Ersatz Euergetism

Have you ever been ambushed by a new word?

      You are calmly reading, and suddenly a word appears you don’t know, occupying so unassuming a place in a sentence that you think you should have been seeing it all of your life. That unexpected appearance without explanation raises your fear that everyone else has known that word forever, that you alone are ignorant of it.

That is how I felt like last week as I was reading a short commentary on one of the apostle Paul’s New Testament letters. Without warning, a new-to-me word came out of the bushes:

“In the first-century Roman context, euergetism was accompanied by standard expectations regarding the giving and reception of gifts depending on the status of the parties involved.” (Notes on 2 Corinthians 9:13 in The Westminster Study Bible [2024].)

Well, of course.

As the beneficiary of more than a little education and who has lived quite a long time with that education and who regularly reads, writes, and pays attention to words, I cannot remember ever being confronted by euergetism.

(My word processor cannot remember it either because it insists on underlining the word in red because it thinks I have misspelled it. I am not the only dunce!)

Of course, I got a sense of the word’s meaning from the way it was used in that sentence. Going further, Wikipedia informed me that

“euergetism (from the Greek word for ‘doing good deeds’) was the ancient Greco-Roman practice of wealthy and high-status individuals voluntarily distributing their personal wealth to benefit the community. It served as a system of exchange: donors gained immense social prestige, while cities received vital public works and entertainment.”

The root of euergetism occurs 4 times in the Greek New Testament, but the word itself is a relatively modern construction. As now used, it applies when a wealthy donor gives something to the public in return for recognition and status. Every gift is a deal; every offering is part of a transaction.

If you knew the meaning of euergetism before reading this essay, I salute you. If you have ever used the word, I double salute you. And if you use it regularly in causal conversation, I still salute you, but for your pretentiousness.

A couple of points about what follows my being ambushed by a new word:

First, shortly after I learn a word that is new to me, I almost inevitably come across it a second and even a third time. It is as if it has been waiting in the wings to stride out on the stage and say, “See, I warned you this was coming! Thank me!”

The second point is that the new word helps me talk about something happening here and now. For example, what do you call it when the President of the United States builds things bearing his name and likeness in D.C., but cons other people (including tax payers) into paying for them? What do you call doing that?

Ersatz euergetism, of course…as if you didn’t know.

Turning Point USA DBA a Charity

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA recently added me to their mailing list. I have no idea who sold them my name and address.

A couple of weeks ago, my first mailing offered me a bright red, “We Are Charlie Kirk” wristband and an opportunity to make a donation.

Last week’s mail brought me a small American flag and an impassioned letter from Riley Gaines, former All-American swimmer turned anti-trans-people activist. Her letter invited me to participate in the “Campus Patriotism Project” by signing a tag attached to the flag and returning it so that it can be displayed “with thousands of others from like-minded patriots at one of 4,500+ schools with a Turning Point USA chapter.”

What will these flags inspire? Charlies’s dream—a dream of “inspiring young men and women to get married, start families, and rely on each other the way their great-grandparents did.”

Here is a graphic included with that mailing:

It conveniently overlooks the truth that the next patriotic generation can and should fight to raise both flags. The two flags are not mutually exclusive.

One more thing, which you may note in the lower right-hand corner of that picture: Turning Point USA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization. That apparent fact completely upends my understanding of what it means to be a charity. TPUSA’s tax status, like its partisan rhetoric, baffles me.

My Stars

 

I never thought that stars were mere pinpricks of light on a black canvas hung just beyond my reach…at least I’ve convinced myself that I never thought that. I honestly believe that I have always known that stars, like the void around and beyond them, are way beyond any reach, brighter than any consciousness.

Constellations have never made sense to me, except for the Big Dipper (and the Little One, too). Growing up on American’s vast prairie lands, I learned early on how to find the North Star in an instant. And Orion: I could easily point out Orion presiding over winter’s bitter cold. But somehow I knew that those connected dots in the night sky were the product of shepherds’ imaginations fixated on that sky, imposing an order that simply wasn’t there.

The stars—individually and collectively—are brighter and bigger than all of us, out of the reach of any of us. They have their reasons.

The way I understood the stars when I was a child…was that unique to me? I don’t know, because I never asked. Perhaps once my father had said to me, Dean, the stars are giant suns millions and millions of miles away from us, and even though my brain could not really understand him, I understood it where it mattered. Same with the Milky Way…a long-shot view through to the edge of the galaxy that bears its name. It is astonishing, but the star-filled wheels of distant galaxies far outnumber and outshine it.

Maybe I believe that I always got the shine and enormity and distance of the stars right because I have always felt that almost everything is more than I am. I am a tall man, but in my head I’ve never measured up to most other people. Almost everyone else is far more important and successful and popular and all the rest than I am. Generous folks have tried to convince me otherwise…oh, you are bigger and brighter than you think…but I have always been quite sure they are wrong.

