...to protect life...

“Government’s role should be to protect life from the beginning to the end.”

(Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, upon signing the “heartbeat” abortion restriction bill)

Dear Governor DeWine,

I truly appreciate your passion for the role of government in the protection of life. I say this despite the fact that you eagerly signed the so-called “heartbeat bill.” Your signature on that legislation gives evidence of a lack of understanding of and compassion for the agony many women experience when they discover they are carrying a fetus they did not plan for and may not be able to provide for.

That said, I look forward to your continuing to keep alive the ideal you have put before the people of Ohio, and before your own political party. The Republican party has become quite adept at creating legislation and promoting rules that are antithetical to the protection of life at almost any stage. It seems more committed to protecting the life–the health and well-being–of corporations than of human beings.

It begins with health care: does not the protection of life mean, above all else, access to needed health care for every American? How can such access be limited by lack of money?

How about income inequality? Every study confirms the common sense assumption that those who are poor or even just surviving marginally do not enjoy the quality and length of life of those who are better off. Does your party commit itself to monetary policy, including tax law, that at least makes it possible for all Americans to secure adequate resources to meet basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter?

How about the administration of justice? From our police departments to our prison systems, is everyone given a chance to be heard fairly in a court of law and, if sent to prison, to be not only corrected but also rehabilitated?

And what about guns and all the forms of violence that plague our communities? It is quite clear that we could enact a number of controls on access to guns that would not “take away” our Second Amendment rights. You cannot claim that government’s job is to protect life from beginning to end and then not even be willing to study gun violence.

Climate change? There’s a threat to the lives of millions, maybe billions, maybe every last one of us and our descendants that your party studiously ignores. It’s a threat that can be met with new technologies, and with new jobs. The Republican party cannot continue to pretend climate change is not a grave threat to us all and expect anyone to think it is concerned with the protection of life, human and non-human alike.

Governor DeWine, you have articulated up a lofty role for government. I have given you few of the many areas where your sincerity regarding it will be tested. I wish you well as you lead your party to help Ohio’s government live up to it.

Sincerely,

KDM

Back To the Same Playing Field

I recently heard an extended report on conditions in Venezuela, where the electricity has been off for some time now and nobody apparently has the power to turn it back on. Thirty million people are suffering unbelievable depravation because political gridlock has rendered the government powerless.

The gridlock has come to this because, after years of economic chaos, two men both believe they should be president, and neither will yield to the other. My guess is that they both are so convinced that only they can save the country from disaster that neither is willing to admit defeat in order to save the country from disaster.

Probably they both believe that “only I can be the president Venezuela needs. Only I can do what Venezuela needs done.”

Are we setting up the same kind of political stalemate that has resulted in disaster for Venezuela? I hope not, because I still believe our dedication to democratic institutions is strong enough to withstand the ego of a U.S. President who believes “only I can be the president the United States needs.”

For democracy to work those who hold power at the moment must have some confidence that those who are now out of power will not destroy the nation should they come to power. But as the Republican Party has moved further and further to the right, the Democratic Party has moved further and further to the left. The farther they move apart the more surely each will come to trust only themselves and their kind with the reigns of power, and the more surely they will believe it is in the best interests of the country for them do everything possible to keep the other out of power. That kind of thinking spells disaster for democracy.

What I am looking for in our next president (hopefully to be elected in 2020) is someone whose strong political convictions are expressed within the context of a profound respect for what it means to be a democratic republic, and for those who do not agree with that person. I am looking for someone who can get a broad cross-section of Americans back on the same political playing field.

Who are you looking for, post Donald Trump?

A Master of His Art

Joseph Flummerfelt is not a household name, but he was well-known and deeply appreciated by lovers of choral music around the world. He recently died, and this is an at-best amateur musician’s appreciation of him.

I first became aware of Dr. Flummerfelt because of the choral leadership position he held for many years at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ. I knew of the College itself because of its long and outstanding tradition of preparing musicians for professional positions in churches. He was the school’s chief choral conductor, and I owned a couple of his recordings. His Westminster choirs often performed with the New York Philharmonic, and with other ensembles as well.

When our younger daughter, Rebecca, was choosing a college, she knew that she wanted to study vocal and choral music. I may have been the one who suggested to her that she look into Westminster Choir College. On the weekend we visited and she auditioned at Westminster, we were able to sit in on a rehearsal for an upcoming performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio. Dr. Flummerfelt was working with the choir on the “Baal Choruses,” where the prophets of the “false god” challenging Israel’s “true god” cry out to Baal to light the fire on the water-soaked altar Elijah has prepared.

What impressed me at the time was not only Dr. Flummerfelt’s attention to the myriad musical details, but his eagerness to teach the students what that unusual series of choruses is all about. It’s not often choirs get to petition Baal! He was as interested in getting them into the text of the music as into the music itself. He knew that choral music, fine as it might be as just music, is a vessel to convey a story, an image, or even a faith to the hearer. I wish all choral conductors took this part of their job seriously.

