The power behind the church's mission

This one's for my more religious-type friends.

One of the joys (and frustrations) of worshipping in a church tradition different from your own is that the hymns are hardly ever quite the same. Today at Christ Episcopal Church we sang Rusty Edwards', "We All Are One in Mission." I've sung it dozens of times in Presbyterian settings, but this was the first time I sang this stanza:

We all behold one vision,
A stark reality:
The steward of salvation
Was nailed upon a tree.
Yet resurrected Justice
Gives rise that we may share
Free reconciliation
And hope amid despair.

It is in the original hymn, according to the web, nestled between our usual Presbyterian second and third stanzas. Seems to offer theological justification for being "one in mission." I wonder why we Presbyterians omit it? Not enough room on the page? Theological considerations? Other reasons? I invite your comments.

(BTW, today's homilist quoted Karl Barth, with approval!)

Another Gun Massacre

The Cleveland Plain Dealer rejected the following letter to the editor because it is too long, and they didn't print my shortened version, either. So here it is, all 340 words of it. Maybe in memory of the 20+ worshippers in Texas who lost their lives this morning because someone . . . I don't know what to say. 

Perhaps the most telling sentences in Stephen Halbrook’s October 27 opinion piece (“More Gun Control Laws Won’t Stop Vegas-type Massacres”) are these: “Pseudo protection offered by paper laws guarantees nothing. Every person is ultimately responsible for his or her safety.”

Halbrook disdains the rule of law because laws don’t guarantee anything. He believes in the law of the old West, the law of the gun. He and no one eise is responsible for his own safety, and he is apparently not responsible in any way for the safety of others.

It’s true, I admit: laws do not guarantee anything. But they sure make life a lot safer on a daily basis for all of us. Traffic laws don’t guarantee I will not be killed in a head-on crash, but knowing that almost all drivers will stay on their side of the road and not drive on my side makes me a lot safer than if everyone could drive wherever they felt like. The beauty of laws regarding who drives where is that I do not have to confront and deal with life-threatening chaos every time I get behind the wheel. I am safer, and my life is easier, and I like that.

I assume that Mr. Halbrook would never think of contacting law enforcement if he received a death threat in the mail, or if someone were stalking his house. After all, he is ultimately responsible for his own safety. “Real men” need no one else.

The gun lobby apparently wants a return to the good old days before the sheriff came to town, when everyone had a six gun and was free to use it without fear of the consequences. I do not want that, Mr. Halbrook, either for myself or my children or grandchildren. Frankly, thinking like yours make me fear for their future, and for the future of the rule of law. For your sake and mine, I hope you and yours do not get the kind of world you are trying to create.

Way Behind

I confess that I am way behind in commenting on the antics and terrors of President Trump and the Bannon-entralled Republican Party.

I further confess that I cannot keep up with the disaster. Every day, two or three new horrors assault common-sense.

Lord, have mercy. That's about all I can say, or pray.

Beyond this Present Devastation

Anyone who doubts our utter dependence upon nature’s graces or our frightening vulnerability in the face of nature’s power is not paying attention. We can design and build the very best we know how, and still be wiped out. A storm, a fire, an earthquake, a hurtling asteroid; a microbe, a parasite, a cell gone awry.

I am not suggesting at all that we must not do our best to defend ourselves against such threats, or to work to overcome them. To do otherwise would be to deny our nature as living organisms.

But we also must realize that everything we do is related to everything else, and that what promises security from one kind of threat may heighten the dangers posed by other threats. Then we must not let our fear of negative consequences, known or unknown, keep us from doing anything at all.

So we move forward, step by step, thoughtfully and fearlessly casting what light we do have into the shadows around us as we try to find the best path into the future. It does us no good to deny either the light we carry or the darkness around us, to ignore what helps us see something and what keeps us from seeing anything.

As I write this I am thinking about what I know about science and technology. They are neither our saviors nor our servants, but tools that will be only as good as the use we make of them. Hammers can build and they can destroy. It depends on what we decide to do with them.

In the aftermath of the current spate of terrible natural disasters, many of them focused on our home continent, we will not move forward without sound science and reliable technology. We must not allow preconceived notions, even those born of religious faith or political convictions, to blind us to what we can perceive, measure, understand, share, and do using our best intellects.

To do any otherwise is to deny the intellects that, I believe, God has given us. Trusting this gift, I am both humbled and empowered.

Fiddlin' Around

President Donald Trump has given new meaning to the old notion of “fiddling while Rome burns.” His administration’s announcement yesterday about rescinding DACA (a message delivered by his beloved Attorney General) was a cynical and calculating pandering to the worst in American society.

I understand why it would be better for DACA to be legislated. But it hasn’t been, and who’d bet on it ever becoming law? The victims are some 800,000 young adults living within our borders who probably have cleaner criminal records and are contributing more to our economy and society than any random sampling of 800,000 native-born Americans. They’ve all been checked out in ways I’ve never been. Now their future is in the hands of a dysfunctional Congress. How is that just?

Ohio’s Republican Senator, Rob Portman, likes to present himself as a compassionate human being. After all, he is against human trafficking and the opioid epidemic, and backs legislative efforts to combat both. But what kind of opposition does he face on those issues? I haven’t heard of any demonstrations in favor of human trafficking and drug addiction. But when it comes to DACA, he hides behind “the law” and “the constitution.” I take neither lightly, but there are situations when the right thing to do does not neatly fit into legalistic categories. This is one of those situations.

I do not know if DACA would stand up in court. Maybe President Trump should have let the Attorneys General who threatened to take him to court if he didn’t rescind it have at it. His own Justice Department, of course, would have sided with them, so they’d probably win. But he’d have shown himself as a man of compassion. Instead we see, again, the “realDonaldTrump.”