In my late teens and early twenties, I loved to sit on the front stoop of my parents’ rural Iowa home on warm summer nights and contemplate the stars and their possible intersection with the Bible and theology I was learning in school. As I sat in those stars’ silent, soulful presence, I felt more deity than I felt in reading all the words of all the books.

But then again, the words in those books helped me feel stars and be awed by them and yet not be tempted, as were the ancients, to worship them and their fellow travelers out there, beyond the firmament.

I rarely see the stars these days, blinded as I am by the lights of our human technology and impudence. I have a favorite high desert retreat where stars are as visible to me as they once were, but now it is hard for me to go there. So, I imagine the stars of my childhood and youth, and I wonder if anyone will ever grasp them for what they truly are, or how humankind fits into their eternal schemes.

I have never thought that I outshine stars.

My Heart and “the Pity of War”

 

Wednesday afternoon, in anticipation of getting a new pacemaker ten days from now, I had an echocardiogram. It was both exciting and scary to watch my beating heart on the monitor— seeing it keep on beating, albeit irregularly, without any awareness or conscious effort on my part, as it’s been beating for over 80 years.

I was home less than an hour when MyChart posted the report of the cardiologist who read the results (with a bit of AI help, do you suppose?). An essay consisting of words that I do not understand and coolly impersonal numbers and values purportedly describing my beating heart is now available for my own cardiologist to read and understand and interpret.

Which is my heart—a muscular organ that second-by-second keeps me alive, or an organized series of letters and digits on a computer screen? Which is my heart to those doctors? Which is it to me?

Last night Maxine and I heard Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, Chorus, etc., conducted by Klaus Makela. I’ve known and loved this powerful work of poetry and music since college days, and last night it cast its magnificent, heart-rending, and soul-searing spell on me once again.

I wonder how my heart would have looked to an echocardiogram after the chorus’s final, hushed, a cappella plea, “May they rest in peace.” Broken, I think.

We Sang Mozart

 

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon. We’d been practicing Mozart for two and half months—together and on our own—but on that Sunday afternoon, we sang Mozart. We sang his Solemn Vespers and Coronation Mass.

I was one of fifteen basses in a hundred voice choir, and there were four soloists and a small orchestra of instrumentalists and one determined conductor. Months of hard work came together inside a glorious quasi-Gothic church sanctuary, and it was as if the building itself—bright shining stained glass and all—was singing Mozart.

I did not sing Mozart the way the best of Mozart’s singers sing him. I did just okay, though better for me than I’d expected a couple of days before. I think that I found some notes that others missed, and that others got rhythms that I messed up, a holy harmonization of just right and almost right, with a wayward just plain wrong as well along the way. We came together as one—even when we had to be dragged back together when too many of us tried to outpace our conductor’s tempo, his face first almost panicked, then relieved.

We all sang Mozart despite our lacks, amateur singers that most of us are.

We sang Mozart on that Sunday, and for a while, embraced in that space’s rose-tinted late afternoon light, something of the holy—of the wholly other—shined through our faces from deep in our souls. (Did anyone see it?) Genius touched us, and we returned his touch: his music’s assurances and shocks, chords and progressions we could not imagine until we heard them, surprises of syncopation and dissonance that transformed sounds sung in time into music that sounded eternal, celebrating living life and loving love the way the creator celebrates, banishing all things ugly, hateful, and deathly.

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon, and for a time we were where no one else will ever take us.

Soli Deo Gloria.

No Kings and Palm Sunday

There can linger no doubt in any sentient being that Donald Trump fancies himself to be king of the U.S.A, if not of this entire world (well, at least of Venezuela and Iran). He ’s stamping his image on coins and printing his signature on hundred dollar bills. He is embarking on massive building projects meant to secure forever his place in our national memory. Such is the business of kings.

What boggles the mind is that so many Americans are buying into his royal fantasy. Apparently millions of us, including the vast majority of Republicans, missed the history lesson on the American Revolution.

We Yankees did what we did not just because we did not like England’s King George III, but because we were completely over any need for kings. In their place, we came up with the novel theory that people should govern themselves through elected representatives—a theory so novel at the time that even after our side won that war, some of us still wanted to crown a king. To his everlasting credit, George Washington rejected becoming king, a rejection that one might think would bury the idea forever.

But here we are, two and half centuries later, not only toying with the idea of being ruled by a king, but actually encouraging it. Many of us apparently love the thought of endowing one person with the divine authority to make all of our decisions for us.

Ah, there it is, “divine authority.” “The divine right of kings” claims that kings are kings not only because they were born into the right families and live in gold-encrusted palaces and control vast and lethal armies but because God made them so. “Divine right” is the ultimate nail in the coffin of human freedom, and apparently Republicans are lovin’ it like they love MacDonald’s burgers.

