Advice for our nation in the new year

It's not easy to read the book of the biblical prophet Zechariah during the Christmas season, but that's the choice I made. Somehow, it's felt right.

A couple of days ago, reading chapter 7, I came upon what is surely the core of God's will for God's nation, Israel, as it was rebuilding after the exile. Here it is, Zechariah 7:9-10:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: "Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another."

I hope one does not have to be "believer" to hear those words as appropriate for us as a people in these challenging times. Take some time to ponder them, and what they might mean for you as an individual and for the United States in 2022. 

Happy New Year!

This Christmas I am particularly drawn to the carol, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” It begins by picturing a “world in solemn stillness” first hearing the angels’ song. There follows the claim that the angels are still singing their song, but now to the world’s “sad and lowly plains,” deafened by its “Babel-sounds.”

The situation gets worse: “sin and strife…two thousand years of wrong…war on earth” block the song from being heard. After a plea for silence, the lyrics focus on individuals whose forms are bent low under “life’s crushing load,” who make their way through life “with painful steps and slow.”

And just at that moment, when all seems lost, the poet calls upon those weighed down by the burdens of life to look up, for hope is coming, rescue is on the way. For once, they can rest, they dare sit down at the side of the road, and listen, really listen to the song that persists in being sung, despite all.

Finally, the promise: the time of peace , seen by the prophets of every generation, is coming. It lies ahead of us all, especially ahead of those of the human family who have never known any real rest.

Now comes the punch line. When the peace of the angel song comes, “the whole world (will) give back the song, which now the angels sing.” The world will repeat, echo, respond by singing back to the heavens, “Peace on the earth, good will to all.” And, I suggest, heaven will be pleased.

The fulfillment of that promise seems far off, perhaps as far off as I’ve known it in my now fairly long lifetime. There’s little evidence the world is singing anything like the angel song these days and years. Yet the song is still out there.

Perhaps the most important thing I can do with my life now is to be sure the song I sing with my life is the song the angels sang that first Christmas and, I trust, are singing still. I need to hush the noise and strife inside of me, listen to what’s above us all, and do my best to live in response to those holy lyrics every single day.

The words are by Edmund Sears. Here they are, though slightly altered:

It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old,

from angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold:

"Peace on the earth, good will to all, from heaven’s all-gracious King.”

The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled,

and still their heavenly music floats o'er all the weary world.

Above its sad and lowly plains they bend on hovering wing,

and ever o'er its Babel-sounds the blessed angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long—

beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong.

And we at war on earth hear not the tidings that they bring.

O, hush the noise and cease the strife to hear the angels sing!

And you, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low—

who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow—

look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing.

O, rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing!

For lo, the days are hastening on, by prophets seen of old,

when, with the ever-circling years shall come the time foretold—

when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,

and the whole world give back the song, which now the angels sing.

Merry Christmas

"To apply a rule..."

“Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. -George Polya, mathematician (13 Dec 1887-1985)

This quote, from a recent A.Word.a.Day post, really hit me when I read it, and still rattles around in my head.

If a mathematician can say this, perhaps judges and others whose job it is to interpret and enforce the law, could, too. It could be a dangerous proposition…who knows what it might unleash? On the other hand, do we not get frustrated when something done “by the book” counters our deeper sense of what is right or just?

It made me think of Jesus’s attitude toward law and tradition and “the way things have always been,” which turned out to be fatally dangerous for him.

What do you think of Polya’s observation?

No Brandon on that tree

 

Let’s go, Brandon! has become a popular slogan among those who persist in believing Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, and other such foolishness. If you don’t know what it means, I’ll just say this: it’s a substitute (a “minced oath,” to use a phrase I have just learned) for as derogatory and offensive a three-word epithet as one might hurl in English against Joe Biden as a person.

Around Thanksgiving my spam filter caught an email from an outfit selling Let’s go Brandon!-inscribed Christmas tree ornaments. This “limited edition ornament is made of ceramic and makes for an excellent stocking stuffer, plus a few joyful laughs.” All that for 50% off during the “Christmas Hot Sale.” Not to mention a “30-day money back guarantee.”