My second first-person memory was at the commencement ceremony when Rebecca graduated from Westminster. Dr. Flummerfelt was the main speaker, and he gave a thoughtful, insightful, and yes, inspiring address on the relationship between breath and spirit in singing and in life. He knew, of course, that the biblical words for breath and spirit are the same in both the Hebrew and the Greek languages. He tied them together in the act of singing in his send-off for the class. I don’t know if he’d have agreed to let me call what he said a sermon, but that’s what it was to me…an inspired and inspiring homily.

In recent years Rebecca’s career path gave me my only opportunity to shake hands with Joseph Flummerfelt. Many of Rebecca’s singing colleagues in the Philadelphia area are Westminster grads, and her Crossing Choir is directed by Donald Nally, a Westminster grad and close associate of Dr. Flummerfelt. Dr. Flummerfelt sat in the pew behind ours at a Crossing concert we attended several years ago, and Rebecca introduced us to him after the concert. I doubt that he remembered the moment for long, but it was an honor to me to shake the hand that so beautifully conducted those choirs.

Joseph Flummerfelt is important not only because he was a fine choral conductor, but because he was a teacher, and an inspiring teacher at that. He left the world not only with recordings of his own work, but with a host of students who carry on his passion for the best in choral music. I am grateful our lives crossed paths—though not closely enough that I could ever call him “Flumm,” as many did. I am grateful for his influence upon Rebecca and so many others.

Nothing, but nonetheless, everything

When the floor under us collapses, dare we make an act of faith to save ourselves?

A journal called Image works hard to provide answers to that kind of question by providing a forum in which today’s religion and today’s art meet, sometimes to shake one another’s hands and other times to shake their fists at each other. Toward the closing pages of Image No. 98 (fall 2018) I was struck by a couple of lines and paragraphs that first dismayed me and then offered me hope.

The dismay came in single sentences from each of two poems by Douglas Luman. The first line is from a poem entitled “Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Port Chester, New York,” and the second is from “The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas.” Forgive me for simply sharing the words that struck me without giving you more about their context. What hit me were the few words by themselves:

… I have nothing to pawn but grains

of sand.

and

… the world owes

you nothing, but gives it anyway.

Nothing to pawn…nothing owed…nothing given…anyway.

The words emptied me of my human pretense that I am owed anything or (much more devastating), that I have anything to exchange for what desperately think I need.

Then I read the next article, Homo Liturgicus: On the Presence of Ritual in Contemporary Fiction, a review by James K. A. Smith of two books. Again, without context, some near-concluding lines:

Sometimes the things we do that make no sense turn out to be the things we need to do in order to withstand the heartbreak that makes no sense, the tragedy that shouldn’t be, the evil that doesn’t deserve a place in the cosmos. These rituals–the things we do over and for “for no reason”–mysteriously build a capacity to do the things we’d never dream of doing–the things we have to do that we’ll try to forget and hope never to do again. …

… a line from “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus…succinctly encapsulates what I’ve been circling around: “For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular  to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.” …

What if rituals are the way we dance with the love that drives the universe?

The last couple years I’ve been worshipping in an Episcopal Church. For a cradle-Presbyterian this has been a bit of stretch, and I am only being honest in sharing that it was not the heightened ritual that brought me there, nor is it all that keeps me there. But I have come to appreciate the rituals I’ve learned to accept and even to anticipate. They link me to something greater than the mere secularity of my daily life.

At our best we Presbyterians have our rituals, though they are neither as elaborate nor as lengthy as those of our Episcopal siblings. And Presbyterians don’t have to do them, as seems to be required by more liturgical churches, so you never know what you will get when you worship with Presbyterians.

One day I will probably return to a Presbyterian Church, but for now, I worship where I need to be. and I am compelled by the ritual.

Returning to Douglas Luman’s poems I focused for first time on a quote by Dominique de Menil printed under the title of the Rothko poem:

“When the floor collapses, it’s time to make an act of faith.”

To “make an act of faith”…to do faith, not just to claim, say, or believe something. Perhaps not even to do something good or just and identify it as an act of faith, as important as that is. But to find a welcoming community of healthy and holy spoken and enacted ritual and, no matter how strange or foreign it sounds or looks the first couple of times, to give it time to speak to you. And to give yourself time to hear.

My Solution

Give the man his wall, but call it a monument ... a monument to fear, hatred, distrust, disfunction, and racism. Move the Statue of Liberty to someplace in its middle, her uplifted arm amputated, her eyes downcast, with tears flowing down her cheeks. Engrave the word “ego” every ten yards for all the egos that went into it and the fight over it. 

Then, please give us an effective, fair, and functioning government. And please, elected folks, old AND new, stop your constant grandstanding at the people’s expense. We are tired of it! Just do your jobs!

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.