The high priest of Donald Trump’s divine right to rule as he pleases is Secretary of Lethality Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is high priest because he’s got the inside track to Jesus. He loves to parade himself around in well-cut suits, tacking the name of Jesus onto fierce incantations and imprecatory prayers pronouncing death and destruction on all whom the king hates, possibly including anyone who dares to disagree with his taste in shoes.

  Between Trump’s personal army (aka I.C.E) and Hegseth’s awesomely-armed forces, this king and his ever-loyal priest intend to destroy all opposition at home and abroad. Meanwhile, over in the increasingly-inconsequential congress, House Speaker-boy Mike Johnson proudly and with a straight face awards to Mr. Trump the very first “America First” trophy, which looks like a gold-gilded bald eagle taking a bow as it homes in on its prey. How appropriate.

Enough. The point of this rant is to link Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies to Sunday’s Palm Sunday celebrations.

It is possible that on the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, the Rome-enthralled would-be royal class was making its entrance on the other side of town on war horses. Both entrances drew their crowds.

Christians need to know which crowd they are in.

Last Wednesday night I heard a fiery sermon warning Christians not to confuse the two who came parading into Jerusalem that day—that is, not to confuse Jesus with any king/Caesar/dictator/despot. The preacher of that sermon is the prophet our nation desperately needs to hear today.

Nationalism draped in Christian trappings is heretical.

Elevating an elected United States President to a divinely-anointed cult figure is unAmerican.

These betrayals of our nation’s founding and of the Christian faith must stop:  stop in the name of democracy; stop in the name of government of, by, and for the people; stop in the name of God, for God’s sake!

Matthew 21:10 records that “when (Jesus) entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking ‘Who is this?’”

I hope that by Palm Sunday afternoon Christians who see in Donald Trump the Second Coming of Christ will look at both Jesus and Mr. Trump and ask of each of them, “Who is this?” and be able to enumerate the vast differences between them. Those differences are not at all hard to see. You just have to want to look.

Please.

Remembering the Kennedy Center

With more than 300,000 Haitians in America on the brink of being sent back to their tragic country, you’d think worrying about the Kennedy Center’s future would be a luxury. And that it is, but I think it is an important luxury, both for what the Center has been and for what Mr. Trump is doing to what it represents.

First, he took over managing it. Then, he put his name before Kennedy’s name. Now, faced with performers backing out of contracted shows by the dozens, he decides to close it for two years for “renovations.”

We lived in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington suburb, from 1975 to 1982. The Kennedy Center was fresh and new and spectacular. We most often visited it for performances of the National Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall, with famed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the podium. I particularly remember hearing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, featuring two of the three soloists on my prized premier recording of the work.

Another clear memory is the December afternoon when our Southern Maryland Choral Society performed Bach and Respighi in the 630-foot long lobby. Singing in that hall didn’t feel like second best at all!

I think Maxine and I attended performances in the Center’s other theaters as well, but I cannot name them.

Maxine and I have been regular viewers of the Kennedy Center Honors program each December for just about as long as it has been broadcast. Those programs told the stories of prominent musical artists representing many genres, some of which I confess I do not much appreciate. But we always sat in awe of the stories of talented people honing those talents into high artistic achievement.

Although the Kennedy Center and its programming are somehow related to our Federal Government, I never worried about the politics of the place. The President welcomed the Honors’ winners to the White House, and sat in the premier box during the show. If any president ever had a hand in choosing who performed at the Center, or who was honored by it, I never knew about it. I am willing to guess that, beyond an occasional suggestion or two, the process was non-partisan.

Donald Trump changed all that, just as he has changed almost everything about how we do politics in this country. In my mind, he is exercising presidential power and prerogative beyond any we have ever seen before, while Congress and the courts sit idly by, unwilling to challenge even his most dictatorial moves. State and local governments are doing what they can, and people are in the streets. But still he marches on, our own little would-be Lion King, lording it over all us apes.

I care about what happens to the Haitians now in our midst. Sending them back to Haiti will be a death sentence for many of them. And that’s worse than what happens to the Kennedy Center. But both matters are strands in one huge cloth of hate and fear-driven narcism and racism that know no internal limits. None of this will come out well.

If anyone who could stop Trump’s ruining of the Kennedy Center fails to do so, then I think the least Congress could do would be to rescind whatever action it once took to name it as memorial to John F. Kennedy, and let whatever Trump builds be called the Trump Center for the Performing Arts. Associating President Kennedy’s name with it will no longer be an honor, because the place of his memorialization will have been desecrated beyond recognition. It will, in fact, deserve to be called nothing more than “Trump.”