To hang on your Christmas tree! That’s right, your CHRISTmas tree, as in JESUS CHRIST’s tree.

People can, and do, put decorations not having much to do with Jesus or Christmas on their trees. For years, my wife has insisted on hanging a Pittsburgh Steelers’ Franco Harris ornament on our tree. I keep peace in our household by accepting it in silence. Besides, there is the matter of that “immaculate reception,” as all Steeler fans know.

But Let’s go Brandon! on a Christmas tree first puzzles and finally angers me. It just doesn’t belong there, even as a similar obscenity about former President Trump, whether in code not, would not belong there.

There is no room on a Christmas tree for the denigration of another human being for any reason, just as there was no room in the heart of Jesus for belittling anyone.

For Christians, Christmas is about the embodiment of God in human flesh and human affairs in the particular, historic person, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’s life, values, practices, and teachings reveal what God intended for us all from the start, and intends for us still.

Although Jesus did display anger, frustration, and disappointment with many whom he encountered, whether disciples, or the curious, or even his self-identified enemies, off the top of my head, I cannot remember Jesus ever cursing another human being. A fig tree, yes. But another human being? I don’t think so.

Neither did Jesus ever seem to fear anyone. Perhaps that is why he never needed to curse them. Could it be that Let’s go Brandon! is a slogan born of fear—fear of Biden’s success, fear of our being wrong?

Practically our entire society embraces Christmas, if not for its theological meaning, then for broader goods and goals that it seems to signify. I have no problem with that. Once a year we all are invited to recognize one who models for us the kind of human being most of us know in our hearts that we should be in our living. For a brief moment we hope that we and our kindred might one day be and live that way. And when we inevitably backslide—usually before the tree comes down— the hope is remembered as it was felt just long enough to know it was there, is possible, and is worth pursuing.

To create and market a decoration for a Christmas tree that curses another human being is oxymoronic behavior. It suggests our merely political divides are so interwoven with our misappropriated religious convictions that we cannot see the humanity of a person with whom we differ. It is to deny Christ, and Christmas, too. I cannot imagine any authentic follower of Jesus putting Let’s go Brandon! on their Christmas tree, or responding to it with the “joyful laugh” its purveyors promise.

I can imagine the baby Jesus rolling over in his manger at the very idea of it.

(If you’ve ordered yours, take heart: you have 30 days to return it. But return it before it spends time on your tree, not after. That would be stealing.)

Beyond my understanding

 

I keep trying to understand—honestly—the Supreme Court declining to consider the new Texas anti-abortion law, thus allowing it to go into effect.

Far wiser and more knowledgeable people than I have weighed in on the matter. But because of the bubble I live in, I have not seen a considered and thoughtful defense of the 5-4 decision, if one is to be made. Maybe someone can help me.

In any case, I cannot understand why the Court’s majority felt it could not disallow a state’s law that does not allow the state itself to seek out and apprehend people who break that law. Instead the law calls for citizens—Texas-armed, no doubt— to sue those they believe may be breaking the law, and if they win, to get up to $10,000 from them.

That’s not too weird for five of our esteemed justices to see through, and throw out? Apparently it’s too weird to justify, and so they offer no justification. Instead, they hide behind their imposing building’s marble facade. We are increasingly governed by people who feel they are not accountable to the citizens they are supposed to be serving. (Lots of proof of that right here in Ohio.)

I guess to the Court’s majority nothing’s too weird if it promises to “stop abortions,” because when it comes to stopping abortions, anything goes—ironically in the state that strives to be at the top in terms of guns but is near bottom in terms of children’s well-being. Unborn children are worth every protection Texas law-makers can dream up, after which they become easy targets.

To keep women from making the most private of decisions regarding their personal welfare, Texas law-makers aborted a crucial norm of the rule of law in its most basic form. And five Supreme Court justices went along with them without the slightest sign of interest. I cannot understand it—honestly.

