them even from a religious perspective. That’s not my interest today.

What interested me today was the report that one of his young congregants hopes to become a pediatrician and another plans to study physical therapy.

Can you become either of those without having to come to terms with evolution, other than by simply denying it? And if you deny it altogether, will you be competent to serve your patients? I’d probably be okay working with an evolution-denying physical therapist, but I am not sure I’d want my grandkids to go to an evolution-denying pediatrician. At the very least, I’d wonder what else they ignored in their studies because it isn’t “in the Bible.”

About Presidential Nobel Peace Prize Awards

For the record, I do not think Donald Trump, nor any sitting American President, should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly not based upon either their rhetoric nor upon actions whose results are not yet known. I felt it was premature for Barack Obama to be awarded it, and thought he should have politely declined the offer at the time.

History has a way of producing surprises. Actions "sure to work" in a certain way frequently do not, and political leaders are pushed to respond in ways that were not in the plan. In President Trump's case, if a few years from now there is relative peace and even reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, than consider him for the Peace Prize. However, I think his use of threat of war to get there may stand in the way of serious consideration.

Then there's the matter of Aung San Suu Kyi, a caution to the Peace Prize committee, in my estimation. What things . . . and what kinds of leaders and leadership . . . make for real peace?

Lakeside Press’s Four American Books: A Tribute to my Grandfather

My maternal grandfather, James Bohaty, was the foreman in the press room that printed Lakeside Press’s Four American Books in 1930. I am grateful that I have been able to acquire them all.

James Bohaty (1892-1984) worked at R. R. Donnelley and Sons in Chicago for 46 years, from before he joined its first apprenticeship class in 1908 until he retired 46 years later. On at least three different occasions the company’s in-house publications carried articles about him: as a press room foreman in 1923; upon his retirement in 1954; and in a 1983 four-page article that was one in a series celebrating Donnelley Pioneers. That third article is entitled, James Bohaty: Dean of the Letterpress, and includes several wonderful pictures (he is the man on the left in this picture). The articles praise his excellent work, his unfailing attention to detail, and his loyalty to the company. A loving husband, father, and grandfather, he was just as committed to excellence and attentive to detail in his personal life. 

In the late 1920s Donnelley’s corporate leaders determined to publish four books that would represent the best in modern book design and production. These four books, to be published by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press, were to demonstrate that American ingenuity and artistry could mass produce books on a par with anything the best European craftsmen could produce using more traditional methods They chose four works and selected an artist to illustrate and design each book. Quoting the 1983 article, “(Donnelley’s executives) wanted to print, in limited editions, classic works by American authors. To that end, they called together the best illustrators, designers, typographers, printers and binders to meet the challenge: Produce the finest books ever done in America. Jim Bohaty’s pressroom was chosen to do the presswork.” One thousand copies of each book would eventually be published.

In addition to Four American Books my grandfather supervised the printing of some of The Lakeside Classics and of the volumes produced by Donnelley’s Holiday Press. I remember him talking with pride about printing the likes of Time and Life magazines, the World Book Encyclopedia, and even the massive Chicago telephone book and the Sears catalogue. Donnelley’s was one of the largest printers in the world at the time.

I recall some of the books on the shelves my grandparents’ living room as I was growing up. Through the decades I often scanned the shelves of rare book stores when searching for just one of the four. I never found any. But upon my mother’s death in I received her copy of Walden.

In 2017 the Cleveland Museum of Art offered an exciting exhibition of the art and culture of the the 1920s – The Jazz Age. Toward the end of our visit I remembered the Four American Books, which are products of that time, and decided to try to find the three I did not have.

Here are Lakeside Press’s Four American Books, with a few pictures of each.

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville; illustrated by Rockwell Kent: 

Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe; illustrated by W. A. Dwiggins:   

Two Years Before the Mast-A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr; illustrated by Edwin A. Wilson:   

Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau; illustrated by Rudolph Ruzicka:   

I found Moby Dick first, and not far away. I had heard of Zubal Books on Cleveland’s near West Side. I called, and was told that they had a very fine copy of Moby Dick at what my online searches told me was a fair price. We went to see it the next day. As promised, it is beautiful, likely hardly ever opened, and in its original aluminum slip case. The following day we returned to Zubal Books and purchased it.

In short order I was able to purchase Two Years Before the Mast from a dealer inGloucester City, New Jersey, and Poe’s Tales from a dealer in Mount Desert, Maine.

Whether the Four American Books realize the goal of being (at least until 1930) “the finest books ever done in America” is of course debatable. There can be little doubt that if any of them deserves that title it is Rockwell Kent’s three-volume edition of Moby Dick. It is the most dramatic of them. Its massive volumes are bound in black with silver printing. Its jet-black ink drawings practically leap off the pages. Grandpa Bohaty liked to tell us how difficult it was to get the large expanses of black printer’s ink evenly spread on the paper. The market value of the original Moby Dick is significantly greater than the market value of the other three books combined.

A small one-volume “trade edition” of Melville’s classic was soon produced to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Many, if not all of the original drawings are in it, but they lack the intensity of the originals. Fortunately, my mother’s older sister gave me her copy of the trade edition, which Kent had signed “for James Bohaty.”

Walden is often considered the best of the remaining three. Rudolf Ruzicka was a well-known illustrator and artist (and Czech, like my grandfather), and his highly-detailed woodcuts reflect the intensely personal nature of Thoreau’s thoughts. Inside the front cover of our copy of Walden Grandpa attached a note to him from Ruzicka expressing deep appreciation for the press work. It refers him a small engraving of a Hungarian town and inscribed “to James Bohaty.” It hangs in our home.

Poe’s Tales’ illustrations are dark and dramatic, befitting the horror conveyed in those stories. The intricate design of the decorations scattered throughout add a sense of the twists and turns of the Tales themselves. 

To some Wilson’s work in Two Years is the most problematical. The colorful paintings seem to reflect more the style of 1920s print advertising than of early 19th-century sea-farers. But it is the only one of the books the uses color at all, and its cover is very striking.

I cannot judge the books beyond what I’ve written, and I do not know enough about the actual printing process, either now or nearly 100 years ago, to judge the quality of the print work. I do know they are all beautiful to my eyes, and I like to think that Grandpa Bohaty may well have held their pages as his keen eye made sure that they were just exactly as they were meant to be.

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Additional information about these books is available in Claire Badaracco’s American Culture and the Marketplace: R. R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign, 1926-1930. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992.