On the day of the President/Attorney General’s announcement, the other news was of hurricane-caused destruction and suffering in Texas and Louisiana; of an even larger storm bearing down on small islands and no doubt the U.S. mainland; of N. Korea and the U.S. brandishing nuclear weapons at each other; of tens of thousands of acres of the North American continent being incinerated; and of a hundred other tragedies. Nevertheless, they found time to appeal to his “base” and put the future of 800,000 human beings in doubt.

Good performance, Mr. Trump . . . your fiddling while the republic burns.

Birds At Home

Standing on a short ladder, I reached up to the top of the downspout–where it bends just under the gutter–and unceremoniously pushed the now-empty robin’s nest off its perch. It sailed to the ground, and landed with a soft thud.

I reached down to pick it up, intending to carry it back into our woods so it could return to the earth, and noticed how solid it felt it my hand. I examined it carefully, turning it over and over. It had suffered no discernible damage from its fall. And it was beautiful.

Through the years I have been caught up short by many of the wonders of nature’s works. But two days ago that perfect home for hatching and raising a new generation of robins struck me as one of the most magnificent of those wonders. It is perfect. It is strong and solid, but light-weight; woven tight, but soft.

How do robins know how to do that?

Season after season robins construct who-knows-how-many nests, most of them never seen by any human being. And now I held one of them in my hand, and it was, it is own way, as magnificent as the Alaskan mountains and glaciers we saw just a couple of weeks ago. And I, being human, almost swept it away without a thought.

Around the corner of our house, not far from the robin’s nest, we hang a wren house. At least a dozen–maybe more–generations of wrens have been hatched there, and we take special joy in watching for them each year. One (a male, I’ve read) claims the house first, builds a nest, and then sings for a mate. When he finally attracts the perfect partner, they work together to produce and nurture the new chicks. When they are feeding them the parents fly all day for days to and from the evergreens behind our house, feeding the hungry children until they fledge. One day they are all there; the next they are all gone. We rarely see the leave-taking.

This year’s wren nesting seemed as if it would never get off the ground. No one showed up until late June, and he (as I understand it) sang for weeks with no apparent success. Finally, just before we left on July 30 to be away for more than two weeks, a second wren did show up. We figured we’d miss whatever was to happen next.

The same day that I removed the robin’s nest I peered into the wren house through its entrance. Yes, there was a nest in there. But there had been no activity since we’d come home, and I figured the nesting was done. I took the house down and opened it to clean it out. The jumble of twigs and grass that wrens use to make their nest cradled two tiny, dead birds, just beginning to show their feathers. Some tragedy had befallen our wren family. It had been a difficult season for them from beginning to end.

It may be time for a new wren house. I want to offer these little birds we so enjoy watching and hearing the best home that I can. I could never build a nest the way birds do, but I do like to help them when possible. Their success and mine are interwoven as intricately as the grasses in that robin’s nest. Their intelligence and skill are different than any I possess. Sometimes I think it is equal to mine.

Nature’s results are never 100% what we think they ought to be, or even what they need to be for success. In this, as in perhaps every way, human beings are just like everything else. It’s pretty humbling. Awesome, even.

ABOUT THOSE STATUES...

ABOUT THOSE STATUES…

I have been reading and thinking quite a bit about the “Confederate Statues” controversy, and offer the following thoughts:

(Be advised, I am a “northerner,” so my views may reflect some geocentric bias.)

1. The conversation is helpful to me personally. For as long as I can remember I have felt ambivalent about these memorials; now I recognize why.

2. One possible solution: contextualize the statues historically by placing a similar-sized statue of a slave in chains next to each one of them. Doing this will preserve the history that many today claim they do not want to lose. Slavery is, after all, what they were fighting to preserve. An explanatory plaque would be a cheaper, but less effective, alternative.

(I know that some argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, but slavery was the intractable problem that led to everything else associated with the war.)

3. Another solution: move all the statues to museums that teach the history not only of the war itself, but of the century that followed it. Or maybe move them to battlefields or Civil War cemeteries, such as Gettysburg and Johnson’s Island, where they really can serve a historic purpose. My understanding is that many of them were put up decades after the war, as much to bolster the legalized racism practiced in most of the south in the early 20th century as to honor particular soldiers. These statues do not need to be displayed in places of honor in order to be useful, though I am not sure how much instructional value most of them actually have.

(I am wary of destroying history’s artifacts when they make us uncomfortable. Second only to the crimes against people perpetrated by Isis has been its destruction of historically significant works of art in the ancient world. Isis’s fundamental contempt for human culture and history is a crime against us all.)

(I am also wary of angry crowds taking it upon themselves to pull down and destroy statues. Mob action is a highly risky last resort, maybe.)

4. The Governor of Maine compared the destruction of Confederate statues to the possible destruction of 9/11 memorials? Really? That’s bizarre.

5. Speaking of history: weren’t these Confederate Generals traitors? Didn’t they participate in an armed rebellion against the country of their birth and to which many of them must have sworn allegiance when they signed on as soldiers and officers in the US Army? (Robert E. Lee, chief among them.) To have allowed them to go back home to take up their lives again after the war was one thing. To honor and celebrate them is quite another. What Americans would want to do that 150+ years after the last shots were fired?

6, in which I answer the question I posed in the final sentence of #5: Americans who long for another rebellion against the United States of America, that’s who would want to honor and celebrate those rebels; Americans armed to the teeth because they think the only way to save their country and their way of life is by violence; Americans who wear Nazi symbols and who wave Confederate flags because they want their convictions to become our fears.

7. Where else on earth would any government tolerate for a moment, much less for a century and a half, the near veneration of those who had taken up arms against it, leading to uncountable loss of lives and properties, for a cause–chattel slavery–that history has judged to be absolutely evil? We are such a complex amalgam of competing passions!