Just under 8,000 miles

The caption on the photo of our home planet at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History shocked me: The diameter of the earth is 7,917 miles. The fact was not one I’d never known, but the stark statement of it so caught my attention that afternoon that I have not been able to get it out of my mind.

Can it be? Can it really be that this earth, massive as it is to us, filled with principalities and powers and Democrats and Republicans, home to 8 billion or so of us and untold trillions of other living organisms, whirling through space in an orbit 93 million miles from its insignificant star…that this earth is under 8,000 miles “through” as the crow would fly if the crow could fly through rock, solid and molten?

7,917 miles is shorter than the distance from Washington, D.C. to Johannesburg, South Africa via jet. In 2015, we made made that trip in about 18 hours. Not long. No wonder my childhood friends and I thought it might be possible to dig a hole from Iowa to China. It’s really not all that far.

It is stunning to come to terms with the smallness of our planet.

We are terrifyingly vulnerable. And yet we treat earth and ourselves as if we are indestructible. Ego-maniac political leaders inflate their importance to cosmic dimensions; armies of tens of thousands massively kill and destroy; buildings stretch taller and cities sprawl farther; untold quantities of natural resources are consumed and their waste products dumped into the waters or pumped into the air our buried in the ground as if there’s no end to nature’s capacity to store our junk.

We ooh and aah over our achievements, inflating ourselves into thinking there’s just no stopping us, no end to our power, no limits on our ability to control the world.

Yet one errant asteroid of just enough mass could bring it all to a quick end…and should someone be watching they would probably say, Earth? Oh that…never amounted to much anyway.

Some of our ancestors had a better sense of our smallness and our vulnerability than do most of us. Not pharaohs and caesars and priests and all their kind…but poets, and prophets, and the poor. They knew their need, and they often held on to belief in something or someone bigger than the mind can fathom in order to try to make sense of the fact that we are here at all. The Jewish and Christian scriptures—the only ones I dare speak about with any authority—claim a creator God who made it all for a purpose and who will bring it all—us all—to our end.

Much of “western” humanity has given up any notion of deity, some of us by carefully thinking and working through relevant issues. Some have posited ultimate determiners other than a god or gods. But I suspect many of us moderns simply find divinities other than ones we make ourselves too damned inconvenient. They push us off our pedestals, and shove us far from being the center of things, and we don’t like that all all.

Perhaps no area of human enterprise is more prone to ignoring anything beyond itself than is politics. That’s why political power aided by religious trappings is the most dangerous of human arrogances.

Earth…not even 8,000 miles from one side to the other? It’s tiny, and we are tinier. Think about it, and pause for a moment to wonder over it…just to wonder.

Thanks to everyone who has been following my journey through and beyond left knee replacement surgery. I want to let you know that my 6-week post-op appointment with the surgeon's PA this morning was all good news. X-ray was excellent, and she was very pleased with my range of motion. Still quite a bit of swelling, perhaps persisting because I am on blood thinner, but that should be much better in two or three months. Have to keep icing and elevating knee. Hard work is the PT and home exercises, but I try to regard them as my "job" for now, so I get them done. Best of all, it feels better all the time. And, I can drive again!

I've learned a lot through this. One thing I've learned is that knee replacement surgery, while common, is not a small matter, at least for me. The combination of anesthesia, drugs, sharp pain you have to push through, trauma to the body, etc., feels as if it affected and troubled every part of my body and psyche. It's all getting better, but I wasn't really prepared for the range of feelings and unpleasantries it would visit upon me. Maybe most people don't experience it the same way. Everyone processes such life events differently. I'd be interested to know others' experiences.

Today's x-ray also showed that my right knee is not magically getting less likely to need the same surgery some day. I'll try to hold it off as long as I can, but perhaps be better prepared next time around. Until then, I will try to keep as healthy as possible. I think that's had a lot to do with my good progress.

