On Our Way to The Inn

Friday afternoon is never a good time to drive Philadelphia's Schuylkill Expressway. Fact is, there's hardly ever a good time to enter that sometime parking lot, sometime race track that winds its way along the river after which it is named.

But there we were a week and a day before Christmas Eve, in a snow storm. We were headed down (literally) toward the heart of the city, and so was everyone else in the world. Snow was blowing across the roadway and sticking to it. Traffic was moving…perhaps ten miles per hour. Drivers were being uncharacteristically cautious. We would get to the Airbnb in West Philly that we’d booked, but when?

Not being very familiar with the area we were listening carefully to Ms. GPS’s calm voice. About an hour into our slow descent, she advised that we’d save seven minutes by taking the next exit and cutting through neighborhoods to our destination. That sounded very good to us, not only because of the shorter time, but also because (and even more urgently) I had to find a bathroom quick. Surely there’d be a convenient gas station near the exit.

Not to be. We exited, and pushed slowly up a hill in a thick stream of cars moving by fits and starts, nothing but city parkland all around us. We finally came to an intersection, turned left, crept our way through fairly down-and-out neighborhoods, and turned this way and that on a route that seemed intentionally circuitous. Not a gas station in sight. I grew desperate. I told Maxine I had to stop. She suggested a bar that we were approaching. I didn’t have to go that bad.

Finally, around some corner under some commuter rail tracks we saw a CVS Drugstore. A drug store, where health is dispensed, surely would meet my need. I turned into the snowy parking lot, frantically found a place to park, and abandoned my wife in the car as I ran in to seek a bathroom. It was then I realized I was outside my comfort zone in more than one way. I was in a strange, inner city, and yes, largely black, community. Would THIS drug store respond to my need?

Of course it did. Unlike our local suburban CVS, it did not openly offer restroom facilities to the public. You had to ask to be let into a locked area to get to them. I will never know whether they let me in because they let in everyone who asks, or because I looked as if I posed no danger of doing something in them other than what they were intended for.

Much relieved, I said thank you to every employee I saw on the way out of the store, and returned to Maxine in the car. At least I could relax as we finished our tortuous trip to a residence we’d never before seen.

As usual in Philadelphia, there were few places to park within sight of our place, but we did find one. I squeezed into it, then walked to the sign to see what kind of restrictions the city placed on parking in my spot. It was something like two-hour parking during weekday day-time hours until 10:00 pm. It was 4:00 pm Friday. The snow was still falling; traffic everywhere was a mess. Surely every traffic cop (including every meter maid, or whoever checks the meters) had more important things to do than give parking tickets to hapless out-of-town visitors, who might be in town to spend money, as visitors do. I decided to risk it: make it to 10:00 pm and we’d be in free for the weekend.

Of course we didn’t make it. Later that evening I found an envelope stuck under a wiper blade. The law had noted our parked Prius just after 5 pm and issued a ticket two hours and one minute later. That will be $26, you who apparently cannot read. No warning, no welcome to Philadelphia, please note the parking restrictions on this street.

I am sure residents of that street truly need and want the powers-that-be to enforce the laws so they can park there, but there is more than one way to tell otherwise benign persons that they’ve made a mistake. And it’s not a big deal for me, that parking ticket. Actually, $26 does seem too small even to cover the cost of issuing the citation.

But the message from the CVS staff and the message from the city authorities are quite different, and made me think about the journey of the holy family to the stable. Ordinary folk offered them welcome and helped them address their urgent need. The Roman Empire collected what they owed, not caring a bit about them as persons until they realized that they represented a threat to its oppressive law and order. Things operate just about the same way 2,000+ years later.

What if we learned to do more than say Merry Christmas?

The rest of the weekend was wonderful, and included two fine concerts of seasonal music, quality time with our daughter and friend, and a reunion with two long-time friends we had not seen for years. Philadelphia is a great city for us to visit, from its music scene to just the right CVS when you need it.

Let’s do more Merry Christmas-ing, friends. It’s needed now, perhaps more than ever.

Give a me gun for Christmas, Jesus

Sad the Plain Dealer cannot give up wrapping front page in hand gun ads. Desperate for revenue, I guess. Really hope they will resist temptation to do it again on Christmas Eve, although being forced to see all those instruments of death will make the contrast with the message of Jesus even clearer. (It is Herod and his warriors who carry the guns in the story. But perhaps if Mary had had one...I can’t think it.)

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.