All in all, I am one grateful person this evening. And I am grateful to no one more than to Maxine, who has been a great nurse, caregiver, comforter, and encourager. I don't know how I would have gotten this far without her!

Needing a New Knee

I need a new knee, and am about to get it.

       I have known this was coming for several years, but since spring the need has become painfully obvious. I walk a short distance and have to sit a spell to let the sharp ache subside. It’s time to do something about it, a surgery I am not excited about, but am grateful can be done.

Not getting it done would increasingly limit what I am able to do, and I guess could eventually making walking all but impossible. As it is, it tends to throw me off balance, which could lead to a fall. Not a good thing at my age.

X-rays show that both knees are “bone on bone.” The cartilage that has greased the skids between the femur and the tibia in both legs has disappeared, somewhere. But at this point, the pain is most acute in the left side so that’s where we will start. (I guess if the surgeon accidentally replaces the right knee, that will be okay, too, because one day it will come to that, should I live long enough. But to make sure he won’t do that now, he has suggested I scrawl a bold “no” on my right knee the night before the operation.)

So, this means abandoning the natural knee I was born with over 78 years ago for a knee manufactured (maybe last week?) out of inanimate materials. Living pieces of me that have always been part of me will be forcibly removed, set aside, and destroyed to be replaced by lifeless objects designed and fashioned by people I will never know and who have no idea who I am or what my life has been and still hopes to be. It’s disconcerting.

Even my surgeon will hardly know me beyond my left knee, and I certainly know little about him except that I’ve heard good reports about his work, which is all I really need to know about him anyway. Not quite the same relationship as I have with the One from whom “my frame was not hidden…when I was being made in secret”—Psalm 139:15—the One whose surgical practice is generally limited to the rib cage and heart, and who also does good work.

Then there’s the fact that I am taller than average. Having been 6’6” in my prime, my longish legs have been part of who I am to everyone who sees me, many of whom, after scanning me from head to toe, have asked if I played basketball, often expressing extreme disappointment in my answer, as if it were theirs to judge.

I’m a couple of inches shorter now, mostly a matter of my spine compressing, so my legs are probably a larger percentage of my height than when I was younger. Finding clothes and furniture that actually fit me has always been a challenge.

If my legs have been subject of more attention than many peoples’ legs are, it is not because of any beauty or muscles. It's just that Monday someone will be messing with one of them while I snooze. Hey, that’s my leg, my knee, my divinely-wrought frame!

Of course, my concerns are nothing compared to the concerns of people who must contemplate having a limb amputated…who lose a limb to illness, accident, or violence, maybe getting it replaced with a prosthesis. Mine is controlled removal and carefully planned replacement, wholly within my power to accept or decline. I have it easy, and am not looking for your sympathy.

But, if you have the time and inclination, send a good thought or prayer my way on Monday. I will be as grateful to you as I expect to be grateful to all those who are directly involved with my surgery, recovery, and care…beginning with my wonderful wife and first responder, Maxine, who may need your generous thoughts and prayers more than I do the next two or three weeks.

Talk to you when I’m awake again.

Can we help you?

A recent exchange about whether it is a Christian duty to help people who do not want to help themselves reminded me of a favorite section of Norman Maclean’s great book, A River Runs Through It.

It’s the story of a Presbyterian minister’s family in early 20th-century Montana. The minister loves fly fishing almost as much as he loves Jesus, and teaches his two sons the same love. The older, Norman, is a model eldest child, while the younger, Paul, becomes addicted to alcohol and gambling and eventually is killed in a fight. Paul is also clearly the best fisherman of the three.

Here, Norman and his father discuss Paul’s struggles, and whether and how anyone might be able to help him. Norman’s father speaks first:

“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”

I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”

He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”

“She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”

“Do you think you help him?” he asked me.

“I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don’t know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don’t even know whether he needs help. I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?”

“I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

Does the passage cast light on the question that brought it to my mind? Perhaps there’s a clue in the father’s announcement that the three of them will go fishing together the next day, to go where they are free to be most themselves. There, on that common ground/river, the would-be helpers and the one seeming to need help might find what they all really need. It’s a step they have to take, together.

+++++++

Totally unrelated post script that I just found on Wikipedia—

“The following quote from the (1992) film version of A River Runs Through It, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago’s United Center.” (It is Norman’s reflection on Paul’s expertise as a fly fisherman, I think from that day the three of them fished together.)

At that moment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. He stood before us, suspended above the earth, free from all its laws like a work of art, and I knew, just as surely and clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.

Don’t you dare stand in the middle of the road!

Liberals think problems are solved by government fixing the system.

Conservatives think problems are solved by individuals fixing themselves.

Of course, it’s not that simple. But listen to what people in both camps do not say.

Liberals rarely hold individuals responsible for how their lives are turning out. The last thing a real liberal would dare suggest is that a Black person, or a female person, or any other “category” of person had made a bad choice or chosen a wrong path. To suggest such is to call their own liberal creds into question, to risk the wrath of the left.

Conservatives, on the other hand, rarely hold that “the system” plays a role in how individuals’ lives turn out. The last thing a real conservative would dare suggest is that unregulated capitalism, or systemic racism, or any other “ism” was a factor in the lives of people who suffer or hurt or just don’t make it. To suggest such is to call their own conservative creds into question, to risk the wrath of the right.

Think it’s not that simple?

Try stepping outside your political box to suggest the other side may have a valid point or two. Or even just that some middle-of-the-road, more moderate or centrist, articulation of a problem might be the best way to begin addressing it. Try it, and then be prepared to take heat from outraged partisans from the right and the left. Be prepared to be shot down before you even start.

No wonder we cannot get along, much less craft solutions to what ails us and our beloved nation.

 

Post-pandemic reentry

Reentering public life after 15 months of quarantine is a process. It is as process we are going through, one day at a time. Each day we ask ourselves and one another what full reentry will be like. Each day gives us a new piece of an answer.

My friend, Eric—incarcerated for 28 years—often pondered his reentry into society, and prepared for it, prior to his release in January.

Astronauts, trained and practiced as they are, must nevertheless ask themselves that question as they prepare for about their high-speed, high-risk, earth-ward dive back into our planet’s atmosphere.

Everyone who has been in the thrall of this global pandemic must wonder what it will be like to reenter a world more or less safe from COVID-19. I know I am.

Will I ever be sure the pandemic is fully over? (News that some are saying we will not achieve “herd immunity” may answer that question.) When and how can I safely return to where I hope I still belong? Who will be there and how will we react to seeing one another, maskless? What structures and institutions and schedules that were the scaffolding of daily living will still stand, and will I ever again have the luxury of taking them for granted?

We may be sure things will not be as they were, or feel as they used to feel, nor will we. More than human hesitancy will make everything somehow different and our responses to it all different as well. For how long will everything seem strange—foreign even—including myself as best I know myself?

My wife and I have eaten in two restaurants since pandemic restrictions began, and have ordered out only about a dozen times. But, after a couple of early attempts at online grocery ordering, she decided the risks of in-person, early morning, grocery shopping were worth taking. We last attended a live concert in August of 2020—an outdoor event, socially-distanced, masked, etc. A couple of weeks ago, we were actually excited to walk into Target, not to casually “shop,” but for specific, planned purchases. No wandering the aisles, just looking—something I have never been very good at anyway.

Being a cautious person serves me, if no-one else, quite well. Now the challenge is not to be overly judgmental of those who more easily throw caution to the wind, even if that wind might carry a virus my way. It would best to get through this reentry together, somehow.

We are watching our daughters for clues, just as they have been watching us for the past year, albeit from a distance. Liz’s unvaccinated school-aged children are back to in-person classes, being as careful as children can be. (But when they both had the sniffles over the weekend, they had to be tested, and were back to online learning until their—thankfully—negative test results came back.) Rebecca flew to Miami Monday for her first singing gig with a non Philadelphia-based group in 14 months. Though fully vaccinated, she must now quarantine for a week. We are talking about all getting together this summer, but where and how and under what circumstances must be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, and could always change. We will not rush headlong into family reentry. We are a fairly cautious family, I guess.

We will reenter slowly because we don’t want to be like the deep-sea diver who rises to the surface too fast and gets “the bends,” or like the chunk of rock from outer space that flames out when it hits the atmosphere at many multiple times the speed of sound. We want to make it home safe, and we think we will, given enough time.

But there are unknowns out there. In the one world we all live in, no one can ignore the horrendous toll COVID is taking on far-way India or close-by Latin America. Borders are porous when it comes to diseases, and COVID’s variants scare us. We move forward, slowly.

And then there was that email from our retirement community’s Executive Director late last week telling us that four people—two residents, two staff members—recently tested positive for the virus, and that three of the four of them had been fully vaccinated.

Reentry may be tougher than we’d thought. And slower than we’d hoped. What will reentry be like? How will we know when we are there?

Friendship and the delicate business of composing a self

The following paragraph from Megan O’Grady’s essay, A Shared Devotion, speaks to me. It was published in the April 18, 2021, New York Times Style Magazine as a reflection on the magazine’s theme—how friends who are creative people (or, creative people who are friends) bonded during the pandemic.

“I’ve come to believe that friendship—not the Facebook kind, but the real kind—is a kind of romance, and that its resilience to … unadorned truths is its test of strength. (“Better to be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.) At the same time, a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self—an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice—standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity—can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you. I think of Margery William’s 1922 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a young boy’s devotion makes the titular stuffed animal believe itself to be real—despite what the rabbits in the forest, the kind that hop nimbly about on their hind legs, might say. We all know the pain of having our dreams dispelled by pedestrian day jobs, student loans, family obligations and amiable philistines. An artist’s self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, our sense of the possible ignited by those who believe in it, and in us.”

A Prayer

 Last night, as my restless mind was wrestling with one of our world's many challenges, I picked up a little book of "Prayers for Peace," and happened across the following. It is captioned, "Those who frequented the air-raid shelters in Hull, Birmingham and Westminster (England) made wide use of this prayer." It is appropriate in our own time of testing: in seeking shelter, do not forget one another.

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in calamity serve one another, in suffering tend one another, and in homelessness, loneliness or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, till the disciplines and testing of these days be ended, and Thou does give again peace in our time.

Amen.

Guns, guns, guns, I'm so sick of guns

The peace and equilibrium of my home town of Grundy Center, Iowa, were terrifyingly upset last weekend when a 41-year-old man barricaded himself in a house near the center of town and began shooting. He was finally wounded and arrested after several hours.

During the standoff, the man shot and killed Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith.

That’s a short summary of a much longer story. I am telling it because you probably didn’t hear about it. I have not seen it in any national news sources, though I am sure it has appeared somewhere.

Who cares about one fatal standoff in a small town in the heart of fly-over country when there are so many other stories of gun violence for us to follow, right up until this very morning, out of Indianapolis? Even if a law enforcement officer was tragically killed? Maybe because both the murderer and the murdered were white, just like when Black people kill Black people? Who cares?

I care. I care deeply, but I fear we are on a train no one can stop.

That train’s engineers are the gun-rights’ crowd that never saw a gun it didn’t adore and thinks everyone has a god-given right to own. Their argument is that the only way to counter the danger posed by all the guns in this country is to have more guns in this country, an argument that flies in the face of facts and common sense.

And it seems quite clear that many law enforcement officers, who should be the best-trained among us in properly handling firearms, mess up with them, too. What confidence can we have a millions of armed civilians getting it right?

The Supreme Court’s (intentional?) misinterpretation of the Second Amendment provides unlimited ammunition for the gun-defenders. Not to mention that former president who encourages them every time he can. Or too many of our representatives, whether in Iowa, or Ohio, or Washington, D.C. Who or what can stop this run-away freight?

Don’t respond by telling me that I don’t know anything about guns, because I already know that. I don’t own one, and never will.

But here’s a thing I know for sure: I felt a lot safer out in the world when there were far fewer gun-toting “patriots” around than there are now. Will I drive home after our trip to the grocery store this afternoon, or will an ambulance take my body, bullet-riddled and bloody, to the morgue? I never used to have to think about that. Now I do, at least somewhere in my subconscious. Hell, I not only felt safer, I was safer.

And we are not a better nation because of it—whether we live in Indianapolis or Minneapolis or Grundy Center.

Republican election "reform"

I have been voting for sixty years, and I am not willing to watch our free, fair, and secure election process get dismantled in pursuit of fixing a problem that does not exist.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square, an election for which there is no credible evidence of massive voter fraud or election tampering. The Republicans lost the US Senate in the same election. Republicans won many of the House seats they won, and they won or continued control of many state legislatures, through gerrymandering largely engineered by them.

Every single person who claims interest in improving our elections must be willing to publicly articulate their conviction that the ideal election system allows and encourages every single citizen to vote, and that at the same time assures our nation that our elections are as secure and trustworthy as they can be.

Every single person who works to improve our election system must publicly foreswear any partisan interest in any changes to it.

The person, whether a citizen or an official, a Republican or a Democrat and something else, who cannot state and honor those principles should get out of the way and shut up. They have no business involving themselves in this matter. None.

Our democracy is at stake, and you know it. Fight for it.

Better than planned

In the summer of 1970, I drove east from Oregon to Pennsylvania. Packed in my baggage was my absolute certainty that the next summer I would drive back to settle down in the West for the rest of my life.

I had been a Westerner for only five years—three of them as a theological student in San Anselmo, California, and two as a youth pastor in Medford, Oregon. Compared to my native Iowa— home for my first 22 years—America’s West Coast was exotic to the point of feeling forbidden, a lingering remnant of Eden. My change in geography had begun the creation of a new me.

I’d be in and out of Pittsburgh in twelve months, yet another degree packed in bags stuffed into my little brown Cougar.

In twelve months, I was driving out West again…this time to pick up the things I’d left there and bring them back East, to Pittsburgh, my new home.

Things had not worked out as planned. Partially because of my own shortcomings, getting that degree clearly would require more than a year. I had successfully completed the class work, but the dean discouraged the thesis project I proposed and I fiddled away hours buried in Hebrew Psalms. I took on a new church job in the spring, considerably sapping my waning energy for academics. My new call was fun and challenging—the scholarly work, drudgery.

I had even begun to appreciate Pittsburgh,. I had made friends, and I was discovering and enjoying southwestern Pennsylvania’s natural beauty. The changes in me kick-started by living in the West were being refined and secured in the realities of America’s rust belt.

Then, in the spring of 1973 I met my wife-to-be. In a bar.

Our meeting had been planned. Another woman I’d seen a couple of times decided I would be better suited to her college friend, Maxine. She and I had arranged to meet for a drink at a spot near Duquesne University, where Maxine was taking a graduate class. When I arrived, Maxine was in the booth with my date, whose plan turned out to work perfectly.

Maxine is a native Pittsburgher. Our courtship introduced me to more of Pittsburgh than I had yet discovered. As I fell in love with her, I fell in love with her city, experiencing it through her love for it. We married in April, 1974.

Life and call soon took us further east to the D.C. area, then back west to Illinois, and finally, in 1989, east again to suburban Cleveland. Those who know professional football will appreciate how difficult it was for Maxine to agree to call Cleveland home. But she did, and we are home here forever.

Along our way we bore and raised two precious daughters for whom northeast Ohio is home, as in, “home is where you grew up.” They have not lived here for years, and likely never will again.

We considered relocating in the West for the first year or two of our marriage. But its lure was moderated by our growing sense of satisfaction with where we were. The birth of children and a deep desire for them to be able to know their grandparents and extended families soon quelled thoughts of moving any further than we already were from our roots.

Though the years, Maxine and I have often traveled out West. We have revisited my old haunts in the Bay Area and southwest Oregon, and expanded our shared geography to include other parts of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In the 1980s we discovered the desert southwest, particularly northern New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. We will never get enough of that landscape and culture. We once talked—for about five minutes—of moving to Santa Fe.

The West remains exotic and almost forbidden. I have convinced myself that if I had moved back, I would surely have lost my fantasy of its being Eden reconstituted. Home is real, hopefully beautiful, but often disappointing, wherever it is.

Every time I revisit my personal Eden—including our Eden-in-the-desert—I remember the time I thought I could live there.

Out of Town: a two-minute scene

 Out of Town

Ralph and George, two late-middle-aged white men, meet almost daily in the same booth at the local coffee shop to catch up on each other’s activities and the news. Ralph has missed the last three mornings because he had to go “out of town.” He is already in the booth when George comes in and slides into the bench facing his.

GEORGE

Hey, Ralph…sorry I’m late. Got tied up on the phone.

RALPH

That’s okay. I just got here myself. Ordered your coffee.

GEORGE

Thanks…you came back to town just in time for some nice weather.

RALPH

Yeah…I even walked over today.

(Pause)

GEORGE

So, where ya been?

RALPH

Oh, I just had to go help Dave and Sue with some home repair projects. I tell you, these kids don’t know how to fix even the simplest things.

GEORGE

Yeah, I know. How are they? Sue’s expecting, isn’t she?

RALPH

She is. Doing great. It’ll be a boy in May.

GEORGE

A boy! Way to go, grandpa! You’ll like that role.

(Pause)

But what a screwed up world that kid’ll be born into. I am so worried about our future.

RALPH

That’s for sure. You don’t know who you can trust…especially the folks in Washington.

(Both sip coffee.)

GEORGE

Yeah, and after everything we did to get Trump re-elected, Biden and the Dems are about to take over. They’ll ruin everything. I guess Wednesday night sealed it for them. Or Thursday morning. Either way, we’re screwed.

RALPH

Sealed the steal, I’d say. Trump didn’t lose; his election was stolen. That’s for sure.

GEORGE

I guess…but you know that I’m still not sure it was. A lot of things about it are questionable, but not enough to change the outcome. Biden promised the world, and lots of folks bought it. We just have to accept what happened, go on from here, and work hard to get Trump re-elected in four years.

RALPH

Hard to wait four years when we know he won last year. Everyone knows it. Look at all the accusations of fraud and cheating. You just can’t ignore all that!

GEORGE

I’m not ignoring it. But whatever may have happened with the election, you can’t justify what happened at the capitol Wednesday afternoon. That bunch of crazies who thought they would get away with attacking it, destroying stuff, and everything. Plus threatening senators and representatives… even Pence! There have to be other ways to make things right.

RALPH

Like what, George? The swamp is so deep and so dark. We can’t trust what seems to be in plain sight. We can’t get what we need by being nice.

GEORGE

So you think storming the capitol was okay, was right? I hope not.

RALPH

Well, no…not really. But when Trump gave that speech—did you hear it?—it’s not hard to see why people got so riled up. I mean, he’s our last hope of taking America back from the libs, and we aren’t a bit ready to let them take him from us.

GEORGE

So, you do think Wednesday was okay? I know you pretty well, but you’re surprising me.

RALPH

Okay or not, folks heard about the crap coming down in the capitol, marched up right up to it, saw people breaking in to try to stop it…well, it was—it must have been—hard to stand back and watch. Too much at stake…

(Pause. Waitress stops to offer refills, but they wave her off.)

GEORGE

So, Ralph…where have you been the last three days…?

RALPH

Not in D.C., George, if that’s what you are suggesting. I wouldn’t do that. My heart was there, but I wasn’t. Call Dave and ask him…

GEORGE

I won’t call Dave. I have to believe you.

(Blackout)